(As if someone erased the outlines.)

The sun is shining with so much intensity this morning. Straight into my window, which is open. So straight into my eye as well.

I have a strong urge to change the direction of my day.
To play hooky from my life and sit in a library instead. To drink a beer for breakfast.
To make watch a plane land, visit the jellyfish again, buy a houseplant, build a bookshelf, scan old family photos, shave my legs.

There's a rocking chair on my front porch.
I want to sit in it, put my feet on the screen and listen to the things I, by sensible necessity, must often ignore:
traffic waves, bird whistles, train horns, broom sweeps.

Why do we wake up in pieces some days? Not pieces. Those suggest a break.

Perhaps I blame Levinas, with whom I spent my last few days.
He writes that enjoyment allows us to experience what is exterior to us as if it were inside of us.
Enjoyment slows down or impedes the need to reason with what is Outside myself.

two days ago, sleepy face and late-night both

Last night, we rode the midnight Bolivar Ferry into a once-upon-a-time city that has since become a void.

I saw him at the wrong end of our boat, tossing bread into the empty sky.

A black ship negated a block of the horizon.
Far away, as the blackness moved, lights disappeared.

Our ferry was mostly empty. We tracked it like terrain with mountains, field, nighttime forest.
A territory of continental shift through the sea.

He said we were the size of a whale.

I said we left in one day, arrived in another.

At the other end of the ferry, three sets of herons floated slowly together.
Herons? At least, the shape of herons. An outline suggesting what fills it.

White bodies following the lines of a triangle drawn in the ocean.
The immensity of the water grew as the distance between them was lost.

They moved like they knew what surrounded them.

Then, it was behind us. The body of our ship disoriented.
I was at the back of the boat. I ran to him, pointing. Shouting.

The engine couldn't have been louder had it been inside me.

But he kept tossing bread into the air. Watching them land.
Whole pieces like hats or plates floating on the surface of the water.

Finally, when I was close enough to make out his hands, when he was close enough to make out my mouth, he turned.

It was what we had wanted without knowing we wanted.
A city's horizon, blacked over, coming toward us.

The shape of nothing in the shape of rectangles swallowing the sky but saving the water.

From where we began, we too disappeared.