1.5 loops
100+ laps
ywca pool
Any day I get to swim is a great day! Another good swim that started with my ritual: push off from the wall and swim just above the blue squares on the pool floor until I reach the deep end, which is about 2/3rds of the way, then surface. Today I shared the lane with another good swimmer. She was using pull buoys and hand paddles and had a strong freestyle stroke. Nice. As I swam, I thought about my latest visual, echolocation poem and wondered if I could figure out a form to read (not listen to) that prioritized aural over visual. Saw lots of orange — orange cones off to the side, orange cones ahead of me, blocking off the hot tub, orange swim trunks on Scott. No pool friends — fuzz or clumps or bandaids. Also don’t remember seeing any dancing shadows. Only the intense smell of chlorine and the almost leaking of googles and the familiar feeling of stroking and breathing and flipping at the wall.
This poem-of-the-day on poets.org! All of it is wonderful, but since it’s long, I’ll post only the second half. I love a great winter poem!
from Posture of Devotion/ Kimbery Baleser
But, in January, we hold this promise.
While lake ice shifts, dark a murmur,
a creak. Now moonlight falls on snow crusts—
always where two touch, night glistens.
When distant wolf howls, answer comes.
Imagine the upturned muzzle, body
a triangle of sound. Hazel eyes
mere slits. This reverence—an ancient hunger
for pack. See, too, each black branch;
limbing—bare, suspended in soon.
How pristine the listening posture
of pine marten, of fisher, of fox—
each body cocked. To pounce, to dive
nose-first into snow’s secrets,
to search winter tunnels for mice.
We, too, poised like supplicants—
rawness of the world a prayer
we read but cannot speak. Silence
an invocation, heavy as tobacco
sinking into snow—into earth’s altar.
Against moon’s brilliance, slit your eyes.
Let warmth of reflected light fill you;
that holy—that glance of tiny gods.
Make of your hands an empty globe,
your body a vessel taut as river.
This image of snow at night! I love opening the back door, looking out at the snow in moonlight, and delighting in the snow sparkling like diamonds, or how I remember stars in the sky sparkling in a cartoon from when I was a kid.
Now moonlight falls on snow crusts—
always where two touch, night glistens.
g listens — I never noticed, or thought about, how glistens is listens with a g. Glistens = sound traveling to ears (and eyes?), glazed with glitter
In her about this poem, Blaeser mentions being inspired by Kaveh Akbar’s talk on poetry and spirituality. You can watch and listen and read the whole thing online, here: The Word Dropped Like a Stone: Sacred Poetics Under the Reign of the Money God. Great title, and opening paragraph:
Today the great weapon used to stifle critical thinking is a raw overwhelm of meaningless language at every turn—on our phones, on our TVs, in our periphery on billboards and subways. So often the language is passionately absolute: immigrants are evil, climate change is a hoax, and this new Rolex will make you irresistible. Interesting poetry awakens us, asks us to slow down our metabolization of language, to become aware of its materiality, how it enters into us. Sacred poetry, from antiquity to the present, teaches us to be comfortable sitting in mystery without trying to resolve it, to be skeptical of unqualified certitudes. This lecture will orbit poems drawn from the past forty-three centuries, poems that remind us language has history, density, complexity. In surveying these examples, we’ll discuss how language art might serve as a potent antidote against an empire that would use empty, vapid language to cudgel us into inaction.
Poetry and Spirituality / Kaveh Akbar