Blog #2

It's about 11:30 A.M. when I start out for the pond but feels both earlier and later than that since I have only just woken up. A weird thing happens when you wake up near the end of morning.  Your body is still sleepy and warm, so the walk to the water was a little bit more lazy and a little bit less cold than my last walk here.  But also, the light of the day indicates immediately that it's almost mid-day, which makes for some confusion. Since my mind is in morning mode but knows that it's later, it somehow feels even later than 11:30 and also makes me feel like I've wasted the morning. Alas.

Trudging through the dusty white snow, most of it still fresh on the ground since there has been few travelers on these paths since Friday, I get caught up thinking about the light.  Sometimes I play a game with myself in the mornings. If I open my eyes and haven't checked the time,  I'll look out the window from my bed where the light pushes in between the blinds. Or if I'm at Michael's, I'll get up and walk to the window by the chair, not looking at the clock, and try to guess the time based on the light.  Obviously, this is a tried and true method of time indication (sundials), but with the science aside, there's something very distinct about sunlight throughout the day.  The rosy, yellow light of very early morning, which bleeds into the whiter, brighter light of morning, followed by the harder light of mid day. By afternoon the light is darker, somehow, even though it's still light.  Almost a fuller, rounder light, which catches more yellow as it goes on into evening, and blues as it fades to dusk.  There's always a feeling to perceive, too, if you're patient.  If you're still for long enough you can gather the energy, and sense the time of the day.  I like to do this, to test my connection to the earth and the light, to make demands upon my body's sense of energy and it's ties to the world.

By the time I finish all this light-pondering, I'm sitting again on the edge of the pond, looking at the frozen fish. I brought a tarp today, to put on top of the snow so I could sit for a while and not freeze. Most of the water is covered with a padding of snow, but spots have melted away in the sun over the past few days, and the frozen fish are still down there staring up at me with their big, round eyes. Looking around at the trees, most of the snow that had landed on branches has already melted or fallen away, and I'm disappointed for not getting to the pond before this.  Already the quietness that comes with the descent and coating of snow has dissipated, and the enchantment of white topped mazes in the woods is gone.

Still, I'm drawn to looking up at the trees.  My eyes scan the full length around the opening of the canopy.  The big oval of sky above is roughly the same shape of the pond, with branchy distinctions here and there.  I spread out my tarp and lie down in the middle, snow all around and that particular cerulean blue of sky up ahead.

When I was younger, I was driving in my car with my family somewhere and on the way back had fallen asleep against in the back seat.  I woke up before we had reached our house and not wanting to move, opened my bleary eyes out the window and up at the sky.  Tree outlines passed by, creating a break between the indigo and navy night, and the darker, deeper brown of the woods. After a few seconds of watching, I realized I knew exactly where we were from the outline of the trees.  I sat up to look at the road and found that we were right where I had expected us to be- route 100 just before the Catherine Avenue exit- which means nothing if you're not from Pasadena, MD, but it's about two miles from where I grew up.  This memory has always stuck with me, probably about 12 years after the fact, even to the point of remembering the exact place in the road that we were.  I was fascinated then as I am still now that without even trying to memorize that information, I had spent so much time looking at the trees out the window of the car that I knew each indentation, each odd branch, each curve in the outline of the woods.


I spent my twenty minutes by the pond today lying on my tarp in the hard sun of the nearing afternoon, just looking at the outline of the trees, trying to memorize.



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Trees make their own silhouettes

hold arched hands against

            a dense sky, 

                        folding, folding

they rebel against the air,

seize a new space to stab with branches,

            shudder into a gasp of buds and knobs,

                         breathless, bare against a colder weather.

Always the reaching oak regards me,

            dark across the lawn.

I bristle at its lenient bend in wind,

wish I could be less like it:

                        how it trembles at the tips,

                        holds everything within,

                        traps records of the years.