The first one likened it to a bumbling porter.
The second imagined it happening
as a generational accumulation
of disorder upon unvanquished disorder.
The third, finally, proposed a mapping
of the porter’s journey from station to station
dispersed throughout the wilderness of the second’s
idea, reconfigured spatially
to allow for a site on which might be reckoned
the failures of the company with the mazy
wanderings of its forgotten agent.
He returns to us years later – toothless, aged –
and recites all that’s left of the damaged letter:
“It was all a question of the weather
and of things that by lots had been thrown together.”