wear books like hats upon your crazy heads
reading books, writing about reading books, reading books about writing and reading books. and tea.

“The sun rose on one of those fresh dewy dawns unknown except in the mountains, when the buoyant air seems as it were to penetrate every pore in one’s body.
[…]
The heavy, sodden framework of flesh and blood which I languidly dragged along London streets underwent a strange transformation, and it was with scarcely a conscious effort that I breasted the monstrous hill which towered above me.  The pinewoods gave out their aromatic scent, and the little glades were deep in ferns, wild-flowers, and strawberries.  Even here, the latent terrors of the mountains were kept in mind by the huge boulders which, at some distant day, had crashed like cannon-balls through the forest.  But the great mountain was not now indulging in one of his ponderous games at bowls, and the soft carpeting of tender vegetation suggested rather luxurious indolence, and, maybe, recalled lazy picnics rather than any more strenuous memories.”

Sir Leslie Stephen

I kind of really adore nature/adventure writing.  I love the “strange transformation”, the scents of the forest, and the contrast of terror and indolence.  This is from a collection of mountain literature, called Where the Silence Rings, ed. Grady.

Crisp is to the apple what
flexed is to the body.

Poor apple.

Being bitten is to the crisp apple
what walking is to the ripe body, but it’s more complicated than that:

the apple of the face has been given
to the running juice of the body

and the body, which is often gracious,
makes it shine.

Lucky apple.

Having a core is to the apple
what having a core is to the body, city, method, circumstance, endeavor.

Having a core is flower-shaped and hurts
in the way that having a shape hurts, which is to say

it hurts ironically, because to have limits
is not just to make a declaration upon a mountainside,

it is also to be the mountainside. Having a flowering core
also hurts in the way that being flower-like always hurts,

which is to say sexually, as if the whole self
has exceeded the skin, which it hasn’t, which means

we always seem to be opening but never ever do.
Both these types of suffering color the air

when we pause to have them. The affected atoms
are hard to see amongst the billions

of sofa atoms, newsprint atoms
but, like the illnesses in the crystalline sea, they are there.

Red apple sliced, quartered, salted. Green apple,

alone in the basket.
Anything left on the shelf becomes weak,

suggestible, vulnerable to other shapes, hungry to be refilled
by something other than itself,

a poison apple.
The joining we do with others needs containing.

Apple pie.
Imagine the mess. Imagine a finger touching the sack of the heart.

Imagine being stopped, controlled that powerfully.
Imagine nothing like that being possible. Nothing ever stopping you

at the root of the breath. Huge apple.
The world in reference to you. How you move. Time a backdrop.

Or close the other eye: you in reference to the world.
How it varies and happens simultaneously.

Good morning.
Little apple.