3.15 miles
locks and dam turn around
70 degrees
humidity: 88% / dew point: 67
Sticky. Moist. Steamy. Wet. Not raining, but water water everywhere. It felt cool on my fingers and face when I brushed against a bush or when the wind shook the leaves.
Sometimes I felt great, sometimes I didn’t. I was wearing my old black Sauconys because it was so wet and they made my toe hurt for the last mile. My heart rate was higher too. I’ve determined (decided?) that my heat tolerance has decreased because of perimenopause. I’m having some hot flashes and struggling to run/move/stand/be in the heat. I’m thinking of asking for Hormone Replacement Therapy.
As I ran, I recited Wallace Steven’s poem, “Tattoo.” The light is like a spider./ It crawls over the water./It crawls over the edges of the snow./ It crawls under your eyelids/And spreads its webs there. I love this idea of the light like a spider spinning its webs under your eyelids. I also like that the first thing Stevens’ spider-light does is crawl over the water — a good connection to my water season, which starts tomorrow! Open swim!
10 Things
- a biker blasting music from speakers — country music (I think) — before I could hear much of it, it was distorted by the Doppler effect
- the brown sign that reads, caution, coyote den, is still there — are the coyotes?
- bright headlights piercing through the dark green and gray
- the sewer pipe near 42nd was gushing
- a long line of cars on the road
- a string of bikers on the path
- a few puddles
- the wind picked up, the trees shifted, making me wonder if it started raining agin
- a group of kids laughing somewhere in the distance, approaching
- 2 lime scooter parked on the edge of trail — both times I neared them, I thought they were people
lines / strings / webs / spiders
a spider moment: As I was about to take a shower, I noticed spider traveling down the tiles. I didn’t want to kill it, or douse it with water, so I turned on the water with the spray pointed away from the tiles and asked the spider to leave. They did — not because of the words, but because of the pressure/feeling of the water.
how long do spiders live? Although most spiders live for at most two years, tarantulas and other mygalomorph spiders can live for over 20 years. (source)
how long have modern spiders existed? The main groups of modern spiders, Mygalomorphae and Araneomorphae, first appear in the Triassic well before 200 million years ago. (source)
orb orb (spiral) webs, orb as eye, orbiting, encircling/enclosing, a spherical body
Alice Oswald, a spider reference in Nobody
A goddess or fog-shape in full wedding dress
sulks in that loneliness what a winter creature
whose lover loathes the everlasting clouds of her
and sits in tears staring at the pleasure-crinkled sea
but she as if a dash of hope
discoloured her sights stands waiting
the way a spider when it wishes to travel
simply lets out a silken
aerial
electrostatically alert through every hair
to the least shift of the atmosphere
at last it lifts on tiptoe and lovely to behold
like a bare twig it begins to blow
wherever the wind will take it but the wind
is the most distracted messenger I know
After citing this, Kit Fan writes:
The new lines at the end of the page carry a rhyme scheme (aabcbc) rare in Nobody and connect the goddess (the owl-eyed Athena who is Odysseus’s protector in The Odyssey?) with the precise, calculated work of a spider, breathing a different kind of life into the “discoloured” world without the watercolors. The two versions of Nobody create a counter-parallel universe for Oswald’s reimagination of The Odyssey, revisualizing the epic as a collage made out of imagist fragments or glimpses of “water-stories,” as the jacket to the UK version calls them. The two texts speak to each other like twins staring at themselves in the mirror, registering uncanny similarities and differences.
Water Stories
The precise calculated work of a spider. Tomorrow, I want to write a little more about the making of a web and the use of spun silk to travel. I also want to return to Alice Oswald and reread The Odyssey again. I love the Wilson translation! I just looked it up and the movie coming out next month is based on this translation. Excellent!