and this moment is gone...

you've taken it for what it is worth.
you've taken it for the architect of epochs, for what is granted
in that time. you look, doubtingly, at the duty of your own shelter,
at nothing more than refuge (not even what is known about the self).
they say, you "will live to an old age if you do not see
your own attraction". they feed you with love and other versions of despair.
you do not flinch. your passion is immune to the birth of a different story.
you are a body fashioned out of clay... your likeness evokes a bottomless lake,
dolphins, worms, and the victory of a daughter's handshake.
if a god or goddess abandoned you the darkest spider would not let
you hang. the unarmed mortality of "this moment", what they might call
"asking the heavens for a joyous vengeance", would see you into hiding,
into a forest or a sea, into a pocket of unopposed air... and you,
taking everything for what it is worth,
would transfer the weight of bones and fleece, golden anthems,
and you would build blossoms of fragrant silk, veins that splash
like a waterfalls' circumference. you would leave no vague uncertainty,
your charm would revolve like an endless planet...
because of the narrow path between orbits you would inherit
a mother's greatest affliction. your beauty would never suffice.
cities, towns, and revolutions would degrade
the sin of a stone monument. a thunderbolt
would show no sign of jealousy. an inscription would read,
"she has punished me for having claimed to have loved her".

*** --- directed at no-one in particular --- ***

something innocuous -- idkw -- *cough*, just pluggin' away *shrug* i guess

My Slanguage Profile

Aussie Slang: 75%
Canadian Slang: 75%
British Slang: 50%
New England Slang: 50%
Prison Slang: 25%
Victorian Slang: 25%
Southern Slang: 0%

I forget where I pulled this from... some other blog I guess...
It must mean I isn't from the south, ain't that right Saving Sweetness.
Haven't done the weird thing yet either.

creating an image, a new regime, perhaps?

`
Don't ask to compare tragedies, don't ask me for a death toll either. Don't ask for categories that have numbers fitting together like sections of an antique cabinet. Let the fin-de-siecle fuels run beneath this road... let prices rise, flood waters? I'm thinking of New Orleans now, of tsunamis past and devastating, I'm thinking I couldn't outrun any of them **wink** **groan, Irving, Julio ** So what do we regard as our immunity to suffering? Is the greater good (as some would call it) offset by the greater "bad"? What I mean is, does it matter how many people are affected by a certain event? Any loss of life, I believe, is a tragedy, any disappearance of a child, even that isn't on the front page of a newspaper, is distressing too... so what good is the hyperbolic media notion that leads every story with "... the death toll is climbing..." Is that really all that we want to know? Wasn't the tsunami bad enough when "only" 15,000 people had died...

Hmmmmm.... I think this subject is too morbid, these images too. What regime, I wonder, could I create that wouldn't have to breathe off this strangulated sensationalism... Perhaps I'm living too far away from everything... I'm too distant from any tragedy, and maybe if anything like this happened to me I would want the world to know I didn't die without counting.

when she's eating Caesar Salad

Is it me, a smirk on the sidewalk,
a pair of hands glancing at an eyepatch'd face?
Is it the white lights of a small wagon, reversing,
or the windows in a restaurant
that always disappear... Stars are peeled
like radishes, like little brooms in a Grand Hall
before a wedding reception. Is it her, hers?
A hint of maternal grace wiping honey from a fingernail,
an axe, a slice, an open wound? What is it
that hinges our devotion? I'm betting
on something that could lean beneath a womb,
a promise that doesn't protest...
a dream upheld by the nipples and hearts
of triple-washed vegetables. Where is a world
that doesn't hedge its own motion? A conqueror
who prays (not preys) and passes the living into death.
Where do her eyes shift? Her lashes blink... Inside,
in the moment when motion is decided she always faces
into the room, she traps grapes and napkins like a princess
usurping a raised sword from a knight...
She measures the soul of a knife-edge, the fat of romance,
she dresses a sandal with toes that abolish a stained spot
on an old carpet, a Naricissistic memory?
She asks, "what would you be doing if I wasn't here?"
The clothes she once disowned disintegrate
from her shoulders, her skin is a garden, an oasis,
a zoo... perhaps an emu or a polished flower for the expression
of bees and spiders: thoughts carving
the beauty of this view... Where else can I stare?
What petals will adapt like the supple scrubbing of her tongue?
What Flora doesn't cut our taste buds?
On that white tablecloth her bones are groping
a dead meal, cutlery, saliva smelling the vines,
olives, unpeeled onions, and milk chosen
from the right teat. She doesn't shriek
when angels pile rodents in the laneway: "oh,"
she says, "those are not for us to dispose of...",
to remember. She loosens her belt with the painting
of dour pink fingernails, she snuggles into her chair,
as though the promise of being
has yet to render this moment with more meaning.
She chews loudly. A moth flickers like darkness
at the ending of the life of an unwilling martyr...
a child on the sidewalk acting like there is no bedtime,
another glass of exhausted wine,
a third course, and in my throat the humming
of a fugitive vanishes in a paradisiacal flood.

water street, a poem taken from SALVAGE

~
3. St. John’s 2003

Water Street, above, (alone), watching the weather smolder in all directions. To the north, and out of view, a set of earlobes pretends they cannot hear, dusk, an embryo? The horizon beginning to heal, waiting on the doorstep for a maternal breeze: a tinting of birth, separation, a trace that the earlobes and the sounds of the city that no one listens to, cannot see. A young flower submerged beneath a potted maple… A stroke of unfamiliar language, an immense thought: how it is that we are all still here? That the line on a cracked sidewalk matches a drainpipe between two cafés?

Water Street, swaggering like a deck of cards, a set of keys bulging the front pocket in old jeans, a stitch already tight… A man standing in a number of spots, simultaneously, carries nothing but an untenable hum, yet he doesn't stumble. And he says all the right things, how are you today, sir? I’m a lawyer can I take your case? Resilience is as fleeting as a splash from a small puddle, a sip of beer, or a slip of the wrist that hides the painters’ keel…

Water Street, seaweed? What else would one expect? Bars and traffic lights, pastels courting newspaper boxes like grainy streaks on a shop window… Today, the damage has become washed and dried, needed, and the bakery on the corner delivers loaves to fishing boats preparing for a week away. Their long assail, the massing sea. Hills that rise to an insufficient green, red columns floating like an apple peel near an unclean sink… how is that roads always turn light brown and windows have holes that totter and bounce within their black frames? Maybe the flickering face has hands to rest in, a dark wall in the sky that brushes a distant mountain with bristles unraveling. There’s history above the clouds, (the canvass)… a fold of skin that falls like the bottom jaw of a long-forgotten explorer, a new cove, an apartment in the south of the city getting noticed by the corner of an untrained eye.

hit INTO

So this is our team name, HIT into, hit in TWO? Our team... light blue shirts, team, as in mates. Old meets new, meets young and wreckless, Art Titus, grab the railing, there's pills for that... *wink* Here is a picture of us on the 6th green, getting ready for an EAGLE!! As I said, hit in TWO! Well, we didn't quite make 3 :((( or four, fore, hit INTO again. I'd say it was blasphemous, not-so-good samaritan robbery. We did hit the hole three times in six tries though :0 From there it was all downhill, until the back nine of course where the holes start climbing again, and that's when we made our move... first birdie, 12th hole, short par 4, beautiful pitch by mees-elf, 5 and a feet, what a feat! Next hole, even feat-ier, driven to the green by an ex-pro (shop worker, haha!). Ziggy on the ground in beer cart girl agony. Another EAGLE goes begging!!! How can I leave a putt like that short... then again, next tee, HIT INTO, twice, come on ya FOUR-EYED-NICKABEET BOTTLE-EATER FREAK! Just kidding, love ya like a bounced check, have you ever played KILL THE BUTTS! No, it's not an ANTI-smoking campaign. Not a beer-cart-girl looking death mulled over... lit her... sweet but not feeling so aces today. I don't know but if she weren't serving drinks I'd think she'd probably tell me I'm using too much uPPer caSe, punctuation too! Luv ya like an afternoon pale fog :))) LMAO!

Alright well... I think the rest of the round might bore you into divoted submission, so I'll just say that we birdied the last hole (my beautiful SW to 12 feet, Nephew Pat's putt, Rosey's drive too, how could I forget such teamwork?) in front of all the other gophers, received a big rousing rousing, rising ovation... or polite applause, is it really polite if you should receive the clapping of something more??? HMMMM... the rest of the evening went quickly and without much distraction. Winners and trophies were announced, the food was delved into, was pretty good according to most (not so good according to that rare gem, well done!)... and as you can tell by this, (or that picture above of a WINNER with SOME prizes), the wind had come up and everything was a little coooooollllerrrrrrrrrr! Some were cooler than others, some people's golf balls went farther downhill than uphill too, ha ha, LMAO! As it was, we listened to FIX YOU on the way home at least three times... and went to sleep motionlessly.

more balls. swivelling torsos?

FGT this weekend. Very important to be prepared... to have patience,
to have a good time!!!

I shall return with PICs and stories I hope.

Mika out.

"I never get in trouble..."

mmmm... okay, so it isn't me that belongs to this phrase,
but someone a little younger (and cuter?), someone who has surrounded herself with flits of affection and nonchalance... someone in a town that devours its own youthful intelligence like a river gorge in the south of France swallows the fragrance of great wine. They say every town has a label, a cave perhaps, so maybe every street in these towns has its own chimney of good smoke, a sign of the cloud, or a cough.

It may not be the most crucial fact in her everyday existence but I bet that she (the one who couldn't get into trouble) could smile her way out of any situation, like if she danced naked on a cruise ship full of old Baptist ladies... or if she inhaled crystal meth outside a smalltown daycare in mid-morning daylight... huh? oh, u get the point? And you don't need to wonder how it is that some of the oldtimers (not me:) think that kids have it easy these days?

what play, what hardship!

mmmm... I think, therefore I suppose, if I could ever have mouthed those words veraciously (in that order too) then I might feel her inexcusable debris of insouciance. But would i have learned less at an earlier age? Would I just go on feeling the harmlessness of my actions?

After all, it's been a while since J. decked me, figuratively, (so that part is not really funny), and it's been even longer since I sat warm-blooded in the back of a police car! LMAO!

I guess time is a boundary that changes, that persuades and erodes the delicate balance of experience. And her? Well, I know she rocks, and she's a Superstar Sweetie but maybe she needs a good little talking to... a lesson in quandary dynamics?

for my NB sweetheart: a ray of sunshine and a lather of spit.

Sprinkling the anger from your shoulder-bladed gold. Queen?
What's happened before us would bring drones from a crowd
if a crowd or tiara were here. How naughty the swing of a weapon
and pulses of air: diamonds engaging the lollipop swords,
saliva held in esteem, as understood as the slate steps of a Country Club,
Held? A reception whose blades you've sown (as though grass
through the tip of a unicorns' horn), yet you've taken more than you need
and written liqueur and lipstick on the same napkin -- what mingling sense
does the meadow procure from another field,
another square on the scorecard? Oh, you've wished,
how those bouncing gods would fulfill their own intended wings,
buffeting pores, sweat glistening amid a mountainous haze.
Tomorrow, they say, the clouds won't form
the spattering torrent of cliché, of rubrical muse
and storms that send us towards the nape of a refuge
primping the flowers that seal your fate: an evening in white, annuals pulled
from the sides of an aisle, blooms that know every sequence equals the equation
of a sphere, of words like four plus three. Fives.
Tables full of billiard balls colliding for those unnumbered guests.
Destiny believing they couldn't arrive, and Milosz translating a cure
for the whimsy of golf and Earthly Delight,
"how lightly they walk", how constant "the hands that march in early morning"
as if wresting the soul and the "onset of an another world".
Risk, they say, is a provision of Hell, is a border that drops
like the slumber of a remembered child, a white line, a stake that leans
beneath the paint. Only here, where things like reflection and mascara persist,
where the radiant face of imagination spares us
from entering the hazardous bliss, we wait for our tee time.

*** -- a poem taken from the edge of the seventh hole, for KA in BURLINGTON!

mon ami Emese...

So we met while running for an early train that was whistling to leave.
She lives in a faraway land (city), she writes often, has a boyfriend
and a beautiful sense of knowing what I'm feeling. I'm not jealous of him
nor filled with the multitudes of envious incompletion...
because... she is listening, she waits for someone who is lost,
she says, "I am the marigolds' stem, inhabit me".

commentary...

Why is the world so bleak?

Of course not. Why am I so sad? Ha ha... isn't it humour that delegates hope?
I'm not so macro-emotional with my questions (macrocephalous maybe), and I don't see the need to comment on the whys and whines of any understanding. As far as I can tell there is no reason for that final appreciation and no order to the randomness of global remorse.

Do I comment on those seemingly greater things?

Maybe, sometimes it's just an observation and a way to avoid the inevitable plunge, the cold heart of oblivion. Right now what I need (besides her :) is some pics from my long-weekend-fantastic... perhaps you've read the post below, and didn't understand any of it?

A bientot mes amis!

THE new NORMAL? or a gift?

Just a catchphrase basin, ravine maybe? Frenzy
of water and remedial light... they think it's all
so relevant -flashes- humid skies swirling above oceans
warmed and wrinkled by a humane breeze. Anchors skulking
away, below the surface! I would never know the bombing
gods ("we trust") could feel so helpless,
so divine in the mirror of their Opposition?
I'm confused, an epochal pool, (not liquid perhaps),
though stagnant as a recent flood... what if they
crossed our shallow fateful river, would this theme
have never occurred before?

I'm not at all political. I'm not corrupt
or bemused with the role of the catchphrase medium.
I work in a garden, I plant trees near a vacant
shoreline yet I'm not imposing any special change in habits,
dreams, or irony either. I prefer less revokable modes,
like knowing the hours of a village library,
the striations of an oak branch stuck in a forested tree.
I know a quote loosely translated from a Milosz poem,
a (Gift), he would say, on which to end:

"There is nothing on earth I wish to possess.
There is no one who knows the worth of my envy.
Whatever evil I have suffered, I forgot. To think
that once I was the same man who didn't suffer
any embarrassment. In my body I felt no pain.
When straightened, I saw a blue sea and flagrant sails."

Dodge-ball

So... the rules, though they contain good memories of childhood, seem open to interpretation. the players... open to interpretation too perhaps. the referree well he's a classy guy, fair as a bowl of muslix with skim milk. and the dog-gone frivolity is a spoon chasing that last platform of grain. it's good to mix sheer merriment with the seriousness of a game, do you want to see a picture of this spontaneous ritual?

Soon :)) Mika out...

a sphere, a poem, and... we're PARTYIN'

arrive. divide the lesser evil of exhaustion, anticipation, and pure genius to come up with something as simple as the first indulgent dip in a cooler-than-it-was-yesterday lake. still arriving, recalling that breeze many years ago, that first sip of a sumptuous lounge... that slumbering chair, that part of a glowing sphere (un ballon-disco, Steph might say) that one doesn't always know or gather around. perhaps the other breezes have gone... oh, they think, the world revolves about us, our instant gracious pleasures, but here between the branches and paths that lead to a conscious beach there is no need for momentary conditions. states of mind and measure colliding like small rounded stones beneath the afternoon waves... stones, as small as perfect sand, white lace, the distant southern shore of familiar lakes enduring before sunset. arrived. My own waving, my own unwavering hope (d'accord, Steph might say), I am here. I walk slowly, and the bygone life seems as certain as a tethered road, I walk, and the people who live here, welcome me, talking openly of their poetic friends. Set free. Young again, at tables dug into weathered shores, at the prudent squint of a generous gift, at a dream, at year after year of a bonfire where the world could never end. A forest of black wood clinging to the tongue of a lake I am willing to taste... Greeting. Dreams that talk of tangible escapes. A boulder outgrown. A question, The Don might say, a quest, but why do we stand and why do we linger here? There is another place, somewhere more ancient than a gust of wind, a cloud, an old coin that was never exchanged. We all have a reason to lament! North from here, old railway lines, shouts of conducted ghosts and scenes engraved by an echo envious urban foes might allow... purchase? Paddles too, and a longing to just BE, to flower like those who have always been here. Hypothesis. Resurrection of return, familiar place and people, the creaking of an old door, 1951 perhaps, or 26, or a billion beyond time instances, the center of all flesh? or Luke the Apostle handing his child a scorpion when asked for an egg, lungs and liver heralding the absence of pain, a shaking of all hands, an atlas for the power of a sky that cannot be pretended. Greeted. The notion of all equations ceasing to exist. A chorus repeated like words under duress befelling another prophet whose armour pulsates at the highest of beats (roll of the eyes), stage (wink), pages? Lance look what the child has read! There is honour among plants, among Isabel's grooved thorns. There is beauty in the bottom bunk. There is a scintillating myth, a moral fibre cleansed of any evil that remained. Difference. Feeling the flush of a breeze when the water is warmer than the air, baptized by an eternal coccoon, garrulous worm. The serpent again. And the parable never ends, the parable "cannot get up and give you anything". And Dee says what if you were the last person on earth and you knew you hadn't long to survive, what would you do, (how would you know?), where would you go? And Dee says this is where she'd come, where Daedelus' plane would set her down, floating towards the raft, and Dee says she wouldn't want to die in a plane crash or even a single car accident. Laughter has a toe in the sand, fresh liqueur, and a dog that pees on you. A dog that yawns more than it barks, that knows you are not looking. More people too. More arms and bones and mouths, more tints of foreheads and labyrynth eyes (so blue, Steph might say). At once the table is clean and full, wine sharing its preserve, its grief and laughter uncorked, oh how time has just begun. A bottle for me, she might say. She, this time? To what end a practical dove, a guffaw! Cold air settling among the coals and luminous hearts... the moon is a likeable device, escape, and sometime later the night's bonfire flutters on and feathers to an end! day too, a saturnal peace ringing like the cool edges of outer space, degrees of serenity... creaking of doors (upstairs, bro says a concave hello). first one to rise, sun warming a square of sand where the volleyball court will settle later in the dawn, land? mist appearing like a fog, (un rêve Steph might say if she weren't asleep), eyes not opening as fully as a mindful trance, eyes like bottles scattered though not yet disposed, those half-full stray ones leaning in the sand thinking they've survived and are hidden from a relentless captor, all of the others bowing to a more mortal horizontal end. the chairs are wet. dew has a way of finding the lowest places... dew? It must be aware yet petrified by what it is, how it forms and remains, the unsuspecting wanderer, melting fleece. Jason, how cold was the Northern air? how hot the cauldron of Medea's rage? Simultaneous refreshment from grapes and Graecian woes --- single digit alarm and heat rising from the lake: all the alcohol that warmed us in the evening declares we were drunk and that no other verdict will ever exist! Dionysus, we are not guilty. We are culpable of nothing other than destiny being impaled! This is the liver, the life. These are my lungs, my running shoes and socks that I plan to wear, timing is proof enough, is a heartbeat set aside for now, like a perfect flat sea, a coastline, the delicate middle of the Mexican Gulf, an oil platform and three ducks suddenly pecking between the toes. I've watched them arrive... I've named them after three of my favorite roads (Tiny Beaches, Ul. Piastow, and La Rambla). La Rambla is the least afraid, carries a smirk and has three pecks before going for the emptiness of my hands... Tiny Beaches isn't too far behind, is peckish too, but Ul. Piastow moves much slower, seems older and stands as though waiting on guard. I return to the cottage for some bread, I run all morning with a kind-of amused glance, a sip of G&T along an appreciative shoreline. I swallow pieces of a hot dog bun, sand and water inveigle me. I return twice without the knowledge of hope or experimentation, without knowing which couch I would have preferred, which piece of meat or unbuttered grain (êtes vous heureux? Steph might ask). The panic of my abrupt discoveries would leave me, I would clean the sand, and the chairs that know desire cannot be overwhelmed by suffering. I would expect no meal, no reward. Later on someone will join me, a dog that scratches maybe, or a cultured bee hunting for something I have already poured from my loins! A queen. A worker. We are all tied to distinctions of colour, gravity, and graves. We are all destined to return, to doubt. What if, Sharon would say, that hill didn't move? I am alone. I have piled wood by the sauna, have emptied glasses and their sticky remains. What comes of nothing is nothing but thirst. We've all believed in a different god, in something more simple, one foot in front of the other? The fear is when you stumble, when a stick cuts you from below... ah yes, there is always time for a game, a seven iron or a wedge, and the disruption of a sterile factory, feathers. oh the players! They are phantoms who cannot be praised enough... watch, from here, from warm lugubrious wood, from the top of a building in one of Budapest's trampled squares. Where am I going now? home to Munich, or somewhere I haven't gone? What brave absurdity brought me this sham of a keyboard? I was talking about a god (n'est-ce pas? Steph would cajole.), I was praying for less storms, less bends in the atmosphere, yet it seems there are too many comparisons here. I am relaxed now, counting the judgements I needn't exploit: the skin on an onion that leaves no sentiment, Cebula from a foreign tongue. I don't care if anyone understands -- THIS(?), this is only an exercise, a work-out perhaps, and the weekend I describe has swam and paddled past many seas, has begun to imbibe like an afternoon amid a faraway reverent throng. What's for dinner the reader might say, how many people for your table? glasses for wine? Oh it's true, I never need understanding, I never find gold or spices like the Marco Polo of Strausbourg, the sailing spaghetti Bolognaise, but what if this meat were maddening? How many underlings would understand the underground is undergoing an undetermined and underhanded amount (of) undergrowth? HaHa, LMAO! And you thought I was only doing the crossword. 23 across: beginning of a quote by yet another American hoo-haa foreign exploder! Infamous hehe! Getting giddy perhaps, watching for the dog that likes to pee on people and chairs, only the dry ones too! 11 down: SPHERE! I'm watching Bill's shoulder as it has a projection of the horizon and his brother's helicopter rides. do you know what acrylic lightbulb just went out behind the red felt ropes of the gallery. oh my, this landscape is composure. (77 across: fleur de ____, Steph might know). There's no hiding the wind or bad roads around Eagle Lake, gravel contusions, rutted slices of the city that do not stop for a poor stranded biker, age slowing down... canine pisser, HOC gradation? I'm at a loss for that which envelopes a long forgotten answer. Return to hot dogs and not enough buns. Like they say, the early duck gets the weiner? Ha ha! It must be the moment when a beer opens and all the girls in that Slovakian pub roll their eyes. Rolling, rolling, rollin' isn't that Will in the cabin with a piece of chalk, a golf-pencil holder, extra-curricular exam! I might fail too, I'm only an expert in meeting young women with boyfreinds (you'd like him, Emese might say). Jealous anyone? Oh I could go on forever, I could go on to forget my many generous loves, how temporarily moving they became, (anything else, Sarah might say, see you at the pool). The idea is to hide one's autobiographical pride, a swamp beneath a pine forest, a poem that returns from a patch of unlamentable dew:


Running the Coast

12. Lake B****, S******dge


Don't run anymore, quiet shoreline, lure of steam,
water warmer than air, nervous hand tightening the lace
in an old shoe: one of those not used on good pavement,
(in a race unknown?).

Don't listen to the eyes: blind as a mounted bass,
a cottage dim without movement or pearl-gray light
as still as the concrete intersection from which
you arrived.

Don't let the first few steps humble vermillion toes,
a coil of bark-black whiskers swept
by an onshore breeze, a bottle half-filled with smoke
and the testament of lungs.

Don't run anymore, and make your accomplices
say, "he wasn't here when we awoke!"
Let them smile and talk openly about pets and cars,
(metal and fur), about a synapse that never fades.

Let their voices divide the echoes of grateful tongues,
bread spackled by sand or a cocktail half-gone.
Don't stiffen the legs with calculations loosely held:
how far to go, how steep the hill that hasn't been made.



Interlude. Enter Louie? It must be evening again, and the worst game of billiards this side of the Wrzesnia train station. May I leave my back-pack here and search for the woman I love? Oh how contrite is the wounding of pride, the fangs of one's longest laments. I've read old poets and reviews of poems about clotheslines and crooked necks, I've returned to the scene of my only crime... what if I didn't really love her? Perhaps the wine has fleshed me out, has discarded my sanity and the remedy of a statue dedicated to Athena. Daphne was a nymph? Myrtle mortal in the temple of the Titans... clouds descending like ivy and a chariot drawn by panthers, wet souls, (il pleut, Steph might say)... and the wind so tempting. I've devoured a collage more suitable for Graustarkian eyes, romance, I've hitched a long untenable wagon. The wheels of lust and lariats guide sincere evidence, frightening imageries perhaps, but they say we can handle it. Grab the wheel and helm... and I awake again to another day, remember that last night I was walking the beach alone, under the influence of a greater sphere, under the cogs of mischief and surprise. The early morning is not as cold as anticipated, but it's cloudy again, brief glimpses of sun are culled from the trees behind the cottage. It's windy too, very much so, out of the south and east, not a good direction for these parts I believe. I'm thinking it's Sunday and somewhere, perhaps in an earlier time zone, people are planning a weekly guidance to the church or golf course. I'm thinking they don't have ducks pecking between their toes again. "Not so easy this time," I say to La Rambla, not so fast I say to Tiny Beaches, and what's wrong, why so melancholy? I say to Ul. Piastow... and it quacks in disbelief, disavowing my supposed superiority... and I return on the wide rambling path to the kitchen of the cottage thinking all the time of J., Sarah, Sylvia and Sara, and I remember Sylvia walking along a Northumberland Street sidewalk, smiling as she confessed to once picking her nose. She was wearing freshly plucked rose coloured pumps and a flower printed dress, lilacs maybe, and we were going to meet her father at a B&B near the university. The confession ended when she stepped on a piece of plywood that had been placed across the concrete, an orange cone on one end, construction perhaps, the plywood bent concavely and tilted towards the road. She slipped and yelled, her balance altered even more by the squeal of her voice and new shoes, I grabbed her hand and swung her safely around, and we fell together onto the grass on the other side --- she was on top, not dirty, and I was wearing a good white shirt (green tie) --- for some reason I had forgotten about that til now --- and now I remember Sylvia saying (unknowingly) later that same night that her friend Sara "has the flattest chest"... I didn't respond then? Suddenly I'm back at the shoreline holding pieces of a bagel two feet off the ground. La Rambla is jumping feverishly pecking away until he has a large piece, Tiny Beaches jumps too, but his efforts are weak and low and I have to lower the bagel and drop a piece into his mouth. Ul. Piastow stands closer to the water waits until the other two disappear with their catch, perhaps he or she is the oldest? Oldest, kindest, purplest, and now I see the bottles from last night and the fire that wasn't, maybe the teeny girls were drinking smoke. Maybe the pipes were loaded... (au contraire, Steph might say), and eggs bacon and spoons have made a casserole in the darkness beneath this blanket. I'm still cold. The phlegm of the streetlights in town (across the water) is a hook for the fish that all those who leave will not catch. I'm willing to wait it out... to succeed in a different shore, context, I'm willing to eat and nap, and conjure munificence! Oh bland wall, spider web, dust from the ancient way of trousers and sandals, of cars with round giant steering wheels, a man in a cordoruy hat and a woman who works where she's not "supposed to" -- were you the first couple to kiss in the front seat? To say good-bye, "have a nice day at work", and drive off? Were you the first to grace the morning in a chorus of grave frustration? No, it cannot be, not here, not now in this driveway, this cool and windy yet soothing afternoon! Another evening bestows games beginning anew, DODGE-ball done in a bathing sweat, long skin and shadows of momentary glee... another glass of wine modelling the short ropes and sails that cover white waves.