Bought pine planks and lined our books on them. Repotted the hanging plant, unscrewed and replaced a hook. This blueprint becomes a tiny point, the disclosing the easier part. And then. You, in particular, guilty of this, the emphasis on particular verbs. Water boils. A thin stutter. Tonally relevant. He doesn’t sound like himself in the recording and speaks without end-stops. I inserted periods and dashes. Contextualized incomplete verb phrases.

Italicized. Enlarged a hole in the heel of my sock and ground enough beans to make two cups. Sent it all back to the writer. Life (tender) keeps on, even with. You season the skillet, replace it beneath the stove. Shadow overtakes the spot, out of the same momentum, the last and most apparent thing. And the counterweight of. Step now into the shower. Rattle of the furnace kicking on hours from now, waking us.

Settled into the zone of provisional imagining: thirty-five-degree drop when the sun slips behind the mountain. A charcoal streak, a stand of yellow larches. Flame frisking at the grate, fold a slab of salmon with lemon eggplant cherry tomatoes shallots thyme in aluminum rounded corners double-wrapped turned down. Pull of whiskey or set in airplane mode and just a moment. Against a fixedness, conversation replays on its usual grooves.

How does an impulse toward solitude shape the mood. I read a book about landscape and mothers and daughters to you by oil lamplight. We fall asleep with a candle lit, but the wood stove burns out and a deep chill. When the sun lights the hillside from the east, the town may wake. The water the morning carries, these artifices of independence. I think, finally, all texts are grieving. Moving from word to word. We do not settle down.

Who would hesitate. By what necessity, the quiet intimacy of his replies to notes addressed to her. Some or all of the fragments in place, though without center or hold. His explaining in her stead. Under the slender progression of the week (neat, without hindrance), those several noises of water, delicate fissures toward a prefigured breaking. By what molecular unkindnesses, her leaving. And now the completion of such a text deemed more essential.

It was late autumn. Shift triumphing as a natural thing. I always begin without direction but confident that the image would recover itself. (Concerned with should.) The quiet brick visage inured against hard-shelled treefruit and graupel. Especially minute under cover of early dusk, gathering from some distance. This new vacancy, what should I lend. A great leftover repeating and repeating itself. Would it overtake them overnight.