drawing, billy collins

ink strokes on rice paper -
a wooden bridge
curved over a river,

mountains in the distance,
and in the foreground
a wind-blown tree.

i rotate the book on the table
so the tree
is leaning toward your village.

wonderful birds with human hands

the wanderers in these good friday streets are characters from the books i have yet to read. a hundred-and-one (one in-a-hundred) woman clicks her spaniel down sidewalks in matching blue fleece. near the library, a man in beaver fur wears his beard like a scarf. so dress up in your sunday best and carry paper armfuls of lilies home with you when you go! the scarlet beaks of tulips are pretending they'll be birds of paradise.
let's breakfast for lunch and coffee for tea. sit long; talk much.

promises like pie-crust

this skylight and built-in-bookshelves are the best parts of my new room

music: the song that we sing, charlotte gainsbourg

i'm itching for pastels and vast sheets of empty paper but the lights are off, doors already locked at all the art stores. streetlamps filter the city in dark yellow and i click-catch photographs when i walk by. the waterfront feels lonely on the surface but has twilight secrets underneath. in marker on the wavesculpture roof,"my shirt is very very blue." and look how tiny mussels watermark the piled-up squares of a wooden dock. they are soft against my hands and their empty shells whisper in cold winds.

if you slow the noise of summer crickets, it will turn to song.

japonica forests and tinfoil stars.

song: cigarettes and chocolate milk, rufus wainwright
sight: sunday afternoon cessnas across the sky

i wander home, thinking of mrs. dalloway and swinging my grocery bags through empty streets. i am preparing dinner parties with orzo and baby spinach, real italian parmesan and olives imported from spain. tonight's moon is overfull, this air smells of ocean and candlewax.

with my arms full of tiger lilies

music: polynesia, mother mother
mood: all our pasts will be erased

here's to the one who paints postcards that settle in my mailbox. here's to the one who plans muffin & lemonade message-in-a-bottle picnics. here's to the one who celebrates spring starting and and secret citywide treasure hunts. here's to the one who listens to poetry and chocolate-chip cookies against our sorrows. you, you are all for me!

everything with wings is restless.

music: emily, joanna newsom
mood: my heart can't break for this

tonight is the last, the very last wardroom night of the year. butterflies and birds collide at hot ungodly hours. how strange to campus-walk knowing the business that belongs to us all; the front-step secrets you are telling, the telephone numbers you dial, names you secretwhisper into this knee-deep muddy darkness. kaleidescoping conversations, the shifting movement of mutable colour, quiet lines in the webs we weave.
there is too much history, here.
i walk home alone with midnight thoughts and cold hands in coat pockets. home has a car in the driveway (this means visitors) and past the locked door and into the backyard to watch the growing starscape. the meteorite's just what causes the light and the meteor's what you see. boy voices from a nearby balcony, skip two fences away. the rubbish bins and i, hiding in the shadows, listen. "i'm a whiteboy just chillin, you're a whiteboy, just chillin, why's there so much selfishness in this house?" wait until they all go away and the pinpoint glow of your cigarette burns down to its fingertips. slam the backdoor so hard it opens, spilling a sliver of light on concrete ground.

ask me questions just to know

listening to: the green fields of foreverland, the gentle waves
wondering: why do we eat oranges one way and grapefruits another?

we fl i ck er while we fade away . . .

hear: revisited gone, qr5
horoscope: judging books by their covers will only produce a dull library. try to spot the difference between what looks good and what truly is good.

the indigo sky glows as sunlight fades and leaves us here in dust. the colour of nightfall will always, always be a thought of you. remember that sunset train trip from our middle-of-nowhere summer? how these speeding-bye skies slow down to a stop in paints and pigment, even hueless words.
still, let's grow up to be writers and readers and the dreamers of dreams.

my favourite bookstore has a (shh...) secret door

music: my moon my man ep, feist


The Piglet lived in a very grand house in the middle of a beech-tree, and the beech-tree was in the middle of the Forest, and the Piglet lived in the middle of the house...

beside clothbound copies of heidi, across from the little prince activity book (baobab stickers, anyone?) there's a handful of pooh & piglet books. i spent hours finding patterns from the colours and pagetop numbers. gas-station childhood fill ups, watching windows for a bookgift. so today, i bought my favourites, 'pooh goes visiting and pooh and piglet nearly catch a woozle' and 'piglet is entirely surrounded by water'. they are both one hundred penny reads. once upon a time, i too put messages in bottles and sailed round my living room in an upside down umbrella.

when i drift off in morning classes, i'm daydreaming about summer art projects and july seaside picnics. i have found a sweet flowershop and a candystore that are full-time hiring (and please call soon). i have lists of movies to watch, and places to go, and books to read. this new season is falling neatly into place.

who i'm for doesn't matter now; what matters now is who's for me.

skynight blues; cheshire-cat moon

music: flowers never bend with the rainfall, simon & garfunkel
mood: suddenly telephone voices seem faraway

now you can smell salt in the morning-warm air and pale green slips begin to peek out from beneath the flowerbeds. and i have new chocolate brown side-swept hair. my today class was at the gradhouse patio with galen and sunglasses and beer. it's bare-leg wandering, scarf-shedding spring! we celebrate with downtown raspberry and coconut popsicles, sitting on our favourite wall between the library and the sidewalk.
this weekend i am marketing and making morsecode necklaces, dropping off resumes, knit-a-thon, coffeedrinking, going to the jenn grant concert, sunday-brunching at saege, also essaywriting. it's going to be wonderful!