1.

There is, of course, the vantage of the reflection. He stares. He moves. He jiggles. He lifts his heft and lets it drop. Every motion occurs first in the brain. The hands that trace the hair. The toes that curl. The nostrils that flare. Remember: he is movement without thought. He only mimics. He knows nothing of the weight you carry, but knows only that he carries it.

2.

Let me tell you about the three giggling girls. They wear Greek letters on their sweatshirts, but I don’t think they know what they mean. I don’t think they know much, except that the guy across the room, with the fashionable hair, is cute. They talk like sparrows.

This is a strange room we are in. No windows. Asylum white. It is a room from a nightmare.

The girls, they vary in size. One is small. One is medium. One is large. They talk, as if they occupy the same body, share the same thoughts. They talk about the guy across the room. He is the only one worth looking at.

Someone says, “It’s OK to be fat.”

The chirping stops. The small one makes a face. The medium one puffs a breath. The large one says, “But why would you want to?”

The cute guy says nothing. He rests his head in his hands, and the glaze over his eyes suggests he is elsewhere. Outside, perhaps, where the sun is out and three sparrows are chirping high in a leafless tree.

3.

I will not lie, Wallace, but you were fat. Not the fat that slows the heart and fattens the tongue, but the everyday man fat.

I found a photo.

You were sitting next to Frost and the two of you looked like the last thing you wanted to do was to be caught in a photo together. Frost looked like his poems, a moment of heightened realization, but there were shadows in his eyes and around the curls of his mouth. You, Wallace, were a man who did not look comfortable in his skin. You sat as if you were trying to conceal something. You did not know what to do with your hands. They were meaty and in your lap. They looked like hands meant to strangle. How those hands could write such delicate poems I do not know.

I read that you thought you were freakishly fat. You were diagnosed with acromegaly, a disorder that sounds as rotund as its definition: a condition causing progressive enlargement of the head, hands, and feet.

Of this I am sure—you and Frost would rather have mused about a leaf blowing in an autumn wind. Frost would have written about the life of the tree it came from, its branching ways. You would have just written that there was a leaf in an autumn wind and it was whirling.

4.

“I like the way it feels,” my lover says. “There are so many soft spots.”

There is one in particular she likes. Even I like to touch it. It is a rubbing stone, one you keep in your pocket and work away at until there’s nothing but silkiness to its surface. That spot is south of the border, I like to say, where the stomach ends and the legs begin. The left side.

It is a secret canyon.

The light does not touch it.

It is left to the mind to fill in the necessary details.

“I can play with this all day,” my lover says.

Times like this, my body and I are one. My lover and I, intertwined like this, are also one.

5.

This is a multiple-choice question.

How many ways have you looked at yourself, Wallace?

6.

I have often imagined that there exists a shadow world. I overindulged in fantasy when younger. I do it now. On nightly walks—the moon or the city lights as my only source of illumination—I can’t help but let my brain transport me to a place where trees dance without color, where the blackbird is at home and his flight is a streak racing across the lighted pavement.

There is this boy. He feels as if he rules the shadows. His body is not obtrusive. He glides along the walls, slips into the cracks in the sidewalk. He bleeds into other shadows, and has the power to manipulate the shapes of them. He likes to laugh, this boy, but what his mouth emits is the sound of silence.

There are words in the shadow world that have no meaning: hide, loathe, the variations of darkness. The boy does not know the meaning of fat. He lives in the world of mischief, and in the world of mischief, it helps to be blind to meaning. In shadow, when the boy eats, it appears as if he is eating himself.

7.

The thin man sees a fat man and says, “Boy, he is fat.”

The fat man sees a fat man and says, “Boy, he is fat.”

8.

Please understand, from whatever angle you look at me, you will see something new. It is hard to keep this a secret. Through the eyes of a blackbird I am no different from anyone else. My movement—no matter how sluggish or slow—will cause flight.

I assure you, however, I am, like you, Wallace, the common man. I sing your poems: Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal. Your world is you. I am my world.

9.

I venture further and further into the woods. I listen to the sounds—the breeze whistling through the leaves, the snapping branches under my feet, the twittering above me. In some fantasy worlds, trees can speak and move. They can uproot themselves and travel to a place where they face the sun.

When I was younger, I loved to wrap my arms around the trunks of trees, press my cheek against the bark. I tried to connect my fingers in the back, but never came close.

Now, my lover does the same. There is an immovable-ness about me.

In these woods, my girth is my trunk; my limbs are my branches. I stand still at the outer edge. I wait for the sun.

10.

And remember: in this vast ocean, you will sink. Fat won’t help you float. This is a myth. You will go straight to the bottom. Minnows will nibble the flesh peeling off your bones. They will make homes in your body. The belly button cave. The tubular innards.

You will not eat. You will be eaten.

My suggestion: if there is a green light above you, reach for it.

11.

I don’t remember his name, but I remember his shape. He looked like a misshapen pear. He face was so fat he could barely talk; his voice was weighed down by the chubbiness of his cheeks. I enjoyed the fact that I had been demoted.

He was afraid, this boy, and his fear made him lash out. “Stop talking about me,” he said to skinny-bones Mark P.

I watched him from the other side of the playground, near the swings.

Mark P. said nothing.

“I said stop talking about me,” and before skinny Mark P. could do anything, the fat kid whose name I don’t remember pushed him on the ground.

I wondered if, when Mark looked up, he witnessed an eclipse. I wondered whether he thought a meteor was going to crash down on him.

It looked as if the fat kid whose name I don’t remember was going to fly through the sky and crush poor Mark P. into the tar, into a fossil. But before any of that could happen, the lunch moms stopped it all.

A change came over the fat kid whose name I don’t remember. He started to cry. “Tell him to stop talking about me. Tell them all to stop.”

He was taken into the school. What happened after the incident has escaped my mind. I think he went to another school. Maybe he lost weight and became someone else.

But this is what I remember: When skinny Mark P. got up, he brushed himself off and said something under his breath. There was no mistaking the shape of one of the words.

12.

Wallace: You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat! Begone!

13.

It was dinnertime all day.

It was snowing. All day it would be snowing.

Fat sat at the top of a cedar.

Its limbs were holding.