The box jiggled, as if to call a dog,

recalled a riddle, that was only posed 

in response to its own late solution:

Will a completion reimposed bypass 

the cognitive burden that is newness,

reconfiguring a puzzle become

less a painstaking effort to locate 

fractions of a head-scratching absence as 

memorizing the products of matched sets 

of projections and sockets? Yes and yes;

and learning not but how to wisely learn,

heartening, as every piece connected 

simplifies the task remaining, limits 

possibilities, until there are none.

The light so late, a novelty, the shared

apartment wall’s blind counterpart, nascent 

cloudburst, was in fact many lights, staggered

exponents of the acrobats’ accord;

streetlights, headlights, windows across the way,

the moon converged in one uncanny gas

obliquely and blanketed the courtyard. 

No sound; non-scream, blood-heavy pyramid

of basal apprehension reported

treed balloons. As shoeless cricket-hours

home-intruded casting slideshow horrors,

rams and lambs perpetually filed 

up the fire escape, embroidering

reticent Mylar as nothing happened.

A fan of deli roses meets tile,

reorients in time: a viable

day bed, after the drop-leaf descended,

on which the dinette’s ponds of filth prevail

until glass is broken, and respite loosed

our song, prisoned under harmful ore and

yet paring unique agony with strained

genericism. While our deciding 

that a meal, say, or argument remain 

incomplete brought that argument or meal

to its close, your voidance let your biding

remittance thrive. The fiddle-leaf fig roosts

in your lees; all else I’m left’s a diamond,

quick to lose the value it pretended.

Absent peeking tip of bookmark, page ends 

minimally parted, distinguishing

having finished it from having never

started outburdens diverse colored tabs

in the contents, text, and the appendix;

the smoothed out dog-ears of former tenants

beckon obscurely; these distrait riddles

(did I quit halfway or stash my receipt

in the middle?) augment our abstracted

sight; readers misled through veins of aligned

spaces toward passages already read,

across countless jejune mysteries, seed

context for a final twist: They just might

have accidentally read the same book twice.