73

Look, this made me think of you. Beneath a few oak trees, N and I watched a whole lifecycle, worms crawling along bark, moths midair, empty cocoons etched and opened to the flutter. Watching a moth halfway out, we wondered whether they awoke to a sense of discomfort, the need to break out, to find the opening. It struck me that they had no language to describe their experience. I mean, I should know that, but still, that means it would not be like that. Then a worm spinning midair, carried by the wind.

(I didn’t understand what that was about, but there was something exciting about that: see—what you don’t understand is also something beautiful.)

In a conversation over lunch, the concept of off-screen space came up. The term is from film studies and is used to describe the space that is not seen in a film but is still suggested to exist. Someone moves out of frame. Someone places the camera. Someone titles their article: “The Terrifying, Humorous, and Thematic Potential of Off-Screen Space.” Someone sits down to catalogue what cannot be seen but must be there. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Film Studies, there are six areas of off-screen space. These being the four sides of the frame as well as behind the set and behind the camera. These being a way of imagining space as a cube and the outside unseen. These being a small number of possibilities to describe what is gestured to but does not appear.

There are so many official accounts and so many photographs. There is enough on screen to never need to see again. There is so much on screen and out there, so many worms. Every image suggests an absence. Every word needs a certain fragility to pass through. There appear so many less moths in the video I took of them, even though there were so many. Next to that, the thought: we decompose. We forget the right thing and put a picture as a stand in. The frame: another enclosure made by an outside.

(I want to work on a project about description’s outside. I am talking about the edge of my mouth, the top of my finger on the keyboard. Imagine six areas.)

Two years ago, you’d place your hands together like you were taking a photograph and speak the click. I have a picture of you doing it, and then another of you doing it in the mirror, framing me framing you. What is off-screen space in the context of your hands. What are the six areas of the space when talking about your hands. The passage from off screen to out of mind. The passage from terrifying to humorous to thematic. What themes do you think about when you think about being terrified? What themes describe the contours of your thinking? What is humorous about the six-sided cube? Now place the camera. Now turn it on. Now open your eyes.

I want to speak in the off-screen space of my writing, outside the assignment to bring one photograph. You have to start somewhere, and we are already so far along. Who will write “The Terrifying, Humorous, and Thematic Potential of The Worm Dangling in the Wind?” Who will write the history of the six sides of your hands? Wouldn’t it be a relief to disappear, to retreat to the space beyond your hands? Isn’t there something else, begging to be brought into being? Look away from these words. There are six areas of space that cannot be seen. Look, I am trying to tell you that they made me think of you.

72

What is one to do when a text compels you to stop reading? What to do when the text asks the reader, who is not you but is somehow already you, to open a file and write in order to revise, redo and undo in order to remain in this shifting state of revision? This could be called a practice, or simply a call, but I want to say that it is an opening, a kind of widening that leads to a smile or the ruse of recognition. It is a certain kind of writing that happens, or really a certain kind of reading, that starts to rip the seams off an otherwise organized day. The afternoon starts pulling away while the wind as the succulent’s thin body moves, made so visible because someone decided it had gotten too big, half of it chopped to bits now, and even though that’s another story it feels like it belongs here, in this long distraction.

How is anyone to make sense of the impossible fact that a text might recognize something in us that we don’t yet recognize in ourselves, given the all too possible fact that the one who wrote the text doesn’t yet and probably will never know us? This is to ask—in a circular fashion so as to trace that widening form that pulls a thread toward formlessness—what does it mean to recognize friendship in someone you don’t even know? And how might friendship be the thing that pulls us away from what we name process, but which is really a narrowing down, a honing, a set of tasks and items, catalogued and named?

For years, I worried that my writing had devolved into uselessness because I’d lost the ability to write essays, until I realized that what I was working on was a kind of poetry. I was trying to find the means to ask a certain kind of question about the relationship between writing and reading and the people who do these things. I was trying to find the moment in which one slips into the other, when a kind of pathological need supersedes the possibility of getting through the next item on the to-do list or the first twenty-five-minute interval of “Time to focus!” from some expertly crafted study method.

The practice is a way of tracing of a series of distractions. The practice is about waiting, then asking, then waiting again. It is still that, even as distance accumulates and other projects take hold. It is still there, memory of another body and the sense that somebody else could be thinking the same. A book and misrecognition. A question. How much of what we know began as misunderstanding, or a subtle pull—the low hum of a desire to not need to explain or to get back to what we were already doing—there, or where we thought we were.

71

Poetry, for a long time, was yours. I would borrow it from your bookshelf or read as a way of getting closer to you. I had been thinking at the time about video art, and what it meant to screen, or not screen something. The aesthetic object, I had come to realize, was a means rather than an end. I made videos so that we could talk about what they gestured toward. They were abstract because I wanted to talk about something else. For example, the sound of the word “you” in various languages, or what came after writing, if we started at its limit. Even when I didn’t know what I meant, I felt like I was getting somewhere. Even when the images fell out of our conversations I didn’t mind. We were still speaking, and so were they.

At a conference, a man presented a talk which included a super cut of young women whose videos consisted solely of them asking for video ideas. In each video they looked directly into their webcam, asking if anyone had any suggestions for them, ideas for future projects. He talked about an emptiness that he perceived in these videos. A video about another video, yet to be made. A call anticipating a response. The women are speaking to an imagined community in a kind of sureness. Someone must be listening, or else, why the images. Or else, why make at all. They understand images the same way I do—they are an excuse, a tear onto an otherwise. A way. 

I don’t know now if I can even say if meaning comes after or before. It’s as though meaning is some other thing, out there with having something to say and the desire to be given the right name. That’s not to say that there isn’t direction or something being traced—a moment, attended to the way someone asking you the right question is, finally, a kind of relief, even if nothing changes in the answering. Some problems are matters of dislocation, wavering in the kind of place making that is nothing other than sitting down for coffee across from a friend, or the kind of orienting that's settled without question. As in, I’m sleeping here, on the couch for a week. As in, we are both leaving, already gone. 

70

I didn’t tell you, I wanted to, other side of the text message slipped between falling and falling asleep. Slow hands and not going slow enough. The ocean grumbles and so I paused. I know, when the water pulls itself back it makes even the smallest stones tense up—they say something among the green, among the overcast upturned afternoon. Go small, go there—suspension of susurration in what was our method, our asking. The question was posed, and so there was some expectation of answering, or at least, of imagining it. I had no answer, nor question to place behind it. And then what. What stirring at the edges, what ripples in the cloud or the sense that a cursor keeps an evening at bay. What about it… Years ago, when I’d trail off and say something to the effect of, “I don’t know what I’m talking about,” you’d say, each time, “You do.” I still hear that echo. We still love each other, one wave chasing after another, disappearing in the undertow. There’s a way that everything works out: same lesson, same sea. Relation is nothing but an instance, being in someone else’s timing. Here, the waves, here, the sounding. Tell me the sound of your breathing, no—stay there, wait—here. Our small clearing, bedsheets and half past ten. There’s a succulent out there, chopped to bits and left to dry on the lawn. I didn’t tell you, half of it is still growing, standing still. I didn’t tell you, these are questions of presence, which is to say, these are questions of love.

69

and then what of words? how to pull the pieces of a language together and say something of someone, to someone. say you, say me, say with a quivering confidence that we still walk the same steps. we see the waves falling into waves, we know that form is doing something before and after us, we know that before speaking of any color there is light and some kind of reverberation. there are things smaller than we can know, and yet we still say that we know them.

how to remain there, here, momentary passage among all that fog. to take illegibility at its word is to understand that there is not a curtain pulled before the truth, or a fogged out window, or a door. there is not something beyond that thing we keep saying is between us. we can keep trying to name it, but nothing works quite like a shape whose function is a breaking. after detailing our short history there were so many questions, and there was a pause. where do we go from here?
 

68

Over the summer last year, I did a challenge where you’re asked to write 1000 words a day, every day for two weeks. The idea is that by the end of the two weeks you’ll have what could be a small manuscript, and every day you can say, “I am writing,” or “I wrote today.” The idea is that you have a lot of anxiety about whether you are a writer or not, and if you are not writing then you cannot be one. The idea is that by accepting a challenge to write you’ll be sure that at least within the brackets of the fourteen days you’re someone who writes, and so you can think about other things, for example, the way you don’t know how to talk about an ending. Even the placeholder is wrong. On the other side of that explanation is the possibility for want to be something of its own. If not form, then breeze, something being pushed, some movement. I am saying there is some kind of movement on the other side the explanation. Who can say or write for something other than putting up another name. You’re you, subtle noise in the dark, passage across a page, disappearing fuzz in the pass of it all. The idea is that focusing on a goal distorts the process to a point that it is hardly worth doing. If it could, it would be about duration, not accumulation. The idea is that on the other side of this page is a movie I want to make about being at the edge of the ocean, watching the sun from the other side of the world. What you are reading is a way of producing a series of roundabout methods to get to what would be the opening image: deep blue in crawling forms, speckles of light tumbling over itself into more blue, more unforms, a wave cresting over, blue, a breaking, a forming, a line.

67

We take the same steps. How the waves disappear before saying what they allude to, how the letting makes an accumulation in place of an opening. It was a wave, I watched the passage break into foam, into darkness, and pulled my hood over my head to shield from the wind. I confused a wave for a passage. I confused me and you for a twilight. At the top of a small hill, we watched the ocean slowly disappear. How will I know when I make a mistake. Low flying passage of twilight, of me and you, of breaking over. How the letting. I tried to match my breath to each passing wave, but even they are too fast for me. Gibbous moon as a small sun. The need to find another way to contain desire. A line in black ink marks the edge of one thought from another. How will I find expansiveness in touch when I cannot touch you. How, for a moment, the questions happened slowly and there was enough time to ask them twice. There was a holding, I happened at once. Place is an accumulation of meaning, it is a kind of practice. Meaning is an accumulation of form. We step out onto the low grasses and walk across the bluffs. The cliffs are the edge of a letting. Form is the relation between things as a kind of container. It is a way to talk about the present while talking about the past. Pull back and watch a droplet slide down the edge of a leaf, succulent body, edges turned red as if dipped into some liquid, as if also noticing. And then somebody and your wild you. And then what. The steps do something other than knowing. A leaf can always be confused for something other than itself, for a form.

66

Here, a touch, a feel. I woke up with a phrase in my head and the thought of exceeding the bounds of our prescribed reason. It is a kind of constant running away that we’re doing. It is a running at a very slow pace, and it is in that slow escape that we met. Our place we make in the passage of just passing through, a conversation about what is inscribed on the body at birth, histories of accumulation and violence, not exactly disavowed, but rather, held close in a means destruction. To speak of a kind of sabotage, to plan from one’s own position. To make uninvisible an obscurity while at the same time seeking a kind of imperceptibleness. The task is an impossible undoing. It is a question in the shape of a hand. It is our walking past the edge of usefulness through the darkened underbrush.

What kind of passage must we make to write our own inscription against and among each other? Touch of pen to page, of hand to arm, subtle embrace in our just passing through. Our passage by the ocean is a short series of evenings and the possibility of continuing to begin. Last night we walked to the park at the top of the hill, up the small set of steps and to a table that overlooked the valley. All those small lights I’ve dismissed as lives which can never be known. Is beauty the recognition of a certain unspeakable possibility? And if so, a possibility of what? And if not, is it that beauty rests on the sense of an otherwise? There, different feel, a touch, a sense we get when walking in suburbia’s eucalyptus cavern. Could be mistaking abandon for refuge. Could be, but is there not a certain refuge here, in breath and wind and shimmering?

65

Explain yourself. People want the backstory, an explanation for the injunction and a reason for breaking away. The language confounds, the poem doesn’t make itself clear enough, the images are not grounded in specific places. They are not even images, they are thoughts, and it is hardly poetry, the product of the work done here. What’s with the refusal to open the door, to shine a light onto the inspiration, the private process out of which form is regurgitated in the form of an extended reply? And even as a reply, the form is unclear. It does not cede itself. Even as it recedes, it concedes to contradiction.

What to make of a mess of language arranged into a series of small piles? What to make of something that doesn’t make itself out to be something otherwise, which presents no use, except for a proposition, framed in the form of a question, of which it attempts to answer: Can articulation move toward something other than redress? Or, to frame it another way, can there be writing which does not exist against and in response to a general accusation of opacity?  

I am trying to carve out a space beside the text, which I have placed on the other side. What is at work here is an extended experiment, a certain breaking off which is also a breaking over. The whole process collapses because of the need for a process, a way of doing things so as to be able do them again. Methodology is described always in reverse, a means of correcting a certain slippage between accumulation and intention.

Last week, we spoke about the fact that our interest in abstraction leads us to have conversations in which neither one of us is exactly sure of the thing we’re getting at—we’re both groping at the contours of something that is still coming into being. We had this conversation while walking by a large roadway, past a series of what I’d presumed were student apartments, each with small lawns bursting with green. Faded blue wood and stucco and washed-out concrete. We were speaking about the limits of knowing, trying to get around that, not around the edge, but rather, to its limit, to brush against its grain.

If there is a place we know that language can get to, why not begin from there? At the bottom of the mirror is not another window, it is rather an equal mix of darkness and green; it is not seeing. The difficulty in explanation is that the project is itself explanatory, and yet at the same time, it is an attempt at breaking explanation at the very moment of its arrival. It happens alongside the call to explain the insufficiencies and excessiveness, to account for a deficit the origin of which cannot be explained in the constraints of a text message. No matter. If the issue was a matter of time, I could understand that. There too is a place I am trying to arrive to but have not yet reached.

64

The slow outside, the slough, useless wanting and the undoing of spring. Not yet. What I wanted to give you was a giving if such a thing could exist, all movement in along the river, belonging to no one, being to no one, undertone implying a worn out flannel, a fray. Nothing of the capacity to own or ownership, or the capacity to contain oneself or speak of or as oneself. Back then it was none of that, but then broke, articulation in the shattering of an evening into cool air, the sweetness and rippled clouds.

«a note on method: to break apart, to be partial, to be impatient to the text, to the breaking, suggested formations form corrections, to suggest that as we explained, to the left, to spill, spilling an a blackened page»

The swamp so low that we walked along it’s edges as birds dipped their heads. There was a time when I believed in the depth of intuition, autocorrected passages in the book someone else would write if they didn’t know you, imagined outside where judgement hangs around, lurking next corner, next block between the curb and the door. Low flying without speed, with no use for that, slow process of partiality becoming its own whole. We skip around the concerns and try our hands at something else, plexiglass of the same kind of thing and thing and thing.

It was with you that I felt beautiful, felt unseen, the total capacity to never see myself in the right way, out with vision, a photo of myself that made me give up on understanding. I was beautiful then. It was what you gave, the beauty I gave you to give back, small golden hoops and not seeing, forgot the whole thing on the walk home, no photograph ever, no capacity, the walk back along a suggested route which bypassed the traffic in a rambling.

It’s not that brokenness is embarrassing, it’s that encountering the edge of capacity makes the horizon so visible, so obvious, that I realized exactly that I’ve been pushing away from a kind of impossible center of bounding, it is not bounding, it is desire, it is not desire, it is desire wrapped in the possibility of being bound. It is that very outside.

63

It was a wave all along.

It was a wave all along. It was repeated, your breaking, the you in the otherwise of the morning in the thick of the overgrowth. Form disappears in a video of a small piece of glass shattering into powder.

It was a wave all along. It was repeated, your breaking. And then somebody holds your wild you and sends you a postcard in the shape of a text message, a picture of the page of a book.

It was a wave, the glass breaking into all those tiny shards and the cup of your holding. A book is a picture in the form of a postcard. Read receipts exist for the purpose of cataloguing attention or the trace of it. Before the glass is broken, it is heated, and a drop of molten glass falls into cold water, causing it to harden with an immense amount of potential energy. They call the ability to shatter an immense amount of potential energy. They call the shattering.

It was a wave all along, the repetition of the tide is a way of watching the morning. I watched the glass break. It is in the breaking that the form articulates itself all at once and disappears. They call that disappearance a powder.

It was a wave, a text message. Your wildness made to be broken as a picture.

It was a wave all along, the glass broke and in its shattering into powder its function was realized. It was made to be broken. The form of the glass is such that it holds an immense amount of potential energy, so when you send a text message you might see a trace of it. A postcard is a picture of the page of a book.

It was a wave all along, the patterned breaking of the video of the tide. I repeated the pixelation. Form is a way of holding what they call an immense amount of potential energy. They call breaking into disappearance, articulated as form. And then somebody holds your pixelated you in the shape of a text message. Read receipts exist for the purpose of cataloguing attention.

It was a wave just the waves. The book disappears into a video and somebody holds a text message out to you, repeating the tide. The repetition of the morning is something other than form. They call what’s left over a powder. Before the glass is broken, it is heated, and a drop of molten glass falls into cold water, causing it to harden with an immense amount of potential energy. Send somebody a postcard in the shape of the page of a book. Text messages exist to catalogue attention in the form of energy.

It was never a wave. The tide articulates form as that which is broken. A postcard is a video of a book in the shape of a text message. They call that disappearance an immense amount of potential energy.

62

So much is lost in the everyday doing. Yesterday the midst of an e-mail broke some small thing in me. Misted plastic sheeting showing a small fissure. The call creates the landing. E-mails insert pointed arrows to indicate previous utterance in a moment of refrain, says Sawako Nakayasu. I say, again with the breaking, the body. Refrain from holding what holds together.

How slow it is to body the loss. How slow it is to keep going. Can not letting (grief) pass also be a passage? ask vqueeram and Vishal Jugdeo. Yes, I say, and walk the passage from the kitchen to the door of my room, illuminated underside of the question turned fortress, turned awning away from the rain. They say, more desire than function, and I say once more for the sake of breaking, for the sake of the light in the kitchen which is also hole to the sky.

In the book about a touch you can really feel, it says to touch the pages of the book as though the paper was not paper but skin, and not just skin but that which you desire to touch. It says, go cliché it even further, make the soft threads into the you of a sleeping wildness, a caress from some past or distant longing. It says to put the paper against your face. Not just touch, feeling. And if not that, the want of it, that substrate feel of the not-yet thwarted, the pickled remembrance of the how much want, of the immeasurable overflow. The rain, falling straight to earth, asks, is it ever possible to be directionless?

61

This is the improvisational underside of some other conversation we were going to have but forgot about. Instead, it was an image of a page and the edge of your hand. Instead, an invitation to go to the cables within which our shared passages pass for data and pass under the whatever of content and containerization. We share under the banner of banality something so precious we can’t even name it—can’t bring it into the right folder or give it the right tag. We let it pass and so we let it go. We pass small notes between thousands of miles and years of time. We’re trying to find another excuse to put everything down and talk about heartbreak and a piece of the sky. We’re exhausted with the calculus of the application and the approach, our own bullshit we took on without even noticing. Re-opening the same document under a different name with a new heading, we moved the line from the end of the fourth paragraph to beginning of the third. Do you hear it, or is that just the sound of the space heater doing its thing from across the room? At some point the need to distinguish becomes indistinguishable from what we’re trying to get away from. There was a flurry of snow and all I could see was white butterflies from that summer pulling into the humid garage. I mean, there was a fluttering and I wanted to touch you. I read an account of the world we used to live in together and cried when the author said that home happened when we were twenty-three. It happened when we were twenty. What we have in sequence are our shared failures to make something of the afternoon and a blanket that makes up a small mountain range. Illegibility was the first awning we met under. Turning our bodies into questions always runs the risk of not being oriented toward each other. But what other choice is there? 

60

Face wash in the kitchen sink across from a small bag of green onion and eggplant, murmuring. Speak. Don’t speak. Don’t pause. The exactitude of my writing is a three-point turn, inconsequential movement toward rest, its failure to name being something to try to find measurement in. And if not measure, what do these words add up to? Could be six extra limbs. Could be three more mouths. Could be, but what of when being dissolves into a finger?

Ruler, timestamp, word count, message—send. Don’t park there without the right sticker. The moon rises next to mars and another planet doesn’t twinkle. Last year I thought I’d seen Saturn rising over the sunset, only to watch it grow into an airplane. Don’t speak so fast, don’t talk. Don’t fall asleep in the midst of speaking. I fell asleep in your arms and woke up there, not knowing. I drove the same passage of road to read you. I asked, and you answered a song of stars, a galaxy, valentine’s day spent by the ocean making out in a car.

Lips move and the numbers add up. A whole mouthful is packed into a small jar and placed before you, before language cracked on the fault line between here and LA. One month teeters over, then another. A science is formed in the space between two hands. Bits of sediment break off in a resuscitation of a forgotten collection of love songs from high school, not homesickness exactly, but a catalogue of longings for what was before the winter. A pause, pockets drenched in sand.

People develop their own code that pulls them together. Little language of less than a year’s time. Is the ocean the same as the ocean, does the metaphor still read, lingering in blue?
 

59

Too much excellence. Even the dissenters speak from a small ledge in great style, perfect anonymity, excellent font choice, footnoted hypocrisy acknowledged into more excellence. Official communications dissolve into two, break into four, shift into eight, something into sixteen, and keep shifting, inbox at eighty percent capacity. I still received the updates and marked my tasks done, gave my reactions, and conspired in encrypted messages. Behind every paragraph formatted into Garamond is a passage of someone else’s writing that I took a photo of to show you. I want to give it all away and still believe something else is possible. Generosity has no font, no method other than remaking, other than walking to the edge of the unknowing, even if such a movement isn’t graceful and the appointment was missed. The plea is not to read me, it is to find another way. A room with the others who failed to get it together on time or got preoccupied with whose hair is in the borrowed book, or whose recipe reminds me of when we first met. There’s so much aching generality of the limits we have. How better to body the loss than to try to know you. We come together at the end of the world to finally be, and from there a whole sea expands from our wanting too much, our asking too much, our hunger, our yearning for something other than an internship and an advisor. We’re here for the secret book club where we go to read each other. It is to linger, to not linger so long. There are so many others. We need to get back to each other.

58

What is broken, what does not break, what is breaking in the broken, what is movement against which we break with desire? What is exception, what is comparable, what list of compatible, what is replaceable breakable, what waves to you? What is moon, what other planet where instead of two there is one, what is one, what is we, what is waves breaking over, break us into desire, into moonlight, what light broken into lightness? What is lightness, what needs assistance from the cashier, what is too light to be measured, what is the assistance that needs a break, what is the wavelength, what is the barcode, what is edged out of summertime, what calls itself December? What is the break in the waves, what is hands cupped hands, what is behind the ear, what is on its way, what is too early, what is overnight day-late next-day, what is sleeping next to us, what is next door? What distance keeps us, what widens it’s smile and shows its teeth, what gives itself away, what is the desire in the breaking, what is the shape of your breaking? What is desire now, after all we know?

57

I'm thinking today about puddles and the capacity to be moved—the capacity to be puddled—in the muddying sense—might also be the capacity to be out of sense, out of step with the pace of things, something not quite right—a puddle-break with the sense-making—puddle the morning by reading the invitations we keep sending to each other—puddle the sky with the sky—puddle the capacity with its own reflection, streetlights and passing cars, wavering droplets and set of bicycle wheels—puddle the movement we call puddling—puddle writing without waiting, without promise—without saying we know what we’re are talking about—puddle in what we know—that we're asking for more puddles

56

I said we but mean I. I said you but mean me. I was tired and something slipped. Some apologies are merely ways of repositioning power, default of the default of some forgotten memory of being pushed in the mud. Polka dotted umbrella opened into the escape I don’t want anymore. It wasn’t the plan to bring you into this, but it was already a mess—already entangled or drenched or whatever metaphor someone else will come up with to name the thing we are for each other. The rain collects itself on anything it can, and we keep each other without asking. Some things are not about the asking. The exhaustion of gender is the question blown into noise, noised into color, pattered into screens which say something about what was once called representation, when I still thought I could talk about that without lying. But there is no lie here. When I said you, I meant you. I meant we and the apathy of puddles.

55

Linger on the lingering, unwrap in the citrus air and fog.
Barthes says that interdisciplinarity is about making something that belongs to no one.
Which means not even us. Which means what we are after is a giving away.
Less a honing, a sureness or even a losing. Less writing without writing to you,
and less a response than a call—a continual shifting, a listening, a pause.

54

In a moment of pause, we talked about the inability to articulate what it was that we were trying to study, and how actually that was a place to come together under—the umbrella of the as-yet-unexplainable, the repeated failure to name a destination other than the refusal of what has been assigned, or the desire to get through with it so we can go eat dinner together. My own interest is in articulation and its failure, writing about writing or whatever we call it when we sit down to talk together after class. Even if it’s not a real thing of study in the way they want it to be, I don’t care. I love the thing we make in the continual renewal to find each other.

Then there was talk of studying puddles, and I speculated on how to write in puddle form. A puddle takes the shape of its shallow container, is temporary, and reflects the world in its immediate proximity. Is the puddle an excess or everything but? And fragility, is the puddle fragile? How to write like the liquid stumbled across when the clouds clear, the torn-up asphalt edges of the sky, leftovers of tire treads and the residual softness, all that blue pouring back toward sky. A body takes shape around the possibility of a new form, and we take in so much without ever realizing. “I want to poke a hole in my words so that people notice you are not here,” writes T. Fleischmann. “Comfortable divots you could fill some day, if you wanted to.” Doesn’t that sound like a puddle?

53

The question is broached: who are the entries addressed to? Who inhabits the “you” which ripples through this series of rubble, successive reaches toward what is without use, small piles of picking up the day and trying to explain it to someone. Articulation is not what I am after, even though it is my material and form. Rather than fixity, I’m interested in direction: the opening in language which moves out toward you and you and you—and still somehow misses. I’m interested in that redoubled missing. What I am after is the excess of the afterward, the walk home, the dinner on a whim, what might be possible over coffee or sandwiches or in our shared frustration in a lack of instruction. I’m interested in the way that in my loneliness, writing to you makes something possible, even if it is an impossible destination and in truth isn’t even you. This is a kind of sensemaking that remakes writing toward a distance which calls itself missing.

T. Fleischmann: “Let’s go to where the mail goes when it’s in the mail, waiting to get to your house.”

Roger Reeves: “What war / keeps me from saying Please, please / do not wash your hair tonight. / We are still trying to find each other.”

52

How can we talk about the reach (the gesture: I am writing to you) without talking about hands? And how to think about hands without thinking about you, without hands holding hands, or the descriptive act that hands make possible? My writing is a trying, the attempt to call something into being through a reach, through description which breaks open when the project reaches its limit, its own edge as hands. The project falls before itself, fails in the act of describing anything other than writing or blogging or speaking into the void of a small rectangle. Hands on cold plastic keys. Hands on pages of ink. Hands scrolling through the numbers, the dumb analytics of hands. The problem with blogging is both that no one reads any of it and that someone might be. Someone’s hands navigating the a different kind of same. Plexiglass and plastic and rubber and self-grime. We like that kind of thing. We keep walking toward each other even as distance accumulates. This project is an accumulation of attempts to make description itself a kind of devotional object. This project is something my hands do.

51

When the poem says: "nothing can go wrong, do you understand / nothing can ever go wrong," is this an affirmation or a threat? These days I notice the small circle that follows me across town, minor weight of an attempt at trusting the body in its own way beyond grasp or understanding. It’s not that I’m trying to stay confused, it’s that I’m trying to hold some other space for what is not yet here. Or, to come at it from another angle: I’m trying to chart some small history of the desire to annihilate the self in the name of Objectivity, the overdetermined turn to remake the world as image, to look out there. Within this anxious checking every desk drawer, anxious searching as many carpet fibers as can fit in a hand, anxious car keys, anxious meanings of unread messages, I am trying to write toward the leaky problem that spills into every day when the door inside a word opens up and meaning evacuates. Do you understand what could go wrong? Nothing can ever go wrong.

50

And if the lesson is everything you don’t want to hear? And if that might be some other truth, silent, along with the three-sided die, the water’s edge, and a morning thick with fog?

In the story about the young botanist and the trees, it was the recognition of a difference which always related back to oneself which marked the beginning.

In the story about the grieving man and the ocean, it was the unholding of the waves that broke the possibility of an ending.

A story makes none of it easier. Sand still moves over sand. Writing still walks up to the edge and looks across. There is still nothing to see, save for a phone call across some small distance.

I mean hear, listen, hear this.

What the trees don’t say, what they shade with their cover, is exactly what they’ve made their home out of. Which to say a certain kind of breath.

Years ago, when trying to find my way, I tried opening a sentence up to itself. I split it into its twelve parts. I made each an anchor from which to make a small journey. 

The problem, then, the same as now.

49

A sense of belonging is just that, a sense. Moving breaks that open, the sensing part, and the insides spill out: intestines in brown ceramics with an opal glaze, red lamp stomach still chewing on the unfinished from six years ago, the drips of some past relationship and a small but expanding bookshelf, filling up with dust. I tried not telling you something that I wanted to, and if nothing else felt some small sense of control. Remember, maintain a focus on the bigger picture and don’t get too involved. And when access to that larger scale is shattered, shifts behind one of two doors and then behind the one just passed though, what then? Someone said that to become critics we have to desensitize ourselves. As if criticism could be described as anything other than the reach to name a wound or the practice of tracing a silence otherwise inaudible. For a time, the questions happened slowly and there was enough time to ask them twice.

48

I know, I know. I get distracted and come up with an excuse. I needed to clip my nails, didn’t I? The new year happens and is celebrated in scattered voices, all crunched down on the phone. In the quiet walk for a burrito, in the darkened alley passing someone else also speaking to some other place, our voices were pulled away. Fragmentation of the floor. What to do with the way it was always dissolving? To reach for the reaching, that ground which at times seems to be nothing more than a play of words, the belief in language, or a way of keeping the fear of falling at bay. In your apartment we talked about our changing beliefs in what an adequate goal for writing could be. No, writing won’t take it all down, but what, you asked, could we truly seek to do? Your goal, you explained, was to write one really good sentence. To be both concerned with it all and make one thing work right—or work beyond your grasp. I said that there has to be a reason to stay in this world, and that my struggle in articulation and its failures happens in that space. I’m infatuated with description and the possibility of what could be. A reason: to walk back down the thin line of steps before the sea, past the stones and the tree that leans toward the water. Each of my projects is an excuse to spend more time with the people I love. Everything is not endless. I want to be with you.

47

The thing that I’m after, it’s unspeakable. Every poem is the same poem because I can’t seem to say what I’m trying to. And because what I’m trying to say isn’t made in language and is only gestured to. I want to write to you about that opening, how it slips through my hands. The mouth that traces a word—how can description get there? To its own outside, the place behind the camera, the place made by being unuttered, by being unfilmed, the next-to-the-thing that somehow drops off, lips unopening. I mean the door that we make out of our two edges, the sometimes-possibility of sitting down to speak or carving out time for a short call, or not carving anything but calling anyway. I’m thinking of that movement, the silent question that marks a long series of beginnings. Exegesis of the outside. Before we begin, notice what’s already here: breath, a few little jars, the sound of pencil. How can we write about love without language itself being broken, unmoored? The point of love (and writing) is to be changed. 

46

Not processing, not wanting to—the little loading screen with the spinning bar that’s just a running in place, an imaginary to fill the time when what’s happening can’t yet be understood. Wheels turning and thousands of bits of information turned into nothing: an image on a screen. Dislocation here becomes a means of holding a sadness at bay, and the sadness of holding that (not reaching out in the arc of your reach) brings with it another weight. Last week it was 20-minute calzones, ice cream from the place across from the other place, baleadas twice in a row, and the tenderness of newly pierced ears. Not in that order, of course.

This week, I sat in my car and watched the sky. In the faded light, a flock of geese flew overhead, and with them, the possibility of everything, for a moment, being released. I had to take a photo to show you. I swiped to open the camera, but instead swiped to mute the volume on the music I’d forgotten was playing. Silence. The same gesture that asks for a pause. The same inability to hold what’s passing by. When I said that I loved you, it was a way of breaking something loose—a door opening to the wind of what isn’t yet known, and the possibility of hands. Who can ever get good at saying goodbyes? Even words yearn for a place without language.
 

45

To explain the project is to undo it—but what if the project is itself an undoing? New sneakers with overly complicated shoelaces or frayed fabric with a thread hanging out, teasing a pull. In the undoing, I’m trying to find you again—a breeze or the memory of warm wind that keeps showing up the moment before a word is written. A pause. The project, at one point, was a series of letters, each reaching outward from a shared center: at once the ocean and the cliffs at its edge. Each letter fanned outward like the petals of a flower. To iterate implies progression—a means of getting closer or the lie of improvement. What I want is a breaking open, what Shira Erlichman calls, “crab walking.” Shifting the poem side to side, like how I learned to set up a shot when I was 17: put the camera somewhere, then move. Sweep the image around, become small, become bigger, become the you that would have started out two steps to the left. Then point the camera at the bridge and everyone’s commute. See how everything changes or nothing does. Perspective is an invention that must be remade continuously to maintain its hold. Attention, too. Ursula K. Le Guin: “Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

44

How much of love is walking to some edge and imagining another? When bell hooks talk about love as action, she does so to demystify what so many seek but are unable to name. Rather than an unplaceable feeling, love is locatable as an action of care.

Elizabeth Povinelli: Every location is unlocatable except as a focus of habituated attention.

If attention is what brings place into being, is it the same place that’s brought into being when me and you become we? Togetherness is made through an us and an outside. I mean, is it the same coming into focus that is predicated on a closing off? The vibrating edges of perception knocked out by a pair of thick framed glasses and what’s possible to speak of. Attention is the turning toward that’s also the turning away.

Simone Weil: Attention, taken to the highest degree, is prayer.

I’ve thought the same for writing, walking a page to say the same thing, hands working the plastic over and over to make something else out of the same breaking. Months ago there was an exercise to listen to the bird calls in your neighborhood. And when there’s nothing to hear, notice in the silence where the mind goes to.

To acknowledge that we all die, Ross Gay says, to acknowledge that we all die softens us.

43

or, to ask over dinner what love might be, expecting nothing.
is that even possible? holding no expectation
as a means of not being crushed by what is, to not be crushed,
keep running with those small blinders or a tamed horse.

before your reading, we spoke of a poetics of an open field,
how the shape of a word moves us somewhere, how far, how together
such a listening might create some somewhere.

less me, more you; less waiting, more wanting; more grasses, more mouths
wet with the morning; less mourning, more losing; less holding, more opening

a door; the the wooden doorstops it took months to buy
from the artist who kept apologizing and calling me angel.
the engraving reads: what words could keep the door open?

42

To stand at the edge of myself and not be afraid. But what is there to fear here? The splitting up of the self, a body into two—or really into the here and the not-there, the inside and the inside-somewhere-else. I’m being loose here, grasping at imaginary divisions. I’m trying, in naming the process, to send some little metallic ball down a little metallic chute toward a little metallic hole: like pinball but without all the dinging and flashing lights and counting score. Actually, keep the score because something should keep track—a ticking clock or a word count or the skin on the back of the hands.

Why go at all toward oblivion or speak to the beating body? Why make a project out of description-as-wind? To keep the space of waiting open / to expect another call / to reach, again, towards what never was but still, somehow, feels like a return. An opening, the coming into clarity of a certain pressure system, this always moving somewhere-else-motion of a question.

Lou, quoting someone or some song: “You don’t know who you are, it’s a question.” This says it all, sums up the entire project and names its central contradiction: the answer being a question again, an open field, a voice tracing a word. Drawing a line in the sand knowing full well the tide is still rising.

I’ve asked the ocean for so many answers, for a way through or a new language or possibility again. A call against a call. The same tumbling, unending response. The same answer, approached again and again in shadow. I’ve spent months spent trying to understand a line from Michael Palmer: “The answer was / the sun, the question”

41

When writing was a way back in, the way was a holding, breath, the rhythm of a hot morning before anyone else in the house wakes up. There were drinking games that no one seemed to fully know the rules to and a series of unanswerable questions. Hands taking hands: there, beside the river with a full moon rising over us—I mean so many of us, so many moons and how many futures. A dedication is simple: a direction (an unknowing).

Cristina Rivera Garza says that we are usually confronted with either an excess of language or its total loss. Words obscure us from each other. When I showed my poem about our meeting on the bridge to some friends, someone suggested navigating along its underbelly. And where would that place us? And where would we go?
 

40

Why are we in different places? I mean, why are we in different places right now while I'm under all this sweetgum? I mean, sweetgum seeds, I rolled one in my hand just now, like I did when I was hypnotized and instructed to reach into my pocket and pull out something that would hold within a whole of my life. One piece, its own whole. I pulled, that day, a sweetgum seed. I rolled its spiked sides in my hand and today did the same. My whole childhood held in that seed which could have been any, but was this one, here. I mean, here in this park in Santa Monica where I was seemingly the only person without a dog or a child. I put down the seed and reached my hands into my pockets. I asked for a new object which could give shape to this life and reached in. My pockets were filled with sand. I mean, my pockets were filled with sand, and you weren’t here.

39

How far would we have to go
to open the door to the other thing, the that
or what we said that was—or keep walking
toward the movement of grasses against the cliff
of someone else—a sentence,
was it a box
              or a mouth opening?

38

A little loosening. Thinking “together” and writing “tonight”—how might such a slip become a tear in what is, an opening toward an otherwise? Hold there, in the distance between joining and this darkness, hot water with lemon and honey, night sky with just a few stars. Hold there, in the distance between wanting to be and wanting to be seen, projections out towards small clusters of language, barnacles against the edge of the shore. Not having makes so many fissures in what’s otherwise whole. Being seen by you the way identity isn’t a question, or rather, is understood to always be one, unfinished and invisible somewhere behind pieces of recrystallized stone, vast caverns of an internal world dug out of pixelated blocks and overflowing noise. What if behind every choice is a piece of thin blue ribbon, a whole city made and remade out of string, drawn across every relation until all that exists are the measures of distance?

37

Writing is always a process of unraveling. Before tapping away at plastic keys there’s an invitation, a pull towards a center, some ephemeral feeling or a gift: a few shells in a pink mesh bag, golden stars reflecting the sun. How to walk to the edge and stay there, even in the terror of it, even in the unknowing? Before the sea, tide and tide and tide. Among the trees, a return to the self, the thought of home and my failed attempts to get my ears pierced. The inadequacy of it, the many proposed solutions that keep being offered to the problem of being, or being without you, or being so far. Beautiful distractions and hundreds of new currencies, fantasies of flight and accumulation, ownership and victory as a means of false safety—or simply a break from the weight of it all. The simple want to walk on the beach with you without a mask on, or not having to fly an hour, or not having to catch each other in my early mornings and your nights. Few things are as sustaining these days as a call, and even though I know I’m about to move it’s hard to believe it. To face my own decision. To speak without an aim, to not ask for resolution, to keep the space of waiting open. Hélène Cixous, in the final lines of Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing: “I realized that perhaps there must be ‘conclusions’ to my journeys, because these sheets I’m walking across with my hands are ‘lectures.’ But there is no ‘conclusion’ to be found in writing. . .”

36

At the edge of importance is what, is gut, is the mantra again and again: go with your gut! Well, my gut has a thousand vessels, enters from too many points and tries to take me everywhere else. Gut says: poetry. Gut says: you need to be with the people you love. Gut says: yes. Gut says: no. Gut says: if someone understands the idea of the openness, the not-knowing-what-to-say, the way what is sought after is always unfinished, a call against a call, gut says: follow that. Gut says: language is the space in which it happens, until it isn’t language and becomes bodies, the two of us sitting on cold sand, wearing masks. Gut says: go home, you need to be with the trees. Okay, so I didn’t do that, I followed a different gut, the one that says, you don’t need to do something so hard, you don’t need to challenge yourself more than the challenge that already awaits. Again and again, the project: how to be with you. And within that struggle gut opens its gut, has its own will, eats everything then asks for another bowl. Gut needs to eat! And still gut speaks, says: you need to change your life, only to fantasize about a backyard with bougainvillea, some friends, and a warm evening a few miles from the sea.

35

Why do anything at all? To be with you, to be with you. 

34

I’m trying to answer a question with another question, draw an edge with water and a few videocalls. Last year we played kickball under huge redwoods, and I tried to find the reason why I hadn’t come to visit earlier. For months we met each week to make an intimacy out of light and stuttered sound. I imagined what a living room would feel like with the three of us inside and you invited me into a week of purple: sweaters and flowers, strips of plastic and other people’s photographs. This year it’s the same again but when a picture of two dogs dressed for tea showed up, I sent it to you. Between us is a year of subtle knowing, hundreds of miles, touch or the idea of it. Poetics is always concerned with the question of relation, and thus, distance.

33

I’m interested in the idea of conversation or the way that wanting to speak can become something in itself, or that not having could, in a certain configuration, become something worth holding onto. With enough distance everything is blurred. Days stack up and “we” becomes a bridge across something—water or void or forgetting it all. For a time, there was just an idea: breath making its way out and back again.

Now there’s a real one, a bridge made of metal cubes painted orange. We walked along the underside and you picked flowers, brought them with you, and said that there was a safety in that, having something to hold onto as you moved. Later, we were on the bridge and a photographer took a photograph of us, said he’d got our good side and that we'd be in the Saturday paper. We’d been scouted, you joked.  

The possibility of “we” is still confounding to me. How the two of us could both be enclosed, reach towards the same place, even if only in name. For example: Remember when we used to live there, below the orange tree, the winter it rained and spilled through our door? In the making of “we” something is always displaced. Writing happens in that unnamable distance.

32

Small catalogue of each time the mind turns, shifts into the little room with no lights and wooden walls: In our videocall it was snowing and I was next to a young magnolia, just as tall as me. It was spring. How can two places exist at once? Endless pages, evenings turning into darkness turning into the space above the ocean, an embrace. I make plans and don’t tell anyone. From loneliness there seems no solution, my fragmented people and all things we talked about making together. A movie about all the movies we imagined—not them being made, rather, a walk along the river where we speak in detail about the many worlds we’d like to craft, each tied together through their shared backgrounds: other people shooting car commercials. Placelessness. I don’t want to go somewhere else; I want to be with you. Remember how we talked about moving to New York together, how many paths we may have closed because something inside told us to? Thin line across a whole page. Pencil and pencil and pencil. Inside, you told me, I know the answer. I know.

31

If writing is a thread, how to weave it into something to be wrapped in, frayed fabric of changed plans and walks at the beach, the ocean and its tiny shells. Before enveloping, there was being. And before all that, a call—soft breeze at the start of spring, unmistakable blossoms of all the pink flowers, three years of videos compressed onto a phone, and iced oolong tea. Is the problem of comfort that comfort envelops, passes over ripples and stucco and violence renamed as compromise? Or is comfort an unwrapping, edges undone towards some beating core, a single sound at the middle of thought: breath or waves or blood. Richard Siken: “Let's admit, without apology, what we do to each other. / We know who our enemies are. We know.”

30

Mid-afternoon when the sky darkens—light turns red with smoke, like last summer but without the distance of it all. This time it’s a FedEx truck on fire a block away. The air is beautiful as it burns, fullness is haunted as it’s made visible. I make coffee and think about the friends I miss. Writing: a process of getting closer. In Anne Michaels’s novel Fugitive Pieces, a geologist anthropomorphizes stone. In his “lyric geology” all things yearn and are moved by yearning, the memory of which constitutes the world.

“It is no metaphor to witness the astonishing fidelity of minerals magnetized, even after hundreds of millions of years, pointing to the magnetic pole, minerals that have never forgotten magma whose cooling off has left them forever desirous. We long for place; but place itself longs. Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment. Eskers of ash wait to be scooped up, lives reconstituted.”

Trying to understand longing, I watched videos on electromagnetism, solar wind, and the tiny magnets existing around atoms. Trying to understand magnetism, I returned to a memory of an afternoon on a blue couch, a hammock below an orange tree, a handful of sand poured from your hands and the comfort of having nowhere to go. On an atomic level, magnetism is produced through currents created by the circular movement inside of all atoms. A spinning nucleus and its rotating electrons produce magnetic poles on the smallest scale. Any distance, at times, can seem unbearable.

29

A biography of longing—of you—the ripple in an otherwise flat surface, a crease turned over on itself until something is broken, lips parted to speak a single sound. You: an opening in thought which falls and falls—but towards what? You: a reach away from an expanse of white, or across one, wings folding/unfolding. You: an address, a letter, a direction or destination however vague or imagined. Envelopes are torn open and pasted together, paper is cut and woven from sixteen different moments, arranged until each resonates, somehow, with the same sound. Fog makes itself out of seemingly nothing, writes a body into existence only to send it off. “Writing goes out into non-existence,” says McKenzie Wark. “To the wind.”

28

The way things open, click, come back into place. How to stay open to that? To keep the space of waiting open—what Clarice Lispector teaches, according to Hélène Cixous. Waiting calls itself and calls on us to follow. The choice is not to do nothing, but rather to attend to the sun, a passing breeze, the way a gesture can move through a hundred bodies, take on so many names. Waiting names itself in what is otherwise unnamable. In the silence, I was told, think about the sounds of birds which have gone extinct, and notice where they may have been. Imagine another listening. I want to remain open to being moved, to not imagine a future too distant, too much of a projection onto frayed tarp or a wall that fits only half of the image. The project, then, might be to devote what is available to fostering the conditions of attending. A bird sitting atop a telephone pole each day, then one day two, then for weeks nothing. A walk at the river in which it was decided that geese have a similar energy to hippos, not that there was a chance to encounter any hippos, but rather, that both should be avoided. Look: See how far your eyes can go without you. “I want to be with you, rigorously,” says Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Writing is one way of doing that—being with or noticing the fullness of you—a walk around a reservoir, speaking in and out of sleep, asking what’s held out of each, blue water and green muck beyond a rusted fence. Take me / take me, too.

27

Writing is the pathway to otherwise, a walk at the cliffs that fall into the sea. Anticipating the drop but seeing something else: the many tiny landslides that make up a passage to the below. Dirt to sand to sea. Writing is the space I turned to then walked away from, a body in motion surrounded by field. Field surrounded by a body. Sounding out the difference between want and being there. Inside is direction bound by some internal form. Pain, but pain encircled, enshrined with scraps of paper, notes at stoplights, the way I think of you every time I see white butterflies.

What’s held inside me also holds me in the too much overflow of missing you. I know how to keep going, that its safety I’m looking for, some structure to submit to, but always the catch: who to trust. Less divided and awake. Less divided through what I learned on the mountain, hundreds of miles from the sea.

The way space happens inside—all my feeling being places. Annie said of my newer writing that there’s a clearer sense of place, which was nice, because I’ve always been thinking about places. I don’t write about non-places, or I’m always writing about a place, the place of missing you or the place of warm wind in LA in the springtime or the bridge you talked about us meeting on—isn’t that a place, somewhere we were once in a fantasy of becoming solid?

Speaking for the first time in years, or not speaking but thinking about it. What happens there in the not doing? Writing is scrawled on the stairs I tried to save myself on, drew a door and found a way through. I did what I said I would do, finally. Writing is walking; speaking is seeing you. Hélène Cixous says, “Writing forms a passageway between two shores.” Are we shores or bodies in the water, clinging to language, a few lines of prose?

 

26

Who says awake before awake, sinks into the small pit behind the stomach, oh, familiar sadness of what’s left behind, of not reaching out, speaking but not being spoken to. The sun made possibility for a moment and for a moment I thought about following it. Today, I slipped again. My song repeated its strings of silence and the space between your leg and mine turned over. I miss closeness and go down all the passages. you / you / you. Writing is holding what can’t be dropped, some edge or dark room I can’t help but return to. A house full of polar bears.

25

I dreamt of it twice and remembered it countless times. There was you and me and the thing between us I couldn’t figure out. It kept moving, shifting the way what’s just forgotten does when memory goes chasing after it, unsure of its shape. I brought myself to the edge of the water so you could join. I walked down the narrow line of stones you’d laid out, danced on them, that little stairway, and continued the descent. I even thought for a moment about taking you up on your offer of going back. But who could do that? We both knew that wouldn’t happen. Besides, that’s not how forgetting works. From that edge what had been the morning’s fog resolved into the faded hills I knew lay before the sea.

Pulled along by the wind, the water grew closer. Subtle movements and the possibility of an opening. Let’s go to the going and make something of the sound of opening mail. I sat in the small piece of shade I found and watched the shadows flicker as though they could finish my sentences. The breeze passed through us and the leaves shook and language opened, unfurled like daylong time-lapses of houseplants or an anemone closing upon contact with a finger, outstretched. I spoke to you even when I knew you couldn’t hear and looked towards you even when all I could see was a pale blue wall. I turned from the sea and walked back to the stairway to return my own gaze, thinking I’d notice a presence or feel my own ghost. Each time I noticed the grasses quivering they’d stop, suddenly still.

We fragmented ourselves into scraps of color torn into smaller and smaller pieces. Digital noise or confetti or grains of rice. We talked of metaphors falling off the table and the specifics of our not-yet-garden. We needed a new city to have planter boxes, irrigation, squash blossoms and lemon cucumbers in golden light. The city remade itself many times, and each time I moved it moved with me and each time it moved I'd drop whatever was in my hands. Still no garden, but spring came and in the sweetness of warm wind there was only a chain of springs. A whole season of forgetting.

There’s the somethingsomethingsomething and the windwindwind, the crash of the break, the ocean that opens again and again. I know that an invitation is only that, but I moved in your direction and wrote to you, searching for the joy of a morning below jacaranda blossoms and city smog. I wanted to find the connection between the way your lips opened reading the word you and the way description kept slipping off. The more I missed you the further away we became, and so I started writing to you again.

24

From loneliness a strange curve downward, from a place where all that’s left to do is turn from the world. Friends, we made a pact. We said, New York if nothing else. New York if nothing, and if nothing, let’s make everything of what we have together and the things that keep falling out of our way, feel further than they should be, the distance that keeps being drawn again and again. I want to say ink, say pencil, say thin line of graphite drawn around or a small line of salt poured around a home, a line of peonies to indicate something which was never spoken, a wanting-begging-searching-hoping-for. See the back of this page? I thought I’d be living there but it never happened, hasn’t yet—I still have to write it all out, can’t make understanding unfold into the shape of forgiveness, still have to sit in the morning sun on the back porch, find specks of white paint stuck to me. These days I need to remind myself to drink water, brush my teeth, eat some food before the next meeting about making a wormhole out of here. Writing is the strand that walks across the void, the somethingnothing twine of waking up too early and being unable to go back to sleep because it’s garbage day or someone’s drag racing down the boulevard. Writing is the place I asked to be everything and learned it could only be that: words and words. What’s the problem with reading that someone else has the same problem as you? That you have to accept it as real. I don’t want that; I’m a sucker for denial, which might be what this whole process is for me. One of unraveling the strings to accept the beating body and the whole world inside that can’t stop and must be tended to. What shape is that? A loosening. Language being gratitude, air.

23

Green and green, imagined forests and walks around campus, fantasies of collaboration and struggle, reading for hours, reading until language: green, outside: green, body: green. Growth is an opening I step into to become a follower, knowing how to lead is not knowing where I’m headed, a way of trusting the path that the body makes of itself, figures. Green and green—and behind that more doors, more hands keeping the knives away, more reasons to peer deeper into the space intuition makes, unfurling like a fern over a matter of days. Language becomes a little smoldering pile, marked up with pencil and folded twice over. This week a book of essays kept me at a distance. It’s so hard to stay there, the distance of interest, of curiosity. I want the disorientation inside the crystal ball of it, to be covered in the thing. I want the depths of the insides to spill down pages and drip across the spine, onto the floor. Why go if we won’t let some part melt along the way? Why walk if we can’t pause and look down at all the little black pieces of gunk on the sidewalk and think—gum or sap or trash or shit or what—and then keep walking, keep going and still write it down.

22

Compelled to write like walking, like grey on gray, an invitation to look at the moon and imagine who else is. What’s the still-falling-apart in the ours of muffled guitar? I stopped writing because I didn’t want to be read, stopped for a moment because I didn’t want to mistake writing for that other thing: packing up a life into a few cardboard boxes, wrapped up for a final leaving, and going off, somehow, still not alone—or not that, just thinking it, writing about it in the same place as ever, same week leading up to charcoal darkening the sky, hot pot, a late night screening from the guy who said young people don’t make experimental films anymore. I was pissed about that. I plugged in headphones for the rush of the ocean or the memory of it. Should have said something among all the drafts and drives to the water, feet first in a slow pour. How to keep going there, those people who can walk that edge with you, can look out from a bedsheet and concrete wall pixelized into speech, can make an ours of that. Careful, we closed it off because of rockslides, deep tunnel into half the movies we never saw but were told to. Reformat. We wrote it again; clicked and clicked; played it back from the beginning.

21

moving in and out of focus with the patterns of it all, sky in the faintest purple and grey, moon in there, too, a calling or receiving, wherever light goes when it goes to you, across from a deep shingled roof, deep blue I mean: the color of home, my father, a place just beyond what is, a sinking after coming to see fear just being fear, small steps being always not enough, big steps far off and the way forward, the clarity of friendship sitting there playing accordion on the couch, huge breathes in slowness, that which is never quiet, the silliness of the sound, its weird sadness as pages are filled, slips of paper are woven into little quilts then tucked away, ink just being ink, weekly meetings dissolving to monthly, to huge impassable distances crossed in a single afternoon, a twenty minute drive, then alone at home on a saturday night, getting a call for sunday plans, canceling things then getting canceled on, some drifting happening, something coming into view  

20

an invitation on faded turquoise: open something which is closed: the endless answers, the how many times, the shades of shadow along the wall, on the grass, shifting in the breeze, hours passing, holding, resting on it, resting, but staying closed: asking of seeing an answer: not wanting to, but having it, the heaviness that comes from the too close of losing, missed connections and a small blue notebook of otherwises: what would it mean, to renounce such a place? I can't do it, can't swim in the shallows of things, paddle from one room to the next, open again to the entanglement of it all, lifting a handful of hairs off one of the couch pillows this morning, impossible to know whose but there aren't many options, finishing a book, closing it after it's final page about death, the moments before and wanting to know: and who could, the circumstances that make nothing else possible, that write history in the tiniest font, scrambled and served with salt, pepper, and piment d'ville on the plates my grandma gave me that as a kid I'd thought were out of style, not my kind of funk, but now, in the pale of my own space remind me of her, holding them after a phone call about poetry, accepting the limits, the need to engage with it all, the difficulty and the more difficult thing: not writing, not unzipping the afternoon at the hidden seam, not making something of it: the waiting, the wait 

19

the whole sky opening up, or none of it: stupid fears like getting t-boned at a four way stop or falling out of the sky: the things that won't happen until it's too late: living next to a construction site for two years and only wanting to leave, having the guts to, once it's finally quieted down: just past sunset, the second week in a row the trash wasn't picked up, a whole block of offerings unanswered: the call of the gull who sits on the same lamp post all day, all year, shitting the top to a pure white, as pure as those things go: failing at it from the start, the project of belonging being nothing more than a shuffling, a shoulder turned in and brushed against a cheek, showing up to the same place time and time again: an apartment on the second floor, the concrete stairway I imagined another self at the bottom of, tried to walk towards: arriving is a quiet, slowed down to a pause

18

a year happens, tide and wind and tide, screen protectors replaced and shattered again. there is no other life, none other than air filled with light smoke and windows cracked open to cool things down, months of trying or preparing to take account of things, to hold what's mine and say, teary eyed, this is who I am: afraid and reaching so as to not fall, going back to the same songs like the seasons, because that's what it is: september again. is it true that all things have an ending? expiration printed in faded ink on a plastic sheet that was thrown away at the start, a moment when there's nothing to say, a call at the wrong time after work, the same traffic on the way home: none other: a curve around a curve, two bodies so close as to forget they're sleeping. we spoke beside the park with all the tiny places, many inlets, corners carved out of dried grass, cinder blocks, sandwich lunches, marmalade, some chairs, and after it all, I drove myself to the sea. I saw the few stars in the city sky. I thought of the fog and being home, how thick it was, how it covered everything.

17

all the books I never finished: the difficulty of things, wadding a little deeper and not looking back, not knowing how, anymore, to let in what’s familiar until it’s too late: two years of negotiating, giving, receiving ice cream fed pork chops, wagyu and now a whole head of bluefin, eyes drooping in against the heat, meat cut off and put into a soup for dinner: the times when things aligned: a shared ingestion of pleasure: of food and drink and weed and then disappearance, the distance found somehow in the space between the living room and the kitchen, even though they’re one shared room, separated by an island, and what of that: the problems I make for myself to solve, a moment’s relief on my unmade bed and the clarity of someone else telling it like it is: he talks at you and never asks any questions: having nothing to say, having to make anew, having been reminded: I’ve moved in your direction so many times, so many afternoons of cheese making something silly okay, I’m thinking now of where my bookshelf might go, and how it’d look there: somewhere else

16

again, something misses: a pain, shifting back inside: the hole in my head I go into when something needs to be preserved: the body or an outlook, a passage perhaps, between me and the world, the line of tiny spiders each perched on its own small space: the crease, elbows along a metal geometry: the art of noticing, tending to what's there, asking for engagement: my whole being, every association that reverberates off unspoken words and shuffles past a full page of scrawl and is parsed out on a phone, or an email for that matter, about the need to keep making, experimenting, finding new ways to be in the world while still making a living: making a tapestry out of loosened strings, conversations and confessions over text message, apologies and late responses, a new circle in purple felt tip after discarding the plan: a walk at the river at sunset, a near full moon, a dinner of kale pesto, blitzed when there was too much olive oil, but as you said, there can never be

15

The need to not be alone in writing, the trouble with it all.

14

purple missing: a whole season, 92 days and then more: jacaranda blooms along every other street, images of a purple schoolyard, cascading purple ache, a purple refusal, purple asking the sky to speak the same thing again, but slower this time, different, purple speech in something other than clouds, unformed and ruffled bedsheets, purple, unmade ideas for books, printed of course in purple, a purple sureness opening to the last page only to quickly close, purple bookmark still pressed between two halves, how many copies, how many phone calls over wi-fi happening in purple, dial tones without answer, weeks of to-do lists composed out of three colors only to fall back into ultraviolet: the unseen purple that lines every wall, every piece of hardwood that’s been chipped off and reflected in the imaginary: imagine this: a purple sheet of paper with one thin line drawn through the middle in black ink, draw it, then draw it again, and make the closest sound to purple you can without speaking, the loudest you can be without making a sound, make purple music out of the trees, so bright green now, holding onto none of it, none of what you can’t let go of.

13

I struggle to make space to write because I want to be like a door, an opening between what is and what could be, even when I know that’s not possible. So many openings shrink away after they’re revealed. The quiet voice not always audible; the quiet rooms not always inviting. I have friends that I love who live far away and we all have our own lives. At dinner, across the table the sliding door sits open, all that plastic mesh. We’ve found a way to continue to find each other, walking out of a home and into a car with a handful of paper towels, ordering too much food. Today, at the river, the brush was burning. I called the fire department, and someone had already called. Already there. Watching a palm tree burn, I was surprised by how many specks of leaves appeared, flying above the flame. Bright red everything, orange and orange. I misheard the song and thought the lyrics said, “Stay fire on fire,” when they really said, “Stay far from fire.” I walked into my own unknowing as a thousand fireworks shot off all over the city. There was a flash of light, and for a moment everything moved.

12

11

There are photographs and miles of thread, a needle pushing tiny divots into paper, a vial of blue ink and a video of the sky. Each morning the birds call out into nothing and a huge swath of blue fabric is made out of an endless gray. There’s a geometry that phone calls make, that people do, hands cradled inward, head tilted up, then down, then up again.

Lemonade. 

There are idling cars and cigarette smoke, a man in a dark brown suit leaning on a crutch, a cappuccino pulled close and a gifted tote resting on a bench that’s too short. The birds call out into nothing, tiny bits of concrete are swept off the street, and a seagull appears on the same telephone pole. There’s a space that men make together, gently leaning away, unmasked. A police helicopter flies above, then a seagull, a speck, moves westward.

Lemonade, he says, standing up without assistance, adjusting his belt, and joins his friends for a smoke.

10

Still me, this Friday, getting back into writing like it’s some last resort or the first thing I’ve ever done. And why write anyway? It can’t simply be because not writing is so bad—because quite frankly there are times, again and again, that I disappear from writing. It’s a pendulum, a wave turning into itself only to turn outward. And when I’m out it’s a relief, that not checking in. But it’s a relief that pains me, there’s something that cuts deep about being relieved to not get so deep with myself. There’s another depth there, a doubling of depth and an incapableness to it. When I don’t voluntarily go to the depths, the depths of me rise up to tell me that they're hurt by that. The ocean within me that wants to be explored—and it’s the place that I’m always at, because it’s also always me. Agnes Martin says:

We do not ever stop because there is no way to stop. No matter what you do you will not escape. There is no way out. You may as well go ahead with as little resistance as possible—and eat everything on your plate.

Sure, I can keep passing things by and writing with other things. There are plenty of other metaphors that I can use to avoid actually writing: walking, singing, playing piano, reading, sitting on my back steps looking at the city in the afternoon, sitting on the same steps at night, pacing around the back lot of our apartment, going for another walk around my neighborhood, following the same streets, noticing the sparrows fluttering around outside my window and their tiny bouncing dance, standing at the edge of the river watching swallows hunting for bugs, attending another zoom meeting only to be instructed to close my eyes and think about a certain problem I’m dealing with then look to the sky and upon doing so noticing that the whole sky is overcast all the way to the sea. But isn’t it every morning here in Los Angeles? I’m woken up by the sounds of car doors closing, people laughing, and a generator giving my room a subtle persistent shake. The sun comes out around noon and it’s pale blue for the rest of the day.

I guess what I’m trying to get at here is that I’ve thought of the last three years as a process of getting back to something I lost, when it’s actually been one of creating that—since the start. I’ve been in it even as I projected it out into the future as some imaginary and into the past as some fantasy to perpetually walk to, call back out to, dig up again and again. Everything is spacial, is a place, even writing. It moves as I do, from one desk to another, from computer to phone to journal to the small stack of printer paper I wrote a poem on yesterday. Lara Mimosa Montes says:

If I am not writing, it is because I may be mortified by my own stupidity. The senselessness I experience upon coming to. A cataplectic swarm. I defer, and make excuses, and complain that I need things like money and time, knowing this is not true. You don’t need a bank account or a college degree to write. But I have these things, and more. I do not, however, always have the words, or answers to the question: “What would help you now to feel more alive?”

This is what I am trying to answer, turning back to writing again and again, printing out the pages of a blog and making them into a hundred tiny books. I don’t want to wait so much anymore.

9.2

In my dream we always kiss for a specific reason. Each time it’s different and happens at a different place. We kiss for what is there and for what is missing. We kiss to acknowledge what we have and what we have lost. In the dream each place is also a time, and it is all very clear and obvious—why we are doing this and what each kiss holds. When I wake up, I try to tell you this, but it is suddenly so distant. I explain that there was always a reason, but when you say, “Like what?” I can’t name anything. “We would have kissed for a piece of your hair,” I say as an example, but it doesn’t make things any clearer. All I can recall is a series of broken forms that we arrived to and that there were many reasons. We kiss each other and begin our day.

9.1

In my dream I sit at the edge of an endless desert on golden sand. In front of me the sand recedes into water. A sea opens up below a clear sky. There are two sounds: the hum of wind passing across the low dunes and the constant fuzz of waves turning over onto themselves, punctuated by the rhythm of the tide. It matches the pattern of my breath. My friends appear, swimming in the water before me. I watch them, the ease with which they float and are carried by the tide, the way their bodies twist as their heads pass below the surface and appear again, they are in constant motion.

I reach my hands into the warm sand and notice someone sitting next to me. It’s someone I know, but I can’t remember their name. They’re wearing a large green sweatshirt that's too big for them. They feel so close, and even though I can’t place how I know them, I feel an immense comfort in their presence. Their hands are also buried in the sand. The rest of the beach is empty and, looking towards the water, I see that my friends have disappeared. Someone next to me brings their hands carefully together and cups the hot sand. They reach towards me and slowly open their hands. Sand trickles onto my feet. In silence, we watch as my feet are slowly covered.

Someone wraps a black cloth around my eyes. I let them. Everything goes dark. The waves are louder now as we stand up together. I can feel their hand resting on the small of my back. We walk into the water. I reach out and feel the soft fabric that someone is wrapped in, the way it curves away from me and around their side. We walk a step further. I can hear the sound of someone's breath and for a moment I think I know who they are. I am about to speak when the water rushes in, climbing up my legs and towards my waist. Someone pulls a lock of hair away from my face and places it behind my ear.

It nears my stomach, the water, and we continue to move. It is just us in the deepening water, my blindfolded head, someone’s sweatshirted body. We are in the softest ocean or the waters of a bay. The water reaches past my chest and to my shoulders. We stop and the cloth falls away from my eyes, and everything is all bright white for a moment. I look around at all the water and the clear sky. Blue on blue. I realize then that I am alone and my head becomes so heavy. I fall backwards, breaking the water’s surface in a small crash, then quiet.

My legs rise up. I float horizontally a few feet below the surface and look up at a shimmering light. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I spin around, I dive even deeper into the water and rise up again. I realize I can breathe here, or I don’t even need to breathe at all. I want to thank someone for bringing me here, but no one is here. I want to call them or write to them, but I have nothing. I don’t even know who they are. I turn around and around, reach out in all directions, but there is only water. Only water, filling everything around me.

8

Oh, there are so many birds. Blink; Don’t blink! Surprise: Along the windowsill, slatted roof, and metal gate, the patterned concrete pillar, next door’s security camera situation, and the telephone pole I keep talking about. We’re outside, idling the car, just watching. How good it is to make a stop out of joy.

The vines in the living room curl back into themselves while pulling away. Every day a whole life happens in mumbled words and I hear fire on fire, the sky the sky the sky. Here at home, I keep preparing for what’s already happened.

I wonder, with the air conditioner installed, will they come sit above my desk, even closer?

7

a language of holes, the absence of stone, a patchworked fabric of clouds, dappled grey omen, beams of light, reflections off a passing planes, an answer: a language of openings, a series of concentric circles held together by the wind, the slightest breeze catching on, getting caught up on the fear of falling, finding old notes: a language of possibility, that mixed-up grammar breathed into the air, broken out of, the openings we find, weekend trips, hikes through fields of mustard flower, the smell of persimmon muffins: a language of awakening, descending, each utterance a step down a spiral staircase made of birch, then redwood, then cedar, towards the same room with the invisible door, the small pile of stones, the tiny specks of purple underfoot, an afternoon nap: a language of not showing up, the absence that is made again and again, receding, tide pools and the sea, black ink, a small river of lights, a dream of arriving: a language of unfurling, the thousand-colored fern, the history we have together, walking through a family home, ropes unraveling, spicy fried chicken, internet radio in an hour of traffic: a language of waiting, asking for more, needy dogs, secret dates, leftovers on the second shelf in the fridge, trout roe, birthdays, quiet streets, frames broken just after coming together: a language of constellations, photographs, the memory of an afternoon sitting on the park, leaning towards each other, sitting alone on the grass, the wailing wind, the deep current, imagined wolves: a language of summertime, the same unravelings, new t-shirts, a wobbling ice tray, cancelled plans, missed calls, errands to pick up hard drives, seltzer, hugging goodbye twice, the smallest opening in the clouds: a language somewhere

6

Quiet, no sound save for paper run along by this birthday gift. “Let’s stay here,” says my therapist and so, I make a pact to again come back empty handed, for what is asked for is an emptying of pockets, of a closet in someone else’s room named mine in the three tree home.

How to learn to follow a quiet shadow the thing in there that makes a place of a little field above the sea.

Walk a little closer, say, “No more,” then walk slowly back again.

When I was afraid, language was not there for me. There are edges that need tending to, missed calls and summertime peeking out somewhere. There isn’t any future, I have to remind myself, no next year, save for the promise of more wind, water lifting itself over and over again, pen and ink and word, pant pockets lined with secrets, notebooks filled with what can’t be held.

Wait—there is still something left to be said.

5.3

The hum of things, a dryer, the whole city moving and small flock of birds passing circles around a lotto sign, the billboard where they land after having danced its rounds. A generator or water pouring from who-knows-where, a gurgle below pale streaks of what cannot be taken away, a blue marked with invisible layers of telephone wires, even a blimp. 

It’s been a year since I started saying, hold on for, wait, a future is, wait, hold that lonely days will one day be the answer to someone else’s question, about what—

is unanswerable. When the nausea wears off and the fever breaks, something comes back into view. Some form, a body, music, maybe, and spins. It all spins. I feel it from my concrete balcony, behind my metal white pained fence, the eternal staircase from which I’ve imagined and imagined another me. A building happened. I still live here.

5.2

Mid phone call, approaching home, I started thinking about theology and how to name myself. Maybe what I really wanted was to study ritual and religion... maybe when it gets down to it, I’m not really historically minded... maybe I’m maybe and maybe, maybe. I stayed up watching video after video of chiropractic adjustments until I’d watched every video on the profile and said, goooodnight, along with the woman in the video, exhaling in her just-adjusted ecstasy.

We had our weekly video call and talked about websites, true loves moving to town, and who we wrote for. I imagined another meeting if we lived within reasonable distances of each other, a dinner maybe, or, if that’s too much, a dessert. Just tea. Just us, sitting around a table, sprawled on couches, leaning against a wall, all of us around on the floor. I found there was a whole lexicon of imaginary postures, each only half filled in.

Walking towards the ocean, I noticed tiny purple flowers breaking out everywhere—slivers of pinkblue, all those openings I couldn’t help but land on. Right before 1am, the coyotes joined together and screamed.

5.1

I said that when I was vaccinated, I wanted to plan a trip to visit my friends in France, and you reminded me that you’d recently visited. After three weeks, you’d gotten sick of hearing everyone speaking French, stick their lips out and exhale language. At first, you’d found it beautiful, but you started to miss the bluntness of English. You wanted words with hard endings—like fuck.

English is like that, a language of bricks, each word overlayed, placed one on top of another. Not that I could, but I don’t want to give that up. I like the way English misses whatever it is it’s describing. The language I have is always wrong, the words pass right by so much nuance, and so to make up for it I keep piling them on, trying always to re-adjust, reframe, make another pass at it in order bring into view what is still missing.

I write with simple words because I think with them. Who thinks with effulgent or gasconade? Yea, there’s a strange wonder to these words, and maybe they could be edited in, but they just aren’t wandering around waiting to be absent mindedly picked up, slapped onto my big pile of thinking.

A website that calculates the readability of a text says that this my writing is readable for a 7th grader, a 12-year-old. The site calculates this with a combination of many different readability formulas, but each involves a similar process: calculating the average words per sentence, calculating the average length of the words used, and calculating what percentage of the text repeats words multiple times. The shorter the sentences, the shorter the words, the more repetition—or so it has been devised—the easier it is to understand.

For me, though, it’s the simplest phrases that are the hardest to understand. After writing and writing, coming up with theory after theory, I was struck by the sheer force of it when my therapist clarified things for me: I miss you. I keep trying to make it more complicated than it is, turn language into some kind of netting, a gauze to place over a wound.

Somehow, complexity seems to mean that something of real importance happened, that the truth could be intricately described—and it could—with thin slices of salami, underripe pear, pork strewing in the pressure cooker, sandals left open and turned over, all that was sweet right before the end. I’d rather turn to that surface, a photo of my countertop with long shadows pulled across the kitchen wall, than sit, silently, with the weight that rests on my lap.

the missing,     the missing,     the missing,     the missing…

 

4

My whole life I've felt I was doing something wrong. The unlivable world, the not knowing, the ability to fake it being the skill I wish I could let go of. You can be anyone you want, I know. But to be everyone you are -- the parting of leaves, the loosening of the grip, the pulsing gaze into the kitchen. A slip of hair is pulled behind the ear. The seagull is still there, sitting on the telephone pole behind my apartment. Back again because that's what it does. Back, because even if it was a different seagull, I wouldn't be able to notice. I have someone to turn to again. I'm still in no-time. It's still the same day. It's still march and the pink flowers are blooming. All along the boulevard.

3.2

What I say is never that, but something else. I’m walking the molten center, standing two hundred yards away, calling towards the break; Crouching on the floor with the hundreds of letters while windows rattle, screens brighten, the gyre spinning outward; Finding form in so many arms, a momentary dream of becoming a spider so as to open again with that much more, each limb only holding so much; What I say is never that, but something else; The distance of hands, a spine curved just so a chest can fit; What I’m saying is that pea tendrils can be cooked up with lemon and garlic and sit, somehow, on a plate; We fit around each other.

3.1

We spoke, our last conversation and what we most wanted. I said, to be reached for, and you, to be returned to. Reaching has no prerequisite, it’s movement towards, extending. The approach. There’s always leaving before there’s return. Waves lapping at our ankles. Months later I went to where we’d walked, under the lifeguard tower, and sat in the sand. Some shade in the midst of everyone. I didn’t know what I was doing, then did. I’d returned and was waiting. If desire can’t complete itself, it can be an opening, a slow sweetness before all’s swept back to sea.