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the salomon shoes (still wearing last
winter's mud), some classic punk, the smoke of leaves, the chocolate
woodiness of hot coffee. a sub-70 degree run is as comforting as a
fall hoodie.
a cool tuesday and an electric familiar
pushes the body through brunswick nature park. . . an immersion of
the sounds of pine growth, a deflated basketball of a turtle dragging his shell, heady smells of
the damp earth, sweep of yellow necked thrushes, squirrels bouncing
branches, sounds of shoes crunching the gravel road towards the kayak
launch where the trail crosses perpendicular, cut left, following the
creek's tarry bank along the oldest trail of the park before turning
into the jerky undulations of the woods. an old paper trail. blood
pushes into legs and eyes and core. the words “Cartilage sinew
muscle & bone” chant behind nature's seminar of acoustics. A
trail run is a burning meditation that engages all the senses.
coolness brings an atmospheric
redemption, a body's willingness to move, an innate yearning to stomp
out miles on earth's variegated surfaces and the mind bending serious
to the hymn of movement. Its an instinct in the new coolness to move
and to try to move lithely, to burn the muscles with joy, kicking
across storm debris in narrow slices of trail by the black water of
town creek which sleeps like midnight quartz.
it is the cadence of crickets and the
still drift of white waterlilies and the pungent smells of decay as
hurricane irene still lays tangled on the trail and the slopes. the
catch of spider webs and their constant disregard. sun &
mosquitoes on shoulders. at a corner I shock into two large deer, one
darts out in perfect sine movement while the other pauses, her head
posed and her eyes black as the creek behind, and she too turns to
spring away.
an old man and his dachsund roam the
trails and he laughs at me “well i can see you have plenty of
energy!” the dachsund runs with me for a few meters and he licks
the air and turns back. i pause. the man tells how he kayaks with
his dog (jack) at carolina beach and he has the gentleness of the
lonely and the aged as he mocks his 72 years. i am torn between the
run and his story and i later feel a guilt of not being more present
to the him.
Cartilage sinew muscle & bone. the
body burns its own fuels of an abstract fire. soutine and his redred
landscapes of soppy paint, of mud mingling against a hill's contour
with mangled trees and limping architecture. i think of the pastry
cook's melancholy. . . his butchery paintings, his trout, his rustic
tables with sparse ingredients. Wirey-boned rabbits splayed for an
oiled pan. The pigments of carcass, rawanimalpaint, gravy paint.
(butcher's paper for his drawings?) the blur of periphery is where
soutine resides, in the elusive catch of redemption, the vapid glory
of renaissance, in the breakdown of muscle on bone and the depiction
of such a thing. unjudged, unhaunting. the detachment with which
turner depicted london like a nocturnal explosion. . . nero's firey
violin bow or whateverthefuck he played while rome was devastated.
Cartilage sinew muscle and bone and not much more to the whole thing,
to this architecture of breath and idea and movement and infinity. layers of the aleph. soutine was poor as dirt as a man but his
soul (and his soul's palette) was a cathedral.
the cadence of legs becomes the
momentum of mind, and the running season is returning with 15k at brunswick nature park and life is good with the tapping of typing
after a trail run in september. Lungs gasp at psalms and miles and autumn may be the one true palette of the year. Like soutine, like a
run, like a lunge of lust, a burn of things primed and respiring into
winter.
