"Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor's map of his lost fields and meadows.  Thoreau said that he had the map of his fields engraved in his soul.  And Jean Wahl once wrote:

Le moutonnement des haies
C'est en moi que je l'ai.

(Poeme, p. 46)

(The frothing of the hedges
I keep deep inside me.)

Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived."  (!!!)

G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 11-12

This rainy day.

This rainy day, thick with birdcalls that reverberate like bells in fog, like chimes that bounce off of burnished metal and glass, like old Paris, when I sent prayers up from dark church floors.  I walk in the park and the air under the branches feels heavy like smoke (incense), it is thick and hangs close to the ground. 

I walked around and around the park today, around the back of it, past the garages and empty cement pools.  I walked by the mechanic shops and the warehouses.  I remembered Seattle walking through shipyards, past docks and under tunnels.  This wet air damps down the noise of cars, makes it easier to think, easier to feel gracious, grateful.

Now I sit, inside, listening, perched between day and night like a dim bird.

Foillard 'Cote du Py' 2010 Morgon in my glass, and Elizabeth Bishop translations of Octavio Paz on the page.  I hold onto poetry today, its spacings, its spaces, its structure.  New Mexico storms would always roll through so fast, in dark afternoons I used to sit and read under my window, in my adobe house wrapped tight like a blanket around my shoulders, eyes out to the night.