"It's like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle's form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said." ~ Michael Ondaatje in "Divisadero"

Remember that whorled sky, Adrienne? Its blue, I said, matched your eyes. We were indoors. Outside, summer was making an appearance at the tail end of a long Northern winter.

You had written me a villanelle - something buoyant, not hewing to the nature of that quite coiled form, appropriate for something more sombre - sadness or loss. Rage even, but not love.

I remember pointing to the two short green alders in the foreground. I then remember saying, "like these I too will awake, become verdant" - perhaps this is not true, for I am unused to speaking much.

We gave each other - what exactly was it? now hard to say - perhaps an inkling of sap that flows in human bodies, and a slow awakening of instinct that makes birds home across continents to nest.

That sudden wild is ravaged now. Headstones of tree trunks, for that afternoon under a willow we spent dozing, And for the past that is lodged in this summer like long splinters of cedars axed to leave a gravel pit.

Note: Titled after Emily Carr's painting "Above The Gravel Pit"