50 minutes with Delia
neighborhood / stone steps / river / winchell
43 degrees / sun
Ahhh!! What a day! Late fall: sun, bare trees, cool air, open air, a long view! The first verse of my new poem seems fitting for today’s run:
Still is like
a place
that opens
only
for that small*
time when
you forget
who you
are and go
so far
inside a
moment
outside is
another
Idea.
*this line, that small time when you forget what you are, is a line from Marie Howe’s poem, “The Meadow” (only word is missing from mine, “can” before forget). Do I want to keep the small or replace it with brief? A realization: small is a reference to place, which I want, brief is a reference to time, which might link still too tightly with time
The moment I went inside of today was this: walking on the trail that winds through the floodplain forest to the river, the sun flooding in through the bare trees, small pale leaves littering the ground like confetti, the trees opening up and framing a view of the river. The river! So blue and calm — a few disembodied voices echoing near the Monument on the other side, soft sand. Returning through the trees, witnessing the steep slope studded with stone steps come into view. So open, but not exposed — a dome of branches and bluff and a few leaves. A small lifetime lived in that moment.
Vision Lost [still]
It’s a strange thing, reading my old entires, during my “on this day” practice. Returning to past Saras that, in the process of reading, feel present. Lots of looping around the gorge, noticing the same things — the welcoming oaks, the surface of the river, the color of the leaves, how open the view is. Lots of big events documented: the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, Biden winning the election, January 6th insurrection, Trump’s re-election, the ICE occupation. Today, I read the entry from 6 nov 2024, the day after Trump won the election:
Even as I knew deep down it was possible, it’s shocking that Trump won and that after all of the terrible things he promised, so many people would vote for him. I started my practice of writing and moving not too long after Trump was elected in 2016, and now I will need to lean on it as I endure another 4 years.
As I ran, I kept trying to remember Lorine Niedecker’s geologic time: slow, long, layered. This terrible moment, a blip. Limestone, sandstone, shale, holding evidence of when Minnesota was part of the Ordovician sea millions of years ago. Glacial boulders still standing, indifferent to humans. The endless dripping and seeping and wearing down of ancient water. Not untouched (or left unharmed) by humans, but on a scale so much bigger than us or what we can comprehend.
log from 6 nov 2024
Can I reshape these words into a poem — maybe part of my vision lost [still] poem? This poem is much longer than the other VL poems. Should it be part of the series, or its own thing and maybe renamed, Still? Yes, I think so! In fact, I must have already known this would happen because, a few hours ago editing the poem, I took it out of the VL form (couples of 3/2 or 3/3) and turned it into longer stanzas. It seemed to work better than way. Maybe it wasn’t me, but ideciding what it needed to be — cool.
I’ll get back to “Still” in moment; I want to make note of something else so I don’t forget it. The “big” political/cultural events that I mention in my log entries are both deeply significant and only blips in comparison to the longer history of this place. How can I represent that in my poems about the gorge?
Back to “Still.” The draft I worked on this morning ends with these lines,
We are here.
We are still here.
Not sure if those lines will remain as the last ones, or if they will remain at all. In writing them, I could hear Elaine Stritch singing Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here” — is it from Follies? (yes, it is, I checked):
Such a great song, such a great performance! Reviewing my draft of the poem, I’m thinking that I might call it, “Still is Like a Place” — the phrase from Rilke’s “Black Cat” that invited me to begin work on it.
Vision Lost [grass]
Continuing on with my “On this Day” practice, the entry from 6 oct 2025, has given me more inspiration for next VL poem. I am tentatively titling this one, Vision Lost [grass] and it’s about how my softened vision (due to lack of cone cells which enable one to focus and see fine details) and how much harder it is for me to discern divisions between things. Note: when I started writing this paragraph, I was imagining I would call this poem body, but I quickly realized it fit with my thoughts from a few days ago about grass.
I was inspired by this discussion in last year’s post:
2 — how much of us is not us?
57%. 43% of a human body is made up of human cells, the rest is: “bacteria, viruses, fungi and archaea (organisms originally misclassified as bacteria)” (More than half of your body is not human).
the importance of microbiomes
3 — L Niedecker and dwelling with place
our bodies as place or space
Instead of fretting over how such a finite parentage might threaten our “humaniqueness,” Niedecker welcomes our bond with nonhuman life and seeks instead to endow us, as she writes in “Paean to Place,” with a deeper appreciation for the “sea water running / in [our] veins.”
“She also insists upon the necessity of our learning to dwell with other biotic elements who share our land-community, including what she calls in one poem “our relative the air” and “our rich friend / silt.”
—
Niedecker’s portrayal of living with beings and things in our environment is not merely a poetic metaphor; it also finds support in the field of biology. We now understand that even our bodies, the things we think of as most us, are in fact shared organisms, with trillions of microbacteria colonizing our guts in such numbers that they may potentially outnumber” (Dwelling with Place: Lorine Niedecker’s Ecopoetics)