Last night I found only the first letter of the Arabic alphabet in your favorite book, the bootleg dictionary we drag with us on all our interstate revels. Close to cardinal virtues you espoused in your precise rendering of pears, seven continents had split, though in real life, which is not still, they blend and reverse. The land where we were airborne for the latter parts of recent history was revealed by bleached yellow dye cleaving the South China Sea — Laut Cina Selatan. To say that name again so I will recall where secondary inflections fall, set them in my tongue like desiccated tropics converging on the page, loose girdles around an unseen pole. At the beginning, lift. One minim, vertical bar sailing over eccentric circles, minute unit of liquid measure and not a drop of the blue unspoken ocean.