3.1 miles
2 trails
65 degrees
A quick run after getting my flu and COVID shot and before taking FWA to an eye exam. Another beautiful, warm morning. Everything yellow and crunchy. The Winchell trail was crowded with hikers admiring the leaves and the view. Heard kids on the playground. Smelled the sour sewer. Felt the soft sand. The theme of the morning: leaves. Brittle leaves covering the trail, making it harder to see roots or rocks. Fluttering leaves falling from the trees. Absent leaves giving me a better view of the other side. And that sound! Before starting my run, yellow locust leaves near the curb sizzled after a car drove by. A few blocks later, a cluster of leaves — or was it a plastic bag? — crackled and crunched in the slight wind.
Near Folwell, after climbing the short, steep hill, I stopped to record a few lines for the next section of my poem. The section is called Nobody and it’s about bells and mom-ghosts and dead cone cells.
In the gray morning
the few cone cells that
remain are starved for
light, everything lacks
form — no edges, no
bodies, just blurs
Here’s a beautiful poem I encountered this morning. I’m adding it to my collection of dirt/dust poems.
Housekeeping/ Natasha Trethewey
We mourn the broken things, chair legs
wrenched from their seats, chipped plates,
the threadbare clothes. We work the magic
of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes.
We save what we can, melt small pieces
of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones
for soup. Beating rugs against the house,
we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading
across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw
the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs
out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie.
I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,
listen for passing cars. All day we watch
for the mail, some news from a distant place.
It’s 14 lines. Is it a sonnet? Is there a volta? Is it the dust, lit like stars?