Le Merle

dear trynne,
on the table beside my couch there is, in a row,
– half sphere (v’s green bowl, needle and thread in it)
– lipped cylinder (candle with tiny white flowers)

right now, the third is an upside-down cone (your left water glass). its usual right-side up cone (spool of thread borrowed for your sky costume), i have kept on the floor with the plants.

last summer, i hit my head on n’s building. i sat inside it, on her floor; you taught me what countermapping was on the phone  ¹. it’s “often used to decolonize space … not a traditional map … not a traditional way of conceiving a place or a space. it’s just the vibes. the mapping of the vibes.”

last night, in the map of my kitchen, i finally moved the horse painting (hooves smaller than candle-flowers) back to the window. you picked it up when you thought it was funny. i didn’t want to smudge the way you’d conceived of it.

“where is the rhythm?” i’d asked, head ringing, n’s floor, of your countermap. you’d said: “rhythm is where something hits something else, right? so it must be at the intersection.”

today at the intersection is a slow eye going up. when i broke up with j, my notebook was open, my computer, open blank. i cleaned my room around it. i cleaned my desk last. i closed notebook, computer, soft cover, hard case, i cleared the scratched wood over and over with the pine / vinegar cleaner i boiled in december with the branch the man gave me in the parking lot. i covered it wholly with the soft gift you made for me everywhere — then the little heart s knit with the tiny skein i found, filled with flax seeds and lavender.

in the essay “poetics of place,” your darian quotes site-writer jane rendell: “there is a difference between writing about a place and writing a place.” there is a difference between writing about a friendship and writing a friendship. between you being here and me skirting around whatever being-things that you left. between protecting memory above all else and letting movement be part of protection.

“i made an open space,” you’d said, “between the ocean and the rock.”

while i stretched in the frame, you asked me “what do you want out of this?” our writing together.

i want to write not about-the-place (poetry), but write-the-place (poetry) by writing to you (poetry). bc a letter is a direction. trace of that knock, a head and a building, a head and a word, the open space between ocean and rock.

hello rock, this is ocean. hello ocean, this is rock.

what do you want out of this?

dear ej,
there’s this thought-feeling that finds me — it surrounds the situation when a friend comes into your home and you’re compelled to show them something. it’s like the object has existed to find your friend and up until now the affection or affinity you felt for it was a type of guardianship.(here I mean “you” as in “anyone.”)

when I visited you asked why being in a friends room made me think of high school. it’s something and was something about the poetics, subtext, an entire life in a space where it also isn’t. it’s also just intimacy.

(here I mean “you” as in “you.”)

you mentioned the horse, the glass with affection. stable. I stuffed away my guilt for how messy we left our corner on the nights we were absent from the basement. you made me so comfortable I forgot to be afraid of being a bad guest. thank you. and I want everyone to know there’s something about me that’s so good about opening a map but can’t conceive of the way of folding it back up again. // it’s not on purpose. // always looking for my keys.

the tour you gave n — curation of your insides outsides. even when you’re not you’re so yourself that people want to go along with it. it was impossible to know what he really thought but I got the impression: touched, a small intimacy within a larger one. there is a lot of nesting.

“between protecting memory above all else and letting movement be part of the protection.”

the rhythm of our words against each other, the language we are developing, the poetics of this place.

this place, soaking my feet to type this up now (March 20th) and where I am now (March 13th) is a crowded table. I never cleared up my oatmeal or water glass and k left a Kirkland bottled water on the table with the photos of Tamarind. chickpeas live like a fresh catch meant for travel, pink mesh, and salt and pepper solemn. dried flowers, melted candle, instructions on how to bake the bread, I didn’t follow, my phone, scotch tape, soy sauce, lunch bowl empty of dumplings. I still hate this table in the middle of the room but it’s almost spring, it will move back to the wall. we haven’t cleaned since we came to visit you –everything is out of place.

for something to have a place still feels dangerous. I’m getting itchy in Montreal but stability is so good for me. if everything had a place in our house, somewhere it belonged, the labour of upholding that would slowly melt me down to a waxy stub. and yet it also happens naturally, things find their places because they’re where they are. you and I both know this well and differently.

***

on your birthday the man on the porch said “if you’re too serious it’ll break your heart” and I focused all my blood on making that a memory. I told you this already but I needed to include it here because you also told me “transness is just towards comfort” and I am trying to listen to the little things people say that move me.

I am thinking about exit strategies, we talked.

it takes so long to get back to where we were, another time makes a place somewhere further. I want this place, we are moving like a pendulum — the sound between the tick and tock.

dear trynne,
always a half skip. i start the notes in my head, recite “dear trynne, dear trynne.” dear trynne, school is over now. there is a silence before work begins. i am trying to really sink into it, let the loud filter out of my brain’s collapse. on my last day of school i wrote from 11-11; the next day we built a garden box; the next day i sanded and refinished my precious desk. i rest. i rest.

on saturday i spent the morning reading anton chekhov’s play “the seagull” because that night we were going to see k’s ellie act as masha. (i was worried i wouldn’t have time to get flowers, so asked n, who is staying with us for the week, if he could get some on his run. he brought back lilies and we realized together that the knowledge of floral connotations is a subtle outcome of gendered socialization. but i loved them in the end bc they looked like seagulls. ellie in the end loved how they smelled. today they opened up, shy proud in royal blue glass on her table.

seagull lilies, a copper iris, ² a cloud in the shape of a grand piano. in “the seagull,” boris trigorin complains about the incessancy of noticing:
here i am with you, i’m excited, yet every minute i’m thinking that the story i haven’t finished is waiting for me. i notice that cloud up there, shaped like a grand piano, and i make a mental note to put that in a story. “a cloud passed, shaped like a grand piano.” a scent of heliotrope. i quickly make a note: “sickly odour, flowers the colour of a widow’s dress, use in description of a summer evening.” i pounce on every sentence, every word you and i say, and store it away for future use. it might come in handy. when i finish a work, i rush to the theatre or go fishing, hoping to relax and forget. but oh no. an iron ball is already turning in my brain — a new idea, and already it’s pulling me back to the desk, and again i have to hurry to write and write. and it’s always like that, always. and there’s no rest for me, from myself, and i feel i’m devouring my own life.

a copper iris, iron ball turning. as e and i walked home in the middle of the night — toronto night, i’m always thinking, so aware about being here now — she asked how much i think i have to lose in order to make art. as i lost / the thread. as i forgot everything i needed to tell you about the woman sitting next to me at the show, her light pink scarf that said new york new york in white cursive. i didn’t get my footing but i was trying, against losing, to explain to ellie about us. somehow. how it isn’t losing — it feeds. there is a future outside of illusion. outside our seeds are sprouting from the same plants, and we are walking to each other.

that passage is from david french’s translation, who, “like many of the british and american writers who have translated the seagull … neither reads not writes the language.” the playwright of e’s staged adaptation, simon stephens, also is a non-russian speaker. instead of knowing russian, french “immersed” himself in chekhov’s stories in letters and worked with donna irwin, a tolstoy scholar. stephens “created this version from a literal translation.” french’s goal: “accuracy without compromising the play’s theatrical vitality.” stephens’: “vitality, sensuality, rage, and compassionate spirt of the original.” vitality. vitality. i wonder about language’s life. i wonder about brash entitlement to vitality without language, but also, in french’s case, about not needing to know everything on your own, actually; rather, knowing you know anything by pushing out from knowing towards. the helden hand. the structure made of clasped fingers to lift someone’s foot up over a fence. stephens’ was a “stated goal” — french’s, with irwin, was a “combined passion.”

i’m not being good, i’m reading too much, biting into too many block quotes, tofu, i’m eating a block of tofu right now, same density, not enough living, the tofu is really good btw, was just what i wanted to chew, but i want to read things or learn things because they mean i will know someone else better. i know comedy because i studied it to talk to nathan. i have no respect for the canon, i told ellie, but the difference is that i read this play as part of the devotional curriculum and instead of it being some transcendent masterpiece it simply meant that i could better know her. that i could know you, because i find things to say to you everywhere. the pinch, as you call it. sickly odour, flowers the colour of a widow’s dress, use in description of a summer evening.

i’m not being good, i’m reading too much, as i sat next to the woman in the pink scarf after spending all day reading i read in the program: “Stephens says plays are not literary. They are a starting point for a night in the theatre. Welcome to your night.” welcome to my night: i walked home alone — not alone — the birds were chirping. i had read, and it too had been a starting point. a starting point: i’ve never had a spring here, so my body keeps trying to decide i am in other places. japan, often. a montreal moment when i sat for the first time alone in a park. spring here is k’s mom, on that we agree.

we agree: the piano clouds will keep coming. the questions speed up. the difference: we have someone to tell. atsushi texts me just now, now, 2 in the morning, toronto night, “i wanted to share it here because it feels big to me.” it is big to us. big in japan? big in our minds, rolling the steel ball, copper iris, touching the sculpture, new dinosaur, together.

dear ej,
I am asking about omens.

a couple of weeks ago I had a dream that I was outside and I stepped into a hole. my feet were bare and the stepping was an accident. the hole was a nest, it turned out, and my foot had stepped right onto a red winged blackbird. its bones embedded themselves into the meat at the centre of the sole. it was gory in that my stepping beheaded the bird. it was not gory in that there was no blood. the bird’s mouth was open and inside was an ugly, grey baby bird who was crying out loudly. the baby was dying too, just not yet. the other parent bird was perched on a beam of wood nearby. I hadn’t noticed it until I heard its devastated cries. it was obvious I was the cause.*

one of the things being tired does to me is put me in a state where meaning-making is irrelevant. I used to think so much about what certain things meant when they coincided with emotion. if I didn’t understand I’d make a story to surround the inarticulable. on my walks to the metro I notice then forget. a few times I’ve sent you pictures for reference. I used to take pictures because I thought things were beautiful– this was when I was a teenager. when I interned at a film company one of the guys told me I had a good eye. it’s true that I only have one good eye. s told me that if I wanted to get good at photography I could just practice after T’s launch. I said I knew that was true but the desire isn’t there, so I just get to appreciate their photos and be impressed when they do art. the only reason I find myself taking photos now is for memory or a joke. beauty is secondary.

in the park, before this interaction, I read T’s new collection slow enough but almost too fast. the sun was setting behind the forest that is only a forest in the summer. men on the soccer pitch were negotiating teams in loud voices.

the day after the day after that was the day I wrote most of this letter. I sat closer to the forest and the sun was strong because it was midday. I ate a beef patty and spread my blue blanket in the open field. the book I was reading was Baby Book. the clouds rolled big and fast overhead. it’s a high school writing habit to describe the weather like it means something. doesn’t pathetic fallacy sound like a thing it isn’t?

eileen myles is chasing me. I’ve only read peanut butter ³ but the cartoonist saw them on the plane and before that I’d been trying to find their poetry at the library but they only have Chelsea Girls and for some reason the montreal library system search is horrendous. it’s so hard to find what I want. S was talking about how eileen myles donated $69 at a fundraiser and they thought it was cringe when everyone went “oooOooh.” I said couldn’t eileen myles afford to donate more than $69? like any poet is rich! my mind’s just been on money. S said a lot of other people donated a lot more money at this particular event and the goal had already been met so the only thing left to do was make a joke. I’d latched onto the wrong detail but I wasn’t embarrassed, just ready to leave, glad to have met them.

I come back to the same conclusions again. if omen  is another word for  sign  it means that it is also an opportunity for choice. omen  is the knowing that choices must be made to let the future come and get me. what I told you is true: this past week I’ve noticed I’m doing better. the weather changed in many ways but I can’t make it make sense yet. suddenly, all the trees were full when I walked to meet f. a cherry tree with fruit that was already decaying stood out — I looked up to make sure it wasn’t a trick. it wasn’t, there were 2 more rotten cherries on the same branch. and the tree was still flowering I started thinking about why I had added the cherry tree memory after the doing better statement and then started to wonder if I was creating meaning subconsciously. then it wasn’t meaning. the image could reach if it wanted to, to tap us on the shoulder and signal something. but it doesn’t yet. it’s waiting.

T’s poems almost articulate something inarticulable about being in a specific body that is almost many things. affinity. with you too, affinity.

the stick of hormones in my arm is doing something. I am forgetting pain. I have felt awake 2 times. but I also bleed a very little bit all the time. overall, I think this is ok.

especially since I have felt myself in the past week even though the hangover made me wonder how to erase “I” from every sentence. it’s the wrong impulse, of course, we talked about it.

I consider again these questions: what does it look like not to erase oneself from one’s own life? does it look like this? does it look like moving?

dear ej, I am so grateful for your friendship! so thrilled at the potential of what we can construct. what I want out of this is this. the finding the way back and then laughing at recognizing something we thought we’d never seen before. like a part of town you think you’ve never been to before and then you see it from a different angle and you know — that’s it!
big love,
trynne

* a footnote! no way… when I was half way done this letter I checked back in on yours from last week. I hadn’t remembered the mention of a red-winged blackbird. literally what the fuck??