among the torn silks of phrase

the week, the month, the moment reminds me of a parallelogram or a prism or something small that can be turned in the palms. wheeling, wheedling - ending and beginning interlocked as a pair of stone birds in a paper nest. and right now the morning (this morning) is soft, moving like the shadows of living plants across the living room floor. (this is the morning, and here - yours) i'm still in my pyjamas on the futon, eating bananas & walnuts & maple syrup on oatmeal and drinking coffee. caught in the pages of a novel, testing out early voices, all i can. outside the street presses up against the house's damp framework with city buses and birds.

"sometimes, i wish that life were less a poem," i tell this to my work friend d. a few weeks ago, watching the coffee ribbon out like treacle (22, 23, 24...) but mostly observing how our stories curl up at the slips of their edges. and i know that this happens, this recognition or recreation of pattern happens to everyone. happenstance. but the red door isn't really red anymore, and the vernon street neighbours were robbed late last week, in the night. things come and they do not come again. "but julia, that is what life is," he says and i know that he is right.

i have been reclaiming solitude and the public gardens, all brimming with tulip trees and a hundred varieties of daffodils. i quietly bless my grandmother that the names are ready on my catalogued tongue (azeleas, paperwhites, alium, hyacinths). i watch the ducks. i sit on the bench and read. i drink my tea. i think about growing with sage, and lavender and, more than this - this kindness.