Journal: Thurs., Dec. 11th, 2014

The spaces in which we dwell and spend our waking and sleeping hours become so important. We attach ourselves to corners and bookshelves, to heights and shadows and mirrors, doorways, the squeaking of floorboards and the peel of paint. What is it about where you spend your nights dreaming, where you succumb to the most pleasurable naps? All you need to do is close the door, and no one will come in. This place is yours, bearing the idle hours of so many years. There were so many hours to while away alone, and there was always work to do, the work of unrevealing one to oneself, finding friends in the inanimate, the adult world in the juvenile.

Rooms transform, grow old, remain safe havens where things are untouched. The indoors have as much enchantment as the outdoors, and you have always loved every space in which you can be alone, even bathrooms and closets. The closets that you piloted as planes, tiny jets stuffed with musty hand-me-downs and oversized coats.

Still Life with Cookie Tin Painting

Resistance like
red spring poppies
under a pristine town

a river painted with
black where the depths
reach up

Cypresses spindle up
from a country house
white walls

Vague clouds of trees
the bed of poppies
leaping out like

a three-dimensional creature
from the flatness of
Idyllic Town, Europe

A road — a creek —
swerves toward the house
into the knotted cypresses

We ask ourselves
how long

Cool Springs

a secret wetland
caught hidden
atop a city plateau

from the marshy waters
spurts a fountain
a dog
canters into

the shallows
and robins twitch
they are only secretly happy

old photos of the park
show men cleaning
the reservoir

that was once here —
men with bowler hats
gave kisses

a sun trickling yolk
as if free I run laps

around old desires
and habits

across the iron-fenced trail
Victorian houses roost below
a rocking horse
filling a window

when I lean upside down
the houses swoop up
towards green

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This poem was written right after I went running on one of the first days in which last year’s interminable winter began to thaw into spring, and I discovered Cool Springs, a historical reservoir and park right around the corner of my Wilmington apartment.

cool springs