How many words do I have in myself this evening? Summer is over and yet it is warmer than ever. Today the sun was too hot and vivid for me to handle and so I hid until I could find the requisite shadows. Now the world is something I can hold onto steadily, if only in slivers. The taste of the lime from last night is still in my mouth. Yet it sometimes feels good to feel hot and strange underneath the sun, to walk and consider the lives I brush up against everyday. My hands take on the tackiness in the air and I raise a palm to my forehead in order to cool myself off. I will be doing something small or nothing at all and suddenly I will think of the beloved. Isn’t it funny how love can feel like the smallest yet most expansive room?
In California I take in the salt and we are frightened, like children, of the web of kelp that slivers around our ankles. Is there some monster lying still beneath the water? Are we to be overtaken? The bright afternoon ends in a scraped knee, sand all over my body, my future foretold.
In California we eat plums quartered and given out for free, my favorite shades of yellow, green and red. I buy a bunch of kale and a dozen mismatched eggs and sweet grape tomatoes to be blistered and a batch of micro greens that are springy and delightful just on their own. The stone fruit is so good that I want to thank the farmer who handed them to me, express gratitude for helping me come back to myself through taste.
I slice half and save the other for later. Its smooth open half welcomes me when I return home the next afternoon. This is not my fridge or my kitchen but this is my plum, right side up and ready to be enjoyed. I think of the poem that somehow everybody knows, the one about the icebox and it being so sweet and so cold. This is just to say.
In California you forget that there are many beautiful people and a particular quality of light until you go elsewhere and return, and suddenly the magnitude of everything is ten times brighter. Dialed up to the maximum quality possible.
In California I walk until I remember how to run and then I slow down again, drive down that oft-mentioned stretch of highway along the coast until my fingers are damp with soil. Until I am made dizzy. I cannot help but say this is so beautiful although it has been said many a time before. The same thing could be said about love but what else is there to do but repeat the litany? I love I love I love I love.
The best I can hope for is an endless search for beauty. I buy a cheerful-looking pair of half-moon earrings that I soon begin to use as a good luck charm. There is a week of vivid dreams, nights where I sweat as if I have been fevered. I think about quitting my job. I think of Agnes Martin and imagine New Mexican pueblos and white sand. The myth of the West is slowly overtaking me. I want to take on its colors, its disappointments, its freedoms.