"Backyard Foliage" by Josette Urso
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spring
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In the east spring returns like a memory outlined in the soft air of certain evenings' instants, always half forgotten, like childhood, with a beauty too precious to be moved through time. There is a visitation, a separate place in the Spring where the times you forget about time are lived and forgotten. This is the birth season of enchantment, echoing with the insane laughter of its forest god Pan. Spring is a place, guarded by forgetfulness, where Pan pipes the music of birth's madness, of being. There are times apart. There is actual magic.
Hello. I have no news of the winter, except its end. I forgot to update the diary so I'm at a loss. Like heat or hot water the city has connections for systems of blood into which you plug and run down the lines of traffic patterns and shifting lights. You circulate. You move through streets like veins with blood cells people surging to a walk sign heartbeat pumping the city's need.
So many people...
You could just disappear if you didn't keep your diary updated to tomorrow's appointments, you could close your eyes and forget. There is nothing here. It looks like the desert/ glass and metal science fiction canyons and verticals of red brick/ the desert looks like this other planet.
I am going to Africa, to Casablanca to meet the ghost of an old friend who only travels now, immediately to Marrakech and the mountains where we hope to rest. I move as fast as he does in one small room, but without those boundaries he has begun to waver he is getting hard to find in wind or direct light, an absence -- the presence of a bank account exceeded by generosity -- paying for my escape.
Would it make you sad to know I think of you? Or that this is no place to visit? This is not a place at all, so much as a map or a blueprint. A piece of paper.
But Spring still appears here like a word whispered into writing, and even if that word is goodbye it is still softer than air, it is still quieter than silence. And for the time being there is this memory, alone, outside of loneliness, a friend.
Marc Penka 2002
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