4.15 miles
the monument and back
67 degrees
humidity: 91% / dew point: 65
Yuck! The air is so thick, everything heavy with moisture. We were supposed to have thunderstorms this morning — 90% chance — so I ruled out open swim, but they haven’t happened yet. Bummer. I bet it would have been a good swim.
I ran through the neighborhood, over the lake street bridge, up the summit hill and to the monument. Then I turned around and ran back, this time running south on the river road path instead of through the neighborhood.
10 Things
- 3 stones stacked on the ancient boulder
- a strange whimpering, soft howling or moaning sound coming from under the bridge on the east side — a non-human animal? a bird?
- no rowers on the river
- a foul, rotting smell as I ran over the bridge — I thought of the rot* that Alice Oswald mentioned in “Interview with Water” and the scarlet rot that FWA told me about yesterday when he recounted some “Elden Ring lore”
- a dark, deep green everywhere
- flowers alongside the trail on the east side: green leaves, fanned like ferns, pale white or purple flowers, small, dotting the green
- new (or newly noticed) graffiti under the bridge on the east side — brick red, I think
- the dark reflections of tree in the water near the shore — so dark that they look like shadows to me
- the faintest trace of a sandbar under the bridge
- the usual puddles near shadow falls are back, almost covering the entire path
*AO and rot: “anything excessive or out of focus or subliminal — for example: a swimmer seen from underneath, a rotting smell. . .”
Here’s another Alice Oswald water poem that I uncovered in a dissertation about Oswald, Jorie Graham, and water!
Sea Sonnet/ Alice Oswald
Green, grey and yellow, the sea and the weather
instantiate each other and the spectrum
turns in it like a perishable creature.
The sea is old but the blue sea is sudden.
The wind japans the surface. Like a flower,
each point of contact biggens and is gone.
And when it rains the senses fold in four.
No sky, no sea – the whiteness is all one.
So I have made a little moon-like hole
with a thumbnail and through a blade of grass
I watch the weather make the sea my soul,
which is a space performed on by a space;
and when it rains, the very integer
and shape of water disappears in water.
Almost forgot: japan is a new word for me. Here are some definitions, both noun and verb:
noun:
- any of several varnishes yielding a hard brilliant finish
- a hard dark coating containing asphalt and a drier that is used especially on metal and fixed by heating — called also japan black
verb:
- to cover with or as if with a coat of japan
- to give a high gloss to