3 miles
trestle turn around
60 degrees / humidity: 89%
Back to sticky running this morning. Overcast, but humid and wet from an early morning rain. I wore my BRIGHT orange YWCA Tri shirt from 2013 and my BRIGHT yellow running shoes. I wonder, did I brighten the otherwise gloomy gorge for anyone? I’m continuing to do my 3/1 method. The first 3 felt good, the second 3 did not, then after that, they all felt about the same: not hard, but not effortless either. Lots of sweating. After climbing up from under the lake street bridge I saw my first “road closed for an event on oct 4” sign. That’s for the marathon! For the next mile, I had a big grin on my face. It’s coming!
Two days ago, I came across WS Merwin’s “The Light of September” in an log post and I decided I wanted to re-memorize it (I memorized it a few years ago). Then yesterday, I decided to re-memorize Diane Seuss’ “I Look Up From My Book at the World Through Reading Glasses.” Today, it was Jorie Graham’s “Still Life with Window and Fish.” As I ran, I recited the lines in my head: Down here this morning in my white kitchen along the slim body of the light . . . Such a wonderful poem that has so much to say about vision and light. As I was memorizing DS’s poem yesterday, I thought about how brilliant it is in describing my experience of seeing the world sometimes — the world, italicized/Douglas fir blurs into archetype. . .Then I thought about a new project: picking some of the favorite vision poems I’ve gathered by others and writing about how and why they resonate for me. Seuss and Graham would definitely be on that list, along with several Emily Dickinson poems.
10 Things
- a small pack of shirtless runners — I heard the loud slapping of their feet first, then saw them as they flew past me
- scuff scuff scuff — a runner in a BRIGHT yellow shirt, scuffing his feet on the path with every step — he was slow but had a fast cadence, so there were a lot of scuff noises
- a few more slashes of yellow, red — I think a few orange too
- the squeaky whirr of wheels on an orange motorized something — not a bike, not a scooter — it was orange and had 3 wheels and the old guy in an orange jacket riding it was moving fast
- the sliding bench was empty
- any view of the river, forgotten — was I able to see it, or was it blocked by leaves?
- a white sky
- no geese, no blue jays, no chickadees, one cheeseburger from a carolina wren
- cars driving on the river road in bursts — a line-up, then no cars, then a line-up again
- waving to Daddy Long Legs who was over on the bike path while I was on the walking path
haunt / overlook
Today, since I’m writing about the overlook — the ones by the gorge, the act of ignoring or passing by without noticing or forgetting — I decided to search for “overlook” on Poetry Daily (poems.com). Jackpot! A great poem by the wonderful Maggie Smith:
In Geologic Time, It Happened Just Seconds Ago/ Maggie Smith
Our honeymoon was a strand
of scenic overlooks. I first wrote
strange—a strange of scenic
overlooks—my mistake, and strange
enough was the desert penned
in red ink. The scene
was either Sedona or Mars. They say
the iron in the rocks calls
to the iron in our blood,
so it tugs on us. It tugged. We stayed
on Airport Mesa, where we called
the crowds drawn to sanguine
sunsets “tourists,” as if we weren’t,
and where, each night, the Milky Way
made a mess of the sky.
Was I the only one who wanted
to wipe its white smudge away,
to polish the night
black again? Our honeymoon
was a stranded scene I overlooked.
We posed for photographs
\
we never took. I remember the moon
framed above the landscape, looking
silvery as a tintype
taken in a modern-day ghost town.
The last day, we reached the canyon
and saw where the river
had over millions of years chewed it down
to bone, clear to the canyon’s
strange marrow, riven
into red, copper, and purple—bands
like sunsets compressed and recorded
in rock. That view
remains. Our honeymoon was a strand,
a strangeness, a look ahead. I wrote
only what I could see.
1 — look / scene (seen) / tourists (gawkers) / a blocked view (Milky Way) / photographs (staged looks) / a view (of the moon) framed / landscape (visible feature of an area of land) / looking like / saw / view remains / look ahead / could see
What a variety of uses of view/see/look here, related to vision! I’d like to try this out in my overlook poem — or, maybe the same approach (gathering and using a wide range of descriptions related to a concept) on my dirt path poem, which has two sections: desire and abandon
2 — overlook as view / overlook as not seeing
3 — geologic time / iron in rock connected to iron in body — references to Lorine Niedecker and “Lake Superior”?
4 — a beautiful description of the carving out of a canyon, both literal and figurative as what happened to a marriage years after the honeymoon
5 — so it tugs on us. It tugged. Love it!