Floodwaters

From the edge of the sea, a non-view

I bought a Moleskin sketchbook last week, but it's still blank. I can't think of anything in the course of my day worthwhile to put in it. I just finished three weeks of searching for a hidden room but didn't find it, claiming it was "lost in the gradient" though the gradient was not drawn either. Waiting for a table for twenty minutes at least at Peet's today, I tried to read people to see if they would leave, creating fiction to pass the din and time, though too often my fictions were tall tales. The bored were the eager and the silent the occupied. It rained for a week along the northeast, and floodwaters came upon us, from Framingham to Storrow. A night along Atlantic Avenue where taxi cabs and commuters floated by the Federal Reserve made me think of that city in my mind that I've glimpsed every here and there for a good number of years now. I met my parents for tea at the Four Seasons and looked out the window at Boston Common while the rain persisted, while the leaves persisted in a hushed vernal lush as the sun set behind an endless gauze of clouds. Some might say a sarcophagus. I think the clouds make for hermitage. In hermitage, water seeping into and out of the ground is at the scale of fingers and toes, shoelaces and the points of umbrellas; points of leaves and pin-hole photographs. A hard wind came this morning and with it the sun, and then died off when it blowed itself over into the Atlantic. The city dried, and I put on another layer of wool. I munched on crusty bread at the last of the latter's face-shone light, and walked through the square where tourists and flakes cringed toward the wind. Then went home, and turned on the lights. Shed wool for a Classics hood, and sat down at the table to read.


Chanson d'installation: Arvo Part, Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten