If first daylight were greener, then these bare oaks, under their small breeze, would glow like seawater.  As it is, however, only the horizon, pure as a clouded eye, intimates visions.

I am not at all sure what I mean by these words. Merely, I have been sleeping far later than usual, and the hues of morning surprise me. Still, in this large house only the dog and the furnace are also awake. The dog cannot resist the long windows, the daybreak stage-show of titmice and tiny woodpeckers and an enormous sluggish squirrel; but even she seems resigned to the rigors of holiday rest. The furnace, alone, soldiers on, roaring hoarsely into the ducts and registers. In this suave building of steel and wood and glass, it sounds as if someone else's leftover troll is complaining in the cellar.

I have been reading a novel by Elizabeth Bowen, who always has a constricting effect on my subsequent subordinate clauses. That, in addition to long walks and long card games, seems to have not so much attenuated my syntax as flattened it. My sentences feel like dough rolled to windowpane thickness on a marble board. That makes no sense, possibly. But this is by no means the first time I have felt as if grammar has become a sort of stretching unarticulated warmth beneath my metaphorical hands, though it as yet has no real speaking purpose. I am awake and slowly becoming accustomed to the colors of daylight. The dog lies on the rug beside the glass door. The furnace blusters beneath my feet. These words are neither poetry nor purpose, but they may presage.