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

through the smoke & to the sky

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

en papeterie

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.

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