All misunderstand their material and fear a thread-puller

will come for them soon, a denuder. All live together

lonely on an outline-only continent, eat angora goat,

and fear each other. “Who will move me off the map?”

they worry, and speak warily to each other, hiding

loose ends as well as they can.

Naked Crusoe wants the whole world naked,

the too-long grass believes; he knows I am lawn

and he knows I am lisle and he’ll take my end and tug,

he will tie me to his pinky and go running to the water.

The idea eats and eats at him, he grows more and more

abstracted, and all the while angora goats attack

his good knot with the help of their teeth. Crusoe,

gone nine hundred days, has reason to doubt

his realism: he stands at the edge of shore and knows

he does not exist in the world at all, but lives in a scene

on an old man’s shirt, he rises from the water and sees

he is not naked but wearing wet skins. I am the first

novel in English, he knows, my spine is three fat

stitches, I feel dagger footnotes up and down.

He confesses this to the silverback, who visits for lessons

in joined-up writing, bearing lettuces huge with big-vein

virus. Crusoe crushes the water into his mouth; inside,

it splits and flows and closes around what he privately

calls his Canaries. “Begin,” says Crusoe, and spreads

his materials: no pens and no paper, only needlepoint

hoops and picked-apart clothes, which the silverback

imagines badly: a tall tweed shadow that stood behind

or spread below him.

“Sign your name,” says Crusoe. “That is, sign mine.”

The silverback sails in, is defeated by a vowel, and attempts

to pick out his stitch. Naked Crusoe feels a raveling. Naked

Crusoe, hands jammed in his pockets, feels his two fists slip out

and enter the world. “Fight me like a man,” he screams, and feels

the snarls of his handprints untwist. The silverback sits at the desk

and unsews as fast as he can. The grass stares in every window;

beyond the grass, the sea. Crusoe seizes the needle and writes

home to himself. Crusoe cries to his rapidly rising hem,

“Shore, I am swimming back to you!”