From "H" to "M"

Agent Hope---- Big Frank Dickinson

". . . Falling through your whole life, you are breaking apart . . .
But in the round shape of the wheel is the idea which is the bone upon which the flesh of the wheel is fixed . . ." Russell Edson

Agent Hope was assigned to him after desire awakened, and disappointment appeared in the mirror. Agent H, let's call him, wore seersucker suits with a panama hat, and carried himself with a swagger. In one hand was an unlit cigar and while it never did get lit, still he appeared ready to smoke it when it did. He followed his charge only intermittently, having a tendency to disappear for long stretches of time and then, often reappear after some horrible setback when he would whisper in the fallen's ear, an ear that until then only heard loss, how that fall could be turned. Agent H would give him this kind of stuff: "Look at the H in hope: its upward reaching sidebars need to be restrained, lowered and centered - and when it is you can make a poem out of it." Agent H was full of those kinds of convoluted kernels. Still, odd as it may seem, they took root. The man began to be guided in his desires less by hope and more by poetry. Sometimes he rhymed, often not; more often he found his syncopated, quick-footed dance and its reverberation with all that surrounded him satisfying and pleasurable, even if he could never really say why.