Out on the street in the cold winter air when I was looking up at the stars and thinking about bicycles I accidentally married a girl. She was struggling to get the words out. The potato masher caught in a drawer of her brain, she can’t get it open. I swoop in with magnificent calm and aplomb to apply a deft solution. I see what you’re getting at, my dear, I say. You do? Of course, I do. She now looks at me with the holiest rewinding conviviality of an expression—as if Jesus had a collection of holiday polaroids. There he is at the beach. On the Coney Island roller coaster. One out of focus with a little child at his feet. There he is eating a hot dog, with mustard down the front of his robe. We can enhance this with some red wine, I say. Try the baby octopus while you wait. We’d moved into a bar for the honeymoon. Her eyes lovingly warm & wide now like crying streetlights. I went on to talk about mosquito coils and world series baseball. We missed a midday flight to Heraklion amid all the romantic hubbub. Cut to ten years later. Literature, I say to her in my wankiest tone, is becoming the bedfellow of Religion. A necrophiliac rape for the last morsel of spirit. Do you remember when I wrote of the west country? Of your eyes? The last time we saw one another was at that public phone booth on Reyes Blvd. I can still feel the weight of the receiver in my hand, the dried up bubble-gum hardship of homelessness. I said something devastatingly stupid before I hung up. When I turned around, you were gone. I’m left in this one-sided waltz now. Our dog sleeps atop the reclining sofa chair, my old camera gear is strewn out in front of me like a recipe for some tepid new memories. I’ve talked to way too many people about your eyes; no one has listened to me. Not a single goddamn soul.