Like the picture of fish that was supposed to be Palestine. You can only paint Palestine twice. After that it’s just a used church where your mother sits, contemplating the abuse of the word “light.” I don’t think anyone ever figured out whether you wait for a revival or cause it. So it’s easy to imagine a husband, and to imagine him looking up from dinner, “Don’t tell the children. They’ll find out on their own.”

Pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes... Still, they’re making it song-like. They’re dreaming feasts and giant balloons. While Mir comes in—hard, hot and soon. They stand in the yard, watching another kind of wind come out of another kind of sky. Me, I’m waiting for the incandescent fragments to stream in. Here is metal, falling on my head. Just science coming back down.

It’s always science or religion that’s falling, and I don’t quite know where to stand. I’m thinking of a man who vacuums the guts out of turkeys for eight hours a day. I’m thinking I want to be that woman at the arboretum who scoops butterflies in a net.

Because early wouldn’t be right. Still, I can’t offer those kinds of comforting words: “We’ve all left a parade, disappointed for the first time in giant balloons.” I can tell you to ward off evil with what it’s already done. But not to you. Use somebody else’s bad luck. Like your mother’s. She kept every snapshot of herself against a backdrop of gathering clouds. I was going over them like lessons.

Hair blows in the funniest way. It could belong to anyone.

This is where my eyes turn red and my legs unfold like noir, causing a man to materialize in a bookshop, causing him to fall in lock-step with a canned plot that sells itself as mystery. In the end, we both know he’ll lose. I’ll die. Someone will wind up with the cat and the jewels.

Something arbitrary as this. I’ll start crying in the mornings.

Soon, my legs will stop unfolding and my hair stop blowing. Soon, I’ll stop being anyone. I’ll have to start asserting my emotions and their necessity during the endless weeks of disbelief. I’ll find myself saying through my brush, sometimes, summer lasts for a year. I could do it like that, you know, become a Hopperian slave to perspective. Paint only the slant of light on his forehead, the ways he squints up his eyes.

Still, some of the spectrum gets through in its way. Tangles up in our lashes until we can’t see past the bend in the universe which keeps turning color back in on itself. Keeps returning us to ourselves in a different frequency.

There never was a father-figure who beat you. Or a set of stone steps leading down into the garden. But one of them should exist, and you have to decide when and how. Take the bridge between necessity and outcome, between father and garden; make sure to record your fear of the water, which you don’t look down at but see in a dream.

Eventually you will have to face the inevitable existence of tables. You encounter them in just about every room you go into, and they’re almost always accompanied by chairs. There’s a plot afoot—to make you sit. To make you productive.

Chairs keep finding their way down to the river, swirling down into its depths, flying off in the ether of the seamstress’s voice. Nature gives birth to convention, and you know the best place to sit. You know how many yards of fabric are required to make her a dress. And this because you cannot stop measuring the almost-real length and width of her body. She is covered in so much of what seems like skin.

One continuous shot and the movement of curtains in the corner. You learned this from the Art Institute of Chicago. From spending so much time staring at one painting of a garden. A girl and flowers and a tree and a woman and light and all of it happening at the same time. The people you see as if through water, but the tree is sharper. So is the bicycle.

You did not learn this from Picasso, though you like him best: so much of a busy canvas depends on variation. On emphasis.

Where are you standing in the portrait of a woman? To whom do you call when she begins to play the piano while Cha is raped on the threshold of a museum? What do you choose to emphasize here? What do you decide about color?

Rewind it, introduce no new variables. It still ends with a pan of someone’s legs and curtains blowing.

The family that records their arguments on video tape can’t scream unless they’re acting out the part of a family screaming. Children aren’t touched in that way unless Mr. Friedman admits it on film, which he’s not going to do. Case closed. The kitchen becomes kitchen again. Lines keep resurfacing in the actors’ mouths and someone turns the camera on. Are you sure you said your part right?

Dylan’s life has become a stuttering tour, every album since Blood on the Tracks an abusive love song to Sara. They held each other with sincere tenderness while filming Renaldo and Clara. She played the part of a whore; he flirted with Baez. Some days his face was painted or he wore a fedora with flowers. The gypsy troubador stopped needing to travel in the arms of his wife. He stumbled back into the skinny figure swaddled in dirty clothes as soon as the four tracks or cameras switched off.

The train is often not the train, but a magical collection of cars speeding you into your future which is constantly coming. Sky becomes more important when entering or exiting the tunnel. A little bit of blue sky. The train won’t stop moving. A black hat around the corner. The woman who wants to look long and deeply at the Orthodox men on the train knows not to. Their religion says she shouldn’t tempt them this way; hers says the hidden face is sweeter. This is the only way they can make Shalom Shalom float across the car between them.