Month: June 2019

4.1 miles
river road path, north/south
66 degrees
humidity: 78%

What a great run! Partly because I felt good, but mostly because I was able to hold onto some thoughts about my poetry and then, 2 miles in, had a breakthrough about my larger goals in writing and how they connect with my earlier intellectual work. I had planned to run 4 miles without stopping but when the idea came to me I decided I should stop at 3 miles and record my thoughts on my phone. I did and then ran another mile. When I stopped the second time, I recorded a few more thoughts into my phone.

Here’s the transcript:

My poetry comes out of decades of work on an ethics of care and curiosity…a pedagogy and poetics of care…fundamental to the care is both the disrupting of knowing and vision and the posing of alternatives, other senses, other motivations for caring and curiosity. Not to know and to dominate but to feel and experience and that connects in with my vision problems and my earnest efforts to both explore the alternatives and to play and trouble the idea of knowing anything with my vision which often leaves me ignorant or produces fantastical or unreal images. That is what this project is all about, it is undergirded by this poetics and pedagogy and ethics of care as paying attention, being aware, being curious.

I’m interested in how our senses get disrupted and this ability to know becomes impossible or distorted through cone dystrophy or through running or swimming of walking or moving. How this impacts what we feel and know and what we can know, how we know it. And some of this exposes the inability to ever really know or the undesirability of striving to know, but it also opens up new ways of knowing and thinking and being that breathe and move.

Cool. I need to work on this stuff some more, but it’s a good start!

This morning it’s overcast. Rain is coming. Thunderstorms this afternoon. Everything is dark and green and out of focus. Soft, not sharp. Fuzzy. Saw several people parking under the lake street bridge and walking down the road to the rowing club. Will I get to hear some rowers on the river? (No.) Caught glimpses of the river through the trees. With all the green up above, you could run miles on this trail and forget that the river was below. Was able to greet the Daily Walker. Encountered a few dogs and their humans. No man in black–does he walk earlier in the summer? Or is he on vacation? Encountered several runners, one flashed a big smile as a greeting. Running by the construction site for Minnehaha Academy, upper campus, I thought about when the old building exploded 2, or was it 3?, years ago.

The Rules
Leila Chatti

There will be no stars—the poem has had enough of them. I think we can agree
we no longer believe there is anyone in any poem who is just now realizing

they are dead, so let’s stop talking about it. The skies of this poem
are teeming with winged things, and not a single innominate bird.

You’re welcome. Here, no monarchs, no moths, no cicadas doing whatever
they do in the trees. If this poem is in summer, punctuating the blue—forgive me,

I forgot, there is no blue in this poem—you’ll find the occasional
pelecinid wasp, proposals vaporized and exorbitant, angels looking

as they should. If winter, unsentimental sleet. This poem does not take place
at dawn or dusk or noon or the witching hour or the crescendoing moment

of our own remarkable birth, it is 2:53 in this poem, a Tuesday, and everyone in it is still
at work. This poem has no children; it is trying

to be taken seriously. This poem has no shards, no kittens, no myths or fairy tales,
no pomegranates or rainbows, no ex-boyfriends or manifest lovers, no mothers—God,

no mothers—no God, about which the poem must admit
it’s relieved, there is no heart in this poem, no bodily secretions, no body

referred to as the body, no one
dies or is dead in this poem, everyone in this poem is alive and pretty

okay with it. This poem will not use the word beautiful for it resists
calling a thing what it is. So what

if I’d like to tell you how I walked last night, glad, truly glad, for the first time
in a year, to be breathing, in the cold dark, to see them. The stars, I mean. Oh hell, before

something stops me—I nearly wept on the sidewalk at the sight of them all.

I love this poem. Unsentimental sleet? So great.

swim: .68 miles
1200 yards/4 small loops
big beach, lake nokomis

Went swimming at the big beach this afternoon while Scott ran around the lake. Cold(er) and windy but still great. I love swimming gin the lake. As always, a little unsettled, wondering what fish are swimming below me. It was only 70 degrees with a few random showers, so I had the lake to myself, except for a few kayakers and paddle boarders.

3.1 miles
river road path above, south/below, north
65 degrees

What a beautiful morning! Not too hot or humid or windy or sunny. Didn’t listen to music or an audio book or the gorge–except I did hear the coxswain’s bullhorn, a man’s voice today. Ran on the path next to the road on the way to the falls then turned at the double bridge parking lot (44th) and ran below, on the path that starts as dirt then mulched leaves then uneven, barely intact asphalt then newer asphalt. This path undulates, climbing up by 42nd, then down, up by Folwell, then down, then mostly flat until the steps at 38th street. You can take these up and run by the road again or take your chances running down on the dirt path of the Winchell Trail–usually there’s a muddy, mucky spot halfway to the bottom of the Oak Savanna and then too many wildflowers crowding out the already narrow path. Sometimes I take my chances, today I climbed the steps and then kept going past the turn-off and down through the tunnel of trees. Felt pretty good and was happy to run 3 miles without stopping to walk. I like trail running. Sometime this summer I’ll have to convince Scott to run the limestone trail at Pike Island near Fort Snelling.

Tried to think about my writing goals and what I want to do with my vision poetry, but couldn’t hold on to any thoughts.

I really like the storytelling in this poem and the light, easy way it packs so much into a story about sitting around in doughnut pajamas on your 39th birthday.

Lounging on the Couch on my 39th Birthday in Pink Flannel Donut Pajamas/Julie Danho

Surely birds would love to peck
at the dozens of donuts adorning
my arms and legs: the glazed, the jellied,
the vanilla frosted scalloped at the edges
like the worn lace tablecloth in Sito’s
tenement apartment where my mother
father sister aunts uncles cousins
would cram in Sundays, post church,
and I’d eat the frosting off two, return
the bottoms to the box while Sito frowned
and Gido insisted I should disfigure
as many donuts as made me happy. After
he died, she pulled the walls around her
like an afghan and didn’t leave. Sundays,
when I delivered the church bulletin
to her recliner, she’d clasp my face
in both hands, grateful. It’s been decades
since I sat in a pew, but I brought my mother
to the last church hafla, where she won
these pajamas instead of what she wanted
(the platter of walnut baklawa). And maybe
I’ve lived too long to be lounging in pink
flannel donut pajamas, but I love how they
rub against my legs like a cat’s head,
love that someone spent time dreaming up
improbable donuts, like this one here
frosted blue-green, then crosshatched
with piped white stripes, topped with pink
and red sprinkles, a sugared inner tube
floating the middle. How can’t I be hungry?
In the next room, my birthday cake sits
on Sito’s old table, mine since the day
we emptied her apartment and I opened
dresser drawer after dresser drawer to find
hundreds of crocheted dishcloths, stacked
as neatly as cash for a ransom. We knew
she must have made them in her recliner
by the window on those days none of us
were there. It’s almost noon and I’m still
in pajamas, waiting for my daughter
and husband to march into the room
and play me the birthday song they wrote,
her on toy guitar, him on mandolin. I hear
them practicing and it’s so sweet my teeth
ache. Sito, was it once like this for you?