Month: November 2024

nov 29/RUN

2.55 miles
2 trails
20 degrees / feels like 9

Today I hit my yearly goal of 1000 miles! It was cold, but not too cold. No frozen fingers or numb toes. I ran at 2:30 in the long, afternoon light. Wow — I love the light at this time in the season and the day. Why? Longer shadows, a feeling of everything slowing down, settling in, preparing to rest. I stayed up above as I ran south, then turned down to the entrance of the Winchell Trail on the way back north. The river was a wonderful purplish-blue and scaly from the wind. My legs felt sluggish, and my feet were sore on the uneven asphalt. I stopped briefly near the edge of the world to make note of the moment — the sun, lowering, purple-blue river, a steep slope, water falling from the sewer pipe. Not a slow drip, but a shimmering shower. Yes — I thought about a section of my poem and how my description of water as dripping from the pipe wasn’t the only way to describe it. Often, it’s more than drips.

10 Things

  1. a graceful roller skier. I don’t remember hearing their poles, just watching the way the relaxed and flowing rhythm of their arms and legs
  2. the river through the trees at the Horace Cleveland Overlook — purple, slight agitated from wind
  3. encountering a walker climbing the hill near Winchell, bundled up in a winter coat with his hood up
  4. my shadow — so tall! — in front of me, once she left the path and went into the woods
  5. the top railing of one section of iron fence which should be straight was curved in — what caused that to happen?
  6. the jingle-jangle of a dog collar somewhere
  7. dry leaves rustling in the brush beyond the trail
  8. the smell of smoke at the usual spot on edmund
  9. a tall person in a coat swinging up against the iron fence near the 38th street stairs
  10. someone on a hoverboard or a strange skateboard with a bright light on the front, moving fast along the trail — I thought skateboard because they seemed to moving like a skateboard across the path in gentle arcs

An Entrance/ Malena Mörling

For Max

If you want to give thanks
but this time not to the labyrinth
of cause and effect-
Give thanks to the plain sweetness of a day
when it’s as if everywhere you turn
there is an entrance-
When it’s as if even the air is a door-

And your child is a door
afloat on invisible hinges.
“The world is a house,” he says,
over lunch as if to give you a clue-
And before the words dissolve
above his plate of eggs and rice
you suddenly see how we are in it-
How everywhere the air
is holding hands with the air-
How everyone is connected
to everyone else by breathing.

The air as a door, breathing as a way we are connected.

nov 28/RUN

3.1 miles
locks and dam no. 1
23 degrees / snow flurries

A 5k run with Scott in the snow! Flurries collecting on the edge of path and in the cracks of the asphalt. Flurries in the air making my already pixelated view — due to dead cone cells — even more pixelated. Strange, dreamy, disconnected. It was cold, but not too cold. I was overdressed: double gloves, double tights, a buff, a hood, a cap. Before the end of the first mile I was losing layers: 1 pair of gloves, then a hood.

We talked about last year’s marathon, and doing it again next year, and how it wasn’t as cold as we thought it would be. I mentioned that one of my favorite views is blocked because of too many branches. Scott liked how I described it, thick with thin branches.

10 Things

  1. brown leaves on the edge of the path, mixing with the snow
  2. a white-gray sky
  3. the flurries with big and clumpy, one flew in Scott’s throat and he freaked out a little
  4. the ravine below the double bridge was open and brown and bare
  5. a steady stream of cars, distanced from each other, flowing south on the river road
  6. all the benches were empty
  7. as we ran on edmund, a car behind us gently revved to alert us to their presence
  8. bright green leaves on a tree near the savanna
  9. a biker biking by in bright yellow shoes
  10. after the run, FWA driving us, we counted 6 wild turkeys crossing the road

That was hard to come up with 10 things today!

1

In January of 2024, I devoted a month to windows. This morning, on poets.org, I found this beautiful window poem, Wooden Window Frames / Luci Tapahonso. Here are the opening lines:

The morning sun streams through the little kitchen’s  
wooden panes; its luminescence tempts me to forego coffee.  
But I don’t. The dark coffee scent melds with the birds’ 
chirping along the hidden acacia. Then, a small bird 
alights on the cross of the wooden clothesline.  
Its tiny head turns from side to side, then as if sensing me,  
it gazes at me through a window square.  
We ponder each other, then remember our manners,  
and it flies off into the clean, cold air. 

2

My Faith Unfolds Itself/ Alafia Nicole Sessions

after Faith Ringgold’s exhibit, “Black is beautiful,” at the Picasso Museum, Paris, 2023

like a ribbonless plait:            
the rain outside descends in strands:
percussive opera for the sheltered:            

petrichor of hominy and green:
grief everywhere, all at once : and then
            the sun : reminds me I’m not new:

they are my dowry : the gone ones
            and their light : refracted through
the body’s fluids : o rivers : how to

            marry threads of water with faith:
predates language : but the word was
            the beginning : have we come this far by fate:

roots fracture, forget, then return : curse
            the pattern of rupture then mend : not unlike
the making of a quilt, or muscle : broth born

            of fire and water : fists full of ephemerals:
blood-honey : water always finds her way:
            I plump and soften : like soaked grain.

nov 26/RUN

5.5 miles
franklin hill turn around
22 degrees

Colder. A double tights day. Sunny, not much wind, clear. I love running in this weather, even if it was harder during the first mile because of lingering congestion. I wasn’t sure how much I could manage, but once I warmed up, I was fine.

Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker — hi dave! — and looked down at the floodplain forest — almost all bare branches. Heard some geese. Noticed the pink graffiti under the I-94 bridge. Passed another lone black glove on the ground, and a black jacket draped over a tree, making the tree look like a person. Was tricked again by the stone slabs under franklin that look like someone sitting. Avoided the uneven asphalt halfway up and out of the tunnel of trees. Saw that there were stones stacked on the boulder, but forgot to count them. I know I looked down at the river many times, but the only thing I can remember about it was the thin line of icy foam at the edge of longfellow flats.

Thought about breathing and whether or not running in this cold was good for the crud in my throat. Tried to keep my shoulders relaxed and my left arm swinging forward more, my right swinging backward.

Found this quotation yesterday. So much of my writing centers on counting syllables and using syllables to guide my lines. And not just any syllables, but syllables that mimic my breathing pattern while swimming (5) or running (3/2).

The most important thing I find is to live by the syllable. When I’m writing, I don’t think about sentences, lines or words, I’m totally living by the syllable.

Rowan Rocard Phillips

The poem of the day on poems.com had a line that made me smile because it’s almost one of my favorites from Anne Sexton’s “The Nude Swim” — the real fish did not mind.

Returning to the Village/ Stephanie Niu

That gray hut is where I first learned to swim. They pushed us
through a gap in the floorboards. Dropped down a rope
to hold. It took us several panicked kicks to find

that we knew how to do it. Once under, our eyes adjusted
to the salt’s burn and gleam. The fish did not care. 
They turned their long bodies and became something’s dinner. 

At home, toweled off, we ate from plates of tasteless crackers
bought from the only supermarket with sides salt-faded
to white. The woman who owns it still lives inside. 

She has no sons; the fish she sells comes frozen
in boxes from the mainland. I once saw her crouch
on the jetty at dawn and place a basket into the water,

raise it again full of leathery fish flopping against her arms.
She gutted them. They were so small. I watched
her toss what was left of them back to the ocean.

nov 24/RUN

2 miles
river road, north/south
38 degrees

Another run with Scott. We were planning to go for coffee after a short run, but both places we tried were too crowded. Another gray morning with difficult light. Everything felt hazy, dreamy. Also, it was harder to breathe. For the past week, I have had a sore throat off and on and some congestion. I’ll take another covid test today, but it could be a reaction to flonase or allergies. Whatever it is, I wish it could go away. Because of my difficulty breathing, Scott did most of the talking. He talked about his upcoming gig and what would be on the set list. I remember looking down at the floodplain forest and pointing it out to Scott. The tree branches were bare enough that you could see the forest floor. Beautiful. Scott pointed out a roller skier to me.

I don’t remember looking at the river or hearing any geese or black-capped chickadees or rowers in the river. No regulars to greet. I didn’t count the stacked stones.

At the end of the run, I commented on how the sun looked like it wanted to pierce through the thick clouds. Behind the grayish-white was light. Now, writing this at my desk, the sun is trying even harder and everything — sky, grass, ground — is brighter.

nov 23/RUN

3.1 miles
trestle turn around
36 degrees

Another wonderful almost winter morning! Sunny, hardly any wind, clear paths. In January, a day like this would feel tropical and offer hope for a coming spring. Ran with Scott to the trestle and back. We talked about the Love Supreme arrangement he’s doing for the jazz combo he’s in and how he’s learning a lot about the form of its 4 movements. I talked about my “And” poem and wondered if there was a 3 syllable word that might convey sudden understanding. Scott answered, Eureka! Nice, but not quite the right feel for my poem. I could use clarity, but I don’t want to — clarity is more the mood of the moment that the reader feels without it being spelled out for them, I think.

A mile later, Scott described how you code and in css (where and means both this and that must exist to make a statement true) and how you code or (where or means either this or that can exist to make a statement true). I was fascinated by how and was restrictive and narrowing in the code while or was expansive. In my poem, I’m understanding and as generous and open and allowing for more possibilities not less. I told Scott that I might need to write an or poem now. And is accumulation, more layers while or is a stripping down.

And = all these things can be true, and more
Or = at any give time, any one of these things could be true

Am I getting too far into theory here, trying to be too clever?

Speaking of or in poetry, here’s a great or poem I just found:

Or / Thomas Sayer Ellis

Or Oreo, or
worse. Or ordinary.
Or your choice
of category

        or   
        Color

or any color
other than Colored
or Colored Only.
Or “Of Color”

        or   
        Other

or theory or discourse
or oral territory.
Oregon or Georgia
or Florida Zora

        or
        Opportunity

or born poor
or Corporate. Or Moor.
Or a Noir Orpheus
or Senghor

        or   
        Diaspora

or a horrendous
and tore-up journey.
Or performance. Or allegory’s armor
of ignorant comfort

        or
        Worship

or reform or a sore chorus.
Or Electoral Corruption
or important ports
of Yoruba or worry

        or
        Neighbor

or fear of . . .
of terror or border.
Or all organized
minorities.

And here’s what Robyn Creswell writes about the poem:

There is no doubt that Thomas Sayers Ellis’s “Or,” is a poem, but it is one of the few that feels to me like a rap—an especially good one. This is because of the way it establishes a pattern and then continually breaks away from it. The poem is based on the repetition of or, but as we read through it, what seemed like a formal constraint becomes a principle of transformation, a hinge that keeps flexing. The poem begins, as I read it, by riffing on the either/or logic of identity questionnaires (“You could get with this, or you could get with that,” as Black Sheep once put it, in a different context). But it quickly ramifies into geography, history, poetics.

Thomas Sayer Ellis’ “Or,”/ Robin Creswell

10 Things

  1. Hi Dave! How ya doing? / Well, I’m out here . . . is Dave sick too? (I’m congested but tested negative for covid twice)
  2. a runner in shorts with bare legs
  3. for a few blocks, at the start of the run, the only wind was the wind we made with our moving bodies
  4. June’s white bike hanging from the trestle
  5. bare branches mixed with bright green leaves
  6. a table with an orange water jug set up on top of it — is this for a group run (I didn’t see any group), or for anyone running by?
  7. the long, jagged crack on the new asphalt just past the trestle seems to be growing longer
  8. a trace of smoke smelled on the way to the gorge — from a fire pit or a chimney?
  9. our faint shadows briefly ahead of us
  10. stopping at the bench right above the steep slope — like I did the other day, Scott wondered how long before it fell into the gorge

nov 22/RUN

5.5 miles
franklin hill turn around
34 degrees

Perfect running weather. Cold, but not too cold, calm, overcast. Clear paths, a dreamy, detached feeling. As I ran, I thought of a goal for this winter: continue working on running with a slower heart rate. I started this during the summer/fall with marathon training, and I think it helped me avoid injuries. This winter I’m thinking I should target 155-160. I wonder what fun experiments I can do while trying to keep my heart rate low?

10 Things

  1. as I ran, I gave attention to my arms — when my form was good, I felt like my arms were blades scissoring the air
  2. the river was half bronze, half pewter
  3. 2 walkers who were not together were both 
    wearing bright RED jackets
  4. 3 stones were stacked on the boulder — the one on top was barely balanced
  5. the yellow leaves were thick on the part of the path that descends into the tunnel of trees
  6. a roller skier bombing down the hill
  7. a noisy squirrel rooting through the dry brush
  8. the slabs of stone stacked under the franklin bridge always look like a person to me — they did again today, looking like a sitting person as I passed them on my way down, just stones on my way back up — I imagined someone playing a trick on me, first sitting there, but then after I passed, putting the stones down
  9. some regulars I haven’t named yet, but that I’ve encountered for years: 3 older white men, walking, stretched across the whole walking path — is it the same guys every time, or different ones, all of them man spreading? That’s what I could call them: the man spreaders
  10. rotting sewer smell in the tunnel of trees, close to where the city is doing some work

More work this morning (and afternoon), on my “And” poem. So far, I’ve written about the formation of the gorge (wanting to be somewhere else) and the designing of the Mississippi River Gorge park (to protect from overdevelopment and sell the gorge as a symbol of the water city). Now I’m getting into my love of the view, which is about what I see — softened, elemental forms, like tree line or water or white sand beach — but also what I feel — open, a veil lifted, a little clarity, freer and more able to breathe and move, to the other side (which stands in for many things, including St. Paul where my mom lived until she was 18, the place where people who died dwell, the normal-sighted and real world that I feel distanced from. I think the view is also about how standing above the gorge enables me to witness how it holds all of these things together, that it doesn’t divide but connects. There is not a gap between girl and world, but a space that can hold them together, along with water and stone, mothers and daughters, hear and there, now and then. These are all references to past sections of the poem.

nov 21/RUN

4.15 miles
minnehaha falls and back
37 degrees
wind: 30 mph gusts

Windy and colder. I wore my full winter uniform: black running tights, long-sleeved green shirt, purple jacket, black fleece-lined cap, black gloves, buff. I overdressed — or did I? I can’t decide. It snowed yesterday, but by the time I went out for my run (noon), it had all melted. All that was left were a few puddles.

10 Things

  1. at first I thought the river was blue, but then I decided it was pewter
  2. gushing falls
  3. (almost?) empty park
  4. dark rocks sticking out of the creek — why don’t I remember seeing them before?
  5. the hollow sounding recording of bells from the light rail train across the road
  6. all of the walkers were bundled up like it was winter, which it almost is — winter coats, hats, scarves
  7. a red car in the parking lot, loud talking — a phone call? — coming out of the rolled up windows
  8. a faint smell of smoke from a fire in the gorge
  9. the sound of kids playing on the school playground — a soft din of laughing, talking, shrieking
  10. the stretch of brown wooden fence between folwell and 38th is in rough shape. Today I noticed one section with a broken slat and leaning out into the open air

nov 20/BIKE

30 minutes
basement
31 degrees / flurries

This afternoon, I decided to do my first indoor bike ride of the season. Not because it’s too cold or because it’s snowing, but because I’ve run 3 days in a row and I wanted to bike instead. Cross-training in the winter isn’t nearly as fun as it is in the summer. Maybe this year, I’ll actually try some winter-specific activities, like snow-shoeing or ice-skating. I re-watched part of the women’s triathlon from the 2016 Rio Olympics. Love that race. I’ve already written about it back in 2017.

Another reason I didn’t run this morning was because, Scott and I took RJP to the post office to renew her passport. Between the lack of music, the surly workers, the flickering light, and the clueless customers, it was a vibe. (am I using that right?) At first, I thought the woman behind the counter was just rude, but when she was nice to us because we had our shit together, I realized that it was more that she didn’t suffer fools — like the woman who didn’t make an appointment, or the woman who could have but didn’t fill out her paperwork ahead of time and didn’t have her old passport or remember the number for it.

Another random thing for future Sara to remember: Pointing at some stamps, I thought Scott said, I like these Leonard Nimoy ones, but what he actually said was, I like these Lunar New Year ones.

Today, I’ve been trying to work on the “and’ section of my Haunts poem, but I’ve been a little stuck. This section is about open space and possibility and the place between beats and breaths and foot strikes. It’s about the gorge as a container holding everything and holding Nothing (air, the void, mystery). It’s about thresholds and room to move/breathe/be and the space created from absence (of land, words, functional cone cells, mothers). Wow, just typing up this summary has given me some ideas!

nov 19/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls
49 degrees
wind gusts: 25 mph

Wet. Windy. Slick leaves. Squeaks. A light gray sky. Singing pines. The usual puddles. White foam falls. Gushing sewer pipes. Brisk air. Mud.

Greeted Santa Claus (the regular runner whose long white beard reminds me of Santa Claus). Passed a man walking with one leg up in a boot on a scooter. Gave directions to 2 walkers — which way to the falls? follow the path, it’s over there.

The creek was a steel blue and rushing to reach the limestone ledge. A kid at the main overlook was jumping in a puddle. The green gate at the top of the steps leading down to the falls was still open.

Wore shorts and a pink hooded jacket. My legs were only cold for a few minutes. Too warm for mid-November. Today is the last day of warmer air. Tomorrow, below freezing.

I started working on the section of Haunts poem that I’m titling, And. Came up with a few lines while running north. Recited them in my head until I stopped near the Folwell bench and spoke them into my phone:

Before a Victor-
ian’s great love for
ventilation, there
was water wanting
to be something and
somewhere else.

The ventilation bit is taken from an article about the origins of the Grand Rounds, and the Victorian is Horace W.S. Cleveland:

The concept of The Grand Rounds was born from Cleveland’s “preference of an extended system of boulevards, or ornamental avenues, rather than a series of detached open areas or public squares.” This was not only an aesthetic consideration: Cleveland had lost many possessions in the 1871 Chicago fire, and saw parkways as an effective firebreak in built-up urban areas. In addition, Cleveland stressed the
sanitary benefits derived from parkways. Cholera, typhus, and other diseases plagued cities in the late nineteenth century. Parkways could save land from unhealthy uses and, reflecting the Victorians’ great
love for ventilation, carry “winds . . . to the heart of the city, purified by their passage over a long stretch
of living water, and through the foliage of miles of forest.”

The History of the Grand Rounds


nov 18/RUN

3.35 miles
trestle turn around
45 degrees

Another beautiful, late fall morning! Sun, blue skies, hardly a breeze. Running north, my shadow leading me, occasionally drifting to the side and off into the woods. Running south, hiding behind me. I saw her only once when I turned around to check. Everything calm, quiet. Everyone enjoying being alone together. An open view of air and the bare-branched tree line on the other side. Blue river. An inviting bench perched on the edge of the bluff. I saw it as I ran toward the trestle. When I turned around, I stopped at it. Right on the edge, a steep brown slope down to the white sands beach and the river. How many more seasons before this bench, already on the edge, tumbles down? The sour-sweet smell of the sewer — a hint of sharp spice. Pounding hammers–not in a fast, steady rhythm, but in bursts and trading off. A great run.

As I ran, I couldn’t imagine how it could rain this afternoon. So much sun and blue skies! But already, less than an hour later, clouds. Rain is coming.

I’m still working on a section of my poem about progress and time and conservation. The ending turns to a vague reference to conversation of matter, where nothing is lost or gained, just transformed. Somewhere after the tunnel of trees, I suddenly thought, exchanged, and imagined oxygen being traded between lungs and leaves.

Made-up Walking Tours

Here’s an article that I found the other day about the poet, Mathias Svalina’s, surreal waking tours in Richmond: Surrealistic Zillow. Here’s how the tours work:

You show up at the appropriate time and place and look for a man with a bullhorn. “Because I’m a man who owns a bullhorn now,” Svalina says. “[Then] I’ll point to buildings and lie about them for 90 minutes.”

and part of its purpose:

“I’m particularly interested in civic history because of the ways that cities use, rewrite, and often weaponize their histories as promotional agents, or as ways of ignoring populations,” he explains. “So, I like the idea of inventing histories that could not have ever existed.”