When this city was mud, there were no armies so we became them. A building was in my way so I smashed it to bits. It, too, became an army. In this emptiness we first discovered the past. You rose quickly in the ranks and your first act as colonel was to tear down the signposts and paint them the color of desolation and give them new names: Road of the Flowers, Road Resembling the Ideal Snake, Avenue on which You Will Always Get Lost. Not to be outdone, I drew animals not yet discovered on every map. When you cried, I handed you a stone and it became your hand. This was an act of great patience. You invented a ship and I invented a canal for it to travel through. When people one hundred years from now will look at the map of our battle, the map with the creatures discovered by then but not yet discovered today, they will remember a song they've heard, a song about how sailing is a metaphor for remaining still, how waves are the illusion of motion, how coherence is like a simile for rope, and they will remember you. And only when the last bitter breath is pulled from my little pocketbook of lungs will I forget.

On warm July evenings the tenements stacked on the bank lean in to hear your hot whisper in the river's ear. "Stop," you begin to say, "I've lost something of value," and it does. History assumes the shape of its shadow. Light strains to see itself. The bugs, dreaming only of a rich inheritance, of the taste of your skin, the feeling of sucking face under the marbled ceilings—we are having dinner at the place we always have dinner at on days like these. You order chicken torta and I am a sticky mess of geometry. And for dessert we will return to a state of primitive accumulation. Yesterday at work I found a ruby, yesterday at work I lost my mind, and the umpire said, "you're outta there!" Gravity is the new game of the avant-garde; that boardroom look the new face of fashion. Did I tell you I've been casted in a movie about a sailor— we must pay the bills—on a deep-sea fishing boat, who, returning from his voyage, spies his fiancee sleeping with a man, a man who, in another narrative, might have plotted to get him jailed in order for this second man to do what the first had not yet done, that is, to marry you? A month later it is winter, you are with child, and the buildings have lost their windows, but once again your lips are pressed to the watery vein. "The relations of production have yielded to the means," cracks your throaty alto, signifying great pain, "and a new day of emancipation has dawned."

See the cello before you hear it: an f, an f backwards. Carve the green and gold into the valley, my shadow, separating fact from possibility. See your carving before you hear its demolition, daughter: I am not here until you hear my chiseling in the cave where shadows play their false arias of bulls and horns, my love. I have never understood a thing about how to lead a country, much less a country of poets eating plums all day, darling. Silence is a stare with its eyes only halfway open. Silence is a stare with its two eyes repeated, sister. For you can never be a man. You don't have enough ribs. And neither do I without a tie and a professional haircut. What does it mean to break a sequence in sound before you see it shatter? This is a road only crows travel, priestess, crows sufficiently attired to be called rooks, sufficiently smart to fuck themselves into eternity, patterned sufficiently, my jewel, to earn thousands I-banking, the collection of eyes from sockets, packaging up packages of mortgages and discarded apples, my apple, enough to afford dinner at places with geometrical ceilings geometrical enough to be called complex. Sentences with enough clauses to be called, my black bird of paradise, ambiguous. Grammar only shatters when you hear it break. Seeing is never enough. As per the rules of language, you, my dearly departed, will be buried ten kilometers outside the sentence. A procession of homeless cats will follow. Honey, your passing will pass.

The opera ends. I stay seated. The peacock: a dog with feathers glued to his tail. The lions, Polish women who leave the theater singing Its cold outside but did you hear they found God. When the sun comes down from the wires a small man steps out of a hatch. He sang a beautiful disembodied tenor, believing the world will end soon. The guards don't notice me and drink behind a zookeeper's cage that appears whole only from straight on. The manager sweeps the floor. If I leave I'll be back tomorrow in another section. Behind the back curtain two lovers break up and it really is the first time that's happened.

A revisionist historian calls apples organs. A revisionist poet does the same thing but with full knowledge no orangutan ever achieved a Newtonian Laconian sense of objecthood. In action is our lacking trait. Jointed, you find yourself joined between bones and an incredible sense of knowing your childhood "buddy" is not yet a meth addict. You, on the other nut, will call a spayed dog a man-of-suit. In a fire popcorn ceilings remain kernels of a dead structuralist ice-cream maker. If there is no dupe- ex-machina, make one and make it snappy; or at the very most pour enough salt and butter over it that it looks like a lobster. Huh? Of course a bird may live with a dislodged head; later we will mount him on cherry boards in our den next to the failed snowboating of our Nietzschean ideals; next to the moon and next to grandperson's ashes.

Sable (hair), 7 Sable (type of weasel), 66 Saccharine, 8 As a description of one's poetic oeuvre, 9 The taste of fake banana flavor, 51 Sage, 44 As the color of a room (or shirt), 78 Sake (the drink), 104 Sake, things done for your, 107 Salvaged shut, 192 Windows of a fifth-floor flat, 4 Sanctioned sources of delusion, 59 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 1 Sazerac, 98 The key to a good one being the anise liqueur, 1 Scars, 7, 9, 42, 47 As evidence of things done to and by a body, 80 As stories, 4 Sculpture, long-lost form of, 232 Seers, 10 Sears, 7 Semaphore, ambiguous confession in the form of, 68 Seraphim, 32 Sex, 2 As problem, 2 As solution, 4, 7, 9, 47, 98 Shaken, 75 From a slumber, 6 vs. stirred, 76 Shakespeare, 1 (exit, pursued by a bear), 60 Skelter: see helter Slow pursuits, 88 As the most rewarding, 54 As interminable, 55 Smoking, one of many bad but inevitable habits being, 7, 9 Sports and the duality of man, 44 Squeegees, 2 Stars above, 37 Oh, that's what he meant by, 38 Suites, As locations of debauchery, 17 As locations of heartbreak, 17

and if you performed all those steps correctly, you will be light as air. If you float too high, you used too much fire; add water. If you don't float at all, too much earth; try wood. Once you have attained weightlessness, try thinking. Think about yellow chrysanthemums in the language of flowers. Think about sex, but paraphrased: Your body is not what I want / but I want it too. Think about who is doing the observing when you observe yourself thinking. Think about the gap between the day you realized you were in love and the day you wanted to be caught being in love. When you realize the gap does not exist, you are ready for the next step. The next step is to do nothing at all. Sit. Collect rain in spring, moss in summer, leaves in fall. Learn patience. But recall that patience without hope is cruelty. Reject the snow in winter. Now you are ready to meet Eros. She will ask not to receive gifts, but you must give her one anyway. Recall, however, that Eros does not demand love. She demands only some small peek beneath the cloth that you've never shown anyone else. Try poetry. Try something with form, meter, or rhyme, with five or seven words per line: Bold sun, crisp gust, cherry blossoms descend Incautious landing lets the pale willow pretend Shy moon, still air, cold March night I beg the wind to blow again. Try to avoid subtlety. Now, you're probably wondering where the squeegees come in. O-ho. The squeegees are critical. That's the best part: You use them to

You is a master of smooth surfaces though less like a fisherman than his bait: sprung, you tosses itself on a hook and parades indifference; a water-led horse, now embarassed to be so on the spot & in the spotlight. Can a jar of hot dogs not scowl when they see lobster all dressed up like that? In difference is you's indefinite characteristic. & you is my woman now, Bess & you is like soooo stupid & you is all made up for the big soiree & you despite all scholarly research to the contrary is the driving force behind surface economies of Windex or other generic window cleaners. Would you look any different if seen through a microscope? A local travelling merchant says, "No," though given his sale prices you probably shouldn't trust him. You is the yellow rose of Texas made more or less yellow by constant threat of execution and terrorist attack. It's not Kansas anymore, you knows. The brick road has been dug up in search of a beach but instead of sand you just stumbled upon a colony of Native Americans and they keep asking you for their shovels and buckets back.

Question of the ages: what have you been reading lately? Cities suspended on mahogany, Cities we walked in under a flaming moon, under dripping streetlights—can the beautiful Be submerged—can an awning protect us from the meteor? I open the book and begin incantations, Remembering our sailing song, our flailing inconsistencies, and heaven descends. I will never Know if your memory matches mine. This is wrong: you unbuckle the chariot and we thrust Endlessly under radiant garments. Smoke connects your toes—ambrosia for the experienced. My weak Knees will always lock. You will always lie in a bed of aching unfulfilment, the ghost of celestial scent.

When an amoeba senses food, it extends a false foot to surround its prey. From the microcellular victim's perspective, at first, this must feel gentle. Normally alone in cold water, the squiggly hunter's enveloping grasp feels warm and comforting by comparison. And so nice to take up residence, for a time, in another, and to be needed. Even as omnivores go, amoebas are not particularly discriminating. Once the instinctual tendrils of want find a victim, any one will do. Even bacteria and fungus have higher forms of partnership. In a sense, cordyceps mate for life: after the spores infect the host, eventually consuming it, the pair travel upwards together. The doomed ants must feel cold up there. But they do not die alone.