we are taking shape from under your hands

music: eavesdrop, essie jain
mood: grammatolatry

you can jump from one stone to another. that is you must jump very quickly and touch each stone for a second. you must never step on the seaweed or the sand, only on the stones, faster and faster. in the end you become a wind, the wind itself, and it whistles in your ears and everything else is wiped out and vanished, there is only the wind and jumping and jumping and jumping.

- tove jansson, 'sculptor's daughter'

a sudden craving for things that linger, like the scraped-thin parmigiano reggiano i eat standing tiptoe on the porch while languid splinters slip into my toes. half-kissed nasturtiums lying pale on the sidewalks, the first pages of books i've read over and again. textual, textural; the world all aburn, is burning with sensations. cafe-au-lait scalds my sleepy lips, molten blue and floodlight (a soccer pitch in darkness), the acrid smell of vinegar. the surface of the harbourfront wave rough & surmountable in the empty night, salted air. these are the things that have substance. this is what we can hold in our hands.

'didn't you ever wonder?' j. asks me at dinner, ringing with hypothesis.
i look at the empty seashells, fragrant & crushed & brimming in the restauraunt half-light. the tomato-bisque blush of lobsters & already too much talk about old corsages, empty tables, a high-school faraway. the plastic bibs tied over our dinner clothes rustle when we move, and the crustacean caricatures dance silly, sideways on the edge of the tabletop.
but he doesn't mind when i answer truthful; we laugh, we talk about new lives (he has glimpses of mine; i depend on stories & catalogue the names of his strangers). later he says that i haven't changed, not really, & i am surprised. 'you do seem happier,' he adds, thoughful. the past, the past is a lightness of heart, it is without consequence & it is well-wishing.

we discussed breaking onto a ship, but we were too overstuffed with cheesecake & raspberry chai creme brulee for dessert. also, there were cameras.

beauty in the way we live

music: weeping canopy, kingfisher & the halcyonaires
mood: repleating

i've been carrying my possessions away in garbage bags, through soft downpours, padding along the sidewalks. it feels luxurious to tumble piles of floral-print dresses, second-hand sweaters, polyester into salvation army bins, your closets. i streamline & simplify. i have been walking everywhere without headphones. my favourite is to leave home with only a key in my skirt pocket & empty hands. n. and i speak about this while she packs, placing objects in her vinyl suitcases & giving away all the unessentials. we are starting anew, happier. wanting less.

interlude: sarah slean prints

discovered in ravens, but also in residence here.

a place without voices

listen: the weakerthans
location: a fence on citadel hill

surreal, i answer you into the darkness. we are the sound of our smiles (the static of old radios, a spark), familiar, the wonder of things i'd forgotten to wonder. (& how i've not yet thought all i want to tell you & how i want to hold this, this, so close.) we listen to the goldberg variations from 1981, our fingers playing through these sudden, silent notes.

here are misty streets of a maritime summer. our paperboats still adrift on the ocean. trees heavy with cherries, green & new.

and now, she wears only silk

music: milk from a pearl, carl spidla
mood: nonchalant nonsense

walking through camp hill cemetery, i stop at the bench in rhodedendron shade. my bag is heavy with walking, thirty degrees, dried fruit, jam-bottles & a vacuum-package of italian cheese. i carry a small bouquet of basil, folding the vinyl leaves between smooth fingers, bringing greenness close so i can smell the spicy sunlight & earth. according to a.'s understanding, souls cannot travel at the speed of flight. they ploddingly arrive, when all is hushed in the hours, days, months that follow. i have been looking westward, waiting.

i am thinking of b. in ways that cannot possibly help except with the helplessness clenched tight around our family. and i wonder if the darkness seems so bleak, so incandescent when this story is your story. we are letting reason go, we are all letting go. there's a bit of l'engle that helps: to learn to love is to to be stripped of all love, until you are wholly without love. because until you have gone, naked and afraid, into this cold, dark place, you will not know that you are wholly within love. i want to go to the wharf & untie ropes, i want to smash dollar-store china from the train-track bridges that circle this city. instead, i plant seeds in terracotta pots, pressing my fingers into the soil. i add water.

when you move out from darkness (in the hours, days, months that follow) you are struck with the certainty, the suddenness of everything. so i walk home from the cemetery, still eating a half-peach offered me by pete of the frootique. i have plans for risotto & there is a full pound of cherries in my bag. i twinge with sadness but it is the most glorious of summer days.

"fame and sound and fury"

song: flat bottomed boat, harmony trowbridge
mood: stargazing

first thing when i got back, with keys swinging in the front door, i went out to the porch hoping (without hope) that the plants had not died while i was away. the cyclamen has shriveled to a moth-coloured tangle but the others (a jade plant, a spider, a christmas cactus) will recover with time. it's silly that it can matter so much but i've been wondering, worrying over two months about these terracotta pots winning their luck with the rainfall. two letters in the mailbox (from m. traveling in england and silver earrings from the ever-talented s.) books in residual piles from the end of classes. the posters still on their walls. we sat for hours, n. and i, catching up between the phone conversations & about everything that is static, changing. we walked to the dock at the end of jubilee & sat in the mist & the ocean moving always beneath us.

there is magic in places you love when you leave them long enough. i am mostly listening to sounds of this world unfolding again. i spent the morning on argyle sipping passion-fruit soda, reading stanzas of onegin between things we say and the passerbys (a summer-slow, punctuated sort-of thinking). local radish in a salad, the first two acts of king lear, & maple trees against a wooden wall for dinner.