The silent deep ablaze with fires

derspatchel and I walked down by the waterfront this evening, with a moon like an illustration from N.C. Wyeth hanging low over the harbor: haze-gold, etched across with cloud-lines in a sky that darkly glowing blue that feels hand-tinted, Jack Cardiff Technicolor in the tropics. I was reminded again how much I miss the sea.

We'd run out this afternoon to see Michelangelo at the MFA, an unexpected corridor of Art Nouveau through Soviet propaganda posters (I love the Faust in this one, but I wish I could link the Dada program or some of the German Art Deco) and not as much samurai armor as we wanted, which just means we'll have to go back; meeting up with my parents was slightly flurried, but everyone enjoyed the art and afterward Rob and I successfully walked to Back Bay for an assortment of sodium-replenishing meats and cheeses at the Salty Pig. I mentioned it was hot, right? It was hot. Like, being an extra in Lawrence of Arabia hot, only with no chance of running into Omar Sharif or Peter O'Toole. Even the shade wasn't cool, only less punishing. (I wrote to Rob as I walked from Powderhouse to Davis, "I like this weather if I can spend it submerged in the sea.") Naturally, we then spent the next two hours walking around Boston in a wistful, increasingly fruitless search for dessert, peaking in a negative sort of way when jm Curley turned out to be closed for a private party and the Friendly Toast stops serving at quarter of ten on Sundays. We ended up at J.P. Licks again, ordering more or less our usual. (This month's coconut-milk flavor is chocolate, which I do not like as well as last month's orange or March's lime, but it goes well with caramel.) But we passed through Copley Square before the sun set, when the wind broke in shirt-twisting vortices around Trinity Church, and crossed the Fort Point Channel looking for jellyfish and Atlantic Avenue looking for ghosts, and after dark the seals at the New England Aquarium glimmer through the murky waters, silver bellies gleaming to their audience as they turn sleek as a wrist at the tank's corners and glide down into rock-shadow, dimming into salt night again. We tried to get information on the ferries out to the harbor islands, but if there was a schedule posted anywhere at the visitor pavilion, I think we were supposed to have an app for it.

So, yeah. That needs to happen. And Star Island. And Portland. This summer. We will not go without sea.

I'm just not sticking my neck out the way I did in 1953

1. I am part of a Kickstarter! After fifteen years of paper and cardstock, the speculative poetry mainstay Mythic Delirium—the magazine that published my very first poem in 2001—is changing over to a quarterly publication of short fiction and poetry in a variety of electronic formats. Mike Allen gives the details here. You should give it money. The first year is fully funded, but everything after could use some generosity. I have a poem in the first electronic issue (as well as three of the rare print issues being offered as rewards) and I should like to see this newest incarnation run as long and successfully as its print-and-ink original. It and Not One of Us are dear to my heart.

2. Richard Matheson has died. I never followed him the way I did other authors, but he kept turning up: if it was famous in speculative fiction of a certain period, he'd written it. I wish I had a copy of Duel (1971), but I will rewatch The Legend of Hell House (1973) for him tonight.

Earlier tonight there was a thunderstorm and it is still enthusiastically raining. We ran around the apartment opening windows. The temperature's come down: I can work at the kitchen table without having to keep getting up and running the tap and sticking my head under it every fifteen minutes. I am only very slightly exaggerating.

(It's not an efficient tap for sticking your head under.)