35 minutes
neighborhood, with Delia the dog
68 degrees
Today, I convinced an anxiety-ridden dog to go for a walk. What a beautiful, late summer/early fall morning! Wow. Our pace was slow, with Delia stopping to “read the news” at every tree, but I didn’t mind. I tried to stand straight and felt the calm in my core — a stillness so sweet it almost buzzed or hummed. Speaking of buzz, Delia stopped to smell some pink zinias and right next to her nose a bumble bee hovered. Only for a moment, then it flew off to the next blossom.
10 Things
- a city pick-up truck with a yellow arrow flashing on the bumper as it drove by
- a thick and long root sticking out of some boulevard dirt where the grass had been removed
- an shaded balcony on the second floor of a house across from 7 Oaks
- a chattering squirrel
- the steady, relaxed rhythm of a shirtless runner with a baseball cap on backwards
- big, bright pinkish-red blooms, emerging from a bush
- soft shadows cast across a big boulder
- a shaggy, scruffy tree, needing a shave, leaves covering the trunk and whole branches
- a steel planter on a boulevard filled with carrot greens, looking to my untrained eye like they were ready to be picked
- a neighbor across the alley dumping some cans in his recycling bin — hello! / hi!
Found this poem the other day, Painblank/ Daniel Borzutsky. So good! Instead of posting the entire poem, here’s the author’s helpful description:
About this Poem
I have said Emily Dickinson’s line ‘Pain has an element of blank’ in my head thousands of times…. I don’t know how many times I have tried to make sense of something only to conclude that the best poetic solution available is to say that it’s blank—the blank in the blank of my blank, the blankest of times, the blankness into which we all digress. Perhaps the thing about Dickinson’s poem is the way in which pain is enveloped so completely by, well, pain itself. But also, the problem of pain’s untranslatability, its blankness, resides in the sounds and symmetry of the words. What I’m suggesting in this translation of Dickinson’s Pain-Blank relationship is a reading and writing practice that believes in two things: that repetition is never repetition and that poetry, like pain and blankness, resides in the body. Perhaps poetry has the ability—definitely for the writer and perhaps for the reader—to assimilate into the body, to become inseparable from it, to become a language that is ingested through sonic relationships that have an effect beyond time, logic, and comprehension.
Daniel Borzutzky
And here’s the Emily Dickinson poem that inspired Borzutsky:
Pain–has an Element of Blank–/Emily Dickinson
Pain—has an Element of Blank—
It cannot recollect
When it begun—or if there were
A time when it was not—
It has no Future—but itself—
Its Infinite Contain
Its Past—enlightened to perceive
New Periods—of Pain.