It falls from the sky, this innocence, this unfinished lifework I didn’t know I needed in my life. It falls onto the table, falls into my sketchpad, sculpted torso dreaming of its own ekphrasis, a fragment completing itself: perfect shoulders, perfect legs, perfect trail of hair along a perfect chest that glows from within like a hurricane lamp and then, too, the addition of the placid penis, relishing its own flesh, cushioned sacs engorged with seeds of love. Is it love? Once, I played a lamb in a nativity play and the angel had a crown of gold straw. Now, what stands before me is a puma. Or at least that is what I see when I stare into his eyes and he stares back at me. He is not what I see but what I am. What I draw, I become. All his poses seem to say: Even when things don’t work out, they work out but only as long as you don’t give up, as long as you don’t stop sketching me, just as the body must succumb to its own illusion, from moment to moment, the self imagining self, somehow residing between ears and behind eyes. I see in his face a lion but also, in the gentle cascade of his limbs, a gazelle. Then it falls from the ceiling, the zandolie – as small as a teardrop, and I take a piece of paper and scoop it up and carry it out the front door. Here, there is no angle from which you are not seen. You must not give up.