An commentary upon the poet Spencer Reese, and more specifically, upon Reece’s “addresses” in his book “The Clerk’s Tale: Poems” (Houghton Mifflin, 2004) in light of Barbara Johnson’s work on the “apostrophe” in her book chapter “Toys R Us,” in her book “Persons and Things” (Harvard University Press, 2008), and also in light of Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology and Jane Bennett’s vibrant materialism. The article explores the apostrophe, and in particular Reece’s “addresses” as the hailing of the ephemeral and the lost and inanimate of history as if they might understand, and as a form of being-with in which there is a wildly constructed (because fictitious) intimacy that retains, nevertheless, great distances, forever untraversable. Similar to commentary, the article discusses the apostrophe as a ‘talking-writing’ to other ‘authors’ who have already left the building, but whose ‘signatures’ either remain as artifacts or as impressions of their absence, or of their muteness.