Sweep the house clean,

hang fresh curtains

in the window

put on a new dress

and come with me!

The elm is scattering

its little loaves

of sweet smells

from a white sky!

Who shall hear of us

in the time to come ?

Let him say there was

a burst of fragrance

from black branches.

- William Carlos Williams

Incidentally, Shelley drowned in the Ligurian Sea, just after seeing his Doppelgänger, and just before his 30th birthday in a boat he had or had not named in honor of Byron – a gem from Wikipedia on the competition of poets: 

On 8 July 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, Shelley drowned in a sudden storm while sailing back from Livorno to Lerici in his schooner, Don Juan. Shelley claimed to have met his Doppelgänger, foreboding his own death. He was returning from having set up The Liberal with the newly arrived Leigh Hunt. The name “Don Juan”, a compliment to Byron, was chosen by Edward John Trelawny, a member of the Shelley-Byron Pisan circle. However, according to Mary Shelley’s testimony, Shelley changed it to “Ariel“. This annoyed Byron, who forced the painting of the words “Don Juan” on the mainsail. This offended the Shelleys, who felt that the boat was made to look much like a coal barge. The vessel, an open boat was custom-built in Genoa for Shelley. It did not capsize but sank; Mary Shelley declared in her “Note on Poems of 1822″ (1839) that the design had a defect and that the boat was never seaworthy. In fact the boat was seaworthy, the sinking was due to the storm and poor seamanship of the three on board.^[7]

February has thus far been 10 degrees warmer than January, which is somewhat welcome, if only to greet the wind as ‘brisk’ instead of ‘death.’  But much of the snow no longer resembles snow, or anything frozen or white.  The plow piles on the sides of the road rise in scales of gray, blackest at the foot, gray in the middle, and gray-white at the top.  It makes you think about pollution.  Since Portland is a city of hills and brick sidewalks, all surfaces gush like creeks during the day, during the melt, and overnight, they freeze into thick rivers of ice, uneven swirls of solid sand, mud, soot, and trash that are impossible to traverse.  While it is strange to see the sidewalk again, and blades of soaked brown grass, these new elements, the polluted black snow, and the solidified city melt (which is a truly ugly color), need names.  I’ve come up with these, blime and grice, which also sound like comically evil cartoon characters.  Blime is the black rimed melting snow bank ; grice is the gray ice puddle that preserves the grit and trash in its slow-wash downhill, to see yet another day in the sun.

As the snow has melted, interesting things have risen out of the submerged depths: last week I saw an avocado on top of the sidewalk snow, several orange and banana peels, a toenail clipper, a yellow pencil, a January worth of dog poop, and many other things, unidentifiable.  The funny thing about Portland is that these these resurfaced weeks ago, and are still there, waiting for the trash fairy, or the new snow.   This is perhaps my one complaint about this city: for a small, tiny, compact place with public trash cans and a very regular trash service, Portland is the trashiest city I have ever seen.  I believe it has to do with the city service, which requires you to purchase special blue trash bags, and only those are picked up at the curb.  If the sea gulls don’t get there first….

rime: Middle English rim, from Old English hrīm; akin to Old Norse hrīm frost

Winter, the foreign season, arrived long ago and the slow cold has left me quiet, with little to say, winter has a way of stopping everything up, and as my feet travel in smaller circles so does the mind, staring mostly at the walls.  January is waist-deep in the cliché of winter, only the texture of the snow varies (flakes, grains, pebbles, sand, ice, wet) and the stuff people use to combat it – sand, salt, chemical pellets, shovels and plows and brooms.  The neighborhood establishments have a range of tolerance for the mess and the extent of snow-clearance is accordingly shaped: the fire department boasts the cleanest sidewalk, unsurprisingly, and some people shovel the storm through and others do no shoveling at all and go about in tall rubber boots or don’t go out at all until the bobcats and plows have run their course.  I have developed a sincere affection for the sidewalk plow, which builds the snow into evenly ribbed walls that reach high as the waist.  Also because I do not shovel our bit of sidewalk.  It has been deeply cold, and mysterious persons have laid the salt down so thick that the sidewalks have taken on a hoary, limed surface as if being preserved in their disappearance or beset by some gritty parasite, all moon surface under one’s boots.  I have become reacquainted with salt stains and my old leather hikers.

It is difficult to run here in winter, there’s always something slippery underfoot, and the East End is a treachery of hills and uneven ground.  Running indoors is warm but depressing.  While it will be nice to sweat again I can’t imagine there’s much poetic about the gym, which sits in a parking lot among banks of snow and looks out on other warehouses, un-built condominiums, the grocery store, and a rock gym.  What I hate about the gym is that there’s nowhere to stare, nothing to look at besides local tv and stationary machines and so you end up staring at the bodies, not wanting to brave any eye contact, you’re forced to stare and not-stare at the backs of knees, the weirdness of knees, and oddly shaped necks, blue-veined muscles, strangely white skin, sweaty shorts, stained backs, all manner of socks, and too much thigh.  The sound of rowing machines bores me. There’s awful music and people grunting, and piles of wet towels and other people’s hair in the showers.  The gym I have joined is painted purple and yellow and there are so many more machines than windows.  It is perfectly designed for madness.  

mink

There are now but a handful of boats, working boats, moored off the East End Beach.  The boats have been steadily disappearing over the past few weeks, as fall turned into winter.  After living in California I had forgotten about the second half of fall, when the brilliance is gone — the leaves are brown and dry on the trees but the rains keep coming and the ground is waterlogged and muddy.  Almost everything in the fields and trees is a shade of brown or white, except for the fall fruits, winterberry, bittersweet, holly, crab apples, cherries and apples.  The fruit is red, and its color is defiant and bright against the canes and shrubs. The shades of brown are pretty in their own right, highlighted by yellow shrubs and white-blonde tallgrass.  But now it is cold enough, now the trees are exposed, the sun barely lights the water blue, the clouds are gray and permanent, and the wind off the bay is fierce and freezing.  I had also forgotten about winter, forgotten that your skin could freeze and that the pavement could feel so hard.  Around the way at the yacht club they pulled in the docks and stacked them in the yards and everything that was living on the underneath began to rot, mussels, barnacles, and seaweed, giving off a powerful stench of ripe sea.  I can’t yet describe the smell of the sea, but I believe you can smell the salt, or the brine, and fish, and the rotting docks smell so strongly of both it is nauseating.  If the weather warms up, you can smell this rot from up the hill, from Congress Street, and it is a huge deterrent to running by the harbor.  

So I run the other way, toward the back cove, I run past the beach along a granite wall and watch the gulls ride the silvery water of low tide.  This time of year it seems the light is always waning, and it takes hours for the sun to finally slide below the horizon.  This in-between light is elemental and sad but impressive, almost revelatory.  I am always expecting something great to come of it, especially when the sun drops and the clouds turn pink before the sky darkens, but nothing does. The other day I ran in the middle of the afternoon and met a small, long-bellied brown creature, who was loping towards me on the granite slabs.  He had very dark, shining fur and small ears.  I was the only person on the trail and stopped to stare at him in wonder.  Given my geographical displacement, at first glance I thought it was a baby sea otter, but I knew it wasn’t that, and it wasn’t a river otter either.  As I was staring – he stopped to let me – a guy rode up on his bike, and asked me what I was looking at, was it a rat.  ”A mink?” I said.  He got closer.  ”A weasel,” he said.  ”It’s a weasel.”  Unsure whether there was even a difference, I deferred to the local, and the weasel subsequently climbed down the granite wall to the water and disappeared between them while I continued.  I thought about this for weeks, without seeing the mammal again, and finally looked it up.  It’s a mink.

It’s all very strange, but it’s strange to think that the images will play for the rest of our lives – the quiet crowd, Oprah glowing, kids dancing, hands reaching, Jessie Jackson stunned, Grant Park leafy, perfect and magical – so many kinds of shock and happiness – and Obama steeling his way through a speech that must have been tough to deliver.  Or was it the easiest thing he’s done in two years?   

My emotions on this subject are even stranger – they range from a dull-eyed heaviness, a lack, an exhausted draining away of all that felt – to the feeling of having eaten too much cake too fast, the sweet mass lodged, the mild fear of tossing it, the need for water.  Will sweetness follow? 

I have these flights of fancy about the future, these never-before what ifs — I like to imagine a basketball court being installed at the White House.  I like to picture Obama taking a judo lesson from Putin.  I like to imagine Obama casually dropping ‘no doubts’ and ‘most defs’ in conversation with Sarkozy.  Obama making intelligence cool again and public affection look natural.  Obama leading our country.

If the debates are like job interviews, I’m pretty sure the only other profession in which this sort of judgment could work is modeling.  If people agree you look like a model, chances are you can probably become one, though there’s no convenient adjective to employ in comparison — uniquely and staggeringly pretty?

I believe the adjective is used by the confident, decided voter — it’s a self-reassurance, that’s my man, and boy, does he look, feel, walk, talk like a president to me.  But it’s just so funny …. I mean, if we talk about looks, there’s good reason Obama never wears shorts, even when playing ball — those legs, I bet, are decidedly un-presidential.  (Although, perhaps his length does increase our notice of McCain’s lack of length).  McCain’s fat, pink-striped tie at Belmont looked like something a former NFL player turned journalist would wear on Sportscenter — unpresidential.  Gov. Palin’s bedazzled flag-pin — decidedly not vice-presidential.  Sen. Biden’s teeth did not remind of us that great ur-president and his dental failures, George Washington (**!).  But I don’t feel like we get close enough to really see the rest.  Perhaps if the networks could zoom in more; let us know exactly what they are wearing and who made it.  I’m still miffed by what then, is the mark of the presidential, applied to these two: but I have a hunch it has something to do with the newly gray hairs Obama has acquired over the past two years, fuzzing around his temple, over his ears — the man now actually looks like he’s gained something.  And isn’t that the only hallmark of any president’s appearance, that they look noticeably older leaving the post than when they started? So much older, you’re often startled when early photos are shown?  They might just be the only people on TV who actually age, who wear it, who let us watch them weary, for better or worse.

**Washington and dental deficiency, from Wikipedia: 
Washington suffered from problems with his teeth throughout his life. He lost his first tooth when he was twenty-two and had only one left by the time he became President.^[74] According to John Adams, he lost them because he used them to crack Brazil nuts, although modern historians suggest it was probably the mercury oxide he was given to treat illnesses such as smallpox and malaria.^[74] He had several sets of false teeth made, four of them by a dentist named John Greenwood.^[74] Contrary to popular belief, none of the sets were made from wood. The set made when he became President was carved from hippopotamus and elephant ivory, held together with gold springs.^[74][75] The hippo ivory was used for the plate, into which real human teeth and also bits of horses and donkeys teeth were inserted.^[74] Dental problems left Washington in constant discomfort, for which he took laudanum, and this distress may be apparent in many of the portraits painted while he was still in office, including the one still used on the $1 bill.^[74]

One of the nice things about proximity to the great blue is that many boats make their home in it.  If there is any wind at all, and sometimes there is none, it prefers to blow off shore in the afternoons, moving east to south east, so that as I run west, the boats point their bows accordingly, into the wind.  There’s a delightful symmetry in this, the bows white in the sun’s glare, their masts rising stick-straight, sails hidden away.  There are a few colored hulls.  Off the eastern launch, there are only small boats moored, a few fishing/lobster boats and small sailboats, and further on, by the Falmouth foreside and the old railroad truss that curves across the edge of the bay, there is one boat that might be called a small yacht, with high, tinted windows and a massive motor, I imagine.

Usually I run while the sailing school is out practicing, and I believe the local college team also sails from the same docks.  I have little sense of the sport but it seems to be practiced by sending your boat around the tightest possible triangle while people in a larger, stationary boat shout things at you and manipulate a blow horn.  I have been surprised at how these tiny boats can accelerate and lean and twist and look terribly doomed but do not, in the end, capsize.  The sails alone are something to watch, and the smallness of the boats, combined with their ability to wobble and cut and made all sorts of jerky half-moves without capsizing, makes the sport look like a precarious one, at best – only a few inches separate you and the water.  The invisibility of the keel makes a swamping look ever imminent.  The more amusing actions occur when they are ordered to all do the same thing at once, and a horn sounds, and a mess of twenty or so boats suddenly spins in a half circle or tacks, their sails tipping the other way.  At times the sails unfurl or flap, then catch wind again, or they slice towards each other, tips almost touching, like ducks settling on water.  I’ve learned not to fear for their safety, but they do generally conjure birds that cannot swim well.  Now that I’ve exhausted my nautical vocabulary…I should remark that yesterday, in the terrifying wind, I saw the leaves beginning to fall.  I saw a black and white setter trotting down the railroad tracks, his owner following on the trail.  I saw a tug boat pushing back a tanker from the pipeline pier, an implausible sight when you look at the vast difference between the two boats, like a smart car pushing a double-long tractor trailer … or something.  I saw a man with a beard down to his chest walking on the beach, and further on, two men, in green and yellow sail gear, played a game of bocce ball.

http://cascobayboaters.com/2008/10/15/the-great-blue-limb-log/