Japanese tea ceremony, for Ben

This is a post-rubble animal. It lives where no one remembers a disintegration. Chasing dust motes and imagining the breaths between fall and settle and crack and shift and particle clumps tumbling off edges. It doesn’t quite breathe.  

There are loads of trails on caves and under the sand so when you make a castle on vacation it gurgles from underneath. It burrows down and invites all the things that might have been buried under asphalt elsewhere to come and play. The small insects dance along behind it, but it cannot quite break them out of the amber. Other, smaller ones, gather around and it shows them into between layers. Sheets on your bed, limescale edge on the showerhead that sprays water over the wall, layers of pudding in your parfait. 

It listens to you sleep in order to practise closing its eyes. Again and again and again and again, and it blinks the night away. Someday, we hope it learns that nobody has earned the stars. Bright and dark and sweaty backs and glimpses out the window to the trees that are only shadows. 

Whispers over your shoulders and pressing on your walls that you only dream of on the overpass.

Petrarch on the hill, for A. T.

It is a very small protozoa and it burrowed deep into the ground and it watches our pans sizzle and our beds get made and our kettles boil and our infrared calls to other places and different animals mostly like us.

It thinks that it can grow flowers above the ground or disintegrate titanium to build ghostly aircraft.

So far, it only makes us wonder if the last popcorn kernel could have been nice to eat without setting off the fire alarm.

why hugging makes us feel better when we're sad, for Kate

An animal lived next to me for a while. We just observe the animals, I know. But one did live next to me. 

It is long. It has scales that sort of separate, all of them. So it suddenly covers small gaps over your gutters and little rain comes through. It just followed pipelines all the time. Gutters or trenches or ditches or little rivulets down the pavement. It splashes in them. Or it swims or drinks them or saves them and expels large quantities so suddenly all the grass is underwater and you can see all the pill bugs and stick insects and termites very clearly. Clear colours and sharp outlines and glistening exoskeletons and you don’t really see it, it just drifts. Always nearby.

When I was asleep, it would fill the room with water through the window, and the edges would all be split, and I would just be in the water. Cold or swiftly moving towards parked cars and underpasses and needles and stone and beach fires on the other side of a high drop. Or something below all the water. Pressure and ghost droplets and still. 

It is glistening and slipped disks and sustained spreading of webbed fingers. Calls through submerged telegraph wires. Twitching hairs in our ear canals, ink veins in sinews left by deep tattoo needles. Intake of breath with you, every time. Narrowing the frequency of your neuronic bandwidth. 

It is an every-shifting vibrating of still. Do you know that these animals don’t really end? But we do not try to catch them.

serendipity and its infinite sadness and joy, for tassos

Once there is a rock. It’s a friendly rock. It sits in the starlight or under the ice or in a meadow of warm sand. It doesn’t wish anything because it’s a very small stone. But it casts shadows. And the ice starts to melt on one side and not the other. Sand grazes on it and the atoms in it slow or speed even when the starlight is not directly on it. It took us so, so very long to discover this stone; anything that can hold on to something on this planet. That can stop something. That can cast a spell longer than itself to keep several centimetres of the pond frozen enough to skate on.

We have some very small animals that like to skate in the spring.

Some of our animals listen near the stone and some lick the heads of future animals that rest on top to rid them of moss spores and microscopic spiders. Because future animals like their outer molecules to ricochet a litter faster than the rest of them. Some of our animals we never ever found and the bravest of animals and the most technologically equipped of us suspect that those animals contributed to the rock. Jagged bits exposed by softer bits sing in the wind, and we see the lungs of something very invisible and very, very far unfurling.