Month: July 2025

july 31/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
59 degrees
AQI*: 157

*Air Quality Index

Cooler! Smoky, again. Ran on the dirt trail on the other side of the river road heading south. Noticed how the trail didn’t seem quite as wide as it did a few years ago during the pandemic when more people were using it. Wondered how many feet have to tread over the same spot to make a trail, and how long it takes for a forgotten trail to revert to grass. Crossed over to the paved path by Becketwood and stayed on it to the falls, then past the falls, then over the Veterans bridge then down the steep hill to the very bottom of the ford bridge then north thenhome.

Listened to cars and birds and voices as I ran south. Put in my “Remember to Forget” playlist returning north. Tried to forget that I was hot and wanted to stop as I listened to Peter Gabriel and Michael McDonald singing about forgetting.

10 Things

orange light dotting the path
turkeys! 4 female turkeys (hens) bobbing their necks and moving slowly, 1 male (a tom) following behind — the hens ignored me as I stopped to look, but the tom turned and stare
the rush of minnehaha creek below me as I ran over the veterans bridge
standing on the bridge above the falls, watching it tumble down to the creek below
a man and a little kid sitting at the bench near the boulder
the path blocked off near Godfrey by 2 trucks and some cones — not sure what they were working on
the path blocked off near folwell by cones: park workers repainting the biking and walk signs
a new person painted on the paved path — glowing white, I checked to see if anyone had drawn in a face yet (nope)
my shadow — I could see my pony tail bobbing as I moved
fake bells x 2: the ding-ding-ding of the light rail pulling out of the station and the chiming of the st. thomas bells at 7:45

excerpt from 38. Shedding the Old/ Samantha Thornhill

Such as the lobster
cracking loose
from its exoskeleton
after moons of moulting,
or the viper that squeezes
out of the skin
of its remembrance,
this oracle invites you
to rewild yourself,
to unbox, detox, and de-
clutter your blood.

Rewild yourself!

july 30/RUNSWIM

2.5 miles
2 trails
71 degrees

Hazy and smoky this morning. Canadian wild fires again. A present from the wind. It looked bad, but didn’t bother my breathing too much. Inspired by the wind, I listened to my “Beaufort Scale” playlist until I reached the old stone steps near the south entrance of the Winchell Trail. Then I listened to the water falling out of the sewer pipe and splashing on the rocks down to the river.

a stone wall with a plaque that reads, WPA 1938 — WPA 1938

I took this picture of a stone wall built by the WPA, and possibly by grandfather, on the stone steps at the edge of the 44th street parking lot. 1938 was four years before my mom was born. Was my grandfather working for the WPA then?

At the bottom of the steps is the Winchell Trail and the 44th street sewer pipe/ravine. Also, the curved wall that I like to admire from above as I run by and the spot in the trail that transitions from crumbled asphalt to cracked. Yesterday I wrote about the sound of the water falling. I decided to stop and record it today:

water falling at the 44th street ravine

10 Things

a section of the fence on the edge, missing a slat
something on the asphalt ahead — a big puddle? no spots of light shining through a gap in the trees — a pool of light!
smoke on the water (waTER — Deep Purple/Pat Boone reference) — my view from the Winchell trail through the trees, light blue looking fuzzy and faded through the smoke
the faint voices of kids on playground
the blending of car wheels above with wind in the trees and water falling down the ravine
an older couple walking fast and with purpose, especially the woman who was leading the charge, seen twice
a small bird flittering by, a flash of yellow — was it yellow, or was it a trick of the light, or was it my unreliable vision?
the 38th street steps are still rainbow colored — well, at least, a few steps are — the yellow and orange and purple ones
glancing across the road and doing a double-take: is that a turkey or a young tree with its trunk covered in black plastic?
empty benches

swim: 2.5 loops (5 cedar loops)
cedar lake open swim
77 degrees

Very glad Cedar Lake is okay so that open swim could happen. It was windy and choppy and smoky. At first I thought my goggles were fogged up, but then I realized it was the smoke in the air. Air quality was bad: 168, which is unhealthy. With the choppy water, it took a few loops to get into a rhythm. Lots of breathing on one side, or breathing every 2 or 3 strokes.

I’ve been working on a new poem form today. I’m calling it inkling. It’s inspired by an Alice Oswald line from Dart: the inkling of a fish. Inkling as vague, the idea of, a whisper, unproven, a rumor. My little poems — 3-5 lines, I think — are about describing or evoking the feeling or idea of something that you can’t quite see, or that you feel more than anything else. My first one will be about fish.

july 29/RUNRUN

2.5 miles
2 trails
73 degrees
dew point: 70

Another hot and hazy morning. I remembered to notice the river and it looked . . . thirsty? Trying to think of the best word that conveys the opposite of refreshing and cool. Uninviting? Thick? Stuck? Inert? By the Cleveland Overlook it was green and dull and thick. Below the Winchell Trail near the south entrance it was a pale blue with a soft haze hovering above it. Farther north on the trail it was bright blue with a few spots of sparkle through the trees.

Because of the intense thunder storm last night, there was water everywhere — puddles, gushing sewers, squishy mud. The puddles were small but filled with the reflections of trees and flat, still. The mud was slick and slippery. Two distinctive sewer sounds/movements: 1. below 44th street, the water was pulsing, coming in waves — a moment of steady flow, then nothing, then water flowing again. I stopped to lean over the railing and watch it. 2. below 42nd street, the water was rushing out of the pipe, making a small waterfall on the rocks below — a continuous dropping of water.

With all the wind and rain last night, I expected there to be more trees or branches down than there were. Was there any new debris? I don’t think so.

The weather is strange this week: very hot and humid and sunny during the day — we’ve had several heat advisories, then violent storms move in quickly at night. Last night, it started with the wind. I opened the front door and watched the trees bending, twisting, waving. Very unsettling to watch. Then the sky unzipped and rain came down in sheets. Will it happen again tonight? I hope not.

For future Sara: Scott and I discovered a new sport to watch during the Aquatic World Championships — men’s 27 meter (that’s 9 stories!) and women’s 20 meter diving. Why can’t the men and women dive from the same height? Anyway, I’d never heard of this before. An extremely HIGH platform is created outside with a small circular pool at the bottom — don’t worry, the water is deep. Divers jump — they enter feet first — from high up, doing flips and twists and somersaults as they plummet. It’s so dangerous that they have 4 first-responders in the pool waiting to rescue them if they need it. And the first thing they do after surfacing is alert the responders with a thumbs up. What? Wow. Like other diving competitions, a lot of the score is determined by how much splash they make entering the water. I can’t see the splash, because of my bad vision, but I still enjoy watching it. After the dive, they show several slow-motion replays, including one from below. You watch as the diver nears the water; Scott says it reminds him of seeing someone falling to their death.

Discovered this beautiful poem yesterday:

Someone Is the Water/ Austin Araujo

I am alone but for this vein
splitting the earth open
and we are silent, the stream and I

far away from our mouths. The stream
folds over itself, my hand
speculating under the surface.

The stippled faces of orioles
sail by slowly, their dark wings working
hard as tired men pulling oars

in a landscape painting, their lantern
chests dotting a modest pattern
across the sky, over this brook

a mile from your house—from you
who are alone but for your sons
and your sons’ refusal to recognize

you cloaked under a sadness,
the color of whose cloth is muted
as these late-afternoon birds.

The stream sluices crawdads
and stones, carefully takes its bend
like a tongue spackled with canker sores.
I still expect it to speak. I’ve come
to listen to this slow
unfurling, hoping I’ll fall

asleep as it turns like a lullaby
a child promises he will strain
to hear, to memorize. I make sense

of smudged pastoral visions.
Gone, the birds long gone.
Palms, I cup water with bent palms.

run: 3 miles
trestle turn around
86 degrees

I was supposed to go to open swim, but the beach has been closed for a week because of e-coli. Not sure why, but I’m guessing it’s because of the storm. What a bummer! I’m supposed to start my “swimming one day in august” project on 1 august. It will be more difficult to do it now that I’m missing august 1 and 3. Thankfully Cedar Lake is open so at least I can swim there tomorrow.

Since I couldn’t swim, I decided to do another run. It was hot, but the humidity was lower so it seemed less terrible than this morning’s run.

10 Things

I think I heard the rowers; I know I saw a few of them heading down the hill to the dock
traffic was backed up — so many cars trying to turn onto lake street
a mini peloton — a dozen bikers — whirred by me on the river road
someone in a strange t-shirt with lots of words or logos or symbols that I couldn’t make sense of was sitting on the ledge under the trestle listening to heavy metal on their phone
a walker, dressed in brown shorts and a brown shirt, passing me twice, their head titled to the side
the sliding bench was a cool, dark green
the spray paint on the ancient boulder looked extra orange today — did someone touch it up recently?
a lime scooter parked in the middle of the walking path under the bridge
the big crack north of the trestle looks about the same as it did last week — not bigger — but the path is blocked off with caution tape, orange cones, and a warning spray-painted on the asphalt
as I neared them, someone was emerging from the old stone steps

july 28/RUNSWIM

2.5 miles
2 trails
70 degrees
dew point: 65

Cooler than last week, but still too warm for me. Felt drained and my feet were sore from my shoes — the Saucony Rides strike again. Even so, happy to be out beside the gorge with my friends — the boulders, benches, trees, shadows, walkers, runners, river. But not the bikers — too many of them, and too many close calls.

Last night, we had some intense wind and thunderstorms. Eveidence of it is everywhere: leaves, twigs, branches, whole trees scattered near the trail, gushing sewer pipes, muddy paths. The water from the 44th street pipe gushed out in spurts, almost like a bucket filling up then dumping over. The water from the 42nd street sewer pipe rushed with a steady flow of water, like a waterfall.

I ran closer to the river and I remember looking at it, but I don’t remember what it looked like. Was it smooth? scaled? blue? gray? brown? I don’t recall. I do remember not hearing any rowers.

I didn’t have any deep thoughts about water or swimming or life or, if I did, they didn’t stick around. Instead, I thought about how my feet were sore and my legs felt sluggish, how I wanted to stop, and how I had some unfinished business and needed to get to a bathroom soon.

swim: 3 loops (6 cedar loops)
cedar lake open swim
88 degrees

The water was warm but calm and more greenish than usual. Lots of scratchy vines and swimmers swimming in the middle. Also, a giant rubber ducky inner tube floating beside the course. The safety buoy of the day was a clunky, lumpy orange one. Lots of other yellow and pink buoys too. The sky had a few clouds but was mostly blue. Made sure to notice the bubbles around my hands. At the end of the swim, near shore, I went a little deeper in the water — it was cool, which felt nice.

As Scott and I left the beach I noticed an older woman waving at someone, than a little kid yelling excitedly, Grandma!

No bathroom stop in the one port-a-potty today. Someone puked on the floor right next to the toilet. Yuck!

july 27/SWIM

3 loops, long*
lake nokomis open swim
80 degrees
humidity: 80%

*there are no set locations for the buoys, so each swim the distance is a little different. Sometimes shorter than usual, today longer. I usually compare by number of strokes. 3 loops last Thursday was 1, 700 strokes, 3 loops today was 2000 loops.

Hot! The few times I stopped mid-lake to adjust by nose plug or googles I was overheated. That doesn’t happen often when I’m in the water! The first loop was choppy with swells. Not rough, but active, and difficult to breathe on my right side. The choppiest part of the loop was the last segment back toward the big beach. Loops 2 and 3 were calm. I guess the wind died down. No sign of blue-green algae blooms.

10 Things

a pale yellow something below me in the water — a leaf? a fish? a vine?
blue sky with puffy white clouds
sloshing sounds as water lapped over me
a plane flying low and parallel to the water
squeaks from my leaking nose plug
spots of sparkling water in the distance
sparkle friends moving fast
below the surface, the water was a greenish-yellow
rounding the buoy, noticing the angle of the rope as it disappeared into deeper, darker water
swimming into a few vines — thin, not scratchy or slippery

I thought about doing 4 loops, but at the end of the third I could tell that my body was done. Hours later, writing this and feeling tired, I’m glad I listened and stopped.

Returned home and watched Tadej Pogacar win the tour and Wout Van Aert win the stage. Excellent.

july 25/WALK

1 hour
to east lake library and back
84 degrees

No open swim today. It wasn’t canceled, but I wanted to watch the tour stage live and the air quality was very bad this morning — wild fires from Canada. Hours later, I might be regretting missing it a little — and if it rains Sunday morning or they close the lake, I’ll be regretting it a lot. Oh well. I walked to the library instead. Hot with bright sun, hardly any shade.

10 Things

leaving the house, a sudden swarm of bzzzzzbzzzzz — bees? nope, a drone hovering above the house. Google earth? Images for a nearby house for sale? Something else, more sinister?
2 people on bikes in bright yellow vests
an older man walking by the church just behind the library, hunched, his head tilted to the side awkwardly, wearing a rumpled suit
passing by a different church — in the courtyard, heard not seen: a fountain/water feature bubbling
same church: a sign for “little sparks” (preschool?) and silver mushroom shaped lights lining the sidewalk in front of the door
a woman on the public phone in the library — no I don’t have that, but I can tell you my social security number, my address, or my date of birth, which she then did, loudly
someone sitting on a front stoop of a duplex, the front doors separated by 2 garages, listening to BBC news, 5 bodies were recovered, or something equally gruesome
2 people behind me, walking slightly faster, slowly gaining — not seen, heard: the occasional footstep sliding on sand or dirt or gravel
as I walked past a car parked in a driveway, I heard a noise — sort of like an alert or an alarm or a ring tone. returning later, heard it again when I passed
(noticed many times before) a free library at the edge of a yard, under it 4 or 5 stones, one of them with eyes, positioned to resemble a (book) worm

As I walked, I thought about water and being immersed in it, then I imagined being immersed in the air that surrounded me, not separating me from the world but connecting me to it, in a soft haze of togetherness, hearing all the other sounds, feeling a part of them. I thought about something I read the other day in Darby Nelson’s For Love of Lakes:

Sight insists on separation; hearing, like touch or taste or smell insist on connection.
Scott Russell Sanders, cited in For Love of Lakes

Sight insists on separation. To me, very little feels separate with its blurred lines and fuzzy forms, and sounds are often difficult to isolate and find their source.

Then, another thought: to be present in a moment requires soft absorption: not focused attention on what you are hearing, but an openness to taking in what’s happening now and only reflecting on it later.

Here are the 2 books I picked up from the library:

Pawnbroker’s Daughter: A Memoir/ Maxine Kumin
It is Almost Than: A Collection of Images + Text by Women Artists & Writers/ Lisa Pearson, ed.

Anne Carson, Water, and You

Found this passage from Anne Carson which I think fits with a conversation of immersion and being reminded of the self mid-swim.

There is a moment you are swimming in the pool, stroking forward strongly and down across the fingers of your right hand as you press it through the water, comes a hair. You feel this hair as a jolt of what should not happen. Just a single hair, so slight a sensation you could think you imagined it except, pushed against your fingers by the pressure of the water as you continue to thrust, it clings an instant, it will not go its way, you may have to shake your fingers sideways in the water spoiling your stroke and then it slides off, this hair that has no business there, someone else’s hair, this little nightmare of a hair whose touch has suddenly startled you out of the sleep of self-containment that swimming induces into the fact of dirt. Other people’s dirt. Other people. Your own dirt, you. Not this pure noncontingent forward motion unmarred by agent or accountability but you, a person, a person known all too well, a person in a swamp of others and others’ dirt, hair, skin, fluids, anger, who knows. You in all this. You utterly violable. Of course everyone is aware swimming pools are full of dirt but there is no reason to think of this now. The thought in fact is canceled by swimming by its sound aspect – both deaf and cavernous – that separates you from normal perception; by its blue aspect, an immaterial blue that reminds you vaguely of laundry ads or other planets; by its water aspect, which cannot help but evoke the whole history of purification and lustral joy not to say ritual rightness; and above all by its heroic, streaming, organized, forward motion. What could dirt have to do with this motion?
excerpt from Waterworld/ Anne Carson

Carson’s hair and dirt remind me of the “friends” I’ve written about in the YWCA pool (a few years ago), my sparkle friends in Lake Nokomis, and the floating vines I encounter in the middle of Lake Nokomis or Cedar Lake that wrap around my head or shoulders or slide (like a full body scan) down my torso and legs.

24 july/RUNBIKESWIM

run: 4 miles
the monument and back
73 degrees
dew point: 69

Thought about going out for a run around 6:30 am but watched Pogacar defend his yellow jersey in the alps instead. Excellent. Finally made it out for a run at 10:30. Not as bad as yesterday, but too warm, especially in the direct sun.

Chanted in triple berries. Admired the reflections of clouds on the river. Heard the kids on the playground at the church preschool. Put in the soundtrack to “Operation Mincemeat” for the second half.

I thought briefly about fields — visual and of tall grass and open vistas — and buoys and dots and simple forms.

Walking home after the run, I noticed someone stopped on the corner with a dog. I wondered why they were stopped — was there a car coming? should I not cross? Got to the other side and realized that it was my son, FWA, and our dog, Delia. It’s happened before — just last week — but it’s always upsetting when I don’t recognize my kids or my husband or my dog. For a moment, they’re only strangers.

Crossing back over the lake street bridge, I took a few pictures of the clouds reflected on the river:

note: I had to crop out my finger from the left hand corner. Even with the cropping, I think these are cool pictures.

visual fields, landscapes, meadows

At the end of yesterday’s entry I wondered what sighting buoys and swimming in the lake had to do with the visual field test. I’m still thinking about it. On a literal level, the way I’ve trained myself to sight a buoy, lining up its path, then trusting myself to swim straight to it even when I can’t see it, is how I took the visual field test last month: I fixed on the center dot and looked straight at it, or where I knew it to be when I couldn’t see it. My eyes didn’t wander. Another connection: at a distance, the buoy doesn’t look like the shape that it is — a triangle — it looks like a small dot in the center of my vision.

Yesterday, reviewing early july entries, I encountered this definition of visual field: “that portion of space in which objects are visible at the same moment during steady fixation of the gaze in one direction.”

It reminded me of definitions of landscape I came across yesterday in the OED: “A view or prospect of natural inland scenery, such as can be taken in at a glance from one point of view.”

the space in which objects are visible at the same time, what all can be taken in (simultaneously) with one glance

as
though there
swung at the end
of a tunnel,
a passage dotted
with endless
points of
arrival, as
though our gaze
started just outside
our faces and
corkscrewed its way
toward the horizon,
processual,
as if looking
took time to happen
and weren’t
instantaneous,
offered whole in
one gesture
before we
ask, before our
will, as if the far
Sonoma mountains
weren’t equally ready
to be beheld as
the dead
fly on the sill)
(Pastoral/ Forrest Gander)

What I remember of better eyesight is how the world assembled all at once, an effortless gestalt—the light, the distance, the dappled detail of shade, exact crinkles of a facial expression through a car windshield, the lift of a single finger from a steering wheel, sunlight bouncing off a waxed hood.
(Naomi Cohn)

A quick glance — my eyes emerge from the water like an alligator to look ahead for the buoy. Often all I see is a green mass of trees and empty water. Occasionally, a bright dot, far off. I don’t see it every time I look, but enough times to keep steadily swimming towards it. No time to think, not enough data to be certain, but I believe it’s the buoy, and usually I’m right. A few times I’ve mistaken a bright swim cap or a car’s headlight or a sailboat for the buoy.

“A field is used more often to describe an area managed by people. The field before you was once an orchard and pasture belonging to a farmer. A meadow is used to describe a wild area.”

“Fields and meadows start when trees have been removed from an area. This can occur naturally with a forest fire or flood, or humans may cut down a forest. Seeds from grasses and weeds take root shortly after and a meadow is born.

As the trees within my macula disappear, my forest meadows. here I’m thinking about my classic memory from science class with the inverted tree in the back of the eye.

bike: 8 miles
lake nokomis and back
82 degrees / 79 degrees

Biked to the lake! No worries, felt relaxed and able to see well enough, or if I couldn’t see, able to navigate well enough. No moments of panic. Biking back was the best. Long shadows, cooler, people biking/walking/running and enjoying the calm evening. I admired the shadow of me on a bike, looking larger than life.

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
82 degrees

Yesterday, open swim sent out a warning about blue-green algae. They weren’t closing the lake, just encouraging people to be cautious. I didn’t see any algae blooms, although I noticed that the water was a more vivid, electric green. The water was warm and calm and wonderful. With the sun, it was difficult to see — I could see dots, which I trusted were buoys as I swam towards the little beach, but swimming back towards the big beach, barely anything other than bright sun, sparkling water. I managed to see the buoys at least once and trusted my shoulders to guide me across. I don’t think I’ll ever not be amazed that this works, that I swim straight to the buoys when I can’t (or barely can) see them.

I tried something new as a I swam. Each time I tilted my head to breathe, I thought a word, usually 1 syllable but occasionally 2: squish flash flit fly flush flare zip zap bird tree cloud blue girl ghost gorge life death bliss breath bubbles bike run float lift shut jump black red orange feet toe hand face field grass give take spirit sprite light dark

There were many other words, but I don’t remember them all. I might try this again. Maybe some great words/images will burst out?!

images collected in consciousness
like a tree alone on the horizon
(Crows/ Marilyn Nelson)

july 23/RUN

2.55 miles
2 trails
77 degrees
dew point: 73

So warm already at 8 am! Decided to do a quick run anyway. Felt better than I thought especially on no coffee or food, but it was still hard. Listened to the new Lorde (recommended by RJP) while I ran south to the entrance of the Winchell Trail. Listened to turkeys and trucks and coxswains while I ran north.

10 Things

a coxswain below giving instructions through a bullhorn — take a drink before class begins . . . today we’ll start with some stroke work: 22/22/22/24
the distant gobble of turkeys
the rumble of a truck
a roller skier
a biker in a bright yellow shirt working on their aero position, back bent low and straight over the bike
the tree that fell and blocked 3/4 of the trail is still there, its leaves now brittle and brown
empty benches
voices above me, approaching steadily — bikers or runners?
another coxswain — difficult to hear over my music
cracked pavement below — some small and shallow, others deeper and slanted, all waiting to twist ankles

a few hours later: a steady rain

Returning to this log entry to wander with a question I posted yesterday:

What kind of landscape even exists in the absence of vision?

Darby Nelson is referring to lakes and how little can be seen below the surface. Landscape is a strange word choice here. Landscape refers to a view/tract of land that’s inland. What’s the word for a water view? Waterscape? Beyond that, the OED definition of landscape is about a view, a portrait, a picture. What is the experience/perception of a space — land or water — called that doesn’t prioritize or exclusively rely on vision?

I’m also thinking about how a landscape is scenery, an object to gaze at, the background. What if we made the lake the subject? How would we understand and name our relationship to it? Ecosystems popped into my head — maybe not the right word, but another way to think about what the water we’re observing, especially when we’re in it, is. And, what if we (you, me) are not individuals separate from the lake as observers but ecosystems too?

It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no such thing as a biological individual. All organisms are intricately nested collectives: networks of relationships between cells and microbes that make it impossible to say where one “individual” starts and stops. Humans are no exception: We carry around more microbial cells than we do our own.
Entangled Flourishing

In the same entry I posted the above quotation (8 april 2022), I also posted and discussed Arthur Sze’s poem “Entanglements.” I especially like these lines:

your field
of vision tears, and an underlying landscape
reveals a radiating moment in time.

“(during my run) I reflected on the underlying landscape as layers that can’t be seen with your eyes, only smelled or felt or imagined. And I delighted in the idea of so much happening, so much present beneath me that I couldn’t see, that I didn’t need to see, for it to exist or to affect me or to be connected to me.”

Field of vision? Suddenly I thought about my interest in writing a poem/s about taking the visual field test (see 1 july 2025). And I’m thinking about landscapes and fields and meadows (see 2 may 2025). A line popped into my head: a meadow of moments — no, a moment meadows.

What does the visual field test have to do with the lake or my experiences swimming in it? A lot, I think. Somehow I want to bring together the visual field test with my swimming and sighting buoys. How? Not sure yet.

july 22/SWIM

swim: 4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
89 degrees
choppy

A great swim, but choppy! Lots of breathing on one side to avoid waves. Sighting buoys (and other swimmers) was harder, everything lost in the waves. The first loop was the toughest. Got into a groove after it and managed to do 2 more loops before pausing to tread water at a white buoy and then beginning the final loop. It was crowded in the water — kids wading at the beach, adults taking advantage of the free night at open swim. Because of the crowds and the choppy water, it was difficult to give attention to the water or the bubbles or anything else. Did I manage to notice 10 things?

10 Things

sparkle friends — particles floating, churning in the water
so many vines reaching up from the bottom, wrapping around my wrist or ankles — it didn’t bother me, but I could imagine that freaking out some other swimmer
a plane flying low, parallel to the water
hot pink safety buoys tethered to torsos
the pale foot of a breaststroker under the water
the silhouette of an upright lifeguard on a kayak, marking the edge of the course
someone swimming at the edge of my vision — far off to the left
3 swimmers with yellow safety buoys clustered together, treading water and talking
mostly blue sky, a few clouds
paused at the buoy, witnessing a strange sight: the way a swimmer was breathing and sighting in the choppy water, jerking their head high up and out of the water — at first I thought they were doing a double-take when they noticed me, but nope, that’s just the way they swim

before the swim

Each summer of swimming builds on the last. I get stronger, able to swim for longer without stopping. It’s not a deliberate choice or part of a training plan — I have no training plan for swimming; I just swim until I am too tired or I have to go to the bathroom or I’ve run out of time. I have loose goals: 100 miles for the summer or a 5k or 6 loops or the full 2 hours in one session. This year: swimming cumulatively for a day, or 24 hours, in August. It’s a goal inspired by the title of a Mary Oliver poem: Swimming, One Day in August. It’s possible, but it will take some planning and pushing myself to achieve.

In July, I’m finding myself thinking about how much time I’m spending above the surface versus below it. This year, I’m below much more than above. In past summers, I’ve done less loops and more stops at shore in-between. This year, I might occasionally pause mid-lake for 5-10 seconds, or take a 30 second break at the beach between the 3rd and 4th loop, but mostly I’m swimming freestyle without stopping. 60-90 minutes of 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left. That’s a lot of time submerged and becoming acquainted with the underwater world!

Below, my thoughts are the bubbles that surround me. Above, they become words that hover above the water or travel across the lake — maybe they get lost beyond the horizon, or maybe they linger, later taking the form of words on a page. Last night, swimming the stretch from hidden beach back to point beach, I imagined each breath as one word bursting into the air: 1 2 3 4 5 BLUE 1 2 3 4 5 GRAY. I didn’t get very far with my words before I was distracted by something — another person? a scratchy vine? trying to sight an invisible buoy? I’d like to play around with this some more while I’m swimming tonight. Does each breath have to be only one word?

My ideas about thoughts below and above the water are partly inspired by the lines from Alice Oswald that I’ve memorized and have been reciting in my head:

dived again and surfaced
and smelt all the longings of grass-flower smells
and bird-flower sounds and vaporous poems
that hang in the chills above rivers
(Nobody/ Alice Oswald)

the vaporous poems as my thoughts bursting into the air and hanging above the surface?

and thoughts escaping to the surface to move beyond the self

I wish I was there or there he thinks and his mind
immediately

as if passing its beam through cables
flashes through all that water and lands
less than a second later on the horizon
and someone with a telescope can see his tiny thought-forms
floating on the sea surface wondering what next

like spirits of sight whose work is on the water
where the massless mind undulates the intervening air
shading it blue and thinking

I wish I was there

or there

All the time in the water, the front half of me submerged except for my quick breathe every 5 strokes, has me wondering about which world is real, which a dream. On 3 July, I posted a quotation from Anne Carson that ended with, Could we be exactly wrong about such things as—he rotates again—which way is up? High above him he can feel the clouds watching his back, waiting for him to fall toward them. Which way is up, which down?

I’m thinking of May Swenson’s “Water Picture” and her vivid description of a water world as the world above water in reverse:

Treetops deploy a haze of cherry bloom for roots, where birds coast belly-up in the glass bowl of a hill

The first line of her poem — In the pond in the park
all things are doubled — reminds me of something Alice Oswald said in her “Interview with Water” lecture: when you look at water, it allows you to exist twice but more darkly (see full quote from 20 june 2024)

And that line reminds me of part of Oswald’s Nobody:

I lost track of
the underneath of things everything became my mirror
once I stood up to look over the side
I sat down again terrified it was myself I saw
thronged and pitch-green
spilling over the top of the earth
the same soft dust-sheets over my hands as the clouds
the same thick curtain across the horizon

Above and below the surface is not just reversal, the same backwards, symmetry, but something else. In her lecture, the lines before the bit about twice darkly, Oswald says:

but the surface of water is complicated by transparency, and its transparency is complicated by refraction. Water is never the same as itself. Rivers can only exist as similarities, lakes reflect more than their own volume

The surface offers the illusion of reversal, one way up, the other down. Below the surface, beyond its mirror, another world waits to be witnessed. And not with eyes — the visibility in lake nokomis is currently 6.6 feet. In the middle of the lake, all I see below me are particles, stray vines, an occasional flash, and murky green-blue-yellow. Not so much dark, as Nothing.

I’m fascinated by surfaces, or what Oswald calls the waterlid. What does the surface look like from below looking up? I should make note of it today. Also, from above, looking down?

Looked up some notes, and found this great quotation from Darby Nelson in his book, For the Love of Lakes:

Human understandings rely heavily on the endless flood of messages from our eyes. But with a lake, the laws of optics work against us. Its reflective surface and the water’s rapid absorption of light with increasing depth conspire to keep much of a lake hidden from view. At a lake, open your eyes and you don’t see half of it. Nearly all the visual input from a lake comes as surface reflections, mere superficialities. Thoreau reveled in reflections. He felt because they were constantly changing they could present previously known truths from new points of view. But those truths don’t penetrate into the world of the lake below, a truth with which he seems unconcerned. What kind of landscape even exists in the absence of vision? How can we fully perceive what we cannot see?
For the Love of Lakes/ Darby Nelson

during the swim

I wanted to think about these things and recite some lines as I swam, but I was distracted by the effort of choppy, crowded water, always looking out for waves crashing over me and making it hard to breathe, or random slow or stopped swimmers. Near the end of the swim, I decided to dip lower in the water so that I could see the surface from below — a wavy, slightly distorted version of the sky and clouds. Cool!

july 21/RUNSWIM

run: 1.75 miles
from minnehaha falls to home
73 degrees / dew point: 64

A quick run with Scott from the falls back home before the rain started. We made it! Checked the weather on my watch after we finished — 95% chance of rain in 8 minutes. Ran at 1 pm, which might be my least favorite time to run. It felt hard. Still, I’m glad we did it. (It never rained.)

We stopped to walk where the trail dips below the road so I could point out the new trail they’ve created that winds down to the river. I can’t wait until they’re finished. It looks cool. Speaking of cool, I was trying to convey to Scott how I felt about the air and what the impending storm was doing to the sky and the air and green of the gorge. First I said “cool,” but it’s not cool (temperature), so I started to clarify, I mean the atmosphere, but realized that atmosphere could be related to temp so I said, I mean the vibe is cool. Cool is such a strange word — both full of meaning and history and empty too. For 35 years, I’ve been trying to expand my vocabulary beyond it, but it never works. How many times a day do I use this word?

I know that there is a rich history of the term within African American culture and jazz and that it’s been appropriated by white culture, but I don’t know the history that well. In poetry, my immediate thought about cool is Gwendlyn Brooks amazing, “We Real Cool.” I also think about Beatnik poetry and the Pia Zadora/Ric Ocasek scene in Hairspray:

“your hair is really uncool”

swim: 3 loops (6 cedar loops)
cedar lake open swim
79 degrees
rain

Overcast, gray. Calm water, warm-enough air. A great night for a swim. As I swam, I monitored the sky, noticing it getting darker and thicker. Wondered if it would start raining. During loop 4, it did. It’s always difficult to tell if it’s raining when I’m swimming. Today I felt a drop on my check and then paused to lift my head out of the water — a steady rain. I think I heard it underwater, but I couldn’t see it, and barely felt it. No thunder, so open swim kept going. Hooray!

10 Things

a graying sky
a big canoe moving fast across the swim course
even as I tried to stay on the edge of the course, the current pushed me toward the center
pale green, opaque water
bubbles encasing my hands
attacks from floating vines
a party with a campfire and barking dogs at hidden beach
buoyant, feeling held by the water
after: itchy skin
standing up in the sand after the last loop — a final look at the buoys and the water

Remembered the first line from the A Oswald poem fragment that I forgot several times last week: this disintegrating certainty

Thought about the bubbles and imagined that they were holding me up, like some sort of raft or inner tube.

My legs felt like rudders, my torso rocked rhythmically, my shoulders rose and fell.

july 20/SWIM

4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
67 degrees

Wow! What a morning for a swim. Sunny and not too windy. I couldn’t see the green buoys heading towards the little beach, but I didn’t care. I’m used to my eyes not seeing the buoys and trusting that some part of me has seen them and is leading me the right way, and I use other things to keep on course — sparkles on the water, which mean other swimmers are around, the lifeguard kayaks on the edge of the course, buildings.

10 Things

a swirled glob of vines
orange safety buoys tethered to torsos
cloudless blue sky
pale green water
a young kid calling out to another kid — look at the little fish!
a swim clinic for people doing the Y-tri — the instructor encouraging people to take breaks if they needed to — of course it’s hard! it’s okay to take a break
little specks: swan boats in the distance
little specks: green buoys looking like far off white dots
sparkle friends
a paddle boarder crossing the path, then a kayak

Recited my Alice Oswald lines: He dives. He shuts himself in a deep soft-bottomed silence . . . Underwater, the silence was more than a lack of sound, not empty but still — the same view with no variations: the pale green water studded with particles. No shafts or light, no fish.

Recited some lines of my own, too: I go to the lake/to beholld to be/ held by the water

a return to EXAQUA

“Water is the medium, the texture, the weight, the space, the motion/emotion or your writing/thinking. Would you agree? Is that too tidy? Your work is attuned to water and being close to it (or, better, being inside it) is important to you” (EXAQUA/ Jan-Henry Gray).

What might it look like to have water be the medium, the texture, the weight space motion emotion of my writing/thinking?

medium = way in which the writing is delivered — print, digital, audio, visual
water as medium = delivered with water = the bubbles sparkles wound on the water my piercing hands leave

Giving water the weight and size of myself
in order to imagine it, water with my bones
water with my mouth and my understanding

weight and size of myself = swimming in the lake, again and again, a full immersion — without wetsuit or raft — more time below the surface than above, my full devotion and attention

july 19/RUN

4 miles
river road, north/south
72 degrees
humidity: 85%

Because I waited until after today’s tour stage — the last one in the Pyrenees — it was humid and hot out by the gorge! Other than the heat, the run was not too bad. I chanted in triples for about a mile and tried to keep my chest up, shoulders relaxed, arms in a controlled swing. I don’t remember hearing the rowers or seeing the river.

10 Things

the entrance to a steep dirt path above the rowing club on the other side of the path that goes under the lake street bridge
a runner behind me, coming fast, slapping his feet on the paved path
a biker sternly telling the runner, you’re on the bike path!
the runner not reacting because he was wearing headphones
the fence panel that they were redoing yesterday was in place and its new, unpainted wood stood out against the other brown panels
a wooden slat of the fence jutting out by the ravine because of a leaning tree — watch out!
2 older women sitting on a bench — one to the other: not bad, 2 miles in 2 hours
a flash of orange in the peripheral — a hidden tree trunk marked for removal
slightly more of a view at the sliding bench — I think park workers trimmed the trees
the crack north of the trestle looks like it might have grown some more

july 18/BIKESWIM

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
61 degrees (there) / 68 (back)

It’s great to bike! Independence! Not having to rely on someone else to get me to the lake. And, being on a bike is much more fun than being in a car.

Overcast and cool. Some wind as I biked south and west. I might have glimpsed the river through the trees, looking almost white, but I don’t remember. Heard the rush of the light rail going past on the other side of the barricade. Also heard the rush of the creek, moving past the spot where all the kids like to swim. Heard the rhythmic thwack of the pickle ball hitting the racket. The pickle ball courts by the lake nokomis rec center are always full. And, as I neared the big beach, I heard a shrill sound on repeat. Scott and I had heard it last night and thought it was a person whistling. Nope. Was it a bird? What else could it have been?

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
64 degrees

A little tired today after last night’s swim. Otherwise, I felt good, buoyant, high up on the surface of the water. My sparkle friends were coming right at me as I swam across to the little beach. The sky was covered in clouds. The positioning of the buoys was closer today than last nigh, so a much shorter course. Two things: the green buoy closest to the little beach was farther away this morning than last night and the middle green buoys were closer together — a tighter angle. According to my watch, I swam a mile and 1000 less strokes today.

I had trouble keeping my nose plug on; it was leaking air which made a funny nose underwater. I wondered if other swimmers could hear it. Have I heard the noises of other swimmer’s underwater before? Not in lake, but I’ve heard clicking elbows in the pool.

Mostly my stroke pattern was: 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left
Occasionally: 1 2 3 4 5 6
or 1 2 3 breathe right 1 2 3 4 breathe right 1 2 3 left 1 2 3 4 left

I recited Alice Oswald, mostly the one about microscopic insects that catch pigment on their shivering hair-like receptors. I wanted to recite the new lines I tried to memorize last night, but I got stuck on the first line. I couldn’t remember disintegrating certainty.

Yesterday I watched a little of the 5k open water swim world championships from Singapore. The competitors were swimming in a shipping lane with an over-sized lane line on one side. This lane line was enormous, much bigger proportionately than a pool lane line. It looked strange and unreal.

10 Colors

orange buoy
red lifeguard kayak
white swan
an occasional dot of robin’s egg blue — the green buoy getting closer
lime green buoy
yellow safety buoy
pink cap
green vine, floating
pale greenish-brown vine from milfoil reaching up from the bottom
a smear of green so dark it almost looked black near the ford bridge: a dark dirt trail that winds through the woods

EXAQUA

Last week, I returned to a poem I posted on this log a few years back: EXAQUA / Jan-Henry Gray. So many good lines about water. I decided to request it from the library — it’s in Gray’s collection, Documents. Yesterday RJP and I went and picked it up. Exaqua is several pages long, with multiple sections. Today I’ll start reading it more closely.

I wondered about the title. What does it mean? In a note, Gray writes that the title comes from the “Notanda” section of M.NourbeSe Philip’s Zong. I’ve heard of Zong! before. JJJJJermoe Ellis writes about it in Aster of Ceremonies. I had to do a little more digging to find out what it means in Zong! Found a masters thesis with an explanation:

When Morrison writes, “By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footsteps but the water too and what is down there,” she gestures toward the material remains of the enslaved who we know to have been drowned by those waters—the “Sixty Million and more” to whom Beloved (324). It is in an attempt to remember “the water and what is down there” that NourbeSe attempts to do the work of recovering, reclaiming, or exhuming those bodies from their liquid graves. The term NourbeSe uses to describe this process is exaqua: that is, to exhume the bodies of the Zong’s victims from the water. In lieu of the enslaved’s literal, material remains—their scoured bones— Zong! orients itself toward creating a textual space where their voices may sound out. When we have observed that a voice is singular, this observation has rested on the embodiedness of our voices. As sound, our voices are constituted by the materialities of our bodies that produces them, thereby carrying something of our bodies outside of ourselves and spacing it out into the material world. For NourbeSe, then, Zong! as a material object is like the surface from which the sound of the captives’ voices reemerge.
Listening/Reading for Dismembered Voices

This definition is fascinating. I want to keep thinking about it as I do a close reading of the different sections of the poem. An immediate thought: the idea of surface here is interesting — surface as where what is inside us travels outside.

immersion

The only way to know a song is to sing it.
The only way to know an ocean is to swim it.
(from Across the Pacific Ocean/ Jan-Henry Gray)

These lines are from an earlier poem in the collection, but I’ve been thinking about them and I think they can be put into conversation with EXQUA. I’d also like to put them into conversation with my own thoughts on being in the water as opposed to being near it or beside it or above it (like I am with the river).

I think about all that I know or understand or am familiar with because of the time I’ve been in lake nokomis over the last 12 years. The quality of the water, its currents, its colors, its buoyancy, its temperatures. The sediments, the ducks, seagulls, loons, dragonflies, the vegetation.

In the water, you feel the ripples, the swells, the rocking of the waves, the wind. Out of the water, you might see a textured surface or a whitecap, but you might only see flat, calm water.

july 17/RUNSWIM

4 miles
river road, north/south
57 degrees
humidity: 80%

In the 50s! What a beautiful morning. Sunny, calm, cool. My gait felt strange, awkward, for the first 1/2 mile. Was it the shoes? I wore Brooks instead of Sauconys. The humidity was high — lots of sweat, not dripping but pooling near my nose. Chanted in triples for the first mile.

10 Things

rowers! heard 2 different coxswains
after 5 or 6 months, they’re finally replacing the fallen fence panel above the northern end of longfellow flats
the dirt they put in the crack north of the trestle has settled and the crack is back and as big as before — at one point will this be unfixable?
good morning! / good morning! — exchanged greetings with a runner with a dog
good morning! — Mr. Holiday wished me a good morning
click click thought it was a roller skier, but it was a biker changing gears
a circle of light below the sliding bench — have they cleared some branches for more of a view here?
smell of cigarette smoke
the dark dirt of a steep trail leading down to the river
the loud slap of a runner’s shoes as he passed me, running fast, or at least much faster than me

I was watching the tour as I compiled the 10 Things list, but had to put my computer away when they reached the last climb — a tough HC. Pogacar went for it near the bottom and Vingegaard couldn’t follow. Wow!

to remember and return to

water and time / log entry for 11 july 2024

lines to memorize for today’s swim?

this disintegrating certainty this water
whatever it is whatever anything is
under these veils and veils of vision
which the light cuts but it remains

unbroken
(Nobody/ Alice Oswald)

while I’m swimming today: recite this bit and the others from Dart and Nobody:

swim: 4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
71 degrees

Open swim is back and I did 4 loops! A wonderful night, in and out of the water. The water was smooth and fast and not too warm or too cold or too crowded. Entering the lake, I watched as a motorized paddle board zoomed by, then another. What? As I swam toward and then past the orange buoy I heard a metallic buzz in the water. Was it because of these paddle boards? I am very grateful that motorized boats aren’t allowed on nokomis. If they were, would I be hearing this buzzing sound all of the time?

I was off course in the first loop; the sun made it very difficult to see the green buoys. But it wasn’t a big deal. On the second loop, I figured it out.

I marveled at the contrast between above and below the surface. Above was a smooth blue, below a glittering green. Checked out my bubbles. Felt the water darken when the sun went behind a cloud. Was attacked by a few stray vines.

Thought about how much I love the water and how confident I am in it, and then about how dangerous and scary and deadly it can be.

Recited Alice Oswald lines — not the new ones I just memorized, but the ones I’d already been reciting in my head.

july 16/RUN

Rain this early (7 am) morning. Hopefully stopping in a few hours. Watching the tour and rereading old entries from july 16ths. Discovered this excellent description of a buzzing bug:

The Locust/ Leonara Speyer

Its hot voice sizzles from some cool tree
Near-by:
It seems to burn its way through the air
Like a small, pointed flame of sound
Sharpened on the ecstatic edge of sunbeams.

note: I first posted this poem on 16 july 2022. I posted it again last year in 2024. Maybe I should memorize it?

a few hours later: what a stage of the tour (stage 11)! Pogacar crashing; Visma waiting for him. What will happen tomorrow in the Pyrenees?

It is 10:30 and a light rain. Won’t stop until 12:30. Do I wait, or go now? It’s probably refreshing and it might be fun to run in the rain . . .

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
66 degrees
light rain

I did it, and it was a great run! Back to the 9/1 (9 minutes running / 1 minute walking) and feeling strong and relaxed. The light rain helped to cool me down, and I liked how my feet glided on the wet trail. Glided sounds strange. How about glode or glid or glod? Started the run by chanting in triple berries then turning everything I noticed into triples — river road, dripping trees, running feet, rushing cars. Listened to everything dripping for the first 30 minutes, then put in the “Energy” playlist for the last stretch.

10 Things

gloom with the occasional bright flash from headlights
one flash looked lower — I think it was a reflection in a big puddle!
the ravine by 42nd was gushing like the falls
the falls were giving off a fine, gauzy spray
a stranded surrey near the longfellow house — were they getting wet in the rain?
someone walking up the hill at the edge of the park, carrying an umbrella
above the creek, the grass next to the sidewalk was soaked with a line of big puddles
the sprawling reflection of a tree in a wide puddle on a sidewalk
the silhouette of a bird on a wire, looking very Bird
the bells of St. Thomas — faint, distant

an hour later: I was planning to do open swim at cedar lake tonight but I just got an email: “canceled due to inclement weather.” Bummer.

a few random Alice Oswald bits

On her process of translating what she notices into a poem, and on poetry as framing the silence:

She and her husband, playwright Peter Oswald, divide their day in two – walking their sons to and from school through fields. But she doesn’t take a notebook with her. She believes in the subconscious, in what is brewing on a ‘non-verbal level’. She thinks ‘a flavour or feeling builds up, almost a sculptural shape that could be a living creature, or a dance or a painting’. Only later comes the ‘plastic art of finding the words’.

There is also, in her poems, a sense of the silence behind every word. ‘One of the differences between poetry and prose is that poetry is beyond words. Poetry is only there to frame the silence. There is silence between each verse and silence at the end.’
into the woods

Wood Not Yet Out/ Alice Oswald

closed and containing everything, the land
leaning all round to block it from the wind,
a squirrel sprinting in startles and sees
sections of distance tilted through the trees
and where you jump the fence a flap of sacking
does for a stile, you walk through webs, the cracking
bushtwigs break their secrecies, the sun
vanishes up, instantly come and gone.
once in, you hardly notice as you move,
the wood keeps lifting up its hope, I love
to stand among the last trees listening down
to the releasing branches where I’ve been –
the rain, thinking I’ve gone, crackles the air
and calls by name the leaves that aren’t yet there

Oh, that ending! Now I’m imagining what the rain does when it thinks I’m not around! Today the rain didn’t crackle the air but . . . dotted it? feathered it? poked or punctured it?

The other day I came across Alice Oswald’s description of a project she’ll be working on next year as a fellow at Columbia University. She’s calling it Interviews with Anon:

At the Institute, Oswald will write a procession of passersby, not all of whom are human and many of whom are imperfectly seen: “My inspiration is the wandering, bartering, folktale style of Herodotus, who included 940 characters in his Histories. I shan’t be writing history. Perhaps it will be more like a headcount or even a carnival.”
Interviews with Anon

Very cool! I can’t wait to read/hear this in a few years.

july 15/RUN

1.75 miles
neighborhood
80 degrees
dew point: 70

Wanted to do a longer run today, but it was too hot! At first I wasn’t going to run at all, but I decided to do a short one to, as I sang to Scott, kick start my heart. Of course I sang the melody of this song completely wrong and of course we had to listen to the original. Ugh! And of course I had to remind Scott that one of the many soccer teams I was on as a kid was named Motley Crüe. Another team: Jabberwockies.

When I was in the shade it wasn’t too bad, but in the direct sun — HOT! I had wanted to run to the overlook on the bridge but I noticed, at the last minute — a few feet from the sign — that the sidewalk was closed. So, I turned down and ran south on the river road trail. Ah, shade!

10 Things

my bright yellow running shoes
the neighbor who is always sitting on his front steps smoking was there but wasn’t smoking
the excited chirping of little kids on the playground at the daycare
from a biker: that was so sweet — the tone of sweet made me think kind, thoughtful, not awesome
a long line of cars on lake street
my shadow, straight and strong
2 runners crossing the street, standing in the bike path, a biker approaching, heads up! / oh, sorry!
the rush of wind through the trees
a steady stream of cars on the river road making it difficult to cross
the dark brown dirt, the gentle curve of the green grass, the sharp edge between of a front yard on 46th

This Be the Place: a Pond

Today is the first rest day of the tour so no cycling to watch all morning. Instead I returned to my morning reading practice of visiting poetry sites and rereading past log entries. A lot of great stuff, including: This Be the Place: A Several-Acre Space of Tenderness/ Han Vanderhart

The “several-acre” space is a pond, which struck me as strange. I think of ponds as small bodies of water and several-acres sound big. But is it (big, that is)? Maybe several acres is small. What distinguishes a pond from a lake? I recall looking up brooks and streams and creeks and rivers when I was reading Emily Dickinson’s poem, Have you got a Brook in your little heart (see 13 march 2021), but not ponds. So I looked it up. Fascinating!

pond or lake: the distinction is arbitrary

The term “lake” or “pond” as part of a waterbody name is arbitrary and not based on any specific naming convention. In general, lakes tend to be larger and/or deeper than ponds, but numerous examples exist of “ponds” that are larger and deeper than “lakes.” . . .Names for lakes and ponds generally originated from the early settlers living near them, and the use of the terms “lake” and “pond” was completely arbitrary. Many have changed names through the years, often changing from a pond to a lake with no change in size or depth. Often these changes in name were to make the area sound more attractive to perspective home buyers.
Lake or Pond: What’s the Difference?

from lake to pond to wetland

Learned that the study of inland waters is limnology. And the terms, lotic and lentic, too:

surface waters are divided into lotic (waters that flow in a continuous and definite direction) and lentic (waters that do not flow in a continuous and definite direction) environments. Waters within the lentic category gradually fill in over geologic time and the evolution is from lake to pond to wetland. This evolution is slow and gradual, and there is no precise definition of the transition from one to the next.
Lake or Pond: What’s the Difference?

From lake to pond to wetland reminds of my discussion of ecological succession and Robin Wall Kimmerer at the begining of May. A meadow becomes a thicket, a thicket becomes a forest.

Was Lake Nokomis ever a (bigger) lake that became a pond, then a wetland, then a lake again? Yes!

The landscape around Lake Nokomis was formed by natural forces, to be a place that absorbed and stored water. Over 11,000 years ago, glaciers carved through the land, and then retreated and melted. As the ice blocks that were left behind melted, they formed an expansive system of interconnected wetlands and lakes. Under these saturated conditions organic material from dead plants was unable to completely decompose, forming extensive peat deposits — a wetland soil. Because peat readily absorbs moisture and can hold up to 10 times its weight in water, it can act as a barrier and prevent rainfall from draining into deeper layers of the soil. This can cause water to accumulate, or perch, above the peat. Once abundant wetlands in South Minneapolis were filled or development.

In 1853, the U.S. Surveyor General’s Office conducted the first government land survey of the landscape around Lake Nokomis, then called Lake Amelia. The area contained over 1,500 acres olakes and wetlands. At that time, the natural lakes were larger and shallower than today. Since then, nearly 60% of the area’s wetlands have been filled. In their place is today’s built landscape.
Lake Nokomis Area Groundwater and Surface Water Evaluation

if we opened people up, we’d find landscapes

Linda Gregg might call my pond a “resonant source,” a term she uses for places that are “present as essences. They operate invisibly as energy, equivalents, touchstones, amulets, buried seed, repositories, and catalysts.” These are the Ur-images of our creative psyches, that live with us and inform our writing. “If we opened people up,” remarked the filmmaker Agnès Varda, “we’d find landscapes.” Along with a Virginia creek and cornfields and the wood with its mayapples, this pond is inside me: as summer, as stillness, as childhood—as peace.
This Be the Place: A Several-Acre Space of Tenderness/ Han Vanderhart

You can not realize you are in despair, looking at a pond’s surface.

I love the surface of Lake Nokomis. How when I lift my head out of the green water to sight, I see blue. How its ripples sparkle and its small waves sometimes look like other swimmers. How dragonflies hover above, bubbles hang just below it. How it often hides its moods from those at a distance; what looks calm and still from afar, feels rough and active from within.

ponds and writers: Maxine Kumin and Henry David Thoreau

Two writers that popped into my head as I think and read about ponds; Maxine Kumin and her homemade pond, Pobiz Pond, on her farm and Thoreau and Walden Pond. I just requested Kumin’s memoir in which she writes about how she and her husband, along with help from friends, dug out a pond on their farm property.

Other poetry people who love ponds? Mary Oliver, of course!

note: I was planning to swim, but open swim was canceled because of thunderstorms forecasted for 6:30.

july 14/RUN

3.1 miles
locks and dam #1 and back
72 degrees / humidity: 84%
air quality: 117

Hot! Humid! Hazy! The shade helped. Avoided the crowded river road trail. Heading south I ran on the narrow, root-filled dirt trail on the grassy boulevard until I reached the parking lot, then the trail to Locks and Dam #1. Heading back north, I ran on the Winchell Trail.

There was a moment when I heard the soft rush of cars, the trickle of water out of the sewer pipe, and . . .? I know there were 3 distinct sounds that I noticed all at once and that I imagined putting in a contrapuntal poem. Was the third sound the rowers? the birds? the tapping which might have been a woodpecker on a tree, or a squirrel with a nut? It wasn’t the wind, because there is no wind today. I felt its lack, but also saw it on the surface of the water. Still, thick. It wasn’t the buzzing of workers sawing or mowing or building something. What was it? Just remembered! The soft then sharp buzz of cicadas, which came in waves. I knew I’d remember it! (It only took 2 hours.)

The common thread for these 3 noises is their steady, insistent beat, not moving time forward, but around and around, on repeat.

swimming words

Catch water, thumb first then the semi-circle pull,
arms straight, centre, down. Palm push back, twist
shoulder to breath. And recover.
Kick. Kick. Kick.

Catch. Pull. Push. Twist, Recover.
CatchPullPush. TwistRecover.
CatchPullPushTwistRecover.
Catchpullpushtwistrecover
(No Moon/ Tanis Rideout)

The Catch/ Tanis Rideout

Stretch bone to breakwall and the tidal roar of thirty thousand
swamps, refuses to crest, to break. Thirst for the bubbled silence
of midnight, midlake, midstroke when the limelight was all
to reach for, a trap door opening to a world below.

Pulse counts in an orchestra — it’s only a paper moon
waterlogged and beaming up, a lighthouse lamp spinning
in time. A course to decipher all the way to safe harbour.
There’s a table laid in checkered cloth. The catch of the day muscles away.

At the edge, pulled bodily from a lake that holds fast and drags
thighs, shins against stacked stone and laps the bloody threads.
It won’t return you whole to the land.

Love the title of this poem and the last line. Does the lake return me whole to the land? What does it mean to be returned whole? And, is that to be desired?

I was planning to do open swim at Cedar Lake tonight, but there is a heat advisory and it’s 90 degrees, so Scott and I will go on Wednesday instead, when it’s much cooler.

process influences constraint

Last week, I read about Sarah Riggs’ approach to writing her latest collection, Lines:

In my poem “November 14” from Lines we start with “Only hour only thought: speech speech.” At the age of 47 I set out to write the book in 47-minute time periods. Roughly an hour, an only hour so to speak, in a field of time dedicated only to thinking/ speaking. Increasingly hard to do this century, with text messages et cetera punctuating thought. So on October 15, 2018, I started on a dictation of the mind so to speak, in which second thoughts are also written, and set my phone timer for each writing session, at the same café for many of the poems. Not written so much as transposed. I determined each poem would be 47 lines, and the lines do not need to be connected to ones before or after, though they could be. There would be 47 poems. The name of each poem is the date it was written. To be in time, in the calendar, to have a project that is a book that is a series. To feel in the momentum of it. To slant into dream, to invite that we survive through the tilt and whir of connecting synapses.
Sarah Riggs on Writing Lines, and the Revolutionary Pleasure of Process, Influence, and Constraints

Process, Influence, and Constraints. I love all 3 of these, and think about them quite a bit. I like how Riggs opens the essay: “The bird song and street noise and lilt of the subway and recent phone conversations go into our poetry. We are made up of influences, there is no blank page or screen, as has been said many times.”

In terms of influence, Riggs offers these suggestions:

Channel an influence or more than one. You can choose to riff on or translate someone else’s work. You can choose epigraphs. Dedicate or address your work to someone.

I like the idea of translation. I’ve been playing around with something I call form fitters, where I take words from other poets I love and fit them into my running rhythms (3/2 or 2/1 or 3/3/3/4) and swimming breath patterns (5 syllable lines or 3/4/3/4 or 5/4/5/4). I also like the idea of taking a line and making it the title or, what about the last line?, of a poem. Playing around with influences could be a fun month-long project?!

july 13/SWIMBIKE

5 loops
lake nokomis open swim
71 degrees

5 loops on a beautiful Sunday morning! Even though we’re still under bad air quality advisory and there was smoke and haze lingering above the lake, I didn’t have any trouble breathing. The smoke-haze made it difficult to see the buoys, however. Who cares — not me! I still swam straight towards the buoys.

My 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left or 1 2 3 right 1 2 3 4 right 1 2 3 left 1 2 3 4 left was relaxed and steady. My arms and legs in constant motion, rotating and kicking.

I call my circuits around the buoys loops, but that’s not quite right. They are more triangles, not curved but a straight line with 3 buoys from the northern end of the big beach to the little beach, then a straight line with 2 buoys from the little beach to the southern end of the big beach, then a straight line parallel to beach from the last green buoy to the only orange one and the start of one circuit, the beginning of another. Swimming in the lake is less about curves and more about lines and angles. Angled elbows, a straight back — parallel, the intersecting legs-as-lines. The first segment was fairly smooth and fast, the second was choppy and sluggish, and the third was smoother and faster.

10 Things

something/someone tapped my toe mid-lake — I couldn’t see anyone, was it a fish? a twig?
particles suspended, glittering — my sparkle friends!
my hands wrapped in bubbles
a loose vine passed over my legs, got stuck in my fingers
a military plane flying fast
light green, a hint of yellow, water
glitter on the surface of the water where other swimmers where
hazy blue sky
a gentle rocking from the water
near the end of the final loop — a sore back

I recited my 4 A Oswald lines about microscopic insects in the eye and surfacing and diving again and giving water the weight and size of myself and lifting the lid and shutting it. Such great lines! Admired the bubbles on my hands, thought of Anne Sexton and shedding them and then believed the bubbles were little thoughts and feelings and ideas that some part of me was shedding and offering to the water and anyone in it.

Thought about my gorge poem that begins, I go to/the gorge / / to find the/soft space. Started composing one for the lake: I go to/the lake // to be held. Thought about the verb, to behold, then beheld, which reminded me of a line in a poem that I love and had pondered on 19 june: Unsee the beheld! / Altitude/ Airea D. Matthews

Unsee the beheld where to unsee is to observe/witness with a sense other than sight, or to unravel, come undone or redone, transformed. Who/what is the beheld? Me, held by the water. So, to unsee me, to let go of me/I and have an encounter/exchange with that which is not-I: the water. I haven’t written about this bit yet, but yesterday I was thinking about Anne Carson and her anthropology of water and I wrote in my Plague Notebook, encounter with that which you cannot contain, control, that is not You — the not-I. In the lake, I am held by the water — rocked, enveloped, lifted — but in the process of being held I dissolve, or the small part of Sara the ecosystem that is I is saturated. Yes, this makes sense to me, but will it to anyone else, including future Sara?

I read mention of May Swenson’s poem “Swimmers” yesterday and I happened to have it in Nature: Poems Old and New. I’m still trying to figure out the different ways I can read the stanzas — across; down the left, then down the right, then bottom?down the left, to the bottom, and up the right? down the left only? down the right only?

Swimmers/ May Swenson

Tossed
by the muscular sea,
we are lost,
and glad to be lost
in troughs of rough

love. A bath in
laughter, our dive
into foam,
our upslide and float
on the surf of desire.

But sucked to the root
of the water-mountain —
immense —
about to tip upon us
the terror of total

delight —
we are towed,
helpless in its
swell, by hooks
of our hair;

then dangled, let go,
make to race —
as the wrestling chest
of the sea, itself
tangled, tumbles

in its own embrace.
Our limbs like eels
are water-boned,
our faces lost
to difference and

contour, as the lapping
crests.
They cease
their charge,
and rock us

in repeating hammocks
of the releasing
tide —
until supine we glide,
on cool green

smiles
of an exhaling
gladiator,
to the shore
of sleep.

However I read it, it’s good!

bike: 4 miles
the falls and back
84 degrees

Biked to the falls with Scott for a beer and a hike and some time to be in the midst of others. Sassy, strong little girls, BIG dogs, small yippy dogs, a hiker with poles, surreys, kids playing soccer, a guy that looked like Mr. Hand, 2 long-haired dachshunds in the ice cream line, a LONG ice cream line, a LONGER food line. A roaring falls, a raging creek, blocked-off steps and wooden path. A dog that plopped down and refused to move, a guy walking by, laughing and calling out to his friend, that dog is done!

july 12/BAD AIR

I was planning to run today, maybe even a 10k, but smoke from Canadian wild fires has blown in and made it unhealthy to exercise. You can see and smell and feel the smoke. Bummer. Hopefully they won’t cancel tomorrow’s open swim because of it. And hopefully they won’t have reason to because the smoke will have dissipated.

So, instead of running, I’m reading this morning: old entries and summaries about water. In “Happy 100th Birthday Lake Nokomis” (2014), I found this paragraph:

It can take a century or longer for dredged water bodies to begin functioning like a naturally occurring lakes. As part of the master planning process currently underway, Nokomis was analyzed to see if it was still stabilizing. The water quality consultant from EOR (Emmons and Olivier Resources, Inc.), has determined that Nokomis has finished its transitional period and is now functioning like a natural lake.
Happy 100th Birthday Lake Nokomis

This idea of Nokomis making it to “natural lake” status needs to be in a poem, I think. What does it mean to function like a natural lake?

And here’s some information, from Theodore Wirth:

The area acquired consisted of about 300 acres of shallow water known as Lake Amelia, about 70 acres of mostly low swampy farmland at the northwest corner, and about 38 acres of higher dry land at its northeast corner [where the Recreation Center sits now], as well as a small strip along the south boundary. The improvement plan contemplated reducing the water area from 300 to 200 acres (the minimum depth of the lake to be not less than eight feet and the low lands to be filled to well above the lake level), and increasing the total land area from 108 to 208 acres. Estimated dredging operations amounted to between 2,000,000 and 2,500,000 cubic yards.
Happy 100th Birthday Lake Nokomis

Here’s something to put beside this idea of Lake Nokomis as a dredged out marsh/shallow lake. It’s a line from a poem:

How can anyone read about the glacial
creation of lakes and not feel connected
to the Earth–capital E?
(from Exaqua/ Jan-Henry Gray)

What connection can/should/does one feel to the Earth when reading about the creation of a lake through dredging and planning and acquiring land for recreation and development? As a preliminary answer, I’ll offer, there is/can be a meaningful connection; it’s just not the same as with a “natural”/glacial lake.

july 11/SWIM

4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
73 degrees

Great water! Warm, buoyant, calm, and near the shore, clear. A steady — 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left — swim. Felt strong and relaxed and rhythmic. Didn’t see the buoys that often but knew exactly where they were.

10 Things

the tops of the mifoil: green, wispy, some feathery, some stringy
light green water
green buoys looking robin’s egg blue
the sharp angle of the taut rope with a weight on its end, anchoring the buoy
ducks swimming near shore
glowing bubbles covering my hands
the lifeguard talking through the speaker, testing 1 2 3 attention open swimmers, the course is now open. enjoy your swim!
pale legs underwater — parallel to the ground, kicking breaststroke then fluttering
the feel of something in the water, then a trail of bubbles, then a pale leg — a quick swerve around another swimmer
rounding the green buoy closest to the little beach, getting a brief glimpse of the next buoy — green, looking only like a bright dot, and only visible sometimes

Recited my AO lines again. a rush of gold to the head — giving water the weight and size of myself in order to imagine it — she surfaced and peered around and dived again and surface and saw someone

the beginning of a lake

I started rereading Argument with the Lake this afternoon — a poetry collection I bought in 2018 — and discovered this description of the origins of a lake. I’ll add it to my growing collection of descriptions — of a river in England (see: 30 aug 2024) and a lake in Germany (see: 2 july 2024).

from Begin/ Tanis Rideout

This lake, like others, was dug out. Glacial ice grinding south, scouring
weak Silurian stone, an arctic tsunami leaving only the backbone of the escarpment. Canadian Shield and broken tumble of kames in its
retreat.

The glacial rebound cast this lake of shimmering waters, Ontario. Give
or take
a geologic blink. And now, a girl on Holocene shores measures the
distance —
her to here. Fifty-four kilometres as the crow flies, the herring gull,
the cormorant with dried wings. Sixty-four against the current.
Three point two kilometres an hour, slower than a winter housefly
bumbling against your window

july 10/RUNBIKESWIM

2.5 miles
2 trails
71 degrees
dew point: 67

Sticky, but feels cooler because of the cloud cover. Felt relaxed and able to keep running without stopping. Wore my bright yellow shoes, which seem to not be hurting my feet/calves as much. The river was a light gray-blue, the trees dark green. Heard voices near the ravine — was it the workers finishing the new trail? Also heard the clicking and clacking of ski poles up above near the road.

Several trucks and workers in and around the house that used to have the poetry window (it hasn’t had a poem for more than a year). I wonder where the poetry people went?

The tree is still across the winchell trail. Every time I encounter it I’m cautious, looking out for people coming the other way, hidden behind its branches. Today, there were 2 people, but they were paying attention and waited for me to pass. Thanks!

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
80 degrees / 78 degrees

Biked with Scott to the lake. Nice! No scary moments. I felt confident and didn’t once question where I was going or where the trail was or if that thing ahead of me was a crack or not. Loud birds. A car not knowing how to drive in a round-a-bout. High creek water under the echo bridge. An ultimate frisbee game in the field between the duck and echo bridges. Slanting light. Kids wading in the creek.

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
79 degrees

Another orange buoy gone, replaced with a green one. Only one left. For 11 years, seeing the orange buoy has been my thing. I’ve dreamed about them, written poems about them, and now they’re being replaced with green buoys. That’s okay, but I will miss them and all of my orange thoughts.

The water was a little rougher. Not too rough, more like gentle rocking. Some stray vines, lots of breathing only to my right side. Difficult to see the buoys. Recited my Alice Oswald poems as I swam and thought about lifting the lid and shutting it again and the sky jumping in and out. During the second half of the third loop, I stopped in the middle of the lake just to see what it was like. So quiet and wonderful. I couldn’t hear anything from the sky or the beach or other swimmers. Very cool.

Sparkle friends, bubbles. an orange glow off to the side, marble legs, ghostly milfoil, blue sky with a few clouds. Above: blue water, below: a light greenish-blue. An interesting effect: looking up blue, down below green.

A great swim. I feel strong and free and grateful to be moving and pushing my body. Big shoulders, no calf cramps, no numb/tingling fingers.

july 9/RUN

3.75 miles
river road, north/south
70 degrees
humidity: 74%

Summer! Not the easiest running with the heat, but it’s beautiful by the gorge. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker and he wished me a happy birthday again!

10 Things

a coxswain’s voice below me
a very loud bird across the road, trilling not screaming
a sea and sky of green in the tunnel of trees
a woman walking down the center of the path, gesturing to herself
the two big cracks on the stretch of path just north of the trestle have been filled in with dirt
orange cones and orange spray paint surround the cracks to warn pedestrians
looking through a gap in the trees, seeing the air above the gorge, feeling so open and peaceful
an orange day lily on the edge of the trail
empty benches
the sliding bench looks like it has slid more

I stopped to take a few pictures of the bench:

During the run and after, I recited AO’s lines from Nobody about the microscopic insects in the eye who speak Greek. Such a great poem! And such a great poem to memorize!

july 8/RUNSWIM

2.5 miles
2 trails
67 degrees
humidity: 86%

Got out for my run a little earlier today. Still warm and humid. The bunion on my left foot has a blister on it, which hurt at the beginning of the run. Looking up the anatomy of the foot, I discovered that the bone below the big toe is actually two pea-shaped bones called sesamoids. I’ve been thinking that I might want to devote a month, or a few weeks, to the foot. Maybe September?

Noticed the river for the first time as I turned down to enter the Winchell Trail from the south. Through the trees it looked green and warm and stagnant. A little later, on the Winchell Trail, a pale blue with a spot of sparkle. Greeted by Mr. Morning! as I exited the 38th street steps.

10 Things

empty benches
a parked scooter with its red lights still blinking
heard water dripping down the ravine and thought of a grotto with a waterfall
the tree that fell on the trail last week is still there, blocking 2/3rds of the trail
a faint voice below — a rower?
2 people across the road near Becketwood, crouched near the trees — looking at something? picking up trash? weeding?
a steady stream of cars
a cool green under the tree cover on the Winchell Trail
a week later, the 38th street steps are still rainbow colored
someone walking around the overlook, headed to the part of the stone wall where a dirt trail descends — was he planning to take it?

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
83 degrees

Warm, buoyant, calm water. I felt fast and strong and confident. Lots of swimmers, a few floating vines. No ducks or fish or dragonflies. At least 2 military planes — black — screaming across the sky. The far green buoy looked robin’s egg blue to me again today. My nose plug squeaked. The water looked mostly light greenish blue with a think layer near the surface that almost looked white. I saw some orange off to the side and shafts of light rising up from the bottom. Translucent bubble encased my hands.

I recited bits from AO’s Dart and Nobody as I looped.

Noticed a swimmer looking so far away from the orange buoy and wondered how much of it was my off perspective and how much of it was them being off course. Probably more me; I struggle with depth perception.

almost forgot: during the second half of a loop, the water suddenly got a lot darker for many seconds — a minute? However long it actually was, it felt like a long time. I couldn’t see what caused it, but I’m imagining the darkness was caused by a cloud. On other days, I felt a shorter darkness pass when a plane passes over the sun.

july 7/RUNSWIM

4.25 miles
monument and back
71 degrees
dew point: 64

Hot! I’ve never liked running in the heat but now that I’m taking lexipro my heat intolerance has increased. For some moments of the run I felt great, other moments I didn’t. So I walked some, ran some, and walked again at different stretches.

10 Things

I kept seeing orange flashes — a sign, a cone, a tree marked for removal
kids yelling and laughing outside at a daycare attached to a church
the river from above, on the bridge, heading east: brown, and looking shallow — were those sandbars I was seeing near the surface?
trickling water out of the limestone below the bridge
the sound of shadow falls, falling
a kid’s voice rising from the ravine
construction on the other side of the lake street bridge — orange cones, trucks, yellow-vested workers, the buzz of equipment
the river from above, on the bridge, heading west: blue and covered in the reflections of clouds*
click clack — a roller skier
seen, not heard: a dog, by the clanging of their collar

*stopped at the bridge overlook to take a picture of the clouds reflected on the surface of the water. Is it just me, or does this look like an impressionist painting?

a view from above the river: gray, corrugated water with reflections of clouds and trees — river with clouds, 7 july 2025

the color of water

How to Read Water is fascinating. Here are some things I’d like to remember from the chapter on color:

The colors we see in water depend on the brightness and angle of the light and the water’s depth, as well as what’s on, in, and under that water.
How to Read Water

something to consider: are you looking at water, or something in or under the water, or a reflection on water’s surface. Is it the color of water, or the color of the ground beneath the water (a puddle), or the color of cloud on its surface? What angle are you looking from?

. . . in many circumstances when we think we are looking at the water, we are actually looking at something different and in the distance. Looking out to the sea in the distance is a great example: What we see in that situation is dominated by the reflection of the sky even further in the distance. This is why the distant sea appears blue in fine weather and gray on overcast days.
How to Read Water

This water looks blue because it’s reflection the sky is one I’ve heard a lot, but I think I’ve always heard it as the reason, not one reason under certain circumstances.

What about when we see different colors — which I often do as I run across the bridge and look down at the water? The different colors are based on how much of the water we are actually seeing. Sometimes I see brown, sometimes blue.

You will notice this if you look for it, but not if you don’t because our brain has gotten used ot this effect and so oesn’t register it as at all peculiar.

something to try: Can you find the area/the moment where the shift takes place from looking only at reflections to being able to see water?

the exact color that can travel furtherest through the water without being absorbed: blue-green color, wavelength = 480 nanometers

Is it a big cloud or Jaws? People often think it has gotten deeper or there are fish around when the water darkens, but it might just be a big cloud.

eutrophication = excessive nutrients — algal blooms reduce light, use up a lot of oxygen, change the color of the water

oligotrophic = low in nutrients, clear

my sparkle friends! “A lot of the particles that see in water will be inorganic, a mixture of mud, sand, clay, silt, chalk, and other substances, each one affecting the colors we see.” Do I see them as anything other than the color sparkle?

Today I’m swimming at Cedar Lake, which is much deeper than Lake Nokomis. It is also more of a “natural” lake than nokomis. What impact do these factors have on its colors and my experiences of them?

swim: 2.5 loops (5 cedar lake loops)
cedar lake open swim
82 degrees

The water by the orange buoy closest to Point Beach was almost hot — so warm! It was a little cooler in the middle of the lake and near Hidden Beach, but not that cool. It was also calm. Not much wind, no waves. A few vines floating over and under and around me. Some milfoil by the beach. I forgot to look at the color of the water from above, but I did look below. Blue-green, a few hints of yellow. Opaque.

10 Things

driving past another part of the lake: the surface covered with green vegetation
clear blue sky, then a few clouds, the more clouds, then dark
the first orange buoy seemed much farther out in the water
breathing to my right, seeing some other swimmers halfway across the lake
yellow safety buoys
something in the sky — a plane? a bird? I’m uncertain
the warm water was buoyant; I felt higher on the water
bubbles around my hands
a line of white buoys at hidden beach
a breaststroker, stroking with intensity — are they trying to race me?

Is that what bothers me about breaststrokers I encounter: that they always look so intense and like they are trying to race me or keep up with me? I think of breaststroke as a chill stroke, where you glide and kick as you travel on the surface of the water, able equally to see above and below. But, there’s nothing chill or relaxed about the breaststrokers i encounter!

Before swimming, I worked on memorizing some more lines from Alice Oswald, this time from Nobody, but I got stuck on the beginning and wasn’t able to recite them in my head as I swam:

There are said to be microscopic insects in the eye
who speak Greek and these invisible
ambassadors of vision never see themselves
but fly at flat surfaces and back again
with pigment caught in their shivering hair-like receptors
and this is how the weather gets taken to and fro
and the waves pass each other from one color to the next
(Nobody/ Alice Oswald)

july 6/SWIM

4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
71 degrees

What a beautiful morning for a swim. Sunny, not too windy. The water was warm and smooth. The sky was blue, the water a greenish-blueish-olive. Flashes of orange every so often. There were a few canoes crossing the path, but no menacing swans or stalking sailboats.

1 2 3 4 5 breathe right
1 2 3 4 5 breathe left

10 Things

a green buoy that sometimes looked white, sometime blue, occasionally green, and often disappeared
a few minnows
glitter on the water from other swimmers’ hands and feet
squeak squeak — my nose plug, leaking air
a feeling of something disturbing the water, then bubbles, then pale legs: how I know I’m nearing another swimmer
the far green buoy looking white and blending into the sailboats in the distance
clear water in the beach/swimming area
pink and yellow safety buoys tethered to torsos
Scooby-doo bubbles
shafts of light underwater, looking like they were coming up from the bottom

Like I did on Thursday, I recited lines from A Oswald on the last segment on my loop. Thought about lifting the lid and shutting it again. I do a lot more shutting, then lifting I think.

july 5/RUN

2.5 miles
2 trails
72 degrees / drizzle
dew point: 71

The Tour de France starts today! Hooray! Scott and I are watching it live this year and enduring the terrible U.S. coverage. I miss Orla and Robbie and Adam and Rob and Ant and Nico. Oh well. At least we can watch it. Decided to do a quick run before the thunderstorms started up again. So hot and thick! But quiet, calm, almost empty.

10 Things

the leaning tree 2 doors down our block is marked orange — will they take it down this week?
the tree that fell over the winchell tree last week is still there, blocking the trail — today, no birds surrounding it
dark green trees
pale blue river
white-gray sky
a bullhorn beep then a coxswain’s voice — rowers!
dripping leaves
gushing ravine
thick air
the sound of rain in the trees but not the feel of it on my skin

le tour, day one: some crashes, a few riders already abandoning including Ganna, crosswinds, tight corners, Remco and Roglich already losing time. Bob Roll’s phrase du jour: put the hammer down. A sprint finish: Jasper wins (boo), Girmay gets second

Yesterday, in a ramble about rumors and whispers, I stumbled upon a tentative theme for the month: the language of water. First step: read/skim How to Read Water.

Here’s an interesting bit I’d like to remember:

. . . ponds and lakes are far from permanent; rivers will tend to grow naturally with time as they do their own excavating, but the opposite is true for still water. Unless ponds and lakes are given some help, they will all eventually return to land, It starts with algae, then the rushes and other shallow water plants getting a foothold, and this allows sediments to gather, water turns to wet mud, and a reinforcing cycle begins that culminates in the water losing the battle against the encroaching land.
How to Read Water/ Tristan Gooley

Reading through this chapter on lakes, I’m realizing that you can determine the depth of a lake by surface-level clues — ducks and swans = shallower water / cormorants (have I ever seen a cormorant?) = deeper. Clouds over land are different than clouds over water, so in bigger lakes you can tell if there are islands by looking at the clouds.

random: Watching a commercial during le tour, I heard the pairing of grit and determination in describing a brand. I said to Scott that I should write a poem with pairs of words like Grit & Determination, that are frequently together, in which they break up and then look for new partners. What are some common pairings/partners: Salt & Pepper, Shiny & New, New & Improved, Footloose & Fancyfree, In & Out?

note from 24 june 2026: Reading this last bit, I’m reminded of a bit Scott and I watched on Parks & Rec last week. While talking about the beauty pageant she and Tom were judging Leslie mentioned the talent and poise portions. Tom said something like, oh, are the dancers from Talent & Poise going to be there?

july 4/REST

Fourth of July, so no open swim. Bummer. Too hot to run, besides I haven’t taken a day off from running since last Thursday. Today a break from disciplined moving outside. But not from thinking and writing and reading and dreaming.

Sometimes when something is missing, what you have left is making and believing (Keith S. Wilson).

Copying this quotation from Keith S. Wilson into this entry, I wasn’t thinking about the missing in relation to the green buoy I couldn’t see last night, yet swam straight towards. But somehow, it was the next thought I had as I stared at the words.

a few hours later: I’m sitting under the crab apple tree in my backyard in the shade — thank you, tree, for this shade on a hot day — and I’m re-reading Alice Oswald’s nobody and pondering a word, rumor/rumour:

what kind of a rumour is beginning even now
under the waterlid she wonders there must be
hundreds of these broken and dropped-open mouths
sulking and full of silt on the seabed
I know a snorkeller found a bronze warrior once
with the oddest verdigris* expression and maybe
even now a stranger is setting out
onto this disintegrating certainty this water
whatever it is whatever anything is
under these veils and veils of vision
which the light cuts but it remains

unbroken

*verdigris: a green or bluish deposit especially of copper carbonates formed on copper, brass, or bronze surfaces

A fun rumor to make imagine believe in spread: maybe your brain, or some part of your brain, or your breath, or some other part of you that is not (only) you, has secret conversations with the water in which the water reveals the location of the buoy and the part of you that is you but not (only) you guides you towards it. Of course, this only works if you listen, which I have learned to do. Can you?

rumour (OED):

General talk or hearsay, not based on definite knowledge

General talk or hearsay personified
1600: “Open your eares; for which of you wi’l stop The vent of hearing, when lowd Rumor speaks?”/ W. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2 Induct. 2

Clamour, outcry; noise, din. Also: an instance of this

To make a murmuring noise

This last one — to make a murmuring noise — reminds me of the idea of bubbles speaking to me in a soft, faint, bubble-whisper. And now, I’m thinking of a book that I checked out of the library years ago: How to Read Water. Since the ebook is available, I just checked it out again! What are water’s languages?

Back to Alice Oswald’s words and her bronze warrior. Have I written about these particular lines (I’ll check later)? I’m thinking of the ghosts — people who drowned, objects forgotten or carelessly discarded — on the bottom of the lake. What do/can they say to me? Do their messages travel through the pale milfoil that stretches up to the light?

july 3/RUNSWIM

3.1 miles
2 trails
72 degrees
dew point: 70

8 a.m. and already 72. It’s going to be hot today. Heard some birds and the coxswain and water trickling, then dropping steadily. The river was pale blue through the trees. When I heard the rowers I wondered how hot they were on the water without any shade.

overheard: an adult runner to a kid biking behind them — you’re doing such a good job!

Wore my bright yellow shoes — the ones I bought over a year ago and have tried to wear several times but always give up because they hurt my feet and my calves. They seem to be working now.

10 Things

purple flowers just beyond the fence
blue sky
empty bench
a roller skier holding their poles up instead of using them
noisy birds near the tree that fell a few days ago onto the winchell trail
a small circle of shimmer: sparkling water seen through a gap in the trees
several stones stacked on the ancient boulder
a small group of bikers — 4, I think — speeding past, one of them wearing a bright pink shirt
a women with a dog stepping off the path near the bench above “the edge of the world”
faint lines of yellow and orange and pink and purple chalk on the 38th street steps

orbit

This morning, another orbit around an idea that I’ve been orbiting for a few years now:

He aligns himself and moves forward with his face in the water staring down at the bottom of the lake. Old, beautiful shadows are wavering steadily across it. He angles his body and looks up at the sky. Old, beautiful clouds are wavering steadily across it. The swimmer thinks about symmetries, then rotates himself to swim on his back staring at the sky. Could we be exactly wrong about such things as—he rotates again—which way is up? High above him he can feel the clouds watching his back, waiting for him to fall toward them.
The Anthropology of Water/ Anne Carson

Which way is up? Which way down? Which real? Imagined? Symmetries or similarities?

I began more seriously than ever to learn the names of things—the wild plants and animals, natural processes, local places—and to articulate my observations and memories. My language increased and strengthened, and sent my mind into the place like a live root-system. And so what has become the usual order of things reversed itself with me: my mind became the root of my life rather than its sublimation. I came to see myself as growing out of the earth like the other native animals and plants. I saw my body and my daily motions as brief coherences and articulations of the energy of the place, which would fall back into the earth like leaves in the autumn.
Native Hill/ Wendell Berry

Brief coherences and articulations of the energy of the place.

Reading Berry, I’m reminded of Arthur Sze’s discussion of mushrooms as poems:

I began to think I love this idea that the mycelium is below the surface. It’s like the subconscious, then when the mushroom fruits pops up above ground, maybe that’s like this spontaneous outpouring of a poem or whatever.

Then, I returned, as I often do, to the beginnings of a poem:

Maybe like mushrooms, we rise
or not rise, flare —
brief bursts from below
then returns
to swim in the dirt…

Could we be more like fungi/mushrooms, with their nets of mycellium, than trees with their roots and branches and one trunk? Googled it: Animals and fungi are each other’s closest relatives: congruent evidence from multiple proteins

And back to W. Berry and the reversing of wild and domestic:

VI.

our word “domestic” comes from the Latin domus, meaning “house” or “home.” To domesticate a place is to make a home of it. To be domesticated is to be at home.

But if we were really to pay attention to what we’ve been calling “wilderness” or “the wild,” whether in a national park or on a rewooded Kentucky hillside, we would learn something of the most vital and urgent importance: they are not, properly speaking, wild.

XI.

Our overdone appreciation of wildness and wilderness has involved a little-noticed depreciation of true domesticity, which is to say homemaking, homelife, and home economy.

XII.

With only a little self-knowledge and a little sitting still and looking, the conventional perspective of wild and domestic will be reversed: we, the industrial consumers of the world, are the wild ones, unrestrained and out of control, self-excluded from the world’s natural homemaking and living at home.

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
90 degrees

Another great swim! Felt strong — no strange calf pain, or feet that feel like they might start cramping, or fear over not seeing buoys. The water was warm and green. The sky was blue with a few clouds. No dragonflies or planes or menacing swans, although there was a lurking sailboat. The far green buoy still looked blue to me, when I could see it as having color. Often it looks like a white dot, or just a colorless dot that I understand as buoy.

I saw pale legs and green globs and a vague orangish red light and sparkle friends and bubbles and ghostly milfoil underwater. No ducks or fish or seagulls. For the last stretch of each loop, I recited the lines from Alice Oswald’s Dart that I just memorized:

Then I jumped in a rush of gold to the head,
through black and cold, red and cold, brown and warm,
giving the water the weight and size of myself in order to imagine it,
water with my bones, water with my mouth and my understanding

He dives, he shuts himself in a deep soft-bottomed
silence
which underwater is all nectarine, nacreous. He lifts
the lid and shuts and lifts the lid and shuts and the sky
jumps in and out of the world he loafs in.
Far off and orange in the glow of it he drifts

Such great lines that feel familiar when I’m swimming in the middle of the lake.

july 2/RUN

4 miles
franklin loop
68 degrees
humidity: 81%

Started at 7:30 a.m. and it was already hot and humid. That sun! Ran with Scott. We talked about AI and whether or not art was a purely human expression and how, within running circles, humidity is considered a “poor man’s altitude training.” We ran over the lake street bridge and the franklin bridge and above the mississippi rowing club and wondered what the loud buzzing noise below was. Trucks. My guess: doing something with the sewer vents by the rowing club. Scott’s guess: pulling a car out of the river.

10 Things

a single rower on the river
graffiti under the lake street bridge: Stop Hate
cloudless blue sky
everywhere, a thick green veil
all the benches we ran by were facing a wall of green — on the other side of that: an unseen river
2 runners ahead of us disappearing into the trees — passing the spot a minute later, we noticed a steep dirt trail
the cracked pavement that I’ve been monitoring for years has grown into a sinkhole
the color of the river: brown in the foreground, blue in the background
I don’t remember seeing shadows, just experiencing the cooling effects of shade
beep beep beep — a truck backing up somewhere nearby

We started out doing 9/1, but had to take an extra minute of walking after the second interval. Still, we got outside and moved over 4 miles in the heat. Small victories: we ran more again in the last 2 miles and we ran up the entire section of the franklin hill even though I had initially wanted to walk it.

Found this definition of poetry by Wang Ping. Several years ago, she wrote a wonderful poem about the Mississippi River Gorge.

That’s what poetry is: a wind, a leaf of grass that ties time and space together (Wang Ping).

field

Continuing to think about the visual field test and the idea of my visual field. Today: what is a field? and can I play around with the idea of a field?

The visual field is “that portion of space in which objects are visible at the same moment during steady fixation of the gaze in one direction”; in ophthalmology and neurology the emphasis is mostly on the structure inside the visual field and it is then considered “the field of functional capacity obtained and recorded by means of perimetry”.

wikipedia

A single, fixed view from one direction — the space, and what’s contained within that space that can be seen.

I think I’ll leave thoughts about visual fields alone for now. Instead, I want to turn to a wonderful chapbook I just bought — as part of an entry fee for a chapbook contest — from Driftwood Press: Questions about Circulation

ruins/ Charles Malone

III.

The kitchen ceiling falls to the floor—
soaked plaster, moldy wood.
Hundred-year-old floors warp
something more sinister than time
in the farmhouse.
Plants grow to cover the windows,
the smell chokes
a massive colony of honeybees takes up in the siding,
raccoons come and go from the basement window.

This is the process by which a home becomes not,
a process other than a real estate transaction—
spills, arguments, accidents, cruelties.
You see other farmhouses stripped of paint
ducking behind wilding shrubs and flowering weeds.
The boundary between in and out blurs,
a sign with shameful orange letters on the door.
What action and inaction, what ruins a house
for the body and the lungs and recollection?
Rain, the creep of ivy, the sedimentary accumulation of dirt
this is the opposite of the joy of work.

Scott and I recently discovered more seasons of the Great House Revival where people take abandoned houses in ~~Scotland~~ Ireland (oops) and restore them. There are lots of discussions of water damage and rotten floorboards and overgrown yards and critters wandering in and out of basements and kitchens and first-floor (which is the second floor in a U.S. house) bedrooms.

Ever since I discovered the concept of re-wilding, I’ve been thinking about my eyes becoming wild again. At some point, my cone cells began scrambling then leaking then scarring then dying. Sometimes, I think of my central vision less like a wilderness, and more like a wasteland. But, there is something wild/feral about the refusal to fix/tame an image. Everything moves slightly — shakes, shimmers, fuzzes, fizzes. Nothing is still.

july 1/RUNSWIM

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
73 degrees
humidity: 75%

I planned to get up early and go out sooner, when it was still in the 60s, but I decided I needed sleep more, so I didn’t go out for my run until 9. Hot! I managed to stick with my plan for longer than I thought I could, and also to know when I needed to walk a little more.

10 Things

a line of bikes — 20? — emerging from under the ford bridge to turn up the trail right in front of me — nobody called out, runner, to alert the others
a faint spray coming off of the falls
a group of workers — do they belong to the semis parked in front of the park building? — cooling off in the shade
a turkey on the hidden part of the trail that dips below the road — when they saw me, they turned and almost slithered into the vegetation
a sandbag near a drain in the grass, initially looking like a dead animal
a faint voice below — a coxswain, I think!
trickling water at the 44th street ravine
the water fountain on the edge of the park does not work yet — or ever this summer? I’ll have to check again
a tree down on the winchell trail, almost, but not quite, covering the entire trail
a biker’s headlights cutting through the trees where the road curves

As I ran and walked, I thought about my vision tests. First, the colorblind plates. The feeling when I took the test was relief and recognition — positive feelings. Later, more mixed feelings. The loss of a language is difficult. But, failing the test is an opportunity to form a new relationship with color. How to represent that? I’m still struggling.

Second, I thought about the visual field test. I have taken it 3 times, I think — once when I was first diagnosed, once 3 years later, and just last month. You put your chin on a chin rest, press your forehead up against a bar, and look through a visor. You’re supposed to stare directly at a center dot and click a button when you see flashes in other areas of the visual field. How could I represent that in a poem?

I’d like to ask the ophthalmologist who administered my test if I could get a copy of the scan, to see exactly what my field looks like. Then, I might try to map my field onto a poem somehow — or map a poem onto my field. It could be like an erasure poem — an erasure of my own writing? Another idea: instruct the reader to keep staring into the center at the dot and try to see the words in different parts of the visual field. This one could be a series of “images” of the field with words.

As I keep thinking about these tests, here’s some more information about the visual field test.

on this day inspiration

On 1 July 2020, I posted Aram Saroyan’s famous “electric” poem:

I’ve discovered that the best work I can do now is to collect single words that happen to strike me and to type each one out in the center of a page. The one word isn’t “mine” but the one word in the center of the page is. Electric poems I call them (in case anyone starts throwing Concrete at me)—meaning that isolated of the reading process—or that process rendered by the isolation instant—each single word is structure as “instant, simultaneous, and multiple” as electricity and/or the Present. In effect the single word is a new reading process; like electricity—instant and continuous.
Aram Saroyan and the Art of the One Word Poem/ Paul Stephens

And now I’m thinking about my visual field test poetry, wondering how I might find an “electric” word to put in the center. And, could I put some related words in other parts of the field? What about a phrase?

here

I need to think more about what word/s to use. I like here, but it also seems like a place-holder for a more dynamic word. Thought about “don’t look away” or “look here” or “stare” or no word, but a dot or an x or ?

Now I’m remembering Rob Macaisa Colgate’s Hardly Creatures and his series of 3 poems: the first, the original artwork, the second was a replica, the third a souvenir. I could write a “regular/intact” poem, then condense it to fit with my visual field.

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
83 degrees

A great swim! One of the orange buoys was missing, but they replaced it with a green one. The buoys seemed to be farther out and it took 3 tries for me to finally swim straight to the final green one. But I did; I cracked the code.

10 Things

loose vines, wrapping themselves around me
menacing swans
military planes buzzing overhead — heard and seen
a nice chat with another regular — an older women I’ve seen for a couple of years. I asked her about the course; she asked me why the water was so cold
pale, marble legs underwater
frog legs almost kicking me
ghostly milfoil
the far green buoy, nearest the little beach, always looked pale blue to me
a squeaky nose plug, leaky goggles
sparkle friends!

4.5 milesminnehaha falls and back59 degreesAQI*: 157

10 Things

excerpt from 38. Shedding the Old/ Samantha Thornhill

2.5 miles2 trails71 degrees

10 Things

swim: 2.5 loops (5 cedar loops)cedar lake open swim77 degrees

2.5 miles2 trails73 degrees dew point: 70

Someone Is the Water/ Austin Araujo

run: 3 milestrestle turn around86 degrees

10 Things

2.5 miles2 trails70 degrees dew point: 65

swim: 3 loops (6 cedar loops)cedar lake open swim88 degrees

3 loops, long*lake nokomis open swim80 degreeshumidity: 80%

10 Things

1 hourto east lake library and back84 degrees

10 Things

Anne Carson, Water, and You

run: 4 milesthe monument and back73 degreesdew point: 69

visual fields, landscapes, meadows

bike: 8 mileslake nokomis and back82 degrees / 79 degrees

swim: 3 loopslake nokomis open swim82 degrees

2.55 miles2 trails77 degreesdew point: 73

10 Things

swim: 4 loopslake nokomis open swim89 degreeschoppy

10 Things

before the swim

during the swim

run: 1.75 milesfrom minnehaha falls to home73 degrees / dew point: 64

swim: 3 loops (6 cedar loops)cedar lake open swim79 degreesrain

10 Things

4 loopslake nokomis open swim67 degrees

10 Things

a return to EXAQUA

4 milesriver road, north/south72 degreeshumidity: 85%

10 Things

bike: 8.6 mileslake nokomis and back61 degrees (there) / 68 (back)

swim: 3 loopslake nokomis open swim64 degrees

10 Colors

EXAQUA

immersion

4 milesriver road, north/south57 degreeshumidity: 80%

10 Things

to remember and return to

swim: 4 loopslake nokomis open swim71 degrees

The Locust/ Leonara Speyer

4.25 milesminnehaha falls and back66 degreeslight rain

10 Things

a few random Alice Oswald bits

Wood Not Yet Out/ Alice Oswald

1.75 milesneighborhood80 degreesdew point: 70

10 Things

This Be the Place: a Pond

3.1 mileslocks and dam #1 and back72 degrees / humidity: 84%air quality: 117

swimming words

The Catch/ Tanis Rideout

process influences constraint

5 loopslake nokomis open swim71 degrees

10 Things

Swimmers/ May Swenson

bike: 4 milesthe falls and back84 degrees

4 loopslake nokomis open swim73 degrees

10 Things

the beginning of a lake

2.5 miles2 trails71 degreesdew point: 67

bike: 8.6 mileslake nokomis and back80 degrees / 78 degrees

swim: 3 loopslake nokomis open swim79 degrees

3.75 milesriver road, north/south70 degreeshumidity: 74%

10 Things

2.5 miles2 trails67 degreeshumidity: 86%

10 Things

more How to Read Water

swim: 3 loopslake nokomis open swim83 degrees

4.25 milesmonument and back71 degreesdew point: 64

10 Things

the color of water

swim: 2.5 loops (5 cedar lake loops)cedar lake open swim82 degrees

10 Things

4 loopslake nokomis open swim71 degrees

10 Things

2.5 miles2 trails72 degrees / drizzledew point: 71

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
59 degrees
AQI*: 157

2.5 miles
2 trails
71 degrees

swim: 2.5 loops (5 cedar loops)
cedar lake open swim
77 degrees

2.5 miles
2 trails
73 degrees
dew point: 70

run: 3 miles
trestle turn around
86 degrees

2.5 miles
2 trails
70 degrees
dew point: 65

swim: 3 loops (6 cedar loops)
cedar lake open swim
88 degrees

3 loops, long*
lake nokomis open swim
80 degrees
humidity: 80%

1 hour
to east lake library and back
84 degrees

run: 4 miles
the monument and back
73 degrees
dew point: 69

bike: 8 miles
lake nokomis and back
82 degrees / 79 degrees

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
82 degrees

2.55 miles
2 trails
77 degrees
dew point: 73

swim: 4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
89 degrees
choppy

run: 1.75 miles
from minnehaha falls to home
73 degrees / dew point: 64

swim: 3 loops (6 cedar loops)
cedar lake open swim
79 degrees
rain

4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
67 degrees

4 miles
river road, north/south
72 degrees
humidity: 85%

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
61 degrees (there) / 68 (back)

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
64 degrees

4 miles
river road, north/south
57 degrees
humidity: 80%

swim: 4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
71 degrees

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
66 degrees
light rain

1.75 miles
neighborhood
80 degrees
dew point: 70

3.1 miles
locks and dam #1 and back
72 degrees / humidity: 84%
air quality: 117

5 loops
lake nokomis open swim
71 degrees

bike: 4 miles
the falls and back
84 degrees

4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
73 degrees

2.5 miles
2 trails
71 degrees
dew point: 67

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
80 degrees / 78 degrees

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
79 degrees

3.75 miles
river road, north/south
70 degrees
humidity: 74%

2.5 miles
2 trails
67 degrees
humidity: 86%

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
83 degrees

4.25 miles
monument and back
71 degrees
dew point: 64

swim: 2.5 loops (5 cedar lake loops)
cedar lake open swim
82 degrees

4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
71 degrees

2.5 miles
2 trails
72 degrees / drizzle
dew point: 71

3.1 miles
2 trails
72 degrees
dew point: 70

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
90 degrees

4 miles
franklin loop
68 degrees
humidity: 81%

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
73 degrees
humidity: 75%

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
83 degrees