Week Two - Perfect Pitch

Week One is over and Week Two has begun.  I ended up doing two ten-mile runs in Week One - one on Sunday and one on Friday - and 10 miles in between, so a total of 30 miles within 6 days.  Now is the time to build miles.

I did not run Saturday because I drove to Asheville to read some poetry.  Yes, it's true, I confess it - Highlands Roadrunners is also Highlands Poemwriter (the two activities are not entirely dissimilar, I find, as I place one word carefully after another on the path) and two of my poems were selected this year as finalists in the North Carolina Literary Review's James Applewhite prize.  So although I did not win, I "placed," and it was an honor to meet James Applewhite himself and be invited to read one of my poems (both of which will be published next year) in front of a hundred or so North Carolina poets (most of them University professors who knew one another, it seemed).  When I read my poem, I first blew upon this little pitch pipe that I took out of my pocket.

 

I suppose most people might think it is about my Dad's pitch pipe, which (I explain in the poem) I inherited when he died.  But it is not.  It is about writing poetry, about the creative process itself, about the poems which we pitch into the cavernous chancel silences.  The marathons we have the audacity to attempt to run.

Tomorrow is a rest day, but the next day I will resume training with six miles of hills.  And all around me I will marvel at the gentle breeze, lifting the hemlock boughs, and all around me the sounds of the great good choir beginning to sing as I climb Big Bearpen once again.