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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?