Solnit

The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making. And so one aspect of the history of walking is the history of thinking made concrete — for the motions of the mind cannot be traced, but those of the feet can.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust

Cassian

 

Temptation

Call yourself alive? Look, I promise you

that for the first time you’ll feel your pores opening

like fish mouths, and you’ll actually be able to hear

your blood surging through all those lanes, and

you’ll feel light gliding across the cornea

like the train of a dress. For the first time

you’ll be aware of gravity

like a thorn in your heel, and your shoulder blades will ache 

for want of wings. Call yourself alive? I promise you

you’ll be deafened by

dust falling on the furniture,

you’ll feel your eyebrows turning to two gashes,

and every memory you have

will begin at Genesis.

 

Call yourself alive? Love Poems Nina Cassian (edited by Andrea Deletant and Brenda Walker) 1988