4.25 miles
marshall loop (to Summit)
47 degrees
What a run! Late fall/November is the best — half leaved, half unleaved. Cooler, more energy in the air. Two things I want to remember more than anything else:
1
Running down the summit hill, nearing the lake street/marshall bridge, a woman ahead of me, walking with another person, wearing the most amazing BRIGHT pinkish orangish jacket. She glowed. As I ran by I called out, I love your bright jacket. She slapped her thigh in delight and called back, It’s my don’t hit me jacket. Then we both laughed.
2
Just cresting the final hill and almost to the ancient boulder, I passed by two women walking and talking and marveling at how beautiful this place is. They both agreed, they hoped they never had to leave it. Then the younger woman, presumably the daughter, said to the older woman (mother): I only want to live here or where you are. That broke me open in the best way possible. I want to make that the title of a poem.
Reflecting on these moments, I imagined turning them into 2 (very brief) acts of a play. Act 1: the bright colored jacket, Act 2: mother and daughter share a moment.
I had a great run. I did the Marshall hill loop. I ran up the whole thing and didn’t stop to walk until I reached the Monument. Then I climbed down a few steps to listen to the shadows fall. After a few minutes, I ran back home — down the summit hill, past the woman in the bright jacket, over the bridge, up the ancient boulder and past the mother and daughter.
added 5 hours later: I just remembered the river and standing on the lake street bridge, peering over the edge and staring into the glitter path. Such bright, sparkling water! I’m not sure I could have stared at it as long and as directly as I did if I didn’t have so many dead cone cells. Bright lights don’t bother me much anymore.
bells
I’m working on the final (I think) poem in my collection. It’s a reworking of my ending poem for the OG haunts. And it’s inspired by some words from Annie Dillard (in “Seeing” from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) that I’ve fit into my running/breathing form:
My whole life
I’d been
a bell but
never
knew until
I was
lifted and
struck. Now
I am still
ringing.
—Annie Dillard
Here’s what I wrote in a pages document I’m using to gather some thoughts:
something about becoming a bell, or remembering that I was a bell — vibrating, carrying and passing on the songs — ancient rhythms of grief joy love anger restlessness buried deep within her, knocked loose by this place, by her ghosts, by her never ending movement — everything buzzing, ringing, chiming, pulsing, thrumming, strumming — even the oldest rocks shimmy and shake and shift and settle — her body, an echo, her feet adding to the ruts and the grooves, leaving a trace in foot strikes and words and shadows and, a scattering of Saras all around
For some of my run I thought about bells and Annie Dillard’s quotation about being a bell and Ammons and energy and movement and cells bouncing and shaking and disintegrating and being replaced and movement and — I wish I could remember the rest of what I was thinking, but I can’t.
I do remember one other bell-related thing I thought about. The book closes with Annie Dillard’s bell struck quotation. It begins with some lines from Emily Dickinson and “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” that I fit into my breathing/running form:
As all the
Heavens
were a Bell,
Being
but an Ear
I am both bell and ear. Some substance of the Heavens/the Bell/the Eternal resides within me. And, to be = to notice, to listen
before the run
Yes, to this poem-of-the-day on poets.org and the discovery of a new word (or the remembering of a word long forgotten): vermiculation!
The United States government murdered over 12 billion birds over the course of 1959
threw [sic] 2001. As they killed off the real birds they replaced thim [sic] with surveillance
drone replicas. Indistinguishable from a biological bird. There are now no real
birds left.
—Official Birds Aren’t Real Informational Van Bumper Sticker
i. The Philosophical Ornithologist
It is, as all things are, a problem
of perspective. What you think
you are watching, watches
you. Your binoculars convince
themselves they’re quotation marks.
The spy in the song, the feathered
thoughts, the cold hard data
you spun into silky fact
that the comment section couldn’t
wait to run its fingers over.
Of course, the pigeons adapted
to an urban space—they’re party birds
with smokey plumage, and they grow
peckish unless they’re bobbing
beaks to Milli Vanilli or waving
glow sticks around the Sabrett stand.
Ancient Egyptians and Williamsburg
hipsters have nothing in common
except how their feelings take sharp
angles in broad daylight when the sun
nests in their beards. What I mean
is that the bygone is hellbent
on a comeback, i.e., the early bird
pecks a blog post about the importance
of visually manifesting the worm—
actually encompassing its wriggle
in your quaint skull before
taking it to beak. You know though
that we are post-extinction and fully
flapped out—just look at us,
ogling Mother Nature’s augmentation
with craned necks, covering every
millimeter of the visible world
with the vermiculations of a stock
ticker. Something’s wrong. Like,
real wrong: I knock on mountains
and hear a vast metallic thud. I sleep
on eiderdown, but can’t seem to
squawk loud enough to stir the other
Denny’s denizens from their Grand
Slam breakfasts. In Altoona, Pennsylvania
and Waco, Texas, I can feel my face
being scanned every time I munch
a Big Mac. On this highway, a pit stop
is a pit stop is a pit stop and overhead
migration is a chance to grease gears
and re-feather the avian bait-and-switch.
vermiculation: Merriam-Webster entry
1: TORTUOUS, INVOLUTE
2: full of worms : WORM-EATEN
3
a: VERMIFORM (resembling a worm in shape)
b: marked with irregular fine lines or with wavy impressed lines
(line in the feathers of a bird)
cells and spindles
Yesterday I mentioned that a line from Hix’s cell phone reminded me of A.R. Ammons’ garbage. Today, I’m revisiting garbage to find and think about the lines.
Reading through it again, I found this:
we, give rise to to us: we are not, though, though
natural, divorced from higher, finer configurations:
tissues and holograms of energy circulate in
us and seek and find representations of themselves
outside us, so that we can participate in
celebrations high and know reaches of feeling
and sight and thought that penetrate (really
penetrate) far, far beyond these our wet cells,
right on up past our stories, the planets, moons,
and other bodies locally to the other end of
the pole where matter’s forms diffuse and
energy loses all means to express itself except
as spirit, there, oh, yes, in the abiding where
mind but nothing else abides, the eternal,
until it turns itself into another pear or sunfish
These lines stayed with me as I ran today.