philologie

The streetlights here are too new; remember the sodium bulbs they used to use? They made everything that soft, quiet, yellow. The only quiet color of the 80s. These lights are brand-fuckin’-new. LED or something, and they light up the arboreal canopy, all of it. Six different bulbs per post and each leaf blazes, belly and back in flat platinum. Their pixelated shadows all across the sidewalks. I used to wonder about the shadows. I'd watch my feet as I stumbled home after a vicious Saturday night. On pre-dawn slogs to adjust delicate experiments. It took me six years to look up. That was on purpose, mind. Some mystery is important. Tonight I'm looking up. The moon's out, high and getting higher. A waning gibbous; a red moon, a harvest moon. The point of light above it is Mars, I think, though I've come to that conclusion because it is bright and red and new, and these days all celestial bodies are suffering from a spot of smoke-induced rosacea. Napa's vines might be ash but if we can't

The sink in your bathroom is cheap. The single tap might have had red and blue markings at one point, but now you just have to know that you need to spin it counterclockwise at least three times to get hot water. Five times if you’re in a hurry. At home, the water is near freezing for most of the year if you don’t choose a side; here, it comes out tepid. But whatever continent you’re on, disk faucets like this one mix hot and cold water to order in their pressure balance cartridge, and the flow from your hot water heater still takes a different set of pipes to the end point than the cold water does. Did I ever tell you how running water works? It’s one of those things that seems so fundamental to modernity that it just disappears, so it doesn’t surprise me that you’ve never questioned it. I guess I didn’t either until I moved here. A math student doesn’t have to know this type of thing, but a handyman does. Anyways, running water: it’s all run by electricity in a city like this. I

The forest ahead is still quiet, though the sun has struck out at the canopy with its first crystalline rays and they have filtered down already to fleck the mosses and lichens of the understory. Last night’s heavy rains were the first for months, and now the muted fall of water from the tips of the cedars’ curling boughs is the only sound here. The mist we walk through is dense, but before us the veil burns off with abrupt candor, the thin light of the sun now revealing the delicate malachite leaves of Ceanothus, now pulling the blades of the bowltube iris from the ambiguity of night. The student leads us. She picks her way along the muddied path, taking small leaps from one crest of hardened soil to another. Her shadow flashes over the silty pools between. She is careful; with her immaculate hiking boots, it’s obvious that the scientist isn’t the sort to relish the pull of mud around her calf. Our student prefers the forest in the deep heat of summer, on those nights where the moon

We’re in a beautiful place, you and I. There are weeds rising resplendent out of every crack in the concrete and there is the slow calm quiet of the peerlessly blue sky. The hush is interrupted, but only by the gentle creaking of a bike as a woman pushes it up the hill. The bicycle’s tires roll over a sparse scatter of brilliantly purple petals; the Tibouchine flowers are senescing. Somewhere nearby jasmine vines creep over a pitted fence. You can smell their perfume mixing with the scent of her exertion; it’s a heady collision. But don’t get distracted, Gabriel. Sun and verdure and the sweet breeze that haunts the trailing edge of summer; they’re nice, but they’re not what we’re after. Keep your eyes open. We’re here to see. Watch with me. Listen to the woman’s struggle, see the sweat pinning her violet curls to the back of her neck. Witness the faint path that the woman and her bike have carved into the carpet of petals. It’s one we’ll follow, of course; we will set our feet where