A man in a mask and wearing a fat tank on his back is bent to the door of the
          parking garage.
He is spraying and wiping, wiping and spraying. Another man with no mask
          and no hair shuffle-dances around him,
gives a wave, crosses the street, tries to open the door to the hotel, which is
          locked and closed, darkened for good:

Out of the darkness, men come 
     with knives. They work quickly, 
muttering back and forth. 

Like orange candywrappers, writes
the daughter now, describing the time
years ago when the goldfish

My father naked in the photo, young
again, crouched among rocks and water. It's an island,
a time so long ago he is thin,

Through the night Grace lives by fire.
She sings to it, she reads it poetry,
she knits and rocks and nods and…

I’ve gone up-rivers to get rid of them
where I dispatch fish. The family
will say this is a lie

she found no reason for it setting there, the poems
not improved by poet’s name?

I think of other women,
how some are beautiful, and do not know it;
how most are not, and know;

I am exhumed on the express
Out of the aftermath of five,
And though I starve on consciousness

The notion of living entities in human shape, intelligent but not human: look upon it as an experiment conducted upon the stuff of being. Shall they be smaller than we? Bushier, perhaps? What impulses bring about these particular condensations? To what extent do the alien existences depend upon certain crystallizations of our own thought, perhaps upon our very words? Shall we postulate elves, speaking the word aloud so as to give life to a certain meaningful vibration?