The story was short, and was this: he knew that midnight was the expiration date most anything he might try, so he raced through a whole life’s worth of mistakes in the few minutes he had left. And, feeling as though he’d made a lifetime of them, he thought he would not make any more. But the streets of his pre-midnight experiences were filled with open manholes, and after midnight, none were covered. Who would have come to do the covering?

There is an edge to the universe, and early man went there. We that remained on Earth, we were the idiot cousins. Though in time, we built buildings and split atoms, early man mastered immortality on garden-craft. They found themselves distended on the other side of the first black hole, and bodiless on the far side of the second. This was how they visited the edge of what can be known, and on the other side of that, they found themselves the idiot cousins of something far greater.

Listening to her old records, she was surprised at how supple her voice had once been. It was 1961 when she recorded “You Can’t Run Away from Your Heart,” which Judy Clay would later make famous for a few minutes. But most of the rest of 1961 was a life someone else had lived. The body was not her body now, the voice was something that had divorced her long ago. She understood, on some logical level, that there had been a hot New Orleans summer and a crisp fall, and that she had ridden in Lon Baxter’s convertible, and his hands had been on her back and thighs. But Lon Baxter was less memory now than fact, a fact which didn’t belong to her; he must have been someone else’s fact. And he had been, in the summers of ‘62, ‘64, and ‘65, before he headed to Mexico and got shot in the knee. And now he was on a patio in Chiapas, blind in one eye. He was listening to her old records too, and in a more sentimental galaxy, they might have read one anothers thoughts in a moment like this. But there he was, cripple, wondering if she still had that beautiful voice and did that thing with her buttocks, and he was thinking of a whole other woman, the one from 1964.

Your move, Eric said. But of course, it wasn’t. Dennis knew his hands would reach for one of the pieces, probably the rook, and move it a few squares on the board, but the move was not his, not really. The outcome was never in doubt. Eric would win this game, and would win the next, and they would stand and shake hands and Dennis would walk into drizzle of a New York March. He would ride the 7 train back to Woodside and stop at the Pizza Boy II at the bottom of the platform stairs. He would buy a hot dog wrapped in a pretzel for dinner, and would go home to Gaynell. They would sit in front of the television until she fell asleep, or he did, or they both did, and one or both would finally slog to bed in the hour of the infomercial. Then he would rise and work and live it out another day. And this would continue until one day he would choose to beat Eric in chess, and that would be the day Eric would tell him, and he would not go home.

Hello, sweet, and I was in your dreams last night. Walked there. Dressed in blue; it’s blue that allows access to the unconscious. Could not think of ways to delight you there, as I cannot here. Though I try. I often think of delighting you. Without knowing how. Delight is no fancy thing. Yet its motives and its charms are snakes and eels to me. So walked aimlessly in the dreamscape, sweet, beside you through the monstrous garden, coming towards you at each crosswalk in the intersection you don’t leave. Sat next to you in one of the Parisian cafes, behind you on the train to Leningrad, in the front seat of the runaway taxi. But hardly you notice because all your dreams are blue-tinted, and I can never, in a dream, speak unless first spoken to.

But the beauty of this plan is that when I have grown just another inch or two I will marry Sasha Monroe because she likes taller men, well taller men than me, and we’ll honeymoon in Cambodia where Sasha will eat her first cockroach and I will carve a thin tree-trunk into a boat to take her to the middle of a lake and serenade her under a moon that looks like sodium bicarbonate under blacklight and the whole of the Cambodian people will rise from the long grasses on the shore of the lake and harmonize with me near the end of the song, the net effect of my voice and the voice of the Cambodian people impregnating Sasha with a child who she’ll carry to term in eleven months instead of nine and who will be born in a deep green hospital in Greece and in the stupor of pain and deep green Sasha will ask to name her Jade. This plan assumes Sasha will not marry before I have grown this inch or two.

My curious talent is that I can make babies cry. My mere presence is incentive to wail. Mothers, so adept at dirty looks already, perfect their own abilities to transmit venom through the air when I am introduced. This is just the most recent talent I have discovered, but there have been others: I can stain a window by looking through it too long, I can wilt deli meats by lingering too long before biting into a sandwich, I can misconstrue anyone’s words into a personal attack. I’ve also displayed a natural knack for killing off hamsters and gerbils when they are in my care, though this can usually be explained by my reluctance to be asked to care for them again.

The ostriches carry pails around the zoo, speaking with the human patrons. This is all the animal union was able to accomplish. They’d had such lofty dreams: lions at the ice cream cart, shrews attending bathrooms, mongoose taking tickets at the reptile house. Only sloth and elephant declined assignment. The ostriches are dutiful. They do not rile at the litter the humans created, their feathers don’t ruffle when the renegade ducks fly overhead. No one else is so calm at the treachery of ducks. They sold us out for a piece of sky, say the marmosets. Though the ducks have been gone eight months, they are the subject of at least a half-hour’s griping at all union meetings. Unless one of the humans comes to the zoo with a guide dog and the guide dog is curt. They all agree that guide dogs have no more privilege for haughtiness; their own display is also a service.

I looked over the final print galley of The Smallest Talk this evening. That book is so close to heading to the printer that I can hardly stand it. Good heavens.

I traded e-mails today with a poet whose work I enjoy immensely. He has a new book coming later this year, and some poems that I have been dying to read will be in it. I’ve heard one of the set, at a reading, and we’ve chatted about the others. Put up a pre-order page, Amazon, and I’ll pre-order this book. (Wait a sec, it’s up… but the cover listed ain’t the one the author sent me to look at.)

For my next trick, ladies and gentlemen, the illusionist said to the eight people in the back room of the bar, I present to you… the dead. His eyes and hands tensed on the spot in front of him, the air became a shroud. Slowly appeared before them all Chester A. Arthur. The crowd grimaced, moaned that they’d expected something a bit more dramatic. One asked who it was and another expressed disappointment that the spirit was just some fop with a Garibaldi mustache. Then one said, I’m quite sure that’s Chester A. Arthur, I recognize him from my childhood book of the thirty-eight presidents. All agreed it was, but who was Chester A. Arthur, really, they grumbled. Then whispers. Couldn’t the illusionist have produced a president who might point a finger at his murderer, wag of some scandal? Arthur’s spirit– and it really was Arthur’s spirit, brought to focus nightly for reasons the illusionist could not understand– opened his mouth to speak, but was again mute, and would remain so until the illusionist could conjure a crowd ready to hear him. This was the third week the spirit had appeared, and still it hadn’t happened. We’re getting closer, the illusionist sighed to the spirit. At least this lot knew who you are.

Listening: lots of Sarah Harmer lately. Why isn’t Sarah Harmer famous like a mountain?

Understand, I didn’t set out to be the guy who writes the poems for movies: I, like you, wanted to be in the May New Yorker. But you’ll only ever hear my work when the studios need to crap out another picture about a sensitive poet. Can’t go on stealing from Auden forever, I suppose, but it’s quite a shame that when an audience should be feeling something, instead, they’re getting spoon-fed what wouldn’t have made it into my high school literary magazine. For the first few, I attempted, I really did, but learned better. Grief is a dwelling, a massive black house that every studio executive wants to live in. So that’ll be every first line: my grief is a house, or my grief is my childhood home, or my grief is a fucking skyscraper. They write themselves, yet I’ve steady work if Gwynneth Paltrow is co-producing another turd, and if not me, Dave Pelican, who paints for every movie that needs a gallery scene. Every time someone stands in front of the giant canvas in wonder, I hope you’ll consider Dave, hunched on a backlot, some twenty-five year-old knob director asking him to make it a little more colorful or a little more dour. We’ve spent more than a couple nights in the quiet L.A. bars, wondering why we don’t just trade, because I’m more than a little handy with a paintbrush, and he does a mean D.H. Lawrence impression. But we end up in our studio apartments, and he’s painting something suitably sullen and I’m making notes for the next project: grief is a mansion just big enough for Leonardo DiCaprio.