among the torn silks of phrase

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.