“Technical difficulties” caused me to not send this this morning. Please accept this poem as an apology.

Athleisure 

Clothes no longer match the bending trees
No longer are bent by the wind or bend
Except at joints, where knees and elbows flex
Against the skin, no longer blending in

Neither with shape, nor colour, being 
Sky blue and neon orange, bleeding 
Out from their surroundings like a scar
In the real, queued to be healed.

Unlike a painting, capturing a park 
Both overpopulated, but along the Seine,
The neutral tones that dress the painter’s corpses
Seem bent like nature, echoing the copses.

Explanation 

I was walking in Rattray Marsh when I noticed how distantly the clothes that my fellow hikers were wearing resembled the natural world of which they were made. 

It seemed to me that the clothes in Georges Seurat’s painting, Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte (Fig. 1), tracked nature more closely than does modern athleisure garb. The pants and skirts were more like tree-trunks; the parasols more like foliage; the clothing’s colours more telluric. 

At Rattray meanwhile, I was struck to notice Pikachu-yellow hats, orange tops, and neon-blue elastic pants. It would have been like a birds’ plumage, but the shapes were so unwieldy that the resemblance was lost.

Two excellent colours to bring with you on a forest hike are neon orange and blue. Why? Because they are not likely to be present on a forest floor, so you will stand out if you need rescuing. 

It seemed like everyone at Rattray Marsh was adhering to this advice; I, somewhat conservatively, lamented the loss of the more organic colours and shapes worn by the figures, the ghosts of Seurat’s painting. 

Today, walking clothes are definitely more functional, but also uncanny. Metal zippers and plastic hooks hang from even the most pastoral Fjällräven clothing lines. As we get better at manipulating nature, our creations resemble it less.

Fig. 1.

Lesson

Bring neon orange or blue items with you (clothes, trash bags, whatever) if you go on a serious hike.

Announcement

I am very pleased to announce that Common Measure will be featuring poems, with brief commentary, by Monroe Lawrence in the coming months. I will be sending out the first of two late in August, and another in the Fall. I am thrilled to bring you another voice in this publication, especially that of such a talented author.

Please familiarize yourself with Monroe’s work:

Vi Khi Nao interviewed him in July

His book with the Elephants Press, 2021 

Stay tuned for Monroe’s forthcoming poems!

Scansion & Vocab

• 12 lines.

• Iambic with a few different line lengths.

• A “copse” is a small group of trees.