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use, beauty, the Other. So affect as a kind of virtual nomad, wandering in the desert of permanent techno-reification.
    â€œUnderneath all reason lies delirium, and drift.” (Deleuze)
    40.
    In any case the ghosts are awake, and fearful. They seem to believe that they are about to disappear forever from our thoughts like mere clouds passing on the horizon, skipping autumn leaves. Although they are now distinct from each other, they fear they will soon be only a remnant archaic category, itself replaced by a new
    generation that wafts around like so much decomposing smoke, detached from even the memory of the fire from which it rose. It will require a new name. This is what I am thinking while simultaneously aware of the fact that I do not believe in ghosts, nor do I know what the difference is between a ghost and a soul: two wayward nouns without objects. The new, renovated ghosts will be soulless and indistinct, mere zeros and ones for whom neither the peace of heaven nor the torture of hell makes any difference. These improved ghosts will have come from the old species as it set out to refine itself in the new age. Refine, and so be equipped to forget the treacherous complexities that made life before death nothing if not a vibrant passage of quixotic, mostly irresolute questions. The species will have tinkered among the twisted strands of the genome, pulling out unwanted threads, as it were, and replacing them with others, so that what was once a tapestry of variegated colors and textures will be as smooth and monochromatic as a pool of melted ice. The new nameless ghosts will float upon this pool.
    41.
    There was a leak in the kitchen ceiling from which water dripped into a red pail from time to time, making a slight splashing sound, rounded at the edges, so you could almost hear the indentation in the surface of the water as the drops fell. Some of the drops did not fall into the red pail at all, but fell instead onto the newspaper I placed on the counter under a second hole in the tin roof of the ceiling. The sound of this second leak, more infrequent than the first, was muted and flat.

III.
DEAR INSTRUCTOR

UNTITLED (SPOON)
    Dear instructor, how to
    clarify this momentum from its
    singularity among thieves.
    The tide was pink this evening.
    I saw three deer, a rabbit, and a fox.
    A visitor came, we spoke, he
    gave me
    amazing tomatoes
    grown by the sun.
    These mild occurences
    and others insinuate
    the forgotten as the retrieved and
    the impossibility of any recovery
    as such. I know, you are lost.
    I am lost as well. We need
    a table. We need
    objects on the table. Say a spoon.
    to Peter Sweeny

OF SPIRITS
    Dear instructor:
    Pound said
    There is no provision
    for them
    and made none.
    Seek below
    the inscrutable flood
    a node broken from care.
    Not the sensuous
    not the damn dream gouged
    not the backward angel.
    Not yet ice.
    Rake up air
    discern the altered start
    tether it
    word by word
    to go on or beyond
    reluctance.
    Attach reception.
    Animate.

LETTER (IN PRAISE OF PROMISCUITY)
    Dear instructor,
    no one is faithful. This is not auto-
    biography. There’s a clumsy note
    on your doorstep
    beyond orange bags at the roadside and
    and this
    apology for wanting to
    to have spoken to you sooner.
    We’re sutured now.
    A calm of sorts has taken hold and
    and yet
    technology is fevered.
    Thought wishes everything were
    were everything French
    as in the living dead of the sad least genre.
    The poem greets its bouquet.
    I am thinking of floral wreaths.
    They seem to have a story.
    The story is not heartland pure.
    The story yields a structure and
    and the structure seems infinite.
    The floral occasion is a circle.
    This would be a trope for
    everlasting or undead love
    but the boy is gone. He stepped out over
    over a crest of ocean into our own
    perdition while we slept. In sleep, the lover
    comes back. At first the lover is
    is a cruel and indecipherable metonymy.
    Then, or after, he seems
    seems released