Heat

--> The heat descends. There’s something almost unnatural about it, freakish, atomic, condensed. Summer here’s a short season, but the orchards and vineyards grow lush fast nonetheless soaking up the last bit of spring rain before the hot light stays long in the valley. Cherries ripen – I spent part of yesterday head in a laden tree, sketchily propped up on an old plank fence pulling the sun-warmed glowing coral and carmine fruit from far branches with fingertips, my arms sticky with juice and sunshine. The heat shimmers aromatic on the ground and I roll a cherry around on my tongue before squishing the warm sweet and sour pulp against the roof of my mouth. The lake shines blue and silver below me; the sun bakes my skin brown as dirt. I blink into the bright, and time sears along in a flash.

Silver Sea

Very soon the open sea which they were leaving was only a thin rim of blue on the western horizon. Whiteness, shot with faintest colour of gold, spread round them on every side, except just astern where their passage had thrust the lilies apart and left an open lane of water that shone like dark green glass. To look at, this last sea was very like the Arctic; and if their eyes had not by now grown strong as eagles', the sun on all that whiteness - especially at early morning when the sun was hugest - would have been unbearable. And every evening the same whiteness made the daylight last longer. There seemed no end to the lilies. Day after day from all those miles and leagues of flowers there rose a smell which Lucy found very hard to describe; sweet - yes, but not at all sleepy or overpowering, a fresh, wild, lonely smell that seemed to get into your brain and make you feel that you could go up mountains at a run or wrestle with an elephant. She and Caspian said to one another, "I feel that I can't stand much more of this, yet I don't want it to stop."

C.S. Lewis - 'The Very End of the World', Voyage of The Dawn Treader, 1952

Magic

Cherry Blossom Season

High Road

The valley grows dark and the sky burns white and the smears of melted snow dance in subdued acid patterns that filtered our brains spinning the world kaleidoscopic on last weekend's island, glimpses.
.
I'm at the verge of my dreams and soon this supercommute will shorten where I live on a mountain and drive up the other to hold the goodness teased from the earth in my hands daily. This is how I will get through March cursed month and city-exhausted.
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When domesticity tires you show up in my head and hate it, there is no hope and you're running still as mad to be there as I am dismayed that even in dreams I'm reaching and stonewalled. 'What good does it do that I'm here?' always mad that you are. 'None! I don't know,' I loss. Forgetting remains a mysterious and elusive process still proving my dreams are not wishes just loops of ghostly worlds. Treacherous sensation, this instinct for the ancient, my invisible double.
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In between when the signal cuts out I shoot twenty-second videos of the hoar trees and silverlakes obsessed with movement through a still and moving world and the indulgent loneliness it wrenches passing fast and stopping quick. Hundreds of pictures in a row, send send send that in our imaginations play on 40min loops on massive scale at the Whitney or MoMA the banal profound destinationless ephemeral an exquisite hell. This is where I wander to escape the bright hope of my future sparkling in fibonacci gleams which burst to be alive, chaos aligned at last.
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Ah! look the green valley, the delta the sun, the wideness, the breadth I do as all water and leap for the coast and the sweet oblivion of routine and grand plans.

Consider the Lobster

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

David Foster Wallace - 'Consider the Lobster' Gourmet Magazine, August 2004

ghost tree

comings and goings

this bright flux gives and takes away
but more so to give and add to our joy
we spread ourselves throughout the world
to come back again soon
full with whispered treasures into one another's palms

ariel

lord's day on the prairie

the belly of paris

swallow me whole.

monet's boat

Giverny, France

last tour

no!
don't leave my body on the shore!
i've never wanted to inhabit it more!
enjoy it
nurture it
un-poison it
join it
root it
sharpen it
knit it together at the mouth of another
sailor with cold limbs in need of ease
good food
warm bed
sleep
and a view

beyond!
again!
no!
i want to live my own imagination
not cede it to dead men's
while my body suffers
emptied
abandoned
torn away
again obliged to open water
while an unwilling heart
rages to keep intact

my home is a sliver on the horizon
i am there! i am there!
meet me there! meet me there!
weighted down with spoils
to adorn the promised land
and revel around a true centre
join our bodies
to finally stay
grafted
alight
whole
grown

fever plane

she and i fever brained opium eyed high in the air devils in the mind she toothless i less than toothsome ravaged plied from the earth our home
we the sick slouch behind the poisoned well who glare at her gums at me glass eyed while we are high opium eyed plied from our minds our home
we the devils soar high and hot fever soaked minds ply our glass eyes to cold windows of the plane opium earth wide and white plied from the sky our home
she and i afeared third eyes glow red and wide burned devils minds slouch to fly above iced plains wide and white hot and blind fevered planed ravaged us sick adrift - our home.

boats

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.

Buckminster Fuller

I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.

the world

slowly reconciles itself to the rightest possible way.

i found a silver dollar

I found a silver dollar,
But I had to pay the rent.
I found an alligator
But his steering wheel was bent.
I found a little monkey.
So I took him to the zoo.
Then I found a sticky kiss and so
I brought it home to you.

(Dennis Lee - Alligator Pie)