Sat, 20 December

Suspended Six clocks in one house, none of them wound. The sky can't decide if it's holding or letting go. Someone has set the table already— hours early, plates like white planets in orbit around a centerpiece no one remembers buying. Outside, the campus empties itself the way a lung empties: not all at once, not ever completely. There is a season for which no hemisphere has the correct name. It falls between the last obligation and the first, and it smells like oil paint left open on a windowsill thickening.