"Wanna make love on the sidewalk?" "No thanks!"

Think of it. What is there to say? When you watch cars driving by--differentially speeded, so to speak--from underneath a picnic table (the grain gum-stucked), where will you draw the absurd line between the thoughts that seem to spill out of the sights?

These are the questions of and for the Steps-->how what you just did is affecting you to many a varying degree, as is every experience you've ever had, as though you too were not a process and experience.

Consider the strengths of affect-->how close and immediate Things seem stickier somehow...but also a bit of their size is at issue, as unequally influential. My last class is still talking through me, for instance, as is that guy whose eyes i met for a moment, in that it was (unfortunately) I who looked away. These things push along the Steps, so to speak.

But to go even further back we must admit of an even stronger sway of force. An experience from two nights ago is far from you right now, you see, and it is still the sharpest one pervading your thoughts (as i experience them) and also you (as yet a process). Moreso, the person with whom the experience was shared must too be admitted as occupying an even larger part of your passive mind...See?

(Even so, the future is here too. Seven minutes before needing to leave: DV training; two girls you'll see there, one compact/beige and the other tall/tiny/darkdark; a Mr. as yet still expected; and something like sleep, at last.)

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (4/29/07)

Not optimism: self-preservation.

The old woman sits shirtless. She is cross-legged on her bed, staring at a candle-stick. She saw it through conception but it will outlive her.

There is a lamp on, defying the day. Its beams are not warm on her skin. They feel like the gaze of a disappointed lover.

She brings her eyes to her lap, looks at her hands. They are soft beyond the shapes they've made. She thinks they are the same as an infant, wrinkled and barely alive.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (4/18/07)

Oh, to Grandmother's house we go!!

The sleeping woman had never seen her flowers lit by a midnight moon, but they stood before the sleet-gray flood with faces upturned as if this were nothing. This whole place of deep, soft carpet and Parisian floral scents had been similarly neglected, and still its ethereal shapes wore on into their existence. From the streaming light at the wall-swallowing window, the room's only furniture was revealed: the form of a tiny wooden chair; the outline of a delicately curving vanity, itself bathed in the semi-light of its looking-glass reflection; the dark queen bed, furthest and harboring the sound of thick breathing—all these things dressed scarcely in silver and shadow.

To abandon this room through its squeaking, sliding door would be to embark along a corridor that doesn't end past the dark wood suddenly lining the walls. Rather the tight, column of space is further emulated by the back of black sofas and the face of dark desks. With each imagined step the wooden floor beneath feet would whine a painstaking sigh in their course through the room and lead to a tiled kitchen. Only the impression of the hulking furniture would remain in a further venturing of the lightless house, and the dusty cold would seem an everlasting scent. Eventually, the single light source infiltrating the glass pane of a lumbering door, set away in a northern corner, would prove too overwhelming to deny.

Stepping outside, the undulating wheat grass was brilliant as it swayed protectively from the glowing walls of our house to the lofty barn a few hundred yards away, reaching beyond them to disappear into the hollow skyline. Only the warm smell of the trees, succinct in the cold darkness, bearing both fresh and rotting versions of avocados, figs, tangerines, and kumquats, tolerantly mingling with the almonds, walnuts, and pecans among them, gave witness to the whispering of the endless fields. These sights, here under moonlight, were the house's idea of a neighborhood.

From the stars' perspective this house would not appear distinct. Only a few acres beyond it was another, and past that one, still another; strangely boxy things stretching out into the hundreds. Each was free to fancy itself alone, masked by its own tall grasses, and virtually all of them do during these quiet hours. Together, their mistaken claim on township is made nonetheless in earnest.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (4/15/07)