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knew, and he stared at her blankly.
She dreamed she was in a tall building that swayed in the wind.

    What are you reading?
A poem.
Does it rhyme?
No.
How can you tell it’s a poem if it doesn’t rhyme?
For someone who listens in to the world’s conversation, you are massively ignorant.
No need to be insulting. Enlighten me.
Alice was silent.
So?
I’m thinking.
I know that. So far your thoughts are inscrutable.
It’s like love.
What is?
You know a poem is a poem the way you know love is love.
But love is more likely than not an illusion.
The feeling of love is not an illusion.
This is not a good enough explanation.
Poems don’t need explanations, Alice said, and added in her sternest, most grown-up
voice,
and if I remember, you are the one who told me not to be empirical, and now you are
asking me to explain something that is not within the bounds of explanation. Poems
are examples of themselves.
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    As in, I know it when I see it? Without an objective criterion, you sink into mere
opinion.
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    It has to do with how words vibrate through more than one sense, more than one
moment. Alice wished the Voice would leave her be.
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    Read to me.
Alice read.

    Do you have a name? Alice asked one day as she was walking toward the river.
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    Yes.
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    What is it?
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    I was christened Goggle, but most people call me Gog, I think because I seem to be
the same coming or going. I’m not really capable of making distinctions and I am
without a direction.
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    Then you aren’t human.
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    I thought I had made that clear. How many invisible humans do you know?
Many, but most of them are in books. Your name, for example, is in a book by
Samuel Beckett.
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    He took it from an earlier source, the Book of Revelation. Here it is direct from my
favorite source, which, by the way, I invented:
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    In the biblical Book of Revelation, a power ruled by Satan will manifest itself
immediately before the end of the world. In the biblical passage and in other
apocalyptic literature, Gog is joined by a second hostile force, Magog; but in the
books of Genesis and Ezekiel, Magog is apparently the place of Gog’s origin.
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    Are you evil? Alice asked. The question itself made her heart race.
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    Evil is as evil does. It is an interpretation, not a condition. It isn’t innate.
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    But what exactly are you?
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    I got caught in the crosshairs of brain and technology. It was a crisis, or crux.
So I am neither one nor the other. That’s the reason I wouldn’t know a poem if I fell
on one. Just then, the Voice stubbed its tongue on something.
Damn! said the Voice, it’s the Weather!
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    The wind picked up, blowing a few last leaves across the ground.

    Alice wondered if, when she is old, she will be wise.
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    Is wisdom something that comes naturally, along with gray hair and wrinkles? Is
that old woman sitting on her porch wise? Wise rhymes with eyes, so perhaps
wisdom is a way of seeing especially clearly, like a clairvoyant. Madame Sosostris is
known to be the wisest woman in Europe . What a silly name for a wise person, Alice
thinks, not
like Athena, which sounds wise. Athens must be named for her, but a city cannot be
wise. Madame Sosostris is reading cards and she says:
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    I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
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    This sends chills through Alice’s soul.
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    Who is the Hanged Man?
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    Alice saw in her mind’s eye a man, with dark eyes and hair, and another, in a mask,
placing a kind of scarf around the dark man’s neck. Then the masked man takes a
great thick rope and places it around the dark man’s neck. The rope turns into heavy
coils. The dark man looks complex: resigned, intelligent, amused, hidden, cruel.

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    The Moon was in eclipse. A shadow passed across its face. The Cat was looking out