"Our moods do not believe in each other," saith the Preacher (OK, saith Emerson, in "Experience"),
To-day I am full of thoughts, and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to–morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.Got a good night's sleep last night, and woke up feeling great; now I'm getting "weed by the wall"-y again.
Time for second breakfast, I guess.
***
I clock about 3.5-5 miles a day on my feet, walking, and even when I'm not walking, I'm often standing (as I am when I write this, for example). Two weeks ago I went for a lovely run with my wife, a little more than 4 miles, but the shoes I chose weren't nearly supportive enough of my ankles and arches. As a result, I had to hobble around in pain for about 11 days, and even today my right foot feels a bit wonky.
Like most things, this had a silver lining: I tossed out a lot of old, worn, ill-fitting shoes that I'd put up for years, mostly out of laziness, and I'm gradually acquiring some spiffy new footwear, all of it suited to my increasingly delicate "pedal extremities," as Fats Waller calls them. A sobering reminder, though, that I'm not the lad I once was, able to leap tall buildings--or, at least, to jog around them--without injury.
***
Here's a Neruda poem I discovered back in my teens--translation by Donald Walsh, if memory serves.
"Tus Pies," por Pablo Neruda
Cuando no puedo mirar tu cara
miro tus pies.
Tus pies de hueso arqueado,
tus pequeños pies duros.
Yo sé que te sostienen,
y que tu dulce peso
sobre ellos se levanta.
Tu cintura y tus pechos,
la duplicada púrpura de tus pezones,
la caja de tus ojos que recién han volado,
tu ancha boca de fruta,
tu cabellera roja,
pequeña torre mía.
Pero no amo tus pies
sino porque anduvieron
sobre la tierra y sobre
el viento y sobre el agua,
hasta que me encontraron.
Your Feet
When I cannot look at your face
I look at your feet.
Your feet of arched bone,
your hard little feet.
I know that they support you,
and that your gentle weight
rises upon them.
Your waist and your breasts,
the doubled purple of your nipples,
the sockets of your eyes
that have just flown away,
your wide fruit mouth,
your red tresses, my little tower.
But I love your feet only
because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.
(One quibble: my Spanish isn't great, but doesn't this translation lose the snap and surprise of the linebreak in the final stanza? "But I don't love your feet / Except in that they walked..." That's too stilted in the second line, but you need, I think, to preserve the flatly negative "no amo" somehow.)