5.8 miles
hidden falls and back
36 degrees / feels like 25 degrees
wind: 9mph / 15mph gusts
The feels like temps have begun. Winter is almost here! It was cold enough today for me to wear gloves. I didn’t mind the cold, although I wasn’t happy about the wind. It was in my face for most of the second half, tiring me out. But, who cares? I was able to run outside for an hour on clear trails!
Today’s image: a silver surface. Maybe it’s because I was just looking at an entry from my gray month (November 2022) about silver, but when I looked at the surface of the river glowing through the trees I thought, silver. The sky is overcast, which I think helped to make it look even more silver (at least to me). Beautiful.
Twice last week and twice this week, I’ve run for an hour. Never really a formal plan; it just happened. 11 sets of 4 minutes of running, 1 minute of running, then 5 minutes of running at the end. I’ve been tracking how far I can go in 60 minutes and trying to make it a little farther each time. Today I went the farthest: 5.8 miles. Over the years, I’ve slowed down. 5 years ago, I could have easily run more than 6 miles in an hour. Oh well.
10 Things
- the surface of the river had wide ridges on it (view from the ford bridge)
- deep laughs below (heard from above the winchell road)
- construction noises near the ford dam — drilling or hammering
- the soft thud of a runner’s foot strikes approaching from behind then passing me
- a clear view of the winchell trail below and a curved stretch of the fence
- a flash of bright orange, a rumbling noise: a parks vehicle speeding up the hill from the locks and dam no. 1
- crush crush the soft sound and feel of crushed limestone above hidden falls
- a few bright yellow trees near the tunnel of trees
- turning around at the falls, running straight into the wind, making my cap shift on my head
- part of the trail near the ford dam overlook has been repaved — smooth, dark — and part of it has not — full of ruts, uneven asphalt, bright orange spray paint marking the cracks
documenting or ditching my ever-growing list of open tabs
For almost a week, I have safari open with tabs spread across the top of the window. Many of these are for past entries re-read during my morning “On This Day” practice. Today is the day to document or ditch them. Here are the ones I’m keeping, in the order they appear from left to right:
1 — lucille clifton’s praising impossible things
This first one isn’t from my “on this day” practice; it’s a poem that I looked up to use for inspiration in a list poem, or in a series of list poems sprinkled throughout my manuscript about the gorge. I love lucille clifton and her unfenced is!
All Praises / Lucille Clifton
Praise impossible things
Praise to hot ice
Praise flying fish
Whole numbers
Praise impossible things.
Praise all creation
Praise the presence among us
of the unfenced is.
A sudden thought: instead of praises, I could make one of my list poems, Oh, Unsee the Beheld! which is a reference to a poem about Ariadne: Altitude/ Airea D. Matthews. Here’s what I wrote about that phrase on 19 june 2025:
I like thinking about to unsee as a verb, an act, a process, a type of prayer? Just as seeing is not a static thing, where you simply see, but a process of light and signals and filtering and guessing by the brain, unseeing is a process of slow (or sporadic) unravelling then adapting — a brain doing mysterious and magical things with the scrambled and limited data it receives, a mind developing new ways to witness/behold without stable and dependable eyes.
And now I’m thinking of unseeing as eroding/erosion and the creation of the gorge. Rock erosion occurs in 2 main ways at the Mississippi River Gorge: 1. soft sandstone slowly and gradually wears away as it encounters water and air and 2. this wearing away weakens the foundation for limestone until it breaks. My unseeing process could be similar: the slow and gradual dying/not working of cell cones until a final break and no central vision. Is this how it will happen? Maybe, but maybe not.
19 june 2025
I kept digging through my archive, and found another entry from 13 july 2025 about unseeing the beheld:
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?
13 july 2025
2 — I Looked for Life and Did a Shadow See
Oh, this poem. I recall posting it because I was thinking about shadows on 7 nov 2019, and not really getting it. Reading it again this morning, I love it. I’m wondering if I could turn this title into a line in my shadow poem?
3 — Chloe Garcia Roberts and temporal saturation
There is too much good stuff in this entry from 3 oct 2025 about moments and gorges and JJJJJerome Ellis’ stutter and blind spot to repost here. How many poems are waiting to be written from this entry? A lot. For now, I’ll post this small bit:
Temporal saturation . . . is used to explain both the canyons that can appear inside moments of great rending, joyous or horrific, entombing an incarnation of the self which will never again exist; as well as the median intervals of floating passivity that resist recollection and whose ending is marked by a feeling of awakening: a drowsy startle or a gradual reconsciousness.
Temporal Saturation/ Chloe Garcia Roberts
canyons. The gorge! The gash, gap, open space where more is possible, between beats, where Nothing happens and where there is (good) Air to breathe. Does it entomb an incarnation of the self which will never again exist? Ooo–I have thought about the idea of different Saras intermingling above/beside/in the gorge. It’s not that they don’t ever exist again, but that they only exist (together) here in this space. It’s the gorge as holding everything — not trapping or entombing, but holding — beholding, witnessing.
a draft of something out of these ideas from today, 12 nov 2026:
anyone
who believes
this space is
empty is
not paying
attention.
All around,
scattered,
are ten years of
Girls who
once did more
than pace.
4 — cells remember
symbiogenesis: we came about not only through competition but through acts of cooperation. We carry evidence of species merger in our cells, and of species relation in almost every structure we daily rely upon. Is there one piece of us that doesn’t also, in some form, belong to someone else? Your fingers ghosting chimp as they slender in the air. Lobe-finned fishes did protolungs, acorn worms might have done something like a heart. The more complex organs, like eyes, had to be developed many times, but jellyfish saw first, and not for us. Biology is remembering. Our cells remember ancient chemical interactions, pre-life, and our limbs remember salamanders. A poem remembers our past in language and posits a future in the simplest sense, like a to-do note, hoping that it will be read at some point hence, reminding us of something worth knowing. It can cast back between the “its” and the “octopus” in the second paragraph of this blog and remember the relation. In addition, it’s an ecosystem that, ideally, like any functioning ecosystem, deals with its own waste. Like the octopus’s smart shadow, a poem’s shadow also always knows more than we do.
Mitosis, Meiosis, Poiesis
Biology remembers. Cells remember. Cells remember? Here’s some future reading: How a cell remembers
This is from 10 nov 2025. Reading it two days ago, I was inspired to write some lines that I put at the end of a poem and then decided they didn’t quite work. Now, they’re looking for a new home at the end (or the beginning?) of a poem:
You
remember
what the cells
that dwell in
your body,
have never
forgotten:
you are more
gorge than girl.
5 — a word remembered, inosculation
Yesterday, I was writing about the tree that is growing through a fence. I wanted to know what that phenomenon is called, and remembered that its mentioned in a favorite poem by Catherine Barnett, “Epistemology“:
And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing
stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect
or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare,
to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.
Initially, I had named one of my vision lost poems with this word, Vision Lost [osculation], but I switched it to [tree & fence]. Tuesday night, after band rehearsal, I mentioned trees growing through fences, then trees growing through bicycles to another clarinet. Yesterday, I decided to look it up: Story Behind the Bicycle in the Tree on Vashon Island, WA
6 — 12 nov 2021, a poem to add to My 100 list of poems memorized
In the Meantime/ Max Garland
The river rose wildly every seventh spring
or so, and down the hatch went the town,
just a floating hat box or two, a cradle,
a cellar door like an ark to float us back
into the story of how we drown but never
for good, or long. How the ornate numbers
of the bank clock filled with flood, how
we scraped minute by minute the mud
from the hours and days until the gears
of time started to catch and count again.
Calamity is how the story goes, how
we built the books of the Bible. Not
the one for church, but the one the gods
of weather inscribed into our shoulder
blades and jawbones to grant them grit
enough to work the dumb flour of day
into bread and breath again. The world
has a habit of ending, every grandmother
and father knew well enough never to say,
so deeply was it stained into the brick
and mind. We live in the meantime
is how I remember the length of twilight
and late summer cicadas grinding the air
into what seemed like unholy racket to us,
but for them was the world’s only music.
I love this poem! So much so, that I want to add it to my list of 100 poems memorized. I think it would be #62.
A Window to an Alligator’s Soul
I’m always interested in gathering examples of the idea that looking into someone’s eyes somehow gives us access to their soul (scroll down for my “eye contact” section on this page). It’s an idea so insidious that many (most?) of us rarely question it and it’s constantly reinforced in our stories. Today’s example: the Peacock show, Poker Face, season 2 / episode 4: Taste of Human Blood. I searched for the scene on YouTube, but couldn’t find it, so I recorded it myself. My framing isn’t the best and, at one point, you can see my reflection on the screen (which I kind of like), but the video is clear enough for you to get the gist of the story. Charley (or is it, Charlie?) the main character, is told that if she looks deep into the eye of this alligator, she will see that he is a gentle soul. She looks, and sees that he is.
I like this example because the ridiculousness of it (alligator as Buddha!) seems to be mocking this belief that you can somehow see a soul (whatever that is) or who a person really is by looking deeply into their eyes.