3.4 miles
river road path, north/south
73 degrees / dew point: 66
10:10 am
A later start. A warmer day. Still a great run. Relaxed. Thought about thoughts and trying to let them pass through me like the wind. Decided it’s easier to think about something else than trying to stop thinking about something. Recited Emily Dickinson’s “Before I got my eye put out –” Favorite lines today: “The motion of the dipping birds/the morning’s amber road” Greeted Mr. Morning! and overhead a conversation that I can’t remember now. Thought I heard the rowers below, but I’m not sure.
Walking through the alley after my run finished, I heard a blue jay. First, the tin whistle sound, then the screech. I’ve decided that, whether I like it or not, the blue jay is my new bird for this year. With that in mind, here’s an ee cummings poem I found. It’s making me appreciate the blue jay just a little bit more.
crazy jay blue/ ee cummings
crazy jay blue)
demon laughshriek
ing at me
your scorn of easily
hatred of timid
& loathing for(dull all
regular righteous
comfortable)unworlds
thief crook cynic
(swimfloatdrifting
fragment of heaven)
trickstervillain
raucous rogue &
vivid voltaire
you beautiful anarchist
(i salute thee
I haven’t read much ee cummings, so I had to look up how to read/make sense of his parenthesis. Here’s something helpful I found in What is the key to reading E.E. Cummings poetry?:
“Cummings often arranges the lines of his poems in seemingly strange ways:
un(bee)mo
vi
n(in)g
are(th
e)you(o
nly)
asl(rose)eep
(Cumming Complete Poems 691)
The key is to read everything within the parentheses first, then to begin again at the top with the remaining words: Bee in the only rose, unmoving. Are you asleep? If that is all he meant to say, why didn’t he write it that way? He wants us to discover the bee for ourselves as perhaps a bee surprised him when he peered into the heart of a rose. Why the “only” rose? Because our attention is completely focused at the moment on one particular blossom, it is as though no other rose exists. Why isn’t the bee moving? Is he dead? Is he sleeping the sleep of the sated?”