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Every few minutes, he wants to march the trail of flattened rye grass back to the house of muttering hens. He too could make a bed in hay. Yesterday the egg so fresh it felt hot in his hand and he pressed it to his ear while the other children laughed and ran with a ball, leaving him, so little yet, too forgetful in games, ready to cry if the ball brushed him, riveted to the secret of birds caught up inside his fist, not ready to give it over to the refrigerator or the rest of the day.

The boy Alexander understands his father to be a famous lawyer. The leather law books of Alexander’s father fill a room like hay in a barn. Alexander has asked his father to let him build a house like bricklayers build, a house with walls and roofs made of big leather law books. The rain beats on the windows And the raindrops run down the window glass And the raindrops slide off the green blinds down the siding. The boy Alexander dreams of Napoleon in John C. Abbott’s history, Napoleon the grand and lonely man wronged, Napoleon in his life wronged and in his memory wronged. The boy Alexander dreams of the cat Alice saw, the cat fading off into the dark and leaving the teeth of its Cheshire smile lighting the gloom. Buffaloes, blizzards, way down in Texas, in the panhandle of Texas snuggling close to New Mexico, These creep into Alexander’s dreaming by the window when his father talks with strange men about land down in Deaf Smith County. Alexander’s father tells the strange men: Five years ago we ran a Ford out on the prairie and chased antelopes. Only once or twice in a long while has Alexander heard his father say ‘my first wife’ so-and-so and such-and-such. A few times softly the father has told Alexander, ‘Your mother . . . was a beautiful woman . . . but we won’t talk about her.’ Always Alexander listens with a keen listen when he hears his father mention ‘my first wife’ or ‘Alexander’s mother.’ Alexander’s father smokes a cigar and the Episcopal rector smokes a cigar, and the words come often: mystery of life, mystery of life. These two come into Alexander’s head blurry and grey while the rain beats on the windows and the raindrops run down the window glass and the raindrops slide off the green blinds and down the siding. These and: There is a God, there must be a God, how can there be rain or sun unless there is a God? So from the wrongs of Napoleon and the Cheshire cat smile on to the buffaloes and blizzards of Texas and on to his mother and to God, so the blurry grey rain dreams of Alexander have gone on five minutes, maybe ten, keeping slow easy time to the raindrops on the window glass and the raindrops sliding off the green blinds and down the siding.

His father told him never start writing or reading in the middle of a book. There’s a title, don’t go on without one. And he didn’t go on without one — he had the title Private. This was life’s taproot — the obedient boy began always at the beginning. Books start out with what the boy calls Beauty — the boat’s still in port. The cat’s alive. Pantry’s packed. Even present tense has some of the grace of past tense, what with all the present tense left to go. Usually, by the first page or second, a relationship emerges between text and title. Some of the words blur on the page and the key ones glow, as does the title, and a fat red arrow with two heads connects them. Yum. It was like owning something. The way when he paid for a fine hat and put it on, he felt a circuit through the rim and top and sides, swilling gray hat blood. And he felt like his heart controlled this circuit remotely, via microchip. If a book could not service him with this truth, which was all the pleasure in the world, he would usually stop reading. He saw the end of very few books anyway — who needs two climaxes? After that intense sensation the book always changed. It was like looking at a plate of food he’d half-eaten and had rendered him bloated and nauseous. Now he is on marches. Now his gun makes a nest in his arm crook with nasty red welts for straw. Now his rear leaks smelly water all day. His whole life he has balanced himself on an absurdly slender proscenium and as he continues to edge out he can’t tell if it isn’t maybe a gangplank. He doesn’t like the switch-up. What’s out there? he wonders, in what he’ll call ocean for now. To his right is an alligator. But the head-ridge has no bone. It’s propped up instead by fumes: rich, dark, and pungent. Far off, men are cradling cracked dolphins. Arrows of fire shoot out the blowholes. The wounds bleed silver. Perhaps they are connecting to a title in the sky. But he’s not seeing any of these things. The world is mostly brown and black, and smells like a rotting fridge. What is it? What is it? Is it a hand? Is it an eye? Is it a hat? It is time.

‘Gabble-gabble, . . . brethren, . . . gabble-gabble!’ My window frames forest and heather. I hardly hear the tuneful babble, Not knowing nor much caring whether The text is praise or exhortation, Prayer or thanksgiving, or damnation. Outside it blows wetter and wetter, The tossing trees never stay still. I shift my elbows to catch better The full round sweep of heathered hill. The tortured copse bends to and fro In silence like a shadow-show. The parson’s voice runs like a river Over smooth rocks, I like this church: The pews are staid, they never shiver, They never bend or sway or lurch. ‘Prayer,’ says the kind voice, ‘is a chain That draws down Grace from Heaven again.’ I add the hymns up, over and over, Until there’s not the least mistake. Seven-seventy-one. (Look! there’s a plover! It’s gone!) Who’s that Saint by the lake? The red light from his mantle passes Across the broad memorial brasses. It’s pleasant here for dreams and thinking, Lolling and letting reason nod, With ugly serious people linking Sad prayers to a forgiving God . . . . But a dumb blast sets the trees swaying With furious zeal like madmen praying.

Black maid, complain not that I fly, When Fate commands antipathy: Prodigious might that union prove, Where Night and Day together move, And the conjunction of our lips Not kisses make, but an eclipse, In which the mixed black and white Portends more terror than delight. Yet if my shadow thou wilt be, Enjoy thy dearest wish. But see Thou take my shadow’s property, That hastes away when I come nigh. Else stay till death hath blinded me, And then I will bequeath myself to thee.

When he wakes up out of sleep, the brown boy remembers two things: his white man calls and breaks the groans of Kevin Bacon, naked and writhing in pain on a hard and wet black street. Bacon has been beaten with broken bottles and has had his chest smashed in with a large flaming couch section. A mob of whites poured gasoline all over his chiseled stomach and then lit him afire. Brad Pitt lay next to him, his stomach breathless and glistening in the flame’s light. The brown boy knows this is somewhere between movie and dream, staring at each stomach; but more importantly, he knows that despite the fire, the bodies did not burn. They did not char or turn black. They simply shined in sweat. The brown boy will commit to his memory, most, Brad Pitt’s dying, and how he eventually turned over on his stomach, his penis turned down and scrape fucking the street—Brad Pitt ejaculating and on fire, the liquid shooting out of him as he looked up, staggered to his feet to let out something between groaning and laughter out to the black sky. Though Pitt had been beaten with bottles and wood, it was not clear where he was hurt, only that he was a screaming surface, dripping with lit gasoline and semen. As the brown boy ponders this surface, the white man has chosen to phone his brown boy. Their first conversation of the day is bound by this scene—and dutifully, for the white man, he wants to start from the beginning: Brad Pitt and Kevin Bacon are in a boxing ring in the middle of a football field. They are both wearing white boxer shorts, no gloves, and about to perform a dance routine. I am standing next to them, looking at Brad Pitt’s hair flop down over his face. He smiles at me before the music starts. From everywhere, broken glass bottles hurl at their bodies, and they are splashed with gasoline. We are also in a dark alley lit by fire. The two are still standing, looking over at me, though I can’t tell who is smiling. I only know Brad Pitt winks at me while Kevin Bacon is on the street, writhing as a large white flaming couch section is smashed onto his chest. My mother was dead in the dream. I was looking through a dense stash of clothes in a cabinet. All of them were soiled, and none of the clothes were hers. I remember holding a pair of purple and green Speedos that were woven to a pair of matching polyester tennis shorts. These shorts were my father’s. I remember my mother making all of his tennis shorts. I also remember pulling out a pair of long sweatpants that were much too large for my mother and holding them up as crumbs fell from the legs. I tried to smell them, wanting to think of her alive. What the brown boy doesn’t say is that he wondered, in the dream, how his father was getting through this—living alone with only her smell left behind. Or how he pulled the sweatpants up to his nose and mouth, absorbing the whole of her scent through his body. Without revealing his father’s grief or his own, the brown boy breathes in the smell of Giorgio mixed with eleven years of shifts at the convalescent home, and gives the white man what he thought he wanted. He quickly shot to the end, where Brad Pitt grinds his fat cock in the pavement, the curve of it pushing down bent and spewing semen into the street. Kevin Bacon stands up and groans, laughing as his bowels leak from his stomach. I was thinking about that before you called. The brown boy knows the white man wants to hear the brown boy rise from sleep, hear the spill from his head in the morning without saying a word. Though this morning, to this dream, the white man has two responses: He calls the dream bizarre and says nothing about the brown boy’s mother, only I feel sorry for Brad Pitt.

If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame. They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, I am the hymn the Brahmin sings. The strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven; But thou, meek lover of the good! Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

Shoulders knobbed against a slat-backed chair, the temples tugged, a pull at the nape, you felt the up- sweep as she smoothed the fine wisps back and tucked yank into yank and a third into that until the consecutive dodges of thumbs and first fingers gathered, fraying and filing to their end—ended in an ornament that, suspended, looked ridiculous, even on a child who mostly set forth with what was called a “finished” look, some loose ends in order where others were not and a slight weight below the nape’s pull. The view others had of it was invisible to you. It made something there where there would have been a blank—now instead a kind of face sent from woman to woman like a duty, an obstinate duty to pattern. It’s too simple to see one thing rather than another, a wish protruding once it’s been suppressed, a vise that holds a thought in its proper place until it bobs to the surface of a generally balmy sea. Women and woman only a letter away—a strand gets mixed, then mixed right out of the heaven of perfect fit; one kind of accident turns into another. The whole head throbs for days. Black and white are woven into gray the way hyperbole has no chance once it’s juxtaposed to reason—negation just a thread among the available options and hope itself apparent there in the very notion a made thing can last. Tougher, coarser, split weave in the years. Shorter, longer, shorter, the brain bound to its anchor. The brushed-out waves with their rick-rack shadows, a thread inside the case, the case inside the locket, the locket beneath the yoke. All the effort to save in itself a form of loss. You can tell a story many ways. You can leave something out or put something in; you can fool yourself and hide. You can shake out the form or try to manage every wisp, but the latter will only bring you pain. You went under the hand and eye of another and the tether cannot be undone.

I wish I could find that skinny, long-beaked boy who perched in the branches of the old branch library. He spent the Sabbath flying between the wobbly stacks and the flimsy wooden tables on the second floor, pecking at nuts, nesting in broken spines, scratching notes under his own corner patch of sky. I'd give anything to find that birdy boy again bursting out into the dusky blue afternoon with his satchel of scrawls and scribbles, radiating heat, singing with joy.

A vigilant gun that always picks out The right target—even if it’s you— No matter who you’re aiming at. A computer that listens and blows you, As you blow it, to your favorite tune. Meat that cleans your teeth As you’re masticating it. A truck so awesome, only the President Of the United States of America’s allowed To careen in it, to his own beat. A dictionary with positive adjectives only. A dictionary with no wet verbs. A dictionary with negotiable definitions. A dictionary that defines words by their antonyms. All the greatest hits from the last millennium Performed live, on stage, on the inside Of your state of the art, acoustically-enhanced skull. A complete set of nude photos Of you, taken by you and sold Back to you—at a discount. A sex doll with a mirror for a face. A sex doll with a Ph.D. A sex doll with adjustable skin tone. A sensitive sex doll that just wants To be friends—a Platonic sex doll. Rain water in a bottle, sunshine in a box And ambience sounds from a bus stop Down the street, recorded on a CD. A 24-hour video of what you did yesterday. A 24-hour video of what you’ll do tomorrow. A super realistic photo of what’s outside Your window, pasted to your window. A baseball game that never ends, To be played simultaneously with A football game that never ends. Cluster bombs that scatter copies of Leaves of Grass Over a thousand mile radius, for a thousand years. Landmines made with dough, Topped with mozzarella and all Your favorite toppings. An airplane that never lands. And, finally, your favorite fairy tale Painted on your new plastic limbs.