The harbor is silver because the sky is silver. I record this so I will remember that on this day, the colors of the world were the colors of one another. The water held the cloud the way a developing tray holds a print — and for a moment I could not tell which was the original.
Rain fell into the rain barrel. The barrel did not know the difference between the rain and itself. I stood watching the water enter the water, and felt I had finally understood something I had been told as a child and had refused, until now, to believe.
The mathematics of ice is the mathematics of water remembering it had a shape. For seven mornings I broke the crust on the harbor with the back of an oar, and each morning the crust had returned, slightly thicker, with the patient determination of a thing convinced of its own argument.
She brought me a single glass of seawater in a corked bottle and said: “this is everything you have ever written about, all at once.” I drank it, of course. It tasted of the harbor in summer, of the rusted iron of the pier, of every page I had not yet written; and she watched me drink with the patient amusement of a person who has known me longer than I have known myself.
A spilled glass on the kitchen tiles makes a country with islands. I drew its borders in pencil on the back of an envelope before I cleaned it up. The country no longer exists; the map remains. This is, I have come to believe, the entire purpose of writing things down.
Below this depth, the colors red and yellow do not exist. Only blue, and the absence of blue. I have brought my red square and my yellow triangle anyway. The water cannot read them; that is no objection. A pencil mark in a sealed jar is still a pencil mark when the jar is at the bottom of the well.
The hand-pump in the yard is older than the house. This morning it gave up four iron-tasting strokes of water before it remembered the job and ran clear. I carried the bucket inside, tipped it into the kettle, and let the kettle decide what kind of day it would be.
Steam from the bath rose in straight columns and then forgot. The ceiling above the bathroom is mottled with the cumulative memory of every winter morning my grandmother bathed there. The plaster keeps a record the architect did not authorise.
The page is darker now, and the primitives glow very faintly — a 1px outer stroke at sixty per cent lightness, because the dark is also a kind of paper. I had not appreciated this. I had thought paper was always the colour of cream, and that ink was the only available verb.
I dropped a small marble into a glass of water and listened. The marble made one sound; the water made a different sound; together they made a third sound that was neither. Three sounds from two objects: this is the kind of unaccountable arithmetic the world performs when nobody is watching.
The hot tap and the cold tap, opened together over the porcelain sink, agree on a temperature halfway between their disagreements. This is how a marriage works, my mother once said, and went back to washing the spinach with both eyes closed.
The kettle whistles at exactly the same pitch as the gull on the chimney pot, two seconds apart. I have begun to suspect a private agreement between them, brokered before I bought the kettle, conducted in the dialect of steam.
After the storm, the puddles in the courtyard reflected three different skies, depending on the angle. From the kitchen window: the cleared north. From the gate: the still-grey east. From above (I climbed onto the shed): a single small blue rectangle directly overhead, which I had not been promised.
An ice cube in a tumbler of summer water has the patience of a small tutor. It teaches the water the meaning of cold, slowly, and at the cost of itself. I drank the whole tumbler in one slow draught and felt I had been the lesson.
I found a bottle of seawater on the shelf labelled in my own hand, dated nine years ago. The salt had crystallised at the bottom. The water above it was still, technically, the harbour, even though the harbour had since been dredged twice and was no longer the harbour I had bottled. I uncorked it and apologised, in case the water knew.
A drop of dew on a spider's wire holds an entire white sky inverted. I do not know how the wire holds the drop; I do not know how the drop holds the sky. I have stopped asking and started copying out the geometry into the back of this book.
The bath cooled too quickly and I climbed out into a towel that had also forgotten its job. I noted the temperature of both, and the time, and the fact that my shoulders had taken the disappointment more personally than my feet. The body keeps its own depth gauge.
The fountain in the square, switched off for the winter, makes a perfect inverted bowl of frost on its catch-basin. I stood beside it and counted the cracks in the ice, sixty-seven, the same number as the years between the war and my grandfather's funeral, which I refuse to believe is a coincidence.
I let a single drop fall from the eaves into a glass on the windowsill, every few seconds, all afternoon. By dusk the glass was a quarter full and the world had got a little quieter, drop by drop. Time, when you can hear it landing, is more bearable than when you can only hear it leaving.
The harbour at low tide leaves a flat shining counter of mud, on which gulls and the small black gulls' shadows do not coincide. The light is at fault, but I cannot prove this, and the gulls themselves seem unconcerned. Perhaps everything that walks beside its shadow has, in the end, two lives.
I have been arguing with the dehumidifier for a week. It collects the air's confessions in a small plastic tank and I empty the tank into the basil pot. The basil thanks no one in particular, in the language of basil, which is a smell.
Marlene phoned from a city I have never visited and described, for thirty-one minutes, the rain on the roof of the train station. I held the receiver away from my ear so that the silent kitchen could also hear it. The kettle responded, much later, in its own voice.
The kitchen tap dripped twenty-three times before I found the wrench. The wrench was where I had left it the previous summer, beneath a saucer in which a single damp coin lay flat, indifferent to its rescue.
My mother filled a small basin with water from the kitchen kettle and lifted me out of it, and I made the noise that everyone makes the first time they meet the air. The water in the basin, I am told, was perfectly ordinary water; it had not been told whom it was greeting; it cooled into the same evening as everyone else.
Below this depth, the log is sealed.