The wild ox will dance and play and the violin will sing

Courtesy of nineweaving. Thank you, Arthur Sullivan, W.S. Gilbert, and Peter S. Beagle, for helping me become the swashbuckler I am today.


You Are A Pirate!


What Type Of Swashbuckler Are You?
brought to you by Maddog Varuka & Dawg Brown

On the train down from Boston to New Haven this afternoon, I saw a white egret in a salt marsh, its neck curved back like a serpent or half a line-drawn heart, in a glitter of sunlight on the silty water. I had wadded up a black linen jacket into a pillow against the window and only the sudden sun on my face, as it came out from underneath the pale overcast, the clouds stacked like grey taffy and stones over the sea, made me blink around and look out in time to catch it—brighter than the clouds, a soul-bird stalking through cordgrass and sedge.

Last night was a full moon in a rolling cavern of clouds, webbed with salt-white seas and shadows, like an Alan Garner illustration. Tonight it's a thumbnail coin, tin-snipped magnesium, so high in blue-black haze that it looks as though it should cast no shadows: and when I turned out the kitchen light, all I saw were streetlights striping through onto the floor.

I have been out of my apartment so long that it smells like a stranger's: dust, and locked windows, and closed doors. I cleaned for nearly three hours after dinner and now there are clothes laid out on the futon, books piled next to the bed; within absent reach beside my laptop, a mug printed wraparound with the Weighing of the Heart and still a quarter full of tangerine tea. All the books stacked double-deep on the shelves are mine, the green glass fishing float hung in a net of yarn in front of the central window, the wall calendar three months behind on gargoyles, the mermaids in my bedroom. I recognize everything. I will have to sleep here to feel at home.

I feel a little like a ghost.

Of a pirate, apparently. Could be worse.