4.75 miles
to top of franklin bridge and back
32 degrees
5% snow-covered
The snow is melting. The birds are chirping. The path is almost all clear. So quiet and calm today. Mostly cloudy, making the river look gray. The floodplain forest was all white. Occasionally the sun sat on the surface of the river leaving a bright circle of shimmering light. Saw a few squirrels. Heard some geese. Any crows? I don’t think so. A few voices below–a family hiking through the snow on the gorge. I wonder when the rowers will return?
Yesterday morning I started reading through The Collected Poems of James Laughlin. What a big book! 1214 pages. I’m reading through them quickly, marking the ones I especially like. In general, I like his simple, clear style. Brief lines. A quirky voice. Here are a few that I marked:
THE POET TO THE READER/james laughlin
These poems are not I
hope what anyone ex-
pets and yet reader
I hope that when you
read them you will say
I’ve felt that too but
it was such a natural
thing it was too plain
to see until you saw
it for me in your poem.
IN THE SNOW/james laughlin
The track of the ermine
the track of the mouse
tracks of a deer in the
snow and my track that
wanders and hesitates
doubling and crossing
itself stops to burrow
and circles trees this
track I made twists like
the veins in a leaf or a
crack in a mirror and it
cries seems to cry cries
to the sun cries sun sun
touch and burn cries sun
touch and save cries to
the snow–and then snow
falls covering everything
new snow covers my track
covers the track of the
ermine mouse and deer.
LITTLE BITS OF PAPER: AN ARS POETIC/james laughlin
Most of them began with a few words
read in some book or a phrase over-
heard scratched on a bit of paper
these chits go into the side pocket
of my jacket usually they stay there
until the coat is so spotted it must
be sent to the cleaners when I empty
the pocket most of the slips go into
the wastebasket but a few are pasted
with Scotch tape on the bathroom mir-
ro where I see them when I’m shaving
some stay there a long time but with
some there is an urgency they come
into my head when I wake to pee in
the middle of the night more words
come with them almost faster than I
can scribble on the yellow pad on the
bedtable the words beget other words
(it’s like spilled milk spreading on
the kitchen floor) words making other
words I don’t make them they make
themselves into the poem but some-
times in the morning I can’t read
what I’ve written (because I wrote
in the dark) so that’s the end of
that one it’s had its say and it
won’t come back I write in darkness.
I picked this last one because it made me think of Susan Howe and her story about Jonathan Edwards and how he would pin ideas he had on scraps of paper to his clothes as he was riding around on his horse. A couple of years ago, I was thinking a lot about how runners hold onto the ideas that they have as their running–scribble it on pieces of paper, carry a small notebook, scratch it in their arm with a stick, talk into their smart phone. Maybe I should experiment with this some more? As I was trying to recall who Howe had been talking about (I had forgotten), I discovered that she wrote a book about Emily Dickinson, My Emily Dickinson. I might have to check it out of the library. Apparently, Dickinson wrote many of her poems on scraps of paper.