Forgive me for seeing your bones before your flesh your flesh before your dress and your dress before your floating gaze, for it´s December, and more naked than the horrible chicken that I took from the cooler bin and immediately dropped, as its thin blood suddenly trickled through the cellophane and down into my sleeve, are the trees, whose black structures pursue me like everything alive but reminiscent of death, and everything dead but seeming to live; math problems with seven variables, spiraling snailshells of poems, and cranes of the Nordhavn, which give in the wind while I fall asleep in your long limbs, but dream of highrises besieged by scaffolding and of scaffolding hung with thundering tarpaulins. Forgive my gaze, which flies over you like seasons alternately crowning you with the light of a caress and undressing you like a raw-cold rain; I don´t claim that this month´s austere treetrunks are any truer than downy leaves in May -- and besides, I´ve left truth to the young: For me it´s enough to say things as they are.

The things that were here before you died and the things that have come after:

To the former belong, first of all, your clothes, the jewelry and the photographs and the name of the woman you were named after and who also died young... But also a couple receipts, the arrangement of a certain corner in the living room, a shirt you ironed for me and which I keep carefully under my pile of shirts, certain pieces of music, and the mangy dog that still stands around smiling stupidly, as though you were here.

To the latter belong my new fountain pen, a well-known perfume on the skin of a woman I hardly even know and the new light bulbs I put in the bedroom lamp by whose light I read about you in every book I try to read.

The former remind me that you were, the latter that you no longer are.

It is the near indistinguishableness I find hardest to bear.

Rainy day outside, a good day to sit around and talk or read a book or listen to music. I think all days can be good only if we can discover the rythms that play out with changing weather. Nature follows that pattern, I am reminded of this fact I see chipmunks gathering nuts for the winter and spend that hibernating.

We have grown so distant and seperated from these that we have lost our sense of balance. We do everything in excess: over work, over consume and over dose. And with such growing distance from what is truely good and truely enduring, I think we even forget what is good. This seperation from nature I think has something to do with seperation from our own stillness.

Once not too long ago, I was on a high moutain lake, with a woman. The stillness of the blue water, with tree tops reflected in it and the sun striking the lake angularly, everything seemed to have stopped, a frozen crystal of time. Even though all the roads between us are now boarded up, such memories offer me a measure of peace, instead of the usual unease or pain. It's as if the whole universe once in a while conspires to give us certain moments that approach infinities, only few but neverthless precious.

And when I pass my fingers gently over all such old memories that seem to be frozen within me, I see that in each of those moments I was alinged with the breathing of nature. I only wish for a few more of such visions, such fantastic dreamscapes in all the days: rainy, sunny and snowy that I still have to walk in and out of.