Stevens had a blackbird. Stein had a rose. Thor had a hammer. He hammered in the morning. Plato had a cave. Noah had a boat. Jonah had a whale. Melville had a whale. Dumbo had a feather. Adam had a rib. Jacob had a ladder. Wittgenstein had a ladder. George Washington founded a nation. We gave him a dollar. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. We gave him five dollars. Harriet Tubman had a railroad. It wasn’t an actual railroad. Magritte had a pipe and a painting of a pipe. It wasn’t an actual pipe because it was a painting of a pipe but really it was an actual pipe in its own way. Sherlock Holmes had a pipe and, separately, morphine. Freud had a cigar and other people’s problems. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Frosty the Snowman had a corncob pipe and a button nose. He got locked in the greenhouse and melted. Eve had an apple. Newton had an apple. Snow White had an apple. The witch had a mirror. Narcissus had a pool that worked like a mirror. It gave him a stiff neck. General Sherman got Atlanta by burning it to the ground. He never looked back. Francis Bacon, like everyone, had less time than he wanted, said I wouldn’t have this body of work if I had been better to my friends. It’s true, he was awful to his friends, but some people don’t even try. They aim low and sleep well. They get nothing. I got a wheelchair, then a cane, and I used to know some things about an earlier version of you. Audubon got all the birds of North America. Darwin got the finches of the Galápagos. Galileo got a telescope. He used it to move the sun to the center of the universe. We arrested him and banned his books. Socrates had a question. Well, several questions. We gave him poison. Van Gogh had a paintbrush. He struggled with yellow. He was 700 things on a small shelf, touching. When he died he was survived by everything that was left.