3.5 miles
trestle turn around
23 degrees
60% snow-covered
Sun. Blue sky. Low wind. Most of the sidewalks are cleared, the path is not. Usually there was a strip of dry pavement. Not the best conditions, but definitely not the worst. I meant to notice the river, but forgot to look, or didn’t remember what I saw. Most of my attention was devoted to making sure I didn’t fall. Heard at least one woodpecker.
Looking down at some clumps of snow, I remembered noticing the clumps by the falls on my run two days ago. Big half-oval lumps of snow, much bigger than a snowball. What made these? For a flash I wondered if there could be a frozen body under that snow then I dismissed the idea. Speaking of lumps of snow: running on the road, heading home, I noticed a big dark gray something ahead of me. Was it a squirrel, stopped in the street? A dead animal? As I swerved to avoid it, I realized it was a chunk of snow that had probably fell out of the wheel well of car. Gross.
Waved to a lot of other runners in greeting. Didn’t see any regulars. No headphones running north. Put in a “Summer 2014” playlist on the way back south.
My Emily Dickinson, part three
Each word is deceptively simple, deceptively easy to define. But definition seeing rather than perceiving, hearing and not understanding, is only the shadow of meaning. Like all poems on the trace of the holy, this one remains outside the protection of specific solution.
Susan Howe referring to ED’s “My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun”
I’ve been meaning to post this wonderful poem by Franz Wright for some time now. It feels right to do it today after reading more of My Emily Dickinson and thinking about the Self, or losing, rejecting, being free of, moving outside of the Self. Often I think about being beside the Self (my self) as a desired thing, but is it? Today I wondered about what it could mean to claim (and celebrate) a self, to have a voice.
Poem with No Speaker/ Franz Wright
Are you looking
for me? Ask that crow
rowing
across the green wheat.
See those minute air bubbles
rising to the surface
at the still creek’s edge—
talk to the crawdad.
Inquire
of the skinny mosquito
on your wall
stinging its shadow,
this lock
of moon
lifting
the hair on your neck.
When the hearts in the cocoon
start to beat,
and the spider begins
its hidden task,
and the seed sends its initial
pale hairlike root to drink,
you’ll have to get down on all fours
to learn my new address:
you’ll have to place your skull
besides this silence
no one hears.
I must admit, I didn’t initially read this poem as about someone who has died, their new address their grave. And maybe it isn’t.