from the bottom of the stairs he looks like that girl we saw at the park sitting on her hands at the top of the slide.  I’ll be the pudgy policeman and you can be her doting father from a white man’s perspective.  he doesn’t remember what he did after lifting the baby from its crib.  god doesn’t speak language but I take it to mean if you’ve seen one flower you haven’t seen them all.  when he was himself a baby his father held him upside down above puddles to develop his form.  absent a similar explanation, I’ll share that sometime before lunch his female boss used her broken wrist to push open a door he’d always thought would lead to a broom closet and not to a bare bright hallway with carpeted ceiling.  as long as I’ve been here, said his boss, none have made the far wall.  memory is a man dying in the ocean and becoming a ghost there.