It’s just about noticing, isn’t it? Sunrise, food, insects on a windowsill; temperature, skin before lovemaking, and after. Cloud shapes, stones, the texture of floor, sheets, wine glass against lips. Neruda says something or other is “abandoned like a wharf at dawn”—and maybe because I’m standing in his house when for some reason I think of it, I realize this is how it starts—seeing the wharf, abandoned, or just imagining, finding, comparing, word  painting; noticing the shade of blue in the centre of an iris and giving that to a part of the body, a vein maybe; now I look for eyes and hollows in throats among twists of driftwood at certain times of day, in light, then in shadow.

It’s like the the A-Z of butterfly wings; seeing what’s there and naming it something that until that moment doesn’t exist—all of that, in order to see it.