3.15 miles
2 trails
41 degrees
wind gusts: 35 mph
Windy! Overcast. Quiet. A good run. Slow and relaxed until I reached a runner ahead of me with a dog who stopped then started then stopped again. At this point, I passed them and picked up the pace, hoping to avoid any more encounters. It worked! I felt good enough to keep running faster and faster. Fun!
Listened to the wind and some yelling in the gorge running south and on the winchell trail. Put in my winter playlist for the last mile, heading north on the trail.
10+ Things
- wind 1: soft, gentle, haunting wind chimes
- wind 2: a small branch of a pine tree with some green needles on the sidewalk
- wind 3: a swishing ponytail
- an empty playground, or a quiet playground
- nearing the Cleveland overlook: the memory of the very LOUD knocking of a woodpecker
- an open view of the river — can’t remember what the river looked like, just that it was wide and open
- mud on the trail
- empty benches
- the strong smell of weed in the 36th street parking lot
- wind 4: leaves scratching the street
- wind 5: a white plastic bag rolling across the street, then stopping in the middle, once side being lifted up
- wind 6: a waving bush
before the run
The difference between a sunset and a sun set/ting.
or, the moment or the space that exists between a sun set/ting and a sunset. Ever since I read James Schuyler’s “Hymn to Life” and misread a sunset for a sun set, I’ve been thinking about the difference between them — one is a object (sunset), the others an action (sun set) or a process (sun setting). The difference between something fixed and something happening, moving, doing. Why does a sun set/ting appeal to me more? One obvious reason: understanding the sun as a subject, the natural world as an actor. Another reason: movement. A sunset is a fixed image, a sun set/ting moves. Poetry is about movement — associations between ideas, the flow of words and rhythms, the refusal to land (stand still) on one meaning or ending for too long or at all. My life is about movement — restlessness; the practice of running and writing; a difficulty in ever seeing objects as fixed, always slightly fuzzy, buzzing like static, not flickering but bouncing or shaking (or something like that). (quick thought: I’m drawn to light, but just as much to motion. How true is that for people with all of their cone cells?)
note: writing about this sparked new ideas, including a tentative focus for April, and some thoughts for a artist statement — more on that below.
Since last month, I’ve been playing around with a poem that attempts to describe the differences between a sunset and a sun set/ting. It’s slow-going. Here’s something to add to my already swirling, meandering thoughts: it’s a poem by Nikky Finney from Ross Gay’s discussion of her work in his talk, Be Camera, Black-Eyed Aperture. It’s not about a sun set/ting, but one rising. The italics are Gay’s; I’m keeping them because they’re helpful for seeing the connections to the movement of a sun set/ting:
The Squatting Sun/ Nikky Finney
6:38, flying east, I witness birth,
pushing out of the blushing vaginal rim
like some wide cherry-dropped child.
All the colors that make red have come
to the only straight line on the earth.
Ghostly, I blink, my eyes tweak her nipples,
she releases and the head does not wait
for my awe.
I thought I knew what red looked like.
Believed I had seen this daily drama before;
the earth in morning-mother motion,
the first bowl of earth-bread sipped,
but never had I been asked
inside the sun’s womb so deep.
What I see has so much to do
With the permission to look.
My egg-white eyes labor to midwife
this moment out all the way.
The baby day pushes clean,
a quarter rim of cherry-spilled earth
lands in a head-back wail
inside my ladling pupils,
the first rising brightness, its long
equatorial head bursts, then crests;
new life passed on
to a pan of waiting salted water.
Some thoughts on the poem by Ross Gay:
. . .this poem witnesses the quiet interior horizon of experience, during which the unfathomably beautiful emerges, and is the contemplation of it. As Finney says, “I thought I knew what red looked like, / believed I had seen this daily drama.” Indeed, it’s the quiet looking that brings the sunrise, the day, wailing into the speaker’s eyes.
Be Camera, Black-Eyed Aperture/ Ross Gay
Gay’s mention of quiet looking here is about black interiority and comes from Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet. I’m thinking about the quiet looking as the labor it takes to see something — the process from light to cell to signal, from retina to optic nerve to brain, from being distracted to quieting to noticing. Usually, this labor is invisible; we believe we just see things, they are just there for our camera eye or eye-as-camera to see.
Whew — that’s a lot to think about and to try to make sense of. Anyway, back to what this sunset and sun set/ting thread inspired. An April challenge: wind! And, some thoughts for an artistic statement:
To describe the world (primarily in poetry) from the perspective of the peripheral and from where some central vision exists but is not/no longer centered. . . . new ways of writing about noticing the world that don’t center central vision or that rely on but don’t center peripheral vision (because peripheral vision, by virtue of how it works, can never be centered in the same way that central vision was/is). . . . a few images I’m currently obsessed with: birds, wind, the idea of the Form, not as Platonic but as vague, basic, lacking the specificity of focus — Tree Bird Cloud.
after the run
After I finished the run, I took out my phone and recorded some thoughts, including:
Somewhat similar to sunset vs. sun set/ting: windblown vs. wind blowing
windblown = evidence that wind existed, witnessed, after the fact
wind blowing = moving through a seemingly invisible force that is happening right now
another example: the absence of birdsong — very quiet, which could have been caused by the birds not singing in the wind, but also by the wind carrying the sound elsewhere
birding: thought about the memory of the woodpecker’s knock near the overlook
i.
an echo
almost
memory
of dead
wood hit hard
somewhere
across the
ravine
ii.
Quiet. Not
absence
of singing
birds but
the presence
of wind
carrying
their notes OR their tune
somewhere else.
A good start. I don’t think I should use somewhere for both.
wind!
So many possibilities for this monthly challenge!
- Gathering all of the wind poems I’ve already collected.
- A wind playlist.
- Tagging related entries with “wind”.
- Reading The Wind in the Willows, which I was reminded of by Mary Ruefle when she described it as one of her favorite book on a podcast.
- Exploring the idea of wind as both a noun for a weather condition and a verb for wrapping something around something else — a scarf around a neck — or for traversing a curving course.
- Returning to the Beaufort Scale