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

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.'

« 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.

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.

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

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

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?