B is the mother.

T is the daughter.

Me is the father.

T visits us one day.

It is strange for a daughter who once slept here and was a
        member of the Us as much as Me or B to be now a guest.

As we reminisced we thought about Sea Monkeys.

When I was little they advertised them in comic books.

Just add water they told you and like magic these Sea Monkeys
        will come to life before your eyes.

I never bought any.

The cost was more than I earned each week for carrying out the clinkers.

But I dreamed about them.

As did B.

T actually bought some and something called Sea Monkeys did in fact
        come to life when she added the water and they wiggled a lot but
        it was not the magic thing she had anticipated.

She said they are still being sold.

What is their magic I asked that has kept them in business so long?

We pondered this knowing that we could only know what magic
        they were for us.

I bought them because they were naked I said remembering
        how in the picture in the comic book they were flesh
        colored and looked almost like people and being a naked
        Indian and being seen naked and seeing naked others were
        very high on my list of wants because in this nakedness
        we flowed into the trees and rivers around us,

But T said no it was that they wore crowns and I recalled
        how she drew picture after picture of a princess in
        exquisitely colored clothes that allowed only her hands
        and face to be seen and indeed she was my princess.

No said B it is because they are monkeys and I realized
        that all her life she had wished to devolve into something
        less cruel or at least more innocent than a human being
        and that I had seen her as a cat or perhaps a dog but also
        a monkey would have been fine in the pictures she made,

But actually the Sea Monkeys were neither naked Indians nor
        princesses nor monkeys but just

Brine shrimp.

Little machines.

Intricate mechanical feed back computers.

Vehicles by which selfish genes perpetrate themselves.

Actually one wonders whether brine shrimp are anything at all,

And if so how?

Maybe they really are Sea Monkeys.

Once we know what matter is we'll have it.

Any minute now.

I had no trouble with B's monkeys so long as they were naked
        nor she with my nakednesses so long as they were monkeys,

But the crowns...

Ah, there was the rub.

When you have crowns you have already divided the world into

Kings and subjects,

Kings who can determine who shall be naked and when
        and what place monkeys will have in the great hierarchy
        of accidental beings some of which it seems are more
        accidental than others for Kings and Queens and of
        course all their daughters are always meant by divine decree.

So T became a princess and I a naked Indian and B my monkey friend.

B was not it is important to understand my pet but a monkey who
        owned herself.

A friend.

But T's Kingdom was elsewhere and though it was sad we had to
        accept it for we are no longer her Queen and King.

Indeed I want neither Kings nor Queens in my world but what shall
        I do without my princess?

Chapter Two, in which our neighbor cuts down a big tree.

The next day our neighbor cut down the big tree in his side yard.

It was a maple like the one in our front yard.

Their maple had provided a shady and cozy spot for their children when
        they played there as it had done for several previous families and it
        was not dead or diseased as far as we could tell so we wondered
        why they cut it down.

It was windy that day and B said when she saw the trees in the neighborhood
        twisting and bending she thought perhaps they were crying.

Maybe I could make a poem out of that she said to poke fun at both her idea
        about the crying and at poetry in general which she feels often does
        something a bit indiscreet if not obscene with the reality of what
        happens but I knew that she was serious about the crying and maybe
        about the poem.

I said no and smiled

And said it would be overwrought that bit about trees crying but as I mulled this
        over I thought maybe so maybe the trees do miss their friend and I knew
        that all that day as my neighbor and a friend of his dismembered the fallen
        tree I felt like crying so why not the trees who were its kin,

But I knew of course that their twisting and turning was from the wind that
        the weather service had predicted and explained in terms of cold fronts and
        high and low pressures and while I may not have followed their
        explanation in detail I knew that the wind would have arrived and the
        trees would have twisted and turned even had our neighbor not cut
        down his tree.

Still I felt that I heard crying.

So I stole B's idea for a poem and here it is,

Sort of.

We discussed why he might have cut the tree down and I speculated
        that he might have feared a dead limb would fall on one of his
        children which I supposed was possible though I had never heard
        of it happening and after all should we cut down all the trees in
        the world for fear of dead limbs or forbid our children from sitting
        under them if we leave a few maples and oaks around just for old
        times.

B thought they might have wanted to remove the shade so as to get more
        warmth on the house which was almost an ecologically correct idea
        in a twisted sort of way that bit about using solar heat though in
        the winter when it would have counted there would have been no
        leaves on the tree so it would not have helped much.

We were baffled.

Why would one choose to cut down a big and lovely tree that had been there
        longer that any of us and undo so many years of patient growing?

But it's his tree we concluded.

He can do as he likes with his tree.

Can a person own a living thing

A cow

A cat or dog

His or her children

A sky filled with birds

A tree?

Can a tree own itself?

I only know that I felt like crying all day as I listened to the chain saws whining
        like dentist drills laboring on a healthy tooth.

I thought about how when I was a child my dentist did not believe that children
        under 12 should receive Novocaine and how I could not sleep for many
        nights for the dread of it.

The whole neighborhood felt the drilling.

Well perhaps.

Maybe that wasn't even the reason for my sadness.

Perhaps it was for T and how strange it was for her to be our guest.

    Chapter Three, in which I am reading a chapter from Bergson and

I am sitting in my room where now I read and write things but which used
        to be T's bed room before she became a guest and I am reading a section
        from Bergson's “Creative Evolution.”

He writes very clearly and I almost feel that I understand him.

The chapter is about the idea of “nothing” and how there can be no such
        thing in the real world.

Nothing he says comes into the world only through a desire or a regret.

Left to itself the world is only fullness.

I recall many years ago reading a passage from Sartre which I also almost
        understood about nothingness and how he created a nothingness when
        he came to a bar looking for his friend and found only his absence
        which was a kind of nothingness,

And I suppose a regret.

I look around the room for T.

She is not here.

Her nothingness is a heaviness in the room.

But it is nothing at all really.

A nothingness is not a thing like a paper clip or an chair.

The things in this fullness do not step aside to make room for it.

This nothingness is only something I have created
        out of my regret and my desire --