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have understood the idea of speaking of it and as soon as she considered speaking of it, it would have become unintelligible. Mo was in that world too real to speak.
ephexis
    “So, you had lunch today?” Mo asked.
    Inflato picked me up to greet me in the living room and ignored the question.
    “Well?”
    “Did you have lunch with someone?”
    “Yes. A graduate student. A woman who is interested in alterity.”
incision
    My mother fed me more and more books. I read the Bible, the Koran, all of Swift, all of Sterne, Invisible Man , Baldwin, Joyce, Balzac, Auden, Roethke. I read about game theory and evolution, about genetics and fluid dynamics. I read about Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde, Joseph McCarthy. I read the service manual for my parents’ ’63 Saab, for the Maytag washing machine, for the Kenmore air conditioner. I came to know about the interactions of adults and the workings of machines, history, and the problems of epistemology. Experience was something I understood would be gained, but my comprehension of those things that had yet happened to me was substantial and solid. I dreamed about fishing with Hemingway and walking the streets of Paris with James Baldwin. I didn’t know what flan tasted like, but I knew how one was made. I could picture the recoil of a fired shotgun and the damage done to the unsuspecting mallard. Through reading, I had built a world, a complete world, my world, and in it, I could live, not helplessly as I did in the world of my parents. I took the fuel dear Mo provided, but I did not use it immediately to write Ralph on Ralph , but to write poems. I wrote them on the pages of a loose-leaf notebook with a crayon (pen and pencils are dangerous) supplied by my mother.
    The Hyoid Bone
    Brace the words,
    the delicate instrument,
    the tongue for sweet kissing,
    upsilon.
    Arch of bone,
    greater cornu, reaching,
    reaching, stretching
    above the lesser.
    Fracture this bone,
    by the violence,
    feel the sick
    pain of swallowing.
    Fracture this bone,
    compromise the support,
    feel the true anguish
    of speech.
    This was the first and it caused Mo to faint dead away. When she came to I was still in my crib staring at her.
    “You wrote this?”
    I nodded.
bridge
    My father did not believe my mother when she presented him with my first poem. He didn’t laugh, but looked at it and asked, “Okay, what am I supposed to say?”
    “Your son wrote this,” Mo said.
    “Eve,” he complained. Inflato looked over at me. I was standing in my playpen, holding myself up by the padded rail.
    “He did,” Mo insisted. She got up from the sofa and walked over to me with my notebook and a crayon. “Ralph,” she said, “write something else.”
    I understood why she was asking and I sympathized with her situation, but I could not simply write on demand. I stared at the book, admiring the infinity of the blank page. Inflato made some kind of disparaging remark that might have been meant for Mo, me, or both of us.
    “Oh, Ralph,” Mo said.
    I tried to shrug my baby shoulders.
    “I’m going to the office,” Inflato said. “I’ve got some papers to grade.” He stopped at my pen on his way to the door. “Say ‘bye-bye,”’ he said.
    I blew a raspberry through my lips.
Vexierbild
periscope depth
    Inflato was beside himself with excitement. Roland Barthes was coming to visit the campus. Barthes was his hero and though Mo had slipped me a couple of books written by the man, I did not share my father’s enthusiasm. I had read his Elements of Semiology and S/Z 15 and so he was no mystery to me. But Inflato was bouncing off the walls, singing and saying to my mother at the breakfast table that perhaps Roland Barthes would read his manuscript and then everything would be on track.
    Inflato brought the great man home.
MO:
Would you like something to drink before dinner?
BARTHES:
To drink. Sometimes I drink. Sometimes I am consumed. Often I have an urge to commit suicide. (Hinckley) But to drink on an overcast