Weird, alone, I sit in this house, right broken foot notwithstanding, or standing. My wife and daughter both gone to tangent. The fake leather chair and the lamplight surround me. The sound of a mower making pretty for the neighbors. Pretty or petty— who cares, it’s all appearance. I think of my friends only months entrenched in Brooklyn, especially Jane, who is ever and Ohio. She wrote the saddest letter of her life on a train, with references to Plato, what can anything mean? Everything is mean; the dog growls at runners. We are but marks on the face of the skyway, a drawing of the infinite, yet perishable particulars. I paint here the gate in my mind out to sea and there hope for monsters and possible returns. Maybe life is best next to mice in a nest, or maybe with exploding in a con- stellated glee. Mine is a fog of chairs and walls, typewriter ribbons, and trying not to falter, not to muddle forever the beginnings and ends. But yours, Jane, is massive to match your affections, back and forth beneath the city with a store of varnished talent. I’m sitting here broken and thinking you’re enlightening, and in lightning . I want you to know it, my silly heart goes out. Ours is a friendship no distance can diminish. Even now I see your features in an idyll raging fire. The house closes in and my foot neatly throbs. I miss you as you miss me, and the noumenon between us. All my dumb love, then a siren.