3.5 miles
bottom locks and dam no 1
60 degrees / humidity: 59%
What a difference low humidity and less direct sun makes! Today’s 61 felt much cooler. A wonderful, early fall morning. Often September still feels like summer — that is, it’s uncomfortably warm — but this year it definitely feels like fall. It looks like it too. Leaves changing color already. At the bottom of the locks and dam, looking over at the east bank of the river, I think I noticed changing leaves. Not sure what color, just the sense that they were no longer green green green.
10 Things
- at the bottom of the hill, the surface of the river was covered with swirls of green-tinged foam
- the pedestrian gates to the lock and dam were open — I thought it was closed?
- encountering an adult and a kid on bikes having just crossed the road. The kid: why didn’t they stop? the adult: because they were breaking the law
- running parallel to a runner slightly slower than me. me, on the dirt trail in the grassy boulevard, them, on the river road trail
- down on the winchell trail, admiring the color of the river: light blue and only partly visible through the green leaves
- no puddles, but patches of soft dirt and mud from yesterday’s multiple rain showers
- near the 38th street steps, another runner emerged from the trees and the part of the winchell trail that travels down to the oak savanna
- the strange shuffle of someone’s feet — part-walk, part-run, part-skip
- lots of cars parked on the street, lots of people walking towards the river — longfellow’s annual clean up the river event
- water streaming out of the 42nd street sewer pipe
girl ghost gorge
It’s fall, so good-bye my obsession with open swim, hello girl and ghost and gorge. I’m hoping to build on the dozen poems I wrote last year and create a full collection. I want to add some different forms and approach my obsessions from different perspectives.
On the way home, a thought, partly inspired by W Berry’s reversal of wild and domestic: my collection of poems / hybrid pieces is about locating myself and making a home beside/above/near the gorge. In a disorienting time — for many reasons, including my vision loss — I’ve been running by the gorge to orient myself, to find a home space, to establish an enduring location.
connections and re-connections: place, family, others, a larger history, the non-human world, my body, a nation (not sure if nation is the right word here, but I’m thinking about the park system and public works projects in the US), past and future Saras.
a flash: somehow bring in the unigrid brochure that I did, or something like it, into the book — a map, a nod to the national parks — would this fit in this collection, or should it be a separate project? If not the unigrid brochure, take some inspiration from the WPA poets hired to write guide books, like Lorine Niedecker. Add in a few entries inspired by that?
Back to the connections/being located thread: I wrote in my Plague Notebook vol. 26: Locating myself on eroding, shaky ground. Too unstable for a foundation? No, but offering a new way of thinking about location and connection and where I might root myself. Not just rooted in the ground, but connected to water and air — the river, the gorge. The location is and is not a place: a specific location with paths and forests, a river, limestone and sandstone walls AND the absence of land that the gorge frames — space, air, Nothing.