Specimens, Days

Leaving San Francisco today after an my carriage of exhaustion caught up with me. We've put 3600 miles behind us, crossed between broad & golden plains, undulating dunes, vast & desolate salt flats, the jagged & sloping rocks of the tahoe wilderness, the sand & low ripple of the lake itself, the valley cloaked in a sunset haze, & finally, here in this city, where the buildings loom unending overhead & tower down avenues on & on until the ocean yawns its response. Glad to be moving along, but I must note the sense of gratitude I have for everyone along the way. My brother & Dawn, the Brosches, my parents, Stef's parents; we seem to be on precisely the right path. Now to turn northwards & glide up the coast into that verdure that awaits. My life, my life, it looks a bit strange right now, but I feel a dormant vibrance awakening. I feel, simply, wonder.

Here in Denver again after a prolonged while away. In Minnesota I thought after trying to lend substance to some fugitive memories, trying to hunt for branches with my initials carved boldy in youth, for my name falling out in casual conversations among friends I once held dear. I sat in the car & looked over the Commons, where I spent so many hours as a teenager, where the passage of time seemed an abstraction, then, hardly worth contemplating. In remembrance, I feel still the kiss of the breeze, the smell of tobacco mingled with fresh-cut grass, the chthonic heft of wet lichen on the rocks at the shore. The bark's thick sinews on the bough overhanging the water. The fine sand cold under my feet in the autumn. & that attending spirit of youth, laid bare in its gaping, honest simplicity. I looked for myself in these places, auguring, divining, as if they would speak, lend me substance, reify these strange & changeling songs in my heart. I found nothing. I found places w

This morning, the steady beat of the rain upon the window panes, the homogenously grey sky hung overhead, the variously hued leaves slick on the ground in their coats of red & yellow & brown. A morning like this calls the sensate to mind, or the phenomena of sense memory. That a sensory acquisition can come already endowed with a kind of emotional heft. That the thought of dew gathering on your leather shoe can conjure something else entire. Or that you can imagine the cold leaves, how they feel in your hands, their crispness gone, their spines supple & malleable, that cold water dripping off quiet & collected. Rain subsumes every sound, in the most wonderful possible way. Twigs break, cars drive past, but everywhere, everywhere that sleepy consistent hum. I have missed rain more than I ever thought possible; Colorado rains fell for minutes & dissipated. New Mexico had its half-hour monsoons in the late summer. Something about the enduring rainstorm, though, I absol