Signs

The next time they met, he was an ecologist. She went with him early one weekend morning to walk slowly through the woods, more a perusal than a hike, his pace like a bookstore patron with all afternoon to spare. She watched him browse, scan, pause, trying to make sense of what he took note of and why. To him it was not all just a fresh flat green. He noticed impossible things. Tiny abnormalities, the slightest disturbances in an invisible design. "I could never do this," she said, admiring, over an apple split in half. "But you do," he said, smiling. "We both read signs."

LATE AUGUST TIMBRE

It's all about the sightlines. Construct as high as materials will allow, but be sure the eyes are tied to the center of the pitch or we'll be left with an audience of leaves, at a point too late to rake them in.

Big questions

The big questions arrived with eerie periodicity, carried by strangers, lonely people in lonely cities, in disconcerting interactions I tried to skid swiftly over or dodge entirely.

A young man with a too-large frame and a too-young face, his manner bright and peering like a high sun, trying to spot something in my demeanour that would reveal me. We walked around, introduced by a friend, I took advantage of his weirdness to get beneath the city's thick skin, trying both to go through him and avoid him as he grew ever warmer, ever more entitled to my thoughts, asking every ten minutes: Qué te llama la atención?

Another young man, in another city, both ambitious and invested heavily in the material, both seemingly indifferent to the terrors in their environment, both accustomed to howling dogs and isolation, to little birds dying without wounds. He is grave and watchful as tries to orient me — a confusing stranger from so far away, another body in his unfinished house, in his solitary life — demanding with a fanatical intensity: Qué esperabas de México?

And a young woman in a bar in a winding, gridless city, bursting with energy, the first to dance, up on stage, pelvis against the guitarist's thigh, a public execution of inhibition, long hair whipping, jeans sneakers sweater backpack, like a lost student of Delhi University, perhaps not even drunk, but fervent, fevered, after something. Taking a pause once she'd got everyone else up, glaring at sitting me, she jabs a finger into my chest and yells over the drums and amps: Qué significa esto para tí?

I know what kind of answer she wants — what kind of answer they all want — and I refuse. To her, the bringer of the biggest question, I am especially obtuse. She rolls her eyes in disgust at my utter lack of life, gets up and goes back on stage to dance. I know that girl. I probably was that girl. So full of feeling, so stuffed with the significance of everything, so convinced she is alone in seeing into the deep.

My answers, unspoken, were these: What I notice is private, what I expected I have forgotten, and what this means, I don't know, we will see.

EAVESDROPPING

Little leaf skittering in the wind, winding its way through the few feet that dare brave the day in these conditions. Elevating voices from a nearby bar philosophically fellating one another with curled lips and aural spurs. Lose an eye following the organic debris from bough to street. Lend an ear to the dreams of the drinking youth, thinking they'll save the day in these dim conditions.

Quicksand

It's not that I am reckless, it's just that I have a talent for identifying soft places and walking straight into them.

ALL THE GRAINS GATHER

All the grains gather neatly toward the center before plummeting to the pile below. Each granule takes its turn: this one water-sliding into the unknown; that one, lazily rolling over its kin; those two finding their way through together.

I took it personally

Every time they shot a man, they shot you, and put a hole in my chest. They choked me, beat me, burned me, hurt me. My body, in pain, desperate for yours, to soothe, to hold, to heal. But your body, elsewhere, seeking refuge in another, painless.