5.6 miles
above locks and dam / ford bridge / under lake street
54 degrees
The first mile was rough. My feet were sore. Mile 2 wasn’t that great either. But, by mile 3, I started to feel better. And by mile 4, I decided that instead of stopping at a certain distance, I’d stop at a certain time: an hour. This run gives me confidence for the marathon. I can remind myself that even if it feels hard in the first few miles, it starts to feel better around mile 4. Better = a little easier, more relaxed, my legs and lungs and arms in sync.
One of the goals for my run today was to visit a few overlooks that I might use in a poem tentatively titled, overlook. On my way back from the ford bridge, I stopped at Horace Cleveland Overlook and took some video. As I ran from there above the river, I started thinking about unofficial overlooks — like above the ravine or above the floodplain forest in the tunnel of trees. Suddenly it hit me: these unofficial overlooks are often overlooked because people aren’t giving them enough attention as they move through the gorge, or because they are hidden from our “normal” ways of looking — the river, the floodplain forest, the steps that wind down to the flats. I decided this poem should have both meanings of overlook — or, maybe even other meanings too, similar to one of Jane Hirshfield’s assays. I need to revisit some of her assay poems to figure out if they fit with what I’m trying to do.
10 Things
- a squirrel who had no fucks to give — didn’t even bother to be startled as i ran by
- white heat on the river’s surface — the sun bouncing off the scaled surface
- a group of bikers meeting up at the locks and dam no. 1 parking lot
- a red bag, under a tree, just below the ford bridge
- the river near the eastern edge, just off of the ford bridge, was a pale greenish blue
- the view of the east bank from the ford bridge: hints of reds and oranges in the trees
- a tall guy, running fast in bursts — doing strides? the first time I saw him stop, I heard him wheezing from his hard effort
- almost all of the floodplain forest is still green
- some little purple flowers on the edge of the trail — Siberian Squill? — so upright and softly colored, looking like little bouquets spread out along the trail
- while most of the benches were empty, more than usual were filled — mostly by a single person, but at one, two women were sitting and talking
Looked through past entries and found a definition for assay from 11 jan 2024:
definition of an assay
Assays began with a poem written after I’d reread Edgar Allan Poe’s stories while writing an essay on how hiddenness works in poems. Some of the qualities of essay exploration and prose step lingered in its music and mode of thinking. At the time, I was regularly seeing the journal Science. On the back would often be advertisements for half-million-dollar machines for performing assays. That word—close to essay and sharing its root in the idea of an attempt, a try—refers to discovering a thing’s nature by breaking it into its elemental parts. The poem became ‘Poe: An Assay.’ That approach to writing, of testing a subject for its discoverable parts, imaginative and factual, caught. I began writing others. ‘Judgment: An Assay.’ ‘Tears: An Assay.’ ‘And: An Assay.’” Jane Hirshfield
assay (def): the testing of a metal or ore to determine its ingredients and quality
Does this fit with what I’m trying to do? Not quite.