Rich Ives

Considerations in the Selection of a Satisfactory Dwelling

after André Breton 

I make leaves happy. They are the vertical roots of the tree that satisfy my aspirations. I have allowed slowness to inhabit me, including the scandalous improprieties of branches and a vast array of tall unruly grasses.

I have discovered that time does not consist of moments. Moments consist of time, including miniature versions of inappropriately arranged lives.

For this reason, I require the elegance of a thirsty wren beside a tin cup full of rainwater beneath the failing dusklight of the porch, and inside, with a view of the proceedings, dark rooms which I shall darken myself.

I should require, as well, underground egress, for pleasure and propriety, along with several inverted treehouses and a grand white pergola for the discussion of tedious social propositions on warm summer evenings beneath the martins and the bats.

In time I shall become the companion of abandon. In this my secret nest shall slowly oblige me, built as it shall be inside the facade of a respectable oak of sufficient complexity to discourage spiders only temporarily.

I should require no interlocutors in the administration of my desires but rather more desires in the administration of my interlocutors.

All the clocks shall be made of lichen. I shall require no Merovingian chairs or Victorian settees, as they encourage sensitivities I am unable to share with the deer. Commentary on the disposition of butterflies shall be withheld until the winter months, when it can be sufficiently batted about without the interference of the actual experience.

If the meadow’s profluent excesses are to be treated as bed linen, they must be washed each night in dew and allowed to dry slowly in the precocious vagaries of the next day’s attentions, while I myself attend to my own transformation.

I do not find acceptable any bodies of water, either moving or stationary, unaccompanied by rough edges, aided and abetted by servings of detritus and flotsam.

I shall take an oath to look not into but out of whatever openings might become useful for the separation of my alternate abode from the appearance of a box since it exists for the satisfaction of entirely different purposes than anything likely to be contained in it.

If I decide a room for the disarrangement of flowers is to be included, I shall allow the sun to design it by its selective absence and raise it with slow, painful consideration of the universe’s irreproachable state of unqualified determination using only the finest disappearances available.

Roofing shall be addressed by the weather’s philosophies. As abundant as they are, their very ordinariness is sufficient reason to believe they will endure. If visitors choose to ignore their dependable excesses, I shall have been well served beneath them. Their weight is not of the literal kind and shall allow for less interference from the walls, which shall in their turn allow for less interference on the part of those captured by appearances.

I shall need no cradle, for I hold my innocence apart and have taught it not to cry out at inauspicious moments, such as those enhanced by the stealth of darkness.

The only animals of white deportment encouraged to linger shall be the two moons, the one passing along greetings from an uncle I remember seeing yesterday and the one that lives inside that memory, where I live with my considerations and complicate each day with reflection.