here comes a start

it's new years' eve eve, but when this posts it will be new year's eve. the washer is spinning and my belly is pleased and full. tonight was homemade pasta and squid in red sauce and garlic bread and salad and a good thick dessert with kiwis and crumble. all in our warm cantaloupe kitchen, with family, tucked in the valley's pocket, the river thrashing rocks recently resurfaced and the buds at work on branches while the bulbs poke down and up and everything readies.

one of these days we'll look out to new color, but the winter that sits beyond our windows, the leftward field of reds and yellows and browns and grays and greens and reds and oranges and yellows, lines and dots and squiggles and feathers and soft and hard and dull and sharp, is beautiful. texture. beds and beds and miles and volumes and bellies and mouths of texture. like an anemone in a pool with its tentacles waving. a starfish on the rocks with its sandpaper skin. the side of a whale pocked with barnacles. a new dish of paint, a pile of cheese grate , a bowl of popped corn and its buttery crannies, ice on the windsheild spreading as quills.

it's a new and old discovery, texture. it's what amanda and nathan give the wines, what bodhi's coat does in light, luna's siamese eyes and a little lady's eyelashes and always a spot of her hair in the back. a certain favorite's earlobes and iris. a book's edge of paper. in the summer the river's silt bed disturbed and blooming. the coat of an owl or a fox's whisker. the sound of hair on string or ice in a shaker or skis cutting snow or oak warming in creaks and pops post frozen-fog night. it's everything.

sometimes i fall a little too in love with texture. sometimes i don't take enough time to rein it. sometimes i make more texture than is needed. sometimes texture suffocates and other times, the best times, of course, it's just right. everything sings. you feel it in your chest. purity.

a fly i'd normally smack buzzing up in the light so the bulb and shade shed dust and the motes fall in whorls like a winter's white storm beneath streetlamp.

i'm glad to be here. i'm glad to want to run around with a magnifying glass and a bandana and a cap gun and be always in boots. i'm glad to see someone endlessly love to jump puddles. i'm glad to come upon orange bellied salamanders playing statues in the road. i'm glad for blackberries that will ripen and the length of light on its way.

happy new year all you. keep peeled. be listening.