I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

Tonight I foresee chaos where I would write calm, and so I will put my four flat stones into the breach.

What I have been dreaming all day, and searching fruitlessly for in my Color-aid box, is blue--a clear, silvery-grey blue, a lucid pale blue, a blue not unlike the color that I named palingenesian (an otherworldly blue constantly replenishing itself) for a friend this fall. All day I have dreamt a blue shirt.

(You see that you will hear my story, my longer story that might turn out to be a song, tomorrow. There are so many duties pressing here right now that I can take no time for narrative.)

I started dreaming the shirt as I watched a tufted titmouse swaying her body back and forth on the grapevine outside my kitchen door. I would, I thought, dress myself in shades of bird, lissome greys and suppled yellows and rosy hints and lightening blues. It is a self I might want to bring into being, though not one I recognize at the moment. Today I would have donned a shirt colored in the blue tint of a bird's wing.

Tonight I play with the idea of a word on the skin at the base of my thumb, there in that hollow I can make when I protrude my tendon. I ink it there to see how it looks, decide the ephemeral will suit.

Here on this longest night, all but one of the candles burning now, I dream again, as so often, of the desk and the window and the breeze and the wide sky: the place to which I would flutter and hover and, once there, settle and stay: the place where solitude's sturdy beauty would manifest in every corner, for every crook of thought. It is not a place I have found yet, though I've come close a couple of times.

It is possible that the place I'm dreaming is a Cornell box; I suspect I'd find my blue there, as well.