I have broken my phone. I have no other phone. I have no other plan. I am soundless, cut off, footed like a piano key.
So silence.
Here we are. You feel a lot like longing. You feel a lot like love. What can I do in you? More writing, reading. Making of mixed tapes, care packages, cookies.
Yesterday I went hiking in the Caledonia forest. It was rainy and white. I got up late and wore a fall coat: green plaid with pink satin lining. My tights were gray and pooled at my shoes. I went to a garage sale and found nothing. My friend, sitting on a futon for sale on the porch, suddenly said, Do you want to get dirty?
What could I say but all right?
It was Saturday. It was a good morning to be up and moving. We changed into jeans and sneakers and went up. Walking this way, for a time you can’t talk, because you are concentrating on breathing, on not falling over this root or that. Then you can’t talk because no one else is talking. Because you are almost at the summit, and at the summit, you can see through clouds. You have been promised clouds. Walking this way, everything dissolves except your body, climbing through air. There was a bubble of no highway, no motorcycles, no airplanes, just us—our breath, the haze it made hanging over needles.
What other ways can we speak?
My friend who lives across the street has taken to shouting beyond the two lanes of truck traffic. Make it 6:30 instead of 5.
In Carolina, someone has nailed poetry to poles.
I think of living in the city, driving home on the Beltway. One long, dry afternoon, Friday, stuck in traffic, I noticed someone had scrawled with a black pen on the orange markers on each Jersey wall dividing the road from the construction site. Each marker had a word. We inched along, one word every few minutes. You had to remember them to make a sentence...
Please
fix
this
road
now
I
mean
really
I think of leaving something for someone in a tree. I think of looking into trees to see if anyone has left anything for me.