He was the one who would not use his face— 
would keep it in reserve, would use his hands, 
one at a time, alternately. Would use feet. 

Would be happy when it suited, would 
mourn when required. Such a poem as was 
needed, he would make. Would want, 

when those he loves are in pain, 
to be. There. To bleed for all equally. 
And here was a thing to believe: “to live whole 

lives with littleness, how tired it makes us, 
a sharp fear, this point to which the eye was 
drawn—defames then defeats the hand—an agony 

it is to follow self into its shameful needs” and 
so forth. “Wherever you can: count” said 
Francis Galton. We do not know most things. 

I might know a few things. I can 
rarely tell the difference. Where there are flocks 
of Monk Parakeets, Green Neighbors, they rouse 

us to collect feathers under streetlights 
on nightly walks where are builded unsightly nests. 
A dozen wild parakeets in furious formation fly 

across the park swerve to streak past, accidental, me. 
Pyromancy, a method of augury by reading 
weblike patterns which appear on bone surface 

following the application of heat, especially 
favored in China—but what did it sound like 
when the bone cracked, its surface crazed? 

The sound of the word “sound,” as in “the sound 
of young girls.” Or “the voices in my head.” 
Complex looking, calligraphically. 

Among things to love in this world are eyelet fabrics, 
suggestive nests of absence promising 
a glimpse of flesh and remembrance of touch, 

of the feel of the young world. 
The skin beneath the fabric shines— 
Wann was a word for it, for gloss or sheen; Fealo 

meant glint, the sparkle of sun, say, on waves; 
while lux meant the source of light, color 
the effect of that light on a surface, as of 

the moistening skin beneath the eyelets. 
Lumen, the ray of light traveling between 
the surface and the eye, the source and 

the surface; splendor was the word for 
that final reflected, lustrous quality, 
that which draws the hand inexorable. 

“The winds sweeping the surface 
of the waters diminish them, as does 
the ethereal sun unraveling them 

by his rays.” De Rerum Natura 5, 390. 
When an electron “moves” to a higher orbit 
it does not move but merely is now elsewhere— 

once it was here, now it is there. This is not 
possible in the old world where I used to live 
by manufacture. The new world is one of 

probabilities, where numbers add up 
and the glint of sun on flesh is ephemeral. 
All is diminished in his world, yet all the more 

unaccountably glorious. We love it all, 
and each the other, or so it seems. His hands 
cracked a sound a second face fallen.