erosion

small fractured things, like strings so slightly out of tune they throw the whole song off kilter, like the sun vanishing behind a cloud on a february day, sending out only splintered, chilly warmth.

fissures, i mean: fissures appearing in surfaces we think we can trust, barely perceptible, the way that things erode and slide, the precarity of our own flesh and bones.

fractured memories and everythhing slipping together except for some small illuminated keepsakes, moments that might better bear forgetting. (who wants to see again and again a wounded look in his eyes, or long for adventurous nights whose image (&scent, &softness, &newness) only ram home the sort of metallic back-of-the-tongue nostalgia that twines too closely with regret?)

regret only in the sense of constantly mapping, and the unrecoverable joys long past.

needless to say, or maybe need to say, this is all an eruption of sorts; this is all a straining sinewy mass of all the things we don't say all day, all night, always. trapped behind my teeth are all sorts of regrets or maybe just reluctant instinctive niceties, fleeting as air, except air sticks around to remind us, to lay damp and heavy on our forearms and the backs of our necks.

maybe this is is what they meant by redemption.

(this sounds like such despair, but all i mean to write on is how beautiful the sun and the shards of melting ice.)

sledding

you're all complaining about winter and dark dampness and the smell of exhaustion in the air, but the snow is so beautiful when it piles up deep, buries our stairs, flies sideways through the wind so that everything is white on one side and bare and lonely on the other, trees standing tall and skeletal against the orange sky in the park. today my stomach and my arms are sore, my elbows aching just a little, but it's all worth it for those two hours we sledded down that hill, yelling and falling and running back up to the top, calf-deep, snow down the backs of our necks, to do it all over again. the best is not the steepest or the longest downhill slope; the best is to find a flattened, faintly reflective groove where others have sledded before, and it's smooth sailing from there. we made our own paths, too, between deep snow angels where i chased the sled as it rolled downhill and i sank in up to my knees, held it in front of my face to keep the shards of sleet from my wind-burned cheeks.

and then we dive into big bowls of spicy soup and dry clothes, march back out through the snow to one place after another and maybe winter's just the coziest time of all.

now it's february, and there's so much more of the cold still to come that i'm not aching for summertime yet, but i'm remembering how i wasted a lot of last year's sunshine by working two, three, four jobs, avoiding the people i loved, shutting myself away and aloof and rolling my eyes at every party i went to. remember, in the summer i hated hipster dance parties and all the raucous sweaty joy of the places i used to love. remember, in vienna, those dumb giddy thoughtless nights were what i missed. there has to be a compromise here. sometimes excitement feels empty. sometimes, i think, there seems to be a divide between things that are meaningful and things that are fun and things that are neither but make the time fly faster. (since when do we want time to go so fast, anyway? i want to wallow in each moment for as long as i can.)

hansel & gretel

the winds pink from my cheeks, i mean, my cheeks pink (from the), i mean, the trails we leave behind as we move, like the faint voluminous traces of snails, like crumbs dropped by betrayed children in the woods.

sometimes we resemble nothing more than palindromes, for all our purported asymmetry. all sudden reversions and revisions, all suddenly telescoping mosaics, kaleidoscopes of infinitely patterned forms. stuttering again and again back to old familiar themes, moments of regression.

each stem you trim short grows out again and again, seeking the shears of yr disapproval. pruning is another way of blessing - creating sharp borders from which meaning can unfold.

i could write a book on this stuff, he says - man, i could write a book on the things i seen.

in winter, things fall to pieces. sometimes the fall is more of a slow slide, a fading of edges, a whimper of a descent or dissolution. the instability of all these connecting forces, these ties we forge to shore ourselves up against the reminders of our own precarity, reminders which hover beyond the corners of our eyes.

in the winter, we close our eyes against the sting of the falling snow and jog blindly forward in search of warmth. (the soft ways bodies acquiesce to one another in the dark hours of morning.)