3.1 miles
big loop*
68 degrees
*44th ave, north/32nd st, east/river road, south/42nd st, west/edmund, south
Another good run. Cooler and very calm, still, quiet. Don’t remember hearing (m)any birds, no conversations, no rowers. At least 3 separate times, I thought I was hearing the clickity-clack of roller skiers, but was actually hearing a bike with noisy wheels or messed up gears or something. Strange that it happened 3 times when I don’t remember ever making that mistake before. Was it the quality of air? Hardly any wind this morning. Sunny, but not bright. Did I see my shadow? Can’t remember.
Recited “The Gate” one more day and thought about gates and openings and doorways and thresholds and windows and spaces where movement and breathing and new stories/ways of being are possible. I think this is my new theme for the month and/or for a series of poems/essays.
Recorded myself reciting it just after finishing my run–my heart rate was probably around 140 or so as I spoke. I got it mostly right but messed up the second to last “this.” The order she writes the three thises–“This is what you’ve been waiting for, ” “And he’d say, This,” and “This, he’d say” is important. It doesn’t have as much impact the way I recited it.
Yesterday, reading Ted Kooser’s Delights and Shadows, I found these two poems that I really liked:
Grasshopper/ Ted Kooser
This year they are exactly the size
of the the pencil stub my grandfather kept
to mark off the days since rain,
and precisely the color of dust, of the roads
leading back accross the dying fields
into the ’30s. Walking the cracked lane
past the empty barn, the empty silo,
you hear them tinkering with irony,
slapping the grass like drops of rain.
The Early Bird/ Ted Kooser
Still dark, and raining hard
on a cold May morning
and yet the early bird
is out there chirping
chirping its sweet-sour
wooden-bully notes,
pleased, it would seem,
to be given work,
hauling the heavy
bucket of dawn
up from the darkness,
note over note,
and letting us drink.