It's a new city and I walk a lot. My voice goes unraised and I needn't have a camera. A year, maybe more, before I say fuck off with any conviction.

Jogging alongside the river I wonder if my heart will float when it pops from my chest and beetles through the air like only a greater organ can. Each day I start at a rusty railway bridge and eventually my legs will be metronomes for entire pink symphonies.

The run finishes at a cemetery. (No really.) I double-over with aluminum incisions in my stomach and read about Beloved Douglas Gardner from my ankles. Wife, two kids, and the river more glib than ever behind him.

Across the street, cars go in and out of driveways quicker than ants.

Another runner, a woman with indestructibly blonde hair, brighter shoes and her own pounding heart smiles and starts in about the wind.

"It gets up," she stammers, (we're all gasping here) "and blows flowers across onto those lawns."

Bright-eyed and barking C0₂, she glances back and forth from the slim tombstones to the neat green rectangles punctuated with shrubs and stripes of asphalt.

I want to ask her if she would ever pick a flower from a grave for a lover. It's a natural question.

You could bet the family camel those flowers on the lawns are gathered up quickly. Some suburban compulsion ranging between reverence and a morbid sense of cleanliness will make hasty bouquets for garbage cans.

I myself am getting faster. Turns out my legs were police dogs all along. When the wind is up I remember and keep an eye out for chrysanthemums.

There's a small forest in Mexico to which thousands of Monarch butterflies migrate each fall. For many it's their place of death. If we could stand there, knee deep in dead petals of orange, words might spring to mind. Every one of them, a version of your name.

Fickle, we perceive a lot and remember a little.

'Muscle memory,' as its sometimes called, involves the inscription of patterns and processes into the muscles and nerves that execute them. Amnesiacs can still ride bikes.

One January morning I heard a flabbergasted Peter Gzowski interviewing a scooped-out sounding woman. Twenty years ago she had suffered a complete memory eradication at the hands of a CIA backed McGill psychiatrist. This woman had forgotten how to speak, who her lovers were, how to go to the bathroom. Adults told her repeatedly they were her children. She could not understand the veins on her thighs.

Prior to her treatment she had been a singer; a soprano in fact. And in her new life, her voice and ears still being impressive tools, she once again let loose with song. This time as an alto.

It was during this, second, musical education that she most graphically encountered her "muscular memory." Her diaphragm and lungs remembered how to support her voice even though her mind had forgotten the relevant hows and whys. This same bit of physiology enabled her to immediately recall how to tighten the peanut-butter jar lid once she was re-introduced to the task of feeding herself.

In part, this is how you open old combination locks or dial phone numbers when you do it "quickly without thinking about it."

Sometimes I call even when I know you're not going to be in. I like to think of that phone that I've touched making small, patient noises near your puddles of clothes and half-open books.

I won't forget those numbers when you die. In some fraction of all the calls I make, I'll be sure to think of them consciously. Other times I'll just slip into the memory, betrayed by neurons and whole channels of muscle. Dialing a yellow pages number looking for toggle bolts I might get four or five digits in completely unawares of the similarity, accelerated by habit, a dog actually about to bite the tire.

"Good afternoon, Beaver Lumber."