Evensong VII (7 January 2024)

After looking at the map of Staten Island and seeing all the green space (the borough of parks!), I drive out to Lemon Creek Tidal Wetlands to walk. Walking is writing. Writing doesn’t happen without walking. Walking is how I swamp out the cluttered mess of my mind, oxygenate the thinking room. Make it ready for the work.

Google takes me to a residential neighborhood, where I park at the end of a cul-de-sac, step over the low bough of a rusted chain, and stumble into the cold woods. The footpath is marked by bright blue discs tacked to trees, which is helpful given the serpentine route is covered in leaves and sticks and I am alone here on this first Friday afternoon in January, new to the place altogether, and wholly lacking an internal navigation system that leads me out of the woods in both the literal and figurative sense.

I happen upon a rectangular hole in the ground filled with ice.

Alt text: A rectangular hole in the ground of a wooded landscape. The hole is filled with frozen water and leaves and surrounded by green moss and young trees.


I happen upon a golden sea of marsh grass hissing in the breeze.

I spy a pair of cardinals cut across the sky and light like bloody slashes on high branches of a white oak.

I find a tire with no rim. I find a deflated mylar balloon. I find an empty black plastic drum.

Patches of moss, as green as summer, sponge to my touch and I sit down to think this through. The being here. Whatever this moment is. I decide it’s just a moment and make a field recording: the pulsing radar of chipmunks alerting each other that a giant is here moving about, the wind rustles the tall grasses. Always a train carving a sonic margin in the map of my imagination. Bird calls I can’t identify. My own footsteps carrying my body away and then back to the locus of the microphone.

https://soundcloud.com/kristen-leigh-151615985/lemon-creek-tidal-wetlands-5-january-2024?si=e96fb770b22e4b8598edd42357d073ab&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

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