walk 1: 30 minutes, with Delia the dog
neighborhood to grassy boulevard
59 degrees
What a fall morning! Today’s color: deep yellow/gold. Nature’s first green is gold/her hardest hue to hold. Three days after the marathon, I’m feeling a little sore in my right foot and my left IT band, but mostly okay. I was thinking of running a mile or two, but I might wait another day. If I were running, the temperature might seem a little too warm, but walking, it is wonderful. Fall!
10 Things
- one block north: yellow leaves from the locust trees, some still on the branches, others covering the sidewalk
- one block north: not yet inflated Halloween decorations — a giant dragon with flapping wings and a glowing belly
- an adult on a bike hauling a trailer with a kid, not quite slamming on their brakes at the intersection, but braking hard in order to stop for an oncoming car
- the sharp click of the heels of a walker’s shoes as he passed, then walked ahead
- unnaturally green grass on a manicured lawn — the blades looked soft and short, almost like moss or astroturf
- the hum of cars moving steadily on the river road below lena smith boulevard
- a tree trunk, stained with green lichen (or moss?)
- a man, sitting in a car, talking to someone, sounding frustrated, rattling off a series of expletives
- the metallic whine of an idling car, needing service
- BRIGHT pink and orange zinnias in a neighbors side garden
life update for future Sara: Took RJP to urgent care yesterday morning after she couldn’t stop puking: norovirus. After resting and getting some anti-nausea medication, she’s “on the mend” (her words in a text from this morning). Successfully avoided urgent care but scheduled an appointment this Friday for FWA and his bruised and swollen foot. He tripped on the stairs last week and slammed his toes down hard on the floor. He’s been on crutches all this week.
walk 2: 50 minutes
winchell / oak savanna / 38th street steps
68 degrees
Such a beautiful day that I had to go out for another walk. This time, without Delia. Did some fact checking for a poem I’m working on about steps. Started by counting steps:
- split wooden steps, 17 (down into Winchell)
- dirt with wood planked caps, 20 (up into the savanna)
- concrete and limestone, 2 sets: 13 then 12 (going up), or 12 then 13 (going down)
Then I took some notes: falling leaves mixed with dripping water, voices, footsteps. cars / a series of stones half buried in dirt, offering traction when the dirt turns to mud / chainlink turns into wrought iron / a graffitied wall / leaves drifting down, echoed in their walled shadows / a busy intersection at the top of the 38th street steps / this poem is mostly about descending, going deep in, sinking, settling, being like water (see Wendell Berry quotation) / mostly not all the way down (to the river) but wedged in, between sky and water, midway down a slope
I’m getting some inspiration for my steps poem from May Swenson and the 7th section of her poem, “October.” As I walked, I thought about how, in Swenson’s poem, it is all about looking from a distance: From the bridge, see far into . . . . See, along the scarcely gliding stream . . . Stand still, stare hard into bramble and tangle, past leaning broken trunks / Will something move? Some vision come into outline? Yes, there — deep in. I’m not interested in looking, especially outside and from a distance, but of being deep in, descending into the often unnoticed world of the gorge. From above, near the road, either in a car or on the paved trail, it’s easy to ignore/hard to give attention to what’s happening below you — it’s hidden by leaves or a slope. The different sets of steps offer an entrance into the gorge / an exit from the road and from the (over) privileging of eyes and vision as the way to notice/be present in the world.
And now, I’m thinking about another big inspiration, Wendell Berry in “A Native Hill”:
Looking out over the country, one gets a sense of the whole of it: the ridges and hollows, the clustered buildings of the farms, the open fields, the woods, the stock ponds set like coins into the slopes. But this is a surface sense, an exterior sense, such as you get from looking down on the roof of a house. The height is a threshold from which to step down into the wooded folds of the land, the interior, under the trees and along the branching streams.
A Native Hill (page 615)/ Wendell Berry
a surface sense, an exterior sense, a threshold from which to step down into the wooded folds of the land — In my collection (and in my practice), I’m not interested in always descending deep into the gorge, closer to the river. I like the view, the freedom of movement above, the ability to glimpse the bigger picture, but I am interested in it for this poem.
And here’s another important quote from WB:
The slopes along the hollow steepens still more and I go in under the trees. I pass beneath the surface. I am enclosed, and my sense, my interior sense, of the country becomes intricate. There is no longer the possibility of seeing very far. The distances are closed off by the trees and the steepening walls of the hollow. One cannot grow familiar here by sitting and looking as one can up in the open air on the ridge. Here the eyes become dependent on the feet. To see the woods from the inside one must look and move and look again.
Native Hill (page 616)/ Wendell Berry
A thought: in my poems about the girl, ghosts, and the gorge, I mostly write about being above, on the rim of the gorge. Occasonally, I write about going below. For all of the poems, I write in third person, often as a girl or the girl or girl. What if I shifted to first person (I or we) when I enter the interior?
A series of associated thoughts: thinking about some lines from Plath in “The Mushrooms”, our hammers, our rams/earless and eyeless/perfectly VOICELESS, then lines from Jorie Graham’s “Still Life with Window and Fish”, but I love it here where it blurs and nothing starts or ends and all is moving and colorless and VOICELESS. I thought about these two uses of voiceless as I heard disembodied voices above me, near the road. Here, in the gorge, everything speaks, all the time. It is not voiceless, but bodiless. Then I began rethinking what could be meant by body — not one voice attached to a singular body, but many voices attached to a body that is not singular, but plural, like a body of water. a body as mycelium? When I descend deeper into the gorge, my singular body dissolves, borders blur, I become part of the gorge and the gorge part of me. Does this make sense? And how might it fit in with a poem about steps?