4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
39 degrees
Wonderful weather for running! Not too cold, but cold enough to not overheat. The color of the day: yellow. I’m sure there were orange and red leaves, but all I remember were the bright yellow ones. Another color I remember: glitter — on the water, among the fluttering leaves. Seeing the low water in the creek on Monday, I wondered if the falls would even be falling. They were, but no gushing or roaring.
10 Things
- laughing kids at Dowling Elementary
- the oak savanna is still mostly green
- a sidewalk covered in dry, yellowed pine needles
- a person taking a selfie with their dog by my favorite overlook at the falls
- the man who empties the parking kiosks — I’ve seen him several times before and wondered why he comes in a regular (unmarked) car and how many coins he collects
- the creek was higher than in past falls when bare rock was exposed
- instead of a rope blocking the steps down to the falls, which is easy to climb over, Minneapolis Parks has added a green metal gate
- the shadow of some leaves falling to the ground, looking like the shadows of birds
- those same falling leaves looking like brown snow
- the swinging shadow of my ponytail
pines and Basho
I ran over yellow pine needles covering the sidewalk at the start of my run and thought about Basho. So I looked up “basho pine” and found this line:
Learn about the pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo.
from Basho on Poetry
Don’t follow in the footsteps of the old poets, seek what they sought.
A poem I was working on yesterday (and submitted to a journal for consideration), starts this way:
It begins here: from
the ground up, feet first,
following.
The following I am referring to is not simple repetition, even as it literally is about following trails already made by past feet, but seeking what past feet sought: connection, contact, familiarity with the ground/land and how it has been shaped.
ghosts and zombies
My plan for this month was to focus on Zombies, but between a kid crisis, the marathon, and a poem that insisted on being reworked, I haven’t given much attention to them. Maybe two other reasons: I don’t really like zombies, and I’m still thinking about ghosts.
from Circle / Dana Knott
human obits in the process
of being written
ghostly obits in the process
of being read
Here’s what I wrote on August 1, 2024 that got me thinking about zombies:
On Ghosts V. Zombies/ Suzanne Buffam
Soul without a body or body without a soul?
Like choosing between an empty lake
And the same empty lake.For the past few years, I’ve devoted a lot of attention to ghosts and haunts, but I’ve rarely thought about zombies. This poem is making me want to think about them now. So many directions to go with it — the relationship between the body and the soul or the body and the spirit or the body and the mind; how, because I can’t see people’s faces or make eye contact, they look soulless to me — I’m a ghost among zombies; Alice Oswald and the Homeric mind — our thoughts traveling outside of our bodies; Emily Dickinson and the soul that wanders; the fish in us escaping (Anne Sexton) or the bees released, returned to the hive/heaven (Eliot Weinberger).
I clicked on the ED link and read my entry from march 19, 2024. There’s a lot of good stuff in it, including a reference to Homer, but not the poet, the cartoon character, Homer Simpson. It’s the clip where his brain escapes his body to avoid listening to Ned Flanders talking about the differences between apple juice and cider (if it’s clear and yella, you got juice there fella, if it’s tangy and brown, you’re in cider town). Wow.
taking it slow
Reading the “about this poem” for poets.org’s poem of the day, Dead Reckoning, I encountered this line:
This poem began as a long sequence but arrived at this stripped-down form after fifteen years of off-and-on revision.
Hyejung Kook
15 years of off-and-on revision! I’m only on year 3 of my Haunts revisions. I’m glad to know that other poets sit with some of their poems for a long time.
After finding this, I read an old entry from October 16, 2021, and found this:
“I am slow and need to think about things a long time, need to hold onto the trace on paper. Thinking is adventure. Does adventure need to be speedy? Perhaps revising is a way of refusing closure?…”
Rosemarie Waldrop
This slow time reminds me of Lorine Niedecker and what she writes in a letter to her poet-mentor, Cid Corman, while working on her poem, “Lake Superior”:
Cid, no, I won’t be writing for awhile, and I need time, like an eon of limestone or gneiss, time like I used to have, with no thought of publishing. I’m very slow anyhow . . . . I’m going into a kind of retreat so far as time (going to be geological time from now on!) is concerned . . . .
Lorine Niedecker