i love all my crime children

Yohji Yamamoto Menswear F/W 2011

The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death.

“When my nineteen-year-old son turns on the kitchen tap and leans down over the sink and tilts his head sideways to drink directly from the stream of cool water, I think of my older brother, now almost ten years gone, who used to do the same thing at that age; And when he lifts his head back up and, satisfied, wipes the water dripping from his cheek with his shirtsleeve, it’s the same casual gesture my brother used to make; and I don’t tell him to use a glass, the way our father told my brother, because I like remembering my brother when he was young, decades before anything went wrong, and I like the way my son becomes a little more my brother for a moment through this small habit born of a simple need, which, natural and unprompted, ties them together across the bounds of death, and across time … as if the clear stream flowed between two worlds and entered this one through the kitchen faucet, my son and brother drinking the same water.”

the undone cowboy writes to his sweetheart by silas denver melvin (click for better quality)