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• • •

Visitors from the mainland are rare. The bridges are down. The tunnels are crushed. And boats will not come near us, for fear of the plague peculiar to this island, which is called “The Green Death.”

And it is that plague which has earned Manhattan the sobriquet, “The Island of Death.”

Hi ho.

• • •

It is a thing I often say these days: “Hi ho.” It is a kind of senile hiccup. I have lived too long.

Hi ho.

• • •

The gravity is very light today. I have an erection as a result of that. All males have erections on days like this. They are automatic consequences of near-weightlessness. They have little to do with eroticism in most cases, and nothing to do with it in the life of a man my age. They are hydraulic experiences—the results of confused plumbing, and little more.

Hi ho.

• • •

The gravity is so light today, that I feel as though I might scamper to the top of the Empire State Building with a manhole cover, and fling it into New Jersey.

That would surely be an improvement on George Washington’s sailing a silver dollar across the Rappahannock. And yet some people insist that there is no such thing as progress.

• • •

I am sometimes called “The King of Candlesticks,” because I own more than one thousand candlesticks.

But I am fonder of my middle name, which is “Daffodil-11.” And I have written this poem about it, and about life itself, of course:

“I was those seeds,

“I am this meat,

“This meat hates pain,

“This meat must eat.

“This meat must sleep,

“This meat must dream,

“This meat must laugh,

“This meat must scream.

“But when, as meat,

“It’s had its fill,

“Please plant it as

“A Daffodil.”

And who will read all this? God knows. Not Melody and Isadore, surely. Like all the other young people on the island, they can neither read nor write.

They have no curiosity about the human past, nor about what life may be like on the mainland.

As far as they are concerned, the most glorious accomplishment of the people who inhabited this island so teemingly was to die, so we could have it all to ourselves.

I asked them the other evening to name the three most important human beings in history. They protested that the question made no sense to them.

I insisted that they put their heads together anyway, and give me some sort of answer, which they did. They were very sulky about the exercise. It was painful to them.

They finally came up with an answer. Melody does most of the talking for them, and this is what she said in all seriousness: “You, and Jesus Christ, and Santa Claus.”

Hi ho.

• • •

When I do not ask them questions, they are as happy as clams.

• • •

They hope to become slaves of Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa some day. That is O.K. with me.

2

AND I REALLY WILL try to stop writing “Hi ho” all the time.

Hi ho.

• • •

I was born right here in New York City. I was not then a Daffodil I was christened Wilbur Rockefeller-Swain.

I was not alone, moreover. I had a dizygotic twin, a female. She was named Eliza Mellon Swain.

We were christened in a hospital rather than in a church, and we were not surrounded by relatives and our parents’ friends. The thing was: Eliza and I were so ugly that our parents were ashamed.

We were monsters, and we were not expected to live very long. We had six fingers on each little hand, and six toes on each little footsie. We had supernumerary nipples as well—two of them apiece.

We were not mongolian idiots, although we had the coarse black hair typical of mongoloids. We were something new. We were neanderthaloids. We had the features of adult, fossil human beings even in infancy—massive brow-ridges, sloping foreheads, and steamshovel jaws.

• • •

We were supposed to have no intelligence, and to die before we were fourteen.

But I am still alive and kicking, thank you. And Eliza would be, too, I’m certain, if she had not been killed at the age of fifty—in an avalanche on the outskirts of the Chinese colony on the planet Mars.

Hi ho.

• • •

Our parents were two silly and pretty and very young