Ada, Arbor

When to begin? It began with Ava. Well, I don't know how far back plans were made to take a trip to Ida. They were going to see Edie there. All I know is that when Ava and the rest of them all made a stop here on their trip south was the first I heard of it. Except that I remember when I first met her I mispronounced her name, I said "Eva."



Not long after, my own travelling plans began to take shape. I knew the route would take me across old Iroquois territories. There was initially some vexation over placenames; was the destination on lake Otsego, in Otsego county? Or was it the somewhere in the city of Oswego, on the shores of lake Ontario, the seat of Oswego county? As the Susquehanna runs south from its headwaters at lake Otsego, it passes first through Otego, then 70 miles downriver through Owego. I prepared a sheaf of maps and set off; soon I was in the clear air and brilliant sun and the trouble with these names ceased to bother me. As I passed to the east of Cortland, heading toward the north country, I was spurred on by thoughts of the great orchards that lay ahead of me.

She said the prettiest place on Earth was Baltimore at night

Our old sailor-friend Daniil Pavloff VIII made this elegant film several years ago but it never achieved any kind of distribution until recently.

The warm wet of a morning not yet turned, day snaked flush with day, spines aligned. Lines unwind, splinter to brittle segments and rays. The stab of it! When I think I'm grown away, far-off enough now to not mind the gap: skipped beat at every third stroke, a stutter somewhere in the heart. Simple, unmendable grief.

What do I do with this love? Interrogating myself just leads back into the big questioning breath-hungry chest which is so overwhelmed with feeling that it can only manifest as a huge swallowing hole such that everything goes around and around uselessly like in an astrophysicist's dimension-theory doughnut model, into the hole and out again without ever having gained any depth.

STOP. Sleepy eyes & spittly beads.

DINNER ON THE GROUNDS

"Sweet; unsweet; coke."

BOUSECHEEK

Too hot to keep chocolate; it runs all over. Every time I take a sip of mate it immediately comes dribbling out through my skin. At the botanical garden I was talking to Jophet by the cacao tree and couldn't believe the amount of brine coming out of me. I got sunburned from sitting & reading in total shade. The twisty red candle on the windowsill relaxed its shape and leaned itself curvily against the pencil-sharpener. I put icecubes in my lemonwater to cool it and they were gone in less than a minute. I put four more in; they were pea-sized a minute later when I went to drink.

Lenya and I were back and forth between Chişinău and Medea gathering our weathers to go south with my tocayo to fête Jophet, who awaited us – and her thirtieth birthday – in Tallapoosa. In one of those meantime evenings I rode bikes out the bay with some Chişinău friends to see if my uncle's schooner was coming in off the banks yet. It was. I'd spoken with Lenya that evening and we had a loose plan to find Jophet at dark and watch some bad films with him; leaving the sunset-glow of the pier toward that end I had the pleasure of encountering Ralu, whom I'd not met before but about whom I'd heard much from Lenya. Her sister took this photograph.

They were clumsy together. The three had shared a couple Augusts' worth of the intimacy of I want to know where this one is going.

Jophet is in Tallapoosa in joy of thirty-first birth & thirtieth cumplimiento. Her bicycle moves through the palpable heat like a flinder-mouse, finely awake to each synchronous valence. She navigates libraries with the grace and force of her years. Her succulents thrive. She can be reduced to no collection of details. Having ganged south to give love and hugs engendered perennially in them by her and having now ganged north again, her tribu already wants more such outlet!

Have you ever seen anything like that before in your whole entire life?

Harvest, Herbst, Κάρπος

Many species of Lycaenid, including our common Everes comyntas, are myrmecophilous in the larval stage – that is, their caterpillar-body will secrete sweet liquors tasty enough to ants to cause them to tend and protect the caterpillar much as a little frontier family would their milch cow. One species, however, complicates or upsets this image most compellingly. Far from settling for the peaceful model available to it as a Lycaenid, whereby it might live out its larval life transforming vegetable matter partly into butterflyward body mass and partly into a sugar-tithe for its protectors, Feniseca tarquinius chooses, inexplicably, fauna over flora as the fodder for its larval stage. Alone in this choice among all North American butterflies, the handsome caterpillar gobblingly ravages its way among the plump little bodies of the Wooly Aphid (Eriosomatinae): the larva of which, it should be noted – and there must be some kind of reason for this disturbing quasi-symmetry – is myrmecophilous.

Bellows Falls Library

I try to be present!

Happy Birthday Ian!

Applying mulch to raspberry beds in sweet May's sudden summer heat: forehead drops prayer-beads of sweat into the riotous dandy-grass alive with bees between my brother's australian boot and my brother's australian boot. Eight species of butterfly intimately met over the day, three of them exposed to reversal film, two of them taken onto my finger. No bulls, so much the better. A baby instead. Birdlets' beaks gaping in their nest. A couple dozen good oysters from Long Island Sound.

love for you on motherday

Cold / Caldo /:/ Black / Blanc

Opposition always devolves immediately into something gentler, more complicated, more porous toward the ichors of loving-kindness. That's if the energies of breath are left to their own magical devices; being that our bodies bound breath in muscular constrictions and that from this we tend to generate notions of selfhood identifiable with body, sometimes the fiction of opposition is maintained and carried to elaborate rhetorical ends by parties who feel it auspicious to oppose one another.

The perennial presence of you in me; the continuous vibration of those moments of luminous intimacy, the surprising way they're free to move in time loosely, erratically, irreverently, with rasp of wing-rustle, like how a perfect early Mourning Cloak moves in space. Or like how a Baltimore Checkerspot does, bright and brindled under the light of your lucky eyes that time in the grass above where the sweet and the salt waters mix.

I could mask this. I could pretend that my memories are of my young youth and of Tamara, whose school was across the piazza from mine in Baku and with whom I precociously eloped in the dory we built together over the course of two tense, rainy months; or that this first, indelible, irreducible love was wrought in me by sinewy Rula, the tough fifty-year-old Greek with the disarming serviceberry eyes who'd been a guerrilla leader during the civil war and whom I came to know in her exile in Tashkent through the sister of the tutor I'd engaged on barter-terms to help me with the pleasurably vexatious jargon of Το Χρονικόν του Μορέως.

I can wear a mask, I can put a mask aside. It's you, You are that love, you're the one I think of and dream of, the one my heart smiles at. My whole heart moves out of this body, embraces that one (yours); forgets its place; stumbles; is ecstatic.

I feel your wings moving, you're on my shirtsleeve; the air between your powdery scales and my pale blue squinty eyes is a live, sensitive tissue. Our presence is common. I feel you kissing me, me kissing you, in love, soft mouths, gently, again and again, continuously – even though I'm just here in the sunlight, sitting, and you're just there on my shirtsleeve.