Run & Paint

Thursday, March 17, 2011

a literary run and a splash quite unnoticed.

brueghel's depiction of the fall of icarus is anonymous & tragic, nearly private and asinine.  wcw's poem launches from this image and it was his language which kept passing through my mind as I ran poplar grove plantation.  I was doubting my fitness for the 50k and thinking that my icarus may land in lake waccamaw and then began debating whether icarus's final descent occurred in an intercoastal salt marsh, a reservoir, a lake.  Of course icarus is everyman and the water-tomb is symbolic 'cause its a sad clown-fate that awaits all ambition but you just keep legging on and looking and thinking and trying to capture something lucid and glowing and bright, trying to abate the private clownface brutality, trying to ignore the tightrope absurdity ferlinghetti spoke of.  Another level of endurance we must constantly endure.


meanwhile spring brought a red-headed woodpecker of fair size with a white ring around his neck, a brilliant bluejay chasing a slightly dulled female, many cadmium red cardinals and huge squirrels.  turtles were crowding a log in the middle of the lake, basking easy.


rumi came to mind, his name laden with associations like cole barker and unc and the moment the book was given to me and the passions of poverty and the ascetic's joy.  there were no lyrics, only a moment of admiration for his ecstasy, his psalms, the idea of the poem-psalm, a holy song of the everyday.
pictures are winter light in january, a false representation of today.