Author: Sara Puotinen

march 19/RUN

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
38 degrees
wind: 18 mph / 37 mph gusts

Ran south and had the wind at my back for the first half, which was nice but it meant that I’d be running straight into it on the home. Not as difficult as I thought, but still draining. Wore the bright yellow shoes I bought last year and promised myself I’d never wear again because they make my feet hurt and calves cramp. They’ve been sitting in the rack all year, and looked so spring-y today that I couldn’t resist trying them again. Will I regret it? Probably. I should donate them instead of trying to make them happen.

10 Things

  1. little kid voices somewhere down in the savanna
  2. empty benches
  3. something glittering through the trees, up ahead — car headlights through the trees at the bend in the road
  4. a faster runner in a white shirt off to the side, heading down to the Winchell Trail — I followed above, watching as they slowly inched out of sight
  5. I don’t remember hearing the falls, just seeing them at a distance, from my favorite spot — white foam, moving rapidly at the corner of my central vision
  6. pale blue water, soft brown trees
  7. dead leaves on the ground — feeling orange to me
  8. the bluff on the other side was mostly brown with a few slashes of white — frozen seeps
  9. branches rubbing and creaking in the wind, sounding less like rusty door hinges and more like whimpering kids: soft, insistent, whiny
  10. running on the winchell trail, about to head up the 38th steps, I looked back and thought I saw someone approaching — nope, just the wrought iron fence

before the run: my blind spot

Yesterday, I read an interview with JJJJJerome Ellis and was inspired by their renaming of their Stutter as clearing:

Ellis’s glottal block stutter—which manifests as intervals of silence in his speech flow—is represented in this interview with the word clearing. Ellis offers this term as an alternative to words like stutter or stammer. Like a clearing in a forest, the stutter, for Ellis, can open a space of gathering between Ellis and the people he is communicating with.

Angel Bat Dawid and JJJJJerome Ellis

After a little digging, I found out more about the clearing and how it works for Ellis in their work:

Stuttering (especially in the form I present with, the glottal block) creates unpredictable, silent gaps in speech. I call these gaps ‘clearings’. Slaves sang in the fields, and whites heard them; but they also sang (and danced) in the woods at night, out of earshot. Undergirding the clearing created by my stutter is that other clearing, in the woods, where my enslaved ancestors stole away to keep healing, resisting and liberating through music – work that I continue today.

The Clearing/ JJJJJerome Ellis

Wow! What an amazing way to think about the stutter. In their follow-up book, the one that introduced me to Ellis, Aster of Ceremonies, they connect the Stutter explicitly with plants and place. I want to connect my blind spot — that growing lack of functioning cone cells in my macula — with water and stone and the gorge. As I try to explain this more, I have so many thoughts, too many words!

Just looked up blind spot and found these exciting definitions:

an area in which one fails to exercise judgment or discrimination

Merriam-Webster online

In this definition, a lack of judgment is a failure. And it is sometimes. But refusing to judge, keeping a space open for listening and beholding and bearing witness without judgment or the reduction of someone or something to a category (discrimination) is also essential.

Another helpful definition:

a portion of a field that cannot be seen or inspected with available equipment

Merriam-Webster online

during the run: my blind spot

I thought about my blind spot every so often as I ran, especially the idea of how it softens and fuzzes my vision. It’s difficult to see with precision, to scrutinize or make detailed observations that encourage me to identify and classify things. As a result, I devote less time to trying to name them, and more time to being with them. Here I’m thinking of Robin Wall Kimmerer and J. Drew Lanham.

I’m sure I had more thoughts, but I didn’t record them. If I had, would I even be able to hear them over the howling wind in any recording I would make today?

after the run: my blind spot

A space without judgment. Back when I was a scholar and teaching queer ethics, I was exploring what an ethics without judgement might look like, one that emphasized room to breathe and, as Judith Butler puts it, good air. I often invoked a quotation from Michel Foucault:

I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep.

The Masked Philosopher/ Michel Foucault

A few days ago, I read something else about not judging from Cole Swensen:

. . . an instance of witness, with witness defined as the act of being present to something, whether it’s an event, a situation, a person, a view. To be present to is to present yourself, to offer yourself, to attend without judgment, opinion, intervention, appropriation or even evaluation, and yet to be present to is not to be passive; it is an act, the act of anchoring the witnessed in history, confirming it, acting as the “second” that fixes it . . . . It is the ear that turns the falling tree to sound.

Walk/ Cole Swensen

Witnessing, being with, beholding. The gorge — a widening gap, a broad space where fires are lit, the grass grows, the wind howls, and river foam scatters. A generous place for holding all of the messy, entangled, conflicting, complicated stories of a place: of preserving and maintaining it, of stealing it, of losing it, of dead mothers who disowned it, of daughters who are attempting to reclaim it, of erosion and transformation and haunting, of a girl losing her central vision and searching for somewhere to be — to feel less alienation and more connection. There’s a lot here!

For the first half of the run, I listened to kids’ voices, for the second half, my “Doin’ Time” playlist. Speaking of time, here’s something great I read by Hanif Abdurraqib about nostalgia:

Another question I was asked about There’s Always This Year was about the use of nostalgia in my work, and the function of it, and I had this long answer I was going to give, but I look back on recent moments, and I realize that a major function of my relationship with nostalgia is actually tied to a committed and principled relationship with my present life. I am in pursuit, often, of a moment I will live and miss before it’s even gone. And the awareness of the longing to come offers me an opportunity to slow down time, to pay closer attention, to say I know something will end, but I would like a vivid catalog of its existence. My favorite Robert Hayden poem is “Double Feature,” which opens its final stanza with “Oh how we cheered to see the good we were / destroy the bad we’d never be.” I love that line. There’s a lot of bad to dismantle, and only some of it is housed within. The world houses the rest, and it is abundant. I require whatever good I can steal and then hoard. It fuels me to the fight(s,) which isn’t the same as a kind of whimsical nostalgia, but it is me saying that I remember there are things I love enough to fight for, even when it doesn’t feel like it. There are things I miss that I haven’t even experienced yet, and I want to get to them, eventually. And then get to what’s next.

instagram post

added later: I want to add these thoughts from an Alice Oswald interview about erosion here, too:

DN: I wanted to switch to another topic that infuses your work, and that is the process of erosion—erosion by water, erosion by wind, erosion by light—the topic of your first Oxford lecture but also, something that feels very present to Nobody. You said in one interview that the anonymity you were striving after for this book was inspired by eroded Cycladic sculptures, sculptures where the features had been nearly washed away. I was hoping you could talk about erosion in relationship to this and to the text.

AO: I suppose that comes back to your question about thinking. The poem conveys a kind of eroded thinking. It’s as if the thoughts have had reality washing away at them; a sentence sets out then gets blown in another direction. Erosion is important to me in that I think poetry has a particular duty and relationship towards time. Poems are miniature human clots I think, they’re full of time keeping in the way that a piece of music is full of timekeeping. In some way, they set their own time but they need to be awake to actual time moving around them. A poem has to offer itself up to the erosion that’s going on in the world. Nobody, more than any of my poems, I think gives in completely to that force of erosion where I would normally try to maintain some human presence in the face of it. I think Nobody allows itself to get weathered to a Cycladic blankness.

This idea of a poem offering itself up to erosion and to being within time, reminds me of something I heard from Jenny Odell the other day in “Another Kind of Time.” She’s talking about how being part of time, having a past, present, and future — and not just being timeless — makes something/someone a subject/actor instead of thing to be commodified/exploited. To be timeless/without time is to lack a context and a life. I’m also thinking about how preventing erosion often requires a sealing up and away from oxygen, water, wind. Erosion and decay are a necessary part of life.

DN: This talk of erosion and time makes me think of that famous Marguerite Yourcenar essay, That Mighty Sculptor, Time. I’m just going to read a couple of lines from it, “On the day when a statue is finished, its life, in a certain sense, begins. The first phase, in which it has been brought, by means of the sculptor’s efforts, out of the block of stone into human shape, is over; a second phase, stretching across the course of centuries, through alternations of adoration, admiration, love, hatred, and indifference, and successive degrees of erosion and attrition, will bit by bit return it to the state of unformed mineral mass out of which its sculptor had taken it.” I was thinking of this when I encountered your interview with Claire Armitstead where you said you think of your poems less as poems than as sound carvings which made me think that the sound these poems were making is eating away at something which then by extension suggests that both the blank page and silence are not really absences in this framing at all but presences.

AO: Yeah, I like that. I’ve always felt that in some way, a poem is really a framing of its silences, that the musical art poetry is all about leading you to those silences in a way that you hear them where normally one doesn’t necessarily hear a silence or an absence, both the sound is eating away that silence but then also, the sounds are, in their own way, erosions made so I let my voice get blown around by the information it’s taken in if you like. The feeling of not quite holding your own. . . .

DN: Let me ask you something about Homer’s syntax that you’ve said in light of sound carvings being a description of your poems. You said about Homer’s syntax, “The tendency of his grammar is therefore cumulative, like a cairn. Each clause is a separable unit. It might be placed loosely on another and held there with a quick connective, but it never loses its essential singleness; which is why you often find that one end of his sentence turns away from the other.” On the one hand, this feels like a process of accretion rather than erosion, an accumulation, but the singleness and the separateness of each component, and that each is surrounded by silence of the white page made me wonder if perhaps, this accumulation is the product of erosion like I imagine the scree that builds at the at the bottom of a cliffside of all the piles of rocks that are single but also part of this erosive process.

I love erosion: I like the way that the death of one thing is the beginning of something else (source).

march 18/WALK

45 minutes
longfellow flats
50 degrees / feels like 39
wind: 20 mph gusts

Sore hips this morning! Is it a running injury or just a terrible mattress? We flipped the mattress yesterday, and sleeping last night was worse than ever, so I’m thinking it’s the mattress. Ascending from the river, I powered up all 112 stone steps and my legs felt great. Would I be able to do that with an injured hip? I don’t think so. I’m definitely incorporating some step work this spring!

10 Things

  1. a woodpecker knocking a few blocks away
  2. the wind was coming from the north and the east
  3. two iron (or wire?) cranes in a backyard — I spied them through a fence — I want a giant iron bird in my backyard!
  4. low notes from a wind chime in the backyard of the house where a family from New Zealand lives — not only do they fly a New Zealand flag, but I heard one of them speaking with a New Zealand accent
  5. on the pedestrian part of the double bridge north of the stone steps — open and blue and brown below
  6. also on the double bridge: a temporary section of fence — looking over the edge of the (it’s high up here), I could see part of another temporary fence halfway down the steep slope — what happened?
  7. the floodplain forest between the steps and the river was littered with felled trees and tangled branches and dirt and dead leaves
  8. creeeaak — branches rubbing against each other in the wind
  9. from below, looking up at the bluff — a brown slope, a wooden fence, voices
  10. a roller skier slowly approaching the ancient boulder

Jenny Odell and Another Kind of Time

Yesterday I started listening to a podcast with Jenny Odell about her most recent book on time and I decided that when the book was ready (I requested it from the library), I would finally dedicate some time to clocks and time and other forms of time that don’t involve clocks.

15 jan 2024

It has taken me until today to return to this podcast. Why? I’m studying time and I got a notification that it was the featured podcast on Emergence. When I got the book, in February, I had already moved onto other projects — an ekphrastic project, then wind. So now, 15 months later, I’m taking up the task I assigned myself. Ha! That’s Sara/gorge time. I briefly returned to it this January, but dropped it again, which is another example of Sara/gorge time — scattered returns and departures, loops, taking it up again and again.

Today, I look several pages of notes in my Plague Notebook. Here are some highlights:

reframing language outside of the rigid belief that time is money and time as stuff that can be measured, counted, and should be hoarded

when did time become a commodity?

And then something happened, and it seems to have to do both with technology and sort of cultural needs: like on the one hand the escapement, which is like a part of a clock that can sort of keep the mechanism going as opposed to like a guy ringing a bell at a certain time, right?

Another Kind of Time

This reminds me of my poem and the idea of person inside that bell tower tugging on the rope to make the bell ring!

That happened. And then also towns that were becoming very commercial started needing to be able to count up and measure labor hours that they were buying from people. And so some confluence of those things led to this notion of an hour: like an hour that can just exist, you know, in the imagination. And that an hour is an hour, and a labor hour is a labor hour, and it sort of doesn’t matter what season it’s happening in, what time of day. And for me, that is a really crucial separating point. That is when this idea of time as stuff started to peel away from all the things that it had been embedded in previously.

As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days; inside the weather, where certain flowers and scents come back, at least for now, to visit a year-older self. Sometimes time is not money but these things instead.

Telling time through weather and seasons, and the leaving and returning of leaves, and the certain slant of light, and the sound of the water, and the feel of the path, and the amount of view, and the ease or difficulty in breathing.

chronos (ordinary, standardized time) and kairos (the interruption of things/ordinary time, extraordinary time)

horizontal (work + leisure used to restore energy for work = work + weekend)
vertical (awe, wonder, interruption, not work, “true” leisure)

migratory time, animal time

what is time to a flower? water, temperature, sun

the 72 micro-seasons in Japanese almanac

how do I tell time when I’m by the gorge?

weather – exposing myself to the elements, running in them, noticing and feeling the effects of wind, air quality, rain, snow, ice, the cold or heat — a relationship to/conversation with the world

witnessing the nearly invisible labor — tree trimming, repaving, managing and maintaining trails, erosion, nest-building

alienation and learning to listen to the world

. . . there’s a part of Braiding Sweetgrass, where Robin Wall Kimmerer is describing—I think she’s talking about like what it would feel like to not know the names of the things that are living around you. And then she says, I imagine it must feel like showing up in a city and you can’t read any of the signs, right? Like, that’s a deeply frightening and lonely experience to have. 

When I heard this bit, I raised my hand and said, “that’s me.” I can’t read signs on or inside building that often — even in Minneapolis, where I’ve lived for over 20 years. It is frightening and lonely and frustrating.

march 17/RUN

4.25 miles
locks and dam no.1 hill and back
50 degrees
wind: 13 mph/ 25 mph gusts

Warmer, windier. Ran straight into it heading south towards the falls. It didn’t howl or swirl the leaves but once it almost took off my hat. And it pushed against me, making it harder to run. I didn’t mind. At the start of the run, I felt a little stiff — especially my neck — but by the halfway point I had loosened up.

I noticed the river several times: Sometimes it was silver sparkle, other times tin or pewter, and it was ridged or scaled from the wind. I decided to run down the hill at the locks and dam no. 1 to get closer to the water. Inspired by AO’s Dart (see below), I wanted to hear the trails of scales and the bells just a level under listening. Did it sound like anything? If it did, the sounds were forgotten as I turned around and climbed the hill. A few steps in I stopped to take in the wide blue view of the river from this angle. It took up almost all of my sight: blue undulations

11 Things

  1. the long shadow of a slender tree cast across the part of the path that dips below the road
  2. an orange sweatshirt on a walker emerging from the winchell trail
  3. squaring my shoulders and running into a stiff wind
  4. 2 people under the ford bridge near the locks and dam no. 1, about to climb up somewhere
  5. the bright white base of the locks and dam no. 1 sign — they must use reflective paint
  6. the benches above the edge of the world and near folwell were empty
  7. the low hum of playing kids on the school playground
  8. the flat top of a recently made stump: orange
  9. a white patch in the river near the shore — was it a chunk of ice? a sandbar?
  10. a tailwind as I returned north — not feeling the wind but its absence and that everything was easier
  11. added a few hours later: a creaking above from one tree branch rubbing another in the wind

Listened to leaves shimmering in the trees as I ran south, my “Doin’ Time” playlist as I ran back north. Most memorable song, “Once in a Lifetime”:

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Water dissolving and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Under the water, carry the water
Remove the water from the bottom of the ocean
Water dissolving and water removing

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, into the silent water
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground

I never realized before how much water is used in this song. Very cool! The same as it ever was is an interesting contrast to what I was reading earlier this morning: Heraclitus and his idea of never stepping into the same river twice — see 17 march 2023

possible lines to recite/chant

Rereading my 17 march 2022 entry, I encountered these wonderful lines from Dart about how the river sounds:

will you swim down and attend to this foundry for
sounds

this jabber of pidgin-river
drilling these rhythmic cells and trails of scales,
will you translate for me blunt blink glint.

the way I talk in my many-headed turbulence
among these modulations, this nimbus of words kept in
motion
sing-calling something definitely human,

will somebody sing this riffle perfectly as the invisible
river
sings it

can you hear them at all,
muted and plucked,
muttering something that can only be expressed as
hitting a series of small bells just under the level of your
listening?

The bells!

High Above on the Ford Bridge Looking Down at the River

O, can you hear them
at all, these riffle-
perfect rhythmic cells
and trails of scales, plucked,
muted, muttering
below — a string of
small bells just under
the level of your
listening?

on moving — Alice Oswald and Cole Swensen

More words rediscovered while reading past entries in my “On This Day” practice:

I found this great quote from Oswald in her introduction to the poetry anthology, The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet:

Raking, like any outdoor work, is a more mobile, more many-sided way of knowing a place than looking. When you rake leaves for a couple of hours, you can hear right into the non-human world, it’s as if you and the trees had found a meeting point in the sound of the rake. (ix)

Mobile and many-sided, more than looking from a distance.

From Cole Swensen:

Then sitting still, we occupy a place; when moving through it, we displace place, putting it into motion and creating a symbiotic kinetic event in which place moves through us as well. 

Walk/ Cole Swensen

march 16/BIKE

35 minutes
basement
outside temp: 28 degrees

Decided to bike in the basement and read an e-book (The Kind Worth Killing). Wasn’t sure I’d be able to do it with my bad vision, but I managed to read for 20 minutes. Then I watched some YouTube and tried to find something on Netflix, but couldn’t. Is that why I stopped at 35 minutes? Probably. Also, I remember feeling a twinge in my left knee.

Discovered a wonderful poem by one of my favorite poets, Rita Dove. Was able to listen to her read it. Wow — she’s good. I’d like to check out one of her audio books so I can listen to her read more. Unfortunately, my local library doesn’t have one. Bummer.

Here’s the last part:

excerpt from Prose in a Small Space/ Rita Dove

Then is it poetry if it’s confined?  Trembling along its axis, a flagpole come alive in high wind, flapping its radiant sleeve for attention — Over here! It’s me! — while the white spaces (air, field, early morning silence before the school bell) shape themselves around that one bright seizure . . . and if that’s so what do we have here, a dream or three paragraphs?  We have white space too; is this music?  As for all the words left out, banging at the gates . . . we could let them in, but where would we go with our orders, our stuttering pride?

I like her “About this Poem” description. Especially this line:

What began as a continuation of our good-natured ripostes went from anti-ars poetica to lyric reverie to—surprise—a praise song to the prose poem! 

Should I try writing a praise song to the gorge or to writing while running and running while writing or to my strange vision or to poetry?

That line about the one bright seizure made me think of poetry as an explosion of the extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary, or of the Stutter, or a pause, or an interruption.

march 15/RUN

4.1 miles
river road north/south
38 degrees / humidity: 84%

Colder today. Back to winter layers: long-sleeved green shirt, orange sweatshirt, black vest, black tights, gray buff, black gloves, purple/pink baseball cap, bright pink headband

A gray sky and a slight drizzle. Bright headlights through the trees where the road curves. Grit. Wet leaves on the trail. Pairs of fast runners approaching.

Listened to other runners’ voices, the sandy grit under my feet, car wheels as I ran north, put in my “Doin’ Time” playlist heading south, including Good Times by Chic. My favorite lines:

I want to live the sporty life

and

Clams on the half shell, and roller skates, roller skates — here’s the full verse:

A rumor has it that it’s getting late
Time marches on, just can’t wait
The clock keeps turning, why hesitate?
You silly fool; you can’t change your fate
Let’s cut the rug, a little jive and jitterbug
We want the best, we won’t settle for less
Don’t be a drag; participate
Clams on the half shell, and roller skates, roller skates

Good Times was released in June of 1979. The clam shells and roller skates line seems ridiculous (and it is, in a delightful way), but it also captures the vibe of 1979.

After seeing several orange things, I decided that would be my 10 things list. I could only remember 8.

8 Orange Things

  1. a giant orange water jug set up on a table for runners
  2. orange lichen (or moss?) on the north side of the ancient boulder
  3. orange bubble letter graffiti on the underside of the bridge
  4. my orange sweatshirt
  5. the flesh of a tree where a branch used to be, newly trimmed and exposed to the elements (water, air): rusty orange
  6. leaves on the ground: burnt orange
  7. an orange effort: a higher heart rate (see 25 may 2023)
  8. hot pink spray paint on the iron fence that I initially saw as orange

ceremony/ritual/circumambulation

A few things related to my planning of a loop run as ceremony:

first, something to chant, from James Schuyler’s Hymn to Life:

Press your face into the
Wet April chill: a life mask. Attune yourself to what is happening
Now, the little wet things

The whole thing, or maybe just the last bit, starting with “Attune yourself”? See also: 14 march 2024, 15 march 2024

Second, the bells! The bells of St. Thomas signaling the start of the ceremony, or the start of some part of the ceremony? Accompanied by:

Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens are a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here –

or

I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

Pigrim at Tinker Creek/ Annie Dillard

converted into my 3/2 form:

My whole life
I’d been 
a bell but
never
knew until
I was
lifted and
struck. Now
I am still
ringing.

Third, form inspirations? A psalm, like Julia B. Levine’s Ordinary Psalms?

Megan Feifer: Both of your poems share the words “Ordinary Psalm.” Why did you choose to name these poems as such? Does a psalm lose its reverence when it becomes ordinary? Is that the point? 

Julia B. Levine: I am currently at work on a (hopefully) book-length collection of Ordinary Psalms. In these poems I am interested in the idea that the ordinary, if deeply lived and carefully attended to, are valid entryways into sacred or reverent experience. As a child I attended a Reform Jewish synagogue and always disliked the prayer books, though I loved the Torah. The difference, it seemed, had to do with the formal and vague language of prayer as contrasted with the heroic, vivid, and oftentimes earthy details of the weekly Torah readings. On reflection, this tonal difference in language may be the primary reason I don’t feel any sense of reverence toward an Old Testament God, but I do believe in the transcendent power of myth and stories. So, in contrast to psalms that rely on a formal address to an anthropomorphic God, I wanted to create a kind of personal prayer book that uses the living language of everyday details and experience to name and praise those aspects of this world that, for me, embody divinity.

Writer’s Insight: Julia B. Levine

JJJJJerome Ellis’ litany of names? Mary Oliver’s prayer as the attention before the words? lucille clifton’s praise of impossible things:

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.

Oh, that unfenced is! That line gets me every time.

march 14/RUN

4.2 miles
minnehaha falls and back
63! degrees

Last night, I read this on Instagram from a local weather blog: Thursday feels like spring, Friday like summer, and snow on Saturday. What? Reading more, the snow should be north of us. Instead, we’ll get thunderstorms. That’s March (and April, and sometimes May) in Minnesota. This morning does feel like summer: warm. I wore shorts and a short-sleeved shirt and a light-weight sweatshirt. Halfway, the sweatshirt came off. The falls were gushing. I think I overheard some woman exclaim, How can there still be ice?! I didn’t look closely, but I imagine the one ice column beside the falling water is lingering.

Mostly I felt fine while I ran. My back didn’t hurt. Both of my hips are a little sore, but not like they’re injured sore. Almost like I’ve been doing too many core/hip exercises sore.

Listened to the birds and bikers and kids on the playground as I ran south. Put in my “Doin’ Time” playlist at the falls and as I ran north.

Playing for Time/ Peter Gabriel
What Time is It?/ Spin Doctors
Time of the Season/ Zombies

10 Things

  1. shadow 1: mine, beside me
  2. shadow 2: fence slats on the trail
  3. shadow 3: a flying bird
  4. a kid at the falls wearing a bright blue jacket with a logo on it that reminded me of a jacket I got from a race a few years ago. Did he run the race too?
  5. my favorite bench above the edge of the world was occupied by a person and a bike
  6. matching bright yellow shirts on 2 bikers biking up the hill between the double bridge and locks and dam no. 1
  7. running under the ford bridge, appreciating the cool, shaded air
  8. the river sparkling silver through the trees as I ran south, below the road
  9. the dirt trail on the boulevard, mostly mud
  10. stopped at the folwell bench to admire the river — all I remember is that it was open and blue

After I finished, I recited the Emily Dickinson poem I memorized yesterday: Crumbing is not an Instant’s Act. I remembered almost all of it, only struggling with this verse:

Ruin if formal — Devil’s work
????? and slow —
Failing in an instant, no man did
Falling Slipping — is Crashe’s law —

I couldn’t think if the right word for the second line. Sequenced? Ordered? Organized? No. It’s “Consecutive.” Of course!

I’ve liked this poem for a few years now, especially the second verse and “An Elemental Rust.” I decided to memorize it as I study time and think about its relationship to erosion (and to my vision).

lunar eclipse

Woke up around 1:30 and realized that there was a lunar eclipse. Got RJP (who was still up, natch) and we sat outside and watched it slowly happen. Well. at least 15 minutes of it. We didn’t have the patience to wait until it was completely covered. RJP and I always check out sunsets and the moon together. It’s one of our things. I am reminds me of a story I read years ago. Can I find it? Yes, but it took a long time. I had a title — October — but not the author or the journal. Lots of searching online and in my files and through my books. Nothing. More than an hour later sitting on the deck, the name Jill popped into my head. How? Why? I searched for “Jill essay October” and found it, except that wasn’t the right essay. This one was about her ex-husband and Texas and leaves; the one I remember was about her daughter and Texas and rain — but it had leaves (or leavings) in the title! Searched, “Jill essay daughter” and bingo! It’s funny how memory works.

Late last night, a surprise rain. My seventeen-year-old daughter and I rushed out to the deluge in bare feet, our T-shirts darkening with each drop. We raised our arms, spinning on the walkway and laughing until lightning seared the sky. I pointed to the tree’s thick arms, thinking about the way they stretch as if waving. We huddled under the light on the porch while rivers swelled against the curbs of the parking lot. When I told her we’ve been running into the rain since she was little, she grinned and nodded, her long blonde hair matted on her shoulders and against her neck.

*

It was there in Utah, when Indie was two and three and four, that I started the tradition: as soon as we hear rain, we throw open the door. During those first rains, I carried her. She was too young to know my sorrow, the way I waited for word from her father, the way I worried about my bank account every month. But when the rain came, all want and worry washed away. And then in the later rains, she beat me to the middle of the yard or the sidewalk or the walkway.

All Our Leavings/ Jill Talbot

march 13/WALK

35 minutes
neighborhood
55 degrees

Another spring-like day! Sun and so many birds. Cardinals and black capped chickadees and an irritating sparrow sounding almost like a squirrel just above us on a branch. Only the smallest lumps of snow from last week’s storm remain. Will I get more this month? Most likely. For now: bare grass and clear sidewalks!

Scott pointed out an orange cat across the street, strutting on the sidewalk, which led to a discussion of a difference between cats and dogs in terms of how they interact with you — dogs need you, cats don’t (or pretend they don’t). I’m a dog person, but I understand the appeal of the cat, especially when they strut down the sidewalk like they own it. I like that cats are fine leaving you alone and being left alone. Here was Scott’s summary of the difference: a dog is like your kid, a cat is like your roommate.

10 Non-Cat Things

  1. bright, blue sky
  2. a breeze only felt when walking in one direction — which? I think east
  3. the trash can at Minnehaha Academy which had been almost covered in snow was clear today
  4. nearing edmund and the river, I admired the soft golden tree line of the east bank
  5. that irritating squirrel-like sparrow: a light — white? or light gray — body with a dark head. Scott said he could see its throat swelling as it sang (I couldn’t)
  6. the saddest bark from a dog: a whine into a holler
  7. accidentally snapping a twig with my foot and having a sharp part of it scratch my ankle — ouch!
  8. a garland with lights wrapped around steps leading up to a fancy house on edmund
  9. other christmas decorations — 2 fake fir trees with lights — on another house — this is the house that also has a round head stuck on a lamp post. During Halloween it’s a pumpkin, then at Christmas a snowman, after that Mickey Mouse
  10. a colorful door — seeing it on other walks, I’m pretty sure it’s bright YELLOW!, but in the light and with my cone cells, it only looked, yellow?

notes from my Plague Notebook, Vol. 24

a blind spot = a gap/gash/silence in my vision = the Nothingness of the gorge

Crumbling is not an Instant’s Act/ ED

slow steady abrupt sudden
the strangeness of deterioration

shifting slipping spreading closing in narrowing

(thinking about Ellis and the Stutter as vessel) what does this openness/gorge hold?

a gap, gash, crack, weathering

rod cells on either side (rock) holding in the nothingness

void absent center

generous/big enough to hold all

unseen unstable shifting

circle cycle loop orbit around circumference (ED)
repeats, soft edges, curves, round

A song on my “Doin’ Time” playlist: Circle Game/ Joni Mitchell:

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

orbiting

Right now, I thinking/writing about a lot of different reoccurring themes: color, time, vision, erosion, the gorge, rituals and ceremonies. It can be overwhelming and feel like I’m doing nothing even as I do too much. Instead of worrying about this, I’ve decided to understand it as orbiting around something that I can’t quite reach. Somewhere in all of my wandering and reflecting and writing is the way into a poem-as-ceremony-as-poem that celebrates (or praises or embraces) my vision. Can I find it? I’ll try!

march 12/RUN

3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
50 degrees

What a beautiful spring-y day! Ran with Scott to the falls in the early afternoon. He talked about the bolt he had to replace on his guitar neck which isn’t a bolt but a bone — a synthetic bone, in his case. He needs to sand it down and he’s planning to use sandpaper that’s been in his clarinet case since college — about 30 years! I pointed out the pile of branches on the side of the trail and mentioned how I’d seen the workers pull up in the parking lot as I ran by a few days ago. I figured they were planning to trees; I was right.

The falls were falling fast and hard over the limestone and under the one ice column remaining. There were lots of people at the park, admiring them. A few bikers, but mostly walkers. A school bus, but no sign of the kids. Was there a field trip, or a bus driver taking a break?

I noticed angular shadows everywhere — small branches, a street lamp, fence slats. Soft shadows too: us.

Only a few random clumps of snow on parts of the grass that rarely get sun.

time

Many different thoughts about time this morning: metronomes (see entries from 10 june 2024 and 29 august 2024); erosion needing time and pressure; stuck in a moment unable to get out vs. suspended in time and not wanting to leave; Mary Ruefle’s pause, Emily Dickinson’s hesitation, JJJJJerome Ellis’ Stutter; a time slip, a shift; Mary Oliver’s ordinary and eternal time.

While reading a book, I encountered this purple description:

The light in the sky was fading, the clouds now purple and dark, the meadows and the surrounding wood losing their color, fading into grainy variations of gray.

Kind Worth Killing/ Peter Swanson

(fading twice?) I thought: purple represents the space between light and dark, between the last bit of color and gray, between not seeing well and not seeing at all (with my central vision), after the crumbling of cone cells and before the total collapse (the last cell gone). This is my purple hour. I want to use that in a poem playing with my literal and figurative meanings of purple.

march 11/WALK

45 minutes
longfellow flats
32 degrees

Colder today, but beautiful. Sun, shadows, cold air! We — me and Delia — walked through the neighborhood then over to the trail then down the old stone steps to the river. A bare forest floor, no mud or ice or snow, only soft dirt. I unhitched Delia from her leash and she bolted off into the sand, always waiting at the edge of my vision for me. If I didn’t follow her, she loop back. If I did, she continued forward until she reached my edge, then look back and wait again. What a dog. The sand was mushy, the water was blue. It sparkled some, but was mostly still, or moving so slow I couldn’t detect it. When we left the river, I powered up the steps, all 112 of them — or a little less, when I took 2 at a time. That felt good! Not easy, but energizing. At the top I could tell my glutes had fired. I felt a nice warm burn. As I continued walking, my back felt looser and I thought to myself, yes, I will climb more steps this spring and summer. Maybe I’ll even devote a month to steps — poems about steps, a playlist, finally taking some of the cool steps in St. Paul!

10 Things

  1. the short section of the stone wall in the tunnel of trees that curves in slightly — have I ever noticed this before? why does it curve here?
  2. voices drifting
  3. the bells of St. Thomas and their noonday song
  4. chick a dee dee dee dee
  5. the soft drumming of a woodpecker
  6. a bright blue sky — cloudless, planeness, birdless, moonless
  7. some dark think sticking out of the water — a log? rock? a piling for an abandoned dam?
  8. breathing in cold air: sharp
  9. a pile of rusty, bent pipes on the boulevard — were these pipes the reason why the sewer was leaking?
  10. 2 people and a dog, ahead, walking slower than us. As we neared the corner, I repeated in my head, please turn please turn, and they did!

The leaking sewer reminded me of something from last night as we watched pro cycling — the time trail for Tirreno Adriatico. Whenever a cyclist was slowing down their pace, the commentator would say they were leaking time. This bothered Scott: why would you say leaking? why not losing?

What does it mean to leak time? What does it look or feel or sound or smell like? Was the commentator thinking about air leaking out of a tire?

before the walk

Listening to my “Doin’ Time” playlist as I write. The Kinks’ “Time” is on:

Time lives our lives with us
Walks side by side with us
Time is so far from us
But time is among us
Time is ahead of us
Above and below us
Standing beside us
And looking down on us

When we were young
And our bodies were strong
We thought we’d sail
Into the sunsets
When our time came along
Now that we’re nearing
The end of the line

Time has changed
Time would heal
Time will mend and conceal
In the end everything will be fine
And if we concentrate
Time will heal all the hate
All in good time

We go on
Drifting on
Dreaming dreams
Telling lies
Generally wasting our time
Suddenly it’s too late
Time has come and can’t wait
There’s no more time

Encountered this shadow poem during my morning, poem-of-the-day practice:

Any Evening/ James Richardson

A far bird sings again, a little further.

There is less and less difference
between your shadow

and the shadow inside you
and all the shadows,

and the evening softly taking hold
says It has always been evening

and now you know.

shadows: yours, the one inside of you, all the shadows

These lines made me think about my idea that the only things I feel as real — solid, fully formed — are the shadows. Other forms, with their details, are fuzzy and — not flickering but slowly vibrating or shaking or softly pulsing.

march 10/WALKRUN

walk: 60 minutes
winchell trail
57 degrees

A slow walk with Delia the dog. Stopping and sniffing and pooping and peeing and listening nervously to rumbling trucks and roofers. On the Winchell Trail, a black capped chickadee just overhead feebeed and chickadeedeedeed at us. Only a few remnants of the snow remain. A mix of dry path with puddles and mud.

Near the end of the walk I decided that what I really needed to do with my back was loosen it up by walking faster. Maybe I’m tensing up too much? Also decided that I’d try a short run.

run: 2 miles
just north of lake street
59 degrees

Ran past the ancient boulder and down through the tunnel of trees. The floodplain forest looks barren — no snow or leaves on the trees, only brittle and brown on the ground. Felt pretty relaxed and a little awkward — not quite a hitch in my step, but not smooth either. That got better as I warmed up. Listened to the breeze passing through the trees, and voices running north. I put in my “Doin’ Time” playlist for my run south. Heard: Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is; A Summer Wasting; Suspended in Time. All three offering visions of life outside the clock/capitalist time.

I almost forgot: I wore shorts today!

10 Things from my Walk and Run

  1. park workers in orange vests getting ready to do some work — trim trees? clear out brush? (walk)
  2. after weeks, they’re finally doing something about the gushing water on the corner of 46th! the barricades were gone, and so was the sound of water gone wild (run)
  3. chick a dee dee dee — a black capped chickadee in a tree just above my head — what I saw: a small dark flurry of movement on a branch (walk)
  4. the soft, energetic din of kids on the playground at Dowling Elementary (walk)
  5. a line of snow — a lump, not big enough to be a wall — stretched across the walking path (run)
  6. the river: open, shimmering, blue (walk)
  7. the tree line on the other side, a golden glow (run)
  8. a slight slip in mud on the boulevard between edmund and the river road (walk)
  9. the soft shadows of gnarled oak tree branches on the grass (run)
  10. 4 stones stacked on the ancient boulder (run)

circumambulation

Returning to circumambulation and the ceremony/ritual of looping around the gorge. A thought: when I swim at the lake I do multiple loops, but beside the gorge, I only do one loop. What’s the difference (mentally, spiritually, physically) between a loop vs. multiple loops. Also, where do my there and back runs — trestle turn around or the franklin hill and back or the falls and back — fit in? What sort of ritual are they?

Loosely, the structure of Gary Snyder’s “The Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais” is:

  • a brief description of place
  • a sacred chant/mantra
  • a further description — more details, directions, feelings/reflections/encounters

I’ll try this structure. I think I want to do the 8 loop that combines the ford and franklin loops. But, I’m taking it easy with the running right now, so maybe I should wait to do this until next month?

but now we really hear chanting
we can’t decode–Don’t
be so rational–a congregate speech
from the redtrembling sprigs, a
vascular language prior to our

breathed language, corporeal, chemical,
drawing our sound into its harmonic, tuning
us to what we’ve yet seen, the surround
calling us, theory-less, toward an inference
of horizontal connections there at

ground level
(Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais/Forrest Gander)

Some chants I might include:

I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble but I am invisible

All trees are just trees

In every part of every living thing/is stuff that once was rock

Listen, I don’t think we’re going to rise/in gauze and halos./Maybe as grass, and slowly. Maybe as the long-leaved, beautiful grass (added the next day: these lines don’t fit with the others, not enough rhythm?)

Life is but Life, and Death is but Death. Joy is but Joy, and Breath is but Breath.

In the name of the Bee-–
And of the Butterfly-–
And of the Breeze–Amen!