july 16/SMOKE

AQI (2:00am): 500
anything above 125 is hazardous

AQI (7:30am): 301

No running this morning. Too dangerous for my lungs to breathe in this smoke. I haven’t heard yet, but I can’t imagine that open swim will happen this afternoon. Even if it isn’t cancelled, if the AQI stays this high, I won’t be going.

the plastic art of finding the words

Returning to my “On this Day” practice, I found an intriguing quote from A Oswald:

She and her husband, playwright Peter Oswald, divide their day in two – walking their sons to and from school through fields. But she doesn’t take a notebook with her. She believes in the subconscious, in what is brewing on a ‘non-verbal level’. She thinks ‘a flavour or feeling builds up, almost a sculptural shape that could be a living creature, or a dance or a painting’. Only later comes the ‘plastic art of finding the words’.

into the woods

What does she mean by plastic here? Reading the quotation again, plastic seems to mean artificial, imitation, not the real or living thing but a replica. Also, plastic as moldable, easily shaped and reshaped, pliable. Molded, modeled, “capable of being deformed continuously and permanently in any direction without rupture.” Formative, creative; (source).

just announced: Open Swim is cancelled for today.

A rotted swan
is hurrying away from the plane-crash mess of her wings
     one here
        one there

getting panicky up out of her clothes and mid-splash
 looking down again at what a horrible plastic
mould of herself split-second
climbing out of her own cockpit

and lifting away again and bending back for another look thinking
     strange
        strange

from “The Swan” / Alice Oswlad cited in The New Yorker

AQI (11:15am): 295

And, the way I (mostly) think about plastic in relation to my vision and connection to the world: a film, a veil, an obstruction, the barrier between me and what is real. A distorted or approximate, not quite, reality.

I looked up “plastic” on Poetry Daily and found this fabulous poem (with an ecopoetry essay, too!):

I Want Biodegradable Sex/ Oliver Baez Bendorf

polypropylene, moss, human hair, pine needles, cardboard, sheepskin condoms, coffee grounds

This sculpture reveals the demand my transition has created for the plastics industry over time. By melting plastic syringes into a compressed form, I hope to create an anticlimax by showing all at once the slow accumulation of material. When you observe me and then the sculpture, is the volume of plastic more or less than what you would expect? Do you agree strongly, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, or strongly disagree that certain plastics should remain single-use? By incorporating an assortment of organic elements, I wanted to create a sense of grief out of the cognitive dissonance. Plastikos, to form or mold, an art long before plastics were invented. Trans is a way of arranging the world through change, but plastic is durable, meaning it never goes away. Very light, gets blown along in gentle winds. It gets washed by rain into sewers, streams, rivers, and finally oceans. It burns forever in landfills, a sickening campfire around which we tell scary stories. It is pleasurable at times when a container fulfills the functions for which it has been designed. I hope to return to earth a little bit more every day, until I’m finally you again.

Bendorf begins their essay with one of my favorite quotations from Lorine Niedecker in one of my favorite poems, “Lake Superior”:

“In every living thing is stuff that once was rock

    In blood the minerals
    of the rock.”

Reading these lines I wondered, how much have plastics transformed what is in every living thing? How much of us is plastic? Found a podcast to listen to: Science Vs. Microplastics — here’s the transcript.

Also in the essay, Bendorf mentions a term I don’t remembernencountering before: “we each have a “terroir”— a particular flavor made up of the unique places and vocabularies that we have absorbed. Those registers that, in a unique combination, make us distinct.” Terroir is a matter of style and substance.

Returning to our “age of plastics,” I’m wondering about its history — here’s a brief overview from the BBC.

When I think of the “plastics” industry, I recall the scene from It’s a Wonderful Life, which was one of my favorite Christmas movies as a kid, and this scene from The Graduate:

One word: plastics


Back to Bendorf, in conversation with Oswald’s idea of sculptural shapes and the plastic art, and my own thoughts about my vision creating a plastic film that separates and distorts:

When you observe me and then the sculpture, is the volume of plastic more or less than what you would expect?

And, one more plastic poem:

Plastic: A Personal History/ Elizabeth Bradfield

How can I find a way to praise
it? Do the early inventors & embracers
churn with regret? I don’t think my parents
—born in the swing toward ubiquity—chew
& chew & chew on plastic. But of course they
do. Bits in water, food-flesh, air.
And their parents? I remember Dad
mocking his mother’s drawer of saved
rubber bands and his father-in-law’s red,
corroded jerry can, patched and patched,
never replaced for new, for never-
rusting.
Cash or plastic? Plastic. Even
for gum. We hate the $5 minimum.
Bills paperless, automatic, almost
unreal.
My toys were plastic, castle
and circus train and yo-yo. Did my lunches
ever get wrapped in waxed paper or
was it all Saran, Saran, Saran?
Sarah’s mom
was given, in Girl Scouts, a blue sheet
of plastic to cut, sew, and trim with white piping
into pouches for camping. Sarah has it still,
brittle but useful. Merit badge for waterproofing.
For everlasting.
You, too, must have heard stories,
now quaint as carriages, of first plastic, pre-plastic.
Eras of glass, waxed cloth, and tin.
Of shared syringes.

All our grocery bags, growing up,
were paper. Bottom hefted on forearm, top
crunched into grab. We used them
to line the kitchen garbage pail.
Not that long
ago, maybe a decade, I made purses for my sisters
out of putty-colored, red-lettered plastic Safeway
bags. I’d snag a stack each time I went, then fold
and sew, quilt with bright thread, line with thrift store
blouses. They were sturdy and beautiful. Rainproof
and light. Clever. So clever.
I regret them.
And the plastic toothpicks, folders, shoes that seemed
so cheap, so easy, so use-again and thus
less wasteful, then. What did we do before
to-go lids? Things must have just spilled
and spilled.
Do you know
what I mean? I mean, what pearl forms
around a grain of plastic in an oyster?
Is it as beautiful? Would you wear it?
Would you buy it for your daughter
so she in turn could pass it down and
pass it down and pass it down?

AQI (4:30pm): 247
AQI (6:30pm): 190

july 15/REST

When I started this entry, I was planning to go to open swim this afternoon, but I checked the air and water temperatures: hot, and saw on the radar that there’s a chance of rain. When I combine that with my desire to be cautious with my healing shoulder I decided I should take a break from swimming today. I didn’t run, either. So hot and sticky this morning! Instead, I worked on my plastic project and my cork board map of lake ideas. Fun!

the next morning: Hours after writing this first paragraph, the smoke from wildfires in northern Minnesota and the Boundary Waters arrived. By the time I went to bed, the AQI (air quality index) was almost 500 (anything over 125 is dangerous; 500 is hazardous). This morning it’s in the 400s. Scary stuff, especially when you think ahead to how this will most likely be happening more frequently. The smoke isn’t supposed to lift until noon on Friday, so open swim will probably be cancelled tonight and tomorrow.

the plastic process

This morning, I reorganized the area of my studio where I gather and process my plastic. Then I cut up part of a milk jug, which creates a cool texture of brittle little shards, and another one of my seltzer bottles. Later in the day, I showed some of the stranger remnants of plastic to FWA and he suggested using the top of the seltzer bottle as some sort of view finder or monocle — something that, when you looked through it, created a visual effect. Distorts what you see? Adds layers of color? Allows you to isolate words? I’m going to have fun playing around with this!

I showed it to Scott and he said, it’s a loupe. A what? A loupe (loop) “is a simple, small magnification device used to see small details more closely.[1] They generally have higher magnification than a magnifying glass, and are designed to be held or worn close to the eye. A loupe does not have an attached handle, and its focusing lens(es) are contained in an opaque cylinder or cone” (wikipedia). A new word, learned!

Here are some things I’ve been doing with the plastic so far:

Cutting up plastic into strips and shards, separating them by color. So far, I’m using these shards/strips to show the color of the lake during open swim. Maybe I’ll turn them into some sort of mosaic, or create interesting sounds with them. As I handle them, I’ve been thinking about the importance of texture for how I see and how I understand/process/identify color.

Looking for and setting aside bigger strips of clear plastic to use for my holes/how I read series — to cover words and/or make them harder/impossible to read.

Cutting out and collecting words printed on plastic bags to turn into found poems about vision or swimming in the lake or something else I haven’t thought of yet.

I’m planning to make things with these plastics, and I’m also using the processing of them as an opportunity to critically reflect on how much plastic I use and to explore plastic as metaphor for my vision and distanced relationship to the world. Maybe I should study plastic for a month? I’m also using the act of processing as something I can do with my hands that is physical and tactile and repetitive enough to open me up to wandering and wondering.

july 14/RUNSWIM

3.1 miles
2 trails
79 degrees / dew point: 70

Another hot morning. Another successful run. Not fast, but steady. Mostly running with some walking. 2 Regulars sightings: Santa Claus and the walker that always wears a skirt and sandals — I feel like I named her, but I can’t remember what. I checked the log and I have mentioned the woman wearing sandals and a skirt 3 times, but have never named her. I think I’ll call her Skirt with Sandals, which is a reference to a phrase we’ve (Scott, RJP, FWA, and me) used many times over the years: socks with sandals. It’s from the show within a Disney show: So Random in “Sonny with a Chance.” I used to unironically wear socks with sandals frequently.

I heard the far off echo of workers hammering something, trickling water, the click and clacking of roller skiers’ poles above me. As the skiers passed me, I heard 2 of them discussion “Love Island.” At least one of them didn’t like the show. I’ve never watched it, but RJP was very invested in this most recent season which ended earlier this week.

Into that World Inverted

1

In Hawaiʻi, you often hear the term “island time,” referring to the slow pace that pervades the culture here. But for me, standing on land just a few hundred years old, island time is a reminder that this is a place in the process of being both made and unmade. Here in ʻĀhihi, there are barely any trees—the soil still thin atop the hardened rivers of basalt and scoria. Not enough time has passed to erode these sharp and porous remnants into dirt. Yet in that short stretch of centuries, between that time and this one, the island has changed irrevocably. When I began snorkeling, I was warned there was little left to see on Maui, most reefs dead and dying—a result of rampant tourism, overfishing, commercial runoff, and warming waters. 

island time — land just a few hundred years old — I’m thinking about lake time and how lake nokomis only celebrated its 100th birthday in 2014 (see: 12 july 2025). Before that it was marshy land — wider and shallower. 100 years is the approximate time it takes for a human-made lake (nokomis was a marsh, dredged, made into a lake) to act like a natural like

“I settle into my liminal position, turning my back to the earth as I know it: the solid ground under my feet replaced by weightlessness. I trespass into this unknown world—below me, I feel how time itself has turned the stone to sand. At last, I cross the threshold with my entire body.“

“I am held in the veil between these worlds that are each, astonishingly, part of this place that we call Earth. Within minutes, my cells acclimate to the cool buoyancy. I am carried away from everything I know. As I kick out, the mechanisms of my movement grow more and more effortless. Anything heavy or painful drains from me. In the water, I am held—a child rocked in a mother’s arms. My body moves differently here, swaddled and swept in the cadence of waves, alongside all the creatures who share this space. . . .”

“I am flying now—a wingless bird gazing down, seeing the universe anew. Like Icarus, I feel the warmth of the sun against my back. Between realms, I face an ecosystem nothing like my own.”

seeing the universe anew — in the ocean, everything might be clear and vivid below, but in lake nokomis, and with my bad eyes, everything is murky, muddled, felt in the briefest of flashes.

“Beneath the inscrutable blue-black mirror of the water’s surface lies this universe in technicolor. “

What is the color of the lake water? As part of my plastics project, I’m gathering the colors of the water that I see when I swim. The plastics project = keeping as much of the plastic that my family uses for visual poetry projects — produce bags, seltzer water bottles, ziploc baggies, miscellaneous. packaging, T Joes’ pasta/rice bags. Here are the colors I’ve collected so far in greens and blues. (The lake is usually much moregreen than blue.)

plastic origins, from top left to bottom right: granola bag, little cukes bag, russet potato bag, Trader joe’s pasta bag, bottle of olive oil, bottle of seltzer water, squash bag

Are these all “green”? I see them that way. The bright green of the upper center is what the water looks like when a blue-green algae bloom is present. Last night’s warm and stirred up water at cedar lake resembles the brownish yellowy green in the lower left. Number 2 and 3 in the bottom row are shards from bottles, while the rest are bags, only colored on one side.

lake nokomis blue

plastic origins, from top left, top right, bottom: Trader Joes’ rice bag, shards of the locks from ziploc baggies, Trader Joes’ pasta bag. I don’t think I ever seen the lake water look like this below the surface, but above, when it’s sunny and I’m looking at it from the right angle: blue, often with purple vibes.

Scott asked me what I plan to do with these colors. I’m not sure yet, but I know it will be part of something that expresses how I see color and how color works in a city lake that resides in a lake city that prioritizes access for everyone and that is working hard to keep the lake and its people safe and healthy in the midst of a climate crisis (almost apocalypse?).

Once I gather more colors that fit, I could create some visual poem to place beside this poem, which is in by chapbook, Inklings:

Fish 3
between buoys 3 and 4

The fish in us escape.
They flash and streak and
leap, then return to
bubble whisper the names
of water’s colors. 

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
air: 96 degrees
water: 84 degrees

Hooray! 2 (almost) pain-free loops at lake nokomis open swim! Before it started, I was able to talk with 2 other swimmers about how much we love open swim. They were a little older than me — 5 or 10? years — and just as enthusiastic about the water.

10 Things

  1. 2 girls — older high schoolers or in college? — flirting with 2 guys at Painted Turtle: loud, awkward giggles
  2. a guy playing guitar, accompanied by a recording — I know I enjoyed 2 of his songs, even danced to one, but I can only remember the other — an instrumental “Careless Whispers”
  3. very choppy water — not the type of waves that put up a fair fight, that you can punch, but the ones that unsettle, disorient, jostle
  4. swallowing a wave of water, which made me more careful about when and where I breathed and stroked
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 breathe right 1 2 3 breathe left
  6. a very LOUD metallic buzz beneath the surface — somewhere someone was doing something that was causing this noise — was it a boat? a machine drilling somewhere?
  7. slosh slap
  8. bubble friends!
  9. being routed by lifeguards when I swam too wide of an angle
  10. the first orange buoy was almost in the middle of the lake — maybe the farthest I’ve ever seen it

The water was opaque and the color was somewhere between these 2 colors:

green 1
green 2

july 13/RUNSWIM

4 miles
river road, north/south
85 degrees / dew point: 72

Last night, I planned to do my run early in the morning, but when I woke up it was already hot so Scott and I decided to walk and get coffee instead. As we walked back on the river road trail, we realized that it didn’t feel too terrible. There was shade and a breeze and the humidity was lower. When we got home, we both changed, then went out for runs — I went at 10:15, Scott at 10:40. I was surprised at how fine I felt. I was hot, but I didn’t feel like I would faint or get heat stroke; I just felt like I was working hard. No anxiety about it — a mental victory! Was it because of my HRT patch? Possibly.

Almost all of my route was in the shade, which was by design; I wouldn’t have been able to run in this heat with direct sun. I encountered many walkers, a few bikers, 1 or 2 other runners, 2 big groups of kids — one on bikes, one on foot.

I listened to my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist. I told Scott later that I was trying to manifest shade. It worked.

10 Things

  1. dappled light, jagged patterns of light on the trail
  2. kids on bikes in bright yellow vests
  3. 2 bikers stopped near the trail, recovering or fixing something on their bikes after climbing the franklin hill
  4. no bugs — no swarms of gnats encircling my face or single gnats trying to swim in my eye juice
  5. the crack north of the trestle is still blocked off — this stretch had the most sun
  6. passing a walker on the path in flip flops, near the rowing club — did they just finish rowing? probably
  7. a scooter on the edge of the trail, but not far enough on the edge — if I hadn’t been paying attention, I could have tripped over it
  8. air quality is good — no smoke from colorado fires this year!
  9. bright blue sky
  10. a flushed face, sweat-soaked shirt

swim: 1.5 loops (3 cedar loops)
cedar lake open swim
95 degrees

Wow, the water was warm! As another swimmer said to me, it’s like bath water. I tried to remember that and not swim too hard. Hot air temp + hot water temp = hot Sara, with no chance to cool down. No worries. I swam slow and steady. 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left. By the 3rd loop, I had increased my strokes: 1 2 3 4 5 6 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 breathe left

Great news: My shoulder didn’t hurt at all on the first loop, and it hardly hurt on loops 2 and 3, and now, an hour later, it doesn’t hurt at all. Hooray!

Not so great news: I sacrificed my other new nose plug to the lake. Treading water at the end of loop one, trying to adjust my nose plug and unfog my googles, the nose plug fell down into the murky depths. Oh well. These nose plugs were slightly too big: I had to adjust them almost every loop. Time to go back to the slightly more expensive ($7 instead of $2) nose plugs. I wish I could find the exact one that I’ve been wearing for more than 5 years, but they’re always changing things, making them “better,” and I don’t think they make the exact one I have now.

The water was calm on the way to Hidden beach, rough on the way back. It was also yellow and murky. I saw some of my bubble friends but no silver flashes. I got tangled up in a few floating vines, had to stop swimming as clueless paddle boarders crossed the swimming course.

images of the day: the wide arc of some swimmers on the other side of the loop, swimming back. What I saw: some splashes, a few caps, buoys, the idea of a curved line. Also, the occasional swimmer, swimming down the middle, or crossing over to swim in the wrong direction. All these swimmers — their elbows and white foam and buoys — looked so far away. Distance is distorted in and on the water.

july 12/SWIM

1 loop
lake nokomis open swim
85 degrees
water temp: 81 degrees*

*measured on 6 july, so probably warmer today, almost a week later

Today the goal was to take it easy on my shoulder. It had been feeling better by the end of this week, but I’m thinking about my bigger goal for the summer: swimming one day (24 collective hours) in august, so I didn’t want to overdo it. Just past the first orange buoy, my shoulder began to ache a little and then ached, dully, for the rest of the loop. I think I can still swim; I just need to do less as I rehab it — strengthening exercises + RICEing it — well, mostly IIcing it: icing and Ibuprofen. It’s a bummer that my shoulder still hurts, especially since I was looking forward to July being a big month of swimming, but I’m not too upset. It could be a chance to approach my open swims differently, maybe spend more time going slow or stopping in the middle of the lake!

When Scott and I arrived at the lake, I noticed all the glittering on the surface. My first thought: wow, that looks so cool. My second thought: all that glitter means the surface is not smooth and that means the water is choppy. And it was. Also, warm — so warm! I liked the choppiness. It wasn’t rough — no big waves were crashing into me. Instead it was constant — wave after wave after wave, making me rock from side to side.

It was fitting that there were waves, because I’m working on revising/condensing a poem about waves (literal waves at open swim and waves of grief after my mom died). Hopefully today’s swim can serve as inspiration.

10 Wave Things

  1. stirred-up water below the surface with lots of sediment floating in front of me, 1: difficult to see anything, like my hands or bubbles or fish
  2. stirred-up water below the surface with lots of sediment floating in front of me, 2: water color was a mix between pea soup green and lentil dahl yellow
  3. stirred-up water above the surface, making it difficult to see buoys
  4. the surface: all glittered up
  5. no white-caps, but lots of spray flying high in the air
  6. an increased amount of breaststroke by other swimmers
  7. more breathing on one side, 1: in the first half of the loop, I breathed mostly to my right
  8. more breathing on one side, 1: in the first half of the loop, I breathed mostly to my left
  9. the yellow safety buoy tethered to my torso was bobbing vigorously
  10. I did not feel like I was fighting the water, but that it was holding me and reminding me it was there

Do I remember the sound of waves? No, I don’t recall the sloshing sound of the water as it rushed over my ears. I bet it was loud.

Found this poem when I searched, “waves” on poets.org. It’s a golden shovel poem, where the last word in each line comes from a different poem. The original golden shovel was Terrence Hayes creating a poem that ended each line with words from Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool.”

[Waves rolling up] ii. / Kimiko Hahn

After Tada Chimako

If I don’t taste the complicated waves—
if I only see the rolling,
only hear the roiling up
or smell those waves
—then I will tumble
head over
stance. Then I spring
up, drenched in partisan sand.

I’d like to try something like this with my waves poem to suggest another meaning. I could either use words from a poem about grief or moving water. For grief, maybe Emily Dickinson, for water, Niedecker or Oswald? Maybe one of my favorites?

several hours later: 6:04 / 90 degrees, feels like 94

a reminder when experimenting with my wave poem: don’t try to force it — find some poems I like about waves or grief and see what happens

Sitting under my crab apple tree, where it is much cooler than on the deck, I reread an interview with Alice Oswald in the winter 2026 Paris Review. I’ve posted bits from it already. Today, since I’ve been thinking about spiriti visivi and insects, I wanted to post these lines:

1

. . . the contracts you make with the natural world that allow you to be in a place, the feeling of living somewhere you don’t own.

(But don’t you own the house?)

Yes, but it’s very clear that it’s really the insects who own it, and the river that comes right up to the garden. The rain comes through the ceiling. It’s interesting, the way the dead and the natural world are sort of exchangeable. That might sound theoretical, but ancient Greek lament, and lament from everywhere, has always used birds and plants as intermediaries for communicating with the dead. And I feel, when I’m here, a deference toward my uncle and my father, who once looked after the house, that’s kind of interchangeable with the deference I might feel toward a bird or an insent.

2

[after discussing the sound that flies and grasshoppers make, the interviewer asks: Is it the choral sound that you love?]

And the fact that they don’t speak with their mouths. I love the way insects speak with their wings or legs. For a

Interview with Alice Oswald

After the interview were 4 new poems from AO, including this one about the fly. 3 fly poets I immediately think of: Emily Dickinson, Aracelis Girmay, and Alice Oswald.

Fly-play/ Alice Oswald

Enter a fly
no sooner nowhere than here
wiping her rear-view eye and
tapping the world
with one foreleg

What is it you wish for Fly?

She merely glitters to me of silence
tapping . . . tapping the world
walks backward . . . refers me to her myth
and exits . . .

The scene is summer

Enter a yellow curtain:

One servant dressed simply as the sun
going in and out with a beam of dust
one fly . . .

WHAT IS YOU WISH FOR FLY?

She merely rotates for me her mask
as if to bring something
born in one world back in another

Then round and round with her weak voice
pleading that her one belonging is her life
which lasts but a day . . .

But you know full well, Fly, it takes
400 insect years for me to lift my ahnd
and by the time it lands
I too will be mute, I too will be you

glitter / silence / tapping
refers me to her myth? what is the myth of the fly?

Here’s another fly poem from AO: Flies

july 10/RUN

12 miles
franklin + ford + hidden falls + veterans home + falls
67 degrees
humidity: 86% / dew point: 65

Ugh! That was hard. It was too hot, too sunny, too humid. My feet hurt from warts and a big blister. I almost altered the route to cut off 2 miles. And I did it. And I felt okay for the last mile, like I could have kept going. Success! I’m proud of myself for persisting today.

3 things I did right

I didn’t have any unfinished business problems! I brought my water and made sure to keep drinking from it. I didn’t give up.

3 things to work on

Bring more snacks/fuel. A bandaid around my toe doesn’t work — it created a juicy blister — find other solutions. Be more intentional with music or mantras or experiments to try for distraction/focus.

10 Things

  1. Mr. Morning! upped his game today with his greeting. Instead of just, morning! He added: Have a Great Day!
  2. rowers!, 1: a coxswain’s voice, giving instructions through a megaphone
  3. rowers!, 2: the gentle slap of the oars hitting the water
  4. the crack just north of the trestle is bigger (again) — they’ve barricaded it off with metal gates
  5. the part of the trail near the trestle on the east side was blocked off — some sort of work with a tall crane
  6. the bells of st. thomas chiming
  7. a skate boarder at the skate park: doing a wide arc at the edge of the course
  8. filling up my water bottle: at the monument, near the skate park
  9. a group of three bikers — 2 adults, one kid — biking slowly in front of me
  10. stopping in the grass to adjust my laces (at least 5xs), stopping at a bench to take off my shoe to inspect my toe (1)

I have to do this again next week, but for the rest of today, I’ll celebrate the accomplishment of running (with some walking) 12 miles and moving for more than 2 hours.

For the first hour, I listened to birds, fragments of conversations, cars, trickling water, and bells. For the next 45 minutes, I listened to a Ruth Ware audiobook. And for the rest of the time: my Color playlist.

I’ve just barely started reading Kohn’s How Forests Think, which I was able to get through RJP’s college library. This is one of the opening lines in chapter 2, “The Living Thought”:

This chapter develops the claim that all living beings, and not just humans, think, and explores another closely related claim, that all thoughts are alive. It is about “the living thought.” What does it mean to think? What does it mean to be alive? Why are these two questions related, and how does our approach to them, especially when seen in terms of the challenges of relating to other kinds of beings, change our understanding of relationality and “the human”?

If thoughts are alive and if that which lives thinks, then perhaps the living world is enchanted. What I mean is that the world beyond the human is not a meaningless one made meaningful by humans. Rather, mean-ings—means-ends relations, strivings, purposes, telos, intentions, functions and significance—emerge in a world of living thoughts beyond the human in ways that are not fully exhausted by our all-too-human attempts to define and control these. More precisely, the forests
around Ávila are animate. That is, these forests house other emergent loci of mean-ings, ones that do not necessarily revolve around, or originate from, humans. This is what I’m getting at when I say that forests think. It is to an examination of such thoughts that this anthropology beyond the human now
turns.

How Forests Think / Eduardo Kohn

I’d like to put this chapter and the questions, What does it mean to think? and What does it mean to be alive?, beside Alice Oswald’s Homeric mind, with thoughts that don’t reside in the brain but travel outside of it, over the sea, Emily Dickinson’s bees, and the possibility that thoughts might be creatures themselves — and not just metaphorically. I’ve written about this before, and I’ll find where, either later today or tomorrow.

the next day:

1 — Alice Oswald on the Homeric mind:

Well, as you know, I’m quite fascinated, even obsessed, you might say with Homer. And one of the things that really tantalizes me in Homer is what is the Homeric mind? Because I think it’s very different from a literary mind. And it seems not to be inside the skull, but to be out in the world. So, there is a particular simile in the Iliad, which actually that first bit of the poem is based on, where it talks about two goddesses coming from heaven to the earth. And they’re very physically described. They kind of fall down from heaven to the earth. And then when they land, they take little pigeon steps, steps like doves or pigeons. So you can really picture them. But the way their flight moves from heaven to earth is as a man, you know, as the mind flutters in a man who has traveled widely, so you can turn it the other way around and say the way a man thinks is like this incredibly physical flight of two goddesses coming down to earth a bit like pigeons. And that’s always really interested me, that for Homer, the mind has the limitations of a pigeon, if you like. It is this kind of … this physical thing that moves. So, if you imagine a place over the sea, your mind actually has to get there. So, even though it may be as fast as the light, it is physical movement.

A Conversation with Kit Fan and Alice Oswald

2 — bee in your bonnet (19 march 2024)

Here’s an article about the origins of the phrase. According to the article, the phrase is still being used in popular culture. I use it, usually when I notice Scott hell-bent on some task — and usually it seems like a task, or idea, that is fool-hardy but that he needs to work through and figure out for himself. 

Sometimes instead of saying, bee in your bonnet, I say that someone (or me) is hellbent. Of course, writing that immediately makes me think of Jackie from the 1979 Death on the Nile:

Jacqueline De Bellefort : One must follow one’s star wherever it leads. 
Hercule Poirot : Even to disaster? 
Jacqueline De Bellefort : Even to Hell itself.

When I envision a bee in my bonnet, I see something that is relentless, impossible to ignore, urgently needing to be dealt with. That’s not quite how I imagine my preoccupation with haunts and ghosts and writing about the gorge. Still, I like the idea of bees in bonnets, and bees in general, so maybe I’ll spend more time with them this morning?

Reading through several ED “bee” poems, I suddenly had a thought: could the bee in your bonnet be your soul, trying to escape the confines of the body?

This thought was inspired by a poem I wrote about in an On This Day post: Body and Soul/ Sharon Bryan. I didn’t mention it in the post, but the description of the soul in the poem, as leaving the body at night to roam around, reminded me of an ED poem I read a few weeks ago, when I was thinking about the difference between the brain and the mind:

If ever the lid gets off my head/ Emily Dickinson

If ever the lid gets off my head
And lets the brain away
The fellow will go where he belonged —
Without a hint from me,

And the world — if the world be looking on —
Will see how far from home
It is possible for sense to live
The soul there — all the time.

3 — thoughts as a swarm of bees, uncontrollable and unwanted

As I started thinking more about my discussion of thoughts as bees, I also thought about how those bees, especially if they are swarming in your head without the lid being removed, could be overwhelming, incapacitating. Then I found this in my log entry from 30 june 2024:

“During the first loop somewhere between the first and second orange buoys an alarming thought appeared: what if I fainted in the middle of the lake? In the past this thought might have caused panic which I would feel in my body — a flushed face, harder to breathe, hot tingling on the top of my head. Not today. No physical effect. Within a few minutes the thought was gone. Is this because of the lexapro? FWA says that sometimes he feels the lexapro working — he’ll start having overwhelming thoughts but instead of spiraling, he feels himself become separated from those thoughts — they become abstract and distant. I wondered about this as I stroked then connected it to Alice Oswald’s Homeric mind and the idea of thoughts not just living in our head but traveling outside of our bodies from there to there.”

from Thinking/ DANUSHA LAMÉRIS

And I found this bit of a poem:

Don’t you wish they would stop, all the thoughts
swirling around in your head, bees in a hive, dancers
tapping their way across the stage?

Who with their whispered psalm
can outvoice their huckster cackle, the trees
blustered to howls while the tesla bees

whine loudly to the shocked air?

other links: I have a page about bees in my “How to Be” project on Un || Disciplined (I had forgotten that I did this — thanks, past Sara!)

one more thing: Finding my archive of bee-related things, is putting a bee in my bonnet. I need to archive all of my resources — or, as many as I can — before my central vision is completely gone. I imagine it will be much harder to do this once that happens!

july 8/RUN

3.9 miles
wabun hill and back
67 degrees / humidity: 87%

An early-ish run. Started at 7:45. If I had run earlier, the temperature would have been a few degrees cooler, but the humidity and dew point would have been higher. Which is worse, higher temp or higher dew point? Dew point, I think. I’ll have to test it out — if I can get up earlier!

For the past month or so, I’ve been struggling with my feet and ankles. I’ve tried a few different pairs of shoes to see if any of them were better. This week — on Tuesday and today — I went back to my Brooks Ghosts. They seem to be working better. Today I realized (or remembered?) to put my laces through the extra holes at the top of the shoe. I think I had tried this early on with these shoes, but it felt too tight, then. It worked!

10 Things

  1. gobble gobble gobble a turkey calling out from a tree in turkey hollow
  2. a bike rushing past me on the wabun hill
  3. an older man and woman stopped at the bottom of the locks and dam hill
  4. thwack thwack the chain from the flag hitting the flag pole
  5. a few bits of glitter on the surface of the river under the ford bridge
  6. the older man and woman halfway up the hill, each of them dragging a tire
  7. almost all benches were empty
  8. stopping at the Rachel Dow Memorial bench for a quick view of the river and to retie my shoe
  9. the wabun hill was covered in wet dirt — a little slippery when descending it
  10. a woman standing on the edge of the trail, looking out somewhere, taking a picture of something

strong shoulders

Open swim tonight, but no Sara swimming. It’s a bummer, but I know that it’s a very bad idea to try and swim with my sore shoulder, My favorite, self-proclaimed “best PTs in the world,” Bob and Brad have some exercises for me to try in the next couple of days:

july 7/RUNSWIM

run: 4.1 miles
monument and back
70 degrees
humidity: 87% / dew point: 68

More uncomfortably warm conditions. Difficult, but doable. I did my run/walk plan: 5/1 (mile 1) — 1.5/.5 (miles 2-4). My feet didn’t hurt that much, and I had a lot of energy, especially in my legs, at the end of the run. I’ll take that as a victory. I listened to my striking feet and dripping water (shadow falls) and the st. thomas bells for the first half, Olivia Rodrigo for the second.

10 Things

  1. St. Thomas bells — faint and short, 8:45, I think
  2. rowers!, 1: on the way to st. paul, crossing the lake street bridge, 2 double rowing shells in the blueish gray water
  3. rowers!, 2: on the way back to minneapolis, crossing the lake street bridge, 4 6-man rowing shells + the white boat with the coxswain
  4. coxswain to rowers: okay and stop. good job!
  5. overcast — a gray sky — is it going to rain? no: soon, sun
  6. the dreamy reflection of clouds on the pale blue gray river
  7. the path near shadow falls: cracked, cratered, ridged — dangerous!
  8. at the top of the shadow falls hill, passing an adult and a kid wearing a backpack — summer school?
  9. honk honk
  10. near the beginning: a woman walking with a dog, holding the leash too loose, the dog licking my leg — sunday, I didn’t mind; today I did

swim: 1 loop
lake nokomis open swim
81 degrees

Written the next morning. Almost perfect conditions. Smooth, warm water, not too crowded, overcast. For the first half of the loop, I felt strong and relaxed, but sometime not long after I rounded the third buoy, my right shoulder started to hurt. It was difficult to lift my arm. Ouch. When I reached the final green buoy, I stopped and rested for a few minutes in the beach area. I tried to swim again. Nope. I had to stop. A big bummer. I think I could have swum 5 loops tonight in this water.

Looked it up in the middle of the night (which might seem like a bad idea, but didn’t make me any less able to sleep) and it’s probably swimmer’s shoulder, caused by overuse. Swimmer’s shoulder is a common injury. I’m hoping that taking the rest of the week off will be enough to make it better. The silver lining: I still have more than half of the season left, so I should be able to swim again.

july 6/SWIM

2 loops (4 cedar mini loops)
cedar lake open swim
88 degrees

Very warm. Choppy. Crowded. As always, a great swim. Before the swim started, the orange buoy was way off to the far side, which caused a delay. The lifeguards wrangled it back and we started with it in its usual place. When I returned after the first loop, the buoy was drifting far out again. Most people were not even trying to round it. I tried, then gave it up too. After the second loop, the buoy had been moved back but very close to shore. After the third it was back in its usual place. The shifting buoy and the too bright sinking sun made it difficult to sight.

10 Things

  1. small fish, about 1/2 foot long, bumping into my hand and my foot as I waited for open swim to begin
  2. a lifeguard kayak escorting a swimmer back to shore
  3. bright blue sky + fluffy clouds
  4. racing another swimmer who kept pushing me out and away from the buoy
  5. swimmers almost run into: 3
  6. swimmers run into: 1
  7. out in the middle of the deep lake, a few ghostly forms below: milfoil, I think
  8. a paddleboarder looming beside me before passing me at a safe distance
  9. on the back half of the loop, I mostly breathed every 4 strokes
  10. on the front half of the loop: watching the curved line of swimmers returning to shore

the next morning: Yesterday was Scott and my 30th wedding anniversary. 30 years?! Wow. Wonderful. We went out for lunch in our old uptown neighborhood then walked around Bde Maka Ska and Lake of the Isles before heading over to Cedar for open swim.

july 5/RUNSWIM

run: 11 miles
ford loop + veterans home + lake nokomis (x2)
66 degrees
humidity: 92% dew point: 60+

I did it! It was humid and hot in the sun and my feet started hurting by mile 4, but I did it! I ran through the neighborhood, then over the lake street bridge, up shadow falls’ hill, past the monument and (mostly) up the east side of the river. I crossed the ford bridge, went through wabun park to the veterans’ home, crossed over another bridge, ran on the edge of the park, then beside minnehaha creek. When I reached Lake Nokomis, I had to run around it twice.

10 Things

  1. teakettle teakettle — a carolina wren
  2. a single rowing shell on the river
  3. from the bridge, the water looked fuzzy, the air above it hazy
  4. just past the monument, I heard the St. Thomas bells — I think it was 7:30
  5. mostly dry dirt, or slightly damp earth on the desire path beside the paved trail — one spot was squishy mud and I almost twisted my ankle on it
  6. cloudy then sunny then shade then sun and sun and sun then shade
  7. someone on the other side of the mustache bridge, running and pushing a stroller, blasting some upbeat music that I didn’t recognize
  8. the creek water is high! I especially noticed that as I ran over my favorite part of the trail
  9. a woman with a dog — she wasn’t holding the leash tight enough and the dog leaned over and licked my knee as I ran by (surprisingly, I didn’t care)
  10. running and walking over the cedar bridge, looking down at the water’s surface: a soft gray blue with reflections of clouds

For more than half of the run, I listened to the birds and my feet and the sloshing water in my handheld water bottle. Near the falls, I put in “Olivia Rodrigo Essentials.” Even though I’ve turned it off many times before, apple music was still set to fading songs, which means it took the last few measures of one song and made its beat match the beat of the next song. When this first happened, the last bit of the first song suddenly slowed, sounding so strange that I was worried I might be having heat stroke. Why does Apple do this? Boo.

3 things to celebrate / 3 things to work on

  1. I kept the negative thoughts away (hooray)
  2. I was able to eat a fig bar during the run and didn’t feel an urgent need to go to teh bathroom (yay)
  3. My legs felt good in the last mile and I had some energy (woo hoo)
  4. My feet hurt for almost half of the run (boo)
  5. My ankles hurt some too — I need to tie my shoes tighter and/or get shoes in a smaller size (bummer)
  6. As is often the case after a hard effort, I was cranky at the end when I met up with Scott (grr)

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
71 degrees

The plan: run to the lake for open swim. Scott would bring my bag with my stuff. I wanted to do at least one loop of swimming. I imagined it would be refreshing and restorative for my sore legs. And it was. Wow, that water! Almost perfect. Calm and warm enough. There was milfoil but no blue green algae. As I neared the beach, I could see clumps of the milfoil washed up on shore. Yuck!

The swimming felt easy and relaxing. Steadily, I stroked, breathing every 5 strokes. Occasionally I stopped stroking and listened to the quiet as I tread water. All I could hear was the soft slap of the water from another swimmer’s hand.

Today, I started counting strokes as I passed by the 4th buoy. 275 to get to 5th and final buoy.

A strange feeling: as I swam from buoy 3 to 4, I could see the green buoy up ahead. It seemed like I kept drifting out, almost too far to the left. Trying to correct my path felt strange and awkward. I briefly wondered if there was a current I wasn’t consciously feeling or if my run had made me less able to swim straight.

overheard: one swimmer to another: not many people here this morning! and you don’t have to rush off after we’re done, do you? and the water is wonderful! Except for the weeds!

Today I decided to start at the normal spot, instead of entering at the far end of the swimming area. The weeks were there, and I had to shorten my stroke when I reached them, but they weren’t too bad and didn’t last that long.

Speaking of weeds, I noticed a bad patch just below the cedar bridge when I was running. So thick, just below the surface. Looking brown and orange, then dark dark green.

Today would have been a perfect day to swim 5 loops. And if I hadn’t run for 2 hours before swimming, I would have done it. I wish I could have, but I’m glad I didn’t try. That would have been too much!

added at the end of the day: Even though I ran 11 miles and swam 1.5 miles today (and achieved 300% of my move goal), I don’t feel wiped out or that sore. Only my feet hurt, and that’s because of the warts (yuck!).

earlier today, I was looking through my 5 july entries from past years. I would like to remember some things from them, including:

1 — 2025

Yesterday, in a ramble about rumors and whispers, I stumbled upon a tentative theme for the month: the language of water. First step: read/skim How to Read Water. 

Here’s an interesting bit I’d like to remember:

. . . ponds and lakes are far from permanent; rivers will tend to grow naturally with time as they do their own excavating, but the opposite is true for still water. Unless ponds and lakes are given some help, they will all eventually return to land, It starts with algae, then the rushes and other shallow water plants getting a foothold, and this allows sediments to gather, water turns to wet mud, and a reinforcing cycle begins that culminates in the water losing the battle against the encroaching land. 

How to Read Water/ Tristan Gooley

Shallow water plants getting a foothold. No!

2 — 2024

Because the buoys are positioned by lifeguards every swim — they paddle out on kayaks where they are advised by someone on shore where to drop their anchor — and because there’s no exact spot for each of buoys, the loop distance varies. Today it was long, which I like — the more distance, the better! Here’s a comparison on 3 different 4 loop swims by number of strokes I took / distance (which I’m pretty sure my watch doesn’t measures accurately):

25 june 2024: 2094 strokes / 3100 yards
30 june 2024: 2124 strokes / 3600 yards
5 july 2024: 2374 strokes / 4000 yards

I like how approximate the course is. Some things about it are set, some aren’t.

3 — 2021

Why I do and don’t like Cedar Lake + differences between Nokomis and Cedar Lake (see 23 June 2021). The first time I ever swam at Cedar Lake was 14 August 2019.

july 3/SWIM

4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
72 degrees

Another great swim. The water was smooth and calm and not cold. It was overcast, which I thought would help me to see the buoys better — no sun in my eyes — but ended up making it harder. Not enough light for my cone-starved eyes. It didn’t matter; I kept swimming and trusted that my shoulders and hips and feet knew where they were going. They did!

Leaving the shore, and entering the lake, I made the mistake of swimming through a terrible patch of milfoil. So thick and tangled! I had to glide over it in order to not get entangled by the thin vines. Future Sara remember: do not swim close to the two white buoys nearest the swan boats!

I swam 2 loops, then got out for a bathroom break, then 2 more loops. After I was done, as I waited for Scott to finish his long run, I took some notes in my Plague Notebook, vol. 28 about the swim. Without intending to, I started jotting down words grouped by their first letter:

smudged (sky), smooth surface, submerged, shoulders, strong, swans

glassy, green, grit, geometry, grabbed (by milfoil), glimmer

flash, fin, finished, flat, far

Broken Bells (blasting from a bike in the park), barely there buoys, bridge

marbled legs, monstrous milfoil, mistakes made

in navigation, nose plugs

leaking, lost, looping,

(metal) detector discoveries (a rare nickel)

As I returned to land and gravity, I lost my nose plug: it fell off my finger. I think that’s the second or third nose plug I’ve donated to the lake over the years.

On the last loop, I looked up after passing my the 4th buoy and sighted the final buoy. It looked so far away. I decided to count my strokes to it: 225.

Last night, I was telling Scott about how I always see lifeguards on kayaks that aren’t there. Today, I think I saw why: something about the Cedar bridge and the tree line and the land, far off and to my left, looks almost like the shape of a figure on a kayak. Well, at least to me.

Before leaving for open swim, I re-memorized Tony Hoagland’s awesome poem, “Summer Studies.” For some of the loops, I recited it in my head. I can’t ever recite it, or any other poem, straight through, from beginning to end. I always get distracted or repeat myself. I think I got to the end of the poem just once.

july 2/SWIM

3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
83 degrees

What a wonderful night for a swim! The first loop was smooth and fast. I felt like a boat, powering through the water, my feet little rudders. I’m not sure what happened during the second loop, but it was much tougher. Water trying to pull me down, 2+ foot waves crashing over me. Did the wind pick up? Whatever happened had stopped by the third loop. Calm again.

note: I’m writing this list the next morning because I didn’t have time last night.

10 Things

  1. blueish green water
  2. clear, and bigger than usual, bubbles being made by my hands — translucent
  3. mostly the light was not too bright, until it was — at one spot, not far after rounding buoy 3, light suddenly illuminated the water in front of me and I saw a thin strand of something — hair? — floating in front of me
  4. a flash of silvery white just below me — a fish?!
  5. my reoccurring optical illusion: swimming back towards the big beach, I kept thinking I was seeing the silhouette of a lifeguard on a kayak — it was there, out of the corner of my eye, but when I passed it, it was gone — was a lifeguard there, or something else that I was imagining was a lifeguard — another swimmer? the tree line? a far off boat?
  6. before open swim began, encountering a guy who called out, doesn’t this water feel great! Then he started singing a Backstreet Boys song — I don’t think it was “I want it that way” but I can’t remember
  7. nearing a far buoy, experiencing that strange effect of the buoy always appearing far away, and me feeling like I’m swimming in place
  8. passing a swimmer doing breaststroke, experiencing that irritating effect of the swimmer seeming to speed up and me feeling like it’s taking forever to pass them
  9. maybe because of the choppy water or the light making it hard for them to sight the buoys, several swimmers were doing a mix of freestyle and breaststroke — a few strokes of freestyle, then stopping to look, then a burst of breaststroke, then freestyle again
  10. as is often the case, the water was extra turbulent and more crowded around the final buoy — a cluster of swimmers nearing it at the same time*

*I like to refer to this section of the swim as Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Mostly, I find it fun.

Earlier in the afternoon I printed out and posted the draft of a poem I wrote about 5 years ago that doesn’t quite work . . .yet. The current title: Look pal, this isn’t the sea. It’s about the joy I find in fighting the “waves” and the choppy water as I swim across and around the lake. The poem is up on my big cork board and I’m planning to gather together and post all of its references: facts about the lake, lines of poetry, the significance of particular words, etc. I don’t want to overwork the poem, but I do want to give a lot of attention to making it work. As I swam through the rougher water in my second loop, I thought about the poem and the fun I have in punching the waves and battling the spray. I prefer the waves crashing into me over the waves sucking me down. The former requires strong shoulders; the latter demands frantic kicks.

The overall vibe of last night’s swim was strong and steady. Stroke after stroke after stroke with little kicks beginning with my hips. 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right and 1 2 3 breathe left and 1 2 3 4 5 6 breathe right and 1 2 3 4 breathe left. My feet, relaxed, shifting slightly to adjust my direction.

laked words / laked forms

written earlier in the day: Yesterday, while writing about an podcast interview with Moheb Soliman, I posed these questions, How do rivering words look different from laked ones? What else do lakes do, besides pooling? I was reminded of that question, when I encountered what I wrote on 18 august 2025:

Later in her process notes, Hartigan describes the three forms she uses in her book:

The forms I arrived at became a way of moving with different paces in time, moving in primarily three different forms/paces: hour entries which are prose-like and which move at a slower loosely-shadowed mental pace that allows for sentences; second entries which are like little insect legs notching forward with alliteration and gap-jumping nonlinear narratives; and a variety of lyrics that often use the slash as an entrance. They work together and of course the forms mix and disrupt their own boundaries too. The slash was important to my mental movement. 

Very cool. I’m thinking about my own forms and how to express different modes of swimming in the lake. Inklings, which is the chapbook I’m working on, are short 5 syllable, 5 line, flash encounters with the lake. Brief glimpses, approximations, things witnessed in the midst of motion. Then I have some shortened sonnets — 5 syllable 14 line poems represent more sustained encounters. What other form to use, and what does it represent?

—

I imagine inklings as changing form slightly (line length, syllable count) depending on the type of water. On and in the lake, my inklings are 5 lines / 5 syllables because that is my stroke/breath pattern. It is different in a pool (I switch up my strokes more), and, if I swam in the sea, I imagine it would be different, too: shorter — 2 or 3 strokes, then a breath, as I navigated the choppier water.

The inklings in my chapbook aren’t just about a type of water, but are specific to one body of water, Lake Nokomis, and one organized activity in that water, open water swim club. I would like to gather details about open swim and the lake for my further reflections on my inklings.

Another thought that I don’t want to forget that I had while reading my entry from 18 aug: For this year’s “Swimming One Day in August” challenge (24 non-consecutive hours of swimming during the month of August, partly inspired by M Oliver’s poem of the same name), I want to return to time and clocks and being inspired by Endi Bogue Hartigan and on orchid o clock.

note: As I work on this, I am overwhelmed. I have so many ideas, so many experiments to try. It feels like I should write something BIG, but there’s too much to read to write to do. I’ve been trying Annie Dillard’s bird by bird method: slowly archiving one thing then another thing then another (see my How To Be project for my ongoing efforts). I think what I’d like to do now is something (fairly) straightforward: 1. Collect all of my summer/swimming log entries in one document 2. Do a rough edit (cut out non-swim and non-water bits) 3. Do another rough edit and another.

more HOMES / Moheb Soliman

walking a beach : moheb soliman

I’ve also typed in the text without the proper spacing, which is too fiddly to do on wordpress:

Walking a beach a drive away from Oswego

Algae break water webs of puce the shoreline lipstick left by
the lake on lovesick miles of napkin good-bye Fudgies snap your towels
of assy sand make the kids chase down the wrappers I’ll replant their
gutted hawthorn and piss off the beach fire from the driftwood
it’s time we got back to work consummate vacation fuck the lake
no love to salvage memories of drinking each other completely
empty of their taste better to forget the acrid pics of summers luxuriating
with anything precious fenced the lifestyle we desired here
the zoos of microenvironments the patios crawling out of the mudflats with
the frogbit floating in impenetrable mats the glass pole dance of dusk
slick stage left just hold your liquor and keep down the zebra mussel-
sucking noise when the speckled black other shoe drops just look away
vacate the promises

2

As I read this poem, and some others in the collection, I thought about something else Soliman said in their interview:

And as far as the writing and the editing, you know, I just am such a convoluted writer sometimes and like I feel like a really sometimes poetry from your writing is like a problem solving, you know, like, how do you just stack this house of cards up enough to sit and just back away before it falls down?

Just enough to not collapse. This idea reminds me of a game I play with myself: how much data/information do I need to “see” something? The version of this game that I play in the water is: how many times do I need to sight the orange or green buoys in order to stay on course? The answer: not many! I’d like to play this game on land, with words. How little can I write/say and still communicate how/what I’m seeing or feeling or experiencing? Beyond a game, as my vision continues to decline (the end point: no more central vision) and my ability to read decreases, I must rely on fewer words. I want my poetry to reflect that economy.

experiment: Take an existing poem that I’ve written and try to take as much out of as I can without it losing its meaning. I think I’ll start with a favorite poem that has never quite worked: Look pal, this isn’t the sea. A further thought: put the poem on my board, along with all of my thoughts, log entries, poems/lines from others about it. Gather as much information as possible, put it on the board, then condense it. Condense!

Poet’s work/ LORINE NIEDECKER

Grandfather   
   advised me:
         Learn a trade

I learned
   to sit at desk
         and condense

No layoff
   from this
         condensery

What a master of condensery L Niedecker was!

2 — better to forget the acrid pics of summers luxuriating
with anything precious fenced

acrid pics — looked up acrid to double-check meaning: “strong, sharp, unpleasantly biting smell” and “bitter in language/feeling” — tried to remember, did polaroids smell? Yes, a distinctive warm, chemical smell. Is his use of acrid here a deliberate conjuring of polaroids? I grew up with polaroids, and using the word acrid offers a much more visceral reader response than just pics or pictures. And acrid as bitter — some regret over what happened/didn’t happen on those summer trips, over not being on vacation anymore?

anything precious fenced — here I’m thinking of Alice Oswald’s description of the sea as unfenced in Nobody: “If you want to imagine the colour of Odysseus’ gown you will have to swim out into the unfenced place, the place not of definitions but of affirmations. ” And, I’m thinking about lucille clifton’s “unfenced is” in “All Praises.”

I’m also thinking about Soliman’s own critical (as in, seemingly negative) use of the word “precious” in his interview:

I was just doing a lot of, like, site, I don’t know if the word would be site-specific writing, you know, just writing on the go, you know, like showing up and wanting to capture a place and not feeling too precious about capturing it because really being there was so, like, sublime, you know, it was just so amazing and seeing such, like, really beautiful hidden pockets of the Midwest and, you know, these, like, oceanic spaces, you know, where you wouldn’t think, you know, Michigan would offer that or something.

and

A lot of these poems are these justified text blocks with like, internal line breaks. And a lot of them started as lineated poems. Uh, and I just liked the ones that weren’t like that more because I felt like line breaks were too precious sometimes.

Just in poetry, not just mine, but sometimes I just kind of bristle at line breaks, you know? Um, they make, yeah, sometimes they make poems feel too precious. And I wanted this to have a bit more of a, like, robustness, you know? That they’re, they kind of just sit there on the page, you know, like a paragraph, you know?

july 1/RUNSWIM

4.6 miles
veterans home
74 degrees / drizzle?
humidity: 89%
dew point: 69

Woke up at 6 am to get in a run before it rained, then heard thunder. Bummer. Had to wait until 9. When I left, the sun was coming out but a mile in, the wind picked up. Did it start drizzling or was that just dripping trees? I think it was a little of both.

It was hot and difficult and I wasn’t sure how much I’d be able to do when I started — 2 miles? 3? — but then I just kept going and it kept feeling a little more doable. Just make it to southern entrance to the Winchell Trail. And, just make it to the locks and dam parking lot. And, just make it to the top of the Wabun hill. Once I got to the top and kept going through Wabun park, there was no turning back, just through the grounds of the Veterans home and over to the falls then north on the river road to home.

10 Wet Things

  1. big puddles on the sidewalk
  2. smaller puddles on the path
  3. muddy ruts
  4. dripping trees
  5. dripping ponytail
  6. soaked shirt
  7. roaring falls
  8. gushing sewer pipe
  9. whooshing wheels
  10. damp face

Early this morning, while making breakfast, I listened to a podcast interview with Moheb Soliman whose book, Homes, I’ve just started reading. Love it! I think I’ll buy this book as a birthday present to myself!

In the interview, the interviewer mentions another poet who I’d also like to check out: Cecily Nicholson. Cecily Nicholson: interview + book, Crowd Source

Also in the interview, Soliman reads several of his poems, including this one:

Great Lake Swamp come heavy-use wetlands:
powers of Toledo origin song

Who let this wetland wet / Who cut this little inlet / Laid the hill for golden
hours / Fit the logs with the salamanders / Foretold the lichen and the mosses
/ Who offered the wildlife crossing

Along this promenade I sing / about how the world’s made / my behorned
serenade to nobody but

Who wet this aggregate / Who raised this bamboo deck / Who had these
grasses mown / Who made the birches grow in groves / Who made this prairie
seric1 / Carved out a space for heron

This is my behorned little dirge / I sing along this little bridge / about how this
little world’s birthed by no body but

Who left this river wet / Sowed the embankment / Set the grade for the slope
of the island / Spawned the minnows to feed the walleye / Who knows the
ripples till flood / Who reads teh dried-out flats of mud

About how the world’s mocked up / I sing along this ply boardwalk / This is
where the trombones stop

for nobody / By no body but / you local / No melody but vocals / As is / La la /
La li / La las / La lis / As is

Who let this wetland wet? I love all of these question about the creating of a place. I frequently think (and ask) about how the paths I run on, the lakes I swim in, were made what they are by people, particularly the city of Minneapolis and Minneapolis Parks. For years, I’ve been studying the documents and the places to find evidence of this creating and shaping.

Before reading the poem, Soliman says this:

And this is a big part of our discourse right now that, you know, humans aren’t separate. I mean, I have a really hard time kind of following that to the end, because I do feel that there’s a profound difference in how much we are able to control and shape that world to the point where we’re not really a part of it in the same organic way that so many other parts of it are, you know, and a lot of the poems like sometimes absurdly, you know, and I mean, I could even read some of those like, but absurdly play with that idea that, you know, we created this place, you know, the hiking trail, like it is actually, it’s not just some natural path.

You know, there’s a lot that has gone into making you feel that you are here at one in a harmonious, quiet moment in the woods or on the lake. And, you know, so our hand is like so strong in those places, and it would be really, like, naive to just write a poem about being out in the woods without also being aware about, of how we came to that place, and how humans are really, uh, yeah, sort of different and yet a part of.

Commonplace interview with Moheb Soliman

I was prompted to find this interview because I wanted to hear Soliman read his own poems; I hoped that might help me understand the strange spacing of the lines. He addresses this desire directly in the interview:

A lot of these poems are these justified text blocks with like, internal line breaks. And a lot of them started as lineated poems. Uh, and I just liked the ones that weren’t like that more because I felt like line breaks were too precious sometimes.

Just in poetry, not just mine, but sometimes I just kind of bristle at line breaks, you know? Um, they make, yeah, sometimes they make poems feel too precious. And I wanted this to have a bit more of a, like, robustness, you know? That they’re, they kind of just sit there on the page, you know, like a paragraph, you know?

Yet, I still love, like, the wordplay of, like, enjambment, and, uh, so, I came to a point where I thought, well, either all of these have to be these text blocks, or they just all need to go to lineated. And I spent a lot of time, like, reworking so many of them into these text blocks. And at one point I was really terrified that, like, I’ve made the reading experience really hard for people.

I don’t know, because to me, I’m just so familiar with them. They’re really, I see them in my head and I understand how they move, like, you know, orally, you know. So, it’s part of the reason I, like, really appreciate the chance to read them, because I feel like if I can just get my voice into someone’s head about the book, it’ll just make the rest of the experience, you know, easier.

Very helpful to read this, and to hear him read his own poems. The next thing he says is also helpful, and is sparking some new thoughts on (my) forms:

A friend of mine kind of made this interesting point where they sort of, like lakes, like on the page. They just kind of pool there with some like, gaps. And I think she was kind of first saying how the poems have a real flow. And then we were talking about how poems sometimes really feel like rivers, you know, and without really meaning to, I kind of forced these to have a bit more of like a lake, like, you know, here they are, in one place, and there, there’s the pooling, you know, that’s happening.

Oh — I want to think about this some more! How do rivering words look different from laked ones? What else do lakes do, besides pooling? They settle, shimmy in place . . . . This question is an excellent one to think about and to go back into my log to find some answers!

a few minutes later: they sink and sour and are stuck, still, stagnant, unstirred. Could it be that lakes, more than oceans or seas or rivers, are about what’s at the bottom, what sinks down, unmoved by currents? Stale and stymied. Layered and sedimented, cyclical – circular

plastic project

Since March, or was it April?, I’ve been collecting the plastic that we use for some unspecified future project. It started with old freezer bags, but expanded to include grapefruit, zucchini, and mini cucumber bags. Now I have sandwich and pita bread bags and the plastic bags that covered the new fan I recently bought. My favorite one: the plastic shell my new googles came in, which looks like another pair of clear goggles.

Definitely in April, I began deconstructing the freezer bags — cutting off the bright blue (zip) locking part, cutting open the clear plastic, then cutting out the white label. Last week, I decided I wanted to use the blue zip lock parts for some sort of visualizing of the lake. Maybe a big map of a lake nokomis loop? My first thought was to connect the strips together with thread or tape, but that didn’t really work. This week, another idea: shred the plastic! I tried to do it in the paper shredder, which would have shredded it almost instantly, but that wasn’t working. So, instead, I’m using my mother-in-law’s old silver scissors and snip snip snipping the strips. This snipping labor is reminding me of the satisfaction I got in the winter from drawing and shading in circle after circle on my New Yorker essays. There is something therapeutic about using my hands in this repetitive task, but also something that encouraged deep, creative thinking. These blue plastic strips are also satisfying to scoop up and sift through my fingers. Will these plastic blue shards become part of my map, or just the process that leads me to that map? Time will tell.

from the zip on a freezer bag to shards of blue lake
  1. seric = silk ↩︎

A few other thoughts:

As I cut up these little shards, I thought about all the plastic that ends up in the lake and an ocean and my organs and tissues and bodily fluids. Yikes!

As I accumulate more and more plastic I wonder: how can I stop using so much plastic? First step: stop using ziploc bags for storing my half used produce! Make my own bread? What else?

Telling Scott about my shards last night, he suggested trying to (just barely) melt them. In one of my bouts of insomnia I looked it up and found some suggestions, but not for what I wanted. In the various sources, toxic fumes was brought up more than once. Also: homemade shrinky dinks.

They are not the same texture, but I have some great green plastic — from zucchini and cucumber bags, and from the plastic wrap on two olive oil bottles. I’d like to mix some bits of them with the blue and see how that affects the color. Could I melt these together?

swim: 3 loops (6 mini)
cedar lake open swim
84 degrees

A calm and warm lake! Wonderful for swimming. I did 6 cedar loops without stopping. or only stopping mid-lake to adjust my nose plug. I noticed orange and pink buoys. Was mine the only yellow one? A few vines wrapped around my head and shoulders as I returned to the first buoy. The water was green-ish. The only fish I encountered were little minnows near shore. My bubble friends trailed below and in front of me.

overheard, one lifeguard to another — I told him he needed to head over to lake nokomis to pick up his swim cap.

A uncapped swimmer was out in the middle of the lake, some more uncapped swimmers were lurking at the far orange buoy.

Anything else? I felt strong and smooth, and often the swimming seemed effortless. Even so, I was glad to be done at the end of the 6th loop.

june 30/RUNSWIM

run: 3.25 miles
2 trails +
75 degrees
humidity: 77% / dew point: 68

Hot! And not too terrible. Yesterday morning, walking to a coffee shop in the heat and humidity I felt like I struggled to breathe but today, when it’s almost as hot, I didn’t struggle at all1. As I ran above, I listened to my “Doin’ Time” playlist. Below, I listened to water trickling out of the sewer pipes and the occasional voice and the cars driving by. I noticed puddles and some wet dirt (it briefly rained earlier this morning). I thought about how fast the summer is going by and if I encounter any coyotes or the den that I’ve seen signs about.

No rowers or roller skiers or regulars. No poetry or flashes of inspiration. And that was fine with me. I was relaxed and free and happy to feel how strong my legs and back are, thanks to several weeks of solid swims.

A week or so ago, I discovered Moheb Soliman’s Homes, a collection of poems about the Great Lakes. I requested it from my local library and picked it up on Sunday. Here’s one of the first poems:

from Homes

At Point Pelee–Leamington,
Sandusky–Cedar Point / Moheb Soliman

This beach has more than two sides
more than the lake and the parking lotmand cultivated and sandwiches farms
and kiosked
aside it
and defies properties
I’ve peed
behind every sorta flora
scared away all kinda fauna
I crossed the lines
of r&r
to bridge the banks of main and head streets and waters
I tried myself
had myself
washed ashore to hamlets
faceup
the whole time
my figure
a petty viaduct only shallow beach could love
I swam each day I changed
myself in the Corolla
and diaspored
footfalls of mollusky sand all over the motel districts of Canuck Sanduskys
where in touch more
with
nature’s what they are
more
than
amusement
or
national park
and
lark
Cedar Point and the
tip
this land does not come to
two
states
means ends
nations
and defies commodity
recreation’s and conservation’s
this place
has
more
than
the
all-night
or
primitive drive-thru and the camping
this whole time my body held in feet
of surf
not diverting to the water
or exiting
but bridges fail all the time nothing new
bridges are being built and rebult
all over these lakes
adding sides to
no end
defying the accounts of travelers
homing in
pointing out
we came in off the water
not really having been
out there
you come out of the water turn right
around get back in there
I’m going out to the water
never really having left there

I wasn’t sure how to keep the spacing with my typing, so I took a screen shot of the page (see above). I’d like to hear the poet read one of these poems to get a better sense of how to understand their spaces….I found them reading it!

Does this help? I’ll hav to listen a few more times, and read more of the poems in this collection. I should also watch this:

So much to think about in this short prose poem. Today, if I can remember as I am battling the wind and the waves, I’d like to think about these lines:

but bridges fail all the time nothing new
bridges are being built and rebult
all over these lakes

There are literal bridges and metaphorical bridges and metaphor as bridge. I want to think about the bridges in the ending lines:

we came in off of the water
you come out of the water
I’m going out to the water / never having really left there

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
90 degrees

It didn’t seem windy but, wow, the water was wild. Very choppy, with an undertow and lots of waves. Mostly I breathed on my right side and did as much punching of the water as stroking. Rounding the buoy during the second loop, a lifeguard approached and called out, we need to evacuate the water! head to the beach! I wasn’t sure what was happening, but I didn’t ask, just swam to the beach. A few minutes later, we all heard a lifeguard tell everyone that the open swim course was just for open swimmers. Then another lifeguard (or was it the same one?) call out, there was a distressed swimmer, but we were able to help them. I’m not surprised that someone was distressed out there; it was rough. I didn’t mind how rough it was, but I didn’t want to blow out my shoulder with another loop. So I stopped after two. I told Scott that June is for being cautious as you build up your muscles, but July is for pushing yourself to keep going. July doesn’t start until tomorrow, so I’m fine with stopping tonight.

I had wanted to think about bridges and being on the water or in the water or out at the water, but I was too distracted by the waves and the need to give attention to breathing and not swallowing water and delighting in the fun of fighting the waves and winning.

A question to ponder: will this be the week (the month?) of choppy water? I don’t mind having a few choppy days, but I hope the water calms down.

  1. Just checked and the humidity was worse yesterday, 89%, so I guess that could have been why it was harder. ↩︎

june 29/WALKSWIM

walk: 50 minutes
to loons coffee and back
79 degrees
humidity: 89%

The heat wave has hit. I had planned to get up early and run this morning, but when I checked the weather and realized that it would already be 76 degrees with almost 90% humidity at 6am, I decided to skip it. As I get older, my tolerance for heat gets worse. So, instead of running, Scott and I walked to Loons for a birthday coffee.

10 Things

  1. some screeching bluejays
  2. the feebee of a black-capped chickadee
  3. a willow in a yard bent over the sidewalk in a arch, creating cool, green shade
  4. a cacophony: 2 bus ticket machines beeping and calling out warnings beside each other, a woman yelling — this is annoying the shit out of me! — at her companion who had pushed the buttons too many times
  5. acquiring a sheen of sweat before reaching the coffee shop
  6. the sharp, truncated bark of a dog somewhere far off
  7. walking by a pick-up truck, hearing a man inside the cab call out, it’s siesta time! — later learning from Scott about the things I didn’t see: 2 construction workers sprawled out on scaffolding in the back of the truck, looking at their phones
  8. the loud buzz of a chainsaw, orange cones blocking off a street: someone getting a tree trimmed or removed
  9. the cottonwood three: 3 gigantic, towering cottonwood trees in the front yard of a 1950s rambler on the triple (or more) sized lot
  10. a bit banner draped across a neighbor’s fence: I’m not mad at you (Renee Good’s last words)

a response from minneapolis aquatics!

Since open swim began, I’ve been frustrated with the amount of milfoil at the beginning of the swim course. Frustrated, and a little anxious. I thought about complaining to open swim. I also wondered if it was even worth saying anything. Then I decided to contact Aquatics and ask about when and if they would be harvesting the milfoil this summer. I ended my email with, I deeply appreciate all that you do to make it possible for us to swim across the lake, and I meant it. I love Minneapolis Parks and I love open swim. I wasn’t sure if anyone would respond, but they did this morning. A long email outlining the different steps they’re taking to alleviate the problem, including another round of harvesting with SCUBA divers and possibly enlisting lifeguards to help. Can the milfoil be controlled? I’m not sure, but it helps to know that they recognize the problem and are trying to do something about it.

swim: 1.5 loops
cedar lake open swim
92 degrees / wind: 17 mph

Very choppy water, which I don’t mind, but I also don’t want to pull a muscle by working too hard to stroke through it, so I only did 3 cedar loops tonight. The water was warmer; I didn’t feel cold at all when I was done. Hooray! I mostly breathed every 4, with the occasional 5 or 3 or 2. Almost always on the right. The beach was very crowded and the vibes were very Cedar. Wading in the water, I could smell weed somewhere nearby.

10 Things the Wind Did

  1. open swim was delayed by at least 5 minutes because they couldn’t get the buoy to stop drifting away
  2. it was also delayed because the lifeguard was struggling to swim back with it in the heavy chop
  3. runners coming in at an angle, 1: the first half of the loop, they were at my back, which sometimes made it easier to swim and sometimes didn’t
  4. runners coming in at an angle, 2: the second half of the loop, I mostly swam straight into them, which made it harder to breathe and to stroke and to see anything
  5. with barely any visibility, I got very close to swimming straight into 3 women — I felt the current their kicking legs made in time and was able to shift my angle
  6. big splashes and sprays from flailing arms
  7. returning to point beach at the end of the second loop, trying to round the buoy, noticing it moving away from me: it had come untethered from the anchor — I gave up and didn’t try to loop around it
  8. returning to point beach at the end of the third loop, I saw that orange buoy way out and off course
  9. leaking goggles, dislodged through the force of waves battering my head
  10. only 3 loops today: too tiring to do more

A great birthday swim! I like swimming in choppy water, especially at the end of my June when I’ve built up my shoulders from 20+ miles of swimming already.

june 27/RUN

6 miles
veterans home + extra
64 degrees

Another beautiful morning. Quiet, calm, low-ish humidity. Ran on as much soft dirt as I could find, which helps my feet. Ran for 12 minutes straight, then 90/30 for the rest — with an occasional 2 or 3 minutes of running thrown in. My legs felt strong and bouncy. My feet started hurting around mile 4. I need to figure this one out. I think it’s mostly warts — yuck! — a few on the ball of my feet, one or two on or under a toe.

10 Things

  1. a coxswain’s voice, down in the gorge
  2. the dirt trail on the grass between lena smith and the river road was narrow and overgrown
  3. nearing locks and dam no. 1, voices somewhere in the trees — on the upper trail leading to the ford bridge
  4. ding ding ding ding ding the recorded bell from the light trail train passing through a intersection
  5. the soft roar of the creek far below me as I crossed the tall bridge that connects the veterans home to the park
  6. a glimpse of the trail Scott, RJP, and I hiked yesterday evening through the trees, below
  7. mostly empty benches
  8. a few e-bikes on the trail, going way too fast
  9. glanced over at the statue of Big Feet/Gunner* when I turned to run through the archway near the falls
  10. surfaces: asphalt, concrete, dirt, roots, brick, sand

*I looked up Gunner on this log because I knew I had written about him. A fun coincidence: I wrote about him on June 27th, 2021! “Ran south on the river road trail past the falls and stopped at the big statue just past the pergola garden. When I would walk or bike the kids over here, about 10 years ago, we (or was it mostly me?) called this statue “big feet” because all the kids could see was his big feet. There was also a little feet (John Stevens)–a much smaller statue not too far way. Today I wanted to find out who Big Feet actually was. I assumed he might be someone connected to Fort Snelling–Zebulon Pike or Snelling or Franklin. Nope. Gunner Wennenberg, a Swedish composer, poet, and politician. This statue was erected on June 24th, 1914.”

Found this bit about names on Poetry Daily (poems.com):

A name is a word but not a word. Some words are names and some names are words. When you’re alive your name means you; sometimes it means the you you mean to yourself; more often the you you are to each person who knows you well enough to use it. If it’s a word, it also means what it means as a word in the mouths of people who don’t know you, and also sometimes in the mouths of people who do know you. When you’re dead your name means you until the people who used it are all gone and then it means pure sound (if your name was not a word), or it goes back to meaning what the word means (if your name was also a word).

Danika Paige Myers on Grave Markers

june 26/SWIM

4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
66 degrees

Wow! A beautiful morning for a swim. Mostly smooth water, a little warmer, sun. I felt strong and relaxed. I avoided the milfoil again by swimming out from the middle of the swimming area, closer to the last green swim buoy. I had to pass over some ghostly vines, but they weren’t tall enough to bother me. I couldn’t see the 2nd orange buoy until it was almost right in front of me (as usual). I thought about how many years — and loops and strokes and kicks — it has taken me to get used to trusting myself and my shoulders and not worrying when I can only see water and sky and generic trees. Occasionally I encountered other swimmers and the lifeguards. I don’t remember seeing any birds or dragonflies or military planes.

What did I think about? 10 Things

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left
  2. through black then cold red then cold brown then warm, giving water the full size and weight of myself in order to imagine it (A Oswald, Dart)
  3. why is that orange buoy (tethered to a swimmer) swimming so far away from the next green buoy? are they off course, or is it my strange sense of the path in the water?
  4. when you can’t see the buoys, use the direction that your sparkle friends are floating as a guide (which is really the angle of the sun — I think — as it illuminates the particles and makes them sparkle
  5. he lifts the lid and shuts and lifts the lid and shuts and the sky jumps in and out of the world he loafs in (A Oswald, Dart)
  6. I should recite more water poems next time — but not, M Oliver’s “Swimming One Day in August” — that’s reserved for August
  7. out here, in the middle of the lake, I am not alone, but I feel alone, both singular and not — not human, but water or fish
  8. should I get out and go the bathroom? (yes, and I did, after loop 2)
  9. is that another swimmer or a wave? (a wave)
  10. (as I approached the last green buoy) I thought about being trapped under it by other swimmers as I rounded it — not in this lake, today, because they’re weren’t many swimmers, but if I were in a open swim race with serious swimmers

I saw my sparkle friends and some swan boats and sail bots on the edge of the lake. I felt the cold water on my fingers, a slimy vine on my shoulders. On the sand, near the lifeguard stand, the air smelled like a farm pasture — the faint scent of manure. And I heard a tinny chime several times on the back stretch of loop 2. I wondered if it was my watch — no, my watch doesn’t chime like that. Was it someone else’s watch? A far away boat? Water does strange things to sound.

I love morning swims at Lake Nokomis! Everything is a little quieter, calmer. Today, Scott came with me and ran his 10 miles. I finished before he did and was able to sit on the sand and take in the lake and the beach and beauty of late June afternoon.

encounters with others

As I exited the water to walk over the bathroom, a guy asked me about the quality of the water and how deep it was. It’s great / probably about 12-15 feet where we’re swimming.

Walking out of the bathroom, heading back toward the water, a man asked, excuse me, I signed up for open swim club. Where do I pick up cap?

Exiting the water after loop 4, a little kid called out to me, Isn’t this great? I love playing in the water!!

Bark bark — officially there are no dogs allowed on the beach, but there was one today, barking a greeting to swimmers as they exited the water — hello friend!

Here’s a photo Scott took of the final green buoy as we sat at Painted Turtle after my swim:

the final green buoy of a loop at Lake Nokomis

I wanted to add a new poem in this entry, so I searched, “aquatic plants” on poems.com and found this great prompt in Orchid Tierney’s EcoPoetry Now essay about her poem, “a field guide to future flora”:

Writing Prompt

this field guide began with a series of interviews with random plants—including artifical flowers—that I encountered on my daily movements—in my garden, on the street, in parks, at work, on the Amazon digital store. I read these interviews as an exploration into the breach of an alien consciousness. look, vegetal life may exceed our capacity to comprehend but these life forms still demand that we listen. perhaps their particular modes of communication travel at scales too slow for our species to register. but those unnamed flowers in your garden—perhaps the little ones, blue and purple in their faces that nudge into dirt—have demonstrated a special kind of intelligence to do so. if you sat down to interview these strange kin on your lawn, what would you say to them? what would they say in return? this is not a metaphor. go on. sit. listen. you have to watch them for a very long time.

Orchid Tierney’s EcoPoetry Now essay about her poem, “a field guide to future flora”

I’d like to try this with the Eurasian Milfoil at the edge of swimming area. My questions would be spoken in my head, not out into the water. Maybe I’ll bike over early one morning? What do I want to ask this milfoil? What might it want to tell me? An initial thought: Eurasian milfoil is an invasive species, brought to North American sometime in the late 1800s or early 1900s on the hull of some boat (I’ll double-check that — just checked. I had recalled reading somewhere that it was brought by a boat, but this helpful resource, There’s more to milfoil, offers another, equally vague explanation: “Eurasian watermilfoil was brought to the U.S. as an ornamental plant decades ago. The state first became aware of it as an invasive plant in the 1970s.”

Orchid Tierney’s entire essay is awesome, offering many ideas to ponder. They begin with this line, what if, as Maureen M. McLane suggests, we are already preplant?

Preplant?! I tried to find the source of this question, but couldn’t. I did find McLane’s collection, This Blue, and requested it from my local library. Maybe the question is in there? Regardless of where they ask it, I like this question. It makes me think of Lorine Niedecker’s and Alice Oswald’s discussions of us as being distilled to our animal -vegetable – mineral selves — or something like that; I’ll have to search for the lines later.

a mapping

I cleared off my bulletin board for the summer, wanting to come up with swim and water things to cover it. An idea: what if I create a map of the open swim circuit on it? I could include the orange and green buoys, the patches of milfoil, specific locations of inklings + other things I experience in that water. Yes! This sounds fun!

to remember and add to my How to Be project

Found this useful discussion of naming thing in an interview with Maureen McLane about This Blue. I wanted to archive it here, and find where I write about naming on my “How to Be” project.

HM: This Blue seems very interested in how language changes the way we inhabit a landscape. Its first poem contains those lines, “Take it up Old Adam—/every day the world exists/to be named,” and in later poems there are trees that are said to go unnamed, or wildflowers that have forgotten their names.

MM: I think it’s very interesting—what it means, say, to come across the name for a plant in French. Part of this question of naming and place aligns with my interest in English as a big and actually multilingual instrument. I guess I really do subscribe to the notion of language in general, and names in particular, as having a kind of spell-like or incantational or incarnational potentiality. That’s a pretty archaic and powerful trope. I was not a person who grew up knowing the names of almost anything. I often encountered things first verbally and only then in the world.

Actually, Jamaica Kincaid talks about this, in another key, in her book Lucy, where the heroine talks about having Wordsworth shoved down her throat—his poem about daffodils. Our heroine is from the West Indies and she’s in New York as a nanny, and her employer wants to take her to Central Park and show her all the daffodils. This is the first time Lucy’s seen actual daffodils, and Lucy’s incredibly annoyed with this bourgeois white woman who’s trying to have her say, “Isn’t that beautiful?” So I think that, (a) Kincaid is amazing, but (b), another way to think about it is that words are as palpable as things. A lot of my poems might be working through that: how we can feel that way, and how naming both honors things and lets them blossom, but how names may not be the only, or very efficient, way for talking about energy in the world.

Learning the name of a fungus could really anchor you in a region; certain words for trees could conjure something about the American Northeast. But somebody like Wordsworth, for all his yammering on about nature, apparently couldn’t tell one bird from another. So I sort of feel like my interest here both is and is not about being an actual naturalist. There are a lot of ways to anchor oneself in the world. For me, it tends to be a linguistic anchoring.

Talking with Maureen McLane, author of This Blue

june 25/RUNSWIM

10 miles
ford loop + hidden falls + veterans home + falls + locks and dam
60 degrees
humidity: 80%

10 miles. It’s been a few years since I ran 10 miles. I just looked it up and, according to my records, it’s been since Sept 29, 2024. That’s a week before the marathon. Wow. It wasn’t easy. I wasn’t fast. My feet really hurt in the last mile. And I did it. And I feel good about it. More than good, great. These long runs are really helpful for me as I try to work on my mental strength and endurance.

Yesterday I was listening to Kara Goucher giving advice on her podcast. What I remember her saying is this: find something positive to focus on for each stretch. Don’t allow yourself to think about what’s going wrong; think about what you are doing right. For many of the running stretches I felt strong and bouncy and in a dreamy state. Not sure I’d call it a flow state, but a state of non-thinking. Of being.

When I was thinking, I thought about my running. In the last three miles, I thought: I need to be particularly intentional in these last miles of my long run to not let it fall apart. I need to work at keeping to my schedule of walk runs. Keeping to this schedule should be something I work on in future long runs.

my route

My route took me many different places: through the neighborhood, past the daycare at the church, over the lake street bridge, beside shadow falls and the monument, on the edge of the new Highland bridge development, just above Hidden Falls, next to a skate park, over the ford bridge, past Wabun and the splash pad, through the veterans’ home grounds, behind the John Stevens’ house; above the falls, back up to wabun, down to the locks and dam no. 1, then north on the west river parkway. There was lots of shade and only a few stretches of direct sun. It was cool and overcast for the first half, a little warmer and sunny for the second half.

10 Things

  1. one rowing shell out on the river — I noticed in my peripheral as I crossed the lake street bridge — kept trying to see it in my central vision, but never could
  2. a woman’s voice at the construction site for home being renovated — she said something like, they’ll be here to hook up the garbage disposal — is that what she said? I can’t quite remember
  3. the soft shushing of my feet as they stuck the soft dirt then slid backward
  4. music blasting from a bike
  5. the soft rushing of water down the channel under the bridge that leads to a hidden falls overlook
  6. a ladder at an angle, leaning against a house, reaching a window on the second story
  7. the hum of skateboard wheels, a flash of a skater behind me, the sound of the board flipping as the skater went up a ramp
  8. a woman sitting on a bench near the veterans home, reading something
  9. 2 people, close together, on the little bridge overlooking the falls, taking a selfie
  10. the thwack of the flag rope hitting the pole in the wind

For the first mile, I listened to the traffic, then I put in Olivia Rodrigo’s new album. I listened to it 3 times as I ran. They lyrics I remember most come from the song “Expectations”: past mistakes are just new information

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
74 degrees

I entered and exited the swim course at the other end of the beach and avoided the worst patches of milfoil. Only a few ghostly vines not quite reaching my toes. Nice. I like starting there, much closer to the last green buoy. It’s less crowded and it shifts where and when a new loop begins. At least, this is what I thought as I swam the second loop and reached the second orange buoy, which was now the third buoy I swim by in a loop and not the second.

The water was a little warmer, or I was. Whatever the reason, the result: no freezing feet or fingers. I witnessed lots of bubbles, some menacing swims, lifeguards that were too close to the buoys, forcing me to take sharper angles around them. No fish seen below, one bird, flying low with its wings spread wide, above, a duck near the shore as I swam into the beach. Two little girls, chasing after it.

Overheard: one of the girls to the other — then he picked it up with his bare hands and threw it!

Overheard: one kid to another, on the beach — how old are you? Eight, you’re eight?!

A big exercise day today. Almost 1500 active calories. 10 miles of running, a mile and half of swimming. It felt good.

june 24/SWIM

5 cedar loops (2.5 nokomis loops)
cedar lake open swim
76 degrees

A wonderful swim! No numb fingers, no worries about being too cold or cramping or running into thick thatches of milfoil. A little choppy, but no waves crashing over me. During loop 4 or 5 I stopped to tread water for a minute at Hidden Beach while I adjusted my nose plug. As I kicked my feet, I could feel the vines reaching up, touching my toes and heels.

I don’t recall seeing or feeling any fish. No stray vines that wrapped around my shoulders either. I was routed twice: once by a lifeguard on a kayak who incorrectly (imho) thought I was swimming off course, and once by a swimmer taking a sharper angle than I was. Both times I had to stop my stroke. I didn’t care.

I felt good when I was done, like I could have done another loop or two. I delighted in all of the bubbles surrounding my hands. I wondered how close to the oncoming swimmers one swimmer was going as I tracked his cap, his buoy, and his frothy kick. I stopped several times to adjust my new nose plug.

Earlier today, before the swim, I was reminded of these lines from the wonderful poet/swimmer, Maxine Kumin:

from “Morning Swim”

the beat
rose in the fine thrash of my feet,

rose in the bubbles I put out
slantwise, trailing through my mouth.

My bones drank water; water fell
through all my doors. I was the well

that fed the lake that met my sea.

I didn’t think about these lines as I swam, but I did give a lot of attention to my feet and my kicking legs as I moved. Did I notice a beat? Would I describe the kicking of my feet as a fine thrashing? I like the idea of my bones drinking water. It reminds me of the lines from Alice Oswald I re-memorized last week: giving water the full weight and size of myself in order to imagine it, water with my bones, water with my mouth and my understanding.

unravel (this morning)

Watching a behind the scenes video for Olivia Rodrigo’s “The Cure” (it’s very cool to see how they created the red thread unraveling effect) and heard these lines: Why can’t you come stitch me up? I suddenly thought about Emily Dickinson and her lines about seams and stitching. Then I thought about Homer’s Penelope and how she wove the funeral shroud for her father all day, then unraveled it each night, to trick her suitors.

tag: aquatic plants

This morning, I’m searching through past entries for mentions of milfoil and tagging the entries with “aquatic plants.” As I read through the entry for 10 july 2025, I found this description:

Sparkle friends, bubbles. an orange glow off to the side, marble legs, ghostly milfoil, blue sky with a few clouds. Above: blue water, below: a light greenish-blue. An interesting effect: looking up blue, down below green.

10 july 2025

It made me think about my chapbook, inklings, and how to talk and write about it. In it, I have brief poems about my sparkle friends, bubbles, ghostly milfoil. In other entries, I’ve written more about marble legs and the orange glow off to the side. Could I expand on inklings through my waterlogged project? A book-length manuscript combining poems with the descriptions of lake experiences that inspired them? Could Mary Oliver’s Long Life be an inspiration for this project?

Here are a few more bits from my reading through milfoil entries that I’d like to remember and play around with for the rest of this week:

1 — rumors whispered by bubbles, spread through nets of ghostly vines (4 july 2025)

Alice Oswald’s nobody and pondering a word, rumor/rumour:

what kind of a rumour is beginning even now
under the waterlid she wonders there must be
hundreds of these broken and dropped-open mouths
sulking and full of silt on the seabed
I know a snorkeller found a bronze warrior once
with the oddest verdigris* expression and maybe
even now a stranger is setting out
onto this disintegrating certainty this water
whatever it is whatever anything is
under these veils and veils of vision
which the light cuts but it remains

unbroken

*verdigris: a green or bluish deposit especially of copper carbonates formed on copper, brass, or bronze surfaces

A fun rumor to make imagine believe in spread: maybe your brain, or some part of your brain, or your breath, or some other part of you that is not (only) you, has secret conversations with the water in which the water reveals the location of the buoy and the part of you that is you but not (only) you guides you towards it. Of course, this only works if you listen, which I have learned to do. Can you?

rumour (OED): 

General talk or hearsay, not based on definite knowledge

General talk or hearsay personified
1600: “Open your eares; for which of you wi’l stop The vent of hearing, when lowd Rumor speaks?”/ W. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2 Induct. 2

Clamour, outcry; noise, din. Also: an instance of this

To make a murmuring noise

This last one — to make a murmuring noise — reminds me of the idea of bubbles speaking to me in a soft, faint, bubble-whisper. And now, I’m thinking of a book that I checked out of the library years ago: How to Read Water. Since the ebook is available, I just checked it out again! What are water’s languages?

Back to Alice Oswald’s words and her bronze warrior. Have I written about these particular lines (I’ll check later)? I’m thinking of the ghosts — people who drowned, objects forgotten or carelessly discarded — on the bottom of the lake. What do/can they say to me? Do their messages travel through the pale milfoil that stretches up to the light?

2 — a lake is not as wild as the river or the sea, but it’s wilder than a pool (9 july 2024)

An open water slogan I’ve seen before: no walls. No lane lines or lanes. But, this isn’t Homer’s sea, Alice Oswald’s unfenced purple. There are shores in sight (well, mostly in sight) and only vines, fish, and swan boats to encounter. No sharks or motorized boats or big waves. Does that mean the lake is all routine? Safe, steady, predictable?

from A Swim in Co. Wicklow/ Derek Mahon

Spirits of lake, river
and woodland pond preside
mildly in water never
troubled by wind or tide;
and the quiet suburban pool
is only for the fearful —

no wind-wave energies
where no sea briar grips
and no freak breaker with
the violence of the ages
comes foaming at the mouth
to drown you in its depths.

Lake Nokomis is affected by wind and watermilfoil reaches out to grip me near shore almost every swim. No, it’s not the sea, but it’s also not a suburban pool.

In the lake, you can’t see much, either above or below. Above: water, vague trees, sky, sand. Below: your hand, ghost vines, silver flashes. No bottom, just void, nothing, or something not-seen. 

In an essay about open swimming in the sea, Lauren Groff (love her writing and her awesome Olympic triathlete sister!) writes:

There is danger, a great deal of it. There are sharks that circle her. They wait. Their teeth shine in the murk. Their bodies lazily trail her shadow as it darts over the coral reef. 

Lake Nokomis doesn’t have sharks. It has uncertainty, mystery, a floor only 15-20 feet below scattered with things we can’t see because the water is stirred up, murky. I wonder, which is scarier? Swimming above sharks you can see, or above a nothing that could be anything that you can’t?

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
75 degrees

A few hours before open swim started, the sky unzipped and it rained hard. I think that might be the reason the water was so full of vegetation: whole vines, chunks of vines, and some green slimy substance. Gross! Before I realized what was happening, I swam through the slime — bright green, soft but not in a pleasant way. I’m glad my mouth was closed and I had a nose plug in. Hopefully it’s not toxic. In the 10 years I’ve been doing open swim, this is the first time I’ve experienced anything like this slime. I almost stopped after one loop, but decided to swim 2 more.

added, 10 july 2024: Reading back through my description, I wanted to add that I didn’t just swim through one random patch of this green slime. It was everywhere, all around the lake. Starting the first loop, before I realized the slime was there, I recall feeling something on the side of my head and wondering if some of my hair had escaped from my cap. No — I think it was some of the slime. The first loop was the worst, but for every loop, I could see it, often below me, but sometimes near the surface.

Okay, against better judgment — mine and Scott’s — I looked it up and it might be blue-green algae, which could be bad and make me sick. Hopefully not. Probably not. If were blue-green algae I think someone would have seen it and they would have cancelled open swim. Future Sara will let us know. (note: future Sara added an update on the original entry)

3 — working on inklings (1 aug 2025)

Today I’m working on more swimming sonnets and Inklings. Some subjects: water quality, blue-green algae, milfoil, water as the medium, loops at lake nokomis are actually triangles, the color of the water, Alice Oswald seeing self in water, again and more darkly, Mary Oliver and the deepening and quieting of the spirit

note: I should look for the pages document in which I might have drafts of some of the poems that I didn’t use!

4 — some poetry lines (12 june 2020)

O for the rising ozone, the dropping oxygen, for algae overblooming like an omen or an oracle.
(from O/ Claire Wahmanhom

5 — a ramble on lake water testing (14 aug 2025)

a ramble on lake water testing

A revelation just last week. Minneapolis Parks tests the lake water weekly, and testing the water is better than not testing the water. But the slow and rigid system of testing only on Mondays and getting results on Tuesdays (e-coli) and Wednesdays (algae blooms) combined with the fickle changes in quality based on weather and other environmental factors, means the testing is not very accurate for what the conditions are at any given time. On an abstract level, it seems obvious to me that you can’t rely on tests to guarantee safe water, but on an experiential level — that is, being in the water swimming for over an hour at a time roughly 6 times a week for 11 summers — I needed an unquestioned faith in those tests and the park’s ability to let me know when it was/wasn’t safe to swim in order to get in the water.

And, mostly it is safe in the water. And it is clean. I get very irritated when someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about says to me, eww, how can you swim in that dirty water!? Minneapolis Park workers and volunteers do an amazing job of keeping the water quality high. And this is partly due to their regular testing. But, these tests can’t guarantee anything.

What am I trying to do here? I’m not blaming the parks department; these tests are expensive and it would be difficult to test regularly enough to keep up with the quick shifts in wind and rain and the groundwater problems (like unstable sewer systems) that have existed from the beginning of the lake’s modern shape in the 1920s when workers excavated peat and used it to build up the surrounding neighborhood. Not to mention climate change and erratic weather and an excess of nutrients getting into the water from lawn fertilizers. And people feeding ducks who poop in the water which increases the amount of e-coli. No, I think Minneapolis Parks, especially Minneapolis Aquatics, are amazing.

All of this is complicated and messy with no easy answers. And it’s scary. I’ve been wondering for a few years when it’s going to happen — because it seems inevitable that it will happen — that lakes will no longer be safe to swim in, unfiltered outside air will no longer be safe to breathe. And this is how it happens, I think. Not all of sudden, but slowly. More days with bad test results and beach closures. Or inaccurate test results and water that is pea-soup green and slimy and that might get you sick.

I suppose this last paragraph sounds depressing, and it is, and also it isn’t. I love swimming in lake nokomis, and I would do a tremendous amount to keep swimming in it. Maybe it’s time to figure out what I can do to help keep it safe.

6 — in the still water of a lake, land will try to reclaim water (5 july 2025)

. . . ponds and lakes are far from permanent; rivers will tend to grow naturally with time as they do their own excavating, but the opposite is true for still water. Unless ponds and lakes are given some help, they will all eventually return to land, It starts with algae, then the rushes and other shallow water plants getting a foothold, and this allows sediments to gather, water turns to wet mud, and a reinforcing cycle begins that culminates in the water losing the battle against the encroaching land.

How to Read Water/ Tristan Gooley

june 23/RUN

4 miles
monument and back
65 degrees

Hot! Bright sun. Some shade. I watched my shadow beside and below me as I ran the stretch of the east river trail between the lake street bridge and shadow falls. Heard a coxswain, then 20 minutes later saw the white boat on the river. I think I saw some rowers, too, but it might have just been waves.

I did 90/30, which should have felt easy, but didn’t. But it kept my pace and heart rate a little lower. Wore my Brooks Ghosts and some new socks — size: youth. I like this size — not too tight or too loose. My feet felt okay until the last mile when the widest part, below the big toe, started to rub, then slightly ache. No Brooks for my long run, either tomorrow or Thursday. 10 miles this week.

Listened to the cars and the kids and the sound of my feet striking the ground for the first half, then Olivia Rodrigo’s new album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, for the second part. I like it; it’s fun to run to. As I walked back, I listened to her song, “Purple” — I better add that to my color playlist!

10 Things

  1. the sandbar, under the lake street bridge, was just beneath the surface of the river
  2. little kids being dropped off at the church daycare — as I ran by, I heard the bell for them to go inside and start the day
  3. cars backed up on the bridge due to a red light far up the hill
  4. voices in the ravine, near shadow falls
  5. the bottom of the water fountain at the monument was flowing continuously — had someone left something on? was the button stuck? no, I think it’s designed to do that for draining and dogs
  6. only one open spot at the monument parking lot
  7. workers were doing something under the lake street/marshall bridge — it didn’t impact pedestrians or the walking trail, but the road up the hill was closed
  8. a line of bikers on the trail — about 8 silver riders in bright yellow vests
  9. running by a house — a flash of red, then a small bird landed on a railing — mostly it had no color for my bad eyes, but a few times I could see that it was red
  10. the slide-y (but not slippery) feel of my feet striking the soft sandy grit on the desire path next to the paved trail

note: It is 2:44 pm and thunderstorms are predicted, starting at 4. Open swim is set to begin at 5:30. Will it happen? Future Sara, let us know! . . . Future Sara here: cancelled at 4 pm, amidst a steady rain with occasional thunder.

weeds / entanglement

Remembering this hours after my run: near the end of the walk home, I thought about nets and being entangled. Why? Just remembered! It was the lines in Olivia Rodrigo’s “Purple” in which she sings about unraveling. Wait — not “Purple” but “The Cure”:

Refrain]
But I’m unraveled (I’m unraveled)
I’m unraveled (I’m unraveled)
I’m unraveled (I’m unraveled)
I’m unraveled (I’m unraveled)

[Chorus]
And my head is full of poison, and my heart is full of doubt
I got toxins in my bloodstream, you tried hard to suck ’em out
And it feels like medication, and it’s good for me, I’m sure
But it don’t matter how your love feels anymore
It will never be the cure

I thought about unraveling is the unwanted thing here; she’s falling apart. But, unraveling can be desired; I’d like for the thick knots and tangles of milfoil to unravel in the swimming area at lake nokomis. This lead me to think about nets and how they can trap us or keep us safe. And knots — in hair, of stomach anxiety, with thread, they’re bad, but on anchors, on the ends of drawstrings, for keeping shoes tied tightly as you run, they’re good.

Knot is a tangle, a problem that needs
unraveling. Not is the thing that isn’t / doesn’t /wouldn’t. Knot a securing, a way of holding on.

Knot Work / Not Work / Knot Hole / Not Whole

When I looked up the lyrics of “The Cure,” I discovered that Rodrigo is calling her tour the Unraveled Tour and has a very cool video for the song, which involves some visually freaky and cool unraveling:

Midway through the video Rodrigo begins unraveling as red threads emerge from her outstretched fingers. More and more red appears.

screenshot from “The Cure” by Olivia Rodrigo / red thread emerges from an outstretched hand

And here’s another knot poem that I posted on this log years ago. It’s a favorite of mine:

Epistemology / Catherine Barnett

Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more.
Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know.
Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord
to keep it from fraying?
Not the man who called my life a debacle,
a word whose sound I love.
In a debacle things are unleashed.
Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary.
I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate,
the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing.
They don’t use words, but they can be said to love.
They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another tree.
And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing
stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect
or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare,
to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.
Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth
and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.

Her discussion of trees talking to each other and growing through fences returns me to the Knot Work / Not Work poem. Here’s what Jishin No-ben (Lee Ann Roripaugh, trans.) writes about tree knots and burls:

from Knot Work / Not Work / Knot Hole / Not Whole: a Mapping

2.
Formed in trunks where branches used to be,
or where the trunk’s growth has choked off
the smaller, lower branches in a tree. Each knot
the mark of a tightening tourniquet surrounding
a phantom limb. Each knot a scar, a toughening
over to cauterize loss, seal the body shut so it doesn’t
bleed out in the snow. In a concentration camp
in Minidoka, Idaho, wood artist George Nakashima
learned to burnish the souls of trees through their scars:
their knots, their holes, their cracks, their broken histories.

. . .

4.
Burl’s the wood formed when a tree is sick
or stressed, causing the grain to arabesque
into strange spirals, distorted forms, eye-spotted
with visible knots. Burl erupts when infestations
of insects or mold spread unchecked beneath bark’s
façade, the burl becoming larger, more ornate,
as the tree continues to grow. They sound like tumors,
or eyesores, but burl’s actually expensive and rare.
A tree can’t survive without its burl. When burl
is cut from a tree while it’s still alive, the tree dies.

I’d like to use these descriptions of tree biology as an inspiration for my discussion of milfoil biology — about how milfoil spreads and chokes out the light and starves fish and ensnares swimmers’ arms.

june 22/SWIM

3 loops (6 cedar loops)
cedar lake open swim
77 degrees

Summer! A beautiful night for a swim. Hardly any wind, warm sun. There were lots of swimmers with yellow and pink buoys. Someone was playing dance music over at Hidden Beach. As I rounded the far buoy during loops 5 and 6, I did several breaststrokes so I could listen. A few very long milfoil vines stretched up from the bottom, which is much deeper than lake nokomis.

I recited some of my favorite lines about swimming from Alice Oswald’s Dart. He dives, he shuts himself in the deep soft-bottom silence — I forgot to recite the next line, which underwater is all nectarine, nacreous — and jumped ahead to, he lifts the lid and shuts and lifts the lid and shuts and the sky jumps in and out of the world he loafs in. I couldn’t quite remember how the next line started, but now I do: Far off and orange in the glow of it he drifts. Love those lines!

10 Things

  1. a swimmer wades in the shallow water near the buoy waitint — to warm up? to get the courage to swim across? to take in the beauty of an early evening?
  2. bubble friends! more of them, below me
  3. a tapping on my toe as I rounded the far buoy — was it another swimmer? a fish? something else? who knows
  4. music, laughter, lots of chatter at hidden beach
  5. all I could sight on the way out was the red kayak of the lifeguard
  6. all I could sight on the way back was the break in the trees
  7. a few spots of glimmering surface
  8. the orange buoy at hidden beach was rarely there and when it was, it was only an orange dot, or the idea of an orange dot
  9. the orange buoy at point beach was muted and covered in shadow — I never saw it from far away, only when I was pretty close to it
  10. strange undercurrents in the water — something disturbing the water — sometimes it was another swimmer, sometimes it wasn’t

A great swim. I did one more loop than I did last time and never really stopped — other than the brief seconds when I readjusted my nose plug. In the later loops, my feet felt a little strange. Were they about to cramp? I paused and treaded water as I assessed them.

Found this in my entry from 2025 on 22 june — the return of my “On This Day” practice!:

Saturday 6:30 a.m. Swimming.

Red water plants waver up from the bottom in an attitude of plumes. How slow is the slow trance of wisdom, which the swimmer swims into.

“An Essay on Swimming” / Anne Carson

Thinking about the Eurasian Watermilfoil (milfoil) at Lake Nokomis, It does not waver in an attitude of plumes. It is a thick thatch, choking out the light, wrapping itself around arms, legs, shoulders.

Thinking more about the Eurasian milfoil, I recalled looking it up and posting some information about it a few years ago. I searched, and found it: 5 july 2024

aquatic plant management

“A few days ago, I looked up information about the vegetation/vines that I swim above in lake nokomis. I looked them up a few years ago, and recall learning that they were milfoil, but this summer I started doubting that I was remembering the name right. I was! There are two types of watermilfoil: 

Eurasian watermilfoil : invasive, choking out native plants
Northern watermilfoil: native, food for the fish

On the Minneapolis Parks’ site, they describe aquatic plant management, which was fascinating. The most effective way to control Eurasian watermilfoil is to harvest it, either with a mechanical harvester or by scuba divers (!). The mechanical harvester, which from what my bad eyes can see is a boat with a big spinning blade

removes plants that are in the top four to six feet of water. The harvested plant material is removed from the water and stored until the end of summer when it is brought to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum to be used as organic fill for their operations. 

Aquatic Plant Management

The scuba divers, who only do this on Wirth Lake and Lake Nokomis, hand-pull the watermilfoil in areas that are inaccessible for the mechanical harvester. I wonder what areas are inaccessible and if I’ve ever witnessed the scuba pulling and not realized it. Very cool!”

Looking through the page today (2026), I noticed that they have a harvesting map for 2026. I also read on the aquatics plant management site that harvesting happens (roughly) from memorial day – aug 31st. I decided to send Minneapolis Parks a message and ask if and when they were planning to harvest the milfoil this summer. Hopefully they will answer, and hopefully it’s soon!

In the meantime: I will avoid that area! And maybe, I’ll try thinking about entanglements and knots and being tethered in ways that restrict, bind, limit. Or, I’ll think about weeds and invasive species and lake vegetation and how and why it overtakes lakes.

a note from Sara-this-second and Sara-since-Saturday and Summer Sara for Sara-sooner-or-later Listen lady, we are taking a break from reading and holes and Alice in Wonderland. We want to be immersed in water — waterlogged and water-logging! Come back in the fall!1

  1. I want to finish my May monthly challenge summary this afternoon and then shift into re-reading my favorite swimming/water poems and working on my waterlog project and returning to Alice Oswald and Anne Carson. ↩︎

june 21/RUNSWIM

run: 2.3 miles
lake nokomis
64 degrees

Decided to run a loop around lake nokomis before open swim in order to be warmed up when I entered the cold water. The run was hard. It felt warm and my gait felt awkward. My favorite part about the run was nearing the big beach and hearing, then seeing, swimmers rounding the far green buoy. I thought: that will be me in a few minutes! And it was.

Overheard: a group of 7 or 8 runners, one of them calling out to the others: They didn’t give us any room. I guess they thought it was their path. Yep, I’ve thought, and probably said, that same thing to Scott on some run around this lake.

I was just reminded of this when I heard the bells of St. Thomas as I write this at my dining room table: When we arrived at the lake, I heard some bells chiming in the distance. I’m assuming a church service was starting somewhere — maybe at the church on Cedar, near Fat Lorenzos?

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
67 degrees

It felt warmer today, maybe because it was sunny. I noticed pink and yellow and orange safety buoys tethered to torsos, bent elbows, glittering water, a few splashes. Some swimmers wore wet suits, some wore training suits. I don’t think I noticed any swan boats or non-lifeguard kayaks.

I’m not sure I felt strong, but I felt stronger in the lake than last week. I decided as I stroked 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left that June is always a more challenging month for open swim: the water’s colder and I’m using muscles that I haven’t used for 9 months.

The milfoil in the swimming area and near the start of the loop was terrible. Thick stretches of it, with individuals vines wrapping around my wrists and feet. I managed to avoid the worst of it on the way out, but when I returned I got stuck in a wide patch of it that I struggled to swim out of. As I have said to more than one person, I am a very strong, experienced swimmer and, even so, I had a few flashes of panic as I wondered how to get out and around these vines. I am seriously concerned that someone will drown in them. They are in the swimming area.

I wonder, is there anything Minneapolis Parks can do about this? Also, if enough people complain, will they have to close down the beach? I don’t want that, but I also don’t want someone to drown in this water or these vines to not be addressed. Sigh.

I’m glad that I ran and that I was able to swim 2 loops in slightly warmer water. Unfortunately, it didn’t help my mood. A few days ago, I wondered what was worse: perimenopausal anxiety or perimenopausal irritability. I thought anxiety was worse, but today, I am irritated and upset and I think it’s just as bad as anxiety. Oh well, like a wave, it will pass over.

Speaking of passing over, I noticed the dark shadow of a plane, blocking out the sun for a few seconds. Even though I know what it is, it is strange and settling (and kind of cool) when it happens.

10 Things

  1. bubbles — surrounding my hands as they entered the water
  2. clouds
  3. breathing to one side: blue sky
  4. breathing to the other side: clouds
  5. stopping in the middle of the lake: silence, solitude
  6. the bright orange first buoy, sometimes looking orange, sometimes white, once or twice green, a few times not there
  7. swimmers: 3 across, a good space between us, all heading towards the far green buoy at the different angles
  8. overheard before beginning: Theo, get your shoes! It’s time to go!
  9. exiting the water, watching as a toddler in a polka dot bathing suit ran across the sand and towards the swings
  10. chanting to myself, lifts the lid and shuts1
  1. I need to re-memorize the A Oswald lines so that I can recite them properly! ↩︎

june 20/RUN

6 miles
hidden falls loop
61 degrees
humidity: 77%

The sun and the humid air made it feel warmer than 61. If only it could feel like this tomorrow during open swim — warm, that is. A quiet, calm morning. Not too crowded on the trails or the roads. Lots of dappled light, flickering leaves. The only time I remember looking at the water was when I had just started crossing the ford bridge. I could see the dark reflections of the fir trees on the water.

I wore my bright yellow shoes. Today, they didn’t feel so bad. Before I went out for my run, I studied the bottom of my shoes. The Brooks Ghosts are already starting to wear down near the big toe, but the Saucony Cohesions and Rides are not. So, do the Ghosts change where I strike my foot, or are they just thinner at that spot? One day I’ll get my stride evaluated by someone at Mill City Running or another local running store.

I did some variations on the Galloway method (90 sec run/30 sec walk). I started with 15 minutes of running, then 90/30 for some time, then 3 min/1 min. Next time I need to commit to just running 90/30 the entire time and see what happens.

Right as I began running, I looked far ahead at the small circle of light at the end of a tunnel of sidewalk and trees. I thought about Alice and her view as she first falls down the hole:

down
and down

Watching this again, I remembered the light from above being brighter. Oh well, I still like it as inspiration for my hole series. Does it work for blur (see below)?

A few times, I recited “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark” by Emily Dickinson as I ran. Not sure I ever made it all the way through; I was distracted by the sound of a skateboard or the flash of a leaf or the feeling of sweat dripping down my face.

As I ran by the empty benches near the Ford/Power Plant overlook, I imagined biking here on some other day and sitting and reading a book, or writing or poem, or taking in the world around me.

10 Things

  1. loud music — dance? techno? — booming from a bike speaker
  2. a sprinkling, tinkling sound — was it falling water or rustling leaves?
  3. a few puddles from yesterday’s rain
  4. soft, wet dirt on the trail between the river road and lena smith boulevard
  5. the flickering shadow of one leaf being moved by the wind
  6. 2 older men talking, sitting at a picnic table near the skate park in Highland Park
  7. a woman running with a stroller, crossing near hidden falls — did she or the kid she was pushing make any noise? I don’t think so
  8. hot sun, then refreshing shade, at Highland Bridge
  9. passing a woman talking on a phone: then, what is it?
  10. 2 women walking — one, to the other: I haven’t perfected my pizza yet

holes and Alice

As I (finally) worked on my summary for April’s monthly challenge, I was inspired to return to the holes project. I want to keep experimenting with the Alice in Wonderland angle and the rabbit hole. What inspiration can I get from some of the scenes in Alice in Wonderland (1951)? So far, I have 3 scenes in particular: Alice falling down the hole1, Alice talking with the Caterpillar, and Alice and the Cheshire Cat.

Just now, I re-watched the Cheshire Cat scene and I’m thinking of pairing it with parts of hole 3: “land in a logic of blur and almost” and “read sentences sliced in half, glitching just enough to scramble what is real and imagined.” At the beginning of the scene, the cat is only a voice singing nonsense words, then a mouth, then eyes. Later, he is only footprints and stripes. How to represent that on the page? And, is that more almost than blur? Should the line be, “land in a logic of almost’?

Another part of this new approach is to simplify the image so that it is easier to understand as form/silhouette. I’m thinking of putting it on a single page — the page in which the word “hole” appears in the NYer essay — instead of the 4 panels. I’m hoping that will translate more effectively online (and on smaller screens).

Back to hole 3: what if I made the blur and almost as two different scenes/pages — one is blur, one almost. “Almost” would be the cat, and “Blur” would be –? I’ll keep thinking about that one. Blur = soft and fuzzy forms, before we grow accustomed to the Dark, right after the light has gone out, or grown too dim? Maybe, the image of a small hole of light, with everything else growing darker?

is water alive?

I was looking for something else (search on poets.com = “blur”) and found a wonderful essay about a poem, “on the water” and its dis/connection to ecopoetics. The author of the essay and the poem, Moheb Soliman, says this about water:

It’s a sacred hook—an existentially common denominator—the basis of everything, to build on together. You understand, but you’re deeply ambivalent about the abstraction of water. Water like a banner quivering in place, placeless. You fear placelessness. It’s why you are addicted to Google Maps. Isn’t everybody? Totalizing specificity, proper naming, sublime order, knowable space.

Yet, like many, you try and reject colonial hegemony. You can’t help but revere Indigeneity. But water flows one way at divides—you’re either duped by western science water as inanimate substance, or you’re co-opting animist beliefs about water. You don’t think of water as alive, nor of it as just a resource. Is there no other way?

Moheb Soliman on “on the water”

The line, You don’t think of water as alive reminded me that I have Is a River Alive? on my Libby audiobook shelf. TIme to start listening/reading, I think!

Perhaps a question to pursue this summer: (how) is a lake alive?

  1. Writing this, I was thinking about the moment before she/we grows accustomed to the Dark and can only see the whites of her eyes, but now I’m also thinking about the moment before that when we see her from the perspective of her cat Dinah as she call out, with delight, Goodbye Dinah! Goodbyyyyyyyeeee! How could I imagine that on a page? ↩︎

june 19/SWIM

3 loops / 1733 strokes
lake nokomis open swim
65 degrees / drizzle
water temp: < 70 degrees

Cold water! I might need to wear my wetsuit for the next swim. I can handle feeling cold at the beginning; it’s the deep cold that I feel in my hands and feet after an hour of swimming that I don’t like. Is it that I have poor circulation? Whatever it is, my right middle finger was starting to go number halfway in. I didn’t want to stop swimming, so I kept wriggling it mid-stroke and trying to punch the water extra hard with that hand. I wonder if it would help if I ran a mile or 2 as a warm-up before the swim?

Cold water aside, it was a great swim. A little drizzle, overcast. Not too many people or boats. Only a few swan boats and one paddle boarder.

I decided to try swimming through the milfoil again at the start. It was still there, but not too bad. The trick: don’t try to swim freestyle through it; don’t try to swim at all. Just glide over it with the occasional breaststroke kick.

I saw a few silver flashes under me near the first orange buoy and one small dead fish, belly-up near the beach. No minnows, but a few bubbles and my sparkle friends — sediment particles coming at me as I swam towards the big beach.

I followed a swimmer — I think it was a woman, but why do I think that? Did I see something other than their orange buoy for a second? — for at least 2 of the loops. I wasn’t trying to follow them — I didn’t want to follow them — but we were going almost the same speed and taking the same trajectory from buoy to buoy. In addition to their orange buoy, I noticed some pink and yellow safety buoys, too. Also noticed at least two people swimming the wrong direction. You are supposed to always keep the buoys to your right, but they had them to their left.

There weren’t any waves, but sometimes the water was choppy, and sometimes it felt like it was being sucked from under me, which makes it harder to feel any power or control in your stroke. Swimming back to the big beach, I often had to breathe every 2 or 4 — always breathing to my right, because the water was high on the left side.

Right before I left for the swim, I reread one of Alice Oswald’s description of swimming in Dart. So good!

Here’s what I read:

Then I jumped in a rush of gold to the head,
through black and cold, red and cold, brown and warm,
giving water the weight and size of myself in order to imagine it,
water with my bones, water with my mouth and my understanding
where my body was in some way a wave to swim in,
one continuous fin from head to tail
I steered through rapids like a canoe,
digging my hands in keeping just ahead of the pace of the river

—

He dives, he shuts himself in a deep soft-bottomed silence
which underwater is all nectarine, nacreous. He lifts
the lid and shuts and lifts and shuts and the sky
jumps in and out of the world he loafs in.
Far off and orange in the glow of it he drifts

What I remembered (but slightly wrong) was this:

open the lid and shut, open the lid and shut

I recited it for a few minutes as I punched through the chop, lifting my head to breathe, then dropping it again to avoid a face full of water.

I heard then saw some military planes taking off. The water was blue-ish gray, the visibility low. At one point, I had a moment of panic when I was so used to the safety buoy belt around my waist that it felt like it wasn’t there. Oh no, did I lose my phone? Nope. I checked and it was still there.

It was a good swim. Again, I swam straight to the buoys even when I didn’t think they were there. I had the occasional flash of panic when I suddenly though, what if I got a cramp or felt faint here, in the middle of the lake?, but those flashes didn’t last long.

june 18/RUNSWIM

9.15 miles
lake nokomis and back
57 degrees / humidity: 87%

My longest run in more than a year. It is humbling to feel like 9 miles was the most I could do (at least today) when I ran a marathon just 2 years ago. Of course, thanks to perimenopausal anxiety, I have flashes of worrying that it’s not being out of shape but something physically wrong with me. A few days ago, Scott and I had a discussion — which is worse: peri/menopausal anxiety or peri/menopausal irritability? I guess, being irritable is a drag for everyone around you, but it seems less draining than worrying that every small ache or pain means you might have a terminal illness. I am rarely irritated, but I am often anxious.

I ran the first mile without stopping, then moved into my 90 seconds of running, 30 seconds of walking. I like this method, although I was a little disappointed that my heart rate was still higher. Was it the humidity? Is that just how my heart rate works when I’m running? Is it a bigger concern — some heart problem? Or was it because I ran the first mile without stopping instead of doing the 90/30 from the beginning? I imagine it was mostly the humidity and doing a continuous first mile. At the halfway point, I experimented with the ratio: 3 min run/1 min walk and 2 min run/1 min walk.

assessment: I feel pretty good now, and I definitely had more energy at the end of the run. My feet hurt — not as much as they have in past runs, but the ball of both feet still ached at the end. Also: my ankles were a little sore, too.

Even though it was humid, and I wished I had worn my tank top instead of a short-sleeved shirt, I didn’t feel too hot. Lots of shade, a cool-ish breeze. I heard at least one woodpecker, laughing; the babbling creek; a dog losing its mind — bark bark bark bark — across the creek. I greeted several walkers and runners, stopped at the park bathroom right before reaching mile 8. I ran past some guy watching a pickleball match; counted several kayaks out on the water; encountered a biggish group of runners ahead of me — would I get tangled up with them? No, thankfully they stopped at the playground to do some exercises and to pair up. As I passed them, I could hear someone calling out, okay, now find someone with about your same pace.

For 8 of the miles, I listened to the world around me. Cars streaming past on the parkway; the hum of a hoverboard on the bike path; kids calling out to each other at the creek; and the thwack of the ball on the pickle ball court. For mile 9, I put in my “windows” playlist. The song I most remember was one I’m almost skipped, Pete Seeger’s “Fly through my window” — little bird little bird fly through my window

random bummer news: The Minneapolis Park Board voted to close the dog park and one of the most decorated American female mid-distance runners, Jenny Simpson, had a medical emergency while pacing a mile race on Monday night: her heart stopped and they gave her CPR for 20 minutes before it restarted. She’s in the hospital now, recovering. She is 39 and just retired from running a few years ago.

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
70 degrees

Brrrrr. I’m not sure what the water temperature was, but it felt cold. Probably 70 degrees. The water was a bit choppy today and full of menacing swan boats and a few clueless kayaks. I couldn’t always tell if the kayak was a lifeguard moving across the course or some random kayaker not paying attention to the course — or maybe not realizing there was a course. I wouldn’t be surprised if no one told them what was going on.

I took RJP’s advice and started at the far edge of the beach, in line with the last green buoy, to avoid the tangles of milfoil at the other end of the beach. It helped a lot. The only milfoil I encountered was a few stray vines in the middle of the lake. One wrapped around my head and I had to fling it off, mid-stroke.

10 Things

  1. clear bubbles, made by my piercing hands
  2. a strange squeaking, rubbing noise as a swan boat neared
  3. often the orange buoys look white, the green ones too
  4. again, I swam straight to the buoys even when I couldn’t see them — only them when I was about 15 feet away from them
  5. the rope tethering the last green buoy to the lake bottom was at a sharp angle
  6. entering the water, I walked past 3 guys skipping rocks at the edge of the water
  7. a few silver flashes
  8. almost ran into another swimmer — I didn’t see them until they were right there
  9. sighting a green buoy, swimming towards it, seeing a sailboat near it and wondering if I had seen the buoy at all or just a boat — always, the buoy was there
  10. my first few steps in the water: brrrrr! very cold — I warmed up but felt very cold by the end, after sitting at Painted Turtle for a half an hour, my heels were numb

june 16/RUNSWIM

3.1 miles
2 trails
69 degrees

A sunny afternoon. Warmer than I thought it would be. Not an easy run, but I did it, and I got to travel on the winchell trail, which was shaded. Mostly the trail was in complete shade, but occasionally some sun came through. In a few spots it glowed so much that I wondered if it was white paint. Nope — I double-checked, just sun. I heard some kids above, then a person sitting on the 38th street steps having a disturbing conversation about someone being shot in the head. I hope they were talking about a movie or a tv show.

5 Run and 5 Swim Things

  1. the path was thick with bikers
  2. the road was crowded with cars
  3. the two benches that I recall noticing were occupied
  4. puddles on the trail from last night’s rain
  5. 2 kids on the dirt part of the winchell trail — the younger kid to the older one: do it! the older kid’s response: that’s mean!s
  6. several military jets flying above the lake
  7. water color: a pale blue-green
  8. little spirits at my feet! (minnows near the shore)
  9. a few friends: sediment and bubbles
  10. the water was so low — near the shore, it was far from the lifeguard stands and there was a little drop-off near the water

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
70 degrees

A great swim! Again, I swam straight to the buoys without seeing them. And when I couldn’t see anything but water and trees and sky, I didn’t panic at all.

A few silver flashes below. 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left. Sometimes, 1 2 3 4 breathe right 1 2 3 4 breathe right. Steady strokes. Sometimes I was sore, sometimes I was worried about my heart rate1, and all of time I was deeply grateful to be swimming in this lake with my strong shoulders and back.

Some dog updates

First, on Saturday, Delia the dog started limping and not putting any weight on her back left leg. On Monday the vet delivered the bad news: a torn ACL. Major bummer! Delia is in good spirits. In fact, she’s managed to figure out how to hop on that leg pretty effectively. It’s hard having to stop her. Currently we’re trying to decide between surgery or not. If she were a bigger dog, there would be no question: surgery. But, with smaller dogs, taking it easy and rehabbing might be enough. Surgery is expensive and traumatic, but so is not being able to run and jump and do much of anything for many months.

Second, it is seeming more likely that the off leash dog park will be closing by the end of 2026. It is on sacred Dakota land, I support the returning of this land (see this article for more info). At first, I was sad about losing it, but then Delia tore her ACL and we think it might have been at least partly due to an aggressive and unsupervised dog at the park. Many dog owners are great with their dogs at the park, but some use it as daycare, ignoring the rules of keeping your dog within sight. Even if the dog park stayed open, I don’t think we would taking Delia back there.

  1. last night at cedar lake, my average heart rate for the swim was 160, which was alarming. Usually it’s under 130. Combine that with my anxiety over any anomaly in my watch data, and I was a little worried. Checked my heart rate after I was done: 126. Phew. Back to normal. ↩︎

june 15/SWIM

2.76 degre5 loops (5 cedar loops)
cedar lake open swim
76 degrees

The first open swim at cedar lake. It was great. I swam for (almost) an hour. The water was cold, but not too choppy or fishy or full of vegetation. Only 2 or 3 big vines wrapped around my head or shoulder. My hands were cold by the fourth loop and my neck was sore.

10 Things

  1. big white clouds up above as I swam
  2. dark purple-ish clouds hovering as we drove away
  3. the vine that wrapped around my shoulders was scratchy and sharp, the one that wrapped around my head was not
  4. a new lifeguard — he was very enthusiastic and earnest about giving people information about open swim
  5. a small bird or a dragonfly zoomed in front of me once as I lifted my head
  6. successful sighting heading towards hidden beach — after a few years of trying, I think I’ve cracked the code!
  7. bright pink and yellow buoys
  8. bright green caps
  9. bubbles — made as my hand pierced the water
  10. clear enough to see my hand and my watch and the bottom right near shore but not much else

spider web

I’m stepping back from devoting all of my attention to the holes and lines and spiders and webs (at least I think I am), but I wanted to try out a web over one of my four panel found poems. So far, I’ve created a basic web over the unmarked text. Next, I might figure out how to mark the text and/or create a distorted (NASA drugged-out) web. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m slow in figuring out how to make things, but eventually I get there. Today I learned that for strength purposes, I should create the outer rings of the web first. Also learned that passing the thread over then under when looping makes it tighter. I think I’d like to study how the spider makes the orb web some more for ideas.

spider web / 15 june / hole 6

june 13/RUN

4 miles
up to wabun, down to lock and dam
60 degrees
wind: 14 mph

I was supposed to do open swim this morning, but it was 57 degrees and very windy and I decided that was too much for me this early in the season. Lots of wind = choppier water = more sighting = sore neck, So instead I watched Paul (steak sause not sexass) Seixas abandon and Del Toro win, then went out for a windy run.

It was a tough decision not to swim; I really don’t like missing open swims. But, as I walked through our alley before I started the run and felt the cool and windy air, I was glad I hadn’t gone. The run was good. The first 5 minutes always feel strange now. Is it that my shoes aren’t quite right, or that I’m getting older, or something else I’m not imagining? I think it’s more a redesign of the shoes than anything else.

I don’t remember what I thought about, and not much of what I noticed. I ran on the narrow and root-y strip of dirt in the grassy boulevard until I reached the 44th street parking lot. I don’t remember hearing any distinctive birds or avoiding any squirrels.

10 Things

  1. a trio of roller skiers on the double bridge
  2. 2 bikers crossing in front of me to bike down to the overlook at the south entrance of the winchell trail
  3. a bike zooming by me
  4. a man sitting on a bench near the locks and dam, fishing
  5. a squeaking noise as something on a light pole was jarred loose in the wind
  6. choppy water under the ford bridge
  7. the dirt path that winds through the grass was narrower in past years — are people using it less?
  8. someone slowly jogging up the locks and dam hill, then stopping at the top
  9. 3 people spread across the bottom of the wabun hill, one of them pusing a bike and holding a (too) loose leash with a small dog
  10. an older couple, the man pushing a walker, on the edge of the trail near the coyote den nearby sign, looking at something — the river? the coyote den? something across, on the east bank?

For most of the run I don’t remember much of what I heard. For the last mile, I listened to my “It’s Windy” playlist. Favorite song today: “Summer Breeze.”

I almost forgot about the shadows! Actually, I did forget about the shadow for several hours until suddenly they popped into my head. At the locks and dam, running by a fence, I saw some sharp shadows and stopped to take a picture:

shadows / locks and dam no 1 / 14 june 2026

Fence and shadow, shadow and fence. Which is more real?

june 13/RUN

5 miles
marshall loop (to fairview)
64 degrees

Ran up Marshall past Cretin, Cleveland, and Prior. Turned on Fairview and over to Summit, then on the edge of the St. Thomas campus. We missed the bells by 6 minutes. Bummer. It was a good run. As we walked home, I told Scott that I was successful for a few reasons: 1. I didn’t look at my watch or check my heart rate; 2. I had a shift in perspective because of the success of my last long run; 3. our run together was only 5 miles instead of 9; and 4. it was slightly cooler outside.


2 images from the run

one — running down the last bit of Summit to the Monument, passing two runners heading up Summit. One runner to the other: it sounded like a gravel-y screech. Then he fully committed to imitating it. It was funny and shocking to hear such strange sounds. Scott and guessed that he was trying to tell the other runner about a bird sound he had heard at some other time.

two — a bike passing us as we ran down the Summit hill near Shadow Falls blasting Average White Band’s “Pick Up the Pieces.”

It was a beautiful morning. Sunny, but with lots of shade. Near St. Thomas I greeted my shadow. Later, I switched places with Scott as we ran so I could be closer to the railing and the edge. I told him that I wanted to let my shadow run closer to the river. I noticed her just above the tops of the trees below us.

The river was low. We could see a sandbar just below the surface. The paths weren’t too crowded.

An unusual encounter: a line of 20 or so kids and adults, dressed up for a hike with big backpacks. Were they going on a camping trip. Scott said, it’s funny how all of the kids moved over to let us run by; it was the adults who were clueless. Yep, that sounds right.

Scott talked about the movie clips he’s using in his latest YouTube video. I recounted several instances — one good, one bad, one neutral — of people drafting off me during runs. We ended by discussing the different Indiana Jones’ movie openings, especially the moment in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull when Harrison Ford hides in the fridge and gets flung up in the air when the bomb goes off. I had a suggestion for a future run topic: rank the top 10 best comic moments in Bond films with Roger Moore.

added at 6:45 pm: For reason I can’t remember, I decided to read my entries from June of 2025. Because the log posts them from last day to first, I’m reading them that way. Already on 30 June, so many wonderful ideas. A random thought as I read it: Richard Siken’s latest book — I Know Some Things. I started reading it and posting about it this past winter (the last time was on 3 dec 2025). I need to return to it. There are a lot of books I purchased in the last year that I haven’t finished. Maybe the rest of June could be about reading Siken and the other books I haven’t had time to read yet? Or, at least this next week could be about reading all of Siken’s book. I could take it to the lake or the falls or on bike rides somewhere else.

june 12/SWIM

1 loop
lake nokomis open swim
69 degrees
wind: 16 mph / gusts: 32 mph

The first Friday morning open swim! Windy. Again, the water temperature was warmer than the air. In the water: ah! Out of the water: brrrrr!! The new way to start the swim: swimming through a patch of thick vegetation. Oh well. I’ll get used to it during open swim. A question: will it be possible to swim around the white buoys on days I don’t have open swim, or will the weeds be too thick? Maybe I can find out by going for a morning swim on Monday?

RJP came with me to the lake. She wasn’t ready to swim across the lake, and said she might try going in for a swim in the beach area. When I returned from my first loop, there she was! We swam together for a few minutes, then I convinced her to swim out to the white buoy. She did, but it freaked her out, especially when she saw the little big of milfoil there. I told her that the milfoil was much, much worse on the other side. We agreed that she might not be ready to swim across the lake this summer. She might try to swim at a pool instead.

It was almost impossible for me to see the buoys heading toward the little beach. Because it was morning, the sun was in my eyes. I kept swimming and didn’t panic when nothing but waves and trees and blue sky were in front of me. Eventually, the flash of the buoy far off to my right. I adjusted it, then swam straight to the third buoy. On the way back, it was easier to see the buoys, but harder to stroke through the water. So much chop! Mostly, I didn’t mind the water being choppy, although it did tire me out.

10 Things

  1. slimy lake floor — covered with milfoil leaves
  2. sparkles on the water surface
  3. ghost vines, 1: reaching up, far enough down in some spot near shore that I could only see the ghostly tips
  4. ghost vines, 2: clustered just below the surface, making it impossible to swim a full freestyle stroke
  5. shaft of light reaching down to the bottom at an angle
  6. 1 2 3 4 breathe right 1 2 3 4 breathe right
  7. 1 2 breathe right 1 2 3 breathe left 1 2 breathe left 1 2 3 breathe right
  8. 2-3 foot waves, rolling at an angle
  9. finishing the swim, standing up, feeling the very cold air
  10. standing in the shallower water (almost up to my shoulders), a small black bird — small enough that I thought it might be a butterfly — flew right past my face

things not noticed or forgotten: sparkle friends, bubbles, silver flashes, the water surface glowing orange because of a reflection from the orange buoy, sailboats, menacing swans, kayakers

SWIMMING 1935/ Peter Davison

SIX SENTENCES FOR ROBERT PENN WARREN

He thrashed his way across the yellow lake,
high in the water streaming past his shoulders
one arm akimbo, then the other, feet
churning like a paddlewheel behind,
and never faltering to whistle, whoop,
spout like a whale, but simply, ceaselessly
trudgening forward to attack the water
the lake had clamped between its bulldozed knees.

That forward motion, hinging on the shoulder,
that steady beat, the tug of arms and legs,
that deafness, purposefulness, isolation
he kept despite the hurl of rushing water—
these were the obsessions of a poet
who celebrates the instincts of his body
religiously as one who greets the sunrise
crosslegged at the entrance to a cave.

For more than forty years I’ve watched this swimmer
in elements no less unknown than water
tell secrets of the ways we make a poem,
the way of Lilburne Lewis with an ax,
the way of entrance to a woman’s body,
the way a deer can bleed to death in snow.

The swimmer’s ears are sealed from careless words
that picnickers are shouting from the shore:
his eyes squeeze shut, to open only when
he takes a sight upon that destination
to which ambition, force, despair have pointed.

How can he, in the cavern of the lake,
let up his churning enterprise to listen,
since, for the sake of breathing, he must swim
as though the shore ahead did not recede,
as though he did not know we never arrive?

His body keeps the pulse of water music
that swimmers cradle as they force a passage,
forever pressing the receding shore,
crazed one-eyed gods who gape into the sun.

Oh, I like this! The description of the poet as swimmer resonates for me.

That forward motion, hinging on the shoulder,
that steady beat, the tug of arms and legs,
that deafness, purposefulness, isolation
he kept despite the hurl of rushing water—
these were the obsessions of a poet
who celebrates the instincts of his body
religiously as one who greets the sunrise
crosslegged at the entrance to a cave.

Celebrating the instincts of the body. Yes!

The “for Robert Penn Warren” in the epitaph was in another swimming poem I found earlier in the search (Swimming After Thoughts/ Jay Parini). Did RPWarren swim a lot? Yes, and it was deeply connected to his writing/creating process:

The rhythm of Robert Penn Warren’s life now is settled but not sedate. He rises early, fixes his own breakfast, exercises with a set of barbells kept on the living room floor then dons trunks and a plastic cap and makes the short walk to a bower-hidden swimming hole behind his summer home. He swims nearly a mile in the chilly water, sculling along at a steady, rigorous pace. The clay-bottomed pool is surrounded by ferns and high trees, and in the morning—as thin, miasmic bars of sunlight filter down, dappling the water in tones of emerald and gold—it is Edenic. Here, his body aching slightly from the exertion and his mind free from worries, Warren slips into a creative trance. This is the the hour when the images bloom. The swims are never draining, are in fact less taxing than distance running, the exercise he used to stimulate himself when he was younger. As Warren strokes back and forth through the glittering pond, a poem usually flowers. 

Robert Penn Warren Finds His Place to Come To

Continuing to read, I found this cool connection to a writer and their memoir about vision loss that I checked out and read (some of, at least) 6 or more years ago:

Three years ago, Eleanor Clark was partially blinded by the disease macular degeneration. At first, the condition seemed hopeless and was emotionally devastating. Clark had written several books, and in 1965 had won the National Book Award for her non-fiction account of the men and women who work in the French oyster industry, The Oysters of Locmariaquer. Her vision stabilized about six months after she was stricken, allowing her to perceive dim, impressionistic glimpses of the world and return to her writing. Composing sentences by drawing giant Magic Marker letters on blank sheets of newsprint then transcribing these jottings with a large-type typewriter while peering through a lighted magnifying glass, she wrote a book about the fight to regain control of her life: Eye, etc.


RPWarren’s wife is Eleanor Clark, the author of Eye, etc! I recognized the book from the description of her writing process with big black markers. I should return to this book! (I just requested it from my local library!)

june 11/RUNHIKE

8.1 miles
ford loop + hidden falls
64 degrees
dew point: 59

Technically, if I follow Scott’s plan, I’m supposed to run 9 miles today. But I’m going hiking at the dog park later this morning and swimming at the lake this evening, so I kept it to 8. I wasn’t fast, but I’m pleased with this run. I didn’t feel great at the beginning; it was very sticky and breathing wasn’t that easy. My heart rate shot up pretty fast, too. I wondered how I could keep running when it was already so hot and I felt so bad. Then I decided to not worry about how much I walked and to just keep going. For the ford loop (the first 4 miles), I ran until my heart rate reached 169, then I walked until it got down to 125. At Hidden Falls, I tried something new: run 90 seconds, walk 30 seconds. I wasn’t sure if I could handle having to look at my watch so much and stopping every 1.5 minutes, but I didn’t mind it, and breaking the time up into small increments made it go by faster — or made me think less about it as some big, overwhelming amount. This is the Galloway method of training. I think I’ll try it on my next long run for the entire run.

For most of the run, I listened to my book, Ariadne. For the last mile, I listened to my bunnies playlist.

5 Running and 5 Hiking Things

  1. the overcast sky made the green in the tunnel of trees seem deeper and darker
  2. a slash of orange on the ancient boulder
  3. a big log floating in the river near the east side of the ford bridge — was it a log? a boat? a person?
  4. a coxswain calling out instructions over his bullhorn to some rowers — heard, not seen
  5. roots buckling the sidewalk, looking like slithering snakes
  6. the entrance to the dog park was dark and green and inviting in an almost sinister way
  7. evidence all around of the big storm 2 nights ago: giant felled trees, trunks tipped over and reaching for the river, a thick branch that must have been blocking the trail before someone cut it
  8. drops of rain hitting the surface of the river, creating slight ripples that distorted the water near the shore
  9. bark bark bark bark bark bark — an enthusiastic dog
  10. kerplunk! splash! a dog swimming more than halfway across the river, moving fast

hike: 40 minutes
minnehaha off leash dog park
63 degrees
drizzle off and on

dog name: the swimming dog’s name was Millie — okay Millie, come here — a human calling to the dog

According to FWA, it’s supposed to rain off and on all day. We managed to mostly miss it, only a few drips on the river surface. We talked about terrible chemistry professors and doing hip thrusts with weights on your lap. FWA performed an imaginary conversation between Delia and another dog. In this conversation, they talked about how great the dog park is. Delia bragged about getting to come twice a week and the other dog said they only went once but that the yard surrounding their mansion was bigger than the dog park.

Possibly for the swim this afternoon: a prompt from Manny Loley

Now I invite you to find the water. In Diné thought, change happens in fours, manifestation happens in fours. There are four sacred mountains, four worlds that we emerge from into our current world. I invite you to create a poem in four steps.

First: find a body of water to sit with and listen. A river, a lake, an ocean—let it connect with the water inside of you. And let the sound that it makes work on your body and your mind and your heart.

Second: build your relationship with the water. Listen for what the water has awakened inside of you. What do you feel? Where do you feel it in your body? What stories are brought to the surface?

Third: follow the reverberations. Write down some of your thoughts, your feelings, your memories. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar, or about making things sound writerly or whether they make sense or not.

Fourth: make an offering to the water. Share what the water gave life to in the form of your poem. Touch the water and give thanks.

waterlogged: heavy with water, dense, difficult to manage, not dry, less buoyant, damaged/distorted/warped by excess water, soggy, characterized by the presence of a lot of water

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
64 degrees (air)
71 degrees (water)

After finishing my run and the hike, it started raining. Off and on, all day. By the time I went to open swim the temperature had dropped enough that the water was much warmer than the air. There was wind, too, which made the water choppy. I didn’t care. It was fun to swim into and through the waves. I swam straight to many of the buoys even when I barely realized I was seeing them. I think I did less sighting and more swimming without looking. It’s strange how much more comfortable I feel now when I see so much less.

a regular: As I exited the water an older man heading in asked me how it was. I said, it’s choppy, but I like it that way. He agreed and then we talked about the crazy amount of milfoil in the water. I have decided that I have said enough about it — it’s out of control and dangerous. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of someone drowning in it. And, like blue green algae blooms, I just need to get used to it and find ways to avoid and/or endure it. Just before he left, the man introduced himself and shook my hand. I’m Joe. / I’m Sara./ Nice to meet you.

Other things I remember: a few patches of blue sky; opaque water with a few silver flashes; a woman swimming, her arms entering the water without her elbows bending; the roar of rushing wind; swimming just barely over the top of the milfoil; the ridgeline of the wave as it rippled over the water; a swimmer exerting a lot of extra energy kicking, white foam everywhere; the hard bump of my safety buoy hitting me in the waves; the silcence and solitude when I stopped in the middle of the lake; looking to my right and seeing a dark line of clouds, hovering

june 10/NOSWIM

I was planning to do the first Cedar Lake open swim of the season. Scott and I drove all the way over there (the other side of town, 30 minutes in traffic), but when I got out of the car: thunder. Then more thunder, then rain, then some small hail. I waited 15 more minutes: thunder. I know the rules. When lifeguards hear thunder or see lightening they must close the lake and they can’t reopen it for 30 minutes. We decided to not wait. As we drove away it cleared up. Sun. Open swim probably started after 6. Bummer. I’m still glad we didn’t stay. Waiting another 30 minutes in the car for the lake to reopen would have seemed like a long time.

from earlier in the day

1

In yesterday’s entry — the part of it that I wrote this morning — I described my bubble friends as orbs. I like this connection to my recent study of spiders and one type of web they weave. A reoccurring theme for summer swimming: looping, orbiting, water orbs?

2

To consider before a swim: what does it mean to be thought through by water?

Alice Oswald: It was probably when I took up gardening that I discovered that being was better than thinking–that actually you don’t have to think things through, you can garden all day and your mind will have been moved by the gardening. And it’s the same when you’re in water. You’re thought through by the water rather than having to think. 

from 3 feb 2026 log entry

3

Reading past entries tagged “Alice Oswald,” I found this:

I’m more and more wary of the kind of willed and conscious act of writing. More and more I leave my mind to do it by itself. So I will, you know, go out and be kind of shocked by all the colours and pictures and smells and then purposefully not think of them linguistically. I think that the underneath mind will then do the work and that’s the mind I’m interested in. So the skill for me is then learning how to raid that underneath mind and then, when you do pick up a pen, you’re listening just hard enough so that you don’t use your surface mind. You get down to the mind that has taken everything in.The whole art of everything is about forgetting yourself

Instead of the underneath mind, the underwater mind, or the just beneath the surface mind? The water-logged mind?

Yes! The water-logged mind. For years now, I’ve wanted to create something that combines log entries and poems and lists (and more) and brief descriptions of using swimming to teach myself to see differently. The tentative title and theme: water logged, which is not to be confused with the wonderful travel/wild swimming/nature book by Roger Deakin, Waterlog. Perhaps the way to approach this book is not to see it as something that I could submit and get published, but as a useful archive and a fun experiment in making — a glossary of words, terms, ideas + a place for gathering a range of ideas about swimming and water. A way to do something more with what I’ve already gathered.

4

autonomic = acting or occurring involuntarily / refers to autonomic nervous system: “a component of the peripheral nervous system, regulates involuntary physiologic processes, including heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, digestion, and sexual arousal. The ANS consists of 3 anatomically distinct divisions: sympathetic, parasympathetic, and enteric.”

from Anne Carson’s “1=1”:

And then the (she searches for the right word) instruction of balancing along in the water, the ten thousand adjustments of vivid action, the staining together of mind and time so that she is no longer miles and miles apart from her life, watching it differently unfold, but in it, as it, it. Not at all like meditation—an analogy often thoughtlessly adduced—but, rather, almost forensic, as an application of attention, while at the same time, to some degree, autonomic.

1=1 / Anne Carson

5

Remembering the rope I wrote about in my 10 Things yesterday — the one that tethers the buoy to the lake bottom that I can see as I swim over it. An anchor of some sort is attached to it, then dropped by a lifeguard in a kayak. This line, this anchor, only a temporary tether, removed at the end of open swim. There are fixed buoys at the lake, too: cylindrical, white ones (4 at the big beach, 3 at the little beach) and reddish orangish pinkish ones, faded from years of sun and water (how many of these? I’ve never counted; perhaps I should sometime soon?). I’ve never really studied them underwater, but I imagine there are ropes that extend down to permanent anchors in the lake floor. The white and red/orange/pink buoys are in the same place every year and stay there from sometime in May to sometime in September — there doesn’t seem to be a fixed date when they are reinstalled or deinstalled each year.

Was it last year that I wrote/thought about the geometry of the lake? Yes — 5 august 2025.

from Swimming Chenango Lake/ Charles Tomlinson

There is a geometry of water, for this
Squares off the clouds’ redundancies
And sets them floating in a nether atmosphere
All angles and elongations: every tree
Appears a cypress as it stretches there
And every bush that shows the season,
A shaft of fire. It is a geometry and not
A fantasia of distorting forms, but each
Liquid variation answerable to the theme
It makes away from, plays before:
It is a consistency, the grain of the pulsating flow.

geometry: the shape and relative arrangement of the parts of something / relationship of points, lines, surfaces, angles


geometry and not
distorting form — angles and points and lines off due to water and unreliable vision

And now I’m thinking about the geometric ways in which I approach swimming in the lake: 

  • angles
  • trajectories
  • following a line, working to understand that relationship between points and surfaces (swimmers’ hands piercing the water and plotting my course with glitter)
  • lines and angles (wider angles to achieve distance from other swimmers, to find the buoy without seeing it)
  • lines and surfaces (try to follow a line that cuts across a wave/swelled surface instead of directly into it) 
  • the line of the rope tethered to the buoy and a weight, anchoring the buoy
  • the angle of that rope line
  • how the angle of the sun and the angle of the buoy determine how likely I am to see it and how much orange is reflected on the surface of the water
  • the angle of the lifeguards in relation to the angle of my projected path, how the difference between these angles affects how straight I swim
  • same with the angle of other swimmers’ paths
  • the sharp angles of prickly vines
  • parallel lines: water and airplane, kicking feet, body and bottom, body and big beach
  • perpendicular lines: water and light pole
  • buoys as balls, spheres, orbs
  • buoys as cylinders
  • buoys as equilateral triangles
  • angles of elbow, the arc of an elbow’s path from out of the water to back in
  • grid quadrants: 1. from big beach to little beach, 2. from little beach to middle green buoy, 3. from middle green to final green buoy, 4. from final green buoy to first orange buoy
  • rounding the buoy vs. cutting a sharp angle
  • coordinate points: hand/water, a swimmer/another swimmer’s toe, orange buoy/surface

I’d like to think more about the relationship between points — plotted through sparkle and hands piercing water / as different entities (object/subject) on a plane (surface of the water). Anne Carson discusses the anthropology of water (need to revisit this), what is the geometry of water (to me)?

Another thought: coordinates. I recall a line I “found” in a New Yorker essay about when the forms are too fuzzy, I escape into coordinates (see 26 may 2026).

june 9/HIKEBIKESWIM!

8:43 am — The first open swim of the year isn’t until the late afternoon, but I’m already excited. Currently I am sitting at my desk. Outside of my window, workers are cutting down the maple tree in our front yard. Someone is up in a bucket with a chainsaw sawing the thick branches then securing them with rope, someone else is on the ground to catch them. It’s a slow, noisy process — and strangely quiet, too. No loud THUMPS! from a branch hitting the ground. Noises: chainsaw, rumble of their big trucks, whine of a leaf blower, thud of the truck bed bottom as the cut limbs are discarded / Noises not heard: no heavy thumps, no shouting from workers to each other1, no beeps or alarms. It is now 9:02. I wonder how long it will take for them to cut it all down.

It’s sad to lose such an old tree — the only (or one of the only?) maples on the block. Everything else is linden/basswood or locust.

It’s also not sad. Mostly this tree has been a nuisance — leaf debris and whirly gigs clogging our gutters, thick tangles of roots taking over our sewer pipe. Every year Ron the Sewer Rat has had to chop those roots up so that our sewer wouldn’t back up.

In front of my window: the bucket is being raised again; it’s herky jerky yet smooth motion almost like a strange dance.

And it’s a relief. Ever since a huge branch fell from this tree last fall, I’ve been worried that another would fall and hurt someone or something. I’m glad we’re finally doing something about it.

currently: branches are gently falling in front of me, a few of them reflecting on the glass of a desktop boom! boom! — as they are tossed in the back of a truck / now it’s raining little twigs and bigger twigs and branches

10 Things About this Maple Tree

  1. Unsuccessfully attempting to weed-whack around it, giving up and hand-pulling the tall, flowering grass
  2. it is a wonderful example of a tree looking like a person, buried upside down, their head and shoulders in the dirt, while their torso and legs stick up in the air
  3. this winter/early spring, I could hear a woodpecker drumming on its dead wood — brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
  4. one summer a few years ago, FWA helped me to try to get rid of some ants “naturally” by pouring boiling water in their ant hill — not sure if it killed the ants, but it destroyed the grass around the base of the tree
  5. last summer, or the summer before, I noticed a new branch growing near the bedroom window and thought, we should really cut that while we can still can, then watching it grow bigger and bigger until it was too late
  6. recently noticed: a big eye in the middle of the trunk where a sizable branch used to be
  7. the leaves on this trees, which turn a golden yellow, are the last to fall in November
  8. all i can see of this tree from the two windows in front of my desk is the edge of its trunk
  9. a sudden thought: I hope we’re not disrupting too many critters’ homes — I don’t recall hearing or seeing any nests in the winter
  10. I won’t miss having to sweep up whirly gigs on the front sidewalk or pull them out of the table on the deck or the planter in the backyard

I’m sure the loss of this tree will have effects (negative and positive) that I can’t even imagine.

hike: 40 minutes
minnehaha off leash dog park
78 degrees

FWA and I cut our walk short today because he had to go to the bathroom. We only hiked to the BIG felled tree. The parking lot was more than half full, but it didn’t feel crowded. Everyone was evenly spaced out and doing their own thing, not clustered at the entrance or on the trail. For the first half of the hike, it was cool and calm, with a gentle breeze. No encounters with aggressive dogs or jerky humans. No dog names overheard. Several very FAST! dogs. So fast that they couldn’t be bothered to stop and play with Delia. One German Shepherd zoomed by so fast that I gasped — wow, that dog is fast!

FWA schooled me on a video game term2: de/buffing. Used in sentence: Walking through that second patch of sun, I was debuffed and never recovered.

de/buffed: (from Reddit because I can’t remember FWA’s exact definition) “Debuff is a game term that means something was hit with an attack that causes negative affects. In this case it “de-buffs” your agility. In games, buff means you strengthen; to improve.”

We talked about how Delia loves to plop down in the soft sand then imagined a t-shirt with the many versions of Delia chilling:

  • ploppin’
  • DOD (dead on deck) when Delia lays down on the deck , with her head landing last, looking like she’s passed out or dead on the deck
  • DOR — a DOD variation: dead on rug
  • wedged between two of Scott’s pillows on our bed
  • wedged between the edge of her bed and the removable cushion
  • sprawled out quietly on the rug, under the dining room table
  • resting misery face: in her bed, her head hanging over the edge, looking miserable

11:01 am Louder thumps as leafless chunks of branches fall / the front yard is strewn with little branch trees / the bucket, suspended halfway up the tree / a big claw reaching up to grab branches, lift them, then toss them in the back of a truck

11:04 am one worker in an orange vest threw up the rope to the guy in the bucket, now the rope is being tied to a branch — when and how will it fall? gently or roughly? with a loud Boom! or a soft thud? / a spray of saw dust is coming down / the branch gently floated down, attached to the rope — I saw it dangling in front of the window! — then boom boom — two quick, deep booms / So much debris in our front yard — very grateful I don’t have to pick it up!

11:10 am

view from my window / 11:10 am

11:14 am

The sound of a big branch falling, then its cylindrical reflection in the glass top on my desk. A very dead, tall and thin branch falling, reflected in the glass / a worker with a chainsaw, cutting a big branch off a bigger branch — grrrrrrrrrrr

1:07 pm

Sawing the trunk: sawdust sparks / dangling from a rope / the ground nears

swimming with Lauren Groff

Sure, I have many ideas and projects and plans for what I’d like to write/make/create this summer, but I also have a strong desire (need? ache?) to just be with the water and the swimming and the words (or lack of words). I want to return to Anne Carson and Alice Oswald and Lauren Groff and Tony Hoaglund and Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin and re-memorize their poetry. I also want to revisit past Sara’s thoughts about water and swimming and first days of open swim.

Speaking of Lauren Groff (which I did, above), I’m currently reading her short story collection, Brawler. Here’s a short video in which she talks about it and how swimming made her a writer:

In addition to finding this video, I also found this short blog entry about Groff’s love of swimming:

I was expecting to enjoy Lauren Groff’s collection of short stories Delicate Edible Birds, but I had no idea that here was another work of swim-lit. Like Groff’s first novel, the marvelous The Monsters of Templeton, these stories take place around bodies of water, and they’re also much concerned with swimming and swimmers. (I’ve not finished the book yet, but I’ve just started reading one story about a deep-sea diver). I realized that I’d read the story L. Debard and Aliette before, in the 2006 Atlantic Fiction Issue, and remember it quite vividly these years later– turned out I liked Lauren Groff before I even knew Lauren Groff. It’s an amazing story of poolside sensuality. The stories linked by these swimming references in a way that intrigues me, and certainly satisfies by latest literary fixation. How positively timely.

More Swim-lit

2:30 pm — workers are done, tree is gone, only a 4 ft stump that we have to figure out what to do with remains — hopefully a gnome home!

blue-green algae advisory

Open Swim is not cancelled, but there is a blue-green algae bloom in the water and a water advisory. The “official” Open Swim Club Facebook page has an announcement with the required warning, but the tone definitely seems to be: we have to warn you, but we think if you use caution, you’ll be fine. We’d like to say it’s fine and you should swim, but we can’t. I’m still going, but maybe I’ll only do one loop. And maybe I’ll try to swim a little slower and to look out for it. Can I see it? Not easily.

bike: 8 miles
lake nokomis and back
85 degrees

Biking to the lake for open swim was great. Warm, but not too crowded and I was able to pass someone without any stress. We didn’t bike fast, but it didn’t feel slow and it’s always safer to bike slow when you can’t focus fast. The bike ride back was harder, with too much wind and clueless walkers walking in the middle of the bike path. Scott rang his “passive agressive bell” (his name for it) half a dozen times and one woman didn’t even notice.

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis
87 degrees

A great first swim. I couldn’t see much, and I didn’t care, my shoulders and brain still swam me straight to the buoys. There were some clueless swan boats and too many vines — it’s crazy how thick they are near the start of the swim! — but they didn’t bother me. I was happy to be swimming and felt strong.

It’s too late and I need to eat, so no more writing about the lake tonight. Tomorrow if I can remember anything, I’ll add some more.

10 Water Things (the morning after)

  1. murky water, but enough clarity for me to be able to see my hand and watch and . . .
  2. bubbles! my bubble friends are back — clear little orbs stirred up as my hands entered the water
  3. a scratchy-squeaky noise as I neared another swimmer — was it their wetsuit? a cracking of a joint or a bone or?
  4. vines 1: started out by swimming straight into a knot of milfoil — when I tried to do a full stroke green strings wrapped around my wrist — join us down below, they seemed to be whispering
  5. vines 2: at the end of the second loop, near the white buoys, ghostly vines emerging from below, not yet close enough to touch
  6. vines 3: rounding the far white buoy, getting stuck in another tangle of milfoil — as I said to another swimmer a few minutes later, I’m a very strong swimmer and those vines made me nervous!
  7. finding one distinctive break in the green in an otherwise generic tree line to use to sight the far green buoy
  8. this year, there are 2 orange buoys and 3 green ones
  9. noticing the pale rope that tethers the buoy to the lake floor as I swam over it
  10. suddenly noticing something in front of me, stopping and hearing a person in a kayak call out, kayak — I think it was a lifeguard, but it could have just been a clueless kayaker crossing the swim course
  1. Mentioned how quiet the workers are to Scott. He found out why when he talked to them: they have headsets. Nice! ↩︎
  2. On our bike ride to the lake I quizzed Scott on this term. He had heard it but couldn’t remember what it was. He said it’s primarily used in first-person shooter games, which he doesn’t play. ↩︎

june 8/RUN

3.15 miles
locks and dam turn around
70 degrees
humidity: 88% / dew point: 67

Sticky. Moist. Steamy. Wet. Not raining, but water water everywhere. It felt cool on my fingers and face when I brushed against a bush or when the wind shook the leaves.

Sometimes I felt great, sometimes I didn’t. I was wearing my old black Sauconys because it was so wet and they made my toe hurt for the last mile. My heart rate was higher too. I’ve determined (decided?) that my heat tolerance has decreased because of perimenopause. I’m having some hot flashes and struggling to run/move/stand/be in the heat. I’m thinking of asking for Hormone Replacement Therapy.

As I ran, I recited Wallace Steven’s poem, “Tattoo.” The light is like a spider./ It crawls over the water./It crawls over the edges of the snow./ It crawls under your eyelids/And spreads its webs there. I love this idea of the light like a spider spinning its webs under your eyelids. I also like that the first thing Stevens’ spider-light does is crawl over the water — a good connection to my water season, which starts tomorrow! Open swim!

10 Things

  1. a biker blasting music from speakers — country music (I think) — before I could hear much of it, it was distorted by the Doppler effect
  2. the brown sign that reads, caution, coyote den, is still there — are the coyotes?
  3. bright headlights piercing through the dark green and gray
  4. the sewer pipe near 42nd was gushing
  5. a long line of cars on the road
  6. a string of bikers on the path
  7. a few puddles
  8. the wind picked up, the trees shifted, making me wonder if it started raining agin
  9. a group of kids laughing somewhere in the distance, approaching
  10. 2 lime scooter parked on the edge of trail — both times I neared them, I thought they were people

lines / strings / webs / spiders

a spider moment: As I was about to take a shower, I noticed spider traveling down the tiles. I didn’t want to kill it, or douse it with water, so I turned on the water with the spray pointed away from the tiles and asked the spider to leave. They did — not because of the words, but because of the pressure/feeling of the water.

how long do spiders live? Although most spiders live for at most two years, tarantulas and other mygalomorph spiders can live for over 20 years. (source)

how long have modern spiders existed? The main groups of modern spiders, Mygalomorphae and Araneomorphae, first appear in the Triassic well before 200 million years ago. (source)

orb orb (spiral) webs, orb as eye, orbiting, encircling/enclosing, a spherical body

Alice Oswald, a spider reference in Nobody

A goddess or fog-shape in full wedding dress
sulks in that loneliness what a winter creature
whose lover loathes the everlasting clouds of her
and sits in tears staring at the pleasure-crinkled sea
but she as if a dash of hope
discoloured her sight stands waiting
the way a spider when it wishes to travel
simply lets out a silken

aerial

electrostatically alert through every hair
to the least shift of the atmosphere
at last it lifts on tiptoe and lovely to behold
like a bare twig it begins to blow
wherever the wind will take it but the wind
is the most distracted messenger I know

After citing this, Kit Fan writes:

The new lines at the end of the page carry a rhyme scheme (aabcbc) rare in Nobody and connect the goddess (the owl-eyed Athena who is Odysseus’s protector in The Odyssey?) with the precise, calculated work of a spider, breathing a different kind of life into the “discoloured” world without the watercolors. The two versions of Nobody create a counter-parallel universe for Oswald’s reimagination of The Odyssey, revisualizing the epic as a collage made out of imagist fragments or glimpses of “water-stories,” as the jacket to the UK version calls them. The two texts speak to each other like twins staring at themselves in the mirror, registering uncanny similarities and differences.

Water Stories

The precise calculated work of a spider. Tomorrow, I want to write a little more about the making of a web and the use of spun silk to travel. I also want to return to Alice Oswald and reread The Odyssey again. I love the Wilson translation! I just looked it up and the movie coming out next month is based on this translation. Excellent!

june 6/RUN

8 miles
lake nokomis and back
68 degrees
humidity: 83% / dew point: 60

So hot! I had planned to bring my water but at the last minute, I didn’t. I should have. At the halfway point, my heart rate was high for such an easy pace. Had to take several walk breaks. I really struggle to run in the heat.

Some things to remember for future runs: run earlier, bring water, drink water the night before, come prepared with poetry distractions (e.g.: recite poems in head).

Scott and I realized that doing our long runs together is not a good idea. We have different strategies and different weaknesses that need to be addressed. So instead, we’ll plan to run our middle distance weekly run together.

What did we talk about? Not much; we were too hot and uncomfortable running. Just remembered something as I wrote “many” in number 5 of my10 things. We discussed the range of descriptive words: a pair, a few, some, several, lots, many, most, all. I talked about how I use lots too often and that it sounds clunky. We also talked about bringing the kids to the playground at Lake Nokomis, especially to the big dinosaur, and losing touch with some old friends.

10 Things

  1. a woman with a hose, watering some flowers in her front yard. as we ran by, she called out: free shower?
  2. a loud hose hissing nearby
  3. a lively game on the pickle ball court, with an enthusiastic player cheering loudly for someone
  4. everything completely still, heavy — Scott pointed out how the tops of the trees weren’t moving at all
  5. blue water with many sparkles
  6. blue-green algae advisory at the beach, 2 kids in the water
  7. running over the bridge, looking down and seeing the glowing green water — yuck!
  8. passing another runner with a dog — good morning! / morning!
  9. at the Lake Nokomis playground, running by a log with rows of evenly cut holes — what is this for? how do kids play with it?
  10. the booming voice of an announcer at the big beach: a charity event for lymphoma

Not the best run, but I’m choosing to think of it as a reminder to be more deliberate and disciplined in my training.

webs

I decided to make a spider web on a piece of cardboard. Some improvement is needed, but I’m pleased with it as my first attempt. Will I do anything with this? Unsure, but it keeps coming up, so I’m seeing where it leads.

my first attempt at a web, using light gray-blueish yarn

june 5/HIKEBIKE

50 minutes
minnehaha off leash dog park
71 degrees
humidity: 72%

Steamy this morning at the dog park. Crowded at the entrance too. I started out skittish, reacting every time a big dog passed by. Something in my body worried that they would slam into me. Thankfully my body chilled out by the end. It rained last night so everything looked greener and the ground was softer.

FWA talked about Adventure Time and how Princess Bubblegum was high functioning autistic and her brother Neddy (Neddie?) was low functioning. Something inspired that discussion but I can’t remember what it was.1 I talked about how great it was to have representations of neurodivergent people that didn’t call attention to them as neurodivergent, that just presented them as part of the range of characters you could have in a show. I said something in a voice that reminded me of my sister Marji and then told FWA about how she gave a talk about cyclones wearing a cyclone costume. So Marji, so awesome. I suggested that she could blow up on TikTok with something like that. Then FWA described a TikTok he recently watched in which a teacher talked about how there is a shift away from kids worrying about being too cringe or not cool enough. This led to a discussion of bullies and how they only have power when people are afraid of them and of not being cool. FWA talked about how the show, The Boys, criticizes bullies and people who use power to try to control others. As we ascended through the stifling woods near the fence, FWA described how the character Homelander, a big bully, is defeated by the other characters. Another great, meandering conversation. I love these!

dog name: Fox / Foxy — a biggish-dog whose exuberance was a little too much for Delia.

people to put on my “shit together” (aka Aristotelean excellence) list: Foxy’s humans immediately called to Foxy and asked if our dog was okay. Then they made sure that Foxy left Delia alone and rerouted them to the river. FWA and I discussed our appreciation of how they handled the situation by asking if Delia was okay instead of assuming she wasn’t because she was too small and delicate (which usually happens when people notice Delia playing with bigger dogs).

other dogs:

Two beautiful, St. Benard-esque (were they St. Bernards? — I’m not sure) running down the hill at a gentle pace. Their owner, who was wearing a BRIGHT orange shirt, called out, okay babies, let’s go. (he said babies with affection, not to tease or demean them).

A loping, awkward, enthusiastic golden retriever running ahead of us, then behind us, then ahead of us again. This dog was sweet and delightful, but also made me nervous as I waited for them to run into me

10 Things

  1. as FWA was driving us to the dog park, he pointed out a coyote running through the grass between river road and Lena Smith — I couldn’t see it
  2. plop! crash! heard, not seen — I’m assuming it was a dog in the water
  3. Delia running by us, fast, her feet thundering enough to prompt me to call her thundercat — later I amended it to Thunderdog: a new nickname!
  4. a strange, almost metallic sounding, thump thump thump — FWA guessed, a bird or a squirrel
  5. a pileated woodpecker, laughing
  6. even more beach at the tip of the trail — the river is so low!
  7. everything even more green than on Monday — branches reaching far over the fence
  8. deep, soft, damp sand — so difficult to climb that FWA calls it his least favorite part of the trail
  9. very few bugs — were they not there, or was it the bug spray we put on?
  10. the pungent smell of poop right after we crossed the road — did I step in some? no, I was passing the trashcan where someone must have thrown away a poop bag. Yuck!
  1. About 30 minutes later: I remembered what we had been discussing. FWA had remarked on how green everything was and how the plants seemed to be talking over. I mentioned Richard Powers’ Overstory and the interview I heard with them where he said, the trees have been around for much longer than us, they will survive our current climate crisis. Will we? All of this led FWA to talk about Adventure Time and how Neddie was scared of everything and was almost always suckled to a tree.He actually created Candy Kingdom ↩︎

webs, nets, threads, grids

Today, I’m accepting the invitation from the spider who crawled near my desk yesterday. I decided to google, “how to make a spider web.” Have I mentioned that I am not crafty or skilled with my hands? Because of this, I need the dumb dumb baby version of tutorials (here, dumb dumb baby = basic and without assuming any level of skill) The phrase might sound rude, but I use it with affection. I first used it with my band friend as we joked about how the second clarinet part — the part we play — is the least interesting and challenging of parts. We rarely get solos or stand out at all).

Here’s a video I found that seems useful. Am I crafy enough to create it? I’m not convinced:

Something obvious that I didn’t consider before: I could use tape for the ends of the web instead of pins. I might try that, but I also might just try creating a web on another piece of cork board not mounted on the wall. This tutorial is targeted at people making their own Halloween decorations. I could imagine putting one of these on the inside glass of our front door.

Reading up on spider webs, a (duh) realization: the silk spiders use to make their webs can come in different colors, including gold, but often they are white not black. I suppose black is the common color in crafty versions and images because of the contrast. I’d like to use white in some of my creations. It might not be as visually interesting immediately, but I think it could distort the text/words in a way that more accurately depicted how words look to me. Cool. I also think I’d like to use thread instead of yarn.

I like using this thread to make visible/trace the mechanics of sight. Here I’m returning to thinking about the light that travels over objects and into our eyes as spiders or insects or Dante’s spiriti visivi or fish. Another poem from my recently published chapbook, Inklings:

Fish 1 / Sara Lynne Puotinen

big beach

On the edge near shore
silver spirits scatter
at my feet to whisper
of what waits beyond
in deeper water.

I looked up Dante, vision, spiriti visivi and found this article: Visionary Science in Purgatorio XVII and Paradiso XXX. I’ll have to read/skim it later!

what spiders webs are for:

  • catching and trapping prey (source)
  • hearing — as extended auditory sensors (source)
  • traveling — to catch and sail on the wind to another location (source)
  • to save cute pigs (source)

random spider web reference I just heard a few days ago while moving the backyard:

itsy bitsy stripper

bike: 5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
80 degrees

A new summer tradition: late Friday afternoon (around 4:30), Scott and I bike to the falls and have a few beers while sitting outside at Sea Salt. This is our 3rd or 4th Friday in a row. 2 of the times, RJP has joined us. I love that I can still bike. I love that RJP joins us — today, I hiked with her: down the steps and at the base of the falls. So many dogs, so many interesting people!

june 4/MAKE

holes and webs and strings and grids

Finishing up this morning on my 4th hole poem, I was committed to setting this series aside for a few months. But as I made my final-ish bloom by pinning shreds of the essay, something kept crawling by me. Back and forth and back and forth, on the edge of the desk. I pushed my stool away from the table, giving this something room to move without needing to crawl on me. An ant? A tick? I watched as it suddenly dangled before me on a thread. A spider! My first thought was, go away!, but later as I told FWA about the encounter, I thought about it differently: what if this spider was communicating with me — Sara! Don’t forget about me. Where are the spider webs you were planning to weave over the words of your poems? Of course I could interpret what was happening as an indifferent spider just doing spider things (what are spider things?), but I could also interpret it like I did those rabbits back in February: an invitation to keep exploring this project in new ways.

a flash — the webs return me to thinking about spiriti visivi and Dante and Wallace Stevens’ light as spiders spreading its webs over our eyeballs and invisible strings in the water that hold us like nets, then light as an insect, then back to my visual poem with specimen boards.

The trick: to tie it in with water, which isn’t a difficult trick, I think. Something about invisible forces/grids/strings/nets that hold us, where holding = tethering, connecting, trapping, restraining and containing.

another flash: Looking at my hole 3, I’m thinking about how the lines shooting out from the center of each verse, are offering a visible trace of the movement of an eye. Cool. I want to play with this idea some more — of tracking and embodying that movement of an eye receiving (capturing?) light and reading words.

Fall through the hole eyes can’t see, land in a logic of blur and almost

other random thoughts with some connection to accepting invitations

*at least to me

1 — On Floundering / Poetry Off the Shelf episode, Don’t Make Any Noise

I think that I was very fortunate in an early career where I did well.
But I wish I believed in myself enough to have allowed myself to financially flounder for a couple of years, instead of doing well. Because I now see, oh, life is a marathon, not a sprint. I would have gotten there.

Yeah. And what would you have done in the floundering? What is something that you’re like, oh, I might have gotten this or that out of it?
Because I think a lot of people who are young and who are currently floundering feel like it will never work out. Right? But I encourage the flounder. First of all, it’s more likely one is going to flounder right now because there are not so many defined career paths, unemployment is impossible. A college degree buys you nothing.
A grad degree buys you maybe something, maybe not. And debt is so high. I think floundering, while the young people I know are incredibly anxious and justifiably so, with my retrospect, I think it’s the best thing you can do.

Yes. I know because I think it also flies in the face of this sort of productivity “narrative, you know, like everything has to yield, like every extracurricular has to yield, you know, your degree has to yield, like, oh my god. And so I do like that you’re like in defense of floundering.
I am, I hope one day you will write a book.
In defense of floundering.”

Don’t Make Any Noise

2 — On keeping that window open / Matt Damon on Conan Needs a Friend

 Ben said this great thing, which was, “Judge me for how good my good ideas are, not how bad my bad ideas are.” And and it was it’s a very profound thing for a 20-year-old to say. um because he recognized that we needed the freedom to kind of barf out all those ideas you know and so often as you know when you’re writing it’s not you write down the bad idea because it’s iterating, you know it that can build into a good idea right and so he was basically giving both of us the permission to just keep the window as wide open as we could.

Conan needs a friend, Matt Damon

I think there was something else I wanted to add here, perhaps from Richard Powers’ archival interview for Between the Covers, but I can’t remember now.

june 3/RUN

4.5 miles
the monument and back
65 degrees

Warm and windy. So windy that I had to take my cap off as I crossed the lake street bridge. The river looked low. I think I saw a long sandbar near the east shore. My feet were still a little sore, but mostly felt okay. Chanted in triple berries for the first 2 miles. Listened to my bunnies and rabbits playlist for the last mile.

11 Things

  1. no rowing shells on the water, but the big white motor boat that follows alongside the rowers was out there, near the dock at the rowing club
  2. workers on the other side of the lake street bridge, fixing something and making a lot of noise doing it
  3. glittering waves close to the easi bank
  4. shadow falls was falling vigorously
  5. running up from the under the bridge on the st. paul side, looking below at the water, envious of my shadow in the water
  6. on the ledge of the overlook at the monument: a insulated coffee mug, white
  7. below the overlook, a person with a dog
  8. tea kettle tea kettle or cheeseburger cheeseburger — a carolina wren somewhere
  9. a person wearing something bright orange, sitting with their bike near the upper entrance to shadow falls
  10. kids being dropped off at the daycare at the church, some by car, one by bike
  11. a handmade wood sign declaring ICE OUT in a neighbor’s front yard on the next block

holes

Time to wrap up this hole project for a few months. I have 4 visual poems that I think are . . . not finished but . . . ready to be considered done. Hole 1, Hole 3, Hole 5a, and Hole 5c. I can imagine returning to them in the fall and trying new (more advanced?) techniques with thread and grids and layers — not just 2D, but 3D.

Well, I would have finished all of the hole poems if a HUGE limb hadn’t fallen right outside my window. We (Scott, FWA, and I) had to drop everything and remove the tree, which took almost 2 hours. Scott happened to be working on a YouTube video as it happened and got a recording of it falling. Yikes!

june 2/WALK

52 minutes
minnehaha off leash dog park
73 degrees

Another hike with Delia the dog and FWA. Today, a few bugs, at least one bite on my neck. Better remember the bug spray next time. It felt cool and green in the forest, too hot and bright and exposed by the water. We took the treacherous steps today instead of the trail beside the fence line. Delia always wants to go this way, but we don’t because of the steep steps and the crowds. I think FWA picked it because someone ahead of us had gone the way we like to go.

dog names: Ernie — FWA thought it might have been Bernie. I’m team Ernie. / Phineas — my thought: someone who loves/loved Phineas and Ferb named this dog.

We talked about bugs and how we should bring bug spray next time, which led me to mention the book by Sue Somebody (Hubbell — I had to look it up; I read the book more than 20 years ago!) about moving to the foothills of the Appalachians to tend bees. I recall her writing about the terrible bugs — chiggers, I think — that took her 3 summers to get used to. FWA mentioned how chiggers burrow into your skin and deposit larvae —

Writing this now, I looked at that up to verify and found this:

Contrary to popular belief, chiggers do not burrow into the skin or suck blood. Using large claws located near their mouths, chigger larvae quickly attach to any exposed skin that contacts infested grass or soil in vegetated areas. The larvae then cut the skin with blade-like mouthparts called chelicerae and inject an enzyme into the cut that digests the skin at the bite site. This makes the cells around the bite site harden into a “drinking straw”, which the chigger uses to suck up the liquefied tissue. Chigger larvae will feed for several hours and then drop off the host to find a sheltered place to digest the meal. The bite site stays irritated by the digestive enzymes long after the chigger finishes feeding and detaches​.

source

Gross!

Anyway, FWA’s mention of the chiggers burrowing into the skin, inspired me to talk about how we are only 43% us and 57% bacterium and other things. I wrote a poem about it last year, “Sara, an Ecosystem.”1 I asked to FWA: Most (all?) of us understand ourselves to be individuals, separate from the world. How much of this erroneous belief is hard-wired, with our brain tricking us to believe (in) this, and how much is socialization? FWA answered: it’s both. Then he started talking about mitochondria and a video game in which they all rebel against the humans that house them and everyone starts melting and shifting shapes. Very cool.

When we weren’t talking, which was a lot of the time, we were both delighting in Delia’s joy and she ran through the woods, leaping over logs and trying to play with dogs that were much bigger than her.

  1. Found the poem. I like this one. I think I’ll submit it to some more journals. I’m pretty sure I submitted it to a few places last fall. ↩︎

june 1

4 miles
ford overlook, east river
64 degrees
humidity: 84%

Ran with Scott on his 15th run-a-versary. (Mine is tomorrow.) We talked about his gig two nights ago — the jazz combo that he plays bass in, when we started running, and whether or not I got covid a few months ago, which would explain some of my strange ailments + uneven test results. We were supposed to run 8 miles today but even before the run started, we reduced that amount. I wore my new Saucony Cohesions: navy blue with lavender lining and soles. They felt better, but not amazing. I realized that I need to retrain my stride so I don’t run on my toes. Did I start running on my toes more when I switched to Brooks? Possibly.

Writing this entry several hours later, my feet feel pretty good, so I think the switch to the new shoes might help my feet recover better.

It rained off and on yesterday and most of last night; everything was damp today: the sidewalk, the overgrown limbs with their new leaves, my face. The air was still and the surface of the river was flat and motionless. We heard a strange sound near some trees. We think it was a bird, but right before we passed it later in the run, Scott read a handmade brown sign that said, Warning. Coyote den nearby, and we wondered if a coyote had made the loud alarm-like sound we had heard earlier.

rabbit hole

In February, I studies rabbits and bunnies and rabbit holes. This afternoon, I was listening to Lily Allen’s latest album, West End Girl, and I heard these lyrics at the begging of the last song, “Let You W/in”:

I’ve become invisible, stuck here in my palace
I’m so fucking miserable in my rabbit hole, yeah, I’m Alice
And I’m expected to be nice picking up the pieces
What is it you sacrifice? I’m protecting you from your secrets

Does rabbit hole work here as anything other than a way to use Alice to rhyme with palace? I’m not sure. Regardless, I really like this album. Speaking of rabbit holes, I’ve written about how Heather Cox Richardson loves to use the expression in her daily YouTube chats — that’s a rabbit hole I don’t have time for right now. Last week, she said it again and added, I should write books about all of the rabbit holes I’m mentioning. From the 1950s Disney animated Alice, rabbit hole seems to mean daydreaming or reverie or being led astray — or too deep in — by one’s curiosity. HCR seems to be referring to actual rabbit holes, with their labyrinth of twisty tunnels. Of course, she’s also using it in the way that it is popularly used now: getting lost in a topic, ending up somewhere strange and unexpected.

may 30/RUN

3.7 miles
bottom of locks and dam
71 degrees

Warm, sunny. Not too bad in the shade. Ran down to the entrance of the locks and dam no. 1, turned around, stopped to walk for a few minutes, put in my “Moment” playlist, then started running again, When I got to “Lose Yourself,” I did a few strides. Felt a few brief flashes of a runner’s high.

10 Things

  1. bawk bawk cockadoodle doo! heard from far away, slowly approaching — what is that? A bike with an open bike trailer passed by, 2 kids in the back pretending to be a chicken and a rooster
  2. no cars on the way down to the locks and dam, only one car parked at the bottom
  3. some voices above me, on the trail going up to Wabun or on the ford bridge
  4. an orange water cooler with a sing, “Mill City Running” near the bench above the edge of the world
  5. empty benches — maybe one or two occupied
  6. a biker passing, blasting techno music — even if there had been a doppler effect on the music how would you be able to tell?
  7. swallowed a bug — forgot about it until an hour later when I had a few coughing bouts — Bug! I called out, to no one
  8. the rush of leaves through the trees sounding like falling water
  9. stopping at a water fountain near the end of my run, waiting for another runner to finish, soaking my hat — I have no memory of what it felt like to put the wet hat on. Did it drip down my face? Did it feel cool? I have no idea
  10. Walking back, noticing a grid on the lattice of a neighbor’s fence — at first I thought, squares, then lines

I started thinking about grids and lines and my interest in them, which led to thinking about how open swim involves some lines, or maybe not lines but trajectories — from buoy to buoy to buoy, and it also has an imaginary grid and points on that grid. But, open swim also has no lane lines. You are tethered/connected to the world and others in a different logic. I’ve already written about this in a few different ways, including in this poem, from my recently published chapbook, Inklings:

My geometry

of open swimming:
an eye, lake water.
Both of us now grids
with one dot in our
centers — a cone cell
that works, a buoy
that beacons. A line
drawn between passes
through vacant lots and
murky seas as it
tethers us to each
other — swimmer and
vision, buoy and
body, to sight and
to rarely see.

may 29/WALK

35 minutes
minnehaha off leash dog park
75 degrees

A shorter walk because of the heat and the aggressive energy from other dogs. Lots of very fast running and circling and barking. Two dogs ran by me so close, I could feel their wind on my legs. As we walked, we could hear a chorus of LOUD barks up ahead — one so loud that it was echoing.

dog name: Chief / a big German Shepherd / on a leash, tightly controlled by his owner. Of course Delia teased the dog before we had a chance to stop her. The owner held on tight and managed to keep the dog under control — no chief, no! I wondered to FWA if they had recently adopted an abused dog who needed a lot of help getting socialized to other dogs.

The sand in the floodplain was deep and soft. I could feel it seeping into my sandals. It was cool, which was nice until it got stuck and collected under my covered toes. These are not the shoes to wear here! I declared to FWA. Why did I buy hiking sandals with a closed toe? I remember: they were half off.

Before Chief shifted the energy, FWA was giving a wonderful description of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid 4 animated movie. He’s so skilled at telling stories and conveying the energy of the characters. My favorite part: when he acted out the voice of one of the characters who broke their compass. That’s it. We’re lost.

Even though she was tired and hot, having plopped down in the sand at least once, when Delia saw some bigger dogs up ahead running in circles around a tree and through some grass, she tried to join in. She wasn’t fast enough. When she tried harder, they ignored her. Oh Delia, you’re out of your league. Finally, she gave up.

moment of joy: a tall Dad holding the hand of a very little girl (2 or 3?) as she looked up at him smiling or giggling and hiked down the hill gracefully.

11 Unhinged Energy Things

  1. the moment Chief’s owners noticed us up ahead and prepared themselves for the encounter — the woman took a deep breath and said, it will be okay or get ready or we can do this
  2. that sand! — so soft and deep and slippery — the coolness of it as it poured into my sandal
  3. kerplunk! crash! a very large something thrashing through the water — a big dog, I thought — no, 2 or 3 big dogs
  4. an owner calling to a dog (I can’t remember the dogs name) and the dog running as fast as I’ve ever seen a dog run. Wow!
  5. two big dogs running beside then past me — any closer and they would have taken me out
  6. BARK! BARK! yip yip bark bark ruff ruff — the cacophony of dogs up ahead, playing or fighting or who knows what at the beach at the end of the trail
  7. a strange and loud knocking or clanking sound up above us, in the tree
  8. dog after dog after big dog, flashing past, some barking, some silent — somehow the silent ones felt even more unnerving
  9. dumping sand out of my sandals near the car, feeling something strange and sticky on the bottom of my foot that wouldn’t come off — a bug?! — a slight panic and a frantic waving of my foot– realizing minutes later that I had put a bandaid on last night
  10. FWA driving us back on the river road — a car that was going 12 mph in a 20 mph zone that hardly anyone ever obeys — average speed for most cars here = 30 mph — a growing back-up of cars behind it — FWA turning off of the road at the first available chance with a flourish and declaring, someone needs their license taken away!
  11. encountering a truck on a narrow city street, noticing a low-to-the-ground recumbent bike drafting off it then trying to pass it while the truck was still moving — FWA was so distracted that he pulled out in front of another truck

may 28/RUN

4.25 miles
falls and back
61 degrees

Cooler this morning, earlier too. My goal was to run at 7. My watch says I started the run at 7:07, which means I left the house around 7. Nice. Wore my old (2021, I think) Sauconys that I stopped wearing because they made by big left toe hurt. At mile 4, my toe started hurting again. Bummer. Back to Brooks again or buying a new pair of cheaper Sauconys.

Ran to the falls without headphones, listening to the cars and the geese returning north. Ran back listening to my “Bunnies and Rabbits” playlist. Bad Bunny’s “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” and The Jazz Crusader’s “Young Rabbits” helped me to pick up the pace. I need to create a playlist for pace — maybe mix it in with my beat/metronome experiment: 1 mile with no music or beat / 1 mile with metronome at 172-180 / 1 mile with music.

10 Things

  1. honk honk honk honk geese returning
  2. sparkling water
  3. soft shadows
  4. a runner behind, breathing heavily, closing in, then disappearing — where did they go?
  5. white foam (the falls)
  6. a roller skier — or was it a roller blader?
  7. tufts of symmetrically place ornamental grass mixed with purple blooms near “The Song of Hiawatha”
  8. a woman in a bright yellow windbreaker passing me on a bike, calling out morning!
  9. Mr. Morning! — morning! / good morning!
  10. ending at the big rock that looks like a chair, stepping on it to look down at the oak savanna: green green green

a return

This winter, I replaced many of my regular habits with new ones: (almost) no alcohol; waiting an hour to drink coffee in the morning; more protein, fiber, and iron; instead of sitting at the dining room table for 1+ hours when I woke up reading poems-of-the-day, I watched a brief video then started work on my Holes project; a consistent bedtime routine — ready at 10, asleep by 10:30. I also transformed my workspace. I added a huge cork board to one wall. It’s been fun to mix it up and try new things. I’d like to continue with many of these new things, and I also want to return to a few I’ve shifted away from, especially reading / studying / memorizing other people’s poetry.

In writing this log entry, I decided to visit my favorite poetry sites — poets.org; poetryfoundation, poets.com. On Poetry Foundation I discovered a wonderful podcast series, Wake, Butterfly:

Matsuo Bashō wrote:

Wake, butterfly— 
it’s late, we’ve miles 
to go together.

Poetry magazine presents Wake, Butterfly, a series of intimate portraits that invite listeners to keep creating. 

The final installment, which is the first I’ve encountered and will listen to, is with Marie Howe, one of my favorite poets! I think I’ll listen to it on the deck.

an hour or so later: I listened to it as I mowed the back yard. Usually I listen to the Bob’s Burgers Soundtrack (and I did today, too, after the 15 minute podcast ended). I’ve also listened to podcasts with Joy Harjo and Vs. with Danez Smith and Franny Choi, and several Agatha Christie books.

I love Marie Howe’s voice. Two times I recall hearing it before: when she was interviewed for On Being 6 or 7 years ago (at least) and in her brief discussion and recitation of her poem-in-progress, “Singularity.” In this podcast, she describes living with a big Irish Catholic family and the stories they would tell. She talks about war (WWII and Vietnam) and how she found poetry. Then she offers this:

I think the poem uses our stuff, you know, like it uses the details of my life, but the details are not important. The details are the cup … That hold something you can’t quite see, but you can feel, I hope. Because when it works, I feel something I can’t see. When I was writing a book called What the Living Do, it wasn’t done yet and I didn’t know how it wasn’t done. It had enough pages, it had an arc, I guess. But I was thinking about when I was in high school and. I was living up in the attic of our house with my brother. My brother lived in one room and I lived in another, and my dad would come up there when he was drunk and, um, pester me for hours—the way a drunk person does, wanting attention, wanting something, and it was very difficult. That’s one of the stories in my heart about my younger life, and I thought, “OK, what else is also true about that story?” And I remember actually standing up from my desk in New York here, and turning around, turning my body around 180 degrees and saying, “What else is true?” And I saw my brother Tom, who would come into the room and try to get my dad out, or would come into the room after my dad had left, and I wanted to praise him. So I want to offer you this invitation. Consider one of the stories of your life that feels fixed, and allow yourself to gaze around that story—quite physically—around the room of it or the time of it and to find something else in that story, even if the story is a painful one, to find something else in that story that’s praisable.

Marie Howe in Wake, Butterfly

Consider one of the stories of your life that feels fixed, and allow yourself to gaze around that story—quite physically—around the room of it or the time of it and to find something else in that story, even if the story is a painful one, to find something else in that story that’s praisable.

I love this idea of taking a fixed story and finding something else in that story to praise. I think I need to sit with this one for a few hours.

Before then, this:

The Maples/ Marie Howe

I ask the stand of maples behind the house,

How should I live my life?

They said, shh shh shh . . .

How should I live, I asked, and the leaves seemed to ripple and gleam.

A bird called from a branch in its own tongue,

And from a branch, across the yard, another bird answered.

A squirrel scrambled up a trunk

then along the length of a branch.

Stand still, I thought,

See how long you can bear that.

Try to stand still, if only for a few moments,

drinking light breathing.

—

This standing still — seeing how long I can bear it — seems like a great thing to do everyday. As part of this: explore different ways to be still. What is it to be still?

The beginning of this poem reminds me of a Mary Oliver poem that I’ve posted on this log several years ago (2 july 2020):

I Go Down To The Shore/ Mary Oliver

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out, 
and I say, oh, I am miserable, 
what shall–
what should I do? And the seas says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

may 27/BIKE!

8.5 miles
lake nokomis and back
80 degrees

My first bike of the season. Every spring since I learned I was losing my central vision, I’m uncertain about my biking. Will I still be able to see? Will it be too scary? Has my vision declined too much (what is too much?)? Today, it was fine. I think that’s mostly because I’ve memorized the path and learned to navigate with less sight. Plus, I don’t try to go too fast (or fast at all, really). What a gift to have another summer to bike to the lake or to downtown or the library or wherever I want!

I brought my goggles and swim cap and a nose plug, but when my goggles leaked and the water was a bit scummy and I forgot to put on my nose plug, I decided not to swim any loops. Instead, I just waded out to water past my shoulders and enjoyed how the water cooled me down. Surprisingly, it wasn’t too cold. Maybe I’ll go swimming tomorrow?

10 Water Things

  1. sparkle friends! close-up, they looked like silvery glitter, with a broader view like some sort of green-ish scum
  2. a very bright blue, cloudless sky
  3. someone swimming freestyle just past the edge of the buoys
  4. little minnows near my feet
  5. just outside of the pink buoys the lake floor was slimy and soft — some sort of vegetation
  6. 3 teen girls, locking their bikes up, then complimenting each other on their nails
  7. 2 young boys, locking their bikes up, one lamenting to the other, I should have brought my wallet for ice cream!
  8. sitting on a bench facing the water, behind me, 2 bikers talking to each other as they biked — biker one: I didn’t mind walking in the rain, but I was cold. biker two: you were old? biker one: no, I was COLD! biker two: I thought you said old! biker one: Yes, I’m 80 years old!
  9. rustling on the edge of water, under a tree, hidden — a duck? a person? something/someone else?
  10. drifting sounds: a baby crying, a bike chain rattling, a dog collar clanging softly, giggles, 2 adults and a kid talking about ice cream

It was wonderful, and wonderfully cool, to sit on the bench facing the water in the shade. Every year I tell myself that I should spend more time at the lake, and I do spend a lot of time there, swimming loops at open swim, but I could spend even more time. I want this year to be the year that spend the most time that I ever have! Future Sara, let me know how it works out!

hole 6

I printed out the four panels from essay 6, What to Make of the Mother Who Made You, taped it up, and cut a hole in the center. Then I mapped my words with pins on my cork board. First I wound string around the pins, next: embroidery thread.

hole 6

I like bits of it, but it doesn’t work. Not yet. I’m thinking this one might need to wait until the fall. I think it’s time to finish the 3 or 4 of these that I’m satisfied with and temporarily wrap this project up. It’s time for swimming and water and (possibly) starting a YouTube channel to promote my first chapbook, Inklings.

may 26/RUNHIKE

3.1 miles
trestle turn around
69 degrees
humidity: 74%

The earliest run I’ve done in some time — 7:30, which is not that early. I liked running earlier. Next time, I’d like to run by 7. Greeted Mr. Morning! for the first time in months. All year, I’ve been running later in the morning or early in the afternoon, so I’ve missed seeing all of the regulars.

The other day I remembered that I had a pair of Saucony Cohesions that I’ve only wore a handful of times because they made one of my toes hurt. I wondered if they would work better (that is, hurt less) than my Brooks’ Ghosts. Yes! Ever since I wore an old pair of Saucony’s to mow the lawn, I’ve been thinking about returning to Saucony’s for my marathon training. Maybe I’ll buy a new pair; they’re less than half the price of the Brooks shoes, and they’re navy with light pink soles.

10 Things

  1. the Welcoming Oaks — tall, green
  2. boom boom — construction noise from across the river
  3. clank clank clank — something banging/being banged below the trestle
  4. the crack just north of the trestle is shifting and growing — what once was a crack became a trench, and now a ledge — orange cones all around it as warning
  5. someone was sitting at the sliding bench
  6. a walker in a bright yellow jacket — were they a rower heading down to the rowing club?
  7. the parkway was buzzing with cars commuting to work
  8. bright headlights from an approaching bike
  9. a lone honk from a goose somewhere below
  10. a man and a dog crossing the path then entering a steep trail down to the river through small hole in the wall of green

later in the day: Watching a video about her life as a pro runner, Lauren Gregory said this: “Consistency isn’t just about showing up when things are going well; it’s about building a life that allows you to keep showing up.” For Gregory, this means routine.

I really like combining Gregory’s idea of life-building practices routines with Des Linden’s famous call to keep showing up:

hike: 50 minutes
minnehaha off leash dog park
77 degrees

A warm, but not as warm as I thought it would be, hike. It started with irritation: a guy standing with his dog right in front of the entrance, blocking the way in, barely moving enough to let us by. Why? We both wondered what he was doing and why, out of all of the places he could be waiting, he was standing right in front of the gate.

Most of the rest of the hike was good. FWA reported on all of the theories about Subnautica 2, and discussed how thoughtful the creators of the game are in their early release — hardly any bugs and a well-developed story. When he mentioned that the area where a huge tree lived was called Xanadu, I asked him if the creators of the game named it that as a more general reference to the pop culture idea of Xanadu, or the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Kahn. He thought it was possible they were referencing the poem. All I could remember from it was most of the first 2 lines: In Xanadu, did Kubla Kahn —- decree.

Kubla Kahn/ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

dog name: I didn’t hear any dog names directly, but I think I heard a woman, who sounded exasperated, calling to her dog down by the water, Scarlet! Scarlet! Come here!

my 2 favorite sounds: First, the bullfrogs. As we neared the end of the trail, at the beach, I could hear the loud buzz of the frogs. The noise was coming from the other side of the water, where the river turns into a creek that winds through a section of the floodplain forest. Second, Delia’s thundering feet. As Delia ran past me, I could hear her little paws pounding the ground — on sand, then grass, then firmer dirt. I love that sound!

holes / strings

I’m continuing to work on my found poems project, but I’d like to wrap it up so I can spend the summer with water. What I need to do now is document my process so that I can remember what I was doing when I pick it back up in the fall. Will I be able to stop, or will I keep working on it regardless of my intentions? We’ll see.

Before I stop, I’d like to get some orange thread — regular + embroidery — and experiment with incorporating it into my otherwise black and white (and gray) visual poems.

I’d also like to figure out the words for my poem using a NYer essay reviewing memoirs by daughters about their fraught relationships with their mothers. In my version, mother = word, and it’s about my fraught relationship with seeing/reading/making sense of the written word.

a few hours later: As I worked on finding words in the essay, phrases and fragments kept popping up, then an idea came to me: Pick out a few of these phrases, which offer a way to describe my experiences reading, particularly in terms of how words connect me to the world. Pair a phrase with one of the spiders-on-drugs webs that has been inspiring me. Map the words on a panel, create the spider web over it. I love the idea; can I actually make it?

Some of the webs are easier than others; all of them seem too much to try without some sort of help. One of Chuck Close’s grids?! I definitely want to do the caffeine web, but I think I should start with something easier, like marijuana:

drug-induced webs

I also want to do “sleeping pills” — especially since I often fall asleep while I’m reading!

spider on sleeping pills makes web

I think I’ll do 3 or 4. Here are the phrases I want to refine/condense:

1

When the forms are too fuzzy
I escape into coordinates

note: I like the idea of this and the linking of coordinates to the grid and mapping and my desire to find concrete ways to locate my vision loss, but I’m not sure it makes enough sense as is. I’ll keep thinking about it.

2

the ordinariness of language lost

3

gaze — an act of creation and of demolition — made hole again

4

nothing, subdued, entangled

5

shadows and absences born
certainty died (or ruptured?)

6

kinship between eye, world, word confounded
threads twisted, knotted, cut

may 24/RUN

8 miles
top of I-94 bridge (near downtown)
61 degrees

Could summer finally be here? I hope so. Scott and I ran north on the river road, down the franklin hill, through the flats, up the I-94 hill, then everything, in reverse. The first 6 or so miles of it felt fine; that last bit, not as much. My feet hurt, and I think it’s because of my shoes. They felt better this week than last week, but I’m still wondering if I should look into some other shoes.

Scott and I talked about amateur runners doping (me), our complicated feelings about bikers (Scott), the virtue of reasonableness (me), labor arbitrage in relation to the production of electric basses (Scott), and how a Lutheran church in south Minneapolis is giving land to an American Indian organization as reparations (me). The first half of the run went by quickly as we talked. During the second half, my feet started hurting, the sun felt warmer, and we were both thirsty, so I noticed the time and the miles more.

11 Things

  1. someone on an elipti-go machine
  2. Hi Dave! / Hi Sara! Hi Scott! — greeting Dave the Daily Walker — it’s been some time since I’ve seen him
  3. click clack click clack — a roller skiers poles
  4. a group of 1/2 dozen bikers, at least 3 of them young kids
  5. a line-up of 4 cars, following behind a slower biker chatting on the phone
  6. a thin, oily-looking skin on the river’s surface in the flats
  7. a lone rower on the river! I listened to their oars gently slapping the water
  8. mostly filled benches
  9. the smell of honeysuckle drifting out of the gorge
  10. rows of black garbage bags filled with vegetation — I think it was Friends of the Mississippi River volunteers removing garlic mustard
  11. the spring that emerges from the rock face below the west bank of the U of M was gushing water

A good run. It helps to run with Scott. Today’s victories: running up the entire (long and steep) I-94 hill; running up 3/4 of the franklin hill; keeping steady for most of the run; finishing a minute faster than last week on a tougher route.

Things to work on: try lock laces; bring water — or stop for water

may 22/READMAKE

read

I just finished the audio book for The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. What a book! I’ve listened to several of Stephen Graham Jones’ audiobooks and I always love his writing/reading of the acknowledgments at the end. In the one for this book, he thanks many writers who inspired him, including the poet Paisley Rekdal and her description of sitting on a rise outside of Laramie and watching the big rigs slide around on 80 in the winter. He says that he’s used that scene in two of his books, that it has somehow stuck with him, and then this, about Rekdal:

That’s what poets can do with language, isn’t it — use it like a stamp, to press things into our souls.

make

In the midst of listening to the last few hours of Jones’ audiobook, I worked on my holes project. I finished the word-blooms and created the shadowy, blurry web of the amsler grid for hole 3 — which I think I should call hole 2 because the original hole 2 has been scraped and hole 3 is the unhinged twin to hole 1.

Here’s how it looks as of today:

hole 3 / 22 may

I really like the effect of these threads and the verses of the poem. I’m thinking of outlining the words in the 4th poem, in panel 2, in orange for the next version of this.

may 21/HIKERUN

hike: 55 minutes
minnehaha off-leash dog park
60 degrees

note: I’m writing this the next morning. I was so busy working on pasting words for Hole 3 that I forgot to work on it.

Cool, overcast, humid. Some birds, but not as many as on Monday. An unfortunate encounter with a dog and their human who was not giving any attention to the dog and how they were being too aggressive with Delia the dog. At one point, FWA and I had to surround Delia and I called out to the dog, in my don’t-fuck-with-me-mom-voice: good-bye! go away! Finally the human noticed, (sort of) apologized and called to their dog, who ran off. But, as soon as we started moving again, the dog was back. FWA called out, would you please control your dog? And, finally, she did.

Wow, that made us mad. I’m glad that the human didn’t try to engage with us anymore because it might have escalated. A few minutes later, as we kept walking, I thought about the incident with the woman who had felt threatened by a guy she had confronted a few weeks ago in a new way.

FWA and I stewed about the encounter for a few more minutes until we encountered a sweet and HUGE black dog and their human. What breed is your dog? / A Great Russian Terrier. / What’s their name? / George. George! As George approached me, his head at my hip (he is that tall), she warned, George has a wet face. What a sweet face and disposition! FWA agreed, adding that George had the energy of an old soul. Walking away, I wondered about the origins of the Great Russian Terrier, imagining them in Peter the Great’s entourage.

a few minutes later: I was wrong. They were bred by the Soviet Army and served as guard dogs at the Siberian Steppes. Yikes!

Watching this video, I was reminded of George. What a sweet dog, and a sweet human who has cared for him so well!

water level watch: for the past month or so, I’ve been taking note of the rising and falling water level at the beach at the tip of the park. One time, the water had consumed most of the beach, another time it was so low that we could walk far enough to reach a biggish log. Today that log was underwater by about 40 feet (in distance, not depth).

run: 4.5 miles
reverse veterans home
64 degrees

Since my blue running shoes seem to be bothering me, I decided to try out my bright yellow shoes again. It felt so strange to run in them for the first 5 minutes, like everything was discombobulated. Awkward, wrong. Slowly I got used to them, but they didn’t feel okay until mile 4. And they never felt great. Sigh. Am I going to need to invest in different shoes?

10 Things

  1. so many cars on the road, zooming past, fast!
  2. the falls were gushing white foam
  3. a line of surreys waiting to take over the paths and annoy Scott
  4. 2 people sitting on a bench, another next to them in a wheelchair, all of them laughing about something, having fun
  5. passing a couple, overhearing the guy saying something cliched — I wish I could remember the expression — I think he was being ironic
  6. 2 dozen middle-schoolers (I think?) running along the trail — spread out, some fast, some much slower — a track team?
  7. stopping at the huge boulder that looks like a chair, a person emerged out of the oak savanna
  8. a biker’s bright headlight cutting through the trees
  9. big groups of people all around the falls
  10. the faint chiming of the light rail’s recorded bells

A good run — not the best, but definitely not the worst. Other than my feet burning near the end of mile 3 (thanks, warts), I felt strong and fit. For the entire run, I listened to an audiobook that is due in 3 days: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter / Stephen Graham Jones. Such a great book, and difficult/painful to read as it forces me to confront the violence against indigenous peoples that is the inheritance of all settler colonists. The violence in the book (it is a horror book about a vampire) is not gratuitous but reflective of the horrific violence done to American Indians in order to take their land.

holes 3

Today I cut out the words of the poem and pasted them on the essay. Realized after I did it that I should have numbered them — one of my main ways of guiding the reader in what direction to go when reading the words. Oh well, this is only a preliminary version. I played around with how to thread it — from the upper right hand corner to mimic my blooms poem, or in the center and all around. I like the center better. I told RJP that I liked to try using a bigger needle for the center — the eye — and have the thread go through that. RJP told me I need a tapestry needle. Time to go shopping again!

threads over essay

Next up: play around with light to create shadows. As I worked on this thread technique, I wondered if it might not work better for another of my poems about the strings unravelling? Instead of thread for this one, maybe I should focus on playing around with shadows a lot more? Fun!

may 20/RUN

3.75 miles
top of wabun hill, bottom of locks and dam
55 degrees

Goodbye gloom, hello sun! Shadows, the promise of summer returning! I was a little nervous about running this morning because my feet have been hurting ever since my 8 mile run on Monday. But, I was fine. I felt strong and happy to be outside in the sun before bugs and heat join us in a few weeks.

10 Things

  1. green everywhere — nothing more specific, just green and green and green
  2. a voice on a speaker at Dowling Elementary telling kids to stay in the classroom until they were told they were free to move around — was this a safety drill? an active shooter? field day?
  3. cracks and ruts and holes on the paved trail everywhere — more now than in the fall
  4. voices below — rowers? no, walkers on the winchell trail — deep in conversation
  5. 4 or 5 cars parked on the way down to the locks and dam — at least 2 were running with radios on
  6. a bright silver flash — sun reflecting off a car hood
  7. empty benches
  8. the water under the ford bridge was mostly a calm blue with a few waves and a faint reflection of the bridge’s arch
  9. nearing the top of the wabun hill, hearing a chainlink fence rattling: someone playing on the frisbee golf course
  10. my face, slick with sweat and the new sunscreen I just bought at Costco yesterday

I listened to feet striking the ground as I ran south, my “slappin’ shaddow” playlist on the way north. Song I remember the most: White Room / Cream

Low Vision

Yesterday I had my first low vision therapy appointment. It was an assessment. She asked me what I’d like help with — she worded it differently, but I can’t remember how. First I said that I’d like help with interacting with people when I can’t see their faces, and then something more useful: I’d like some strategies for dealing with that uncomfortable moment when I enter an unfamiliar place and can’t make sense of my surrounding. She recommended 2 apps to try (more on that later) and the basic technique of grounding myself by standing with my back against a wall and taking a minute to get my bearings. I like the idea of stopping and standing against a wall. Two of my big problems are feeling pressured by others, or having them try to help me when I want to figure it out myself. Standing back should help with those problems.

back to hole 3

Woke up yesterday to a realization: I really like the idea of my specimen board, but the execution of it feels forced and not very interesting. Time to set that one aside for now (or forever?). I decided to finally begin my summary of April’s monthly challenge, partly because I don’t want to get too far behind on my summaries, and partly to shift my attention back to grids and holes and lines. I only needed to read a few days into April to find some (re)direction. Here’s what I wrote on 6 April:

I’m thinking about grids and the lines and why it matters to me….how reading is so important to that locating and how being located is to be held, to be connected, to be seen or recognized or have others aware (of you).

6 april

This morning, before my run, I decided to rework hole 3. A new plan:

  • my standard 4 panels — 3 panels of page 1 of the book review of Helen Oyeyemi’s new book, A New New Me, 1 panel of page 2
  • 4 short verses — the first 3 mostly “found” on one of the 3 page 1s, the 4th made out of the words from verses “1-3 that are “found” on page 2
  • a grid + hole in the top right corner with many strands of thread emerging from it to cover the words of the poem

The words of the poem:

verse 1: swap out the dead-eyed liturgy of doomed vision
for (with?) looks of shadowed magic

verse 2: Fall through the hole your eyes don’t see, land in a logic of blur and almost

verse 3: read sentences sliced in half, each one glitching just enough to scramble what is real and imagined

verse 4: in a scramble looks logic, eyes read blur as what is

one tiny cheat: even though I don’t use as in the first 3 verses, I added it to verse 4 because I needed to — can I keep playing around with this to make it fully work?

I would like to have this on my cork board before the sun begins streaming in the front windows. How will the shadows fall on the panels? What might the thread-shadows say? If this looks cool, I’d like that to be part of the poem.

I have the panels up on the cork board. I didn’t have time to do anything but mark where the found words go, but I was able to create some thread lines. Now I wait. And wait. And wait. It wasn’t until 7pm that the shadows began to appear. The ones from the threads weren’t as interesting as I wanted, so I started experimenting with other ways to make shadows. A flash of a thought: tape my blind spot on the window where the light is streaming in so it can cast a shadow on the paper. Yes! I had three templates, so I taped them all up. I want to play with this some more tomorrow — hopefully it will be sunny again!

3 holes taped on window, casting shadow on essay, close-up
3 holes taped on window, long view

may 18/RUNHIKE

run: 8 miles
around lake nokomis and back
62 degrees
humidity: 86%

A long run with Scott. 8 miles this week. It felt easier than the 7 miles last week. The only problem: my feet. About 4 miles in, I noticed my socks were bunching up and under the ball of my feet, which was painful and made me alter my gait. Next time: different socks.

I started the conversation with Alice in Wonderland and the scene with the Cheshire Cat; it’s an inspiration for my found poem about landing in the logic of blur and almost. Scott talked about his YouTube channel — the main one and one of his secondary channels that he jokingly created for one of the gnomes in our backyard. I also talked about shifting my perspective on my unfinished business problem: not trying to avoid it, but learning how to accept and manage it while I’m running. What else did Scott talk about? A lot, I just can’t remember what.

10 Things

  1. the green looked and felt greener, the brown richer and darker after last night’s rain
  2. birds! so much birdsong everywhere and all the time
  3. a mini-ambulance parked on minnehaha parkway, a Ghostbusters logo painted on the side
  4. an older man with a cane calling out to us as we ran around the lake — the birds are attacking me! Just then, a bird swooped down on him
  5. a little dog with a big, fluffy tail, shaking their butt as they walked
  6. the view of the lake from the cedar avenue bridge: completely still, the reflection of ascending plane travelling across it
  7. puddles — most of them on the lake trail
  8. stopping at the port-a-potty near the little beach: no toilet paper in either one
  9. more benches than last year set up around the stage at the falls — Scott guessed that they start out with a lot, but the number dwindles over the course of the summer as the benches get broken, I wondered if people stole them
  10. the view near the bench above the edge of the world is gone until next fall, now it’s a wall of green green green

hike: an hour
minnehaha off-leash dog park
61 degrees

The air was cool, but thick down in the floodplain. The ground was soft and firm, in some spots muddy. So many birds! I wish I would have had my phone and recorded them. Hardly anyone was at the park — because of last night’s rain? and today’s humidity? The few cars were all parked on the one side of the parking lot. No one, including FWA, wanted to be the first to park on the other side. The surface of the water was covered in some sort of scum. When we got closer we realized what it was: seeds.

dog names: Dolly (or Ollie), Squirrel, and ? — I can’t remember the name of the Corgi we encountered.

We talked about the social life of birds and Subnautica 2 and delighted in Delia’s joy. I noticed she seemed to be leaping more as she ran; we agreed that it was probably because of the firmer ground.

added the next morning: I forgot to mention the moss, or was it lichen?, that I studied on the side of some big trees down in the floodplain. Very cool — an intense green covering the soft and wet bark on one side, while dry and rough bark was on the other side.

The greens and browns were enchanting. So were the birds. And the quiet — so peaceful and still.

And today, after months of focusing almost exclusively on my “how I read”/ holes poems, here’s a bit of a beautiful poem from Tracy K. Smith:

God of Song/ Tracy K. Smith

My son listens into daylight,
head tilted, eyes tuned
past the range of  the seen.

What he seeks to see is
vibratory. A butterfly’s itch.
The pitch at which a mind

is freed to dart, spark, break
into flight. His gaze rakes space.
What does his ear see? Beads

of  breath rising from the body
of a bee. A whiff of rain batting
a new green leaf. I watch him—

What does his ear see? I like the images of hearing in this poem.

hole 4b

Yesterday, I spent some more time with my found poem inspired by a specimen board. It’s slowly coming together, but I have more work (thinking, executing) to do with it.

So far, I’ve cut the words out of the essay, leaving holes where they were. I printed out the words — in sizes according to their importance. I also cut out labels for each word, with the poem position and location. I need to figure out how I’d like to put the “board” on the panels — glue the labels directly on the page along with the pinned words OR make this board on a different page to be placed over the existing text. It would be easier (and less risky) to do it on a separate page, but I like the idea of doing it directly on the panels.

I took some pictures to document my progress:

here’s the board with the words arranged by size with their labels
Here are the 4 panels of the essay. The big space where there are no holes is where the “board” will be placed
I was inspired by the Manitoba Museum picture I posted the other day to take this one

Today, I began working on it some more, but it is dark outside today and I mostly rely on natural light to see in my studio space, so no more cutting or drawing or pasting for me today. Maybe it isn’t just the light; after my 8 mile run and hour long hike, I’m tired!

hole 3

Before running this morning, I thought a little more about another hole that is in the preliminary stage. The text involves the phrases, land in the logic of blur and almost and glitching just enough to scramble what’s real and imagined. I think the Cheshire Cat could be inspiration for these lines. How? Visually, I’m not quite sure yet, but I’m struck by the cat’s song at the beginning. The words sound like words, and they’re almost English, but they’re not quite. And the cat appears in varying degrees of visibility: just a mouth, a full body, indented footprints in the dirt.

“Most everyone’s mad here. You may have noticed that I’m not all there myself”

The caterpillar scene was about words and language and As, Es, Is, Os, and Us; the Cheshire Cat scene seems to be about finding your way when you’re lost in a world of nonsense and madness (where madness = beyond/outside of logic, upside down). Yes, locating and being located. Reading and language helps locate us and us locate/orient ourselves. I’ll think some more about how the Cheshire scene might inspire me.