Specimens, Days

Revising the wedding I am to perform next week, the sheer simplicity of certain elements of life strikes me. That unfettered awe of our youth that dropped our jaws & stood us up before our futures as if before the gaping cusp of some endless landscape of unimaginable contour, that slow struggle in which our faithful naiveté collides against our impregnable sense of maturation, our endless longings, the thrum & thrill of love & love enduring. It seems suddenly the same thing, drawn out from cradle to coffin, a kind of furious desire that knows not where to lay its head. That we learn along the way is hardly disputable, but that we come to know is something else entire. Love offers us the same wonder that youth did—a comparably powerful ally that we can no more readily define for its enduring presence than we could any of the fleeting moments of our pasts. It is wonder invested, I think; a kind of lineated awe, but awe nonetheless. Right now, I wait for my fiancée to return h

Hopkins with his fine eye & excruciated tone would stare a thing down until its thing-ness dissolved into a kind of essentiality; not precisely its own essence, but a marriage of both its individuated & its general modes of being. A kind of auratic wavering that ghosts a thing. He'd spy a knotted chestnut tree, or a gust roiling over grain-tops, & in each subtle motion & after exacting witness there would come to the forefront of consciousness the apophantic moment, the rising at the same time of the thing & the self. Coupled thus with the world, Hopkins felt the embrace of his god, in the dissolution of a border between self & self's alterity. What seems critical of a sudden is that never for one moment did his inscaping demand an absented sense of self, never did it hush the quiet storm within his own rising chest. He was an essential part of the world's universality, as much as the kingfisher or the carrion or the Deutschland splintered against th

A brief run up Saxon Mountain today, my person lodged between two intermittent stormclouds which cast great grey shadows over the broad mountainsides. From the third switchback one looks down upon the lake in Georgetown, green-blue & stunning-cold. No sense of wonder attended my run. Willa stayed home, her tail flat, as it gets from time to time. A simple day & one barely worth a mention but for the heart beating in my chest, the air fanning my lungs, the dappled sunlight & the susurration of breeze & gale outside, the light & hurried shower of rain playing upon the red planks of the patio. Some days it is enough merely to look upon the grain of the oak of the fence-post, or the paint where it shows wear upon the table-top. These, our quotidian comings & goings, the unrecalled exigencies of the mundane. In running, I felt a finitude today, itself only remarkable in hindsight. At a good clip up the dirt road that zig-zags Saxon, I felt that rare almost mechanical

Atop the western ridge over Watrous Gulch again, I had a simple, quiet day of it. The ascent was without trail, & my steps gingerly carried me over budded black-eye susans & columbine, scrub & sage. Nurse logs from decades ago, or rather their imprint upon the soil, could be seen here & there like shadows, phantoms of having-been. A fine mulch attended their angles of repose, soft underfoot, fecund. & perched atop the ridge, Willa in the distance chasing after a chipmunk in a patch of thick & twisted pine, I looked over the gulch below, the stream & its densely foliaged banks, the bark & plank laid over as a bridge, the winding trail small & peculiar from afar, a pencil-line drawn over an acquiescent landscape. Two hawks were gliding about a copse where late a camp was made, scavenging or investigating. I could plainly see them from above, some two hundred feet below me, their gliding so controlled that it seemed to announce a plane like an invisible

A crisp sixty degree day feels a great deal warmer under mountain sun, especially heading up a bare, exposed scrub-hill towards a distant rock outcropping. Remarkable weather for a hike this time of year, the aspens in the infancy of their turning, the conastoga pines already half-russet from late bark-beetle attacks. The way in marked by a lashing out against oblivion. Near a dilapidated section of wooden fence that stands alone, two horse ties in the distance falling over slowly like the wounded in a gunfight. & the white bark of the aspens gouged in shoddy script with names scrawling vertically down that have already come to mean nothing. A quarter mile past & it is forgotten, the interlopers on prosperity cordoning themselves off to the first feeble climb. & after, pitch after pitch of aspen grove, expanding vistas of the Dillon Reservoir &its unfortunate environs (condos, etc.) that one can glance over in focusing on the jutting peaks that delineate the horizon. Wi

& a missive this morning from India ending love love love. to Varkala, up to Rahjastan, to Bombay, & back to Delhi before her plane comes home. & this morning Willa & I will head up Guenella Pass to find a suitable trail (suitably empty of people), & we will linger upon the soapstone banks of the creek, the morning sun falling in glaring sheets over the small ripples of the clear-brown water, the cooling underbreeze in eddies off its roiling surface. I will put my head under, & she will wade & take gaping bites at the current, & she will again lean her heft against me when I am prone on the ancient bridge of two by fours. I will hear snapping twigs & falling pinecones, I will search the far reach of tangled wood & dappled dawn for shapes familiar, remembering the contours of the cougar I spied last week, its velvet body a thing of sprung grace, illuminated by headlights in the otherwise black of passing twilight. fear attends to every run, to eve

What is it that renders me paralyzed before the not the notion, but the evidence of freedom? Such long hours I've spent in no place particular, thoughts hovering upon substantiation, ideas in their slow revolutions while my hands lay idle. It was thrust upon me in thinking, that the effect of moving so regularly as a child was to modify that old addage, that it reads for my psyche "nothing ventured, nothing lost." A wonder that I may find anything meaningfully efficacious, that love can prove intrepid, enduring through tedium & turmoil. Reft & reft again, asunder from so many fanned flames, you begin to wonder less & less at the trail of smoldering ash in your wake, & instead facilitate clean breaks. Your mind tells you it is so, & your heart's rebuttals, those undying profusions, come to nothing unless you've properly anchored that to which they attend. I used to expect to come to death this way, trembling, cold, my hands grasping nothing wher

A run today up Watrous Gulch, bifurcate trail that veers right where Herman's Lake is left. Passed an old woman in a blazing pink windbreaker, &, yards ahead, her husband, who asked after her progress. A tenderness, that. & ahead, at Bard Creek, was a structure loosely banded together of lightning-struck bark, fallen branches, planks of ancient oak shaped dountless by the blades of miners in forgotten years. Two benches, a fire-pit, an overhang strung shoddily together with twine pushed to its limit. The valley affords a thick & tangled scrub-grass, briared & dense around the flowing rivulet, itself a copper-brown. & on either side, grass gives quick way to looming granite, tree-line falters & the great bald caps of the mountains jut formidably into the now-greying sky, black clouds beginning to creep over their barren domes. We are hit with hail on our run out & get to the lot in good time for it. An amicable wood, no dint of foreboding as one finds els

Here at Herman Lake, the azure sky pure & unbreached by cloud, the high tundra grass a copperwire, porcelain-fragile in what is no ireffutably mid-autumn. The ater of the lake is frigid, but Willa insists on a swim, out of character for her. Afterwards, she leans the weight of her wet body against me as I sit, lapping at me with her pink tongue. She is content. Around me yawn the capacious mountains, their stone teeth of granite, soapstone, Oklahoma buff turfed in yellowing lichen & moss. It is the sense of being here unnoticed, or of being permitted such rich passage, that thrills & enervates one's gratitude & simple faculty to marvel. I address you, my love, from this place, where late we waded or dove to the depths of the blue lake before the storm fell in behind. Your footsteps dot Kerala in paths the contours of which I cannot conceive-- but it is your face I conjure now, how I might hang upon its shifting countenance. Come to me safely. Here, here, the autumna

This, an attempt at unreservedly exploring a kind of pursuit that seems quite appealing to me. Travel a bit, document. Move, document. Run, document. & permit the transgressions of a regularly inflated prose. Stands to reason that, posited in such wild environs, the care for the consequence of being too effusive can be diminished considerably. Besides which, we can uncover the ponderous in the elementary just as easily as we can translate the extraordinary into the mundane. So.