Dear love, back from picking up this week's vegetables at the CSA farm. The scent of fresh thyme and lemon balm lingers on my left hand. I snipped sprigs of each and clutched the small handful on my way home. I pause now and raise my fingers to inhale faint lemon earth. Were I to offer my fingers to you - extend my arm and observe while you close your eyes - I imagine you would flare your nostrils, breathe in deep, and stir, aroused by the aroma, for a moment swoon, and then come up for air again, open your eyes, look in my eyes with a smile - and kiss me. Or it might put you in the mood for roast chicken, as it does me too (I usually stuff a whole bird with thyme, lemon, and garlic as well) though at the same time I think it would make a subtly heady herbal fragrance suitable for a kitchen goddess.

Where are you sweetheart, you seem scarce today, perhaps you're in transit (because surely not, I pray, in a coma, traction or prison). Ah no, here you are now, and I wouldn't mind taking a stroll with you around the garden - garden of my dreams though, because ours is so overgrown I tend to avoid it, especially with all the rain this week. But yes, that is a nice image, and so let me put my journal away and bring you a glass of wine too and we can sit together and look at Penelope and at the little woodland garden - which is much fuller now than when that image was taken a couple of years ago. The astilbes, dark spikes barely tinged with color are at their ascetic peak, and for the very first time since we planted them a few years ago, the oakleaf hydrangeas have bloomed, magnificent, heavy ivory efflorescences unfolding in stages from top to bottom, and now in full bloom, rather like the effect for me when things have gone for the briefest revelatory moment, which I prolong as long as I can stand, never more than several seconds I'm afraid, all I can stand, transcendently well. Had I forgotten my body was involuntarily capable of that? Not volcano, but teeming opposite, vortex, concentrated pool gathering inward and outward at the same time, sea anemone undulating, concupiscences whirling.

That's how it is for me, on my solo voyages of discovery - no, not solo, the discoveries of the buried depths of dazzling icebergs don't occur without very specific and concentrated thoughts of you. That, plus I did a couple of loads of wash, and should have vacuumed but couldn't, and Penelope & Claire seem to be new BFF's semi-amorously hanging out together on the same porch step Penelope stretching out a langorous paw towards Claire when she stirs, and dinner I want to hear so much about your day, just see you lean back against the back of the Wave Hill chair and tell me - whatever might cross your mind at the moment to say. Here, have a savory cracker with some creamy camembert darling, I'm just back with a small tray and fresh drinks for us. Here, smell my wrist darling, fresh thyme & lemon verbena from the herb garden, and just for you, in my dreams darling, I've put an enormous organic chicken, the kind that march here & there around gardens in these parts, in the oven, and after we have our libations and watch astilbes acerbically unfurl and hydrangeas droop lush & drenched but before the mosquitoes drive us crazy, I'll lean over and plant a kiss on your sweet soft lips and linger yours at mine, demonic overgrown garden all around, cats scattering, maple tree obliviously bowering, I'll place my hand at your stem, you'll excavate for mine, and we'll meet you and I, volcano & vortex twisting, revolving, positive and negative concentrating, conflating, in effulgent, transcendent

it lasts only a few seconds
but what seconds
clouds part to glimpse
oneness with infinity