To refer to your heart as The Penguinery

To bronze your heart-shaped knees

To run numbers up the flagpole

To vespertine Maria

To chia-pet the fairway and to shrinky-dink the admiral

To love your colorized body even more than the original

To knit cob-webs out of sugar cubes while the fulsome,

diegetic mergatroid

of space and time collapses

To drown in a library

To contain imaginary toads with real cherry bombs in them

To marry someone "special"

To deliver a papal bull to a Jägermeister girl

To bounce a check for veggie bacon at the local food co-op

To depants Maud Gonne or raffle off a politician, pick one

To drink its hot-dog water like a good fellow

To laminate the small of your back

To act as interim liaison to the Psychedelic Mole People

To huff on tractor fumes

To throw you in the casino pond when you've set yourself

on fire

To bootleg moonshine in a tuba

To smoke that ass

To come around for a second pass over Kankakee,

at midnight

To sew itself inside a patient

To be epicene in doorways

To page you at the ballet

To show your boyfriend something nifty,

over by the pie-safe

To define "mortician's dozen"

To age from 18 with a bullet straight to 40 at the buffet

To haul you to the Cineplex for the matinee interrogation

To watch your lips move while you read

To breathe when you breathe, sweet-pea

One of the most affecting parts of the chapter for me was the description of the wedding between Mnemosyne and Hermes - the union of tradition to ingenuity, to keep our feet in the past while looking towards the future. I thought this poem was a striking example of the two gods' virtues; the poem is structured traditionally, using lists and repetitions to achieve its music, but its actual content is unorthodox, silly, even nonsensical, seemingly chosen for fun. And yet there are snatches of legitimate tenderness and humanity tossed into the word-salad...Hermes, I'm sure, could grate on even the Olympians, but it was still he who carried their poems and love-letters.