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He flew off west, and after the setting sun made his shadow unintelligible, we never saw him again

love poems

          Today I woke up and something was different. I think I dreamed about you. I wasn't tired when I got up this morning. My eyelids stayed open instead of asking to close again like they usually do. I think my top and bottom eyelids must be in love with each other, because they always seem to want to be together. I do a lot of sleeping here.
          Aaron wrote me a poem yesterday. He says he is in love with me, but I know better. So I wrote him a poem back explaining why he shouldn't be in love with me, but I don't think he really understood it. If someone wants to be in love, there's nearly nothing you can do to stop them. And I love you, but you're way aways down south with the storms. You laughed, but be careful please.

it started quietly

It's difficult to get used to the turning here, and I'm very sorry for the lack of posts, but I'm starting to settle in. Time is changeable, you know? But I get to see the sun rise over the valley each morning. Nevermind the early wakeup.

I like morning times because they are quiet.  Nights are loud and bright with possibility and silver and hope. But mornings are still, as if the world is still remembering how to fill the place with sound.  the world is bigger in the mornings- emptier. Nights are close, but in the morning the atmosphere is stretched out and clean. And if you have time to sit and watch it fill up with a cup of coffee while it cools enough for you to gulp down, well then. So much the better.

call to study

"and I plan to be forgotten when I'm gone, 'cause I'll be leavin in the fall"

I've gone away to school dears, far away to the mountains where Autumn kicks up her skirts early and whirls round and round with old man Winter until they two collapse in a pile indistinguishable. The twilight here feels, as if its always known you, and the buildings watch over us as they have for countless generations. Tradition is the most important thing you can have and the ghosts hold it tight. They creak through the abandoned mill across the river, faithfully blowing their mournful horns, a call to work, though no one answers but us anymore. We go to class with ghosts, go to sleep, eat with them, as many as the living here; the city even a ghost of its former self, struck down by the new age of computerization.

glass beads and old lace

Apologies about the absence. Been thinking about string and how it ties together, leads back to the start. I'm headed towards a new start as the year closes in on its final lap, wondering what needs to be left behind and if snow really does make a sound when it falls. Just when I'm supposed to be letting go, history holds on all the tighter- crumbling family albums and Grandfather so handsome in his uniform and navy cap, no wonder Grandmother waited. Bicycles and army tanks in Rome, and the gifts he brought back sit sentinel on the chest of drawers

distance is not for the fearful

Today was lemonshine instead of sun and I hung the wash very carefully out to dry. Been polishing the mother-of-pearl, coaxing life back into the finished wood, can’t let beautiful things die in dust. These days the wind blows harder, pulling and tugging with scents from days half dreamt, half remembered. My heart pushes with it, shh shh a little longer now dear, have to still it just a little longer. Must remember to tie down the shutters when its time to leave, can’t have things knocking about while I’m gone

indian summer

          The sycamore bark started falling in June that year. That should have been the first sign, but no one remembered to watch; expected anything like what came. Ignore the warnings and you stitch your own demise into your hem. The year she left, it was the summer of the coyote attacks. Everyone was scared. The animals came out at dusk- no one knew from where- they hunted in twos with almost human-like cunning from usually solitary creatures. By the start of July, three little girls had been bitten, no older than 6 and as young as 3. None had died but the men touched their shotguns with light hands and murmured that it would only be a matter of time.

          No one would remember that the moon had been curiously full for the past weeks, rising swollen and orange above the riverbeds which overflowed with a higher than usual tide. No one would recall the strange wind that blew in from the north that year; hot gusts that made the treetops dance till they moaned and knocked wires off poles. The wind smelled of blackberries and when it blew there were always more stars than usual. Things started turning up- things that had never been lost in the first place: buttons and keys and knives with mother of pearl handles, bits of glass and fine hair ribbons, gold-papered boxes, shells that belonged to fantastic creatures, and on the shore one morning, the delicate hand of a statue, fingers all broken off except for one, pointing out a judgment.