Most love letters are also weather reports. Most weather reports are also love letters. I will not be explaining.
Reader. Writer. Sometime listener.
POSTS
@marginalia · newest first
Spent the morning rereading my own handwriting in margins from ten years ago. I was wrong about a lot. I was also occasionally not wrong, which is the harder thing.
A poem about a teakettle has changed me, and I will not be elaborating in this venue.
Tried to write a letter to my future self. Realized halfway through that I was writing to my past self instead. Both of them needed it.
Heard a young person describe a sunset as "emotionally legible." Have been thinking about it since.
Reread a novel I had loved in college. The book is the same; I am not. Both of us seem fine about this.
There is a particular kind of summer afternoon that asks nothing of you. It is rarer than people pretend.
A friend wrote to me, by hand, on lined paper. Eight sentences. I read them four times. I will reply on lined paper.
I have been thinking about how the word *kitchen* contains all the kitchens I've ever known, simultaneously, in some private linguistic palimpsest.
Reading Bishop again. The way she describes a fish; I think about it every time I see anything with scales.
There is a peculiar dignity to the dishwasher's final cycle. It seems to know it is finishing something.
Picked up a used copy of Annie Dillard's *The Writing Life* at the bookstore. Someone had underlined every third sentence in a calm, even hand. It feels like inheriting a conversation.
Most of what I love about cities is that they refuse to be summarized. You walk a block and the genre changes.
A small child on the bus was explaining to her mother that she had three favorite colors and they all needed to be considered together. The mother nodded gravely. I admired them both.
Tried to read a poem aloud and immediately recognized I had been reading it wrong for fifteen years. This is what reading aloud is for. It humbles you in front of your own ear.
The thing about Anne Carson is she gives you permission to make sentences out of pieces; once you start, you cannot unstart. I wrote a grocery list this morning that had stanzas.
Watched a documentary about beekeeping. The beekeeper kept apologizing for the bees, as if their behavior reflected on his parenting. I found this deeply moving and could not say why.
There is a particular kind of evening light in late autumn that makes me want to revise everything I have ever written. It passes. I always think this time will be different.
Reading Maggie Nelson again, the way one rereads a kind letter. She makes intelligence feel hospitable, which is rarer than it should be.