a) There we left you, on the suspiciously lush pasto of your parents' lawn, in the warm dark of a very late night. The funniest bits of texting I ever messed with.

b) There we left you, in that hard world of winter with all the water stoppt up solid & framing the clean live air in angles & planes, slip & fall, miss the train!

Pink rock faces ocean's thunder in craggy early-20th-century planes, lines interrupted and truncated and textured according to superannuated spatial notions out of the cities of Europe. We used to come here with our wooden things, our oily pigments and stiff sailcloth panels; we'd make pictures. I'd make pictures of you, you swimming, you sitting. I'd swim; you'd make a picture of that. Where did all those pictures get to, I've been meaning to ask you. I float off, into the islands. There are three knives on me: one for oysters, one for scallops, one for cutting beads out of green lilac or apple.