2.5 big loops (5 cedar loops)
cedar lake open swim
84 degrees
20+ wind gusts
Big wind gusts as Scott and I walked on the gravel trail to the lake. I wondered how choppy it would be — not bad. No waves forcing me to breathe on just one side. Felt stronger than last Wednesday.
I’m writing this entry the next morning. What do I remember?
10 Things
- swimming through a loose vine — wrapped around my shoulders for a moment — not sharp or scratchy
- a swimmer in a pink cap (this year’s cap color is an ugly bronze)
- a tangled patch of vegetation growing up from the bottom right by the buoy
- black, wet-suited arms beside me for a few strokes
- the water above, a dull blue
- the water below, a vague empty green
- no waves but sometimes it was hard to stay up on the surface
- the lifeguard’s kayak gliding by me, fast and smooth and red
- more vegetation from below in the middle of lake — how tall are these vines?
- last year, the far buoy was placed very close to the swimming area at hidden beach, this year it is farther out
Alice Oswald and Nobody
I’m having fun returning to Nobody, feeling like I’ve found some ways into AO’s watery dream-world. I love reading it and Lorine Niedecker and then swimming across a lake.
1
Reviewing my notes in my Plague Notebook, Vol 21 (!), I found this, from AO in “Interview with Water”: continuous present, dream time. This reminds me of Mary Oliver’s now and now and now, which comes up in The Leaf and the Cloud and “Can You Imagine”:
but now and now and now
Swimming across the lake is both a continuous present and not a continuous present. I’m not aware of time, but I do keep track of loops. Maybe each loop is its own continuous present? It would be interesting to try and get lost in the loops, to not count them. I can set up an alarm or a distance workout on my watch that will alert me when I reached a certain amount of time or distance. (How) would the dream-state be different in this loopy state?
2
I’d like to remember (memorize?) this part of Nobody which I imagine is about making poems:
About an hour ago she surfaced and shook her arms
and peered around and dived again and surfaced
and saw someone and dived again and surfaced
and smelt all those longings of grass-flower smells
and bird-flower sounds and the vaporous poems
that hang in the chills above rivers
Those vaporous poems! The diving and surfacing and diving and surface! I love this as a description of a poet — me? — finding words hanging just above the surface. Could they be there for me today during my swim?
3
This definition of day turning to night — wow!
I’ve always loved the way when night happens
the blood is drawn off is sucked and soaked upwards
out of the cliff-flowers the way they worn out
surrender their colors and close and then the sky
suffers their insights all the shades of mauve green blue
move edgelessly from west to east the cold
comes ghostly out of holes and the earth it’s strange
as soon as she shuts her sky-lids her hindsights open
and you can see right out through her blindness
as far as the ancient stars still making their precise points
still exactly visible and then not exactly