Day Of The Dead

8:14 p.m. Wednesday. R and I went for a run down by Westlake this afternoon. It was much colder, mid-40s. We decided, rather than stop and turn around at Diamond Marina and go back the way we came, as we usually do, to continue along Westlake to the intersection at Dexter and Nicholson, by the Fremont Bridge. We walked down a small road with virtually no traffic (one car went by) where there are rows of houseboats that extend all the way to the Aurora Bridge, which arched above us with its immense network of steel girders, reminding me a little of looking up at the network of steel girders on the Eiffel Tower. R reminded me of a suicide that had recently occurred. A young woman had somehow managed to climb up the protective fencing along the bridge railing, and jump to her death. How strange that must be to live in such close proximity to such tragedy. Imagine, I said, having a suicide suddenly appear on your dining table.

It was the Day of the Dead. All Souls Day. The dark asphalt was constellated with huge yellowish leaves. The lassitude of late afternoon was filled with gleaming correspondences. Is there anything more radical than a shovel full of fungus? If I ever get a tattoo on my back it will be a canary or an armadillo. That’s how I felt about the breeze at that moment. Sad as a banana.

I thought there was a flight of steps on the west side of the Fremont Bridge which would’ve allowed us to skip one of the lights of the intersection, but there wasn’t. We had to wait for two lights. This intersection is insanely huge and complicated. Seattle is a city of intersections. It’s also a city of improvisations, having to accommodate sudden growths in population, first due to gold, then Microsoft and the tsunami of electronics that followed. The lights are long. I could set up a folding chair and read Tolstoy’s War and Peace while waiting for the light to change.

We walked up Fourth, which is astonishingly high and steep. Just walking up Fourth is like flying in an airplane. You go up so fast. It’s fun. You can turn around and look all the way over to Phinney Ridge, where the Woodland Park Zoo resides, and the poet Philip Lamantia once lived, and could hear the lions roar in the morning. I mean Phinney Ridge the neighborhood, not the zoo. Philip did not live in the zoo. But he could hear the zoo. As I do now. In the still of a November night. Not a real zoo, no. A zoo of metaphors. And spider monkeys. And trumpeter swans doing Miles. And giraffes nibbling glissandos in the dampness of funny Phinney Ridge.

We walked down Bigelow and I thought of Kauai. Because I was cold (sweaty than still equals cold) and to imagine a warm tropical climate smeared my mind with glorious sunlight. The gossip of palm fronds in a tropical breeze.