Walking. With Airborne Droplets.

~ Live & Learn

2:30 am. I flick open Sleep app. 4 h 25 m.  Hmmmm. Dale-like. How does she do it? Lori’s magnesium? Something. Something.

Morning papers. COVID-19. Masks. No masks. Airborne Droplets. Transmission. Virus is a hoax? Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “Bring out your dead!”

4:50 am.  I pack my sling…phone, camera, earbuds, water…and I’m out the door. This unknown life force pulls me forward.

57° F.  Special Alert: Dense Fog. Exactly how my head feels. Dense fog.

I walk.

Dark.

Walking under street lamps to Cove Island Park.

Infinitesimal droplets fall on my face. Airborne droplets.

I roll up my sleeves, first right, and then left.  Droplets land on the inside of my forearms, and they tingle.

“Hey you, Agnostic!”

“You talking to me?”

“See anyone else?”

“Can you feel that?“

“I’m feeling Something. Something.”

Droplets stop. Infinitesimal, ephemeral, and gone.

Gull cries overhead.

They trigger David Gray’s tune “Gulls.” I search and play it on a loop:

This land belongs to the gulls
And the gulls to their cry
And their cry to the wind
And the wind belongs to no one…
Toward the sea that god sewn
Toward the sea that god sewn

And I walk, looking out over Long Island Sound, fog beginning to lift.

Feelin’ something…

Notes: Photo mine. Weed Avenue, Stamford, CT. This morning.

43 thoughts on “Walking. With Airborne Droplets.”

  1. I don’t see an atheist, I see an agnostic…. You are searching. For what? Let’s leave that open for now. Or, let’s say You are not sleeping enough. Stop measuring everything. Let things happen. When you walk or run, ENJOY just these moments. Happiness and Thankfulness are not measured. They are lived. They are felt…
    Now, go back to your home, to your bed. Feel the droplets borne of your excercise, they are yours, and only yours. Feel their cool. Sleep…..

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    1. Miasma. Never heard of it. “a highly unpleasant or unhealthy smell or vapor.
      “a miasma of stale alcohol hung around him like marsh gas”. Learned something. Love this word. Exactly where my head is at.

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  5. You had me in early morning light. The sleeplessness. The fog. I ran and walked with you in the mist. Questioning. Wondering. Musing.

    and then…

    I listened to that song. And I fell out of step with your poetry and fell into love with David Gray. His words. His voice. His music. Spiralling. Opening me up to the majesty, wonder and awe of life – in all its confusing, miasmic, incomprehensible, everyday mystery.

    As Maria Rainer Rilke wrote…. Live the questions now.

    Oh — and hey! You used it! Ephemeral! Nice. 🙂

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  7. Ah David…. what can I say? I got a whopping 7 hours 41 minutes -okay, I woke up five times and only spent 39 minutes in deep sleep but at least this one wasn’t in two shots of three hours, right?
    I’m with Kiki – WE have to stop measuring everything. (Yes, I capitalised the WE because I’m including myself in that one.)
    And thank you for the David Gray – I ended up listening to three songs before I cam back to comment.
    And I love that you went out to walk, camera in hand, meaning you wanted to be in the moment, not run past it.
    And now we can see that Eric inherited his photographer’s eye from Dad..

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  9. I hope I don’t lose you — I’m sending this madness to you this afternoon —
    it’s long, so sorry. Have a drink while you read…

    The whole page is a place to draw… the actors have to interpret a visual script these days. We’ve been lifted off the page of prose prose prose… in the multitudinous stage directions, those heavy heavy dead weights of descriptive prose. No wonder Shakespeare didn’t want to get bogged down,
    Stuck in the morass
    Of Stage directions.

    Larry Kramer dies today.
    Oh oh oh

    The men who did not die in the 80s of AIDS… who survived to write the plays… they’re in their 80s…70s…Tony Kushner next? Will they succumb to this one? Too exhausted to fight another battle, they are, after all, in their twilight years. And I…approaching and I…remember. Oh JJ…it’s all for you.

    And so I walk. I run. I run because the effort silences the muse. I know I know, I just wrote a whole fucking blog about wanting to muse while I walk…but today is another day, and so…it’s a lie today. What is true today is this:
    I need the muscle pain to distract me from the flood of myriad connections along the path. …

    If I want to feel ignorant…all I have to do is homework — looking up the history of Somalia helps with this, the history of Ethiopia, Eritrea and even Djibouti – The Horn of Africa. Muslim, Christian, Persian, Jew… tribal, hostile Somalians, all victims of the Locusts, all struggling to eat, but Ethiopia – those smug Christians – those Smug Smug Christians – always holding the power cards, their sense of being the originals, the ONES who KNOW… augh…they have such guns from Europe. Guns first, Christ later. But Wikkipedia is chalk full of information that I do not have – and I see, baldly and boldly how little I know… and this is good.
    This is god’s reminder…but if ignorance is a sign…and knowledge is a sign too, and if everything has its counterweight and tension…and I am aware of it…aware of the process…the research involved, then I am still not in the comforts, held warmly in the arms of ignorance… and I need some of this when I walk around my house, ready to slice the watermelon, and wonder…should I respond to Live and Learn’s blog, a
    Fellow poet

    In the world making
    Connections
    And posting black and white photos
    Of birds of fog of mist and of mystery

    But she writes through the clichés, in a fresh voice – though not a mean voice – why do I keep thinking this is a woman’s voice? I think…it might be…
    See that?
    See it? Hear it? Stop…
    Wonder about that.

    I think…it might be…augh augh augh you poison, you vial, you syringe.. you killer you, this line
    This writing across the page will serve as antidote to your veil of beauty, your “gift” of breath, though it is a life force, a life breath
    It also breathes
    Fire
    Conflagration

    And so I put it out with my watery prose, writing across the page to calm myself down… and so there is this other poet on the other side of the world – I know I know I know – there’s a million! Well, at least a few thousand…I know I know…fuck you too… for taunting me…I know… let me at least pretend…to know something? There is the poet across the country, and he/she/they writes (Oh god, I am trying, I am trying…but look! The verb gets all fucked up when you write three pronouns, trying to be inclusive, okay okay, just pick one and make the verbs match but what if you just don’t KNOW, and so okay, use THEY but it’s so fucking plural and if you aren’t pleasing someone’s need to be plural, it just sounds sucky! Okay Okay, I get it, okay? I’ll try, I’ll try to learn, Promise.)
    I want to respond
    But I go to the kitchen instead and cut the watermelon. It’s tough. The knife is stuck. How can they sell a watermelon where a sharp knife gets stuck? How dare they, those mother fuckers, selling watermelons that someone like my mom can’t even cut!? I push through the tough skin, wondering if I missed my chance to write to the other poet. Well, I did. I guess. Unless I send this off…talk about a turn off, getting a hostile letter to a watermelon from some mad woman who refuses to break her lines this morning because she knows…she knows…that the broken lines can result in a broken mind and broken spirit down the road, so she travels…down the road but still has the proclivity, the propensity, the pure muscular determination to write the longer sentences damn it…and so she, whoops, whoops, whoops…when did I become a she in this paragraph…don’t look back, baby…tits to the wind, forward march… for “April is the cruelest month” and now Mother May I has returned, always like she does…oh oh oh that’s it…it’s my mom, as usual, hovering…shoo shoo fly…
    And so I wonder about writing to the poet across the world…but I slice the watermelon, only to discover that it is not only tough to cut, but it’s stiff and sour and even a little sandy inside..How dare they sell a watermelon like this? And so I think about taking it back…retrieving my 2 dollars, and I know I know I know…it’s not the two bucks … hell, that’s one fifth of what I spend on one pack of smokes, which I still buy, god damnit, and yet, maybe maybe maybe they keep me writing
    Longer sentences because they make me stop and take a break…

    But it’s not the two bucks, it’s the whole principle of the thing – and Mother May I… yes yes, she proclaims, as she always does…”take it back.” “take it back.” Since she has consumed her life with food and yes, I did say that right, she does not consume food for her life, she consumes her life with food so that she doesn’t have to think or feel anything else, because it’s just too damn overwhelmingly scary—so I do not blame her – when you prick us, do we not bleed? And so I wrestle with what to do with the watermelon…and finally wrap it in plastic and throw it in the garbage can. I wrap it in plastic, thank you mom for making me aware of things like this, I wrap it in plastic because god damn it, it’s so fucking hot around here, and it seems that the heat increases things
    Increases smells in my kitchen and I just emptied the fucking garbage and I’m too hot to take the rinds directly to the can outside, so I wrap it in plastic to keep it from sticking and stinking up my kitchen, I want to get rid of it completely so I can say, “it didn’t happen, it’ didn’t happen” so that I can free myself from my mother’s command, “take it back, take it back” and I can free myself to write to the poet across the world who posts black and white photos and writes
    Sometimes not
    With the wind
    And may want the contrast
    Of the mean, mean, nasty and wicked witch of the west, yes that’s right…no Glinda today, just spit and venom all spilling out across the page so as not to think that each white space is precious because I must never ever believe that
    It is too precious
    Lest I go mad

    Of course, I am anyway.
    __

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  11. Follow up to my reply an hour ago —

    I did something I have warned myself NOT to do…press “post” or “send” too soon. I really love your work.
    I wish I could edit the response above (not sure how to do that)…, take out
    the section about my confusion — a man’s voice, a woman’s voice…
    too loaded these days.
    I sometimes forget
    myself.
    But like I said….beautiful words.
    Cheers… did you remember to have a drink?
    __
    To all your followers — I hope
    you’re not mad…

    (like me… on occasion)

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        2. He’s one of my favorites too – we used to listen to him all the time. I’m glad Dave posted to give me a reminder to play him again. Siri, play some David Gray….

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