In May of 2025, my focus shifted gradually from grass to surfaces and textures to edges to moments to color and then returning to grass.
grass
Katie Farris poem — Ode to Money, or Patient Appealing Health Insurance for Denial of Coverage:
America’s optimistic to dye its money
green. Leaves are green
because of chlorophyll, which is the machine
that turns sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into leaf, stem, and root. All
the little blades of grass left behind by the lawn mower like Civil
War soldiers. Same as cash.
Grass! A whole month with grass?
like Civil War soldiers — the line this is referencing in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was one of my first favorite lines from a poem:
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
I posted this section of Song of Myself on 18 may 2020. Here’s another part I want to remember:
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Mary Oliver and a poem as a green field.
Minneapolis Parks and mowing grass.
The History of lawns in the US.
- The difference between meadows, fields, pastures, abandoned orchards, oak savannas, and prairies. Succession. (2 may).
- Poems that mention, or are about, meadows and fields (3 may).
- RWK, moss, and succession at an abandoned mine in the Adirondacks (4 may).
- RWK’s moss and enoughness, MO’s grass, praying, and one wild and precious life (5 may).
- 10 Grassy Things, “crying” grass, and the surburban lawn (8 may)
- grass roots and astroturfing (9 may)
- more on suburban lawns and what it means to be wild (10 may and 11 may)
- another grass line (25 may)
surfaces
- Surfaces, boundary layers, intimacy with RWK and Forrest Gander (6 may).
- Wendell Berry, ground contact time, the edge as the place where two seams or surfaces meet, the need for context (7 may)
- feet first, following (12 may)
- stillness in movement over surfaces (13 may)
moments
- Sidhartha Menon and the moment as beyond judgment, Georgina Kleege, my blind spot, and the moment between seeing and sight (15 may)
- location of moment: among or between — Lorine Niedecker, Marie Howe (16 may)
- ruts vs. grooves (17 may)
- moment: just after you realize you don’t know where you are and just before you locate yourself / moment: when you lose time and can’t recall a stretch of your run / via negativa (18 may)
- moments have a context, a history / Chloe Garcia Roberts and Fire Eaters (19 may and 20 may)
- moment as between — between the dusk and darkness / between lived and learned experience / between what the eye sees and the mind thinks (21 may)
- moment as air, the space between water and stone, air as a character not only the background (22 may)
- volta: as the moment in a poem when a door opens, or you turn a corner (23 may)