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It will not stay. But this morning we wake to pale muslin stretched across the grass. The pumpkins, still in the fields, are planets shrouded by clouds. The Weber wears a dunce cap and sits in the corner by the garage where asters wrap scarves around their necks to warm their blooms. The leaves, still soldered to their branches by a frozen drop of dew, splash apple and pear paint along the roadsides. It seems we have glanced out a window into the near future, mid-December, say, the black and white photo of winter carefully laid over the present autumn, like a morning we pause at the mirror inspecting the single strand of hair that overnight has turned to snow.

The first sentence is a sentence about writing. The second sentence tells you it's alright to lose interest. You might be one of those people who sits back in his or her chair without interest, and this would have been the third sentence you would have read. The fourth sentence, what does that say, that says something about how I genuinely feel, even if it no longer matters how I genuinely feel, that has not even become the topic of another book. The fifth sentence says that that was left by the wayside because it was such a variable thing. That's what the sixth sentence said, and says, that it sits there still, varying, changing its colors, etc., the army of ancient Rome marches by, they think it is some sort of tomb and display their eagle insignia. The seventh sentence ill conceals its surprise that I should have tried to make it all look so far away. The eight sentence is therefore a meditation on something close at hand. The ninth sentence is a means of approach. In the tenth sentence I discover I am staring at a list of things I have done written in blue pencil on brown paper. In the eleventh sentence I draw a one-eyed duck on the paper beside the list. In the twelfth sentence I circle one of the numbers on the list and I start to feel nervous. In the thirteenth sentence I realize I have chosen something. In the fourteenth sentence I decide I will read my choice aloud. In the fifteenth sentence I stall by saying the words "I don't have a choice." In the sixteenth sentence I stall again by thinking about the obelisk on the Upper East Side in Central Park and how it is called "Cleopatra's Needle," and how around the base of the "needle" there are metal supports in the shape of crustaceans, I think they are crabs in fact but sometimes that word is slightly obscene so I consider not writing it. In the seventeenth sentence I think some more about the kinds of joke that employ that word and whether it is worth thinking about such jokes, as it does alter the genre of what you are writing if such things are allowed to be thought as a part of it. The lawns of the park were very green in summer, and it is early summer right now, right as I think to think this, and this is the first time I have lived in New York City for a full year in ten years, this is what I tell as the nineteenth sentence. In the twentieth sentence I recall the list and resolve again to look at it. In the twentifirst sentence I misspell twenty-first with two "i"s. In the twenty-second sentence I look down at the list, I have circled no. 18759351 on the list. In the twentisecond sentence I misspell twenty-second using an "i" again. In the twenty-third sentence I read what is written next to no. 18759351, it says, "He was sitting on a bench...," but at this moment a breeze enters in through the open window, lifting the page and you begin reading another line, the words, "And you hand in the application and it takes three months and...." In the twenty-fourth sentence you can see me set the page down as another person walks through the door. I turn off the electronic typewriter and scroll out the page and place it facedown on the desk and I cover it with a notebook you weren't aware was also there on the desk. Now you can see it, it is almost the exact same color as the surface of the desk and now you can see it. These were the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth sentences, respectively, it is the lot of the twenty-seventh sentence to have to announce that. In the twenty-eighth sentence a cloud passes over the apartment on its way into space. In the twenty-ninth sentence, I think, next year this will be the number of my age. The thirtieth sentence is all about the speed at which time is passing. In the thirty-first sentence I won't care anymore, I'll see that reality only accrues to itself and does not have to mean something. In the thirty-second sentence I want you to agree with me. Things happen by chance, and what Montaigne pleads with us to believe, in an essay, is that fortune makes herself known in the act of reading, there is much that I could not have intended which is yet here, I forget exactly how this goes, this being the thirty-third sentence. I sit down beside myself in the thirty-fourth sentence and say to myself, smiling, even small numbers are big. This is the working of time, the thirty-fifth sentence joins in saying this, too, once one has crossed the years their number does not matter. But what I was trying to get across was, I think in sentence thirty-six, that maybe you could not have done things earlier, maybe it just was not possible in those days for whichever reasons. You spend the thirty-seventh sentence attempting to spell those reasons out. You fall asleep, and in the thirty-eighth sentence you dream about a room. The room is a classroom in which you are alone, says sentence number thirty-nine, the windows have been left open and a sentence can be read on the blackboard. In the fortieth sentence you have to force yourself to go on. Descartes's dream, you remember, in sentence forty-one, provided a quote supposedly from Ausonius. This is the forty-second sentence,Est et non. Then I think it is safe to say that something begins to happen, sentence forty-three tells us. Sentence forty-four says that you should forgive. Sentence forty-five says that you remember this number as having been particularly beautiful when worn by your mother. Sentence forty-six says the figures move away. Sentence forty-seven is a sentence about what loneliness names itself in the paradoxical presence of others. Sentence forty-eight says it has a name. Sentence forty-nine says that I cannot remember this name. Sentence fifty says that I go back and try and live there in that moment when I was saying the name. I say, "Happiness." This was sentence fifty-one. That was sentence fifty-two. Sentence fifty-four is a sentence about how there is too much of so many things, there is too much of all the words, but the world runs on underneath them and I keep on imagining how you could have heard me, how you could not have heard me. Sentence fifty-five is a sentence about picking up the phone. Sentence fifty-six is a sentence about picking up a small cellular phone but not using it and willing the phone to ring on its own. The gray cotton of the sweatshirt I wear is a warm cotton in sentence fifty-seven. In sentence fifty-eight I decide to keep on saying the numbers. In sentence fifty-nine I hold the page up to the light and see the type on the other side show through, In sentence sixty you start to believe me. In sentence sixty-one I start to go back to the beginning. I wonder if I should worry. The world is full of pauses, the world is full with continuations, says sentence sixty-three. I let sentence sixty-four go. In sentence sixty-five it occurs to me that I concern myself here with something that ought not to be touched. Sentence sixty-six is a guess that this is the mystery of counting, that it goes on and means itself without having a meaning. I count the people in the distance I can see from my window in sentence sixty-seven. In sentence sixty-eight the breeze has a sweet smell. In sentence sixty-nine, it turns the last week of May in the year 2008. Sentence seventy concerns the lack of what I wanted, in my own mind, to be saying. In sentence seventy-one I'm going so far as to ask you if you can see this, how much of what I thought lay before me remained in the distance. In sentence seventy-two there is a hill there. In sentence seventy-three we see flowers open their faces and then black snakes slide down the face of the hill. In sentence seventy-four there is still nothing. In sentence seventy-five the moon changes place with the sun. In sentence seventy-six this takes place again, only now it is day. In sentence seventy-seven it is still day. In sentence seventy-eight it is still day. Why do you think about tragedy, sentence seventy-nine wants to know, since it is the least likely thing to happen. Sentence eighty will eventually come to me and want to know what I am doing with myself. Sentence eighty-one reminds me to expect this question. In sentence eighty-two something changes. I stay up two nights running and in the morning the sidewalk seems to rise up and meet my feet underneath my feet. Sentence eighty-four contains the question, didn't you already know that this would start to happen. Sentence eighty-five agrees. When I start to read sentence eighty-six I discover it contains the words, It is also true that what you said could be. For this reason, sentence eighty-seven is a sentence about why there are certainly points of correspondence between what we expect to be the case and what is. Sentence eighty-eight proclaims it feels the excitement and not the work. Sentence eighty-nine takes action without saying anything first. In sentence ninety I cover my eyes. In sentence ninety-one I uncover my eyes so that I can look again. In sentence ninety-two I cover them again. Now I am speaking to you. Now I am speaking to you. Say the words after me just as I say them. What it means to live is the subject of sentence ninety-six. You are moving out of earshot now. We are not going to miss each other. You have an excellent memory. Please never forget I was the one who told you that

I used to mock my father and his chums for getting up early on Sunday morning and drinking coffee at a local spot but now I’m one of those chumps. No one cares about my old humiliations but they go on dragging through my sleep like a string of empty tin cans rattling behind an abandoned car. It’s like this: just when you think you have forgotten that red-haired girl who left you stranded in a parking lot forty years ago, you wake up early enough to see her disappearing around the corner of your dream on someone else’s motorcycle roaring onto the highway at sunrise. And so now I’m sitting in a dimly lit café full of early morning risers where the windows are covered with soot and the coffee is warm and bitter.

Early to bed and early to rise: If that would make me wealthy and wise I’d rise at daybreak, cold or hot, And go back to bed at once. Why not?

Mudman in earth cafeteria, I eat aardwolf. I eat ant bear. I eat mimosa, platypus, ermine. “White meat is tasteless, dark meat stinks.” (The other white meat is pork, triple X.) Rice people vs. bread people. White bread vs. wheat bread. White rice vs. brown rice. Manhattan vs. New England. Kosher sub-gum vs. knuckle kabob. “What is patriotism but love of the foods one had as a child?”* To eat stinky food is a sign of savagery, humility, identification with the earth. “It was believed that after cleaning, tripe still contained ten percent excrement which was therefore eaten with the rest of the meal.”** Today I’ll eat Colby cheese. Tomorrow I’ll eat sparrows. Chew bones, suck fat, bite heads off, gnaw on a broken wing. Anise-flavored beef soup smells like sweat. A large sweaty head bent over a large bowl of sweat soup. A Pekinese is ideal, will feed six, but an unscrupulous butcher will fudge a German sheperd, chopping it up to look like a Pekinese. Toothless man sucking a pureed porterhouse steak with a straw. Parboiled placenta. To skewer and burn meat is barbaric. To boil, requiring a vessel, is a step up. To microwave. People who eat phalli, hot dogs, kielbasas vs. people who eat balls. To eat with a three-pronged spear and a knife. To eat with two wooden sticks. To eat with the hands. Boiling vs. broiling. To snack on a tub of roasted grasshoppers at the movies. *Lin Yutang **Mikhail Bakhtin

I am the Earth And the Earth is me. Each blade of grass, Each honey tree, Each bit of mud, And stick and stone Is blood and muscle, Skin and bone. And just as I Need every bit Of me to make My body fit, So Earth needs Grass and stone and tree And things that grow here Naturally. That’s why we Celebrate this day. That’s why across The world we say: As long as life, As dear, as free, I am the Earth And the Earth is me.

Doors open and shut. We ’ ve come to the place where nothing shines. I hear eternity Is self-forgetting.  Interiors warm with the nightmare of guests and poetry And you.  Everything darkly Reverent years of reading about death eluded. Bled Back from the ear sidestepping your bullets bloom in on ye lay Rock.  Rud.  Spread So swiftly tastes like mud.  Dredged mud off The corpse sled hushed down woodsmoke. Said the stars thrum on Marie Marie.  Hold on tight. In the depths of outer space Is man.

Earth rais'd up her head, From the darkness dread & drear. Her light fled: Stony dread! And her locks cover'd with grey despair. Prison'd on watry shore Starry Jealousy does keep my den Cold and hoar Weeping o'er I hear the Father of the ancient men Selfish father of men Cruel, jealous, selfish fear Can delight Chain'd in night The virgins of youth and morning bear. Does spring hide its joy When buds and blossoms grow? Does the sower? Sow by night? Or the plowman in darkness plow? Break this heavy chain, That does freeze my bones around Selfish! vain! Eternal bane! That free Love with bondage bound.

I smell me coming up behind me some days— sweet sarcophagal history. The Ark after the beasts disembarked, the motel bed as the maid draws the shades, shakes the sheets, blinks back the stink, the leafed hollow where the stalled mower sits in its exhaust and smells of wronged flesh, wing, meat but me mostly, climbing the steps, extract of me, stinking of me.

The earth shakes just enough to remind us.