well, that's one word for it... urban renewal, highway construction. Anyway, we owe our sense of being not only to supportive forces but also to those that pose a threat. I've read a lot of New Yorkers expressing love for their city over the last few days, claiming it for themselves, surrounding it with fields of care. They've been making place more than ever. The city is theirs and they are the city, more than ever, because of tragedy.

When I read that for the first time, on my way to work on the bus, it opened up a thousand science fiction short stories in my mind. It took me ages to find it in the book again and when I did, it seemed quite unremarkable. I'd enriched it with my imagination, with thoughts of steel and chrome and aluminium and glass and crete and the surface of the moon and my God, the stars. Now, when I team it with the other paragraph about homesickness, all I can think of is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and how they're going to build a super highway through the universe, right where earth hovers. "What? you didn't know about it? The plans have been in your local galactic council for the last 500 years! You'd think somone would have cared enough to take a look!" Or however it goes.

Anyway, I just wonder if there will come a day where we have to feel about the earth the way New Yorkers do about New York this week. The reason I love it so much is because it's home, the reason I love these landscapes, because they are where I live, where humanity lives, because this is where thousands of years of human drama have played out.

My hair is the colour of chopped maples
My eyes dark as beans cooked in the south.
(Coal fields in the moon on torn-up hills)

Skin polished as a Ming Bowl
showing its blood cracks, its age, I have hundreds
of names for snow, for this, all of them quiet.

This earth is our identity, the same way New Yorkers identify with their city, the same way they live and breathe it, the same way they make it live and breathe. Except different, the earth would still live and breathe if we weren't here, I don't know that we are in symbiosis, I don't know if we are white daisies covering a bare planet. A lot of the time, I do feel like we are visitors, intruders... but it's still home. The thing is, the earth would still live and breathe, but we wouldn't know it lived and breathed, we wouldn't know it because we wouldn't be here to experience it. So it would go on without us, but would it be alive without us?

Maybe it would. Maybe it's us that would be dead without the earth. I look out the window and it's grey and the trees look small, and I feel like I'm the one that would die without it.

That's rather convoluted and senseless, I'm not really sure what I'm trying to say. This has been another day of many entries.

But what would I equate my hair to without the earth, my skin, the palm of my hand, smooth, cross-hatched with small lines like a topographic map, like the alluvial plains of Canterbury with their braided rivers, like an estuary or a desert, the palm of my hand is all these things.

Fields, willow trees by the slow lazy river, my watershed, my hummocky gold-stripped valley, you have such small hands. I knew that I should love you.