note: I’m writing this the next day, when I feel even crappier than yesterday, both from sickness and the news that Trump might invoke the insurrection act and bring in troops to Minneapolis.
Woke up with a cold or the flu or something that made me too tired or run-down to exercise. I must really be sick; I rarely don’t run just because I have a cold.
The following was written yesterday morning, before the sickness really hit and before an ICE agent shot a person in the leg in North Minneapolis and things got even more tense.
a bridge / some steps
bridge 1
The idea of a bridge has been appearing a lot lately. First, in some favorite lines from a poem gathered this past year:
It’s not accurate to say we know
what we see. Truth is, few understand
the physics of color.
Vision
tends to end up being an imposition
more than a recognition of how the fog
consumes much of the bridge, as if nothing
is able to fully connect one side
of the Thames to the other.
(A Lexicon of Light/ George Looney)
I re-wrote these lines and turned them into a poem that offered a bridge between inner and outer color. It’s unpublished, so I’ll only post part of it:
And Vision
can’t help us describe
how a bridge can be
consumed by gray fog
yet still link two shores —
the inner and
the outer.
It’s delightful to go back to this poem and re-read the entire thing. My version is based only the favorite lines I gathered; I didn’t remember that it was about a painting by Monet and an actual bridge over the Thames River!
Here is how Looney describes the bridge at the end of the poem:
The bridge
is more than a construction passed over
by trains and imbued with shifting colors
with the time of day. It becomes, for the artist,
a lexicon of light and all that light does
to this world.
A lexicon of light — a dictionary, a set of meanings in a language
And for me, the bridge is the link between my inner and outer world of color, where the outer world is mostly gone, replaced with the rich language (created through gathering poetic lines about color) of the inner.
bridge 2
I’d return to three thoughts:
you; the “world
we wanted to go out into,
to come to ourselves into”;
& the right form
to bridge two subjects apart
(Tall Flatsedge Notebook/ Brian Teare)
Am I reading this bit right? Does he want the bridge to separate the two thoughts/things, the you and the world we wanted to go out into? Yes, I think so. Just before these lines, he writes:
At its smallest
: matter has no ideals” : taking off my socks, I find
several flatsedge seeds hooked : no split of self
from self
So, a bridge as delivering us somewhere else, creating space and a distinction
Bridge 3
Far from something to fear, I’d say that poetry is an art form that allows us to redefine our relationship to fear by stepping in close to the facets of the world that we don’t like, or don’t understand. Often enough, these are the same things. Often enough, it is the illusion of extraordinary distance, blurring out details and shrouding motives in shadow, that makes us fearsome to one another. Not always, of course, but often enough. It’s not always possible to test out such a theory in life, but poems are built to bridge distances of all kinds: between people and events separated from one another by time, geography, temperament, and belief. A poem can even bridge the distance between the living and the dead.
Fear less / Tracy K. Smith
I read this bit about the bridge — bridge as linking, lessening distance — last night. It’s in the first chapter, “Fear Less A poem is a Tool for Careful Listening,”
steps
As I think about the bridge — literally and figuratively — I also think about how it gives us a good vantage point from above where we can see farther, but it also keeps us at a distance from what’s below us. Running on the lake street or the franklin or the ford bridge, crossing from one side to the other, I feel removed from the gorge. It becomes less of a place that I feel/hear/smell/touch and more of a landscape, only seen and admired and assessed like a work of art. To get deep in the gorge, I need steps. My favorite are the old stone steps, 112 of them, that lead down to a floodplain forest and then Longfellow Flats. Steps are less horizontal and more vertical — they lead us down — within, beside, among — into the muck (what Lasky might call, the muck of making). Of course, steps can also lead us out, but I’m more interested in how they bring us in.