3.7 miles
trestle turn around
65 degrees
Warm and windy. Lots of sweat. Another day of telling myself to keep showing up. A hard run with lots of walking. But, one faster, freer mile, and some scattered thoughts that might lead to something! I’ll take it.
11 Things
- under the lake street bridge, the side of the road was packed with parked cars — rowers?!
- yes, rowers: heard the coxswain calling out instructions
- briefly watched the rowers through a gap in the trestle: a head, an oar, a boat gliding by
- ran into a branch while avoiding another runner, just a few inches from my eye, imagined a scenario in my head where the branch had cut my eye
- in the tunnel of threes: a sea of swaying green
- a woman stretching in the 35th street parking lot, blasting music out of her phone
- wind pushing me from behind, making my ponytail swing to one side
- a cartoonish figure spray-painted on the sidewalk: bright orange outline
- loud rustling in the nearby brush then a hiker emerging from below
- whoooosssshhh — the wind rushing through the trees
- dragonflies? running near the trestle, an insect with a long, narrow body and wings almost flew into my mouth — no iridescent color, no color. Later, pausing at the top of the steps, I saw half a dozen of them. They opened and closed their wings in the sun
Yesterday, I decided that the theme of color or green wasn’t working for me this month. Instead, I’d like to return (again) to Lorine Niedecker. I’m particularly interested in her form of condensing and how I might apply it to my Haunts poems. Yes, the haunts poems are haunting me again. Before heading out for my run, I found a few lines from LN’s “Paean to Place,” that I especially like:
grew in green
slide and slant
of shore and shade
Child-time—wade
thru weeds
Maples to swing from
Pewee-glissando
sublime
slime-
song
A few times, I recited the first big: I grew in green/slide and slant/of shore and shade. As I thought about those lines I wondered what I grew up in. Green, for sure, but not by water. Then it came to me: I grew up on the edge of green in subdivisions that butted up against farms and woods, creeping, consuming those green spaces. I also grew up in carefully managed and cultivated green — bike paths through small stretches of trees offering the illusion of nature, privately owned by the subdivision. A very different green than the rural green of my dad’s farm in the UP or the urban green of my mom here by the Mississippi River. I thought about the managed green I run by and the difference between it, a public, national park, and the managed green of my suburban childhood, with its private green parks and private (No Trespassing!) acres of farm land, soon to be sold and converted into more “little boxes.”
Yes! The green I grew in was in-between col-de-sacs, and within small ravines and the slight stretches of trees or creeks developers left for aesthetic reasons. This green has deeply influenced my understanding of the wild and “green” spaces and is one reason why I’m fascinated by the management of nature.