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Links to the original pictures (not my own, alas):
1. linen skirt: detail, 2. A Quick Dip, 3. the sea, 4. blueberry peach,
5. Natura Morta, 6. ., 7. Untitled, 8. morning,
9. my mother's ..., 10. i dream..., 11. Untitled, 12. yellow dingy

Lately I have been thinking about:

- Maine. I have never been there, but I am in love with it through image. Ryan bought me a leather bound copy of Thoreau's The Maine Woods for our anniversary yesterday. I think I will read it outdoors.

- The colors of the ocean. I have been enamored since last summer, though the colors are not a part of my landscape. That gray-blue follows me around in my heart. Sometimes we have it here, in the middle of the country--you can see it just after the sun sets, minutes after, when one side of the sky looks like a Maxfield Parish painting, but the other is that slate-ish blue with gray puff clouds near the moon.

- Windows. And light pouring through them. I am jealous of beds and writer's desks that are pushed up against those old, multiple squared windows, the world flush with green outside. Our own are strange, especially upstairs, hanging low to the ground, sashes hanging above them by enough to mask the fact that they are abnormally placed.

- Mostly, writer's retreats. I have never been on one, though I've been fascinated, especially after I went to the Palm Beach Poetry Festival this past winter. And sitting on my grandmother's screened in porch, the lake a roll in the yard away, the canoe spanning the distance, nearly, my laptop clam-shelled open, writing poems about swimming in loose sand and mussel detritus, thinking about holding my grandfather's ashes in my lap that last morning. I'm also thinking about Shari's photograph of the cottage where her mother stayed, and about this Minnesota graduate's retreat as well.

So, you see, I am full of this strange longing, this desire to snap the clam shut, to get myself out to the coast, to palming a mug of chai, to thick blankets slung over my lap and porches and worn gray wood and the waves, those quite crashes and crashes, bringing little bits from the ocean, things I can put into my pockets and line up on the writing desk overlooking the fog.