Stevens had a blackbird. Stein had a rose. Thor had a hammer. He hammered in the morning. Plato had a cave. Noah had a boat. Jonah had a whale. Melville had a whale. Dumbo had a feather. Adam had a rib. Jacob had a ladder. Wittgenstein had a ladder. George Washington founded a nation. We gave him a dollar. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. We gave him five dollars. Harriet Tubman had a railroad. It wasn’t an actual railroad. Magritte had a pipe and a painting of a pipe. It wasn’t an actual pipe because it was a painting of a pipe but really it was an actual pipe in its own way. Sherlock Holmes had a pipe and, separately, morphine. Freud had a cigar and other people’s problems. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Frosty the Snowman had a corncob pipe and a button nose. He got locked in the greenhouse and melted. Eve had an apple. Newton had an apple. Snow White had an apple. The witch had a mirror. Narcissus had a pool that worked like a mirror. It gave him a stiff neck. General Sherman got Atlanta by burning it to the ground. He never looked back. Francis Bacon, like everyone, had less time than he wanted, said I wouldn’t have this body of work if I had been better to my friends. It’s true, he was awful to his friends, but some people don’t even try. They aim low and sleep well. They get nothing. I got a wheelchair, then a cane, and I used to know some things about an earlier version of you. Audubon got all the birds of North America. Darwin got the finches of the Galápagos. Galileo got a telescope. He used it to move the sun to the center of the universe. We arrested him and banned his books. Socrates had a question. Well, several questions. We gave him poison. Van Gogh had a paintbrush. He struggled with yellow. He was 700 things on a small shelf, touching. When he died he was survived by everything that was left.

My housemate’s girlfriend has a kid who stays with us half the week. He’s kind of slow for a ten-year-old, but everyone keeps insisting that he’s six. His hair’s too long but I don’t really know what he looks like because I won’t look him in the face. He’ll barrel into the kitchen, saying something about dinosaurs, and stop abruptly, saying You’re not Andy. I never turn around because sandwiches are important and he shouldn’t be encouraged to barrel into a room without looking, thinking that it’s safe because rarely is anything safe, and most people aren’t Andy, and they will just take what you say about dinosaurs and twist it around until you sound crazy. Also he probably has jam on his face and dirty hands. Also I don’t want to turn around and look him in the face and scare him with my face, which is a sad face, the face of someone going through a difficult thing and not handling it very well. He isn’t messy, not really, just too young to understand that you have to clean as you go because messes compound and you have to confront the things you’ve ruined before they drown you in wreckage and filth. Unless he’s ten, in which case he’s old enough to learn. Also he got shampoo all over the bathroom because he was pretending he didn’t know how to wash his hair, hoping someone else would do it for him, but he put on such a good show that he convinced himself that he didn’t know how to do it after all, and he scared himself, which is pretty much what I do all the time, so it was irritating and made me feel self-conscious. If he’s six, he probably looks cute with jam on his face. If he’s ten, probably not. I don’t know what I’d do if he was sixteen, standing behind me with too-long hair and jam on his face, going on about dinosaurs with his dirty hands and not looking up and not realizing that I’m not Andy. When I was in the hospital and my head was full of noise and snow I still knew who Andy was. Also there are dogs. I call them Dog, Other Dog, and Little Dog. I won’t learn their real names. The only reason you name a dog is so you can tell it what to do. I don’t know what to do so I’m staying out of it. I don’t look the dogs in the face either. Once you look something in the face it starts to want things.

Zebras have stripes, leopards have parties. Bobcats eat ham sandwiches and crème brûlée. A bird will sit on your finger and tell you a story. A dog will sleep at your feet all night and not overthink it. The dog is chasing squirrels in the backyard of a dream. I was a beautiful day, I was yellow next to pink. I was a brush fire, a telephone. I was, I am. The mayor gave me a sash and a gift certificate for a complimentary dinner. He was very proud. It was a cakewalk. I took the long road to thicken the gravy. I pushed the words around. I pushed them hard. I did it blind, with the pictures in my head, and the technicians in the cloud factory filled the sky: cumulous, cirrus, cumulonimbus. They made some shapes so we could guess. We looked at them. I did. Meaning comes from somewhere. You could feel the figs swelling in the fig trees all afternoon. Imagination—image is the coal that fuels its little engines. Shovel coal. Call it love, call it a day’s work. Keep the furnace burning in the factory. The puff puff puff of possibility. You don’t need to know someone to be their lover, you don’t need to know anything. To get over Ben, I thought about Steve. To get over Steve, I thought about Paul. I went swimming in a blue rectangle. It wasn’t actually swimming but I called it swimming. Around the pool: A thousand grasshoppers. Strawberry cake: If only I had the room. The planes land and sometimes there is luggage, so here’s a little lamb for you. Maybe it’s a cow. And a tree in the background and a bat in the tree like a blot or a stain or a gathering storm. I know, I’m doing it wrong—meow, meow, meow. Big words and pig fat, très estúpido—but then, what do you know, the invisible table reappears. Go ahead and finish the thought. Say the dream was real and the wall imaginary. Fill the sky with clouds. A thought came up to the window and surprised me. And that was that. Nothing but fingerprints on glass. Don’t blame me. I didn’t invent the world, I’m just looking at it.