August 17

First sustained sunlight in some time this morning. When I cusp on days off there is always a blankness to fill, always this sense of crawling from a wake bleary-eyed & tender-brained. Giving the hours time to decompress & normalize. I had decided against fishing Brushkana, the forecast all grey & raining, but I may reconsider. Or a ridge to ridge run that would take the better part of a day, some hitching to or from & some scrambling one ridge to the next. A good day, at any rate, to flee the cabin; a shared day off. I am almost past complaint, not for absence of fodder but for its uselessness alone. Maybe another month in his company & then free of it. These exaggerated versions of home that I slip into, one place to the next, shades of increasing absurdity, almost at this point farcical. How they push me towards a nesting, towards a burning for my own dear space indeterminate before me. It is perhaps always this way, hedging toward what we want by winnowing out the dross, stumbling upon clarity like some buried thing the fingers flick against in a separate rooting altogether. How constellation cuts the drear of night, an ossified light cast against imponderable darkness. The way the word ‘relief’ bifurcates from a shared stem; how compare finds purchase for proximity, & proximity, in turn, for contentment. I imagine moonbright eyes scanning stars for shape, those initial inchoate figures insinuating themselves just briefly before flaming out into oblivion again. The namer of constellations, taut-fingered, mouth agape. This will be the scabbard hanging luminescent from the belt of Orion. This will be the clustered sisters. & those, those uncountable flames, they do not fall gracefully into named shape, do not suggest some gravid form inhering, dehiscent through the boundless black, must remain unconstellate. What is named, what provides naming’s relief. Backwater stars. Slough stars. Daphne’s arms tangled into branch while the root lays buried in a black dirt. & then all form blazing into fiery light, & the relief a chiaroscuro gloaming into yawning oblivion.