Day: December 8, 2023

dec 8/RUN

3.5 miles
trestle turn around
42 degrees

It didn’t feel as warm as it was because of the wind and the clouds. The sky, smudged white. Gloomy. Clear paths with a few chunks of ice still sticking around. How did they not melt yesterday when it was 49 degrees and sunny? A good run, even if my left IT band was sore.

IT doesn’t stand for iliotibial, it stands for:

  • Itchy Teeth
  • Irksome Toes
  • Incandescent Tonsils
  • Infatuated Trapezoids
  • Indigo Toenails (from Scott)
  • Inconceivable Tracheas (from RJP)

10 Things

  1. a noisy car speeding down the river road — don’t remember the color of the type of car or who was driving it, just remember that it was LOUD and FAST
  2. chick a dee dee dee dee
  3. the floodplain forest was roomy and deep brown and open to the river
  4. click click clack — roller skiers hitting their poles on the path
  5. bright headlights cutting through the tree trunks on the other side of the ravine
  6. can’t remember the color of the river — probably pale brown or gray or brown — just that it was soothing (looked at my video: blueish white)
  7. at the start of the run, the pavement was wet — why? melted snow?
  8. a regular — Santa Claus! we raised our hands in greeting
  9. overdressed — took off my orange sweatshirt at the turn around
  10. a mom on roller skis to her kids, also on roller skis — we’re almost there! I’m assuming she meant the big franklin hill

Listened to my breath, my striking feet, the cars driving by as I ran north. Put in a Billie Eilish playlist running back south.

Before turning around, I took some video at a favorite spot: the curved fence on the Winchell Trail before Franklin:

Not yet winter by the gorge. Listen to the sirens on the other side sing with the chickadees and the cars.

After I finished running, I recalled a line I had composed while running for a poem I’m working on about the bells of St. Thomas:

Have others
outside
forgotten
those bells? 
Or do they
hear them 
ringing still?

I like the double meaning of still here — both: continuing to ring and ringing until they become still/stop. I have to sit with it longer, but I think I’d like ring instead of ringing, but it doesn’t fit the 3/2 form.

As I write this I’m remembering another thought I had: getting rid of all of the longer poems that begin with I — I go to the gorge, I sync up my steps, I want connection, I orbit the gorge, etc. Those are the ghosts that haunt this Haunts poem — they are the traces/residue/palimpsest that is still there, but not fully. I think this makes sense to me, but I’m not sure if I can remove all of those words that I love and have spent so much time with…yet.