Month: January 2025

jan 3/RUN

3.5 miles
trestle turn around
12 degrees / feels like -3

With the sun, it didn’t feel like -3 to me. No brain freeze from the wind, or numb fingers, or frozen snot in my nose. Well, as I’m write this I’m remembering that my legs felt slightly disconnected from my body, like logs or stumps, which is because of the cold.

My shadow ran in front of me as I headed north. She never wandered from the trail. I was just about to write that I forgot to look at the river, or forgot what I saw when I looked at the river, but then I remembered: sheets of white spread across, from east to west, between lake street bridge and the trestle. The ice looked like white waves and very cold. I stopped at the sliding bench for a moment and admired the river, then stopped a few minutes later to admire it again. Quiet, calm, a soft blueish-gray.

I listened to my new playlist (see below), so I don’t remember noticing much else. I was re-energized when Taylor Swift’s “I Forgot that You Existed” came on, and had some interesting ideas during “Veronica” about memories and the mind and thoughts and when and where they do and don’t travel and how and when we can’t access them anymore. Then I thought of an image for thoughts scattering and one’s mind being blown that I read on twitter several years ago: a mind being blown as not being blown up, but as being scattered like someone blowing on a dandelion — each thought or idea or memory is one of the dandelion seeds being spread. Now I’m thinking about each memory or thought as a bee swarming from a hive . . .

remember and forget

It’s looking more and more like remembering and forgetting might be my theme for january. It seems fitting for the first month of the year, when I’m trying to remember some things and forget others from 2024. I’m excited about this topic, and have thought about it before. There are so many ways I could approach it: the moment of remembering, the softness of forgetting, memorizing poems, memory loss . . .

Here’s my tentative remember to forget playlist:

  1. Remember the Time/ Michael Jackson
  2. I Don’t Remember/ Peter Gabriel
  3. I Keep Forgettin’/ Michael McDonald
  4. Try to Remember/ The Fantasticks
  5. Don’t You (Forget About Me)/ Simple Minds
  6. I Remember/Molly Drake
I
  7. Forget to Remember to Forget/ Johnny Cash
  8. September/ Earth, Wind, and Fire
  9. I Forgot that you Existed/ Taylor Swift
  10. Veronica/ Elvis Costello
  11. I Love You and Don’t You Forget It/ Sarah Vaughn
  12. Do You Remember Rock n Roll Radio/Ramones
  13. Do You Remember Walter?/ The Kinks
  14. Remember/ A Little Night Music
  15. I Remember it Well/ Gigi
  16. Forget You/ Cee Lo Green
  17. (Love Will) Turn Back the Hand of Time/ Grease 2
  18. Memory/ Barbara Streisand


and here are a pair of lines from two different poems, one about forgetting, one about remembering:

the snow
has forgotten
how to stop
(Blizzard/ Linda Pastan)

As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so
the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together

and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.
(The Meadow/Marie Howe)

jan 2/RUN

5 miles
bottom franklin hill and back
18 degrees / feels like 10

A beautiful, sunny morning. Cold enough to make my eyes water but not my feet numb. Birds, sharp shadows, a clear path. Only a few small chunks of hard snow on the walking path. From the distance, the river looked completely open and ice-free. When I stopped at the bottom of the hill to check, I noticed a few lumps scattered around the surface. If I hadn’t stopped, I never would have seen them — there were so few of them, and they were so small!

I remembered to look at the river. I forgot the sudden and unexpected surge of anxiety I experienced before the run, while I was sitting at my desk — not panic, but a rush of something then shaking hands, chattering teeth — then remembered it, and then forgot it again. This happened throughout the run. I remembered to breathe and to stay relaxed. I forgot to check my watch. I remembered to zip up my jacket pocket so one of my black gloves wouldn’t fall out. I forgot to check and see if June’s ghost bike was still hanging on the trestle. I remembered the time I ran up the franklin hill and recorded myself describing it. I forgot to look for fat tires.

Halfway up the franklin hill, I stopped to walk and put in my “Slappin’ Shadows” playlist, since the shadows were wonderful today. The fourth song to come on was Cream’s “White Room.” I thought about the second verse and these lyrics:

You said no strings could secure you at the station
Platform ticket, restless diesels, goodbye windows

First, I was struck by the strings. I thought about invisible threads or tugs, then Taylor Swift’s invisible strings. Then, I was struck by nouns in the second line, especially the restless diesels and goodbye windows. I’m not sure if I thought about it while I was running, but now I’m thinking about one of RJP’s favorite books as a kid, The Hello Goodbye Window.

Before the run, and before my surge of anxiety, I edited and added to some lines about descending into the gorge that I had started last week. I was partly inspired by a discussion with FWA yesterday about his walk down the old stone steps to the beach. The lines aren’t quite finished, but here’s what I have. I’m hoping to have FWA read them to see if they capture any of his experience:

From the bottom, she
looks up to behold
a steep set of stone
steps wedged in loam by
grandfathers. At the top,
the edge, and beyond,
the trail, then the road,
wind-bent trees, worn grass,
a neighborhood. Down
here feels different — wild,
untouched, real, above
only distant dream.
The girl follows a
break in the trees to
a white sand beach and
the river. She shuts
her eyes and listens
for the bells that chime
four times an hour.
Once or twice, instead,
she’s heard a bagpipe’s
mournful skirl float
down from the cenotaph
on the other bluff.
A moment, a breath —
she opens her eyes
returns through the trees
ascends the steps and
breaks the spell.

And, speaking of remembering and forgetting, here’s another fragment I’m working on:

One day the girl sees
the river and re-
members what she saw.
One day she sees the
river and does not.
And one day she for-
gets to look. How strange
it is to not notice
what is right there,
looming so large it
has shaped this whole world.

jan 1/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
15 degrees / feels like 3 / flurries

2025, I’m not sure how I feel about you. Not dread, but not exuberant hope either. I guess I’m trying not to think about you and what you might bring that much. Running beside the gorge helps. Very few, what ifs, many more now and now and nows. Today’s run was great. I was surprised to see that the feels like temp was 3. It didn’t feel that cold. I guess I picked the right layers: 2 pairs of black running tights, a black fleece-lined cap with ear flaps, a gray buff, a faded green long-sleeved shirt, a bright orange sweatshirt, a purple jacket, gray long socks, black short socks, black gloves, pink and white striped gloves. At the halfway point, one pair of gloves came off.

While I ran, I thought about remembering and forgetting and decided when I returned home, my 10 things list would be of things remembered and things forgotten.

10 Things Remembered or Forgotten

  1. I remembered to look down at the river
  2. I remembered what it looked like: steel blue, a few thin sheets of ice
  3. I remembered to stop at the bench above the edge of the world to take in the openness — soft, almost still except for a single leaf fluttering and several leaves sizzling, and was the water moving very slowly or was that just the staticky buzz of my glitching cone cells?
  4. I forgot about my headache
  5. I forgot about my IT band
  6. In mile 3, I remembered my IT band and thought about how it’s impossible to fully forget your body, which is good, because why would I want to do that?
  7. I forgot the election
  8. I remembered to look carefully, and more than once, before crossing from the trail to the grassy boulevard
  9. I remembered to stop at my favorite view of the falls — the water was gushing over the side
  10. I remembered what I overheard above the falls: a dad — no hiking today, a mom: we can take a walk instead!

I suppose it’s easier to remember what you remembered, than to remember what you forgot!

Reading through a past entry from 1 jan 2019, I was reminded of how I used to gather favorite lines at the end of the year and turn them into a new poem. I’d like to do that again this year!

The poems that I’ve been writing this fall about the gorge, are mostly about water and stone, but the open space of the gorge is important too. I’d like to devote some time to it as air, as openness, as possibility, as room to breathe, as Nothingness, as mystery, as inexplicable, as . . . . Here are two different fragments that may or may not turn into something:

When water cut through
rock, sandstone wore away,
limestone broke up, and
an abundance of
air arrived.

*

When water cut through
sandstone and limestone,
it made of the rock
still standing a frame
to loosely hold the
newly formed space. And
what a space! Such an
abundance of air!
Such room to breathe and
to be! Big enough
to hold more than is
seen or imagined
or witnessed with words.