30 minutes with Delia
winchell / abandoned spur* / neighborhood
57 degrees
*I’m writing part of a poem about this part of the trail that I’m describing as an abandoned spur. I think it used to be part of the Winchell Trail, when the trail was marked with a chainlink fence.
I think this might be it: peak fall. Beautiful colors, bright sun, cooler air, leaves drifting down like snow. Finally, Delia can take walks; it’s been four months since she tore a tendon. I’m not running today because my IT band continues to be sore. I’m not worried it’s serious, but it needs more rest, at least, that’s what it whisper-screamed at me around 2 am.
I was planning to take Delia down to the oak savanna, but I heard too many kids’ voices — a school group? — and decided to go the other way. Past the leaning tree with its muffin top bark hanging over the broken fence slat, past the Welcoming Oaks and the gravel trail down in the ravine, past the guy in shorts sitting on a bench at the overlook who greeted me with a soft, hello, and to the stone steps that lead to the spur of the winchell trail that is no longer maintained (or barely maintained?). Counted the steps for my poem: 12. We took the trail then climbed back out near the ancient boulder, then crossed the road to the grassy boulevard between the river road and Lena Smith Boulevard. I kicked my feet through the leaves, listening to the delightful crunch they made. Fall!
As we returned to the neighborhood, I recited the poem I re-memorized this morning: “Halos” by Ed Bok Lee. That visual impairment improves hearing/taste smell touch is mostly myth./ With it, however, I can detect fuzzy spirits exiting the building/halos around bike helmets/each streetlamp a pink-orange dawn . . . Such a great poem!
earlier this morning: Some little kids (I think they’re in elementary school) have decided it would be a fun challenge to try and climb the 6 foot stump of our tree that we’re planning to turn into a gnome home next year. I wasn’t able to catch them yesterday, but I did today — hey, please get away from the tree NOW! I suppose the please was unnecessary, but I’m proud of myself for not yelling, hey, little shits, get off the tree!, which is what I wanted to yell. AITA?
About an hour later, some welcome visitors: wild turkeys! 11 of them, chilling in my front yard, visible from my window. Thanks for the show, ladies and gentleman!
Sometime between the turkeys and my walk, I worked on my steps poem. Here’s some lines from Wendell Berry that I referenced in yesterday’s post and that I think fit:
I have entered the downflow of the land. The way I am going is the way the water goes. There is something comfortable and fit-feeling in this, something free in this uielding to gravitiy and taking the shorter way down.
A Native Hill (615)/ Wendell Berry
I’m thinking of calling the poem “Gravity” instead of steps. And, I’m thinking of these lines from L Niedecker in “Paean to Place”:
How much less am I
in the dark than they?
Effort lay in us
before religons
at pond bottom
all things move toward
the light
Except those
that freely work down
to ocean’s black depths
in us an impulse tests
the unknown
It’s possible I’m straying too far from the poem, but I’m interested in ideas of darkness or darkening and going deeper in, beneath the surface, below the road, down in the depths. All of this, of course, connects to my darkening vision and my turn toward both reimagining sight (with less light, darker) and moving beyond sight to other ways of feeling and noticing and witnessing the world. And, all of this, connects to ghosts and the dead and those that have gone underground.