Someone in a machine moves snow in the courtyard; otherwise, the unenforced silence feels like the last institutional luxury.

I think of summer as a bombardment or as a series of advertisements. I partake, order from the website, eat and eat and am ill. These green billboards, these wet magnetic strips. In contrast—

The cold and dry disposition, &c—

The parallelism is dull, as truths often are. The salt on the carpet creates little eddies like clouds, and everything is the shade of clouds, and also the sound of them.

The momentary joy of silence, then—

—then, realizing its inability to immediately confer productivity, the slow sink back into the body’s paradoxical hyperawareness of its own blunted edges, the phantom noise at the temples reflecting whatever neighborly infelicity one blames for these flashes of temper. The stubborn field of the page.

Urban striations; the pleasant semi-crunch of snow compacting under tires—

Each syllable I pull from my mind feels drawn as if from an overdeep well, the bucket too eagerly reinforced. The shaft of the present is collapsing, and yet (or and so) we pull harder, we must surface what we can, now that “surface” is a verb, rather than a cracking shell perforated by thousands and thousands of holes we’ve dug for cash.

To pull cash from under the surface.
To surface the cash.
To surface the annual report, for cash, I must say to the dean “I have pulled this many syllables from my mind.”

There are, of course, worse things to have to dig for. The worse things enable my annual report. I do not have to enumerate these things to the dean.

I commute on foot. My steps take me from texture to texture. In my relationship to gravity, I am the opposite of a tree.

O this ceaseless and anticipatory unfolding—

Each morning or afternoon unaccounted for like a small canister-shaped measuring weight, deposited into the jar slung beneath your diaphragm.

I am saving money.
My days squat on the fence behind the house, clustered and miserable. Their hunched bulk stands in sharp contrast to the sinuous lists people post on the internet chronicling their reading and writing.

What evenings you must have, I say to myself. What series of purchases, what good and beneficial deliveries!

To what extent is it a common condition, the utter inability to distinguish the good life from being a good worker?

I give myself each hour a small poisoned gift, which is the hour itself. Stacked in their black wrappers, they form a starless proscenium against which I perform rituals of personhood.

Steel morning. A series of maintenance trucks moves through the streets, a kind grumbling. The skin around my eyes feels tight, a product both of desiccation (aging, low humidity) and of inflammation (frequent bouts of weeping).

A friend tells me that in central Maine, they’ve issued a notice that you should not eat the local deer due to elevated levels of fluorinated chemicals in their flesh. Decades-old paper byproducts in the rivers, now a million small tributaries of contaminated blood. I look at the map. I see the lake, surrounded by red boxes. I have never seen a deer by the lake. My mind touches the edges of the red boxes and feels the deer there. Distantly, despite the dryness enveloping my body, I perceive my mind as a handful of water, clear and cold and full of invisible wrongs.

First thought best thought: when enumerating types of melancholy in As You Like It, Shakespeare begins with the scholar’s and the musician’s. Being neither, Jacques declares his sadness “mine own,” and all the other characters essentially roll their eyes.

This is fair. Personal branding is often clear even at a distance.

Each day it snows a little. A good friend’s father dies suddenly; I snap a picture of the orchid she gave me a year ago that has, either because of or despite my ministrations, prepared to bloom again.

There is no metaphor here
of the large white petals that will transform us.

I tell her look, it’s thinking of you, but of course that’s me, my small and pale green mind like a fist.