she has taken to notebooks

She has taken to notebooks.
She has taken to arranging
books in alphabetical order
by author.
She has taken to love like a duck to water.
She has taken a leaf from her plant:
a leaf in the process of morphing
to gold from green. That death should be
so transparent, disturbs her. But mostly –
tearing the leaf along its seam –
she is curious.

She has taken to notebooks.
Three of them. Small.
Black. With fine lines but not on the first page,
which has a space to enter details.
Name. Address. Etc.
(Does one pronounce the ‘t’ in et cetera?
It is different from eccentric, which doesn’t have an ‘x’.)
She has taken up again the habit of feeling disrespected.
She conceals the feeling in her palm
like something botanical, something small.

She has been reading the French Philosopher.
She knows about things happening
to themselves from the inside.
She has taken to being less tired.
While meditating, the knowing arrived:
a whack of understanding; a lightning cry
through old studio walls and into her chest.
Rigidity raised to a moderate frequency:
the helpfulness of selfishness.

She no longer shops communally.
Of late no longer inspects her tongue.
She admires maths boys in tweed jackets
and inspires glad-eyes in visiting academics.
They will all go together to the city in the north.
To hear people talk for three days about Being.
They will not be bored a single sentence.
She is overwhelmed by the amount there is to say.
She toys with the possibility that expression might be straightforward.

She is taken with the smooth Spain-Asian boy,
who sweats in small rivulets from the hairline at his nape.
Who - while lifting his dumbbell weights -
sweated in larger quantities onto the floor.
She rides home in an evening that forgot to take its light.
She recalls the feeling of getting so much air
- cool and sombre air riding the streets.
But the memory is not about feeling.
It is about looking.

She has taken to sitting inside the boundaries of things
and complaining.
She has sand-papered her mermaid skin,
thinking friction was a good sign, a sign of happenings.
She walks dishevelled along a drizzled street, noting:
the ability to bend over backwards is another kind of skill.
And to fall sideways, and shimmy into wormholes
nipped from air resembles a most covetable nimbleness.
She may have to enter this in one of her notebooks.

 But not No 1 however, or No 3. The first
contains information pertaining to income.
The other, contraptions to be purchased for her home’s
metamorphosis. And notes.
Scrawly notes that upon writing become
immediately obsolete.

She has taken to Asian greens.
She has taken to Vitamin C.
She has taken to stating her emotions in single clauses.
She hopes this will help.
That it is like properly chewing one’s meal.
Taking things in polite and bite-sized fashion.

(As a child she was criticised by a friend’s mother
for cutting her pieces of meat way too big and told
it was rude and inappropriate for a little girl.)
She has taken to examining pornography in gift shops
and wonders what that means.
She has taken to wondering what ‘appropriate’ is.

She has been taken up by something difficult.
She has been taking things both seriously and ever-so-light.
She has been taken over by swarms of vicious fatigue,
by flashes of cowardice and fright.
She looks forward to night, to sleep, to waking.
She often wonders what ambition might feel like.

She rose from it like a phoenix years ago,
so clean of ashes, still and pale.
She forgets now the reason, but nevertheless notes