Sequestered Nooks.

Those old neighbourhoods, whose buildings are all slotted against one another and are all different, their arms around each other's shoulders like those worldly, cultured, promotional photographs, buildings with balconies out front of the second storeys, whose residents come out on those balconies and stare across the street at each other and down through the tree leaves at the people bicycling past, well, that is the sort of street I am living on right now. There are always alleys that sneak behind places like this, and my bedroom looks out over one of those.

And there is this figure that has moved into a corner, a little nook, where the slotted building next to mine happens to be a bit longer than this one. I have not yet seen him through my window, the angle is too sharp to look right down onto him, unless I put my whole head out there, but I have never much liked heights. He moved in down there beneath me, bums I suppose they call people like him, and he laid one mattress down and propped a second mattress up as a third wall, and draped a sort of canopy above this space to protect from the rain, tucking all his belongings beneath.

He is pretty loud with his rustling, since it is just down on the ground below me, and I hear that sound a lot, the one that people make when they sniff really hard to get all that stuff out of their nose so they can spit it out somewhere. I go to sleep right around when the sun comes up, but it is hard at that time, right when he seems to be rustling around the most.

They call them bums, I guess, because they do not sleep in places like this one, and since their sleep does not happen in a place like this one, they are seen as sort of imposters, sleeping in those nooks, places that are not really used for anything else but are not meant for them anyway. But, really, places like this are more the charlatans, trying to stand taller than the trees, to prove a use, trying to make sure the colour of the city is anything but natural, trying to keep that nature from coming through the cracks, from tucking itself into nooks and persisting just behind us, and because of that, I think, I do not mind the trouble I have in trying to fall asleep during all that rustling and that deep, wet sniffing. No, it is not something that I mind too much, so a little loudly, well, loudly enough at least, I play maybe a Red House Painters album late at night or maybe a mix album I made and I hope that maybe it will help him sleep better.

Breeding lilacs.

I grew up surrounded by fields and forests, with alarm clocks and snooze buttons of birds calling through my always open window. I memorized at what time and angle the sun would grow ready to send its rays into my room. I have been writing a book this summer, on a topic that makes me look back to these things. I had a thick sponge of lawn rolled out wide around my house, where I would lay and listen to my neighbours' horses and children trotting about during summer afternoons. These things made me feel simple.

This summer I'm living in a big city. I have always found a honeyed novelty to places like this, where bricks and pavement scab the dirt, the real earth. When I was young my family went to Disneyworld for a vacation, and padding along the theme park street was not unlike my daily wanderings here. There are candy shops and silly trinket shops. There was a magical precipitation while standing on the sidewalk there on Main Street, USA. Here it rains for perhaps twenty minutes every day, and those minutes, like magic, tend to be the ones where I am out for my walk. The rain quiets the sharp buzz of these buildings, and softens the grate of old memories against brinking horizons. The rain makes this all simple, all the same.