December 20

I’ll tell something like a story.

Green and wonderful, the bird—whose Latin name I have forgotten, and also whose common name—sang in a bush full of poisonous red berries. We watched it through binoculars from the charabanc. You sketched it in pencil, lightly but with zest. The twentieth century edged on. I wore a cerulean scarf; later that afternoon you pulled it deliberately tighter around my neck, trying me. We were wading in a warm lake, water lapping against our knees as if it were testing our reflexes. We had known each other for approximately two hundred conversations. Blue spread everywhere, out to and beyond the horizon, up to and beyond the sky. Later still, in a den of iniquity, we joined in the singing of bawdy songs full of words I barely knew, whose melodies seemed to me—at that precarious time of my life—very like the melodies of the green bird, whose green I can still see when I close my eyes, here on a planet so far away from it.

cats’ eyes
the eye
of the storm

it won’t stop raining I’m a cloud

chartreuse
I tell it
slant