last night i dreamed of the pacific and wooden boats, high cliffs and homes on them i'll never live in. i left the new green there, and the crocuses whisper-blooming east take months to get the message here to the st. lawrence which still today must absorb cold sky. here by the river and old brick, i must still wear coats and gloves. here, the ships are big and metal and i am full and warm for now, staving off ice-hot restlessness which will soon catch up and gnaw through guts again. i must stay new ahead of it, pursued, or be cannibalized by stillness.
a traveler's heart belongs nowhere but in mobile legs and the houses of friends, in fragments of cities absorbed into the chest. here i stow trinkets, sentimentality scurried away like a child, encrypted love hidden deep in cold and unknowable canals, maps unmade, while cartographer's bones float through darkness in unmanned gondolas. this is the city that i live in, the rumored roads my ribs make. i bring it with boat-me glancing through real places, swiftly tracing and leaving traces, stopping only briefly, to go away again.
