I spend a lot of time alone now. It doesn’t bother me. The others took up too much time. I am glad that they are gone. But it is January and now and then I think of January in Minnesota, how in late afternoon a rusty stain appears along the rim of the sky and creeps across the ice.

On an inside day in November, a smoke and cider day, Burton Glass found a white greasy kiss stamped against the black post of the sunporch he was painting at the shore, off-season in Rehobeth.

It pleased him. Look at that, he said.

Every October Chaim Fogel went to the Bergen-Belsen Survivors’ Banquet at the Plaza or at the Pierre. Naturally, he preferred the Plaza, because of the hors d’oeuvres: avocado appetizers, little cubes with fresh ground pepper on them and an outstanding Italian dressing. 

My name is José, I am Catholic and I was not a plainclothes policeman very long. In Argentina I wrote poetry and prayed to the Virgin every day for my mother who was a cancerous balloon grounded in the chicken shack behind the house and for my two sisters who tap-tapped their way past my window every hour drowned in lipstick and sperm.

Willie and Liberty broke into a house on Crab Key and lived there for a week. Crab Key was tiny and exclusive, belonging to an association which had armed security patrol. The houses on Crab Key were owned by people so wealthy that they were hardly ever there. They were elsewhere.

The text of this book was set, via computer-driven cathode ray tube, in a film version of 12 point Sophonisba, a typeface designed by A(rthur) A(delbert) Rawling for the Bald Eagle Linotype Company of Evanston, Illinois, in 1929. Due to the financial crisis of that year, the Bald Eagle Company went out of business before the typeface could be used, and its peculiar graces lay dormant all these decades, to be appreciated by the world for the first time only now. 

Was that the moon? None of my business. And anyway I’m myopic. Third grade. I remember. Things growing dim. Chalk lines fading like runic characters. The fluorescence. My classmates’ faces glowing,

I tell you, I am no more interested in poetry than the next fellow is. I mean, I can take it or leave it. On the other hand, once in a blue moon I come across a poem whose unfolding holds me for the distance. 

What I have been doing lately: I was lying in bed and the doorbell rang. I ran downstairs. Quick. I opened the door. There was no one there. I stepped outside.

Wachtmann glared at the parrot and tried to recapture the chords he had seen in his dream. He kicked off his blankets. The cloth had slipped from the top of the cage and hung down like a tongue. Beckmesser was rattling his throat and adjusting his wings. His right eye was completely closed now.