Category: Running Log

feb 26/RUNGETOUTICE

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
35 degrees

A much better run today than yesterday. One difference: I had a big snack — yogurt, blue, pumpkin seed granola — before I went out. It was sunny and above freezing. Less layers! 1 pair of tights, shorts, 1 shirt, 1 pull-over, gloves, baseball cap. Listened to the snow melting, wheels whooshing, kids playing, a playground whistle blowing, grit scratching the asphalt as I ran sound, my “Bunnies and Rabbits” playlist on the way back. Listened to Jenny Lewis’ “Rabbit Fur Coat” again and want to look up rabbit fur coats — how do they compare to mink or fox in terms of status? who wears rabbit?

10 Things

  1. looked up — cerulean blue sky, no clouds, no birds, no planes
  2. drip drip drip drip — water falling down the gutter
  3. the strong smell of weed — like a skunk — in the 44th street parking lot, or was it the locks and dam no. 1 lot?
  4. the annual puddles have returned on certain neighbor’s sidewalks
  5. a thin sheet of ice on the river
  6. a few more cars in the falls parking lot, a few more people at the overlook
  7. an older man standing near my favorite spot, reading the old — how old? 1940s or 50s? — plaque about the falls, his partner just ahead, patiently waiting
  8. the cobblestones were clear! no ice, no snow, only 1 or 2 puddles
  9. running south, nearing the double bridge, my eyes fixed on a something shining BRIGHT — sun reflecting off of an object — the top of a trashcan?
  10. standing behind the Rachel Dow Memorial bench, stretching and looking down at the river, out and over to the other side, watching a car travel the east river road

rabbit fur coat

My “research” didn’t yield that much, but enough to guess that the coat symbolizes Lewis’ mom’s obsession with attaining status, obtaining wealth.

Commercial fur trade of rabbit took off in the 20s. Less expensive than other animal furs, easily dyed and plucked to resemble other fur. A more accessible status symbol.

crepuscular

A few days ago, I used the word crepuscular (“Rabbits are crepuscular grazers” — 24 feb 2026) and suggested it would make a good title for a poem. This morning I’m exploring how other poets have used the word in their poems.

crepuscule: twilight (rare: noun)

crepuscular: of or relating/resembling1 twilight;
of an animal active in twilight (adjuective)

1 — from The Possessed / John Berryman

There was a time crepuscular was mild, 
The hour for tea, acquaintances, and fall 
Away of all day’s difficulties, all 
Discouragement. Weep, you are not a child. 

The equine hour rears, no further friend, 
Intolerant, foam-lathered, pregnant with 
Mysterious grave watchers in their wrath
Let into tired Troy. You are near the end. 

Midsummer Common loses its last gold, 
And grey is there. The sun slants down behind 
A certain cinema, and the world is blind
But more dangerous. It is growing cold. 

Light all the lights, heap wood upon the fire
To banish shadow. Draw the curtains tight. 
But sightless eyes will lean through and wide night 
Darken this room of yours. As you desire. 

2 — from Le crépuscule du soir / Charles Baudelaire / trans. Roy Campbell

But insalubrious demons of the airs,
Like business people, wake to their affairs
And, flying, knock, like bats, on walls and shutters.
Now Prostitution lights up in the gutters
Across the glimmering jets the wind torments.
Like a huge ant-hive it unseals its vents.
On every side it weaves its hidden tracks
Like enemies preparing night-attacks.

3 — from Crepuscle with Muriel / Marilyn Hacker

the void of an hour seeps out, infects
the slit of a cut I haven’t the wit to fix
with a surgeon’s needle threaded with fine-gauge silk
as a key would thread the cylinder of a lock.
But no key threads the cylinder of a lock.
Late afternoon light, transitory, licks
the place of the absent cup with its rough tongue, flicks
itself out beneath the wheel’s revolving spoke.
Taut thought’s gone, with a blink of attention, slack,
a vision of “death and distance in the mix”
(she lost her words and how did she get them back
when the corridor of a day was a lurching deck?
The dream-life logic encodes in nervous tics
she translated to a syntax which connects
intense and unfashionable politics
with morning coffee, Hudson sunsets, sex;
then the short-circuit of the final stroke,
the end toward which all lines looped out, then broke).

4 — twilight school / early 20th-century Italy / Britannica entry

crepuscolarismo, (Italian: “twilight school”), a group of early 20th-century Italian poets whose work was characterized by disillusion, nostalgia, a taste for simple things, and a direct, unadorned style. Like Futurism, a contemporaneous movement, crepuscolarismo reflected the influence of European Decadence and was a reaction to the florid ornamental rhetoric of the Italian author Gabriele D’Annunzio. It differed from the militant Futurist movement in its passivity, but both movements expressed the same spirit of desolation, and many crepuscolari later became futuristi.

crepuscular animals / wikipedia

Ten examples of crepuscular animals, active at dawn and dusk, include raccoons, deer, rabbits, skunks, bobcats, foxes, bats, house cats, coyotes, and moose, with many mammals, insects, and some birds fitting this activity pattern to avoid extreme heat and predators. 

Bats! I’ve been gathering poetic lines about bats for several years now! Not because I like bats (although, after all my thinking about them, I’m starting to!), but because the poetic language used to describe them is helpful in my own thinking about how I navigate the world in my less defined light.

  1. I’m interested in this idea of resembling, particularly in relation to light and my perception of it as I lose more cone cells. Does crepuscular describe me? Am I perpetually in the light of dawn and dusk? I’m also interested in it in terms of time, where twilight = that small/brief in-between time before day/light turns to night/darkness, the stage just before a final loss (in my case, all of my central vision) ↩︎

Get Out ICE

I’ve continued to tag my entries with “Get out ICE” because ICE is still here in Minnesota and is still awful. But that is about it; it’s time to return to posting examples of ice out. Here’s one small “ICE OUT” example that I heard about as I listened to a running podcast. As she was recounting her 100k 8-hour trail race, Molly Seidel wore “ICE OUT” on her vest. She said it was important for her to make this statement:

I haven’t been super vocal on social media just because I don’t feel like that’s where I can put my voice to best use sometimes. But I think being able to make a statement on what I wear through what I do and wear that for 62 miles mattered a lot to me.

Molly Seidel / Ali on the Run podcast

I can’t remember if I mentioned it here or just on Facebook, but I have posted about Olympic athletes speaking out against ICE, most notably Jessie Diggins. Local professional sports teams, like the Timberwolves and the Frost are too.

Somewhat related, but also very different, cycling communities in the twin cities have been very vocal in their opposition to ICE. A week after Alex Pretti was murdered, thousands of cyclists did a ride in honor of him. And Recovery Bike Shop on Central in NE Minneapolis has been very active, both in resistance and in caring for immigrant communities. Just today they posted a flyer about training people for bike patrols and wrote this:

This is a game changer for our communities. Patrollers on bikes can cover A LOT more ground and reach active incidents much faster.

And bikes are not trackable like cars.

We’re still walking Central Ave TONIGHT (and every Thursday) at 5:30.

And the Holland Neighborhood Association will be at Recovery Bike Shop at 7:00pm with Council Member Elliott Payne. Find out ways to engage in the community. This is where change happens.

facebook

feb 25/RUNGETOUTICE

2 miles
river road, north/lena smith, south
22 degrees

Sunny, cold, shadowed. Most distinctive shadow: the ball-like one, made by the light of the street light. It was nice weather for a run. Not too cold, or too warm, clear trails. Unfortunately, I struggled. Sore legs, unfinished business, and some fatigue. And now I’ll struggle not to worry about what caused the bad run — this worrying about my health is the way my anxiety is expressed. No fun.

Even with my not-so-great run, can I remember 10 things I liked (or loved)?

10 Things

  1. the feel of my feet sliding on the grit as I ran up the lake street hill
  2. the bright orange graffiti under the lake street bridge
  3. the surface of the river, covered in a thin skin of ice, a pale gray
  4. the bright blue and empty sky
  5. the deep footprints on the snow-covered walking path, descending just below the road
  6. feeling strong and relaxed as I ran up the hill from under the bridge
  7. the sheen of the thin glaze of ice on the shaded sidewalk
  8. some puddles on the sidewalk where snow from a yard had melted
  9. looking through a net of bare, slender trunks
  10. chirping birds, all around

For the first part of my run, I listened to the traffic and my feet striking the gritty ground. For the second part of the run and the walk, I put in my new “Bunnies and Rabbits” playlist — see below. I heard these songs today:

  1. Rabbot Ho / Thundercat
  2. Baile InoLVIDABLE / Bad Bunny
  3. Rabbit Fur Coat / Jenny Lewis
  4. Abracadabra / Steve Miller Band
  5. I’m Drivin’ My Life Away / Eddie Rabbit

I’d liked the speed/fast beat of the Bad Bunny song, the storytelling in “Rabbit Fur Coat,” the 80s kid nostalgia of Abracadabra, and the little North Carolina Sara nostalgia of Eddie Rabbit (from June 1980, when I was 6). Jenny Lewis’ story about her poor (both, no money and tragic figure) mom made me think of Diane Seuss and her use of a rabbit motif — see below and this diane seuss and rabbits.

Rabbits, Rabbits, Everywhere — written earlier today

As is usually the case when I give attention to something I haven’t given much attention to before, that something is suddenly everywhere, or not everywhere, but the instances of it seem to grow exponentially (you might say, they breed like rabbits). The rabbit/bunny/hare floodgate has been opened! This morning, I’m finding so many rabbit references!

And what’s the point of all of this? Following the rabbit down the rabbit hole is a wonderful distraction. It is also an excellent opportunity to learn. And to learn more about rabbits, which leads to caring about them as living things and as symbols. This caring might (is) enabling me to open up a closed part of myself (closed = strong dislike of rabbits). And it is helping me to think more broadly and specifically about the impacts of humans and human encroachment on environments and the consequences of that encroachment for humans and non-humans. Plus, all (or any) of it could inspire new poems.

Here are a few rabbit-related things:

1

The killer rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I should rewatch this movie because I remember the rabbit in the cave (or is it a bunny) at the end, but not that clearly. Is the joke that rabbits/bunnies are soft and cute and frail and couldn’t possibly be vicious killers?

2

Bunny Lebowski in The Big Lebowski. It’s been long enough since I’ve seen this film that I all I can remember is that she is the young wife of the Big Lebowski, who is kidnapped and is a catalyst for much of the action. Is that right? I could look it up, but I’d rather use this lack of remembering as a reason to watch the movie again.

3

Rabbit in Red matchbox from Halloween. Near the beginning of the movie, the nurse who has accompanied Dr. Loomis to pick up Michael Myers from the mental hospital and bring him to his parole hearing lights a cigarette using a match from this matchbook just before Micheal Myers attacks them and escapes in their car. Later that same matchbook appears in the grass near the dead body of a mechanic. A clue! Michael Myers must have been here! And now he’s going home to finish what he started!

4

Harvey, a Jimmy Stewart movie from 1950 in which Stewart befriends a 6 foot tall invisible rabbit. I have never seen it, but when I was younger, after having watched Rear Window, I developed a bit of a crush on Jimmy Stewart. Maybe that’s why I thought of this? I looked to see if it was streaming anywhere or available from the library. Nope.

5

Max and Ruby, Ruby and Max. A cartoon with baby brother/big sister bunnies. My kids watched this when they were young, thanks to hand-me-down dvds from my sister whose kids watched it when they were young. When and where did it air? What I remember most about this show was that the adults were almost non-existent and Ruby was the suffering big sister who rarely got to have any fun because she had to mother clueless Max. The gendering in this one — wow!

6

The documentary from PBS, The Pill. When I taught a class about debated issues within feminism, we usually started with a section on Reproductive Justice. Instead of focusing on abortion, we looked more broadly at women’s reproductive health and their access to care and control over their own bodies. I often screened this documentary and I recall a section with rabbits in a lab that also included the story of how they experimented on women in Puerto Rico. I can’t easily stream this again, so I’m relying on my memory and the transcript. The section is called, “A Cage of Ovulating Females.” Here’s the mention of the rabbits:

Margaret Marsh, Historian: Gregory Pincus wasn’t a physician, he was a scientist. And so he could give the pill to as many rabbits as he wanted to. Rabbits everywhere could take this pill. But he couldn’t give the pill to women. He wasn’t a doctor. He couldn’t run a clinical trial on human beings.

The Pill

And here’s one bit about Puerto Rico:

Getting the pill to market would require approval from the Food & Drug Administration, and that would entail a large-scale human trial. In exasperation, Katharine McCormick, asked, “Where can we find a cage of ovulating females?”

Puerto Rico had a network of birth control clinics and no Comstock laws. Pincus called it “the perfect laboratory.”

The Pill

The experiments on Puerto Rican women were considered a success, but some of the women suffered terrible side effects: headaches, nausea, dizziness, vomiting.

7

Rabbit from Winnie-the-Pooh — Winnie-the-Pooh’s neighbor who sometimes wishes he wasn’t — there’s a real Dennis the Menace vibe happening here, with Pooh as Dennis, Rabbit as the menaced neighbor. Yesterday I read about how Lewis Carrol intended the White Rabbit to be a sharp contrast to Alice:

For her ‘youth’, ‘audacity’, ‘vigour’, and ‘swift directness of purpose’, read ‘elderly’, ‘timid’, ‘feeble’, and ‘nervously shilly-shallying’, and you will get something of what I meant him to be. I think the White Rabbit should wear spectacles. I’m sure his voice should quaver, and his knees quiver and his whole air suggest a total inability to say ‘Boo’ to a goose!”

The White Rabbit in Fandom

I see a similar contrast between Pooh (as Alice) and the Rabbit (as White Rabbit):

8

Cadbury Creme Egg Bunny. Growing up, I LOVED these eggs. Unlike now, in the 80s and 90s you could only get them around Easter. More than any other, these eggs are my favorite childhood candy. Do they hold up? Not really. I remember the commercial with the bunny that sounds like a chicken:

the 1983 commercial with copy read by the Smuckers guy!

9

9

Diane Seuss and rabbits. Yesterday I remembered a line from a favorite Diane Seuss poem, I Look Up at my Book and out at the World Through Reading Glasses:

The load of pinecones at the top,
a brown smudge which could be anything: a wreath
of moths, a rabbit strung up
like a flag.

She’s referencing some famous still life painting with the rabbit, I think — this is in her collection all about still life paintings, Still LIfe with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl. I looked up “Diane Seuss and rabbits” and found two other poems by her with rabbits in them!1

excerpt from backyard song / Diane Seuss

Uncorked, I had a thought: I
want the want
I dreamed of wanting once, a
quarter cup of sneak-peek
at what prowls in the back, at
what sings in the
wet rag space behind the garage, back
where the rabbits nest

Her first poem had a rabbit/ Diane Seuss

in it. Life
story at age fourteen sifted
through a rabbit.

It had a tattoo on a hand
in it. And cherries, the kind
that come in a can.

She tended
toward rabbits back then.
Toward the theoretically mild

that are really
wild. Like ducks on a pond
that is really a moon

full of menacing weeds.
The duck gets ready for noon,
she wrote. Yes,

nonsense, I guess.
She embroidered a poem
on a foam

pillow with a felt pen.
Pinned an actual
cherry on it back then

life story sifted through a rabbit — drawing upon this poem and a few others, AI suggests that Seuss frequently uses the motif of rabbit to explore themes of wildness, vulnerability, and the grotesque. In the summary, it (AI) misnames the poem “Basket,” which is the name of the journal, not this poem.

theoretically mild, really wild

Ducks on a pond, right next to the rabbit? That has to be reference to the optical illusion — do you see a duck or a rabbit? — right?

11

The Runaway Bunny — This was one of my favorite books as a kid. At first, I wondered why I thought that, then I found the book and opened it and saw why:

book inscription: To little Sara on Easter 1978 -- from Mommy and Daddy
my copy from 1978

11

Looney Tunes: I want hasenpfeffer! I am almost certain that when I watched this cartoon as a kid, this was the first time I had heard of hasenpfeffer or imagined that rabbit was something you could eat. I still never have, but whenever I hear the word hasenpfeffer I think of this cartoon.

Hasenpfeffer

From a comment: “The King wants Hasenpfeffer which is traditional Dutch and German stew made from marinated rabbit or hare, cut into stewing-meat sized pieces and braised with onions and a marinade made from wine and vinegar.”

What to do with all of this rabbit-holing? I want to orbit around all, or at least many, of these ideas. Bring them into poems. Write a series of small poems about rabbits and bunnies and hares. As I was writing this last line, another bunny zapped into my head — The Runaway Bunny! I’ll add it above. What form should these rabbit poems take? Could this be an inspiration — Seven American Centuries? Whatever the form, I like the idea of returning repeatedly to century bunny/rabbit themes, and telling a story across the poems, not in one poem.

  1. Yesterday I realized I could easily do footnotes and I’m here for it! Googling “Diane Seuss and rabbits” the AI explanation seemed useful and it was, but also a bit suspect. When I clicked on the links offered at the end of the AI summary and read the source, it often wasn’t saying what AI claims it saying. AI takes some liberties, I think. ↩︎

a Rabbit/Bunny/Hare playlist

When Scott reminded me of Thundercat’s song “Rabbot Ho,” I knew I needed to make a playlist for this recent preoccupation!

  1. Rabbot Ho / Thundercat
  2. Baile InoLVIDABLE / Bad Bunny
  3. Rabbit Fur Coat / Jenny Lewis
  4. Abracadabra / Steve Miller Band
  5. I’m Drivin’ My Life Away / Eddie Rabbit
  6. The Young Rabbits / The Jazz Crusaders
  7. Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits / Magnetic Fields
  8. Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) / Florence + the Machine
  9. Rabbit Fighter / T. Rex
  10. Jack Rabbit / Elton John
  11. Here Comes Peter Cottontail / Gene Autry
  12. White Rabbit / Jefferson Airplane
  13. White Rabbit / George Benson
  14. Rabbit Will Run / Iron & Wine
  15. Breathe (in the Air) / Pink Floyd
  16. Pink Rabbits / The National
  17. Mycomatosis / Radiohead
  18. Alice / Peggy
  19. Mad as Rabbits / Panic at the Disco
  20. Bunny is a Rider / Caroline Polachek

feb 24/RUNGETOUTICE

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls
35 degrees
25% puddles

Sitting at my desk in the morning, I heard some noise — rustling, I think? — just outside the window. Freezing rain or snow — graupels. Then it started snowing, not too hard, but enough to cover everything. No! I wanted to run today. Luckily, it warmed up and by the time I was ready to run, everything had melted.

10 Things

  1. a police car parked parallel to the road in the first falls parking lot
  2. aside from the police car, the lots were empty
  3. a lime scooter leaning against a bench
  4. one guy standing at the bridge overlooking the falls, with an orange hat or an orange something else (I couldn’t see)
  5. voices below on the other side of the wall, down in the falls
  6. no one else in the park
  7. big puddles everywhere — my one foot was soaked only 5 minutes into the run
  8. kids yelling and laughing on the playground
  9. the river was covered with ice and snow with one sliver of open water
  10. a walker approaching me, walking 3 tiny dogs — this made me smile

The run was mostly great. At times, my legs felt heavy (or, at least, heavier than they usually do) and I stopped to talk a few extra times. Were they sore or my lack of ferritin or some other ailment? The second half felt easier.

bunnies — nudge? muse? pest? ghost?

note: I started writing this section yesterday and have spent over four hours this morning wandering through the spaces it created . There’s a lot of movement in it — traveling from thought to thought to thought, here to here to here. Future Sara, and anyone else reading this, you might get lost.

So far I’ve written two bunny poems without really trying to. I’m starting to believe they want me to write about them. This very idea suddenly appeared in my third poem. I started writing about the moment when I first noticed the bunnies in the backyard at night and realized they had probably always been there. Then I wrote in my Plague Notebook 27: I didn’t choose to notice them as much as they decided to be noticed. And I thought: muse! Could this poem be about bunnies in the backyard and about bunnies as the thing that has decided it’s time for me to write, and write about them? For years now, I’ve disliked bunnies, and never imagined writing about them. But now here I am, writing about them, and I fear that I might learn to like bunnies.

All of this has me wondering, what is a/my muse? I’m familiar with the term, but have never seriously studied it, either as a concept or through examples of it in the popular imagination. Do I want to now? Is it necessary for my poem? Maybe instead of devoting a month to it — although that could be fun! — I’ll give it a day or two?

Muse/ Linda Pastan

No angel speaks to me.
And though the wind
plucks the dry leaves
as if they were so many notes
of music, I can hear no words.

Still, I listen. I search
the feathery shapes of clouds
hoping to find the curve of a wing,
and sometimes, when the static
of the world clears just for a moment

a small voice commes through,
chastening. Music
is its own language, it says.
Along the indifferent corridors
of space, angels could be hiding.

If the bunnies are my muse, I didn’t seek them out. I looked out the window one winter night and saw them on the lawn, not knowing what they were. Did they seek me out, or are they indifferent to me? Did they reveal themselves, or did I just happen to notice them one day? I think I do less trying to find a muse, more trying to create the conditions where it could be possible. I noticed the bunnies because I was doing a month-long practice I called the purple hour. It involved using the time when I woke up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, to notice purple and write about it. One night, I was studying the different purples in the backyard and there they were, the bunnies. And maybe it’s more than creating the conditions where it’s possible; it’s also about being open to what could be a muse, letting it in.

Muse — to be occupied by, possessed, taken over, haunted, held captive, in the thrall of?

This idea of captivity reminded me of the poem, Captivity/ Siddhartha Menon which I posted on this log on 15 may of this year. In an essay, Menon wrote this about the final line of the poem:

“You are paralyzed.” It suggests the fatal indecision of a rabbit caught in a hunter’s flashlight, and snaps the poem shut” (Siddhartha Menon on Epigraphs).

My rabbit/bunny is back! This sentence is the only mention of a rabbit in a 872 word essay about a poem that features a bird. Where will my bunnies appear next?

Returning to definitions of muse, I googled it, and just past the dictionary entry — the nine daughters of Zeus, a person/personified force who is the inspiration for an artist — in the “People also ask” section was this question: What makes a woman a muse? Here’s the AI generated answer:

A woman becomes a muse through qualities like enigmatic allure, deep connection, and embodying creative energy, acting as a profound source of inspiration for an artist, often sharing a unique bond that fuels artistic expression, though not always romantically. Muses can be captivating personalities, friends, lovers, or even strangers who embody traits like wisdom, charisma, or mystery, prompting the artist to create, often embodying a living, breathing work of art themselves, inspiring everything from specific works to an artist’s entire focus. 

Eww. The uneven power dynamics here, between the subject (isn’t it most often a male artist?) and the object (a woman who is not an artist, or is not considered an artist) that inspires them bother me. After images of male artists and their models flashed in my mind, a phrase appeared: Manic Pixie Dream Girl. I recalled encountering a critical feminist essay about this trope back in the day (around 2007 or 2008, when I was teaching pop culture and queer theory at the University of Minnesota). I searched for it. Not an essay, a video from Feminist Frequency. Yes! I remember them. This video holds up. Around 4 and a half minutes in, they link the trope directly with the Muse:

manic pixie dream girl

And now I’m thinking about birds in poetry and how they’re used to do a lot of the heavy lifting of a poem. She’s not the only poet to write about it, but here’s a good example of this idea from Ada Limón:

does this bird want to be in this poem today? Maybe it doesn’t. You know, we always want to turn the animal into something else, right. And sometimes I want to let the animal be. Of course animals are symbols, of course they turn into our metaphors. I mean, that happens. But I also think there are moments when you just think, okay, the birds aren’t going to save me.1

VS Podcast Interview with Ada Limón

All of this makes me wonder: what am I doing as I keep putting the two bunnies in my backyard into my poems? And why do I insistent on calling these wild and mature eastern cottonwood rabbits bunnies? I’m not sure these rabbits are indifferent to me, but I think they notice me in terms of whether or not I am a threat to their main activity: grazing in the grass.

Now I’m remembering an interesting fact I encountered the other day: much of the eastern cottonwood rabbit’s time is spent eating, 6-8 of the day, both during the day and at night!) Okay, I looked it up again and I was right about the 6-8 hours a day, but here’s a delightful detail: primarily during dawn and dusk. Rabbits are crepuscular grazers. Crepuscular (cre PUS cular)?! What a word, and a good title for a poem?!

But, back to if rabbits (I still want to call them bunnies) notice me or not. Is my assumption correct about noticing me in terms of my threat level? Another google:

Wild rabbits are acutely aware of humans, perceiving them primarily as potential predators due to their innate, high-alert survival instincts. They utilize exceptional hearing and a keen sense of smell to detect people, often fleeing immediately to safety. While they may learn to tolerate consistent, non-threatening human presence over time, they generally maintain a healthy fear of people.

Yes! So, here’s something interesting: in the poem I’m working on right now, tentatively titled, Bold as Brass, my backyard bunnies do not care that I’m passing by; they keep grazing. They’re seemingly so indifferent that I’ve started calling out a pre-boomer phrase (and unironically!) to anyone around me: those bunnies are bold as brass! Where’s their healthy fear of humans? Is it that they can tell I am no threat, or are they being impudent? Or, has something screwed up their “normal” behaviors, and could that something be human-caused (like the over-developing of land, the loss of “natural” habitats, the increased need to live in the midst of humans?) Could that be the true heart of this poem?

Possibly, but first, another plunge2 down that rabbit hole! What do “experts” say about my theory of encroaching landscapes? Looked up “rabbits encroaching landscape” and What to do about wild bunnies? appeared. Here’s the subtitle: “Timid wild rabbits may occasionally eat plants in the garden, but usually live unnoticed on the fringes of our yards.” Usually unnoticed and on the fringes? Two favorite themes in my poems! Also included in one of the first paragraphs: edges, in-betweens.3 Back to “usually unnoticed,” here’s another useful bit from the article:

Here today, gone tomorrow is one way to describe rabbits in suburbia. Given the many predators who make meals of rabbits, their populations can rise and fall dramatically over the course of a year.

Come on, now, the pun was set up for you: hare today, gone tomorrow! Anyway, does my recent (for the last year) notice of backyard rabbits, almost every day, count as part of this normal rise and fall of rabbit populations? Or does it indicate something else?

The line about the gardens make me think of two things. First, a memory. My mom loved gardening and was especially proud of her West Des Moines garden (I created a digital story about it a few years ago). I recall the rabbits liked her flowers, especially her roses. On the advice of a neighbor, she sprinkled bone meal around the bush, which didn’t work. Not wanting to kill the rabbit, she managed to catch it — I can’t remember how, maybe with the help of that same neighbor — and drove 10 or 15 miles out of town and into the prairie to release the rabbit.

Second, a few feelings I recall having decades ago when reading the section in Peter Rabbit when Peter Rabbit’s coat gets caught on Mr. McGregor’s fence and he’s trapped and then when he manages (barely, at least how I remember it) to make it home and has to recuperate in bed. The feelings: not fear or relief but an understanding that life was dangerous and serious and an ambiguity as to who was in the wrong — the bold, misbehaving Peter who disobeyed his mother’s orders and stole vegetables, or the hard-working farmer who was planning to kill Peter as punishment. I recall thinking I was supposed to think Peter was in the wrong, but I wasn’t buying it.

What to do with these rabbit wanderings? And where has my plunge down the rabbit hole led me? It seems fitting to conclude this ramble with the rabbit hole, which is a reference to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and her following of the white rabbit down into Wonderland. Of course, “down the rabbit hole” is also a term used for getting lost on the internet:

“Down the rabbit hole” is an English-language idiom or trope which refers to getting deep into something, or ending up somewhere strange. Lewis Carroll introduced the phrase as the title for chapter one of his 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, after which the term slowly entered the English vernacular. The term is usually used as a metaphor for distraction.[1] In the 21st century, the term has come to describe a person who gets lost in research or loses track of time while using the internet.

wikipedia

Out-of-control curiosity. Distraction. Losing track of time. Getting lost in strange worlds. These are presented as bad things. Are they? Many of them are embraced within poetry. And they are great tools of refusal and resistance against late-capitalism and wannabe fascist governments — you’re not working for/perpetuating the system while you’re following the rabbit hole.

Does that work when the getting lost is online, where the rabbit hole is designed to be the way curiosity is monetized: the more levels of the rabbit hole you enter, the longer you stay lost in all of the information offered, the more attention you give to a site and its advertisers.

I started this ramble yesterday after realizing my third bunny poem might be about the muse. That realization was partly inspired by a recent rereading of an excerpt from Tommy Pico’s poem, “IRL.” Somehow I’ve made it back to that beginning. Here’s the last section of that excerpt:

All I need is my phone.
Subway, elevator, drifting off
in a convo—no one really seems
to notice, occupied by their own
gleaming pod of longing.
I am the captain of my shit,
possessed by the spirit
of Instagram I am omnipotent
on Twitter on Blurb on Vine
Soap boxes on the street corner
of my mind Clear, boosted, boundless
something come stop the shaking
A sun to fly towards iMean
something to do: mimicry
of purpose. The injury
of hunger is: death. The word
of the day is: Gloze.
To explain away.
Glowing gauze glozes the
etc. Weather.com says
Stay inside forever, or
drop dead. We’ve ads
for you to click. You n me?
It’s going to take soooo long
for us to know each other
ten years.

I don’t understand all that is happening in this excerpt, but the more I read it, the more doors it opens for me and my thinking about the internet, IRL, and the Muse.4

  1. “the birds aren’t going to save me” — I suppose my initial turn to the bunnies was with that expectation, where saving = giving me something else to think about other than ICE and Occupation Minneapolis and fascism and my high blood pressure and insomnia ↩︎
  2. My choice of plunge is deliberate; it’s a reference to Emily Dickinson’s “I felt a funeral in my Brain” — And then a Plank in Reason, broke,/And I dropped down, and down,/ And hit a World, with every plunge,/And Finished knowing – then – ↩︎
  3. Something else included: “rabbits will excrete, eat and re-digest their own droppings to obtain the maximum amount of nutrients.” I wonder if that’s part of what the rabbits in my yard are doing when they spend so much time stock-still in the snow. ↩︎
  4. One last thing about the Muse that I want to mention for a future discussion. What if the bunnies/rabbits are not a muse, or a catalyst for action (which was said of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland), but a gate? As in, Marie Howe opening in “The Gate”: I had no idea that the gate I would step through / to finally enter this world / would be the space my brother’s body made ↩︎

feb 22/RUNGETOUTICE

3 miles
river road, north/lena smith hill x 3
15 degrees / feels like -2
wind: 24 mph gusts
100% clear path

A late afternoon run. It was cold but I had on (almost) all of the layers — 2 pairs of running tights, 2 base layer shirts, 1 hooded pull-over, a jacket, a buff, a cap with ear flaps, 2 pairs of gloves — so I was very warm. Only now, back inside at my desk, can I feel how the cold burned my face. I saw a few walkers, but I think I was the only runner. The river was open, the paths were clear, the sky was a grayish white.

overheard: 2 men walking a dog, heading north — when can we get out of this wind?!

Yes, the wind was rough. I don’t recall it stirring up anything, just howling, and feeling cold. 3 miles was enough for me today.

thank you past Sara!

Performing my morning ritual — my “On This Day” practice in which I read past entries from this day — I reread 22 feb 2024 and my lengthy discussion of pain. Such a gift today when I seem to be having an almost 2 month long argument with my body. I hesitate to call it pain, although I am in some discomfort. It started with a mild but persistent “cold” (never tested it, so I’m not sure what it was) that lasted more than 2 weeks. Then the discovery of high blood pressure at an annual check-up, which I’m monitoring for the next month (doctor’s orders), and that is sometimes normal, sometimes not, and is leaving me unsettled by its refusal to be one or the other. Combine that with the return of anxiety, a stretch of particularly bad restless legs and insomnia, and the acceleration of fascism in the US. Fascism aside, none of these are that big of a deal, and maybe that’s part of the problem. If they were actually a big deal, I would learn how to accept and accommodate them. Instead they linger as uncertainties, specters of worry, causing a rift between me (who is the me here?) and my body. (This litany of minor complaints is offered as gift to future Sara who most likely won’t read them as complaints, but as the documenting and archiving of what it felt like to be living in this strange and terrible and hopeful time.)

I’m not sure when I created the hashtag, body in pain, but I should do more with it — maybe create a page? And maybe I can do a little more with the 2024 entry and this — 18 august 2017.

Get Out Ice

Fight
Unlawful
Conduct
Keep
Individuals and
Communities
Empowered Act

Democratic lawmakers in New Jersey have sent a blunt message to Immigration and Customs Enforcement with the introduction of a new bill.

The “Fight Unlawful Conduct and Keep Individuals and Communities Empowered Act” – or F*** ICE Act – was introduced Thursday in the State Assembly. It aims to extend residents’ rights under state law to sue federal immigration officials for unconstitutional conduct. 

“There have to be real consequences if ICE breaks the law,” said Katie Brennan, an Assembly Democrat who is co-sponsoring the bill alongside former Hoboken mayor Ravi Bhalla, also a Democrat, according to The New York Times.

The Independent

Many of the articles about this FUCKICE Act described it as vulgar in the headline, which reminds me of a great quote from an article in MPR recently about mocking ICE and the Dildo Distribution Delegation:

“When people come out and say, ‘Well that was really vile or vulgar or distasteful,’ it sets up the question: isn’t it more distasteful and violent and vulgar to shoot people in the back of the head when they’re at a protest or to kill the citizens of Minneapolis?” Winchester said.

misheard

Read a poem last night, or was it early this morning?, by Kelli Russell Agodon that connects with my interest yesterday in sense misperceptions, and reminds me of something I wrote about on a log entry from 26 jan 2025: the 10 muses of poetry, including: Mishearing, Misunderstanding, Mistranslating, Mismanaging, Mislaying, and Misreading. The poem: “Coming Up Next: How Killer Blue Irises Spread —Misheard health report on NPR” And here’s something else from that 26 jan 2025 entry to put with all of this:

A second key might be “eavesdropping.” As it happens I have deficient eyesight and hearing, not enough to impair my regular function but enough that I can, as my colleague Karla Kelsey puts it, “squint,” either with the eye or the ear, without difficulty. Some of my best lines—especially the generative lines, the bits of poetic grist from which poems develop—come from phrases I’ve misheard in conversation or (at least initially) misread as text. I guess you could say I “own” such material—I make a lyric and creative claim to it—by mishearing or misreading it.

An Inheritance Reassembled

I bought a collection by Waldrep after discovering this intervew, and a few of his poems. Maybe it’s time to read it!

feb 21/RUNGETOUTICE

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
18 degrees / feels like 6

After a week of warmth, winter is back and this time the paths are clear! Hooray! It is (almost) never the cold but the uneven trails that bother me in January and February (and March and often April). I felt good as I ran south and even better as I ran back north. As I ran, I thought about how I was wearing my dead mother-in-law’s purple jacket and my dead mother’s teal cap with the tassels. I liked feeling as if they were both there with me. I also thought about #2 (see below) and what it means to be good at something. I imagined it not as something you are, I am good at x or y or z, but as a moment you experience or as a means to a deeper end: to feel free or satisfied or joyful — because I can run well, I am able to float on the trail and devote more attention to this place or to travel farther on this trail or enter the flow state and feel closer to the earth, the air, the water.

10 Things

  1. a flash or a slash or a blur of bright red below me — with a second glance I saw that it was a person with a red coat walking on the winchell trail
  2. a BRIGHT dot and a thought whispered in my head — yellow — an instant later recognition, a crosswalk sign
  3. thump thump thump the deep bass of a song exploding out of a car
  4. another car, more music — a song that I could almost but not quite hear — I strained my ears to identify any lyrics or a melody, but couldn’t
  5. the faint echo of the train bells near the falls
  6. the falls were still gushing from behind the ice columns, the dark water of the creek was rushing
  7. a group of people standing at the wall, looking down at the falls — they were laughing and cheering as they threw something below — I think they were snowballs
  8. the river was completely open and was mostly a deep brownish blueish dark gray — it stretched wide and far and looked more like a wall than water
  9. my feet slid (but didn’t slip) on the grit on the trail
  10. the paths held a range of people — single walkers, walkers with dogs, running pairs, running trios, adults and kids walking single-file — but the benches held nothing — they were empty

some things to remember

1

For almost a year now, I’ve been jumping from project to project. In the spring, it was color, then in the summer it was water and inklings, in the fall my book manuscript on echolocation and the gorge, and this winter it has been love. So many projects! And I have more big ideas that have been simmering for years and waiting for the light of my attention. But, I also like wandering without a clear purpose or goal. I like devoting a month to a random topic, like shadows or windows or wind, making a playlist for it, exploring new things that I haven’t encountered before. It’s difficult to balance a desire to wander and experiment with the need to turn it into something.

And right now, the need to turn it into something is winning. Even as I write this, I’m thinking of another project which would be part of a larger manuscript on how I see. So far, I have written about how I am seeing color (inner and outer color), how I navigate, looking at the world as if through water (inklings), now it’s time for another section/chapbook of this — thoughts? Optical illusions or hallucinations or mistaken identities? I’m imagining this might include examples from my log of seeing something in a very WRONG way — like disembodied legs walking toward me on the trail.

My starting point could be to gather: examples from past entries; lines from poems that speak to/of the beauty and the danger of these illusions; some research on illusions by scientists and psychologists; excerpts from essays by G. Kleege and Naomi Cohn; examples in art — like Monet and Magritte. Along the way, I want to turn this work of gathering into a resource page for others.

2

In my post from 21 feb 2017, I posed the question, what does it mean to be good at running? What does it mean to be good at something? And now I’m wondering, what does it TAKE to be good at something? The word excellence echoes in my head as I think about my studying of Aristotle and the figure skating in the 2026 winter Olympics. Two different models: Ilia Malinin (the quad god) and Alysa Liu. And I’m also thinking about the idea of needing to suffer for your art and where joy fits into your practice. And, another question — is the goal always to be good, to excel, to master?

3

A book to buy, or to check out of the library: Against Breaking — the power of poetry / Ada Limón

4

A mural to find:

a storm drain mural for water quality, designed and painted by local artist Precious, shows a sunset over a cityscape in vibrant colors. You can see it at the Mississippi River Gorge scenic overlook along Mississippi River Boulevard in Highland Park.

FMR

5

a poem to read again and to place beside my restlessness, my desire for movement, and my desire to find new ways to understand stillness:

The Art of Silence / Christine Anderson

a Buddhist monk taught me to sit silently
be the moon floating over my back field
a buttercup cradled in a clump of spring grass
sit hushed
as the broad shoulders of granite mountains
in their shawl of clouds—
sit despite
an unquiet morning
that buzzes and twitters and zips
sit to be a dewdrop
in the garden
a perfect pearl of daybreak—
a Buddha
sitting.

Get Out Ice

Found a substack list of LOTS of anti-ICE stuff happening around the cities. This one seemed particularly fitting:

We want ICE OUT!!! Of our city, our state, our community, and for one night only, out of our margaritas.

Celebrate National Margarita Day this Sunday 2/22 at Hai Hai with NO ICE margaritas to support our restaurant community. ICE doesn’t belong here anymore and we are pulling frozen water out of our favorite cocktail to prove it. A portion of each No Ice Marg sold will be donated to @thesaltcurefund for restaurants in need. If and when ICE leaves, restaurants will have a long way to go to recover from the impact their occupation has had on our community, join us for a drink and some laughter and help us take one step forward towards recovery.

Hai Hai Instagram post

feb 20/BIKEGETOUTICE

32 minutes
basement

Watched the women’s cross-country relay for most of the bike, then Alysa Liu’s amazing Free Skate for the last 10 minutes. Scott and I watched Liu’s performance last night, and I watched it again this morning. Admittedly, I can’t really see that much of it — no details, not her beaming face, none of her lines, only the feel and speed of her movement, the energy of her joy. And I guess as I watch it I am a little sad not to be able to fully witness her artistry. But I still loved it. And I’ll be watching it again and again as an antidote to all the other shit happening right now.

Bunnies

Earlier today, I read in an old log entry about my discovery, last february, of two backyard bunnies. Then I read a post on Facebook from Minneapolis Parks about how some rabbits pee blue. It felt like a nudge, today you should write about bunnies!

Here are some sources for inspiration (or more) about rabbits/bunnies:

1

Have you seen weird blue spots in the snow lately? There’s a good chance it’s rabbit pee. Eastern cottontails (the most common rabbit in Minnesota, you’ve probably seen them running around yards at dusk) sometimes eat buckthorn branches and bark, especially toward the end of winter. Buckthorn contains a phytochemical that turns urine blue after being exposed to sunlight.
So, don’t be alarmed if you come across one of these spots, it probably means a well hydrated rabbit stopped by. (Minneapolis Parks)

2

Looking out the kitchen window, seeing 2 dark forms in the white snow — bare patches or something more? Staring for a few mnutes — am I imagining that slight shift? No, 2 animals, standing still for minutes. What are they doing? Quick movement, then bounding figures. Rabbit-like. But these animals look so dark — is it a trick of the dim light — bunny fir darkened in the lilac light? [there is no indigo in a backyard illuminated by neighbor’s security lights.] Or, could these creatures be raccoons?

update, 20 feb 2026: A definite answer: bunnies! All late fall and winter, 2 or more bunnies have been hanging out under our crab apple tree — at night, in the afternoon, at sunrise and sunset. They’re very bold, these bunnies, not running off when I walk by. When this happens, I’ve started saying, these bunnies are as bold as brass! Why? Not sure. And, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea: I like bunnies or rabbits about as much as I like squirrels, which is not at all.

3

The idiom bold as brass describes someone who exudes extreme confidence, someone who is brazen or very forward. The term bold as brass is ascribed to the Lord Mayor of London in the 1770s, Brass Crosby. Crosby defied the House of Parliament by supporting the printing of a pamphlet regarding the proceedings of Parliament. The phrase bold as brass was first recorded in Life’s Painter of Variegated Characters in Public and Private Life by George Parker published in 1789, some time after the incident involving Brass Crosby. Some say this disproves the link between Crosby and the idiom bold as brass, others say it reinforces the link. In fact, the word brass was used to mean boldness or brazenness for at least forty years before the appearance of Brass Crosby on the political scene. The idiom bold as brass reached the zenith of its popularity in the early 1900s.

4

an illusion: duck or bunny

5

A cup holds
sugar, flour, three large rabbit-breaths of air.
(My Weather / Jane Hirshfield)

6

But then the rabbits tire
And the fire catches up,
Stuck onto them like the needles of the cactus,
Which at first must be what they think they feel on their skins.
They’ve felt this before, every rabbit.
But this time the feeling keeps on.
And of course, they ignite the brush and dried weeds
All over again, making more fire, all around them.
I’m sorry for the rabbits.
And I’m sorry for us
To know this.
(Rabbits and Fire/ Alberto Rios)

7

The rock that is not a rabbit suns itself
in the field, its brown coat that isn’t fur
furred with light. The rock that isn’t a rabbit
would be warm to a palm but wouldn’t
quicken or strain from touch.
(The Rock that isn’t a Rabbit / Corey Marks)

8

it is the
sadness of the unperceived and therefore never felt and
seldom expressed, except on occasion by polka dancers
and little girls who, in imitation of their grandmothers,
decide who shall have their bunny when they die.
(Green Sadness / Mary Ruefle)

9

A white rabbit hopped beside me and for a moment I thought it was a blob of snow that had fallen out of the sky. The rabbit and I studied each other. Rabbits taste like chickens. My My mother and father had taught me how to hit rabbits over the head with wine jugs, then skin them cleanly for fur vests. “It’s a cold night to be an animal,” I said, “so you want some fire too, do you? Let me put on another branch, then.” I would not hit it with the branch. I had learned from rabbits to kick backward. Perhaps this one was sick because normally the animal did not like fire. The rabbit seemed alert enough, however, looking at me acutely, bounding up to the fire. But it did not stop when it got to the edge. It turned its face once towards me then jumped into the fire. The fire went down for a moment as if crouching in surprise, then the flames shot up taller than before. When the fire became calm again I saw that the rabbit had turned into meat, browned just right. I ate it, knowing the rabbit had sacrificed itself for me. It had made me a gift of meat.
(The Woman Warrior / Maxine Hong Kingston)

I ended up doing other things today and didn’t have much time to work on it. I found a title and some opening lines:

There is no Indigo

In a backyard illuminated
by a neighbor’s security lights
there is only lilac.

I think I’m going to also need to include the line about how I like bunnies as much as I like squirrels, which is not at all.

Get Out Ice

The only ice I am into today is the Olympic ice and Alysa Liu’s free skate!

feb 19/SHOVELWALKGETOUTICE

7.6 inches
30 degrees

When I went out for my run yesterday in the early afternoon to “beat the snow” I had no idea it would snow so much. What was completely bare yesterday morning, is now covered in white. Wow. It is very winter wonderland-y. If I didn’t need to take a day off from running, I’d be out there right now with my yaktrax. Instead of running, I settled for an early morning shovel. This winter, I’ve been shoveling my sidewalk and the sidewalk of my neighbors on both sides. The snow hasn’t been too hard to shovel and it feels good to help others, even in this small way. Today as I shoveled the sidewalk of my neighbor to the south, she opened her door and called out, Thank you Sara! Normally I listen to a podcast or a playlist when I shovel, but I didn’t today. I’m glad. I might not have heard her thank you if I had!

10 Things

  1. the snow was so bright that even though the sun wasn’t out, I wore sunglasses
  2. chirping birds
  3. a droning snow blower
  4. the sharp scrape of a shovel
  5. the snow moved easily under my crappy plastic shovel — it was both fluffy and wet
  6. without the snow, the sidewalk was slick
  7. the serviceberry tree/bush at the edge of our deck was loaded down with snow —
  8. once I accidentally brushed against it and snow fell under my jacket and down my back — brrr
  9. later I gently knocked the heavy branches with my shovel; a soft layer of snow fell on my head and covered my sunglasses
  10. my shovel unearthed clumps of dead leaves at the edge of the sidewalk

walk: 60 minutes
Winchell trail to Rachel Dow Memorial Bench
32 degrees

Every winter I try to do at least one winter wonderland walk, when it’s not too cold or too windy and everything is covered in white and winter feels like WINTER — as in the ideal form of winter. Today was the day for this year! Admittedly, the edges of the trail and the curbs were very wet, but I didn’t mind because I had on snow pants and boots.

As I walked to the river, I recited Wordsworth’s “Snow-flakes” — Out of the bosom of the air/Out of the cloudfolds of her garment shaken — and watched small clumps of snow dropping from the branches. I listened to the water falling over the concrete ledge, then the limestone ledge, then into the ravine. I felt the snow compacting through my boot and creak creak creaking with every step.

added on 20 feb 2026: Rereading my entry from 20 feb 2023, a mention of footprints reminded me of something else about my walk on the Winchell Trail: lots of footprints. I liked knowing that other people had taken this walk before me and wondered if they loved it as much as I did. A distinctive thing about these footprints: even though the snow was new, the footprints weren’t pure white. Many of them were tinged with yellow — not from dog pee, but from something else. The over saturated ground? The snow itself, polluted? And, related to footprints, the tracks from cross-country skis! Unfortunately it took me a few minutes to process that they were there and that I should not be walking over them and break the trail that someone had made. So I ruined a block-length stretch of them before realizing and shifting over to the unbroken snow.

The view of the river through the tall, slender trees was amazing. The water was all open and a blueish-greenish-gray — at least to me. I took some pictures but none of them captured the beauty of this moment.

snow-painted trees, a fence, the open river

When I got to the Rachel Dow Memorial Bench, I brushed off the snow and sat for a few minutes. I heard the birds and the faint rumble of a pick-up truck across the river. Then I walked back on the trail closer to the road, and it finally happened — an SUV sped through the puddles on the edge of the road and splashed me. When I run, I often wonder/worry if this will happen, but this was the first time it actually did. I didn’t mind; it was warm, and I dressed for it. Did they do it on purpose? Possibly. No other car splashed up water. Do I care? Not at all.

Get Out Ice

Another sticker in the Arbeiter bathroom. Maybe I should make a sticker to put up in that bathroom? A poetry sticker?

Best Friends Forever / Epstein and Trump

feb 18/RUNGETOUTICE

It is 1:30 pm. It is sometimes raining, sometimes snowing, and is all-the-time windy. It is also 32 degrees. But the pavement is bare and it might not be this clear for a few days because we are supposed to get some more snow. Should I go out for a short run when I have the chance? Or, are the conditions too crappy, my left knee too sore? Future Sara will let us know! Sara from 2:47: I did it! I went out for a run in this blustery weather!

3.3 miles
river road, south/north/neighborhood, south
31 degrees / feels like 17 / snow
wind: 25 mph gusts

Not the best conditions, but I’m glad I went outside. I started by running south on the river road trail, but it was tough. I was running straight into the wind and stabbing snowflakes. I turned around at the Rachel Dow Memorial Bench, then turned off the river road and onto Lena Smith Boulevard at 32nd. I was plannng to do some hills but the road was blocked off. Instead, I meandered through the neighborhood.

I encountered one other runner, at least one fat tire. Any walkers? I can’t remember. It was difficult to see what was ahead of me. Snow was thick in the air and I pulled the visor of my cap down low to block it. If I saw the river, I don’t remember what it looked like. When I turned around to head north again, it was much easier and more fun. The snow was swirling in front of my face, looking like white confetti or bits of styrofoam. It wasn’t as cool, but it reminded me of the scene at the men’s Free Ski Big Air final that Scott and I watched last night. The sky was black, the heavy snow was illuminated by the bright lights of the venue. I remember admiring it and wishing it would snow here again so I could run through it. Well, the snow today wasn’t nearly as heavy as what I saw on the tv, but it was still delightful. It will probably be a slippery nightmare tomorrow, but today it was fun!

Lisel Mueller!

I’ve posted several poems by Lisel Mueller over the years: When I Am Asked/ Lisel Mueller, The Blind Leading The Blind/ Lisel Mueller, Sometimes, When the Light/ Lisel Mueller, Things/ Lisel Mueller, and Monet Refuses the Operation/ Lisel Mueller. But, I’ve never checked out any of her collections until now. Yesterday I picked up Alive Together: New and Selected Poems / Lisel Mueller. I started at the beginning, and stopped when I found this poem:

Losing My Sight / Lisel Mueller

I never knew that by August
the birds are practically silent,
only a twitter here and there.
Now I notice. Last spring
their noisiness taught me the difference
between screamers and whistlers and cooers
and O, the coloraturas.
I have already mastered the subtlest pitches in our cat’s
elegant Chinese. As the river
turns muddier before my eyes,
its sighs and little smacks
grow louder. Like a spy,
I pick up things indiscriminately:
the long approach of a truck,
car doors slammed in the dark,
the night life of animals—shrieks and hisses,
sex and plunder in the garage.
Tonight the crickets spread static
across the air, a continuous rope
of sound extended to me,
the perfect listener.

coloratura = elaborate ornamentation of a vocal melody, especially in operatic singing by a soprano.

I imagined that Mueller knew something about vision loss when I read her, “Monet Refuses the Operation” a few years ago, but I didn’t know that for the last 20 years of her life (she died in 2020), she was losing her vision and couldn’t read. I found out about that while reading this interview, “Slightly Larger Than Life Size“:

Mueller speaks always in a steady, gentle tone—even when describing the death of her beloved husband, Paul Mueller, in 2001 or the partial loss of vision she has suffered over the last 20 years. “I’m blind for reading, really,” she explains plainly, almost as if she were describing someone else. “I use an enlarging machine. And I have two friends who come read to me.” 

Mueller also no longer writes, in part because of her diminishing vision. She treats this circumstance with the same tough realism—compellingly at odds with the ethereal nature of her poetry—as the other hardships in her life. “I do miss writing,” she replies when asked the obvious question. “But I simply don’t have the images coming to me anymore that would start a poem. The language no longer flows. I would have to force it and come up with some artificial things, and that’s not my way. I’m someone who has learned to put up with things as they are. Because of the blindness, because of what happened to my husband, because of leaving the country that I was born in and coming here—I accommodate myself.”

Slightly Larger Than Life Size

I accommodate myself. Love that line! A title for a poem, I think. I wouldn’t say I put up with things; rather, I adapt and find new ways to be, to see. I like the line about not forcing it and coming up with artificial things. I agree.

In my imagined poem titled, “I accommodate myself,” I might start it with a line from Mueller’s “Losing My Sight”: I never knew . . . . / Now I notice. Maybe I should make a list of all of things I’ve noticed since my vision began declining?

The perfect listener. Reading this line, I immediately thought of Ed Bok Lee’s line in “Halos“:

That visual impairment improves hearing,
taste, smell, touch is mostly myth.

I do notice things much more than I did before my vision loss; I’ve made it a big part of writing/attention practice. I’ve devoted many runs to listening or smelling or feeling the various textures. So, being a good listener didn’t just happen because my vision declined; I worked for it. Yet, even as I’m noticing more with my ears, I do also seem to struggle to hear what people are saying to me. So much so that I asked for my hearing to be checked at my last appointment. It was fine. So, what’s happening? Why do I need more time to process what people are saying, or need to ask them to repeat it? FWA thinks I might have an audio processing disorder — something one of his favorite Youtubers has. Possibly. I think it has more to do with how people use visual cues — gestures, their surroundings — to convey the meaning of their speech. People with normal sight don’t realize how much they are relying on vision when they speak and they don’t recognize how that impacts people who cannot see the things that they are referencing. I find this frustrating and also fascinating to think about how we our senses work together.

One more thing about Mueller’s poem. I’d like to memorize it. There are too many wonderful lines that I don’t want to forget.

Sharing the Love

I have not given much any attention to building an audience here or on social media and, as a result, no one is seeing/responding/sharing my love poems. It is probably also because of the algorithm. Scott suggested that I put the link in the first comment and post a picture of a dog. It’s time for me to think again about if I want a bigger audience. Actually, the better question is: how can I reach people with my work? For me, it’s less about a big audience, more about finding ways to share what I’m doing and connect with others. Experiment time! The goal for me is not a bigger audience, but finding ways to contribute and connect. Hmm . . . I’ll have to think about it some more.

a few minutes later: As a first step, I’ve decided to try sharing my love poems again on Facebook. I put the link in the first comment and posted a photo, not of a dog, but of this Valentine that Scott noticed in the bathroom at Arbeiter Brewing:

Valentine, I’m falling for you & hoping the system does, too.

Also, I posted the STOP ICE photo that I posted here yesterday on my Instagram.

Maybe one of the biggest reasons I’m not sharing on social media is because it’s hard for me to do it with my bad vision. Everything takes so much longer and I can’t always see when I’ve made a mistake. And, I’ve been self-conscious about posting photos that I imagine are poorly cropped or framed strangely. Time to get over that.

Get Out Ice

Seen on a bathroom door at Arbeiter Brewing:

sickers on a bathroom door at Arbeiter

feb 17/RUNGETOUTICE

4.3 miles
minnehaha park and back
47 degrees
wind: 13 mph / 32 mph gusts

Warm, but windy, which made it feel colder, but only sometimes. The rest of the time it felt warm. Warm enough for bare arms. My left knee was a bit stiff and sore. Maybe I should take a break from running tomorrow.

overheard as I ran near Minnehaha Academy: a whistle blowing, then an adult voice — Okay fourth graders! I guess recess is over.

10 Things

  1. at least 2 runners were wearing shorts
  2. all of the walkers were bundled up in coats and hats and long pants
  3. open water!? I think the ice has fully cracked on the surface of the river, but it could just be much thinner in parts. Looking down at it, there were blobs of white, with larger stretches of pale grayish, blueish, greenish
  4. the falls were gushing behind thick ice columns
  5. voices below — an adult with several kids — were they hiking behind the falls?
  6. a police vehicle parked sideways in the parking lot at 44th
  7. the cobblestones near the falls overlook were all ice-free, but not puddle-free! squish squish squish
  8. more of the walking path is clear and open — a few clumps of snow, wet and shiny pavement, grit
  9. an old pick-up truck was parked under the ford bridge, up on the sidewalk across the road from the trail — was it hiding — if so, why and from whom?
  10. the walking half of the double bridge was covered in slushy snow, the bike half was mostly clear with a deep puddle in the middle

I decided that I would listen to music for the second half of my run. Because it was windy, I put on my “It’s Windy” playlist. The first song: Sailing / Christopher Cross The last song was the sound of birds chirping. Huh? Oh — checked the title of the track: “Breeze (forest)”

Get Out Ice

When FWA got home from his errand this morning, he told me that all of the Stop signs in the neighborhood have a stenciled “ICE” under the “STOP” in a matching font. Of course I had to check and take a picture!

STOP ICE

I’m not sure how long these signs have been this way. I hadn’t noticed, but I don’t drive, so I rarely see the stop signs. I wondered how long it took someone/someones to do this? I hope the city leaves them alone.

added, 18 feb 2026: Three notes from Scott. First, as we drove to the library, Scott and I noticed more stop signs with “ICE” and some without. Scott guessed that this stop ice action was probably not that systematic. Second, he also pointed out that it is not a stencil, but a sticker. Would I be able to notice that if I got close enough? I’ll have to take a walk today and check. And third, Scott informed me that these stickers have been on stop signs for several weeks.

Love

I finished my love poems. I decided to call it, We Love, We Love, We Love, We Love. I posted it on instagram, facebook, and as the home page of my author site: sarapuotinen.com

feb 16/RUNGETOUTICE

4.05 miles
river road, north/south
51 degrees
50% sloppy

51 degrees! Another run with bare arms. Lots of puddles, but also lots of dry path. I was able to run on the walking path for long stretches. The surface of the river has cracked — no open water yet, but patches of thinner ice in light gray were scattered all over. A bike passed by blasting music: “Losing my Religion” by REM. I heard some kids’ voices at a playground before I reached the river. Saw/heard an ambulance rumble by on the river road, its LOUD siren freaking out all the nearby dogs. Near the end, recited Alice Oswald’s “A Story of Falling” as I ran — in my head, not out loud. Also near the end, heard the bells of St. Thomas chime twice — it’s 2:00 already? Wow.

I stopped to walk several times, often because I had become trapped on a part of the path that was suddenly blocked by a short wall of snow or a deep puddle. One of the stops was at a bench nearing Franklin that I have delighted in noticing before. It is dedicated to “Margaret Carlson, Dog Lover.” Today I remembered to take a picture of it!

“She cherished her girls; Schnapps, Candy, Maggie, Mitzi and Suzi*”

*yes, it should be a colon, not a semi-colon, but who cares; I’d rather give my attention to the fact that one of her “girls” is named Schnapps, and another, Candy!

I’m not sure if I’ve written this yet, but I’d like to remember: when I go out running now, I carry a whistle and my passport ID card. And I don’t listen to any music, so I can be better aware of what’s happening around me.

Get Out Ice

I am almost finished with my collection of love poems. Here’s the final poem, which is an erasure of a Facebook statement by Carbone’s Pizzeria on Cedar near Lake Nokomis:

This New Normal / 15 February 2026

This New Normal

We are with you. We love you.
love Always.
We Love
We Love
We Love
We Love
this new normal together,
love