Oh my I miss you. I’m here on my back again, laying in the same tall grass and watching the same stars cycle overhead, my eyes following blinking lights across the sky, my mind traveling faster than my feet ever will.

It’s been forty long years. Our house is the same, I left it just as you did darling. It’s quieter, and lonelier, I can’t deny.

I think of when we were first married, when the you posed a question of loyalty, half turned to the kitchen window and waving a spatula for emphasis. You asked me if I thought of you while I was away, if you were ever and always in my thoughts. I caught you around the waist, the morning sun catching all your hairs in a dance of flame and shimmer, I showered endearments and playful tones of love.

Our cabin, my cabin you made ours, every quilt and ornament and decoration and corner a piece of your eye and mind.

Our little one, who was so close yet never was. I hated myself then, hated myself for you, hated the weak blood and poor genetics I had dared to contribute to you, hated the mortality of former generations that kept her from being yours.

You would laugh at me now darling, an old man talking to flowers and dustballs and hummingbirds. Bartholomew is an old man as well, we two sputter and hiss at each other, me with my clumsy feet and him with his claws, the house our rivaled respected domain, keeping peace only in the memory of you. He doesn’t let me near your reading robe, many nights I’ve told myself I couldn’t bear the sight of it, and many nights his eyes have warned me that I had better. I’m glad he’s there, fighting for your memory when I don’t have the strength.

It won’t be long now, you can tell the Old Man to keep his eyes off you, I’ll be there soon. He gave you to me once, maybe he’ll be kind enough to do it again. I rejoice at the pains in the knees, I laugh at the hanging in my chest. It means I’m coming to you darling, it means I’m coming home.

In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,

May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing the curlews,

Hearing the horizons endure.

- ted hughes, the horses -

There are few things that grip the pit of my stomach like the strike of bared branches against November blue, that hard-eyed crew-cut autumn blue that draws color out sharp and breaths out soft.

In those branches is the epitome of a season that for all its sweet is the most bitter, in which every leaf is tipping gold because it's on the downward turn - the season in which I remember that we're eternal.

Because you see this concept of time, it's something our bodies understand. Our bodies understand it because they belong to it, to the clay world transience. They move within its determinations and along its grooves with unflinching and inevitable obedience from first fertilized egg to last taken breath.

But our souls, they know better, and are never fully reconciled to this unnatural constraint. The sense of injustice, of loss, of poignancy in grasping at a full moment just as it's slipped away - the autumn ache -

it's the eternal within us arching its back against the temporal around us.

(and in that knowing, it becomes less of loss and more of hope.)

pick a picture

1.

or

2.

?

[dipping my lens into the study of color as a concept,

so please let me know the why behind the which!]

one million footnotes

A daily pre-twitter conceived blog, each entry a single line, described by the author as:

"Footnotes to a nonexistent book, a series of observations, a novel without the plot, the autobiography of an imagination, linked poetry of the everyday world, an impossible goal."

Excerpts:





"He considered the varieties of vanilla ice cream he could buy and wondered if the closer something was to nothing the more variety it encompassed. "






"A long enough hug, and the heat moved between them. "






"He spilled the pencils like ink all over the page. "






"It had been forty years since he'd seen a live raccoon cross a road, and this one wasn't attached to a leash. "

belief and explanatory reports

"I guess we're all, or most of us, the wards of the nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn't explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn't explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people, fools, and mystics, who were more interested in what is than in why it is. So many old and lovely things are stored in the worlds's attic, because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out."

"The Winter of Our Discontent"

-Steinbeck