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.

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

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.

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

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.

music: the privateers, andrew bird
mood: oregon

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

the unspoken

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

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.

:: 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

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.