1.

Two shepherds approach the crest of a hill. One of them has been inconvenienced. His gaze sweeps the valley.

“I’ll stab the clouds with my horns!”

The other stands back and looks at his companion; not only at him, but at all of him.

“Jesus, those are your horns?”

2.

I don’t know of whom I feel more jealous: the person seated behind me talking about how inappropriate the new films are, or the person responding affirmatively to this disapproval with a certain anecdote of his own—to which the first interlocutor assents, “Yeah. That is pretty hilarious.”

3.

If email smelled like whomever composed and sent it, we would rely less on email.

Perhaps this is precisely why we rely less and less on email?

4.

There’s no way that sound is coming out of a real baby.

5.

He woke to see that the song had gone viral. As its gentle strum entered his skull, he felt an egg drop into his stomach from which something instantaneously hatched. It surveyed, with great vanity, the nest into which it had been born, and opened its little beak.

6.

Like many in his generation, he had a condition in which a phosphorescent white apple hovered just above his lap at all times.

7.

Thinking about his persistent unemployment.

“I was lazy, but all the same, I saw a great deal more than I was required to see,” he wondered.

8.

Dream, 4/4

“Are you going to be at the photography reading tonight?”

“I can’t tonight. I’m thanking my bank.”

9.

“Who was living with those shells? To whom will they will them in their wills?”

10.

“What wise food you have!” she whispered.

11.

“Who among you,” she asked into her headset microphone, “is in the mood for a mal du siècle-style sequence of events?”

12.

The way Debussy’s string quartet in G minor will turn on a dime. Biting lemon ice in a harbor, aft sunlight, gulls noming, endless tears, etc.

He knows he can go anywhere in this boat.

Does he go anywhere?

13.

And then a little hum on the horizon, a low comedy.

Lower comedy: three voices knocking their heads together on a windy hill.

“Time to take that voice to the hospital,” the Fire Marshall says. “Looks like it’s got a bad case of bliss.”

14.

Notes travelling together by sea, by rail, by car, by air.

15.

“And the confidentiality of the air below the esplanade.”

16.

Eating’s mimesis, and other poems.

17.

“The time we have at our disposal every day is elastic, the passions we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it, and habit fills up what remains.” (Proust, Budding Grove)

18.

Dream, 4/8

“Beautiful eyes. Have you always had them?”

“Yes, I’ve always had my eyes.”

19.

She painted a finger doubting a wound.

Then she painted it again.

20.

The ill dew: I don’t care who sees.

21.

Two days after turning 33. What happened that day?

At midnight the night before my birthday I read a passage in Proust in which he describes Odette’s clothing as a technological finery near the edge of civilization.

Kristen hid her suitcase in the dunes and we walked out to the breaker, then walked back to retrieve her bag. The handle now broken, she fished a shirt out, tied it around the ruins of the original handle and a scarf around her head, dragged the suitcase along the boardwalk in such insane, noisy fashion that strangers passing on their late afternoon walks stopped to try to help her fix it. “I’m sorry if I ruined your birthday solitude,” she laughed, and got into a cab that would take her to the airport.

On the train back home, high school boys yelled and laughed as they attempted, with an anxiety pointedly not borne out of his deathlike slumber, but the possibility that they would anger him if he woke too abruptly, to alert their dreaming friend that his stop was coming up.

22.

Before he began, the poet prefaced his comments by expressing humiliation for what he was about to say. A delicately rancid genre of poetic address in its own right, and a rich one.

When he ended his preface, the room erupted in applause.

23.

In later stages of his life he couldn’t decide who he’d wished he’d been more: Ovid, a real celebrity, or a hillside trampled with sunlight, a heavy mist slipping down its eastern face carrying the verdant smell of freshly-cut email.

24.

“I’m seeing the dentist tomorrow, so you have to be nice to me.”

As if it were not nice to be in possession of such fine tooth.

25.

Parable of the Bridge

I enter the bridge with a group of Hasidic boys I had seen from the other side of the street. At the Manhattan side you encounter three phrases in succession underfoot. They are, in reverse order, no cocaine in the promise land, fuck the president, and pull the lever.

A driver stopped in front of them and leaned on his horn. They didn’t flinch. When I caught up with them they seemed, and perhaps only seemed, to speed up. They were throwing little Technicolor sperm twisted together of gunpowder and tissue paper. A bluish chemical smoke hung around them, sunlight and exhaust.

My step quickened.

26.

Dream, 4/20

Margaret explains that her spices are her cats.

“See?” she says, framing the spices with her hands in an equal sign. “These are my cats.”

27.

He imagined that his ideas grew off of his body like vines. They got caught in subway doors, etc. Fat bumblebees coated in a thick robe of pollen levitated around him wherever he went.

He plucked a flower from one of his vines, held it to his nose, and closed his eyes.

It smelled exactly like email.

28.

If we think of prosody as a kind of speech, then a ballad is a performance. Notebooks on the other hand are more private, a performance for oneself.

Even more private than that?

This here ill dew.

29.

To the left of the fire and under the plastic marlin, she checked her email.

30.

Can you imagine it if you could just say shit about Greece and numbers, listing a random assortment of words as evidence that what you say is true, “rupture,” “Echo,” “ruse,” “loam,” “ray,” “remainder,” “fluster”, “cataract,” fact,” “Jerome,” “stone,” spending every evening, after calling it a day, saying words like that?

31.

On the spine of Jess’s copy of The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky the word “diary” is, for some reason, crossed out.