to my city-strangers & my unnamed campus rats:

you are & always have been the main characters in my chicago love story. i haven't met her yet, but i'm sure the portland version of myself will miss you the most.
you make this city what it is for me no matter who i'm with, where i am or what i'm doing there.
don't you think there is such a beauty in that kind of consistency?/ thank you for the mangoes & also for the salt.
Oh! & just today thank you for splitting that fancy sort of kitschy something with me... maybe i'll go to savannah sooner.

i know it's just a matter of seasons. this is the midwest after all. fields for farmers and crowded streets are really the only sorts of places where you can meet people you once knew. OR at least that's how a man on tour described it to me & he was a crowded person who has lived with these ideas fuming in his car for so long. the creases in his hand kind of looked like mine, but much more exaggerated in an exhausted kind of way, & i couldn't help but believe every word he said especially when he was using so many words to say nothing at all.

AND what about him? In the most conventional sense, he is an urban shepherd, a cross walker who takes his job seriously while he tends to crowds of people at busy intersections and such. After work, the piles of things around his city streets take up all his time. I was thinking about him today and how he's a hoarder of sorts for empty items like luggage, hatboxes and briefcases. There is an arrogance about his collection of hardly collectible items.

you surround yourself with these things, but don't you feel any strength inside of you?- A wily egyptian woman said this to a flimsy egyptian man once & I know she would have said it to this man. I keep imagining him in a striking field of colored balloons in a vacant lot next to apartments and row houses. He walks from corner to corner all day long guiding his floating balloons from place to place. It's the kind of image that is beautiful in the right lighting and captured in a still picture.

& I don't even have to say it, but it is so haunting in real life like commodified midnight & like most purposelessly dramatic people.

a sprig of rosemary is the most romantic thing about that particular kind of incident. the house was made out of wood and it was delicate, unlike any of the people who lived there, though, they, too, were made out of wood. people who are made out of wood don't have eyes. in our world, we'd say they are blind, but luckily their society knows better & not having eyes is seen as their gift. they are part of a scent tribe and inhabit a forest in grasse, france where clouds of lilac-colored smells hang light in the air. base notes are likened to familial lineage and top notes to individuality. they are warriors for nature and lovers and the strongest people to have ever lived. late at night, the wood people ether into perfume and float into the crevices of cracking bark to soak & write letters to old travelers. the now wind-weathered-people are lulled to sleep by the tales and the lores that cradle their little sheer bodies.

sometimes two wood people fall in love & they start to smell the same. often times a family is formed before they even realize they belong to each other. it's like the one legend of a man who brought her a sprig of rosemary & always, she'd find a use for it: eventually they did what the hopeless & the hopeful, the lonely & the lovely do & they grew into each other. they named their first born rosemarine. the first sentence she said out loud was something about the moon and how it was always out. most people, she noted, can only see it when it's dark enough, but we're lucky because we can always smell it and scents it. she wondered if the rest of us knew the constellation of stories that surround the moon as well as she knew them. "the light is piercing, but so is the sentiment. and i guess so are we." that's just how she was.

notes about portland:

terrible tim on the 8 told me ports and coin tosses on the west coast were enough and serenely erie. it was a boston and a gold rush to a could-have-been-boston in 1851. the two rivers crossed at a point known as "the clearing" & 800 people lived there and though they are historic, in some ways he thinks we're just as alike as anyone could be & he's probably right, as most terrible people are.

i think about us and our drifting poetries often- i am because we are. it's not necessarily the words written on paper, but it is how we live- the way we all swim indoors & the water that splashes up against our windows. That's why we will never feel as lovely in the outside world- you see the way everyone walks and runs like zombies-it's almost apocalyptic. sometimes this city is just dry air & a concrete street. but inside 1234 we are all swimmers and floaters. water slips through our fingers and holds us up like ships. graceful strength is the most beautiful kind and nothing embodies it quite like the buoyant bubbles that come up and burst from our blurred voices. there is something to be said about soft hands in winter, peppermint, a gray coat in everytime and anyplace & patience when people have no idea what it means to live for their shadow. you can at least laugh at it. stand atop a steeple and percuss a tune on my hips with twigs. i think someday & maybe soon, my heart will beat with that rhythm. i could be one of those people in a constant state of spiritual remembrance- some sufi/salinger aromatic thrill. we know no one could pick out phonies quite like HC and that's why i was terrified to meet him. thank god, he's just a character in a book i read once.

today was the earliest i've woken up since my boston days, i hated it, but i just had to stretch. it was a stretch of a lake shore street and there WERE smoky billowed clouds hanging over these perfect waves made glassy with slushed ice and such. the leafless trees were distractingly beautiful. & you know my rubber wheels tend to drift as it is with such an aloof captainesse behind the wheel, but my car and i, well all of us, drift in exaggerated ways when there are brittle winter trees innervating the city's brain. i love, love, love how the branches curve like dancers and how their legend is so much granderrr- don't you feel it sometimes? the skeletal environment can be so charming & honestly so worthy of your attention- a public accordion would have been a particular kind of transportation for this morning and i couldn't help but hope to ride in one & to find my mom living in the orchestra village; in these last couple of days, i'm sure it's where she belongs - after all, when she quit playing the guitar as a 14 year old is precisely when she planted her seeds of paradise lost.

andalusian ceramics & turkish hammered metalware are the only things i want to surround me tomorrow and i definitively do not want to pick up scattered books from the street while cars honk at me- what an urban myth and a real disaster. i've felt very heavy these past couple of days with all the things I have to carry in circles- 60 history-years and his classical guitar are especially weighted & vacant in their own ways. luckily, in a graceful chance, just as i was starting to feel blurry and tedious- this man with a perfect fedora and the most perfect beard was rapping & echoing in the city underground something about escaping to yourself. ack, exactly.