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sound: jet plane, papercuts
sensation: gingering

and as they sit there, across from each other at the weatherwood table, she is made conscious, more than before, by the weight in the eyes of the man on the opposite bench. he reads her as a stranger, measuring impartially, more austere than unforgiving. blossoms of coffee stain the cover of last week's new yorker, the copy sitting carelessly under her elbow. she moves her arm. every gesture is fabricated, from the way she twists her hands around the cup of earl grey, to the feathers & anchors pinned to her cardigan. the grey of the wood, and the gray of the sky, the boy whom she knows sitting on a nearby treestump, smoking his cigarette down to the quick. all this is fabricated and all of this is true.

the most beautiful bodies are like transparent glass.
the most powerful flames like water washing the tired feet of travellers.
the greenest trees like lead blooming in the thick of the night.

-czeslaw milosz

we are somewhere between the side of the road and the lake, where the sickening hum of the mosquitoes is lost to the strange song of bullfrogs and the pleading of the loons. we lace between tree-roots and trip over invisible clusters of stones, our bare feet squelching into the hollow mud where it has been raining for days. we pretend not to notice when the other ones fall. we hesitate, do not complain. and when we four get to the water, we are left speechless with beauty. there is the absence of the moon and a paleness soaking over the distant rooftop trees (lighting up sky and water, like afternoon pollen dusting the surface of chocolate lake). we splash into the imperceptable depths, our warm legs suddenly tangling, untangling with the ropey slime of waterlilies. the rocks here seem rougher, hewn & igneous for our nakedness and the midnight lake tastes like summer.

so the weeks float on as a canopy; a woven, living patchwork of battle-won peace - this generous helping of plans & production. the radishes in the backyard swell and push against the ground. the world feels as though breaking a narrow sunstreak. at night, the residual light filters out, draining from our bodies into the feathers. we wake up younger in the morning, ready ourselves for the cinematography of the moment, something so much more than all these bare fragments.

"emotions are the link to ideas. it's hard to absorb an idea intellectually if we can't also feel it in our bodies, if we don't have an intellectual understanding. these two things are the morality of art, which allows us to learn and makes art generative so that it produces something in us."

-anne michaels

the treebranch
that is posed like an oracle
on the concrete checkerboard
of the gardens


weightless wait less;
this is motion & this is rest

or just the whirring
fly home pigeons
of your anxious,
ancient hands.

music: much more than that, sharon van etten
mood: and nothing but

"everyplace has its own energy; tension. here (halifax, nova scotia), it arguably arises from the fact its on a coast, an edge. this is a borderland
between
land and sea, which is not just a geographic reality but a
psychological reality too - a state of
being
in between (sometimes stuck, other times secure)."

*

when i sat down to draw you a memory map of my city (such an ownership after all these few years...) the intersections blurred into a tangled lattice of hows & whys & each and every ignorant instance of a when. i sat there puzzled with the september-raw pencil, the blank page (there have been so many blank pages, flat & lazily, expectantly waiting), unable to attempt such a delicate cartography. do you want my memory-places or my remembrance of the measurements? and how can i describe the geography of such an amalgamation? such a distance?


and the truth is there were some things i never meant to give away. now i am standing before the refrigerator hum of creativity, with the aluminum foil folded around the grilled fiddleheads & the cheese made by your art-student husband (how 'the shape of jazz to come' and the sound of listening drifts in from the front room turntable) i discover the leftover pieces all my own. objects that i know instantly and so well: a photograph of the peony-tree from the house where i grew up, some of the delft blue tiles a. & i so carefully portioned out like a game of (as the german sea captain announced at last night's party) 'x-s & o-s.' that was almost a hundred years ago. there are two glass ladybugs, paired together on the corner of a postcard and finally, a mosaic from firenze in the shape of a heart. these were the things that i never meant to give away but in the mishmash of migration, of time & streets travelled, they have ended here; on your refrigerator somewhere north of north street and west from the place where i live. i think of telling you this -- of demanding, or begging the recollection of these small monuments but i do not. i am relieved, here in the weathering, to finally have such tangible & fierce signs of loss.

75% apricot, 25% plum.

there is a growing & shared sense that h. has correctly identified as the beginnings of ambivalence. we are learning the business of adulthood, which consists mostly of understanding ourselves as arbitrary self-creatures, done school & feeling profoundly untethered (we are all, in our ways, seeking out reasons for persistence or departure). the periphery suddenly sharply in focus; our actions & decisions becoming the calibrated measure of our own self-worth & wellbeing. importance.

the definition of home: a place where you have settled (a person, object, thought, architecture or melange of these things) already the taste of your tongue. so easily explained; anything it is possible to classify & can be (is willing to be) named. it is also the generous plenty of an interlocking pattern by escher, cold open leaves in the teapot, wet clay. muscle memory. the equidistant simplicity living in the gesture of return.

if you would like
a letter, please
send me your
address.

music: house of diamonds, bowerbirds
mood: forsythia; forsooth

he reaches his hands up to the summer leaves; their soft-shape shadows between his fingers twisting with the streetlamps. and i walked around today thinking about memory maps and the city (the co-relative distances of near and far). bouillabasse creatures, the humming winds of citadel hill, reconstructed clothing. sunlight. but here, i want to say, with my arm stretched out long and bare like branches, here is the very where. oh where. how to fit such things on the paper.

cxxxiv. forget-me-not

forget-me-not (frideles) contains neither correct heat nor correct cold. it holds not powers useful for humans. it is like a weed and is not valuable as medicine. if someone should eat it, it would do
more harm than good.

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.