word: megascopic
warmth: cafe-au-lait

it rained all night long,
but i slept under the noise.

today the sky is perfect

for reading on the library
picnic benches.

this is how
it might feel
to live in a place
where homonyms
hang from the blue
cactus branches
of home.

right-leaning
a precision more resolved;

ivory once grew in my mouth.

A Conversation
W. S. Merwin
(From 'Houses & Travellers')

There is a wind that when it turns I hear the garden and the desert discussing things with each other. Sometimes in the garden, sometimes in the desert, day or night. Mud walls, stone walls, no walls, limestone, sheep far away, howling, birds singing, hissing, trickling, silence, dry smells, watered smells, moons, stars, flowers that are keys between them.

They tell their dreams to each other, the garden and the desert. They dream above all of each other. The desert dreams of the garden inside it. It loves the garden. It embraces the garden. It wants to turn it into desert. The garden lives within itself. It dreams of the desert all around it, and of its difference from the desert, which it knows is as frail as feeling.

It must be a long time since I first heard them talking. I must have heard them when I was two. I must have heard them when I was one, and so on. Perhaps before I was born. Or anyone was born. Or any roundness became an egg. Or the water was born, cooling on a high rock, prophesying tears, prophesying eyes.

I must have heard them even before the rocks were born moving in the colored night. Probably I have heard them since the light began looking for something to write on, flying on, white, with the colors hidden inside it and the darkness around it, forgetting nothing from the beginning, prophesying the end of knowledge, prophesying the wilderness, prophesying the garden, prophesying the wilderness dreaming that it was a garden. And the garden. And the wilderness.

listen: hey, elvis perkins in dearland
look: awaiting

april she tells me, counting months so the silver bangles clang together down the smooth lines of her arms (can you imagine the metallic colours of a place you've never mined?) tumeric & saffron & cloves, waking at midnight to boil water for your tea. there are patterns illegible as things that are written on the body. white socks stained by the red hem of a cotton sari and many silks folded in a country far, far away. this selflessness cannot be taught.

another winter we survived & green things light up the earth.

construction paper plans for a new season: i am essentially done, passing already into next chapters & rifling through school archives. securing space. the truth is i am unafraid as i never thought i could be. far more intrepid. today, i walked halfway across the city with enough change in my pocket for a loaf of bread (sidewalks & sunlight throwing us into each other again). may there be sunlight. may there always be such malleable days.

music: vampires with dreaming kids ep, twin sister

mood: fascimile

a) climbing back into my chair and the thousand-mile conversation i am thinking so many directions but mostly of how we have been wearing less armour, these days. the tomatoes are too salted, the bread is still warm. i think about people becoming clear as daylight. (jump forward, over the time-zones and time together.) we expand into seasons & indentations, the places of beginning. here, this is a mirror. this is the truest reflection of light.

b) on the blinded street today, your ex-roommate suddenly appeared - the one with pale eyes and the slow-fading sentences. his hands were pushed into the pockets of a fur-coated jacket. he has intentionally started dressing like a young edward gorey. he still shuffles his feet.

c) i would have two languages & a room of dark tulips.

listen: all we ask, grizzly bear
location: gate 20

before i left the seaside, everything shone through like flecks in the pavement. there are times when happiness roars in, bowling you over unexpected because you were not trapped away from happiness at all & it is a currency that inundates.

there was fresh colour in the sky, behind the branches and through the windows of the tallest office buildings. up right to the top (the very) & over the harbour islands & paper-dot boats & the striped smoke towers that invent clouds.

even now, my worries about then are mostly veneer & i've been feeling how everything that looms is weaving together. i am finding moments of falling into place.

look: the saffron fringe
listen: isobel, po' girl

i read 27 pages of infinite jest and lucy knisley's french milk but mostly, the last week was strongest at its moments of looking up from pages, clanging the bookspines closed. this morning, i walked through rough icy streets with a clothbag full of research tomes, slipping them into the library before the beginning of day. (i thumb through the pages, erasing marginalia & brushing off the rain.) i rode the no. 20 bus route & took red-door photographs, the ones i've held off so long, like settling in the comfort of this vocabulary that sometimes rhymes with concession. i follow far along our patchwork story.

coffeeshops full in the potential of the morning, jazzstandards & the weight of my unread book, new acquaintances & cellophane buckets of impossibly orange roses. (more than anything, this city has taught me about the inescapability of place, the way narratives pile up & clutter the hollow places between buildings.) it seems that all i have ever wanted is to plait motion with stillness.

and you measure seashell pasta over the boiling water, your hands rich & generous once again. i arrange the dinner plates like a mirror with wine-glasses on the right and the left. we drink our wine. we sleep.

a gloomy monday reading about koltès: modes of being that cannot be dealt through rational appeals, the capacity to affirm death in a surrealist manner roaring through the classical form of a play. love as something kept radically separate from the substance of touch. but mostly, i've been thinking through different conceptions of food: the architecture & aesthetics of wild sweets chocolate or secret masterworks from ferran adria's laboratory. a borrowed copy of brillat-savarin's physiologie du goût & revisiting this.

i keep having emerald dreams.