we are taking shape from under your hands

music: eavesdrop, essie jain
mood: grammatolatry

you can jump from one stone to another. that is you must jump very quickly and touch each stone for a second. you must never step on the seaweed or the sand, only on the stones, faster and faster. in the end you become a wind, the wind itself, and it whistles in your ears and everything else is wiped out and vanished, there is only the wind and jumping and jumping and jumping.

- tove jansson, 'sculptor's daughter'

a sudden craving for things that linger, like the scraped-thin parmigiano reggiano i eat standing tiptoe on the porch while languid splinters slip into my toes. half-kissed nasturtiums lying pale on the sidewalks, the first pages of books i've read over and again. textual, textural; the world all aburn, is burning with sensations. cafe-au-lait scalds my sleepy lips, molten blue and floodlight (a soccer pitch in darkness), the acrid smell of vinegar. the surface of the harbourfront wave rough & surmountable in the empty night, salted air. these are the things that have substance. this is what we can hold in our hands.

'didn't you ever wonder?' j. asks me at dinner, ringing with hypothesis.
i look at the empty seashells, fragrant & crushed & brimming in the restauraunt half-light. the tomato-bisque blush of lobsters & already too much talk about old corsages, empty tables, a high-school faraway. the plastic bibs tied over our dinner clothes rustle when we move, and the crustacean caricatures dance silly, sideways on the edge of the tabletop.
but he doesn't mind when i answer truthful; we laugh, we talk about new lives (he has glimpses of mine; i depend on stories & catalogue the names of his strangers). later he says that i haven't changed, not really, & i am surprised. 'you do seem happier,' he adds, thoughful. the past, the past is a lightness of heart, it is without consequence & it is well-wishing.

we discussed breaking onto a ship, but we were too overstuffed with cheesecake & raspberry chai creme brulee for dessert. also, there were cameras.

beauty in the way we live

music: weeping canopy, kingfisher & the halcyonaires
mood: repleating

i've been carrying my possessions away in garbage bags, through soft downpours, padding along the sidewalks. it feels luxurious to tumble piles of floral-print dresses, second-hand sweaters, polyester into salvation army bins, your closets. i streamline & simplify. i have been walking everywhere without headphones. my favourite is to leave home with only a key in my skirt pocket & empty hands. n. and i speak about this while she packs, placing objects in her vinyl suitcases & giving away all the unessentials. we are starting anew, happier. wanting less.

interlude: sarah slean prints

discovered in ravens, but also in residence here.

a place without voices

listen: the weakerthans
location: a fence on citadel hill

surreal, i answer you into the darkness. we are the sound of our smiles (the static of old radios, a spark), familiar, the wonder of things i'd forgotten to wonder. (& how i've not yet thought all i want to tell you & how i want to hold this, this, so close.) we listen to the goldberg variations from 1981, our fingers playing through these sudden, silent notes.

here are misty streets of a maritime summer. our paperboats still adrift on the ocean. trees heavy with cherries, green & new.

and now, she wears only silk

music: milk from a pearl, carl spidla
mood: nonchalant nonsense

walking through camp hill cemetery, i stop at the bench in rhodedendron shade. my bag is heavy with walking, thirty degrees, dried fruit, jam-bottles & a vacuum-package of italian cheese. i carry a small bouquet of basil, folding the vinyl leaves between smooth fingers, bringing greenness close so i can smell the spicy sunlight & earth. according to a.'s understanding, souls cannot travel at the speed of flight. they ploddingly arrive, when all is hushed in the hours, days, months that follow. i have been looking westward, waiting.

i am thinking of b. in ways that cannot possibly help except with the helplessness clenched tight around our family. and i wonder if the darkness seems so bleak, so incandescent when this story is your story. we are letting reason go, we are all letting go. there's a bit of l'engle that helps: to learn to love is to to be stripped of all love, until you are wholly without love. because until you have gone, naked and afraid, into this cold, dark place, you will not know that you are wholly within love. i want to go to the wharf & untie ropes, i want to smash dollar-store china from the train-track bridges that circle this city. instead, i plant seeds in terracotta pots, pressing my fingers into the soil. i add water.

when you move out from darkness (in the hours, days, months that follow) you are struck with the certainty, the suddenness of everything. so i walk home from the cemetery, still eating a half-peach offered me by pete of the frootique. i have plans for risotto & there is a full pound of cherries in my bag. i twinge with sadness but it is the most glorious of summer days.

"fame and sound and fury"

song: flat bottomed boat, harmony trowbridge
mood: stargazing

first thing when i got back, with keys swinging in the front door, i went out to the porch hoping (without hope) that the plants had not died while i was away. the cyclamen has shriveled to a moth-coloured tangle but the others (a jade plant, a spider, a christmas cactus) will recover with time. it's silly that it can matter so much but i've been wondering, worrying over two months about these terracotta pots winning their luck with the rainfall. two letters in the mailbox (from m. traveling in england and silver earrings from the ever-talented s.) books in residual piles from the end of classes. the posters still on their walls. we sat for hours, n. and i, catching up between the phone conversations & about everything that is static, changing. we walked to the dock at the end of jubilee & sat in the mist & the ocean moving always beneath us.

there is magic in places you love when you leave them long enough. i am mostly listening to sounds of this world unfolding again. i spent the morning on argyle sipping passion-fruit soda, reading stanzas of onegin between things we say and the passerbys (a summer-slow, punctuated sort-of thinking). local radish in a salad, the first two acts of king lear, & maple trees against a wooden wall for dinner.

glowing, gloaming:

song: throw the stone, micah p. hinson
mood: to the island airport!

there is something to his outstretched hands (a fragility) & blinded eyes in this cardboard darkness. and somehow it makes me entirely vulnerable to watch this (my eyes have adjusted to our artificial black) while he steps tentative through rows of saws & screw-top jars of nails. the builder of houses & mender of all things, now with his tendril arms and uneven footsteps. he is searching for scissors, amber bottles, the light-switch. we swirl paper in chemicals, timing this perfectly & peer into the red-light liquid. we are waiting for images that will float on the surface as memories, shadows, fingerprints left in places you have left behind.

sitting in the backseat on old boy road (inverary, ontario), thinking about suitcases & halifax & i am flooded with sudden anxiety. unrest. something pitted deep my stomach that comes as a surprise. in the car, past half-cut hayfields & their rainclouds, c. asks, "what do you think of me coming to king's for next year?" we talk about possibilities, while i quietly cross my fingers, my toes. the feeling dissipates, unraveling under the wheels & does not return. i want these distances smaller.

we spent this weekend at harbourfront centre, waiting under christmas light canopies for the late-night shows, sleeping through the morning rainstorm. after friday's show we chat with jill barber about nova scotia & church concerts & the blinding stage lights. "yours are the only faces i could see and the songs, they are all new." a pirate parade marches through the ohbijou show with bagpipes & waiting for them to pass, we turn in our seats. an empty bandstand listening to songs written in banff about this city. (later that night, we find half the band & margaritas at the tex-mex restaurant on queen). there are piles of cds outside a relocated music shop, scattered about the sidewalk & strangers look through them, bringing home the most mysterious.

cool evenings: the cats & the alleys

listening: coffee, entire cities
drinking: lukewarm & decaf

it's the feeling of elongation, with my arms stretched out every direction. betwixt, amidst, elastic. resin borrowing the inverse object shapes of your bodies. tonight i trespassed home through the seminary & the wet grass brushed against my knees & i was walking east toward the stillblue & thinking of seagulls & oceans & sitting on the vernon street doorsill with you. (an appendage: suburbia is dull, but it surprises me with verdent pathways, lavender blossoms of meringue trees, a pair of middle-age identical twins, drifting pollen, 1930 ford convertibles, robins clutching at wires.) it smells of mock orange & the cedar-smoke of summer cottages.

last week, i went to a show at the canadian textile museum of war rugs from afghanistan. 'after three decades of chaos, the customary flowers on rugs have turned into bullets, or landmines, or hand-grenades. birds have turned into helicopters and fighter jets. landscapes have filled up with field-guns and troop carriers. sheep and horses have turned into tanks. there have never been rugs like this before.' my reactions to news-stories, to real life is hardly ever visceral, but i ached for the threads of this close-woven violence. walls & walls of such uneasy tapestry.

right now there is a moth fluttering soft at my bedroom window; i am tired from birthday parties & the main-tent at the jazz festival, still not sleeping in the night. tomorrow my grandfather and i are developing film in the basement & tuesday i'm on the train to kingston for a few days. there are two books to finish before i leave: swann's way & the inheritance of loss and about ten thousands loose ends to be tied (if you are reading from nearby -- my last toronto hurrah will be the jill barber & ohbijou concert at harbourfront centre on saturday june 28th). i was sitting in m.'s backyard this weekend, surrounded by endive & radish & two-days of elegant appetizers. we watch tree-shadows on blades of grass, against the pool's surface, crosslegged in lawnchairs, sipping beer, discussing camels. all a sudden, i realized that without waiting for time, i already think of right now as radiant, soft-spoken & entirely happy.

three weeks of transient insomnia

music: vampires of the west coast, ghost bees
mid-morning: coffee & grapefruit

when i got home last night, i tipped the measured triad of white capsules into my hand, swallowing them dry & tumbling into bed. melatonin is tame in terms of sleeping medication, but i don't like the corpse-heavy feeling that it leaves, not being able to wake myself in the morning. feathery dreams of stirring honey into your tea, hide-and-seek in hayfields are suddenly replaced with traveling trombone cases, anvils, elephants. but i slept through the night, and for the first time in weeks, i don't feel four-in-the-morning overdrawn.

l. and i had dinner at a cafe on baldwin street (with a gift certificate & carafe of red wine), dressed up in our summer best & adding cardigan layers when it got cold. tea-candles & christmas lights, pistachio sauce & a salad of warm chevre, creme brulee made from the recipe in claude monet's journals & chocolate banana torte. we found a box of lps discarded on the sidewalk (our favourite is a band named 'zon,' 1981), recited poems by john donne, brainstormed essay topics for a shakespeare summer class. we had easy catching-up conversations about grad-school & boys & being trapped between places. i went home on the midnight subway feeling organized, heading for magnificent somethings. sated.

i have a dental check-up this afternoon, but afterwards i am going to find an out-of-the-way cafe & finish 'tropic of cancer.' tonite: ice-cream plans & a king's birthday party in the west end. also, i've been writing again, transferring the stories that have shuffled round for months into words. i will be home in two weeks!

colours in this notebook look all wrong

music: bass player, my brightest diamond
mood: penmanship

there was a massive electrical storm last night and the off-white walls of my bedroom, cool with evening, were all lit up with lightning. it slides smooth across the oily surfaces, threatening my body when i touch plaster. thunder resounding in the hallway, through my bones, the foundations of the house are shaking. it feels childish to be a bit afraid, but i am. i bury myself under stuffy blankets and wait for the sky to gentle, to turn dark again.

the days have been sticky-hot or grey with rain; in kingston, i'd sit up late in the downstairs screened porch to read & write half-letters, drink sweet-fern tea & watch fireflies. lake swimming & long walks, downtown lunch at chez piggy on friday afternoon. dad gave me his pen (a parker sonnet) so i could finish my letter "in the same hand" on the train-ride home. this is perhaps the most touching gesture i can imagine. the pen feels precious heavy in my hand & makes my script elegant, discursive even, but i haven't seen my words appear ink blue in years.

c. had an extra ticket to the saturday concert on olympic island (young galaxy, stars, death cab) & we traveled on a caravan of trains, leaving kingston separately and meeting in the great hall of union station. i caught her singing fall horsie on the ferryride, we spent the hottest hours of the afternoon in a serpentine queue, eating plums & lying in the lacy shade of centre island. the stars played through a gourmand cloud of seagulls, everything sunset-coloured, converse-worn grass littered with highschool kisses & glowing cigarettes. torquil campbell said many inappropriate things and scissor-kicked at broken microphones. he threw water & roses into the crowd.