November Dog Walk

After school, if I can get out the school-door and home in time to catch the sunset, I take the dog for a walk through the woods. Dog-walking is one of my favorite things to do because it is so ordinary, so part of the ritual of daily life. And every dog-walking-day I see or experience something so exquisitely particular to the moment that it opens my heart.

I'm reading Matthew Zapruder's, Why Poetry. He says this about stumbling upon poems when he was younger:

It was like plugging something into a socket, and electrifying my imagination, making me feel I was more aware, empathetic, thoughtful, engaged, alive.

Poetry makes dog-walking more meaningful; dog-walking makes poetry more possible.

#writeout

November Dog Walk

That interminable gray. All day,
the temperature hovers around 40.
Water, not able to freeze,
also does not evaporate. This
liminal space.
Perpetual twilight.
A single crow caws. A last-leaf
flutters to the ground
from the red oak, a species
that hangs on
long past when others
have given up.
The sun, hidden all day, slides
under a crack at the horizon.
And suddenly,
the Indian grass glows
golden;
the blue-stem:
rust.

– steve peterson

Me reading this poem:

Drop here!