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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.

"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

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.