music: tell me, au revoir simone
mood: oyster realms & alkaline

he lays murky deep cups out like a palette, glasses circling the table and the spoons pointing in from the edges, already heavy with condensation and clean with the steam. pouring water from a pair of broken kettles, making their surfaces billow with the sandglass patterns of brewing. we wait before cutting into the pointed, loamy depths. we are studying the complexities and layerings of coffee: the sunlight, the soil, the seed. we learn to read with the texture and weight of taste all the discretions of the harvest. my favourites are from ethiopia: they are pronounced & floral & brisk as blueberry sweetness, or remind me of a forgotten time. this is the taste of tobacco flowers & bergamot. sumatrans curl at the back of my throat, dark and resineous, rich with creosotes & notes like the blackest sheet of music i have ever seen. i am still feeling for the stretch and warp of the pianist's hands.

the world fell clean and washed and dry as felted wool after the storms cleared from hills of nowhere (we are somewhere not anywhere at all). and i watch your fingers crossed & unconscious as tea leaves in my saucer, arranging the world like a tapestry of myth and maybes. i have been so busy dreaming of the heartostay.

listen: something good, red river
look: my sweet old etcetera

it was the most splendid first of spring because i had forgotten all about the equinox until long after sunset, too caught up in the simple acts of living. i breakfasted with m. on hot-cross buns and almond lattes in the bakery-soft morning, the whimsy of afternoon spent with n. citydrifting through the secret latticework streets. we sat on falling down, crumbling cement steps of winter, eating take-out pad thai & leafing through the new gastronomy, entirely drenched with spice & sunlight. i read poems from a half-purchased book into the fabric of day, like cups of oversweet tea, like sounding a tenter of the here & there.

all week long i have been noticing the alien smell of caramel & coffeegrounds against my skin, in my hair; the nicest feeling of gathering a connate pattern of very late nights. the orchestra of empty glasses are the remnants of a party, the room of found instruments: a melodica, a broken accordion, the we're-out-of-tunes guitar. ideas & questions filtering in and through the air & all around. we talk over the droning about the troubadour anthems of our parents and the 1960s and the hollows we've prescribed ourselves by time. the ice melts sharp in glasses of whiskey and novel faces in the candlelight & we are downtown, deconstructing bookshelves and now it is the morning, dear.

ten year old boys sitting sideways & restless on the cafe chairs,
untwisting cinnamon rolls into the snail shell laze
of march break afternoons.

the sweep of the airplane is just like
the trace of your finger against sky.

music: 5 years time, noah & the whale
mood: proclivity for productivity

there's something about six o'clock and the way contours hang deep from the saw-toothed parts of our houses. sunlight across powerlines & the dry salt tumbling & staining old lanes of traffic. i will never be anywhere as pointed as a rooftop shadow.

i spent yesterday afternoon with m. at the slip of ocean i like the best. we sat with our legs crossed & ate synthetic things, filling ourselves with round & cheerful colours. when i listened, i could hear the dull gurgle of the tide, a sound that echoes in the makeshift streams of snow-melt. with toes flat against the edge of water, we look up into the sheltering boards so we can dream better about remember whens. is that supposed to be a tulip? he asks. it looks more like a half-eaten, plum-coloured pear

& i thought
we were going to look right through and see the sky.

it is spring today & i caught the very first crocuses! a year a thousand years ago, they were ancient & wise, ossified by winter. these are such wonderful, straightforwardly flowers.

sound: we're a whistling orchestra
song: in the flowers, animal collective

uni is the last unknown piece of sushi. it reminds me of ocean liniment, mustard-yellow & cold, made from the invertebrate spines of very deep. (rawness & warm rice between chopstick-fingers finally becoming a ritual.) i talk about this under harvest moons of early morning: how the peripheries of a creature melted through my teeth and i could not taste the edges.

music: hospice, the antlers
mood: leeks

i was watching the baby when it started to happen.

her hair stood up like filaments, straight in the web of sunlight so she looked weightless & irresilient as a creature from far away. her palms were flushed pink and she cupped a handful of moist goldfish that flew to the floor when she choked, airless. everyone turned. we were outside the hospital, and the bus driver kicked his foot on the brakes. walked back through the seats, stepping on the crackers so that they turned to dust. she's alright, alright, alright but this look i've only seen this look on the crowd's face once before, when we pulled into the train station & i was only seven.

later, i walked home but ended up somewhere else.

*

fact: when they wired the houses in los alamos
they used 15,000 tons of borrowed silver bouillon.

*

my sweet friend & i dream about living this summer as if it were without relent. we will fill the sea with hurricane tents, and hang bouquets of cameras from the doorknobs of our bedrooms. like this. or, the sound of the stories that we tell. soon, i will be serving coffee in the victorian house across from the gardens, and teaching myself how to draw peonies from the hiss of steamed milk. we will capture everything. i will wish for a rowboat the colour of maples.

*

dearest, you inhabit places as a landscape.

word: megascopic
warmth: cafe-au-lait

it rained all night long,
but i slept under the noise.

today the sky is perfect

for reading on the library
picnic benches.

this is how
it might feel
to live in a place
where homonyms
hang from the blue
cactus branches
of home.

right-leaning
a precision more resolved;

ivory once grew in my mouth.

A Conversation
W. S. Merwin
(From 'Houses & Travellers')

There is a wind that when it turns I hear the garden and the desert discussing things with each other. Sometimes in the garden, sometimes in the desert, day or night. Mud walls, stone walls, no walls, limestone, sheep far away, howling, birds singing, hissing, trickling, silence, dry smells, watered smells, moons, stars, flowers that are keys between them.

They tell their dreams to each other, the garden and the desert. They dream above all of each other. The desert dreams of the garden inside it. It loves the garden. It embraces the garden. It wants to turn it into desert. The garden lives within itself. It dreams of the desert all around it, and of its difference from the desert, which it knows is as frail as feeling.

It must be a long time since I first heard them talking. I must have heard them when I was two. I must have heard them when I was one, and so on. Perhaps before I was born. Or anyone was born. Or any roundness became an egg. Or the water was born, cooling on a high rock, prophesying tears, prophesying eyes.

I must have heard them even before the rocks were born moving in the colored night. Probably I have heard them since the light began looking for something to write on, flying on, white, with the colors hidden inside it and the darkness around it, forgetting nothing from the beginning, prophesying the end of knowledge, prophesying the wilderness, prophesying the garden, prophesying the wilderness dreaming that it was a garden. And the garden. And the wilderness.

listen: hey, elvis perkins in dearland
look: awaiting

april she tells me, counting months so the silver bangles clang together down the smooth lines of her arms (can you imagine the metallic colours of a place you've never mined?) tumeric & saffron & cloves, waking at midnight to boil water for your tea. there are patterns illegible as things that are written on the body. white socks stained by the red hem of a cotton sari and many silks folded in a country far, far away. this selflessness cannot be taught.

another winter we survived & green things light up the earth.

construction paper plans for a new season: i am essentially done, passing already into next chapters & rifling through school archives. securing space. the truth is i am unafraid as i never thought i could be. far more intrepid. today, i walked halfway across the city with enough change in my pocket for a loaf of bread (sidewalks & sunlight throwing us into each other again). may there be sunlight. may there always be such malleable days.

music: vampires with dreaming kids ep, twin sister

mood: fascimile

a) climbing back into my chair and the thousand-mile conversation i am thinking so many directions but mostly of how we have been wearing less armour, these days. the tomatoes are too salted, the bread is still warm. i think about people becoming clear as daylight. (jump forward, over the time-zones and time together.) we expand into seasons & indentations, the places of beginning. here, this is a mirror. this is the truest reflection of light.

b) on the blinded street today, your ex-roommate suddenly appeared - the one with pale eyes and the slow-fading sentences. his hands were pushed into the pockets of a fur-coated jacket. he has intentionally started dressing like a young edward gorey. he still shuffles his feet.

c) i would have two languages & a room of dark tulips.

listen: all we ask, grizzly bear
location: gate 20

before i left the seaside, everything shone through like flecks in the pavement. there are times when happiness roars in, bowling you over unexpected because you were not trapped away from happiness at all & it is a currency that inundates.

there was fresh colour in the sky, behind the branches and through the windows of the tallest office buildings. up right to the top (the very) & over the harbour islands & paper-dot boats & the striped smoke towers that invent clouds.

even now, my worries about then are mostly veneer & i've been feeling how everything that looms is weaving together. i am finding moments of falling into place.