3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
50 degrees
What a beautiful spring-y day! Ran with Scott to the falls in the early afternoon. He talked about the bolt he had to replace on his guitar neck which isn’t a bolt but a bone — a synthetic bone, in his case. He needs to sand it down and he’s planning to use sandpaper that’s been in his clarinet case since college — about 30 years! I pointed out the pile of branches on the side of the trail and mentioned how I’d seen the workers pull up in the parking lot as I ran by a few days ago. I figured they were planning to trees; I was right.
The falls were falling fast and hard over the limestone and under the one ice column remaining. There were lots of people at the park, admiring them. A few bikers, but mostly walkers. A school bus, but no sign of the kids. Was there a field trip, or a bus driver taking a break?
I noticed angular shadows everywhere — small branches, a street lamp, fence slats. Soft shadows too: us.
Only a few random clumps of snow on parts of the grass that rarely get sun.
time
Many different thoughts about time this morning: metronomes (see entries from 10 june 2024 and 29 august 2024); erosion needing time and pressure; stuck in a moment unable to get out vs. suspended in time and not wanting to leave; Mary Ruefle’s pause, Emily Dickinson’s hesitation, JJJJJerome Ellis’ Stutter; a time slip, a shift; Mary Oliver’s ordinary and eternal time.
While reading a book, I encountered this purple description:
The light in the sky was fading, the clouds now purple and dark, the meadows and the surrounding wood losing their color, fading into grainy variations of gray.
Kind Worth Killing/ Peter Swanson
(fading twice?) I thought: purple represents the space between light and dark, between the last bit of color and gray, between not seeing well and not seeing at all (with my central vision), after the crumbling of cone cells and before the total collapse (the last cell gone). This is my purple hour. I want to use that in a poem playing with my literal and figurative meanings of purple.