Don't remember much these (rainy) days: my memory bleeds details which, without attendant, congeal together. The mess resembles those dishes made of gelatin and pig or rabbit, luridly photographed for provincial French cookbooks from the 60s and usually accompanied by MFK Fisher extolling the virtues of a firmly chilled aspic.

In a more certain mood, I would say that lately I have been feeling like a ghost. But no one really knows how ghosts should feel. . . Perhaps I should render the feeling, instead, as a landscape: a tide, wet and warm, pulls away to reveal the body of a yearling whale, beached on a lonely conch-speckled stretch of land. Indulgent metaphor? I can't tell anymore.

After class today, some relief was gleaned. I wrote a poem about an African American Studies professor of mine at the Pot-Bellied Pig over cheesecake and coffee, even though I swore I would never write a poem in a coffeeshop. Then I biked to the port where the piers bob, pinned into place by tall cement pillars. The birds were gone, but not their remnants: dried white shit and shells cracked and picked meatless. In the ruddy golden, hovering light of a newly autumn day, the fragments of a body more ancient than memory glowed iridescent.

<<