The versions here are perhaps edited for spelling or grammar, and occasionally really pointless sentences have been taken out. As much as I would like to, I haven't added anything to these versions that were not in the originals.
I am slowly typing up some of the best pieces and displaying them. Maybe someday I'll scan in my pictures, but these are realatively unimpressive. They're mostly birds I saw from my balcony. :~)
As far south as I've ever swum
| The horizon nearly glows with intense aquamarine. A small plane flies overhead, its motor gargling mechanically against the sound of small wavelets washing up clumps of salt-crystalizes seaweed and paled chunks of coral reef. A bird with a bright red spot next to his beak flaps by overhead. Anita and my Tetis are asleep, one on each of my sides. The delicious smoke of someone barbecuing in a stand of palmtrees is a few steps away. Little boys yell at each other in Spanish, music ribes across from cars in the parking lot, sea gulls call. Tetis had said this is paradise. But I squint across shades of green and blue in the ocean at the beautiful horizon. No one can cut white wakes in that bright threat. Tantalizing. Remembered dreams and well-founded imaginings. A beautiful paradise future. And my mother calls from across the sharp sand, intricate coral ground across millenia, and she tells me there's a Cuban pastry half-eaten in the car. The sun is warm and, on the edge of my hearing, palm fronds rustle. |
From the beginning through "firmly in brief," written in Last Chance Cheese over dinner. After, written in the bathroom of my cabin at camp, where there was a nightlight.
The two pages this is written on are so covered with writing in funny little clumps running against each other and into columns and connected across the page with each others through quickly-added arrows that I couldn't quite translate these to pages correctly. The writing is mostly here. But there's emotion even in the craziness of the way I wrote it. Sorry that didn't translate.
Italics were not in the notebook.
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Ashokan Resevoir, Olive Bridge side shore-driving
I don't think I've ever seen mountains rise from the water's shore. White cloud had brushed away the mountaintops while the wind-ruflfed water reflected the blank white sky. Each more-distant forrested giant paled futher into unreality, and even the nearest barely held its green from between resevoir and sky, standing firmly in brief temporality.
The stone and forest giants silently grow more misty, more grand, more awesome in their veiled power.
Un tad lietus nak,
Un tad makons krit, dalas no pasaules ir pazaudetas, pasaule apmiglojas, un kamer udens pie vina lielo saisto asi-maigo krituma smidzina manu seju kur es tupu sunaina papardeta kalna krituma kajam, es izjutu tadu Dieva speku, un es gandriz nemitigi ludzu Dievu.
White-haired Jody who found out my name just as I went to look, who calmly sits in a rocking chair on a porch to write, who is concerned over the lost keys, & donns a yellow ruber to take walks in the rain. Justin, who paints love and breasts, who keeps two longhaired cats that shed all over his studio that was once a crurch, who asks if I like going to church and sings the song with my name, and asks where I will have my dream farm. Ryan O'Connor from the Carribian and Last Chance Cheeze, who laughs over his dreams & our acents, who doesn't do summer work for school, who believes in the full moon and in spirits. And Ryan says we are just animals, like his dog and his neighbor's, who dig only when the moon is full, with the same blood and the same body rhythms.
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