1 mile
neighborhood
28 degrees
It seemed colder than 28 degrees as Scott and I took Delia on a walk this morning. Damp. It looks like snow, but hours later as I write this, it still hasn’t started. The sky is a heavy white. There was some ice on the sidewalk — thin, almost invisible patches. Conscious of my vision, Scott pointed them out. It’s strange how my vision works; I was able to see all of them. I think it’s because of the texture — the icy patches make the concrete just a little bit shinier.
10 Things
- good morning! greeted a neighbor on the next block — the one with the cat (matt) who rules the sidewalk and the very cool poetry station. I thought about asking his about it, but didn’t — next time!
- most of the ice was in the usual spots — the places where ice always forms because of the slope of the ground or the way a drain pipe is positioned
- a dog’s sudden appearance on the other side of a fence startled, then delighted me
- the soft tinkling of a collar, almost sounding like a bell
- Dave the Daily Walker in the distance
- the decorations in the trees of a house on the corner of 28th — over-sized ornaments in soft colors
- noticing the contrast colors of a house, wondering to Scott, didn’t that house used to be all one dark color? He couldn’t remember, but I do, now. I’ve written about this house before and its once purple door
- I’m not sure what we were talking about but I have no memory of what I saw or smelled or heard for the next couple blocks
- oh! one thing I remember now: the beautiful frosty pattern of icy leaves etched on the sidewalk — the leaves were gone, but had let their prints
- Delia’s wagging tail as we neared our garage — are we almost home? (wag wag wag)
A few hours ago, before our walk, I did my standard 30 minutes for flexibility yoga. Wow! It felt so good and made me very relaxed. As I stretched, I had a thought about my series of Haunts poems: break up the long 5 syllable sections with some short lines from other writers (mostly poets) that I fit into my 3/2 patter. I call them for fitters. I’m thinking of these kind of like Jane Hirshfield’s pebbles or Mary Oliver’s sand dabs or Victoria Chang’s tankas in Obit. I’m also thinking of them because of the poet Sparrow, who I just learned about in Lydia Davis’ essay on form. Sparrow wrote an entire series of “translated” New Yorker poems.
I thought I had written about the sand dabs and pebbles on here before, but I can’t find anything:
A Year with Mary Oliver posted all 9 of MO’s sand dabs on instagram! Here’s an explanation of the form:
(Sand Dabs 1/9) Over the next nine days, we’ll be sharing each of Mary’s nine “Sand Dabs.”
As Mary wrote in the footnote of Long Life: “The sand dab is a small, bony, not very significant but well-put-together fish.”
The incomparable @mariapopovadescribed “Sand Dabs, One” as “just a few lines, largehearted and limber, each saturated with meaning and illustrating the principle it espouses in a clever meta-manifestation of that principle embedded in the language itself.”
The remaining eight also fit that description.
They read like many of the excerpts from Mary’s notebook (which she shared in the essay “Pen and Paper and a Breath of Air,” found in Blue Pastures)—free form noticing and thoughts, in list form.
All nine Sand Dabs are scattered throughout four of Mary’s less frequently visited books: Blue Pastures, West Wind, Winter Hours, and Long Life. She wrote them over the span of nine years. Just adding more as she went along.
We weren’t able to find any place where all nine lived together. It was fun to collect them from their disparate pages, put them together, and read them all in a row.
Mary Oliver’s Sand Dabs
And here’s a Pebble from Hirshfield:
Retrospective/ Jane Hirshfield
No photograph or painting can hold it—
the stillness of water
just before it starts being ice.
The mention of ice reminded me of a wonderful description I found in the novel I just started reading, A Little Stranger/ Sarah Waters:
I recall most vividly the house itself, which struck me as an absolute mansion. I remember its lovely ageing details: the worn red brick, the cockled window glass, the weathered sandstone edgings. They make it look blurred and slightly uncertain–like an ice, I thought, just beginning to melt in the sun.
The Little Stranger/ Sarah Waters