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autumn of 1977, I was living in the Beluga Motel in Churchill, Manitoba, a town located at the mouth of the Churchill River on Hudson’s Bay. I was mainly engaged in translating stories about Noah’s Ark as told by Mark Nuqac, an Inuit elder. One day, there was a break in the weather and I propped open a window using a Gideon Bible. I left the room to get breakfast at the Tundra Hotel and when I returned, a gull was perched atop my old Underwood typewriter. The gull had already unraveled the ribbon, was maniacally squalling, its muddy footprints all over the table. Later, I mentioned this to Mark Nuqac. “Any tracks on the floor?” he asked. None, I said. “It flew directly in through the window, eh?” he said. When I got close, the gull scattered out through the open door.
    I was up at 5:00 a.m. reading DM’s essays and recollections in Writing In Restaurants. It was just getting light out. I decided to drive over to the old waterwheel housing in Maple Corner. For a number of days I had been observing a kingfisher working the pond there. I took Writing In Restaurants along with me, thinking it might be nice to sit reading with my back against the weathered, splintery wood of the wheelhouse. It was about a ten minute drive to the wheelhouse. When I stepped from the car, I immediately glimpsed the kingfisher. It was on the telephone wire, then flew over to the roof of the wheelhouse, then flew back to the wire. “Kingfishers have punk haircuts,” my daughter, Emma, had said. I was aware, in the early light and breeze off the pond, that if your criterion is succinct enough, moments of perfection might truly exist. Shorts, T-shirt, tennis shoes on, a book, a breeze off the pond, smell of old wood, a kingfisher plummeting along its sight line now and then, a world without humans except in a book—happiness was beside the point.
    Screwloose ambushed silence, squawked and spoke in broken utterances as if attempting to translate the rain forest dialect in which he thought and dreamed into the 1950’s English he eavesdropped on day after day, my brother speaking, Paris speaking, the car radio. Actually, the parrot’s voice most closely mimicked that of the radio DJ, whose name was Ambroce Ambroce. Ambroce began his morning show with, “How ya doing this morning, my fine feathered friends?” Paris, at our breakfast table, would hear this, turn to Screwloose in his cage and say, “He’s addressing you, sir. Be polite. Answer Ambroce Ambroce’s question, you stupid bird!” One morning, I accidentally happened upon Paris naked from the waist up, standing next to the dryer in the basement. Through the oval glass, I could see her EXIST TO KISS YOU T-shirt tumbling. My mother was at work. My father was who-knew-where. My brother was working on his car. The hood was propped open. Naturally, I stared. Paris turned around. “Hey, there,” she said.
    “I got an A minus on my cursive example,” I stammered.
    “Well, that’s very good,” she said “But, hey, look. A girl needs her privacy.”
    When I went outside, I heard the parrot railing from the back seat, “This is Ambroce—ka, ka, ka, Ambroce, reeeechak, reeeechak, don’t ya know.”
    — for DAVID MAMET
    Joseph Cornell
    A SWAN LAKE FOR TAMARA TOUMANOVA {HOMAGE TO THE ROMANTIC BALLET}
    1946
    box construction: painted wood, glass pane, photostats on wood, blue glass, mirrors, painted paperboard, feathers, velvet and rhinestones.

CONSTRUCTION
    John Burghardt
    wanted to make an end—because the end
    was motion, nothing. He’d been leaving too, out of the nest
    of tubing, little taped-up breathing egg. You’d watch his chest.
    I’d watch you doze: the bars, your face, your breathing hand suspended
    with the paper swans in the mobile—
    but probably I dreamed that too. The air—
    conditioner was a little monastery
    plainsinging commercials.
    “Coffee?”
    “Please.”
    I thought you’d feel
    him moving in your hand. If I had gotten back
    in time—or in