The schooner of separation, with its cargo of words is nearly at vanishing point. Waves break over driftwood beached here at my moonlit feet. No stars, not even the hiss of nebulae falling away from our planet - with its distant cities, you in one, I in another - in the whitewashed sky. All those June days of green heat & evenings we spent watching thunderstorms to the Great American Songbook-

Were those deeps we reached, Adrienne, trompe-l'oeils rather than moments of a lived summer, I wonder?

[1] His mind - a bone-lantern, a skull hammered into a stone-spine, above a hearth that is always stone cold - dreams of Adrienne's red tresses. It was caressed once by them - A while back - softly like smoke billowing from memories burning now, in his mind.

[2] Adrienne lies in a stanza - room in Italian - she is still, sleeping. He is outside of her, a movable language written and lost when Wind sifts shadows of tree leaves Over her naked body - which is now being loved by another. The stranger's arms are dipping into the river that is Adrienne's waist. He wonders - are shadows as forlorn as this when bodies move, and leave them behind, without a thought?

"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"