i remember losing a shoe last time this happened

changes.  the more i continue down this path, the more i tap into creative parts which are completely contradictory to writing about running.  and, after weighing the relative merits of maintaining a blog for each (running and not), i've decided to consolidate and write what feels right at the moment under the "lupine and daisy" rubric.  i have a feeling most of this will be poetry.  that's just what it boils down to for me. it's been this way since i was eighteen and i was writing poetry about submarines and a son of mine that still hasn't been born - thank god. i've moved on to flowers and mountains and genitalia (they're all the same, by the way).  but it's still the same basic view of the world.  i don't really think any other way for very long.  i'm starting to think of this forum as one long lieder cycle for me.  i've toyed with taking that to more formal places in terms of maybe doing a long trip and writing a poem each day to document the progress instead of, say, a travelogue, but that seems like too much pressure just yet.  i'll keep it informal.  i do see patterns developing, lupine and daisy each are emerging leitmotifs for me, tropes meant to invoke very specific persons, places.  and i like that.  i like that there might be some digging, some thinking on the readers' part to follow me.  and if there is none of that, that's fine too.  maybe there is something to build on.

i write this of course for myself.  this thought, this change of course is merely an abandoned sand bank.  the course of the river has moved elsewhere. 

i'll see you on the other side.

from THE LOVE POEMS OF MARICHIKO

I

"I sit at my desk.
What can I write to you?
Sick with love,
I love to see you in the flesh.
I can write only,
"I love you.  I love you.  I love you."

Love cuts through my heart
and tears my vitals.
Spasms of longing suffocate me
and will not stop.

IX

You wake me,
Part my thighs, kiss me.
I give you the dew
Of the first morning of the world.

XVII

Let us sleep together here tonight.
Tomorrow, who knows where we will sleep?
Maybe tomorrow we will lie in the fields,
Our heads on the rocks.

XXIV

I scream as you bite
my nipples, and orgasm
drains my body, as if I had
been cut in two.

XXXVI

I am sad this morning.
The fog was so dense,
I could not see your shadow
as you passed my shoji.

XXXI

Some day six inches of
ashes will be all
that's left of our passionate minds,
of all the world created
by our love, its origin
and passing away.


XXXII

I hold your head tight between
my thighs, and float away
forever, in an orchid
boat on the River of Heaven."



translated by K. Rexroth, 1978ish

Falling in Love in the Time of Slime Mold

some slimes (myxomycetes) begin life as protoplasm,
can move, can ingest nutrients, do
show sacrificial behavior, do exhibit group dynamics, can find their
way back together if separated, that is, they
"are no more than a bag of amoebae encased in a thin slime sheath"
but act as though they had "simple brains".  as such
they are no longer classed as fungi.

i saw several Chocolate Slime Molds on Granite Mt.
and found that I had much sympathy for them.
could have been me there on the end of the boot.  and you.  maybe
we were there and will be again. who could say?
maybe we'd grow out of my corpse. that wouldn't be so bad.
that would  be the perpetual spirit carrying on i guess.

i'd lift you up to get at
that leaf, or light, or shove a sporangia right up through me
to make more of us.  and be born again without hubris.
i'd do that.  i'd find you.  i'd hold tight if need be.  i'd let
go if need be too.  i bet we'd laugh as we
rolled around the forest floor shoving our cytoplasm back and
forth like kids inside those roll inside inflatable balls.  we'd never have to stop.

much of what i write is done while listening to music.  which is probably why most of my blog is riddled with mistakes grammatical, syntactical and logical, if not imaginative.  it's hard to see the keyboard sometimes behind tears.  or behind closed eyes altogether.  today's bit was done while this was playing.  go ahead.  get yer kleenex out now.

fairy slippers (Calypso bulbosa)

stopped to pick fireweed leaves for tea
underneath Granite Mountain. tinkham rd.  exit 47.

worked my way up through the avy chutes on the south face
but got a little concerned shortly thereafter

about the fact that there was still a good amount
of snow above me and the day was getting hot.  turned back.

late start.  did see a sooty grouse strutting wildly back and forth.
tail feathers splayed out like a turkey's.  two huge white

rings on his neck, flexing.  sprinted after him to
see if he'd drop a feather in his panic.  nope.

calypso orchids look like something lewis carroll would have
liked. trillium just hitting the upper slopes.  salmonberries

still need a week or two.  all this.  (a sweep of the eye).
"you mean there's a senator for all this?"

I had to go and sit while my brain ran around.
I had to go and sit while it played killdeer.
I had to sleep with my eyes being crows
with my feet being the mountains
with my cock being the spring river
with my hands the stars.
my teeth turned to bark
my mouth to roots
nose to leaves

----

we took off our skins and laid down inside each other and in
the headwaters made
what became in time a third

while down-
stream

---

I watched a junco (junco hyemalis) catch a wasp over the fire pit, go
clean its beak on the vine maple.
I'm staying with them.
They say, "the sharper the knife, the cleaner the line of carving."
They say, learn the names of as many of us as you can.

----

 the night sky was filled with birds

----

the wind moves

the mountain moves

we move

----

The song and the quill and the life given.
All the dappled shade there ever was gathered up at once.
The sound and shape of rising rivers darkening
to umber embankments year after year.
The multitude of ways to say love.

i said to the mountain, "you are the most beautiful mountain i have ever seen".

i said to my love, "you are the most beautiful woman i have ever seen".

charms

And

after letting go of wanting that little Jay feather I went and sat in the park in a golden light yesterday.  I took off my shoes and socks, folded my legs beneath me and resolved to watch the world for a few minutes. No expectations. Sometime into my vigil, I don't remember how long exactly, from the corner of my eye I saw there was a feather flickering in the grass.  

A Stellar's Jay feather

I found a Stellar's Jay feather yesterday down in an alley by my house.  Most of my immediates think of them as bullies or nuisances, and they might be.  And they, in turn, might think the same of us.  But I find them beautiful.  So when I found this little feather with light blue coloration on one side of the quill and cream on the other, I was delighted.  I placed it carefully in a little edition of Leaves of Grass that I sometimes carry, mostly as an affectation.  When I got home a little later, having remembered that it was tucked away in the book in my jacket, I went to retrieve it.  But it was gone.  Every once in a while I get the notion to look again.  Scour the pockets, flip through the book like a deck of cards.  But I don't.  I just smile.

Meditation on the Manis Mastodon

softly        reclining       Majestic

ringed on 3 sides by littorals

fresh out of the ice,
robes of suprabundance, florabundance
whose stubble was once a feral beard of
conifers growing for close on 2500 miles.  two thousand five hundred.
north to south.

you go scouring for answers.
the mind just doesn't hold such things.

and the blueheron waits for a minnow
to make its one unlucky move of the day.
blueheron can't afford to be unlucky.

and so won't.

you're holding wet lilacs to your breast.  it is the season of lilacs.
the season of procreation and replication.  of contribution.

will you?

every now and then a purple blossom shakes free, tumbles
down your naked body, comes to rest on an erect lupine nipple
or catches in your balsamroot pubic hair -

- you brought me lilac sprigs and eucalyptus in a hard rain, in a feverish dream.

i still smell them, the scent is still fresh on my skin

of bent grasses blowing uphill in the late afternoons of
ghosts of Pleistocene pelages hunted to extinction of
songs and myths and words themselves loosed over the land wildly
around campsites and in the ashes of pre-Clovis campfires and the spilled blood
of death and birth in the first human cries of babies raised in both hands to the sky and
the last cries of
the dying

breath.  think of that.  

i think douglas fir is the shadow of god espaliered

of perfect stillness

and the rising and falling

and how good things multiply of themselves, bonum diffusivum est

 
i wake each night under Ursa Major
and each night too Lyrid meteors arc thru it
and the doug firs frame the dream-mandala like
gnarled fingers of the old earth cupped.

every night i rise to meet it one or more parts or the whole of me

o lord i jumble myself before you.
i am a solitary oxeye daisy cleaved to your supple chest.

you, love, are not god.

but an eddy, a form constantly                         wondrously                        

                 easily                           ever so briefly overcoming entropy

overcome me before you swirl away like smoke

changing

Love the Human

(A little reminder to be wild and graceful, respectful and loyal, and to never stop going out in it.)



WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW TO BE A POET

all you can about animals as persons.
the names of trees and flowers and weeds.
names of stars, and the movements of the planets
                                      and the moon.

your own six senses, with a watchful and elegant mind.

at least one kind of traditional magic:
divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot;

dreams.
the illusory demons and illusory shining gods;

kiss the ass of the devil and eat shit;
fuck his horny barbed cock,
fuck the hag,
and all the celestial angels
                              and maidens perfum'd and golden -

& then love the human: wives    husbands   and friends.

children's games, comic books, bubble-gum,
the weirdness of television and advertising.

work, long dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted
and livd with and finally lovd.     exhaustion,
                            hunger, rest.

the wild freedom of the dance, extasy.
silent solitary illumination, entasy.

real danger.     gambles.    and the edge of death.



Gary Snyder, 1970

To be a bird

"To go beyond and become what - a seagull on a reef?  Why not.  Our nature is no particular nature; look out across the beach at the gulls.  For an empty moment while their soar and cry enters your heart like a sunshaft through water, you are that, totally.  We do this every day.  So this is the aspect of mind that gives art, style, and self-transcendence to the inescapable human plantedness in a social and ecological nexus.  The challenge is to do it well, by your neighbors and by the trees, and maybe once in a great while we can get where we see through the same eye at the same time, for a moment.  That would be doing it well."  Gary Snyder

Sometimes when I've been reading Snyder I'll stop and say "holy fuck, has this guy had access to my things?"  He writes, often enough to be unsettling, the uncreated yet creating consciousness in me.  I've been interested lately in the idea of crossing over.  Not to some metaphysical "other" plane like television psychics claim to.  Nor precisely like biology means either, though it is closer, a process in which two chromosomes pair up and exchange genetic information resulting in unique genetic material and thus, diversity.  I mean crossing species.  I mean imagining yourself as that particular junco right now.  What sensations would I be feeling?  Would the early afternoon sunlight still seem dappled?  That breeze that's just risen from its lunch up-canyon, how would that feel on my feathers?  Could I see air?

This might seem strange to many of us, but it's really got quite a long history.  In both Buddhist iconography and Native American art there is an intermingling of 'animal' and 'human' eyes.  In Western mythology of course the examples are innumerable of humans becoming and unbecoming animal.  Often as punishment.  Rarely is it a positive experience in the West, to assume the form of an animal.  And crucially, it seems the human mind is kept even with the body not belonging to it.  This seems impossible.  That junco could not "know" running for running's sake.  But does the junco look back at me with its black eyes and cross over into me?  Do we exchange parts of ourselves and in doing so create some new form? 

Deep Ecology teaches that every life form has intrinsic value.  Intrinsic value.  And that it is also possible to identify with every life form.  Radical, isn't it?  It is a powerful experience to imagine yourself as another animal.  Or as a Wood's Rose.  Or as a mountain.  Or as Puget Sound.  It dissolves our inherent solipsism, vestiges of our selfish anthropocentric "guardianship" and "management" of the wild world, the world at all.  We are wild.  Our very language is wild.  We cannot contain it.  See       it          walking               away.

Forever

walking


away.

Like the preternatural glance of the Blue Heron, a breathing and perfectly alive hieroglyph on the creek bed.

Or like this visitor...

New scientific evidence suggests humans didn't evolve to run! Finally!

Seems humans didn't evolve to run after all, or at least not without modern western medicine and self-help groups.  According to Ignatz van Beaner, PhD of the University of Copenhagen at Albuquerque (Department of Continuing Education and Distance Learning), humans have evolved to run for short spurts sometimes lasting up to two weeks followed by recurring trips to the doctor or at the very least having to confront several new and strange pains that weren't present before the bouts of running began.  "It turns out there is strong evidence that humans and pain have coevolved", says van Beaner.  "Humans may have engaged in persistence hunting in our history, but surely these hunts were interspersed with long periods of hobbling around and general complaining at our lot in the food chain.  And we may have never actually succeeded in running anything down other than the occasional sloth."

In a recent study that isn't peer reviewed due to lack of interest but was nevertheless published in the Journal of Inter-Mountain Physiology and Kinetics, van Beaner found that one hundred percent of his subjects had some kind of pain after running and thought seriously of going to the doctor or taking pain medication.  And that's saying quite a bit because of the two in the study, one was actually a medical doctor and the other was van Beaner himself who, ironically, is called "Doctor" by students and colleagues.

"This is probably really a problem for the psychologists", van Beaner admits.  "Why would anyone want to subject themselves to this viscous cycle?"

In other news, espn.com used a T.S. Eliot reference this morning.  "Cruelest Month: Pujols' April empty of HRs".  Who ever said the polymaths at ESPN didn't read their classics?  April is the cruelest month, indeed.