among the torn silks of phrase

2009-07-15T22:55:00.007-05:00

i have a new blog
& you can find it here.

2009-07-15T22:52:00.000-05:00

2009-07-02T22:42:00.003-05:00

2009-07-02T22:21:00.001-05:00

2009-06-27T19:12:00.009-05:00

sound: jet plane, papercuts
sensation: gingering

and as they sit there, across from each other at the weatherwood table, she is made conscious, more than before, by the weight in the eyes of the man on the opposite bench. he reads her as a stranger, measuring impartially, more austere than unforgiving. blossoms of coffee stain the cover of last week's new yorker, the copy sitting carelessly under her elbow. she moves her arm. every gesture is fabricated, from the way she twists her hands around the cup of earl grey, to the feathers & anchors pinned to her cardigan. the grey of the wood, and the gray of the sky, the boy whom she knows sitting on a nearby treestump, smoking his cigarette down to the quick. all this is fabricated and all of this is true.

the most beautiful bodies are like transparent glass.
the most powerful flames like water washing the tired feet of travellers.
the greenest trees like lead blooming in the thick of the night.

-czeslaw milosz

we are somewhere between the side of the road and the lake, where the sickening hum of the mosquitoes is lost to the strange song of bullfrogs and the pleading of the loons. we lace between tree-roots and trip over invisible clusters of stones, our bare feet squelching into the hollow mud where it has been raining for days. we pretend not to notice when the other ones fall. we hesitate, do not complain. and when we four get to the water, we are left speechless with beauty. there is the absence of the moon and a paleness soaking over the distant rooftop trees (lighting up sky and water, like afternoon pollen dusting the surface of chocolate lake). we splash into the imperceptable depths, our warm legs suddenly tangling, untangling with the ropey slime of waterlilies. the rocks here seem rougher, hewn & igneous for our nakedness and the midnight lake tastes like summer.

so the weeks float on as a canopy; a woven, living patchwork of battle-won peace - this generous helping of plans & production. the radishes in the backyard swell and push against the ground. the world feels as though breaking a narrow sunstreak. at night, the residual light filters out, draining from our bodies into the feathers. we wake up younger in the morning, ready ourselves for the cinematography of the moment, something so much more than all these bare fragments.

2009-06-21T08:08:00.005-05:00

2009-06-21T07:53:00.004-05:00

"emotions are the link to ideas. it's hard to absorb an idea intellectually if we can't also feel it in our bodies, if we don't have an intellectual understanding. these two things are the morality of art, which allows us to learn and makes art generative so that it produces something in us."

-anne michaels

2009-06-21T07:40:00.008-05:00

the treebranch
that is posed like an oracle
on the concrete checkerboard
of the gardens

weightless wait less;
this is motion & this is rest

or just the whirring
fly home pigeons
of your anxious,
ancient hands.

2009-06-21T07:31:00.002-05:00

2009-06-10T18:41:00.007-05:00

2009-06-06T19:26:00.036-05:00

music: much more than that, sharon van etten
mood: and nothing but

"everyplace has its own energy; tension. here (halifax, nova scotia), it arguably arises from the fact its on a coast, an edge. this is a borderland
between
land and sea, which is not just a geographic reality but a
psychological reality too - a state of
being
in between (sometimes stuck, other times secure)."

when i sat down to draw you a memory map of my city (such an ownership after all these few years...) the intersections blurred into a tangled lattice of hows & whys & each and every ignorant instance of a when. i sat there puzzled with the september-raw pencil, the blank page (there have been so many blank pages, flat & lazily, expectantly waiting), unable to attempt such a delicate cartography. do you want my memory-places or my remembrance of the measurements? and how can i describe the geography of such an amalgamation? such a distance?

and the truth is there were some things i never meant to give away. now i am standing before the refrigerator hum of creativity, with the aluminum foil folded around the grilled fiddleheads & the cheese made by your art-student husband (how 'the shape of jazz to come' and the sound of listening drifts in from the front room turntable) i discover the leftover pieces all my own. objects that i know instantly and so well: a photograph of the peony-tree from the house where i grew up, some of the delft blue tiles a. & i so carefully portioned out like a game of (as the german sea captain announced at last night's party) 'x-s & o-s.' that was almost a hundred years ago. there are two glass ladybugs, paired together on the corner of a postcard and finally, a mosaic from firenze in the shape of a heart. these were the things that i never meant to give away but in the mishmash of migration, of time & streets travelled, they have ended here; on your refrigerator somewhere north of north street and west from the place where i live. i think of telling you this -- of demanding, or begging the recollection of these small monuments but i do not. i am relieved, here in the weathering, to finally have such tangible & fierce signs of loss.

75% apricot, 25% plum.

there is a growing & shared sense that h. has correctly identified as the beginnings of ambivalence. we are learning the business of adulthood, which consists mostly of understanding ourselves as arbitrary self-creatures, done school & feeling profoundly untethered (we are all, in our ways, seeking out reasons for persistence or departure). the periphery suddenly sharply in focus; our actions & decisions becoming the calibrated measure of our own self-worth & wellbeing. importance.

the definition of home: a place where you have settled (a person, object, thought, architecture or melange of these things) already the taste of your tongue. so easily explained; anything it is possible to classify & can be (is willing to be) named. it is also the generous plenty of an interlocking pattern by escher, cold open leaves in the teapot, wet clay. muscle memory. the equidistant simplicity living in the gesture of return.

2009-06-06T19:25:00.000-05:00

2009-06-01T08:03:00.005-05:00

if you would like
a letter, please
send me your
address.

2009-05-22T20:54:00.007-05:00

music: house of diamonds, bowerbirds
mood: forsythia; forsooth

he reaches his hands up to the summer leaves; their soft-shape shadows between his fingers twisting with the streetlamps. and i walked around today thinking about memory maps and the city (the co-relative distances of near and far). bouillabasse creatures, the humming winds of citadel hill, reconstructed clothing. sunlight. but here, i want to say, with my arm stretched out long and bare like branches, here is the very where. oh where. how to fit such things on the paper.

cxxxiv. forget-me-not

forget-me-not (frideles) contains neither correct heat nor correct cold. it holds not powers useful for humans. it is like a weed and is not valuable as medicine. if someone should eat it, it would do
more harm than good.

2009-05-12T08:10:00.009-05:00

the week, the month, the moment reminds me of a parallelogram or a prism or something small that can be turned in the palms. wheeling, wheedling - ending and beginning interlocked as a pair of stone birds in a paper nest. and right now the morning (this morning) is soft, moving like the shadows of living plants across the living room floor. (this is the morning, and here - yours) i'm still in my pyjamas on the futon, eating bananas & walnuts & maple syrup on oatmeal and drinking coffee. caught in the pages of a novel, testing out early voices, all i can. outside the street presses up against the house's damp framework with city buses and birds.

"sometimes, i wish that life were less a poem," i tell this to my work friend d. a few weeks ago, watching the coffee ribbon out like treacle (22, 23, 24...) but mostly observing how our stories curl up at the slips of their edges. and i know that this happens, this recognition or recreation of pattern happens to everyone. happenstance. but the red door isn't really red anymore, and the vernon street neighbours were robbed late last week, in the night. things come and they do not come again. "but julia, that is what life is," he says and i know that he is right.

i have been reclaiming solitude and the public gardens, all brimming with tulip trees and a hundred varieties of daffodils. i quietly bless my grandmother that the names are ready on my catalogued tongue (azeleas, paperwhites, alium, hyacinths). i watch the ducks. i sit on the bench and read. i drink my tea. i think about growing with sage, and lavender and, more than this - this kindness.

2009-05-04T16:49:00.002-05:00

2009-04-26T20:56:00.013-05:00

music: god help the girl
mood: misnomer

we stand for hours with sunlight gathered soft in the corners where our arms join, at rough paper edges of the beginning. this is the gesture of origin, these are the roots. there is so much that we don't talk about, like turning life into storybooks or the stenciled topography of growing into ourselves, still. i am pinning daylight to walls, chasing the beams through windows and forgetting about the woodwork. the wind sweeps & billows all afternoon against the concrete safety of us.

brunch: bare arms & legs and sips of black coffee, apricot french toast & apple slices & compote. the clicking whirl of bicycle wheels, laughter, the pickpocket stories. the open, vacant doors of the armory.

in the smallest clay pot is where the sage grows.

like the mechanical catch of into burnt hands;
how all the currencies are ordered and arranged:
miscalculating the moment you appear.

2009-04-18T19:16:00.008-05:00

music: spirited, laura gibson
mood: the first of all

mist hanging like plumes
from the streetlamps.
locomotion gestures
&
a lot of living,
(the loss of patience)
lately.

more soon
stay close, stay tuned.

2009-04-18T16:36:00.005-05:00

2009-04-12T20:47:00.014-05:00

mood: a spiderweb trapped
music: inni mer syngur vitleysingur, sigur ros

raindrops & snow & hail
kept falling into the open cups
of the daffodils
outside the windows of the
senior common room.

recollecting
the comforts of
candied tea-party nostalgia
reading all the final
dusty mirrors like silverscreens.

in the brick hall at the farmer's market, a girl sits on the snow-stained floor and she plays the accordion. i can tell it by the sound, by the pattern of missing buttons. i have studied the same tractions of unfolding paper & silence. from across the crowd, i can smell old books, i can still smell the leather & cigarettes.

this is a celebration list i made today:

-marmalade jars
-pale blue ducks for my jacket
-york redoubt, without a
-seagrasses
-linens & laundry
-melodica
-listening, watching, thinking parties
-homemade bread
-fishing for bicycle baskets
-shoot the expired film
-take-home exam

we are quietly in the kitchen, r. and i, sitting on the counter while you look closely at the greasy edge of the knife. i am waiting for smoky tea to finish steeping so i can sit cross-legged at the end of my bed & finish my last paper. you are waiting for the wide open feeling to become more tractable, more a simplicity like breathing.
everything sounds mottled right now & i am thinking about collecting a sleepy army of alarm clocks. (so close, so near & even still, adjusting focus.) red moons over open bridges, the puckered sweetness of burnt cookies & the velvet birthday, lines like tightropes in the sky, rain in my shoestringing, downtown candles & raw guitars, russian fairy stories and all the textures of here.

2009-04-09T18:56:00.003-05:00

2009-04-07T21:55:00.018-05:00

music: chopin waltzes no. 1-14, dinu lipatti
mood: when i dance

polaroids taken from the ever-wonderful tender letters

the bus swings round in the gravel sphere at the very end of the road, the brakes streaking the silence; the engine, the engine. do you see it, the pale indigo of springtime nights and how the forgotten lunar smudge is darkening the sky? headlights on the white birch shapes by the roadside and then disappear. "you've come way too far. you should have gotten off ages back and now you're going to have to wait till we turn around." i watch the dried & tangled hulls of ships, the lego-brick piles of lobstertraps, the feeling of the otherside blurring by. sometimes, i feel like a story-collector who has become a gatherer of things and i do not know how where and which the stories. "here," he says. "take the first road on the left, because that is where you're going." he cannot know that written over and over all the pages of my notebooks is this: conviction enough for stillness.

it is middling night when i leave the cove, and in the coolness, under the streetglow moon all i can hear is the wind between the layers of my sweaters, the purity of motion and the footfalls of a dog walking ten kilometers over the cordillera hills of country road. i'd forgotten the elation and the easy hum of bicycle wheels, how effortless the here to there, how joyous. (this happiness is fizzy like the fountain soda we sipped from straws hours earlier at the shopping mall.) the damp air smells deeply of brine and promise. i am ten years old. this is that summer evening with darkness draws in and we are wary for the silhouettes of parents in the driveway. we will never be finished with this resinous day.

2009-04-07T21:54:00.006-05:00

2009-04-04T21:25:00.012-05:00

listen: transatlanticism, death cab for cutie
look: we go into the blue

"i've been pulling at the pocket-watch strings all week," i say into the telephone, while testing the resinous skins of apples in the grocery store of afternoon. they are clear & crisp and filmy with wax and soft-planed as everything has been lately. bright. effortless. effortless as breathing, or light, or the sound of motion. the oily tap of your pastel against blank paper, the gathering of your mouth against the teacup edge of evening.

the city disappeared into mist & ocean was seeping over the hollow edges of the ferry. the air so heavy and warm that we moved slower than eyes could follow: a morning invisible and silver as swords turned sideways. we were neither of us ourselves, and the uncertainty of recognition kept us company all the way across the harbour. at least, i think it was you. when i saw you begin to wind the film into your old kodak i turned away, preserving the anonymity of just another figure at the railing.

they have always been there increasing their numbers
at the foot of dim rills, all around and under
the ghostly edges where moonmaps surrender
and hold out white flags to the night.
"the armies of the moon," gwendolyn mcewen

there are two rooms at the observatory: the first is full of buzzing computers, lit up like kaleidoscopes with all the patterns of the sky & the labelling of the heavens. there is a wide row of windows, looking over the perpendicular city, all streetlamps and telephone polls. the sky above is dark distant trees and clouds. through the door is the telescope room, galvanized metal curves ripped open into the glittering sky. the craters of the moon are granular as rice or the distant, not-so-distant stars that, with so much effort, you are learning how to name.

2009-03-30T18:31:00.014-05:00

music: tell me, au revoir simone
mood: oyster realms & alkaline

he lays murky deep cups out like a palette, glasses circling the table and the spoons pointing in from the edges, already heavy with condensation and clean with the steam. pouring water from a pair of broken kettles, making their surfaces billow with the sandglass patterns of brewing. we wait before cutting into the pointed, loamy depths. we are studying the complexities and layerings of coffee: the sunlight, the soil, the seed. we learn to read with the texture and weight of taste all the discretions of the harvest. my favourites are from ethiopia: they are pronounced & floral & brisk as blueberry sweetness, or remind me of a forgotten time. this is the taste of tobacco flowers & bergamot. sumatrans curl at the back of my throat, dark and resineous, rich with creosotes & notes like the blackest sheet of music i have ever seen. i am still feeling for the stretch and warp of the pianist's hands.

the world fell clean and washed and dry as felted wool after the storms cleared from hills of nowhere (we are somewhere not anywhere at all). and i watch your fingers crossed & unconscious as tea leaves in my saucer, arranging the world like a tapestry of myth and maybes. i have been so busy dreaming of the heartostay.

2009-03-30T16:35:00.006-05:00

2009-03-26T07:40:00.002-05:00

2009-03-22T18:38:00.019-05:00

listen: something good, red river
look: my sweet old etcetera

it was the most splendid first of spring because i had forgotten all about the equinox until long after sunset, too caught up in the simple acts of living. i breakfasted with m. on hot-cross buns and almond lattes in the bakery-soft morning, the whimsy of afternoon spent with n. citydrifting through the secret latticework streets. we sat on falling down, crumbling cement steps of winter, eating take-out pad thai & leafing through the new gastronomy, entirely drenched with spice & sunlight. i read poems from a half-purchased book into the fabric of day, like cups of oversweet tea, like sounding a tenter of the here & there.

all week long i have been noticing the alien smell of caramel & coffeegrounds against my skin, in my hair; the nicest feeling of gathering a connate pattern of very late nights. the orchestra of empty glasses are the remnants of a party, the room of found instruments: a melodica, a broken accordion, the we're-out-of-tunes guitar. ideas & questions filtering in and through the air & all around. we talk over the droning about the troubadour anthems of our parents and the 1960s and the hollows we've prescribed ourselves by time. the ice melts sharp in glasses of whiskey and novel faces in the candlelight & we are downtown, deconstructing bookshelves and now it is the morning, dear.

2009-03-22T18:25:00.001-05:00

2009-03-20T20:41:00.013-05:00

ten year old boys sitting sideways & restless on the cafe chairs,
untwisting cinnamon rolls into the snail shell laze
of march break afternoons.

the sweep of the airplane is just like
the trace of your finger against sky.

2009-03-20T20:06:00.000-05:00

2009-03-20T15:01:00.003-05:00

2009-03-16T18:38:00.028-05:00

music: 5 years time, noah & the whale
mood: proclivity for productivity

there's something about six o'clock and the way contours hang deep from the saw-toothed parts of our houses. sunlight across powerlines & the dry salt tumbling & staining old lanes of traffic. i will never be anywhere as pointed as a rooftop shadow.

i spent yesterday afternoon with m. at the slip of ocean i like the best. we sat with our legs crossed & ate synthetic things, filling ourselves with round & cheerful colours. when i listened, i could hear the dull gurgle of the tide, a sound that echoes in the makeshift streams of snow-melt. with toes flat against the edge of water, we look up into the sheltering boards so we can dream better about remember whens. is that supposed to be a tulip? he asks. it looks more like a half-eaten, plum-coloured pear

& i thought
we were going to look right through and see the sky.

it is spring today & i caught the very first crocuses! a year a thousand years ago, they were ancient & wise, ossified by winter. these are such wonderful, straightforwardly flowers.

2009-03-16T18:26:00.001-05:00

2009-03-16T18:11:00.001-05:00

2009-03-15T07:11:00.080-05:00

sound: we're a whistling orchestra
song: in the flowers, animal collective

uni is the last unknown piece of sushi. it reminds me of ocean liniment, mustard-yellow & cold, made from the invertebrate spines of very deep. (rawness & warm rice between chopstick-fingers finally becoming a ritual.) i talk about this under harvest moons of early morning: how the peripheries of a creature melted through my teeth and i could not taste the edges.

2009-03-15T06:23:00.000-05:00

2009-03-14T08:37:00.045-05:00

music: hospice, the antlers
mood: leeks

i was watching the baby when it started to happen.

her hair stood up like filaments, straight in the web of sunlight so she looked weightless & irresilient as a creature from far away. her palms were flushed pink and she cupped a handful of moist goldfish that flew to the floor when she choked, airless. everyone turned. we were outside the hospital, and the bus driver kicked his foot on the brakes. walked back through the seats, stepping on the crackers so that they turned to dust. she's alright, alright, alright but this look i've only seen this look on the crowd's face once before, when we pulled into the train station & i was only seven.

later, i walked home but ended up somewhere else.

fact: when they wired the houses in los alamos
they used 15,000 tons of borrowed silver bouillon.

my sweet friend & i dream about living this summer as if it were without relent. we will fill the sea with hurricane tents, and hang bouquets of cameras from the doorknobs of our bedrooms. like this. or, the sound of the stories that we tell. soon, i will be serving coffee in the victorian house across from the gardens, and teaching myself how to draw peonies from the hiss of steamed milk. we will capture everything. i will wish for a rowboat the colour of maples.

dearest, you inhabit places as a landscape.

2009-03-12T06:43:00.005-05:00

word: megascopic
warmth: cafe-au-lait

it rained all night long,
but i slept under the noise.

today the sky is perfect

for reading on the library
picnic benches.

2009-03-10T18:55:00.011-05:00

this is how
it might feel
to live in a place
where homonyms
hang from the blue
cactus branches
of home.

right-leaning
a precision more resolved;

ivory once grew in my mouth.

2009-03-10T18:52:00.003-05:00

A Conversation
W. S. Merwin
(From 'Houses & Travellers')

There is a wind that when it turns I hear the garden and the desert discussing things with each other. Sometimes in the garden, sometimes in the desert, day or night. Mud walls, stone walls, no walls, limestone, sheep far away, howling, birds singing, hissing, trickling, silence, dry smells, watered smells, moons, stars, flowers that are keys between them.

They tell their dreams to each other, the garden and the desert. They dream above all of each other. The desert dreams of the garden inside it. It loves the garden. It embraces the garden. It wants to turn it into desert. The garden lives within itself. It dreams of the desert all around it, and of its difference from the desert, which it knows is as frail as feeling.

It must be a long time since I first heard them talking. I must have heard them when I was two. I must have heard them when I was one, and so on. Perhaps before I was born. Or anyone was born. Or any roundness became an egg. Or the water was born, cooling on a high rock, prophesying tears, prophesying eyes.

I must have heard them even before the rocks were born moving in the colored night. Probably I have heard them since the light began looking for something to write on, flying on, white, with the colors hidden inside it and the darkness around it, forgetting nothing from the beginning, prophesying the end of knowledge, prophesying the wilderness, prophesying the garden, prophesying the wilderness dreaming that it was a garden. And the garden. And the wilderness.

2009-03-10T18:42:00.026-05:00

listen: hey, elvis perkins in dearland
look: awaiting

april she tells me, counting months so the silver bangles clang together down the smooth lines of her arms (can you imagine the metallic colours of a place you've never mined?) tumeric & saffron & cloves, waking at midnight to boil water for your tea. there are patterns illegible as things that are written on the body. white socks stained by the red hem of a cotton sari and many silks folded in a country far, far away. this selflessness cannot be taught.

another winter we survived & green things light up the earth.

construction paper plans for a new season: i am essentially done, passing already into next chapters & rifling through school archives. securing space. the truth is i am unafraid as i never thought i could be. far more intrepid. today, i walked halfway across the city with enough change in my pocket for a loaf of bread (sidewalks & sunlight throwing us into each other again). may there be sunlight. may there always be such malleable days.

2009-03-10T18:06:00.018-05:00

music: vampires with dreaming kids ep, twin sister

mood: fascimile

a) climbing back into my chair and the thousand-mile conversation i am thinking so many directions but mostly of how we have been wearing less armour, these days. the tomatoes are too salted, the bread is still warm. i think about people becoming clear as daylight. (jump forward, over the time-zones and time together.) we expand into seasons & indentations, the places of beginning. here, this is a mirror. this is the truest reflection of light.

b) on the blinded street today, your ex-roommate suddenly appeared - the one with pale eyes and the slow-fading sentences. his hands were pushed into the pockets of a fur-coated jacket. he has intentionally started dressing like a young edward gorey. he still shuffles his feet.

c) i would have two languages & a room of dark tulips.

2009-03-10T15:55:00.005-05:00

2009-03-05T21:36:00.016-05:00

listen: all we ask, grizzly bear
location: gate 20

before i left the seaside, everything shone through like flecks in the pavement. there are times when happiness roars in, bowling you over unexpected because you were not trapped away from happiness at all & it is a currency that inundates.

there was fresh colour in the sky, behind the branches and through the windows of the tallest office buildings. up right to the top (the very) & over the harbour islands & paper-dot boats & the striped smoke towers that invent clouds.

even now, my worries about then are mostly veneer & i've been feeling how everything that looms is weaving together. i am finding moments of falling into place.

2009-03-05T16:54:00.005-05:00

2009-03-02T16:58:00.043-05:00

look: the saffron fringe
listen: isobel, po' girl

i read 27 pages of infinite jest and lucy knisley's french milk but mostly, the last week was strongest at its moments of looking up from pages, clanging the bookspines closed. this morning, i walked through rough icy streets with a clothbag full of research tomes, slipping them into the library before the beginning of day. (i thumb through the pages, erasing marginalia & brushing off the rain.) i rode the no. 20 bus route & took red-door photographs, the ones i've held off so long, like settling in the comfort of this vocabulary that sometimes rhymes with concession. i follow far along our patchwork story.

coffeeshops full in the potential of the morning, jazzstandards & the weight of my unread book, new acquaintances & cellophane buckets of impossibly orange roses. (more than anything, this city has taught me about the inescapability of place, the way narratives pile up & clutter the hollow places between buildings.) it seems that all i have ever wanted is to plait motion with stillness.

and you measure seashell pasta over the boiling water, your hands rich & generous once again. i arrange the dinner plates like a mirror with wine-glasses on the right and the left. we drink our wine. we sleep.

a gloomy monday reading about koltès: modes of being that cannot be dealt through rational appeals, the capacity to affirm death in a surrealist manner roaring through the classical form of a play. love as something kept radically separate from the substance of touch. but mostly, i've been thinking through different conceptions of food: the architecture & aesthetics of wild sweets chocolate or secret masterworks from ferran adria's laboratory. a borrowed copy of brillat-savarin's physiologie du goût & revisiting this.

i keep having emerald dreams.

2009-03-02T16:30:00.000-05:00

2009-02-28T15:10:00.002-05:00

music: symphony #1 c-moll op. 68, johannes brahms
mood: a memory of taste

through the smoke & to the sky

2009-02-25T20:36:00.011-05:00

listen: mr. tambourine man, bob dylan
look: a poet, a painter, a candlestick maker

it's bright today, so bright that the icecream melts into a puddle on my way home & we walk down the fat tightrope lines blurred wet by winter tires & snow. "all day i have been in the world in a way that i haven't been in the world forever," i tell you. i think about how ours is a recessed strangerness, one with very deep pockets. but here we are with glowing & the feeling of brick & sun heavy on my back. the sky yielding to february eyes, the stretch of a moment into permanent blue.

i lay on my bed all afternoon, listening to "middle cyclone" as if it were a book. my love, i am the speed of sound or a foundry of mute & heavy bells. don't let this fading summer pass you by. counting clouds. drinking peppermint tea. enjoying the luxury of the lost habits. we watched a japanese movie about the cupola-interior architecture of a spanish city & then i read some fairytales. life in this city requires integrity angled and implicit as the smallest bones of your feet.

2009-02-23T22:28:00.007-05:00

click

the carrying arms, the antlers
hollow's cove, beatbeat whisper
optimist vs. the silent alarm, casiotone for the painfully alone
patience for books, the loom
lament for birds (post-wine), miss scarlett
fortune teller, forest fire
the pillowmaker, john southworth
opus #11, dustin o'halloran
big red machine, justin vernon & aaron dessner
who made it, sogyumo acacia band
the waves, princeton
bad medicine, liz green
providence, the love language
what about the bob, jaymay

2009-02-22T16:31:00.035-05:00

mood: only so many pictures of snow
music: heart of clay, nat johnson

all morning, i sat in library sunlight (under the glass-ceilings of reading week, with caramel in my cappuccino). i was tapping my hands over the laptop humming pages of the thesis and thinking about egg ornaments. how they smelled of straw & rows of slat-board henhouses, smooth & hollow as glass jars, painted & purchased on thursday mornings at the market in kingston. how under their acrylics, the shells must be tea-stained and buoyant & restless. every year, i would wrap them in paper towels and place them reverently in the crawlspace. sometimes i would open them again months later, uncrumpling boxes onto the white carpet. my favourite was a pale, well-whiskered rabbit.

* * *

in april i lifted bruised, greenish robin's eggs from the curved sidewalks of our street. and i would run home for lunch waiting for hatchlings that every year, never came.

* * *

lately, days have been like that,
lit up with joys -
contained, fleeting
(green ships on such grey ocean),
very very careful.

* * *

we rechristened the stars that night while you were here & so busy with visiting the city and with me. we went down to the end of the road past snowploughed piles, out into the darkness. there were lights across the water and at the lip of the harbour, beacons of distance and motion. the same gestures held in our bodies, the structures of sentences, a pattern of memory. parallels. we stood a long time, looking at the sky and we didn't say much of anything. thoughts back and forth.

* * *

wornonasleave.

* * *

legs crossed in the northwest gazebo under streetlamps & solitude & february rain. the hyacinths on my writing desk are oversweet.

you & i are night painters

2009-02-16T12:27:00.006-05:00

mood: coffee, breakfast, radio-news
music: all the years, beach house

on monday morning, we talk about how things change more quickly than their names, watching beside our shifting visionaries the narcotic kaleidoscopes of 'worldwide.' what does it mean to know the self as a noun? a verb? we chart the unstable geography of no-other's land.

i spent much of yesterday in my kitchen, the counter bustling with all the ingredients for homemade soup & walnut bread. i made tea with dried leaves and sugarwater. it was snowing a bit & everything smelled of parchment & rosemary.

there are things that are worth learning: why dim-lit stars fade when you look at them direct and brokenness as something that is living; the brute sincerities that ebb, flow.

2009-02-13T19:52:00.004-05:00

2009-02-13T19:14:00.014-05:00

in the japanese tea garden, i sit beside a pond eating sesame cookies
and reading from all the torn slips of fortune.

the sun is a morning star

2009-02-13T14:46:00.015-05:00

listen: at the hop, devendra banhart & jana hunter
look: luminous

"we need to hurry," he says, pressing into the night & it's the rawness of his tweed jacket that pulls him forward, this and all the dedication aligned in his features. "i don't know why," he says to me quietly, "but everytime i'm in a new city i need bookstores as landmarks. i'm only comfortable in the familiar mapping of all the pages." we have never spoken before.

hours later, we meet a vagrant poet named osiris who sways above our table, his hands clutched finger to palm and fragile as birds. "let me tell you the truth of it, brothers, sweet-faced lady" he says. his eyes looking past us, his eyes right through us. there is grey in his beard and it marks the filament of years, his cheeks high and smooth as a child's. the black scarf uncurls from his neck and he finds the hem, sweeping it back over his shoulder, covering his throat with the woollen night. the new year's sky is glossy like streetlamps & ghosts but he has the vagabond laughter of being in better days.

i see things here that i have never seen before: february daffodils and cyclamen in the bank vaults. i buy gala apples by the pound and chase seagulls that come up to my knees & we watch the canvas billows of the sunday market. on saturday t. takes me to a at dive bar at the end of the universe (the only one that survived the first earthquake) where there are stained-glass windows as dark as dry smoke. i carry a white carnation in my hands and we dance the rough-house blues. i have learned so quickly the flatteries of an absurd city; the clanging, side-seated trolleys and such irrational hills.

2009-02-13T10:48:00.011-05:00

music: providence, the love language
mood: plum wine

"twenty-one? look much younger," he says.
i shrug & the fur brim of my hat falls into my eyes. i haven't taken it off for days. in the bathroom, under the sheepskin tiles & the whirring of a fan, i see how the reflection has become very wise & out of place.

dizzie gillespie was playing that afternoon, that afternoon in the alleyway behind rows of orchid merchants and right in the tickytacky heart of chinatown. i was looking at the four o'clock arabesque of a stranger's watch and the dusty sunlight bleeding into dusk. the restaurant deserted, with all the straightbacked mahogany chairs pushed against the brocade tables, watercolours curling like scrolls in their long frames. there were empty mirrors made of all the dollar-store porcelain.

i'm not sure what i've come for in this brief city, so i busy myself with collecting the geometry of footsteps and the noise. a japanese man sits at a table across from me, his nose hidden in the golden gate guidebook and his order is identical to mine (the rich taste of the wine, and a neat row of handmade dumplings lined up across the plate). and as i lift my glass, i feel the sky becoming dark over my shoulder. the owner's wife comes in with fuschia-coloured orchids all wrapped up in cones of newsprint. she leaves the winter door open.

2009-02-11T18:29:00.002-05:00

2009-02-04T22:42:00.007-05:00

en papeterie

2009-02-04T21:37:00.013-05:00

music: (my girl's got) miraculous technique, belle & sebastian
mood: stationary

during the past weeks, i've mostly been gathering my ends together - dripdrying everything i own in black & demure, leafing through my passport, asking strangers about how to pay cable-car fares. "are you excited?" they inevitably ask. (i say yes, instead of explaining how i'm far too steady to get caught up in anticipation of the approaching, the inevitable.) the funny thing is that i am excited about the conference at st. mary's & and all my solitary exploring in san francisco. i'm tangibly excited in a prickling toes sort of way.

i woke up early this morning & walked beside downtown cross-country ski trails. truffle oil dinner & afternoon pots of tea, movies (in the mood for love, nick & norah's infinite playlist, ugestsu) and walking home through streets with the long-lost. at a lecture in the senior common room tonight, we listened to the second movement from beethoven's piano sonata no. 32 in c minor - all the quarter hour way through. i had never listened properly before. still wrapped in sweaters, winter coats and the comfortable weight of years, we were lost in the quiet.

2009-02-01T12:47:00.002-05:00

click

heartbreaker, jenn grant
billie holiday, warpaint
service bell (featuring feist), grizzly bear
paper planes (m.i.a. cover), pale young gentlemen
pictures of mother, regal standard
arrival of the birds, the cinematic orchestra
dylan, emmy the great
fangela, here we go magic
cello song (nick drake cover), the books & jose gonzalez
tunnelvision, here we go magic
new york song, dark dark dark
cane and rice, sodastream
all the big trees, riceboy sleeps
the hundredth time, gigi
come to your senses, the leisure society
i lost my colour vision, burning hearts
in the great green room, peter adams
heimat, hauschka

2009-02-01T12:37:00.024-05:00

2009-02-01T12:25:00.002-05:00

2009-01-30T19:07:00.039-05:00

the night was a van gogh dream, painted with planet-stars (and who could tell the difference, who but a half-slip moon that was swinging like a bitter drunk in the winter sky). all the mittens had frozen into the shapes of their fingers. the party-goers might have settled for the quiet un-explanations of strangerhood, but there was too much to say and they spelled it out with alphabet pretzels. this made their throats dry and left trails of salt on the insides of their hands.
she was thinking of a boy she hardly knew, one who lived on the other side of a hill that pried their city into such neat halves. how much she liked the kindness of his button-down shirts (which were always green) and the untangled contours of his smile. he would bring lukewarm styrofoam coffee or stale pastries wrapped in cellophane when her days grew very difficult. sometimes it helped. she was someone perplexed and a little sad and her hands were always full.
so she would follow the parties out into the night, wearing all her coats & tripping over the ice & the laughter. in the morning she would fall asleep watching stars through the window, hoping she might still wake to find their toes buried in the sunlight.

2009-01-29T00:38:00.046-05:00

i wake unable to speak, with the mornings already
heavy and orange above me.

i am uncertain
how
it took so much
to recognize this
and the way that
the shadows of us will continue to lengthen.

i have caught ruin in your face,
she says,
her fingers
tapping at my wrist.
we ramble thoughts
through piano whispers
and a vague duvet, we
burrow in such
confidence.

i foretell the camphor
aftertaste of needing ten thousand kilometers.

intermezzo

2009-01-23T21:26:00.024-05:00

mood: incalculable & counting on fingers
music: war, emmy the great

photos by mrs. french

the memory: waiting for the last bell, with my spine pressed against the wooden panels of a piano & the sensation of notes on bones, the tenacity, the very substance of this sound. i sat cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the strings & i was so conscious of your fingers on the keys. i think it was brahms (you really ought to have played brahms). everything has fallen away now but the hush of a forgotten hallway, leading me to all the vantages of time.

salt-stains on my teeth & these inadequacies that bump and clatter like old tin-cans on the sidewalk. i found the most incredible field of ice beside the waterfront and i sat there alone awhile, watching the water, the reflections & the light.

2009-01-22T08:47:00.009-05:00

piles of books for research projects,
dinner parties drifting into sunrise, recipes from home,
a new lens for my camera.

2009-01-17T16:23:00.022-05:00

you found me out in a field, you tripped over my sight

these are long-distance days and all the while, the mercury empties from windowsills (how they leave our hallways with reluctance, already in awe of the clarity and the lamina glow as streets dissolve again.) & as for me? i have been restitching buttons on sweaters & closing up the seams with needle & thread.

i am taking all the penciled measurements of time.

i lie on the hardwood floor with my feet on a whitewashed radiator, and from the other end of the line, s. tells me about direction & the ways of passage. she memorizes road-maps like poetry, and the navigations of right now bring me such comfort. distance seems small & the nearness seems much closer. across the atlantic, we talk about inspiration and the way we seem to glow, sometimes.

yesterday, i bought spices for chai & great bunches of kale that broke off in cold-weather shards as i walked home. i am reading a book of essays by david foster wallace & derrida for class. silk-screening & laundry, good silences. empty mornings. early mornings.

2009-01-12T22:40:00.003-05:00

music: the privateers, andrew bird
mood: oregon

a blanket of snow
& my submerged steps become
quietly aligned.

2009-01-10T10:21:00.005-05:00

the unspoken

2009-01-07T19:55:00.029-05:00

mood: oriented with south at the top
music: drum practice

one: with inescapability pressed into every footstep, in the smallest gestures of this as an ending of sorts. (these days we carry with us & these days we leave behind.) be brave, be unpretending. do not fight this.

two: my heart has settled on a new city, but it is all so fragile i haven't yet told anyone.

a sudden diffusion of light

2009-01-05T17:52:00.031-05:00

listen: the waves, princeton
look: aglow

"i'm calling from amherst, from the train station," her voice creaks, crackles with distance and snow. "a notebook of yours seems to be in our lost and found." this is last week. before leaving the seaside in december, i looked under all the couches, between rumpled sheets, behind the bookcases & i was so convinced that it was somewhere, under an unsuspecting pile of looseleaf. by the end of term, our apartment collects stains like the inside curve of a teacup.

a uniformed woman finally hands me the pale, black rectangle - this is today, weightless and unfamiliar. she is knowing and she looks me in the eye and she says that she wouldn't want to lose this either. i have come to meet trains every afternoon of the new year, and all the while, the moleskine was waiting on the windowsill that overlooks the platform and the grooved tracks. (if the words had been different, if the words had come sooner-)

i sit in the empty station for a long time, readjusting, reassuring. i read myself as if a stranger, with exploratory eyes and curious for difference. i am troubled by new cracks in the spine, blunt pages, the tatterings of tangled ribbon. strangerness. a translucent poppy from the hillsides of florence, dessicated and purpling, flakes quickly into dust. leaves picked up off sidewalks still between the blankest pages. (this, this is akin to the rediscovery of story; the settled, sleeping body of memory.) how, standing at the wicket with my fingers crossed, i am struck by such possibilities of loss and recollection.

2009-01-04T20:56:00.010-05:00

:: montmartre photo blog ::

She had always known a thousand ways to circle them all around with what must have seemed like grace. She knew a thousand songs. Her bread was tender and her jelly was tart, and on rainy days she made cookies and applesauce. In the summer she kept roses in a vase on the piano, huge, pungent roses, and when the blooms ripened and the petals fell, she put them in a tall Chinese jar, with cloves and thyme and sticks of cinnamon. Her children slept on starched sheets under layers of quilts, and in the morning her curtains filled with light the way sails fill with wind.

-Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

broken pottery was his commodity

2009-01-04T20:55:00.016-05:00

music: salt part 2, meursault
mood: frostbite

sinking footsteps through the snow like waves & i am careful to step only in blankness (always, always, always doomed to begin afresh). at night, or in the dark of early afternoon, my limbs relaxing into gradual sleeplessness. the taste of edgeless wishes, gifts of red bean paste & genmaicha.

2008-12-29T21:46:00.007-05:00

mood: the myths drift like kites
music: air fountain, wool strings

"Life on this knuckle of cliff is lived at the edge of time. The village, strung along taut fingers of rugged hillside, has long since turned its back on England to reach for the elements, each small home defiantly lit at night against danger, pressing against its neighbour to gain a view of the sea's parade. And all around this stubbornness, the sea extends itself, connected and absolute. Rocked by the wind's uncertainty, lichen from overhanging rock hovers over a million conversations of water. But for all its force, no gale disturbs the salt-starched bushes further up the cliff, pillars of longing and regret, their windblown heads forever looking back toward the mainland of their home."

Rachel Manley, Horses in Her Hair

2008-12-29T20:06:00.001-05:00

2008-12-23T22:25:00.016-05:00

traveling through streets full of whimsy; an old man standing alone at the health food store, his face folded in concentration while he trembles sesame butter into the counter-top container (carefully inspecting each hand for delicate stains, these opulent betrayals). in midafternoon sunlight, the wooden floors are burnished with wet footsteps & the pattern of motion (here, progress is slow). and on slushy subway platforms, commuters weighed down with lunchboxes & shopping bags wait to go home. ("viens ici." she whispers this across the open space of the train. she smiles when his fingers touch the sleeve of her coat.) a little girl is led down king street, a hat pulled right over her eyes.

in the kitchen everything glows with christmas; chocolate-covered figs, passionfruit curd, molasses sugarcookies, candied peel for panettonne, chopped ginger-root & toasted pine-nuts.

there are things i will always want to give you; the ruined foundations of falling-down farms, a blue antiquarian forest, eggnog steeped in earl-grey, knitted socks & words implacable as desire.

2008-12-19T16:19:00.003-05:00

kindling days

2008-12-15T20:42:00.010-05:00

music: up the long tracks, beatbeat whisper
mood: tutli-putli

stop, look & listen.

i am submerged with gratitude for small gestures of home: snowshoes by the front door, sleighbells in the garden. time-softened towels, drinking tea with k. (cups & saucers, delicate cranberry-almond rectangles), the hollow bowls of miso that dad & i sip on our way home from the train-station. tomorrow, we are going to bake all the best of my grandmother's handwritten recipes. my laundry is spinning happily in the dryer & i am sitting here with coffee & the distant grumbling of a familiar house: dishes & cupboards in the kitchen, the snapping of a hearth-fire, traditional carols & a dull rustle like the turning of pages.

the train-ride from halifax was full of familiar faces, but mostly i didn't feel like talking. instead i slept under my coat, alternately reading & watching for the constant swoosh of telephone poles and wires (there is so much snow in the depths of new brunswick). but we all gathered together at cafe tables in the montreal station, drinking tepid coffee & talking sleepily about directions. it is both a steadiness of motion and also a timing, and i left halifax without needing to seek refuge.

before dinner, i bundled into as many sweaters as could fit under my coat and went out to the five o'clock darkness, to the snow-laden orchard where broomstick branches & footprints & aloneness gather. a violet glowing from greenhouse windows & amber lights of the kitchen reflect on the ground, stir the gathering wind. the lake is supposed to freeze tonight, calm & deep enough for skating. in the orchard i could hear such stillness and everywhere, the stars.

the baroness redecorates

2008-12-11T23:28:00.012-05:00

listen: the four seasons, op. 8/4, RV 297, "winter" - antonio vivaldi
mood: the pastness of past

caught up with the mean reds, mostly means reading, too much thinking of thoughts, cold tea & stomping around the flat after midnight. abandoned books & hot chocolate in the library lobby; all the vagaries & grand, sweeping gestures of procrastination. i am finished book one of war & peace.

yesterday, i walked to my favourite house on tower road in the rain & blustering (under the streetlamps, swirling birds or leaves or moths). i stood for a while beside dark windows, damp & full with presentiment that in a year's time, i don't know where (and in that moment, the certainty that it cannot be the impalpable here). to be sometimes so windblown & without direction.

so we sit at your kitchen table, eating disappointment & the thick-skinned clementines until our mouths begin to burn.

nobody, not even the rain

2008-12-08T09:46:00.003-05:00

music: dry grass & shadows, alela diane
mood: breakfastasleep in bed

finished with school means long-awaited lazy mondays curled around tolstoy (this year's reading list is war & peace) and sunlight & blue sky filtering through the shadow-blotted snowdrifts on the ceiling of my room.

really exciting news arrived in the middle of yesterday's doldrumming rainstorm and when i woke up, all the trees were covered in snow.

back to book one, but more later.

2008-12-08T09:24:00.004-05:00

"We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges,

and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last
with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing."

tricotage & temperance

2008-11-19T21:11:00.013-05:00

look: the first snow snows
listen: lily, jonquil

the damp smell of winter coats, mixing with dripping glass wires & all the uneven sidewalks. tree branches stretch down like the vertebrae of strange, unfinished creatures, touching telephone lines and the gabled windows of our houses. a midnight bakery warmth drenches the neighbourhood. every morning, r. and i take turns pressing the coffee.

i spent hours walking through the snow, kicking it up from the tips of my rainboots & into the afternoon puddles. this is representative of an aestheticisation of the 'ur-phenomenon,' and negates the intrinsic dualism implicit within a physiological & physical experience of being human. the alternative, of course, is to consider it simply the basis of scientific empiricism --
(i have dreams of orca whales & owls.)

more & more, i catch myself trying to explain things that don't really fit into the con-text of words. romanticism in science, the taste of oranges & chile, the feeling of wool under my fingers.

there is such goodness here.

& i don't know what comes next but there's a stability in motion.
i am excited for uncertainties.

eyes like disappointed lemons

2008-11-17T19:15:00.008-05:00

mood: snowsuspecting

-photograph by cig harvey.

this week's grocery list:
parsnips, pinapple, patience,
persistence, persimmons.

2008-11-07T16:31:00.014-05:00

mood: streetlamps light the leaves
music: vanilla, miss scarlett

winters begin in november, with sidewalks obscured like tree branches by their sudden yellowing. (this marks our passages through time as seasonal.) pencil skirts & dress-shirts, a whimsical library of greys. we jump into piles of leaves, rustle through the empty streets. a sense of nothing too trivial: when you ask me if it matters, the answer always yes.

2008-11-07T10:58:00.016-05:00

-photographs by peter bowers

We rise early, collapsing our tents into sleepy red rock, already alight and glowing with the sunrise. Everything is monochrome, unutterable as the birth of seashell moons. A place consisting of texture: the worn-down igneous folds, the mirrored stillness of water. Human silhouettes lean like saw-toothed pines, always in the act of distancing. Twenty hands grasping at the gunnels, lowering heavy-set canoes into the resiliency of water.

Mostly, I think about granite.

The soft green recedes when you drive north on Highway 69, until coral-coloured cliffs tower over pavement. Rattlers sun themselves in the grooved afternoons, pressing their bodies against the crevices. Wind-swept water and trees, reindeer moss underfoot, the cinnamon-sweet smell of blueberries. Something always raw & unmarred. An emptiness that becomes etched with memory.

2008-11-07T10:46:00.013-05:00

she calls this place
a hinterlanding because
it seems a stepping off
to nowhere.

a cabinet of curiosities

2008-10-25T07:17:00.015-05:00

listen: changing of the seasons, ane brun
mood: without seeking

introspective, prospective, retrospective, -
i become forgivable like plum-coloured leaves, shadows wet with rain & collapsing sightless, like sighs into pavement. this comes hand-in-hand with a relentless feeling of never enough, with a city built for our longings.

this place, this season, is the loveliest.

2008-10-20T19:39:00.016-05:00

tarot de marseille, emmanuel polanco

ii.

below it, peter broderick

iii.

For a fraction of a second, Doubt, that strolling player in my life, stares down from the ceiling, a flicker of menace. I give it a complicit wink, then wonder if this is the same shadow that foreclosed on Mary Swann. But no, the steady unalarming breathing beside me convinces me otherwise. Strange how the whole of this man's body seems to breath, as though equipped with gills. Reprise, reprise; that lovely word mixes with the shadows. A number of thoughts come toward me at full sail, an armada of the night, blown by happiness.

A week ago, Morton Jimroy wrote a letter in which he said: "We live in a confessional age." But he's wrong. This is a secretive age. Our secrets are our weapons. Think of South Africa, those clandestine meetings. Think of the covertness of families. Think of love. How else can we express mutiny but by the burial of our unspoken thoughts. "I love you," says Stephen with his uncomplicated breath. "I love you too," say I, biting into silence as though it were a morsel of blowfish and keeping my fingers crossed.

-Carol Shields, Swann

iv.
:: object not found ::

2008-10-16T06:23:00.045-05:00

* * *

i was waiting above the train-tracks, leaning against the rimy seashell bridge. it wasn't anything specific - simply a pause, just a moment of discontinuity. & the woodsmoke moon on undersided october leaves, a sensation of empty distance, of side-stepping parallels. i was thinking of the word 'audacity,' the imaginary crickets, & a feathery tabby had wrapped itself around my ankles. (i have become the girl who is curiously, consistently followed by cats.) a book of new stories in my bag, the sounds of fall music & no mittens. down by the northwest arm, the water is all stillness & barnacles. are you ever made from papier-mache wings? i was other places & i didn't notice.

"are you okay?" asks the woman, leaning out from the darkened passenger seat.
she looks at me with concern. she is wary, full with the caution that small creatures will move suddenly & against your expectation. the man beside her has one hand on the steering wheel. he is already reaching for his phone.
i smile and say "yes," but it's the absurdity of the moment, mixed with the sudden feeling that offered proof is impossible.

when i woke up this morning, i made coffee & counted the polka-dot-tar-spot turning leaves of the backyard maple. i was still thinking about the strange distances of concrete.

in an abandoned firehouse with you

2008-10-12T20:45:00.029-05:00

song: telethon, emily haines & the soft skeleton
supper: pumpkin pasta

the season resounding, surrendering, crisp with the drenched & reddening trees. in this backtrack, falling down desolate desolate place (to dissolve, of late -) we navigate abscessed nails & shards of the short-lived windows. bricks flying through the glass, a crowbar tears at wooden slats. shadows turn to silhouette & we walk here like echoes. there are envelopes beneath the open floorboards. memories of wallpaper. we are homeward highway & orchard apples. all the sunlight of the day.

2008-10-12T20:29:00.007-05:00

these are the colours of autumn: alazarin,
bistre, sangria, scarlet, amaranth, umber,
sepia, tenne, cordovan, burgundy; russet.

bricollage

2008-10-06T20:51:00.028-05:00

music: blue sands, colleen
mood: calico-minded

for m.

a theory of optics: we are seeing as how,
we are becoming seen.
& this raspberry smell of the rose-gardens
(& tonight, the moon is a smile).

a wren means chance, but a mourning-dove is luck

2008-09-27T12:28:00.035-05:00

music: what me worry? st. vincent
mood: worsted wool

Dürer would have seen a reason for living
in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house
on a fine day, from water etched
with waves as formal as the scales
on a fish.

-The Steeple-Jack, Marianne Moore

this week, i've worn right through the toes of two pairs of shoes; too much gamine-esque gamboling round town with my stockings bare on the concrete. normally, it's the heels that wear away first: this indicates reluctance, lingering too long, the delicate curses of over-nostalgia. (leather & nails & thread become lost in the gravel.) thursday night seeped into my feet & on friday, i bought new flats. continuing continuous, toes first, stepping forward.

n. & i sit on the backporch with a pot of lapsang souchong (for conan doyle, for a house faraway) & with our savory-cinnamoned aubergines. maple leaves on the doorsill, all across the city, sharp & ruddy & quiet with right now. we talk about how this year, this strange firstlast year, is for becoming pressed with memories.

i bought apples this morning (i've asked d. to bring some from the half-wild orchard when he comes to visit), and green-grey & cream alpaca for a knitting project. somehow, the skeins & i wound up in your room, untangling all our knots while you & i said things about time. things like, 'chronological, but seasonal,' and 'all the septembers that we have been.'

2008-09-22T18:20:00.004-05:00

« L’homme endormi est une dupe momentanée ; les poètes sont des dupes volontaires. Mais il y a aussi des dupes involontaires et incorrigibles, qui prennent des moulins à vent pour des géants, des Maritornes pour des princesses et des marionnettes pour des personnages en chair et en os. La raison de leurs illusions nous est connue : c’est que les vaines images de leur cerveau les frappent avec la même vivacité que les images réelles. Et, s’ils ne doutent pas de la vérité de celles-ci, pourquoi douteraient-ils de la vérité de celles-là ? »

-Joseph Delbœuf, Le sommeil et les rêves.

2008-09-22T16:37:00.012-05:00

how subtle,
to suffer the loss
of isolation:

reliquary eyes
between
reliquary eyes

become fragrant
as crepitude &
rose hips.

we fill houses
with hallways; with fancy-
faced mirrors.

anticipatory geography.

2008-09-17T11:06:00.038-05:00

mood: mainstay
music: cold bread, johnny flynn

"there is such a thing as being so caught up in the activity of your own life," she says, tasting cornmeal crumbs from the sharp & honeyed tines of her fork. we'd gone stealing two-penny caramels from the sunday flea market (unwrapping nostalgia in those cellophane squares), losing our friends in the unremarkable crowd, wandering through the clutter of kitchen appliances, records, paperbacks. we are reaching out to our vulnerabilities. i've been telling stories, keeping secrets. i am leaning into richness.

i haven't been writing or recording much in words. instead i linger with a careless, flippant feeling of ink & blank pages. (moments more moments than the beginnings of memory.) there are lots of impromptu conversations. films. autumn walks. flowers from the market. triangles of toast, squares of sushi. & on sunday afternoon, i came across the book i've been forever seeking in all the second-hand bookshops.

peach-marzipan mornings & opera cakes for dinner

2008-09-06T15:22:00.012-05:00

mood: over-abundance
music: in our blood, horse feathers

(an anthology of internal exploits & external joys.)

curled up words for new lives in old places, all our half-built half-printed half-secret projects. we are busy finding places in which to place our sweetness. last night, we were a quiet circle with champagne or cigarettes, misting street-lamps on a shared patio. ('it is just like miranda july's story,' says h.) three dinners on the stovetop, we eat before-school breakfasts together on the back-porch. apple cider & scorching-sweet honeydew when we get coffee-shop caught during wednesday's downpour. market meandering, midnight concerting, housewarming. an all alone ferry-ride & blackberries in the darkness. everything is brimming, everything at peace.

with petals by balmain

2008-09-02T08:42:00.031-05:00

mood: from here to here
music: sweet dogs, trolle//siebenhaar

m. & i sat on the front porch this morning & everything, everything (black coffee, muesli, conversation) was the crumbling taste of autumn. mostly we were quiet. we are in places that don't need dissection, don't require so many words.

it's been an in-between week of late nights & then up-with-the-birds. professors are shuffling through campus & uncrumpling their pages in coffee-shops (girls with red hair & green bicycles cycling past every window). half-unpacked boxes of utensils & suitcases are in the hallways of our new homes.

& you, do you remember the september tree & all its soft-changing leaves?

happenstanzas & heliotrope

2008-08-23T10:37:00.020-05:00

listen: my beach, human highway
location: on the way to duncan's cove

august 11, 1958
an old fash. library
on corner the red brick building curving around
- compassion for readers glimpsed inside - much
wandering - only remembered warmth
people interested in all kinds of malted milk drinks
sketched in pencil on yellow paper
-from 'joseph cornell's dreams'

we sit in a knock-kneed circle, pulling at the roots, looking through lenses that hang on ribbons & ropes at our necks. (they are pendants; we are pendent.) "is this an umbel?" you ask. "certainly," i answer, "but it's also a compound inflorence." we aren't graded for knowing the species of something, only for knowing what it is that things seem. so we sit on the reindeer moss, describing how everything curls round our feet.

i've befriended a very sweet girl named fia who has just arrived from sweden & points at the aspens, mumbling in latin & asking for english words. also, a trio of over-caffeinated urban planners. we talk about daylighting streams & houses built of straw. we climb houses (scraped elbows) & trees (scraped legs), sharing squares of chocolate at lunchtime & eating our way through a series of intricate sandwiches.

there are clouds cast overhead & a translucent, daylit moon. i cut larch branches with fia's knife from lapland and almost tread on a hundred-year-old arctic blueberry. a painted boat hovers against the saltwater, wooden steps leading from a grey cabin to the dock. ocean. this place is everpresent, windswept, & i think that everything here feels tovian. we are at summer's end, we are worn down & lanceolate with time. & autumn is beginning hopeful. there are always handfuls, yet.