Who was happier, the first person to braid hair or the first person to unbraid hair? Happiness is a recent concern, a porch light flicked on late in our existence. Since I am writing the history of this moment, I am writing the history of all moments, all robin and nightingale song, all torture song. I know (not suspect) it was the unbraider, the man (not woman) who touched the long curls of hair, the long curves of a mountain in hair, the long waves of a sea in hair. He was happier than the man who wove the hair...

The museum of pieces of things left over when other things are put back together opens at nine. I work in the coatroom with Ellen who is from Boise. We hold hands inside the pockets of long black coats. I would stand taller if I wore the night on my back. My favorite exhibit is the flutter, a theoretical particle they think god forgot to put back after a cigarette break from making everything up. Ellen says Boise has a beautiful downtown, which means she smiles like the green center of a smallish metropolis. Once, when they snapped the lights...

Hello. You’ve read your way into a time machine disguised as a poem inside a book calledThis Clumsy Living, a title taken from a Rilke poem. For you, it’s sometime after March of 2007, though the words you’re reading, such as that word “reading,” are being typed on May 23, 2006. It’s sunny here. On my desk, a Bible open to Genesis rests on a short story about a man whose son is heading off to Parris Island for basic training, which sits on a history of zero I printed out from a web site, which is on top...

Mother. The beginning sound. I only feel the word as an instance: my mother. It’s that way with weather. Speak of rain and I think of a toy dinosaur floating in a pail meant for sand: rain is green, small, extinct. That is both memory and imagining, I’ve not been given one apart from the other. Mother called me in to supper—probably. Mother danced with a painting by Kalf—unlikely. But I advocate the dance, it’s more interesting, the better story. Some people are pregnant with facts. Aristotle limped, the siege machines of Dunart were carved at the bottom...

There are these notions of how the world would be better. Shoot all the anti-Semites. Wear only red socks. Hunt truth like the wolf hunts elk, in packs, with relentless teeth. Make language stand up and be something like a house, give it the force of wind, the courage of a storm to destroy itself. What we think of as wild I think of as honest. Doing, not what you think, but what you are. The difference between counting the rings of a tree and finding a place in the sky. A theory toward wolf would be a fine addition...