They hastened away to the Northern summer of play and change, where the sun and the rain share the infinite vault of heaven between them; they went off to the innumerable, nameless, clear lakes and to the white summer nights of the North.  They hurried forth to fight and to make love.

-Isak Dinesen

You open your eyes to the sound of a motor.  There is sun enough today, you think, that my neighbor is mowing his lawn.  You shuffle to the window and you greet the cold, slick rain.  Across the street, a generator forces air and paint through the nozzle of a power spray-gun.

You put on your Sunday best. 

You must wash it away—you tell yourself—the stink of all your unfinished work.  A reminder: be sure to get under the nails, for it lingers there, sickly and brown.  But be quick about it, now—it’s already five of one and she’s due back at two.

Round the corner with a bright red umbrella.  Mind the puddles for it will not do for your boots to be wet until dinner.  

Sit on a stage.  The patrons are around you, with their coffee and their books.  They open their books and they open their ears and they await your performance with the stiffness of those words.  Be a little nimble with your chatter and your wit; extol the virtue of this gay and profane little world of ours—so flippantly grave, so exuberantly serious.  Do it with a little craft.  They are listening, after all.

And then, good-bye! —She is gone to the street with the cold and the rush and sting of the traffic going by.  Try to remember the warmth of red booths, of the coffee and the patrons and the chatter.  Red can be warm but it does not last.  The last warm things in life can all be found, abandoned at the bottom of empty cups.

You hum a little; it gives you strength.  Strength can be real but it does not last. 

You walk out into the rain and make something out of nothing.  Nothing is what there is until you’ve poured some something into it.  The universe is closed.  In from where; out from what?  You walk into the rain.  You wonder about nothing.

Here is a full stop.  There is the road.  Here are the vines and there are the envelopes, full once with words but now empty of rain.  The river is swollen and it bears no regard.  Departed; left no addresses. 

You think with your eyes.  They are tired.

—Your hands are scrubbed raw but you still see the stains; the flowers have all gone to seed.

You try to work but you sleep instead; fall asleep to the sound of a motor. 

Dream a dream where the sun is shining—and your neighbor is mowing his lawn. 

-Amelie Andrezel

(by Amelie Andrezel)

Writing is a word and writing is a rhythm. 

There is a ghost of a voice curled down in the marks of its punctuation; it rises like the dead on the echo of a beat. We resurrect it with the wet slug of tongues against our bare, eager teeth.  We anoint it with the scraping sound of lips—long dry—against the violent air.

It is juicy and sharp.  It is lively and dense.  It is not the ocean, burst from boundaries and absent of form, but the arches and the beams of a vaulted cathedral.  It is a loom on which we stretch ideas to gossamer.  It is a scaffold by which we hoist dreams from the ground.

It is delicate in its conception; it is ferocious in its form.   

It is a patient, shapely tribute to a wild and shapeless joy.

Yes, writing is a word and writing is a rhythm—but it is also life, scribbled and printed and punctured and bound, waiting for voices to wake it, to rise.

Sound! be its trumpet.      

Eileen had long thin cool white hands too because she was a girl.  They were like ivory; only soft.  That was the meaning of Tower of Ivory but protestants could not understand it and made fun of it.  One day he had stood beside her looking into the hotel grounds […] She had put her hand into his pocket where his hand was and he had felt how cool and thin and soft her hands was.  She had said that pockets were funny things to have: and then all of a sudden she had broken away and had run laughing down the sloping curve of the path.  Her fair hair had streamed out behind her like gold in the sun.  Tower of Ivory.  House of Gold.  By thinking of things you could understand them.

-James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of.  And the cards for first place and third place were beautiful colours too: pink and cream and lavender.  Lavender and cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of.  Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place.  But you could not have a green rose.  But perhpas somewhere in the world you could.

-James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”