Founded on absence of meaning, reinforced with leopard print Streets and Sanitation trucks chiming in reverse, the familiar incongruity of the city lances itself, repeatedly, like a cluster of plump boils.

Bicycle cops on rape patrol scan the hedges with spotlights. A man loads cases of Mexican beer into a dingy, rows out amidst a forest of nodding, cruciform masts.

Sit here on the steps of the museum, cigar in hand. What is obsessive note-taking but an extension of the meandering pattern of dreams?

The question of significance is amplified by the arrangement of monuments: Christopher Columbus stands with his bronze back to the brontosaurus, bones lit blue by the liturgically swollen moon.

Lean against the pillar foot of the sauropod skeleton. Exchange fire for smoke. Contemplate an arrangement of objects such as to form a narrative, its own alluring architecture, an Arabesque, the site of the encounter.

Something cackles over a cop radio, and three bicycles set off up the lakefront, past big geometric statues, hunks of metal cut to precise, meaningless shapes: tilted cylinder, bisected pyramid, egg.

Think of the rough wire brushes paleontologists use at their tooth quarries, a scraping of the stone itself, reading stories backward through time.

At a yacht some distance out, strung with paper lanterns, the dingy arrives, to shouts of celebration.

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