brunswick nature park & chaim soutine.

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.