music: god help the girl
mood: misnomer

we stand for hours with sunlight gathered soft in the corners where our arms join, at rough paper edges of the beginning. this is the gesture of origin, these are the roots. there is so much that we don't talk about, like turning life into storybooks or the stenciled topography of growing into ourselves, still. i am pinning daylight to walls, chasing the beams through windows and forgetting about the woodwork. the wind sweeps & billows all afternoon against the concrete safety of us.

brunch: bare arms & legs and sips of black coffee, apricot french toast & apple slices & compote. the clicking whirl of bicycle wheels, laughter, the pickpocket stories. the open, vacant doors of the armory.

in the smallest clay pot is where the sage grows.

like the mechanical catch of into burnt hands;
how all the currencies are ordered and arranged:
miscalculating the moment you appear.

music: spirited, laura gibson
mood: the first of all

mist hanging like plumes
from the streetlamps.
locomotion gestures
&
a lot of living,
(the loss of patience)
lately.

more soon
stay close, stay tuned.

mood: a spiderweb trapped
music: inni mer syngur vitleysingur, sigur ros

raindrops & snow & hail
kept falling into the open cups
of the daffodils
outside the windows of the
senior common room.

recollecting
the comforts of
candied tea-party nostalgia
reading all the final
dusty mirrors like silverscreens.

in the brick hall at the farmer's market, a girl sits on the snow-stained floor and she plays the accordion. i can tell it by the sound, by the pattern of missing buttons. i have studied the same tractions of unfolding paper & silence. from across the crowd, i can smell old books, i can still smell the leather & cigarettes.


this is a celebration list i made today:

-marmalade jars
-pale blue ducks for my jacket
-york redoubt, without a
-seagrasses
-linens & laundry
-melodica
-listening, watching, thinking parties
-homemade bread
-fishing for bicycle baskets
-shoot the expired film
-take-home exam


we are quietly in the kitchen, r. and i, sitting on the counter while you look closely at the greasy edge of the knife. i am waiting for smoky tea to finish steeping so i can sit cross-legged at the end of my bed & finish my last paper. you are waiting for the wide open feeling to become more tractable, more a simplicity like breathing.
everything sounds mottled right now & i am thinking about collecting a sleepy army of alarm clocks. (so close, so near & even still, adjusting focus.) red moons over open bridges, the puckered sweetness of burnt cookies & the velvet birthday, lines like tightropes in the sky, rain in my shoestringing, downtown candles & raw guitars, russian fairy stories and all the textures of here.

music: chopin waltzes no. 1-14, dinu lipatti
mood: when i dance

polaroids taken from the ever-wonderful tender letters

the bus swings round in the gravel sphere at the very end of the road, the brakes streaking the silence; the engine, the engine. do you see it, the pale indigo of springtime nights and how the forgotten lunar smudge is darkening the sky? headlights on the white birch shapes by the roadside and then disappear. "you've come way too far. you should have gotten off ages back and now you're going to have to wait till we turn around." i watch the dried & tangled hulls of ships, the lego-brick piles of lobstertraps, the feeling of the otherside blurring by. sometimes, i feel like a story-collector who has become a gatherer of things and i do not know how where and which the stories. "here," he says. "take the first road on the left, because that is where you're going." he cannot know that written over and over all the pages of my notebooks is this: conviction enough for stillness.

it is middling night when i leave the cove, and in the coolness, under the streetglow moon all i can hear is the wind between the layers of my sweaters, the purity of motion and the footfalls of a dog walking ten kilometers over the cordillera hills of country road. i'd forgotten the elation and the easy hum of bicycle wheels, how effortless the here to there, how joyous. (this happiness is fizzy like the fountain soda we sipped from straws hours earlier at the shopping mall.) the damp air smells deeply of brine and promise. i am ten years old. this is that summer evening with darkness draws in and we are wary for the silhouettes of parents in the driveway. we will never be finished with this resinous day.

listen: transatlanticism, death cab for cutie
look: we go into the blue

"i've been pulling at the pocket-watch strings all week," i say into the telephone, while testing the resinous skins of apples in the grocery store of afternoon. they are clear & crisp and filmy with wax and soft-planed as everything has been lately. bright. effortless. effortless as breathing, or light, or the sound of motion. the oily tap of your pastel against blank paper, the gathering of your mouth against the teacup edge of evening.

the city disappeared into mist & ocean was seeping over the hollow edges of the ferry. the air so heavy and warm that we moved slower than eyes could follow: a morning invisible and silver as swords turned sideways. we were neither of us ourselves, and the uncertainty of recognition kept us company all the way across the harbour. at least, i think it was you. when i saw you begin to wind the film into your old kodak i turned away, preserving the anonymity of just another figure at the railing.

they have always been there increasing their numbers
at the foot of dim rills, all around and under
the ghostly edges where moonmaps surrender
and hold out white flags to the night.
"the armies of the moon," gwendolyn mcewen

there are two rooms at the observatory: the first is full of buzzing computers, lit up like kaleidoscopes with all the patterns of the sky & the labelling of the heavens. there is a wide row of windows, looking over the perpendicular city, all streetlamps and telephone polls. the sky above is dark distant trees and clouds. through the door is the telescope room, galvanized metal curves ripped open into the glittering sky. the craters of the moon are granular as rice or the distant, not-so-distant stars that, with so much effort, you are learning how to name.