i.

Impatient with spring's incendiary budding, we longed for the
irreconcilable tossing of summer's phenomenal vowels: brief cawing
from gulls on the pilings to divide and overturn May's minor successes
(that profusion of greens rubbing against the loosened pane). We
watched as an afternoon was laid over the afternoons, like rain on the
sea. Renting one of the many clattering skiffs in which to reach the
peninsula, we traversed an idea of space and saturation all the way
out to where the phosphorous shards of early evening grew hard with a
deepening friction. Occasionally the lacunae between stars would glow
dimly-stars that became, under different names each night, our ardent
relief-a cool and continuous wake left by scores of April violets.

ii.

More than a pyrrhic discovery-clusters of Queen Anne's lace
through which the wind inscribes a muted text. Salt air burns the
last of winter's damp cordwood to ash. The weathervane spins inside a
set of parallel winds. By our road, the heavy monody of goldenrod.
The first June lily opened its whitest furl-the field itself in
an hour of heliotropic origin. After that, we liked the way the tight
equation of waves went on finishing nothing among the many drifts of
seaweed swaying all day at the fray.

iii.

Of the types of inflorescence, she liked compound umbel and corymb
best-wild carrot and cherry-variation of structuring root,
pith and stem. What became of the leaky skiff, its aluminum tuned to
thinness by this water's relentless logarithm? The days themselves
became fractions of polished metal, tuneless numbers, as the acute
and accurate boat was worn away by reference, and by our other forms
of luminous inquiry. The bay dispersed the heat of our instincts
until the boat became the question of a transparency gained through
travel. So long exposed to those elemental particulars, the boat is
hard to conceive of-moving as it does between one ideal shore
and another-just an inference of relation with seldom a trace to
be spoken of. Then, just an open sea to hold the boat's oscillations,
the echoes of its cold burning song.

iv.

It was the effort of sifting through August's scattered abeyance that
awakened our love of autumn's delay-that voice of its tonal
gesture in a phonemic drift through which vowels were only so many
moorings-boats in the harbor. Every so often the gulls' pitch
reduced the day's amplitude to fractions of its blue equation, leaving
the wooden piles of consonants with which our nights were built. Not
the view, but the window glass (long past molten) was our perspective
on this sea's refracting tones. Outside, a wind's thin tremolo
through dunes would light or delay our sleep. We knew how suddenly
the idea of a more distant paradise leaves you.