(The line breaks here are imperfect. )
The Long Walk Thursday
The inevitable flux of the seeing eye toward measuring itself by the world it inhabits can only result in himself crushing humiliation unless the individual raise to some approximate co-extension with the universe. This is possible by aid of the imagination. Only through the agency of this force can a man feel himself moved largely with sympathetic pulses at work.
– WCW
Leave 6:15 the site of the first canoe landing in Seattle in 100 years, seagulls and geese fight crows for picnic scraps, geese crap all over the grass Amtrak and freights make the morning whine. Few places to pee. Blackberries at 7th NE and NE 40th.
Join “Professional Beggar” Judge Thomas Burke and Maine native Daniel Gilman’s former RR line at Freddies and off are we canalside to Fremont & Gas Works Park. Evidence of more geese and a place to pee. Why don’t I come here more often, skyline, barking crew coaches with old fashioned megaphones and sideways longhouses reflect abundant July sun.
Cheshiahud lived here w/ Madeline, he a Duwamish Chief after Si’ ahl, he Lake John for which this loop is named. Hear about Kansas Webster. Krissie’s roller derby girl. Betsy’s pilgrimage to Camino de Santiago. Can’t maintain her pace and thimbleberries! Arrive at Magnusson Park our hanger’s around here somewhere.
Later w/ Tara, try to get to the soundgarden, now protected by Homeland Security and dogs w/ sloppy tennis balls. Kolya on Cage. Eugene’s new hippies. We all exchange needs. Will DK wear my extra hat who will get a new car a new bike toenail clippers a job a backyard ditch reflects the sky and an acupuncturist?
Mars needs a dorky
lady cave, preferably w/
a slanted roof.
6:48A – 7.28.11
Magnusson Park
The Long Walk Friday
Breakfast she says of kindergarden salad (orange cheese cubes and grapes) after middle of the night crow kvetching and Jesus, what’s a guy gotta do to get hot water? And will you freaks get away from our impressionable suburban children?!?
Leave Magnusson Park 9:30 via the mini-ferry Fremont Street, pass on breakfast ice cream head to upper deck, houses (landscape scabs) squeezed in lakeside & the route retracing the 130 yr old wake of the Squak on Lake Xacho’ and Gabe ready for a capsize with a bike helmet. Ah the Burke Gilman again. Ah the pleasures of thimbleberries except when they’re beyond where even thin fingers can go other side of golf course fence.
Walking, a holy act they say and as we walk, the poop changes from goose to horse in the land of the manicured chemical lawn & three car garage. Somewhere there’s a Burning Man bus waiting, thighs chafing, here’s the unwanted sun and shade (or a breeze) a prayer answered. There’s Redhook Brewery straight ahead, with beer and meat and cable tv but NO. We turn left (some of us) go up the Tolt Pipeline Trail, up into the sun. Orange flags to cross the street or caution where horses were. Eight minutes of meditation, a non-lacto pescatarian flossing between raves for burgerville and screeching at an eagle. Are you taking ALL horse trails the equestrian asks, crosswalk buttons out of my reach.
This actually feels like somewhere DK says alongside the Sammammish and Christopher, SCAD-trained, plots scenes in Kenmore, where the Bucket of Blood tavern’s a memory. Shoe psyche honors Liz Duncan, dead before her Saturn could return. Life’s short Liz, so long may you run, maybe long as our walk.
Next time, if you’re
giving us flags
make ‘em white.
8:48P – 7.29.11
McCormick Park
Duvall, WA
The Long Walk Saturday
The word of the day is blister (size of Saturn) or DeBord or mosquito. Dagaz Tara washing hair in the McCormick Park drinking fountain or the locals at CC Espresso & Ice Cream complain about those bureaucrats with DEgrees and one of several 100 year floods a couple ago. There are vanilla cookies in the urinal and I can’t wash away the sugar.
The path is flat and straight and exurban but soon the blue of Cascades appears and soon the hills are lush with cedar and firs the fire of the sun the path and Misha’s miracle of ham and swiss cheese and tales of his Bloody Mama and emerging blisters. By night there’s a feast fit for a caliphate in Carnation and sisters angelic harmonize their satanic vampire town and I can not kill every mosquito but I try and I try and I…
There is an angél de la manana and cold showers rinsing soapy scrotums before getting our formals on & in this spatial triad at once we’re part of Nora’s Squire Park Woonerf and alleged hipsters wasting public money under the weight of what seven wars and the only war that matters, Diane, is the war against the imagination and peacekeeper we aim to be.
Peacekeepers
digesting whitefish and Lebanon’s
finest, harming nothing
but our feet and mosquitoes.
10:02P – 7.30.11
Tolt McDonald Park
Carnation, WA
The Long Walk Sunday
Where are we? She asks. When are we she asks. We’re trekking through Cascadia in the summer of no summer in the time of the parenthesis between the death of the old gods and the birth of the new. In the summer of no summer with a rain that is no rain past most of the landscabs is it a landscape as process?
Up over Coho Country, Griffin Creek here Anna Christina is welcomed into the joy of angél la manana y la montaña con dried mango looking for po folk but finding only the sound of gunshots. It’s not a bike behind me, rain re-starting on the maple canopy.
Through the corrugated tunnel & the last stretch is Tokol Road balloons festooning the path & the mist reminds us we are home. The river fool-like takes its leap, makes its healing mist, here’s a snag, roots clipped, still wary of going over, here are tourists who drove their fucking SUV’s straight here after breakfasts of French Toast and bacon and cappuccinos & here I am nothing more than a blister. An owie the kid says walking by, indeed. An old skin shed a mission complete I walked here from Golden Gardens I want to tell someone but settle for you in the moment that is this poem.
Cascadia by moleskin
the trails are there someone has to
put their foot down.
2:37P – 7.31.11
Snoqualmie Falls