There were birds above McGolrick, unsure whether to glide above and complete the sense of a natural (or pastoral) diction in the park, its grass, its buttonwoods, or rather to make circles above the stone monument at the central pavilion and contradict that statue’s representational commitments with an older symbolic language of omen. They were black. I remember asking you, because I don’t know birds, if they were crows or ravens or the silhouettes of cardinals, or if they were a new theory, even darker, where all things, all pathways, all histories, could be described with the sequence: “input -> modulation -> output.”
        That’s when you thought you saw Homer and almost got up from the bench. Had you approached, he’d have turned around, the shadow of him parting, and you’d know it wasn’t him. Instead you turned to me, asking “what do you want out of poetry?” and when I couldn’t say with confidence, you handed me the branch of a linden. “I broke this off of my shoulder earlier” you said, and yes, of course I believed you. I could still see the stump. I didn't really answer your question, but I did say one thing while we were there, about the line break, its eighteen colors, how it can divide a sentence in two, like, for example

Now, the sky’s red

salt is unavailable.

bringing separate articulations into momentary overlap, in this case, a plain account of sunset (“Now, the sky’s red”) and a more surreal lyric gesture (“the sky’s red salt”).
        “But I am real” you said, and that has stuck with me. In the moment, my reply was something like “well, that doesn't change that poetry, or lineated poetry, is a way of producing chords within language, harmony, which is different from more stable double meanings, or metaphor, because so many of the micro-polysemies possible in the line break fade in time, like chords, dissolve upon contact with the finished sentence.” But that was just a way of talking a whole lot, so I wouldn't have to say anything. I didn’t know what to say.
        I told you I would send an email, accounting what happened at the park, so you could remember it with me, and with a more elaborated answer to your question, and I'm here now on the fold-out futon in front of my laptop, and the girl I love is gone, and the leaves of your linden branch, after a few days, have yellowed and hardened on the living room table, so that I can smell their decay, brightening out before the deep cold.
        When I lived in New Haven and drove by its shoreline, I would have said that I ordinarily want in a poetic work a kind of shore, for it to feel calmer in the morning, picking up a writhing quality around sundown, but still to maintain an overall stability in posture, to be here day after day. And that wasn't too long ago, but it really is starting to feel like I was impossibly young then, as though that were my first memory, a time when I expected the appeal of the afternoon sunlight’s shape, as it passed through and knocked against the window panels, to stay just as it was, my regard for it, with a few small changes in alternating directions. Instead, this presumably stable coastline, between faith (or wonder) and disillusionment, itself changes position. All coastal territories in you change position and angle over time as a consequence of erosion or, conversely, the tumbling over and accumulation of sediment.
        Now, be that as it may, there should be (shouldn't there?) something, vertebrae, even soft ones, like how the spine of the rain is the sky reflected in its puddles. I think there is already a spine, and yes, I saw a little girl who dropped her strawberries on the sidewalk of Nassau Avenue last summer, the irregular pace with which they tumbled into a scattered pattern, eight of them, divided three and five by the sidewalk’s seam and its bright hints of grass, not round enough to roll but still in a continuous motion with pauses that appeared as deliberation. What I want from poetry is surprise. Yes, that posed a problem for her, staring at them as the wind picked up and covered her face, making her wince, and a problem for me, or us, too.
        The problem of course is that we could interpret this image of intention on the part of the strawberries (their apparent hesitation) to be our (humanity’s) innate wish-fulfillment fantasy, to see in the objects of this world, in their long afternoon shadows and various physical fibres, mirrors of our own personalities, bus fares, ways of turning away in a bright but nonetheless cold pine forest, verbal ticks, residences. In this projection, we could imagine about our own intentions a kind of chance matrix or prefigured chemic determination.
        “But I am real” you said, and that has moved me.
        And when we greet the empire without touch, whose code speaks in our voice, instantaneous and post-captcha, whose invisible influence covers the face of the world like the invisible wind covers the face of a little girl who dropped eight strawberries, most of all, I want stochastic process to fail. I want intention-within-chance (Providence) to beat chance-within-intention (data).
        I knew a man with a lot of promise and ambition but enveloped in a wide-spanning depression named Archimedes who sometimes had trouble eating, and I would take him to this burger place on the Upper East Sidewhose antlers were more like that of an antelope than a deer, and at the boulders by the river, where I would sit with him, and he was really harsh on Anne Sexton for one, but he truly understood all hidden mechanisms, and was therefore unimpressed even by wind, but by the river, and the clouds struck with sun just so, a bird perched, and Archimedes understood all trees to be theories of upwardness, the slow, year-by-year theories of approach toward the sun as all men were theories of approach toward heaven, and a bird was perched in the speckled branches of a theory of upwardness and whistled out from it unremarkably, so that its tone carried over the river. I asked him if it was a sparrow or a grackle, but his eyes were dead even when they moved to look at the bird. Then the river began to whisper to him, “Archimedes, find this cold will,” as expected, but after a pause, the sound, softer, like an echo, continued “fray come world’s mid-June.” Just like that,

                        Archimedes, find this cold will

                        fray come world’s mid-June.

and transmuted the word “will” from noun (“this cold will”) to auxiliary verb (“will fray”) at the left margin. Archimedes looked at me and said “hang on, did you hear that last part?”
        A long silence came on then, but here, in the sensory, I’m still waiting for columns to acquire a texture by their own weathering and be unmistakeable, for these new composite dawns to yellow gradually in sharply delineated patches and be unmistakeable, for my ice cream to get here, Belgian chocolate, her favorite, not because of the supposedly bio-chemical chance collisions of preference, but because it’s her and it’s still her, and I don’t miss a hair color changing in the sunlight; I miss her, Hank, but thank you for the autumn from your shoulder.