I try to listen to my body—I do—but I don’t always want it to be listening to me. The invisible needle inserts itself surgically into the abdomen just as I am trying to leave the house. The dick becomes indifferent for my wanting it to care. There’s nothing poetic about it, no “snow / That came when we wanted it to snow.” As my children are playing me recordings of sounds they say my ears are too old to hear, I do hear—not entirely welcome, just barely bearable—the water in the shower stall, in a memory I’d forgotten, of showering with my mother and asking why the water turns white as it spills off the tips of her breasts. I, or what would become I, am three, and know as little about elegance then as I do now, another middle-aged cisgender man writing about the breasts of a mother he hasn’t seen, a mother I haven’t seen, in we don’t know how long. I didn’t ask for any of this. The same fly that had been buzzing against the south window is struggling now inside my bedside lamp. Winter fly, miracle fly: you think you’re better than everyone else, whereas I, lying back in bed, am content with the evening and the book and almost proud to have remembered that tomorrow is garbage day. What a thing to call a recurrence in one’s life. You, fly, are having a garbage day, too. You’re always objecting, but there is another way. Do you feel how the idea’s intrusion into the heart of the matter is yet another offering of anatomy? In the rumbling of bins being taken down like clockwork to the curb, I hear the storm that precedes the end of the world. Watching and rewatching your end, I know that ours will probably be inglorious, too. You know, we named the city at the center of this world to honor the brother of the man who was murdered by his brother.