Last night, sensing the signs, Australia’s long-
time light-welterweight champ Kostya Tszyu 
threw in the towel on his last title fight

It’s said they started in beach sand,
but now it’s Gobi, Sahara, Mojave grit
the fish sift through their gills, absorbing 

He could be on acid, the way he holds them
to the light and stares. “Wow,
man. Heavy. Oh wow ...”

Each has a foot-square paper napkin stuck
to the headrest: a bow to budget travelers' sensibilities.
Too bad each square evokes a paper toilet seat:

He tells of headless people with eyes on their shoulders,
dog-headed people who bark, one-legged people
who hop fast, mouthless people fed by the scent

She bought it because her baseball player didn't want her to,
because her playwright and her President and her Attorney
General disapproved. You're a star, they said—the one

Then there is the question, how to disrobe for swimming? For if a girl simply strips naked, she is immodest. If she takes off some clothes but leaves on others, she is still undressing, still immodest, her body motions sure to spawn lewd thoughts, as for instance seeing a mother walking with her child sug- gests nights of abandoned passion.

While asleep, a man gives birth to an idea of a woman. He wakes and finds it curled comfortably against him.

Nothing will budge it. Not hot water. Not detergent. Not scraping with a steak knife. It stands firm—a thick, chalky scum blanketing the glass-bottom, glowering threats of foul taste and disease.

Remember how we’d gape at those g-strings and pasties, and giggle and yell and leave blue-balled and pretending not to be?

“Papaya.” Waterfalls. Flowers. Clear blue seas. Lush islands where it was always 80, and no one got sick. Where women were beautiful, gentle, obliging.

   I used to want to make sense. Then I wanted not to make sense. Now I want only to say something not stupid.