The sun was shining in through the slightly frosted windows. Kate lay on her back, sprawled across the containers on a lime green swath of linen that contrasted with the fading orange tips of her hair. David sat behind the canvas. His brows were furrowed and he streaked paint inadvertently across his forehead near the hairline as he swept his shaggy bangs subconsciously back.
“You probably shouldn’t chew on that,” Kate said, motioning her eyes in David’s direction.
It wasn’t until he removed the oil-soaked brush from between his teeth to answer that David even realized that it had been in his mouth. “Stay still,” he said, squinting at her through the lenses of his glasses.
“I suppose it’s your choice if you want to poison yourself,” Kate snorted and settled back into the pose.
David said nothing, but the brush soon rested on the palate. He watched as Kate breathed softly. His hands, with the same rote deftness and familiarity they handled a bottle, instinctively flicked and hovered. Armed with the charcoal stub, they captured the wavering of her chest in the playful quality of the lines they willed onto the page.Kate’s languid figure rose slowly out of the emptiness of the blank canvas, quickly but methodically built up out of a series of seemingly random gestural lines. From her supine likeness emanated a serene quality, as if her body were pressed with the greatest ease onto the haphazard crates.With intensified care, David turned his attention to the finer details. Kate’s eyes, nose, and thin but poised lips sprung up from the pale flesh of her round face. Her lips, in particular, captured the attention. You gravitated toward them, drawn by the alarming softness of their outline. David let his hands pass again over their contour on the page, retracing the corners of her mouth with a tender obsession, so common to old lovers.
Read moreIce Wine -Lia Ices
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I’d hate to leave you
While we’re still combined
An unready bud ripped from a flower’s spine.
And I’d hate to leave
Like the eyelash that flew
Never seen again but as a wish for you.
Bones they are trees
Not our enemies
They wave in the wind and grind their brittle teeth.
And I collect their skin
Yes, I need their bark
For my new kind of hide and my new kind of dark.
These fruits that we have grown have froze
Heavy on the vine
Winter’s brew is born from the temporal and rime.
The thicket and the thistle cry a new kind of wild;
Drink up to new dead and new alive.
I’d hate to leave you
Like a setting sun
When the minutes and hours have all but added up.
And I strike this tinder
As an oath and a vow;
Winter is wild—I’d hate to leave you now.
And these fruits that we have grown have froze
Heavy on the vine
Winter’s brew is born from the temporal and rime.
The thicket and the thistle cry a new kind of wild;
Drink up to new dead and new alive.
I’d hate to leave you like a
setting sun
When the minutes and hours
Have all but
added up…
I strike this tinder as an oath
and a vow
Winter is wild;
I’d hate to leave you now.
And these fruits that we have grown, have froze
heavy on the vine
Winter brew
Is born from
the tempo and rhyme
The thicket and thistle cry new
kind of wild
Drink up to new dead and
new alive.
A half-step and a twirl
And it’s down, down, down
Carmine cheeks
And an ermine coat
She’s gonna tuck her body in
A thousand year snow emergency.
A vial and a kiss
And it’s poison
The sturdy trunk
Of an apple tree
Pretty boys and tiny seeds:
A thousand year snow emergency.
-Everybody’s Love to Ann
Flume - Bon Iver
Arranged and performed by Wells Andersen
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Accompanied by some photographs I took a couple of years ago on a New Year’s Day photowalk with my father in my hometown of Rochester, Minnesota.
It was a peppery smell of leaves, hunched and drying in vases by the sink. It was the lemony sage of death, gathered in vivid yellow piles of corpses and raked across the lawn. It was a melody and a dance and a secret, half-remembered, carried away on a mote of dust: crossing twilight, crossing shadow.
I saw it in the sick, red color of sprouting begonias in jars upon the windowsill; heard it in the rattle of frosty panes behind black, drawn curtains.
It hung in low, inaudible tremors over boot prints in the snow. There were paths there, in the moonlight, reaching out to the grave and back.
Yes, from the grave and back again, past the trees and down the ridge, to the hollow where the tulips lie sleeping in the snow. So many paths traced out to the grave, but they crack and they fade in the spring when thaw comes.
The lion lay down once more across the plain, bringing with him the mantle of winter.
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Last winter I sat down at my kitchen table with a microphone and some instruments and cut a rough little EP about the progression of Fall into Winter and eventually Spring. I called it “The Lion of December.” Today was the first day this year I could really feel the winter rearing up in the distance, so I’ve posted all the tracks. Here they are, in order:
Like I said, it’s certainly not a professional album, but I hope it’s enjoyable anyway.
