I ate wild blackberries twice while I was in San Francisco. The first time, P and I were walking on the cliffs above Land's End and he stepped off the path and into a thicket; we got brambles in our jeans and sweaters and stained our fingers with juice. After that he picked us nasturtiums, gold and orange and spicy and glorious. Much later, on J's porch, we each drank a cold PBR very quickly and then he said, "so do you think we should kiss?" and if I said yes, I said it against his mouth.

The second time was early Sunday morning-- two, maybe closer to three AM. J had made us an extravagant dinner: oysters, and boquerones, and toast with ricotta and peaches, and a green salad and a steak and some salmon and a dish called a tomato party. We had been drinking champagne and then bourbon and then calvados, a sweet, sharp, apple brandy. J's house is in the Presidio, on an old military base in a national park, so she bundled us into her various pieces of North Face and we used our phones as flashlights and hiked down the hillside, hundreds of wooden steps, to the empty beach. The sand was flat and damp and the rocks were huge and it was impossibly windswept and romantic and quiet and dark.

Coming up again J fell and twisted her ankle. She clambered onto B's back and made him carry her to a patch where some blackberries were growing, for dessert.

"You know the poem," B said, back in the house, where it was warm, and all of us were bright and unsteady with the climb and the alcohol and the hour.

"I do," I said, but P didn't, and so we read it to him. P is a double Cancer: sun and rising. An ocean of a man. The poem undid him. He crawled under the table. I crawled under with him, lay on my back, and looked up at its construction, its beams and joins. I felt like a kid again: a small person in so many large spaces. 

Later, we were talking about how we met: years ago, when I was on the road trip that took me from my life in New Haven to this one in Los Angeles. We were both in the middle of uprooting ourselves that weekend: I was midway through a cross-country journey, and he was breaking up with his first love. "I liked you right away," he said. "And it was just, like, obviously not going to happen right then. All I could do was to tell myself just try not to look at her too much." 

It was so funny. Here we were, five years later, and that feeling had survived. Almost everything was different, but finally there was no reason not to look, and then touch. 

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All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
-Robert Haas, Meditations at Lagunitas

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I don't have anything coming out this week, but I do have a recommendation if you happen to be in Berkeley at any point: the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents, where you can smell a lot of concentrated animal glands and flower essences and think about how weird and dirty and primal being an animal actually is.