2 miles
ywca pool
Met RJP at the pool again after she was done with her classes. Added in about 1000 yards of swimming with the pull buoy. I tried reciting the poem I memorized yesterday — Linda Pastan’s “Vertical” — while I swam, but it was difficult. I couldn’t sync up the lines with my breathing rhythms. I don’t think I was ever able to recite the whole thing, only the first bit: “Perhaps the purpose of leaves is to conceal the verticality of trees which we notice in December as if for the first time: row after row of dark forms yearning upwards.”
10 Things
- cloudy water, at least as much, maybe more?, crud than the last time I swam: floating hairballs, some strange stain on the wall tiles in my lane
- when I got in the pool, there was only one other swimmer. More people came, then left. At one point, most of the lanes were filled, but it was never too crowded
- I could see that a storm was moving in by how the pool floor kept getting darker then lighter as the thickening clouds moved past the sun
- heard a click underwater several times. Decided it was caused by the swimmer next to me — her knee of elbow clicking as she did the breaststroke
- watching my daughter swimming freestyle underwater — looking strong and serious. Once as I passed her, I kept my head below looking over at her until she looked back
- doing my starting ritual of pushing off and them swimming underwater until I reached the blue line and the end of the shallow water, I held my arms out straight in front of me, almost squeezing my ears. I felt like I could have stayed underwater until I reached the wall
- the muscle I felt most while I was swimming today was my calf, and especially as I kicked harder during my first lap. It wasn’t sore, and it didn’t hurt, I just felt it more
- following behind my daughter, trying to stay slow and never pass her, I started my flip turn then stayed at the wall, suspended underwater
- worked on my flip turn, trying to flip with my core, and not my arms
- every so often, when the sun came out from behind the clouds, I saw a circle of light on the pool floor
Yesterday I posted a poem from Linda Pastan that describes a sparrow as “brief as a haiku.” That made me think of the first poem in her final collection, Almost an Elegy:
Memory of a Bird/ Linda Pastan
Paul Klee, watercolor and pencil on paper
What is left is a beak,
a wing,
a sense of feathers,
the rest lost
in a pointillist blur of tiny
rectangles.
The bird has flown,
leaving behind
an absence.
This is the very
essence
of flight—a bird
so swift
that only memory
can capture it.
All of this quick movement and the brevity of the bird in flight, also made me think of another poem by Pastan I discovered today:
The Birds/ Linda Pastan
are heading south, pulled
by a compass in the genes.
They are not fooled
by this odd November summer,
though we stand in our doorways
wearing cotton dresses.
We are watching them
as they swoop and gather—
the shadow of wings
falls over the heart.
When they rustle among
the empty branches, the trees
must think their lost leaves
have come back.
The birds are heading south,
instinct is the oldest story.
They fly over their doubles,
the mute weathervanes,
teaching all of us
with their tailfeathers
the true north.
Because of my interest in peripheral vision and what it means to see movement (as opposed to sharp, fixed details), I’m always trying to find poems that offer details and descriptions of movement. I love how much Pastan focuses on how the birds move — they swoop and gather, cast wing shadows, rustle like leaves. She doesn’t offer any descriptions of their color, size, or sound. She doesn’t even name them. I don’t miss those details. The description of their movement is enough.
I love all of this poem, but today, especially this:
They fly over their doubles,
the mute weathervanes,
teaching all of us
with their tailfeathers
the true north.
Their doubles, the mute weathervanes? Tailfeathers as teachers? So good!