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.

music: symphony #1 c-moll op. 68, johannes brahms
mood: a memory of taste

through the smoke & to the sky

listen: mr. tambourine man, bob dylan
look: a poet, a painter, a candlestick maker

it's bright today, so bright that the icecream melts into a puddle on my way home & we walk down the fat tightrope lines blurred wet by winter tires & snow. "all day i have been in the world in a way that i haven't been in the world forever," i tell you. i think about how ours is a recessed strangerness, one with very deep pockets. but here we are with glowing & the feeling of brick & sun heavy on my back. the sky yielding to february eyes, the stretch of a moment into permanent blue.

i lay on my bed all afternoon, listening to "middle cyclone" as if it were a book. my love, i am the speed of sound or a foundry of mute & heavy bells. don't let this fading summer pass you by. counting clouds. drinking peppermint tea. enjoying the luxury of the lost habits. we watched a japanese movie about the cupola-interior architecture of a spanish city & then i read some fairytales. life in this city requires integrity angled and implicit as the smallest bones of your feet.

click

the carrying arms, the antlers
hollow's cove, beatbeat whisper
optimist vs. the silent alarm, casiotone for the painfully alone
patience for books, the loom
lament for birds (post-wine), miss scarlett
fortune teller, forest fire
the pillowmaker, john southworth
opus #11, dustin o'halloran
big red machine, justin vernon & aaron dessner
who made it, sogyumo acacia band
the waves, princeton
bad medicine, liz green
providence, the love language
what about the bob, jaymay

mood: only so many pictures of snow
music: heart of clay, nat johnson

all morning, i sat in library sunlight (under the glass-ceilings of reading week, with caramel in my cappuccino). i was tapping my hands over the laptop humming pages of the thesis and thinking about egg ornaments. how they smelled of straw & rows of slat-board henhouses, smooth & hollow as glass jars, painted & purchased on thursday mornings at the market in kingston. how under their acrylics, the shells must be tea-stained and buoyant & restless. every year, i would wrap them in paper towels and place them reverently in the crawlspace. sometimes i would open them again months later, uncrumpling boxes onto the white carpet. my favourite was a pale, well-whiskered rabbit.

* * *

in april i lifted bruised, greenish robin's eggs from the curved sidewalks of our street. and i would run home for lunch waiting for hatchlings that every year, never came.

* * *

lately, days have been like that,
lit up with joys -
contained, fleeting
(green ships on such grey ocean),
very very careful.

* * *

we rechristened the stars that night while you were here & so busy with visiting the city and with me. we went down to the end of the road past snowploughed piles, out into the darkness. there were lights across the water and at the lip of the harbour, beacons of distance and motion. the same gestures held in our bodies, the structures of sentences, a pattern of memory. parallels. we stood a long time, looking at the sky and we didn't say much of anything. thoughts back and forth.

* * *

wornonasleave.

* * *

legs crossed in the northwest gazebo under streetlamps & solitude & february rain. the hyacinths on my writing desk are oversweet.

you & i are night painters

mood: coffee, breakfast, radio-news
music: all the years, beach house

on monday morning, we talk about how things change more quickly than their names, watching beside our shifting visionaries the narcotic kaleidoscopes of 'worldwide.' what does it mean to know the self as a noun? a verb? we chart the unstable geography of no-other's land.

i spent much of yesterday in my kitchen, the counter bustling with all the ingredients for homemade soup & walnut bread. i made tea with dried leaves and sugarwater. it was snowing a bit & everything smelled of parchment & rosemary.

there are things that are worth learning: why dim-lit stars fade when you look at them direct and brokenness as something that is living; the brute sincerities that ebb, flow.

in the japanese tea garden, i sit beside a pond eating sesame cookies
and reading from all the torn slips of fortune.

the sun is a morning star

listen: at the hop, devendra banhart & jana hunter
look: luminous

"we need to hurry," he says, pressing into the night & it's the rawness of his tweed jacket that pulls him forward, this and all the dedication aligned in his features. "i don't know why," he says to me quietly, "but everytime i'm in a new city i need bookstores as landmarks. i'm only comfortable in the familiar mapping of all the pages." we have never spoken before.

hours later, we meet a vagrant poet named osiris who sways above our table, his hands clutched finger to palm and fragile as birds. "let me tell you the truth of it, brothers, sweet-faced lady" he says. his eyes looking past us, his eyes right through us. there is grey in his beard and it marks the filament of years, his cheeks high and smooth as a child's. the black scarf uncurls from his neck and he finds the hem, sweeping it back over his shoulder, covering his throat with the woollen night. the new year's sky is glossy like streetlamps & ghosts but he has the vagabond laughter of being in better days.

i see things here that i have never seen before: february daffodils and cyclamen in the bank vaults. i buy gala apples by the pound and chase seagulls that come up to my knees & we watch the canvas billows of the sunday market. on saturday t. takes me to a at dive bar at the end of the universe (the only one that survived the first earthquake) where there are stained-glass windows as dark as dry smoke. i carry a white carnation in my hands and we dance the rough-house blues. i have learned so quickly the flatteries of an absurd city; the clanging, side-seated trolleys and such irrational hills.