Who left her glove on the windowsill, and why is it black rather than a more becoming pearl? The inferences and conjecture pile up until morning is no longer an acceptable part of your day. It begins to look like a poor excuse for an oil painting, something tossed together by someone unsure of why he is doing what he is doing. Someone who was told at some point in the past that he had a great deal of talent, but who now recognizes any such declaration must, of necessity, originate with those who love us and so feel it necessary to dissemble as concerns what is real and what is merely a matter of convention. Maybe the menu should remain unchanged, then, through the following week, but we all know the inevitable is coming. It is flexing its muscles in the mirror even though it is fairly slight of build and therefore subject to ridicule by the adolescents who happen to being watching from the corner. I inventory the empty places in my bones, in my organs -- the multiplying cavities and voids where I should find nothing but body, or something so like the body as to be its twin and replica. I take the resulting list to an expert, someone who can tell me what I am supposed to do to remedy the situation. I am expecting sage advice, snippets and excerpts from Cicero, from the Popul Vuh, but there is something stale and unsatisfactory about treating the body as if it were a machine. Something to be tuned up and re-fitted on a regular schedule. Wouldn’t it make more sense to wait for the body to declare itself a simple auxiliary of the mind before we set about trying to make it whole again? Shouldn’t we at least give it credit for trying? If you stand at the edge of a precipice and look down, what you will see is most likely a mirror image of what you expected to see well before you ever reached the edge. And by mirror image I mean something turned around, backwards. It is the opposite of that which should be. Something so familiar and yet completely broken as to remind you (hopefully before it is too late, before you go plunging to your death without meaning to, simply because once we get close to the edge of anything, we are somehow required to determine for ourselves if, in fact, it is an edge rather than something else; some other, less lethal, and therefore less meaningful, structure) of nights when the rain was turning to snow and you could almost hear the transformation from where you were lying on your bed by yourself in the dark. It sounded like someone grinding his teeth, but in an adjacent room. It sounded like the tumblers in a lock turning over even though, as near as anyone can discern (in this particular instance at any rate and not any of those others nominally just like it), there is no one in the vicinity angry or inquisitive enough to go about acquiring the appropriate key. Or endeavoring to turn it.