I wake before the alarm, light sticking under my eyelashes and persuading me to leave behind dreams that have slipped small ideas into my body like bait hooks. It’s early enough that my limbs still feel like trees, and turning from right to left I try to escape my shoulder joint, facing the sun and curling into the smallest shape possible. I wonder whether under the cover of darkness more words have walked into the bed, but nothing comes to mind. For a short handful of minutes I allow myself to feel wrecked by anything and everything that may be construed as sad, or worrisome, and then stretch my arms one by one over my head, placing palms on the cold white wall. Today I might witness a man dancing in a street he believes is completely empty, or notice a perfectly circular stone.
Lifting myself from sheets, I consider how differently people interact with parking meters. I have seen those frustrated before they even finish reading the charges, others moving slower than time itself for fear of pressing the wrong option, then the occasional person who you can tell knows how to gently prise amusement from the mundanity of such tasks. Then I wonder if anybody else has ever observed me interacting with a parking meter. People are not very good at seeing things; their eyes are too small and they flicker too quickly from shiny object to shiny person and back again.
Half an hour later I’m trying to see patterns or ghosts in the dried sides of my coffee cup, but this morning all I can see are letters that I haven’t written, landscapes I haven’t walked across. I dreamt that you threw my heart into the sky, and because you could throw very well it ended up there in the thinness, caught between worlds, too far away from me to remember who it was meant to be coming home to.
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
The upcoming spring issue of Orion Magazine, mentioned already a week or so back but not mentioned in this particular way: It has a beautiful theme carried out in intriguing ways, and in addition to my regular column I’m also responsible for a spread of trees unlike other spread of trees, which involved painting all of the ‘official’ national trees and making them into a strange and lovely forest.
Above is an incomplete unfinished glimpse, as the best glimpses often are. (I’m excited for the arrival in print of this impossible forest, though I’ve actually forgotten several times in these waiting months that it exists/that I painted it.)
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Beautiful, tender pencil works by Kirsten Sims, from her difficult-to-describe 2020 exhibition Lost in the Light.
— Amy Leach, Things That Are
Ah! Another nice one. Your painting reminds me of Gauguin’s landscapes of trees and Lenore Fini’s landscape L’eau endormie at the same time. Like the contrast of the ochre and raspberry against the celadon greens. The forest floor yearns for a stage in a new age Hansel and Gretel. “ there stands a little man looking like a clown, he wears a little cape, made of velvet brown, tell me who the man can be standing there beneath the tree, with a little cape, made of velvet brown.”