In the event that my idea atrophied in the middle
of your monologue, I’d rushed to prepare a note.
Empathy is to imagine knowledge of another
person—it is to replace them with yourself. He
was always good at picking things up with his toes.
One’s private calculations appear as animalcules
in the mind. The giraffe browsing at your thoughts
from below. Lamarck conceived of the “internal
clock” like this. The almost-swan elongating its
leg. Giraffe with its tall will. This secret doesn’t
exist, therefore it is all the more secret to you.
Not being able to afford facial reconstruction
surgery, you settle for the next best thing: being
on the lam with your usual face. To say all trauma
is learning something about the inconsiderate
world is to say all learning is trauma. When doing
the closed captions, one must be as accurate as a
diving team beginning to dive. A phrase is muscled
out. When you employed gestalt techniques in a
mock counseling session, your instructor chided
you for noticing too much. Footnotes get fuller.
Cowboys eat up fringes during bouts of starvation.
Where disfiguration occurs at the sentence level,
the self runs into its products. Squid fisheries at
night, illumined, are seen by satellite imagery as
suns. The vase’s figural decoration: its crouching
carved surfaces turn away from their perceiver, as
if acting coy. On bycatch, what is caught but
unwanted: black habits of the saints flank the
duchess. Squids are noctambulists. No symbolism
is ever intended in the mass production of
earthenware, but that rarely stops the living
hermeneuticists from penciling in their guess.
