“I’ve been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech—if not all human speech—is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breath in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder—they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we’re breathing in. The problem is, that when we’re breathing in, we can’t speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other.

The minute we start breathing out, we can talk; speech is made with the outgoing, exhaled breath. The problem that is poses, though, is that as we exhale, nutrients are leaving our bodies; our bones get softer, our muscles get flaccid, our skin starts to loosen. You could think of that as the dying breath. So as we breath out, we have less and less presence.

When we make verbal meaning, we use the dying breath. In fact, the more I say, the more my meaning is disclosed. Meaning grows in opposite ratio to presence or vitality. That’s a weird thing. I don’t know why God made us that way.

It’s a kind of paradigm for life, right? As we die, the meaning of our life gets disclosed. Maybe the paradigm for living is encoded or embedded in speech itself, and every time we speak we’re enacting on a small-scale, microcosmic level the bigger scale of our lives. So that the less vitality we have, the more the meaning of our lives get disclosed.”

—Li-Young Lee

Every summer there are three mornings, maybe two on a slow season, when you wake up & the boulevards are flooded with mulberries. There are theories. The younger trees rebel against the hottest nights, or the elders are too weak to carry their little globes, or they are all allergic to the pheromones our teenagers’ kisses leave behind like exhaust. You hear all of this at the impound lot, every time. See, if you leave your car parked on the mulberry emergency route when it happens, the city tows you so the plows can get through. Everybody gets towed. Going to get your car back takes forever, like waiting in line for your prom picture. You see all your exes. There’s one guy who always storms in with violet & crimson handprints on his shirt, sometimes blood in his beard. By the way he knows fire, you bet he’s a preacher or glassblower. He comes in yelling about the trees. They picked the wrong boulevard to fuck with. If we pray hard enough, we can make it rain axes. Nobody ever asks what the city does with all the berries.

Dear ghost stories: I always took you for country folk, but have yet to find you in Kansas.

Dear iTunes on shuffle: two Norah Jones songs in a row? You knew it would rain tonight.

Dear Ezra Pound: you’ve ruined nature for me. Flower petals & faces, for better or worse, now only remind me of concrete & steel. I walk past my neighbor’s garden & long for skyscrapers, the sick steam of engines. People breathe smoke, worship wheels, fade like so many apparitions: God & the forest.