A quick run before taking FWA to buy his biggest purchase ever: an A clarinet. Not an easy run, but a sunny day with fresh air and clear trails. More cool, refreshing green coming from the floodplain forest. Everywhere, mundane, flat green. A green greeting: saying good morning to a runner with headphones on who didn’t me coming. A green sound: a bird’s clicking jaw somewhere below.
A green chant to keep me going:
Sycamore Cottonwood Slippery elm
Spoken in my head over and over. It helped me in the tougher moments when I wanted to stop and walk.
green
Even as green is my favorite color, I do not like when green takes over everything. Green = busy doing things, producing, connecting, crowds/crowded/crowding out.
4.2 miles longfellow garden and back 73 degrees / dew point: 75
Sticky again today, but not as bright. Still hard to run through the thick air. Struggled on the way back — walk run walk run. Trying to remember to keep showing up and believing that it will get easier, or I will get better at handling the difficult moments, or I will finally start getting up early. I tried to think about green.
my favorite green
Running south, just past the ford bridge, nearing the locks and dam no. 1, cool air was coming from the green to my right — a small wood. Refreshing! Often I associate late spring green with thick and stifling, but today it was fresh and generous, making it easier to breathe and to run.
After Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827), “George Washington at Princeton,” 1779
the color of life takes sun yellow and bluest blue sky and water for green ferns chartreuse buds beading above moss dappled shamrocks fragrant healing of sage, laurel, mint, basil, thyme, rosemary, myrtle amid the tall wonders of juniper pine, olive, pear even the meeting of sea and river— the sky, an intermingling of viridian and chetwode horizons, and cerulean clarity— offers its green seafoam, its seaweed pats, the crocodile at the edge of a freshwater marsh its teeth open gritted in green against the backdrop of hunter rainforest dripping in green
heaven is a field of persian green lit by translucent jade and celadon lamps a many-roomed chateau scented by aromatic tea leaves the aperitivo: gin, apple, and bitter lime the time: midnight green the guardian: a mantis in prayer
joy: harlequin, verdun, spring magic: kaitoke forest in its energetic whisper and pulse
green must exist inside brother james would he call it camouflage or nyanza or sap for washington it’s in the colors of flags the fields far off feldgrau or military or empire green or dollar bill or rifle green revolution with chains the result mix the green like a spell in making safe life hush arbor life nurturing abundant life free life bring the background to the fore ease ease ease life
So many greens! How many different greens can I see? Today, mostly, it was just green (or brown or gray).
Offering some advice on being judicious with your use of adjectives, Ted Kooser writes the following lines:
Morning Glories/ Ted Kooser
We share so much. When I write lattice, I count on you seeing the flimsy slats tacked into squares and painted white,
like a French door propped in a garden with a blue condensed from many skies pressed up against the panes. I count on
you knowing that remarkable blue, shaped into the fluted amplifying horns of Edison cylinder record players.
What? Come on, you know exactly what I’m talking about. I didn’t need to describe them like that, but I like to
however a little over my words, dabbling the end of my finger in the white throats of those __. You fill it in.
I could go on, but all I really needed to do was to give you the name in the title. I knew you’d put in the rest, maybe
the smell of a straw hat hot from the sun; that’s just a suggestion. You know exactly what else goes into a picture like this
to make it seem as if you saw it first, how a person can lean on the warm hoe handle of a poem, dreaming,
making a little more out of the world than was there just a moment before. I’m just the guy who gets it started.
Do I know that remarkable blue he’s writing about? Does he see the same blue that I do? Do we need to imagine the same blue to make his poem meaningful?
Reading “Making Life on a Palette” and “Morning Glories,” I’m thinking about the different work they ask of the reader, or, of this reader, me. “Palette” is filled with green words with histories that I don’t know; I had to do a lot of googling to dig into the poem. “Morning Glories” asks me to build an image from the name he offers, to draw upon the shared understanding/image of the flower that I already have.
Lately, I keep coming back to the question, how little data can we have and still “see” what something is? Not much, I think. Yet, to assume that we all see the same thing — the thing as it is — excludes a wide range of experiences and detail and ways of seeing. It leaves out a lot of different shades of green.
Speaking of green, I remembered that I had collected ideas about green in my plague notebook vol 3, June 2020:
13 years of running today. I had been planning to celebrate it with a long run, but even before I went outside I knew it wouldn’t happen. Mostly because it already felt too warm and too crowded (at 8:30 am). A rule I should remember to follow: no long runs on the weekends. Too many bikers and runners out on the trails. I also felt tired. During the first mile I chanted triple berries and tried to convince myself I could run 8 miles. By the time I reached Beckettwood, a mile in, I knew it wouldn’t happen. I ran down to the overlook and admired the river for a few minutes. Wow! A circle of white light in one spot, sparkles in another. I watched the light dance on the water through the trees and breathed.
The green and the sparkling water reminded me of a line in “Bein Green” by Kermit the Frog. Yesterday I started working on a color playlist and that was the first song I added:
It’s not easy bein’ green It seems you blend in With so many other ordinary things And people tend to pass you over ‘Cause you’re not standing out Like flashy sparkles in the water
This blending in and not being flashy makes me think of the line from Wallace Stevens that I posted yesterday:
It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
rhapsody: a portion of an epic poem adapted for recitation
When green is all there is to be It could make you wonder why But, why wonder? Why wonder? I’m green and it’ll do fine It’s beautiful, and I think it’s what I want to be
An epic poem about green as green as mundane, ordinary, everywhere? These days, green is especially ordinary for me. Often I can’t tell the difference between brown and green or gray and green or blue and green.
green
yesterday while waiting to pick up my lexapro at the pharmacy, I noticed an unusual green in the vitamin aisle. A whole section with white and green bottles. Branding. I asked Scott what color green he thought it was, but he didn’t have any answer. Somewhere between jungle green and olive green? I forgot to check what brand of vitamins was using this color. update 28 june 2024: a few days later, I was back at the pharmacy and I did check — Walgreen store brand
overheard on the winchell trail: (a woman describing her breakfast to her friends) and a shit ton of arugula
(from The Secret Lives of Colors) Scheele’s green: named after Swedish scientist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1773 when he discovered the compound, copper arsenite. Scheele’s green was used to print fabrics and wallpapers; to color artificial flowers, paper; and as an artist’s pigment. By 1863, it was all over England. Then people started dying and it was determined that copper arsensite was very poisonous — one 6 inch square sample of paper containing the compound could kill 2 men.
Mostly overcast, a few moments of sun, no shadows. Sticky, everything damp, difficult. I felt better during the run — distracted by the dew point and the marshall hill — but when I finished, I felt a heaviness: hormones. The NP agrees: perimenopause. The good news: I’m healthy, the new NP I went to is awesome, I don’t feel anxious, I have an order in for an SSRI (lexapro). The bad news: I feel bummed out (depression doesn’t quite fit, I think), there’s some problem with insurance so they can’t fill the prescription so I have no idea when I can actually start taking the medication. But it’s June, I have several cool books to dig into, and I just got a hug from my daughter so I’ll be okay.
intellect mystery history remember remember remember
Then played with remember:
remember try to re
member try to remem
ber try to remember
Then I decided to chant some of my favorite lines from Emily Dickinson:
Life is but Life and Death but Death Bliss is but bliss and Breath but Breath
Life is but life is but life is but life Death is but death is but death is but death Bliss is but bliss is but bliss is but bliss Breath is but breath is but breath is but breath
Life life life life Death death death death Bliss bliss bliss bliss Breath breath breath breath
something important to remember: Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 counts of falsifying business records. He is now a felon and will be sentenced on July 11th. He can still run for office, but most likely won’t be able to vote (for) himself.
I’d like to focus on color this summer: June, July, and August. I’m not sure how I’ll do it, yet. Will I break it down my color? Possibly. Yesterday I picked up 2 color books that I had checked out 4 or 5 years ago. I’m anticipating that I’ll find them more useful now: The Secret Lives of Color and Chroma.
I also checked out Diane Seuss’ latest, Modern Poetry. Here’s one of her poems with some color in it:
Legacy/ Diane Seuss
I think of the old pipes, how everything white in my house is rust-stained, and the gray-snouted raccoon who insists on using my attic as his pee pad, and certain sadnesses losing their edges, their sheen, their fur chalk-colored, look at that mound of laundry, that pile of pelts peeled away from the animal, and poems, skinned free of poets, like the favorite shoes of that dead girl now wandering the streets with someone else’s feet in them.
At the beginning of the book, Diane Seuss offers a quote from Wallace Steven’s poem, Man with Blue Guitar, which I first learned of while reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. It is a long poem, so I won’t include all of it, just the part that Seuss quotes, with a few lines before that too:
