5 miles bottom franklin hill and back 72 degrees / dew point: 60
Whew! I was sure the dew point would be even higher. It felt very uncomfortable out there. And difficult. But I kept moving and didn’t push myself too hard. I ran to the bottom of the hill then walked up it. Then ran, walked, ran until I was back to the ancient boulder — no stones stacked on it today.
Last night RJP graduated from high school. I’m very proud of her for surviving it. I’m proud of myself too. It was very hard and I am tired. No more k-12 public school! Hooray! I loved many of the teachers and the music programs, but I won’t miss being subject to this schooling process.
RJP’s graduation was delayed by almost an hour because a fight broke out at the previous school’s graduation and someone was hauled away in an ambulance. FWA said he saw the guy, and he looked like he was probably fine and not in much pain. Other than the delay, the graduation was great. The awesome poet Bao Phi gave the address — so good! He, along with the student speakers, centered the experiences of BIPOC students.
10 Things
white sky
dark green mystery
at least 2 specks in the sky — a plane? a bird?
click clack — roller skiers powering up the franklin hill
foamy water
glowing orange shoes on a runner
voices below near white sands beach
one runner to another: well, that killed about an hour and a half — huh?
a greeting from Mr. Holiday!
a few days ago I mentioned something in orange spray painted on the sidewalk — it’s the outline of a cat (but not Garfield, I think?)
a section from Wintergreen Ridge/ Lorine Niedecker
Reading (again, for the 3rd or 4th time?) LN’s “Wintergreen Ridge,” I was delighted by her connections and associations:
Women saved a pretty thing: Truth:
“a good to the heart” It all comes down to the family
5 miles bottom of franklin hill and back 70 degrees / dew point: 60
Overcast, which helped it feel a little less warm. Sticky, thick air. A lot of sweat, especially on my face. Dripping ponytail. So green even the air was green. Greeted the Welcoming Oaks — hello friends! Descended into the tunnel of trees and was enveloped in green. Chanted triple trees: sycamore/sycamore/sycamore/red oak leaf/silver birch. Heard the rowers through the trees. Admired the barely moving, calm water under the bridge — the surface was dotted with foam and reflected clouds. Saw a speck in the sky out of the corner of my eye. Tried to look at it, gone. Tried again, a plane almost covered in fog. Saw a dark ring around it — my ring scotoma? Appreciated how the outline of the treetops on either side of the river road echoed the shape of the river banks. Walked up the hill — it took me 7 minutes — then ran, walked, ran back. Ended with a dozen roller skiers above me while I climbed out of the tunnel of trees.
For the first mile, in the dark green quiet, everything was dreamy. Thought again about how running puts me in a strange, surreal state. Nothing quite real. Then thought about Lorine Niedecker and the physical act of seeing with messed up eyes and using the poetic form to represent that. I’m not aware of how my eyes move as I see except for when I look to the peripheral as a way for my central vision to see something. I imagine having nystagmus makes you more easily register the movement of your eyes. How conscious was LN of her eye movement and how it was mimicked in her lines? When I think about how I see — the mechanics of it and its physicality — I think more about what happens when the corrupt or limited data travels as electrical impulses through the optic nerve and to the brain. Are the effects of nystagmus primarily physical — strain on eyes, the rapid movement creating dizziness and headaches? I should read more about it. . . . The physical impact of my vision sometimes reads as dizziness and light-headedness, but mostly it’s just a vague sense of unease and fatigue — more naps. I rarely feel the eye strain or get headaches from my effort.
In the article I was reading about LN’s nystagmatic poetics, this poem was discussed:
Tattoo/ Wallace Stevens
The light is like a spider.
It crawls over the water.
It crawls over the edges of the snow.
It crawls under your eyelids
And spreads its webs there—
Its two webs.
The webs of your eyes
Are fastened
To the flesh and bones of you
As to rafters or grass.
There are filaments of your eyes
On the surface of the water
And in the edges of the snow.
note at 11 am: Today is my first day of open swim! After the swim, I’ll return to this entry.
I’m spending the afternoon on the deck, reading Niedecker and thinking about Alice Oswald and Niedecker and my Haunts poems. Here are some jumbled thoughts:
You have been in my mind/between my toes/agate — Lake Superior/LN
You’ve been in my mind
beneath my feet Mom
Look for me under your boot-soles — Walt Whitman
Ars Poetica/ Arcelis Girmay
May the poems be the little snail’s trail.
Everywhere I go, every inch: quiet record
of the foot’s silver prayer. I lived once. Thank you. I was here.
“We a lovely/finite parentage/mineral/vegetable/animal” — Wintergreen/ LN
I’m interested in how many layers you can excavate in personality. At the top it’s all quite named. But you go down through the animal and the vegetable and then you get to the mineral. At that level of concentration you can respond to the non-human by half turning into it.
Alice Oswald interview for Falling Awake
To write a poem is to be a maker. And to be a maker is to be down in the muck of making and not always to fly so high above the muck.
We can’t float or fly for long, above. We are part of the muck, not stuck but entangled, beholden
to work down/ to ocean’s black depths/us us an impulse tests/the unknown — Paean to Place/ LN
2 loops / 1.5 miles lake nokomis open swim 80 degrees
Open swim! Open swim! I was nervous before the swim, wondering if I would see the buoys. I did! The water felt wonderful — a little cold, but not too cold, and wavy but not choppy. I watched the sun filtering through the water, avoided the vegetation growing up from the bottom and the swan boat stuck right by the orange buoy. That menacing swan was a little too close as I neared the buoy. The last green buoy was so far from the orange buoy — it seemed to take forever to reach the beginning of the loop. Oh, I love open swim and what joy to have had a good first swim!
Was planning to bike to the lake and swim today, but it rained. On and off all day. So I read about Lorine Niedecker and took notes. Then, a quick walk with Scott.
Here are some observations from my deck, the yard, the window at my desk, and the walk:
10+ Things
deck: the sky heavy, gray, expectant — but it’s not supposed to rain today! — it did and then did again
deck: under the lime green umbrella, hearing the first drops, soft and slight
deck: the service-berry bush at the edge of the deck did a better job of keeping the deck dry than the umbrella!
front yard: after rain today, and the wind the past few days, the yard was almost as much twig as grass. Our neighbor’s tall tree with the wandering limbs offers unwanted gifts all year
desk/window: in the left window, a blob stretches above the other hydrangea leaves — dark, diseased — what is it?
side yard: not sure what this blob is even up close — could it be army worms? or is it just a failed unfurling?
side yard: near the gate, a rogue tree is growing outside of our neighbor’s window. Will they cut it down before it gets too big and becomes a problem for us?
desk/window: rain, pouring down, missing the gutter and sliding straight off the roof in sheets — too much debris/dirt in the gutter?
no lightening but far off thunder rumbles
green green green green green green green green
cabbage or lettuce or something else green growing in a neighbor’s planter
the sweet snell of pine after the rain
convinced I was seeing a giant fish sculpture until Scott told me it was wrapping over a tree
workers re-roofing a sharply angled roof with no harnesses
Here ares some thoughts to remember from Niedecker:
1
LN’s life by/with/on water involves saturation not transcendence.
2
Thru birdstart wingdrip weed-drift of the soft and serious water (from “My Life on Water”/ LN)
3
Reading is a bodily act — within the body, not transcending the body. The physical act of reading words with diseased eyes.
4
Time to challenge the myth that not being able to see “naturally” makes your hearing improve — That visual impairment improves hearing, taste, touch, smell, is mostly myth — Halos. Ed Bok Lee — LN used sound in remarkable ways, and also explored seeing differently.
5
One of the traditions LN draws from, Objectivism, believed in the clear, straight-seeing eye. In later work, like “Wintergreen Ridge,” she challenged the possibility of this straight-seeing.
Tell all the truth but tell it Slant — ED Alice Oswald and the slow, oblique, slight squinting of the Old Women in the Illiad
6
Imagists (Ezra Pound, HD): to see the world as it is, the IS, the this, scrubbing away to the essence
Objectivists (Zukofsky, Williams Carlos Williams): to look with clear eyes, pay attention, as is in context
Oh my scouring eye/that scrubs clean the sky — “perhaps you tire of birds”/ Donika Kelly
7
I used to think I was goofing off unless I held only to the hard, clean image, the think you could put your hand on. But now I dare do this reflection.
Still struggling with endurance, still showing up. How much of this is mental, how much physical? The sixty-four thousand dollar question, as my dad used to say. I think it’s both, but probably more mental. Maybe the lexapro is already kicking in, but my struggles aren’t bothering me. After the run I thought, these struggles will make showing up at the marathon start line, then finishing 4-5 hours later, much more meaningful.
It rained this morning, so everything was wet, even the air. Everything was also green. Green green green. Any other colors? Nope, not much to break up the green. Green green green green green.
10 Things
lush green, dark, on the part of the path that goes below the road
puddles
a woman ahead of me, running, wearing only one compression sleeve on her right calf
a group of kids walking to the playground at minnehaha
a much bigger group of kids walking near 42nd — a long line, 3 across, took me 10 or 15 or more? seconds to pass them
gushing water near the ravine by the oak savanna
the bright yellow crosswalk sign — my bee — was muted in the gray sky
crossing the bridge high above the creek, all green, no view of the water below
lush green, dark, on the steep hill descending to the locks and dam no 1
a pile of e-bikes parked near a bench — black with blue accents
paean to place/ lorine niedecker
Before my run, I started writing out, by hand, Niedecker’s poem. It’s so long! My hand started cramping up. I had to write slowly to account for my visual errors, like not seeing the words I’ve already written and writing words almost over them or above them instead of below them. The slow work is good, giving me time with each word and line.
Ah, summer mornings! Beautiful. Cooler. If I would have slept better, I would have tried to go out even earlier. The first half of the run felt good, then I got hot and it got harder. Today I didn’t worry about what that meant for my training. Instead, I enjoyed the brief minutes of walking, taking in the trees at the falls — so green! so full!
10 Things
the falls, flowing, white, undulating — the water not falling straight, but almost falling over itself — was it hitting some limestone on the way down?
a bundle of something on the ground next to the dirt trail — a hammock?
2 women with tall hiking packs on their backs walking on the paved path
some animal — a turkey? — upset, calling out, a human voice saying something — hey?
a flash below the double bridge — a sliver of creek almost covered by green
2 roller skiers near locks and dam no 1
the dirt trail cutting through the small wood near ford bridge looking cool and inviting
happy kids on the minnehaha park playground — happy: green voices, where green = young, outside, tender
(walking back, about to cross 46th ave at 37th street) 2 older women chatting, then greeting me, oh! hello!
(walking back almost to my alley) heard on a radio or from a phone or a computer in neighbor’s backyard, the next one is Scandia — was this talk radio or a zoom meeting or what?
Lorine Niedecker and “Paean to Place”
to dwell with a place:
What is required, however, is sensual, embodied experience—close encounters of awe, wonder, fright, disgust, or even tedium—which remind us both of the real earth with which we dwell, and that we share our home with innumerable cohabitants.
in the leaves and on water My mother and I born in swale and swamp and sworn to water
My father thru marsh fog sculled down from high ground saw her face
at the organ bore the weight of lake water and the cold— he seined for carp to be sold that their daughter
might go high on land to learn
Wow! Reading this opening, I’m thinking about the Objectivists and the Imagists and Ezra Pound’s 3 rules for writing poetry:
Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective
To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation
As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome
What condensery and music in these lines! And what wonderfully effective descriptions of two people dwelling in and with a particular place, especially her mother, born in swale and swamp and bearing the weight of lake water and the cold.
definition of ecopoetics:
The word itself is an amalgam of two Greek words: oikos [household or family] and poïesis [making, creating, or producing], so that ecopoeticsquite literally means the creation of a dwelling place, or home-making. The term came into special prominence after the influential British literary critic Jonathan Bate published The Song of the Earth in 2000. There, Bate defined ecopoetics as a critical practice in which the central tasks are to ask “in what respects a poem may be a making … of the dwelling-place” and to “think about what it might mean to dwell upon the earth.”
LN’s opening lines and her descriptions of her parents, reminds me of Mary Oliver’s The Leaf and the Cloud and her brief mentions of her parents in the first section, “Flare.” LN and MO have different experiences but they rhyme, somehow, or echo?
My mother was the blue wisteria, my mother was the mossy stream out behind the house, my mother, alas, alas, did not always love her life, heavier than iron it was as she carried it in her arms, from room to room, oh, unforgettable!
Like LN, MO was also an amazing poet of place, but she doesn’t extend her ideas of place to her parents — a deliberate severing:
I mention them now, I will not mention them again.
It is not lack of love nor lack of sorrow. But the iron thing they carried, I will not carry.
So much to say about that iron, but I have run out of time right now. Perhaps more later. . .
I’m back. First, the not carrying the iron makes me think of my mom and her desire for displacement from her abusive parents. More than once she said to me that she wanted to break that cycle of abuse — and she did. And I am grateful. But there’s something to explore here for me and my relationship to place, this place 4 miles from where my mom was born and raised, that I can’t quite get at yet.
The iron also reminds me of the wonderful lines from the opening of LN’s “Lake Superior”:
In every part of every living thing is stuff that once was rock
In blood the minerals of the rock
*
Iron the common element of earth
Both MO and LN write about their fathers. First, MO:
My father was a demon of frustrated dreams, was a breaker of trusts, was a poor, thin boy with bad luck. He followed God, there being no one else he could talk to; he swaggered before God, there being no one else who would listen.
and LN:
He could not —like water bugs— stride surface tension He netted loneliness. . .
. . . Anchored here in the rise and sink of life— middle years’ nights he sat
beside his shoes rocking his chair Roped not “looped in the loop of her hair”
The “looped” quote comes from William Butler Yeats and his poem, Brown Penny and it’s about love. I like how she throws in this line from poets or about poets, like this:
Grew riding the river Books at home-pier Shelly would steer as he read
I noticed another line of the poem in quotes, “We live by the urgent wave/of the verse.” Looked it up and found an article about “Paean to Place” and thanks to my college-attending son, I have access to it! Time to read it: Lorine Niedecker’s “Paean to Place” and its Fusion Poetics
Warm and windy. Lots of sweat. Another day of telling myself to keep showing up. A hard run with lots of walking. But, one faster, freer mile, and some scattered thoughts that might lead to something! I’ll take it.
11 Things
under the lake street bridge, the side of the road was packed with parked cars — rowers?!
yes, rowers: heard the coxswain calling out instructions
briefly watched the rowers through a gap in the trestle: a head, an oar, a boat gliding by
ran into a branch while avoiding another runner, just a few inches from my eye, imagined a scenario in my head where the branch had cut my eye
in the tunnel of threes: a sea of swaying green
a woman stretching in the 35th street parking lot, blasting music out of her phone
wind pushing me from behind, making my ponytail swing to one side
a cartoonish figure spray-painted on the sidewalk: bright orange outline
loud rustling in the nearby brush then a hiker emerging from below
whoooosssshhh — the wind rushing through the trees
dragonflies? running near the trestle, an insect with a long, narrow body and wings almost flew into my mouth — no iridescent color, no color. Later, pausing at the top of the steps, I saw half a dozen of them. They opened and closed their wings in the sun
Yesterday, I decided that the theme of color or green wasn’t working for me this month. Instead, I’d like to return (again) to Lorine Niedecker. I’m particularly interested in her form of condensing and how I might apply it to my Haunts poems. Yes, the haunts poems are haunting me again. Before heading out for my run, I found a few lines from LN’s “Paean to Place,” that I especially like:
grew in green slide and slant of shore and shade
Child-time—wade thru weeds
Maples to swing from Pewee-glissando
sublime slime- song
A few times, I recited the first big: I grew in green/slide and slant/of shore and shade. As I thought about those lines I wondered what I grew up in. Green, for sure, but not by water. Then it came to me: I grew up on the edge of green in subdivisions that butted up against farms and woods, creeping, consuming those green spaces. I also grew up in carefully managed and cultivated green — bike paths through small stretches of trees offering the illusion of nature, privately owned by the subdivision. A very different green than the rural green of my dad’s farm in the UP or the urban green of my mom here by the Mississippi River. I thought about the managed green I run by and the difference between it, a public, national park, and the managed green of my suburban childhood, with its private green parks and private (No Trespassing!) acres of farm land, soon to be sold and converted into more “little boxes.”
Yes! The green I grew in was in-between col-de-sacs, and within small ravines and the slight stretches of trees or creeks developers left for aesthetic reasons. This green has deeply influenced my understanding of the wild and “green” spaces and is one reason why I’m fascinated by the management of nature.
Another beautiful morning. Felt drained by the sun, but still managed to push through a few moments when I wanted to stop. Walked a little. My mantra: keep showing up. It might not get easier but I’ll get better at handling it (it = heat and humidity and doubt and the desire to stop). Listened to my Color playlist for the second half, the birds for the first half. Sparrows and woodpeckers and cardinals. The falls and the creek were gushing. I read the other day that, after 2 years, Minnesota is no longer in a drought. Hooray for the farmers! And the flowers! And the trees!
Today, the green was cool, then scraggly. Sprawling, stretching, overstepping. Almost consuming the narrow dirt trail on the grassy boulevard between edmund and the river road.
something for future Sara to remember: On Tuesday, I went to open the lime green umbrella on our deck and noticed something dark in the corner. With my bad vision, I thought it was a leaf at first. Then I saw something that looked like wings — a bat. I dropped the umbrella cord and ran inside. A few minutes later, Scott cautiously opened the umbrella then freaked out when the bat flew out. He staggered back and rammed into the handle of the door — hard. Knocked the wind out of him. Since then, he’s been having intermittent back spasms, which he describes as “charley horses” in his back. I would be freaking out, but he’s handling it fairly well. The worst part: trying to sleep — too painful in the bed, and we don’t have a recliner. Maybe he cracked a rib, maybe it’s a strained muscled. Hopefully it heals soon.
What I remember is seeing the bat wings as it flew away, looking like a Scooby Doo cartoon. Since then, I’ve cautiously opened the umbrella — no bat! Every time I bird flies overhead, their shadow crossing my legs, I wonder — a bird or a bat?A thought: bats as fully fleshed shadows. What if the dark forms we think are shadows are actually bats? That’s both a creepy and delightful thought!
A quick run before taking FWA to buy his biggest purchase ever: an A clarinet. Not an easy run, but a sunny day with fresh air and clear trails. More cool, refreshing green coming from the floodplain forest. Everywhere, mundane, flat green. A green greeting: saying good morning to a runner with headphones on who didn’t me coming. A green sound: a bird’s clicking jaw somewhere below.
A green chant to keep me going:
Sycamore Cottonwood Slippery elm
Spoken in my head over and over. It helped me in the tougher moments when I wanted to stop and walk.
green
Even as green is my favorite color, I do not like when green takes over everything. Green = busy doing things, producing, connecting, crowds/crowded/crowding out.
4.2 miles longfellow garden and back 73 degrees / dew point: 75
Sticky again today, but not as bright. Still hard to run through the thick air. Struggled on the way back — walk run walk run. Trying to remember to keep showing up and believing that it will get easier, or I will get better at handling the difficult moments, or I will finally start getting up early. I tried to think about green.
my favorite green
Running south, just past the ford bridge, nearing the locks and dam no. 1, cool air was coming from the green to my right — a small wood. Refreshing! Often I associate late spring green with thick and stifling, but today it was fresh and generous, making it easier to breathe and to run.
After Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827), “George Washington at Princeton,” 1779
the color of life takes sun yellow and bluest blue sky and water for green ferns chartreuse buds beading above moss dappled shamrocks fragrant healing of sage, laurel, mint, basil, thyme, rosemary, myrtle amid the tall wonders of juniper pine, olive, pear even the meeting of sea and river— the sky, an intermingling of viridian and chetwode horizons, and cerulean clarity— offers its green seafoam, its seaweed pats, the crocodile at the edge of a freshwater marsh its teeth open gritted in green against the backdrop of hunter rainforest dripping in green
heaven is a field of persian green lit by translucent jade and celadon lamps a many-roomed chateau scented by aromatic tea leaves the aperitivo: gin, apple, and bitter lime the time: midnight green the guardian: a mantis in prayer
joy: harlequin, verdun, spring magic: kaitoke forest in its energetic whisper and pulse
green must exist inside brother james would he call it camouflage or nyanza or sap for washington it’s in the colors of flags the fields far off feldgrau or military or empire green or dollar bill or rifle green revolution with chains the result mix the green like a spell in making safe life hush arbor life nurturing abundant life free life bring the background to the fore ease ease ease life
So many greens! How many different greens can I see? Today, mostly, it was just green (or brown or gray).
Offering some advice on being judicious with your use of adjectives, Ted Kooser writes the following lines:
Morning Glories/ Ted Kooser
We share so much. When I write lattice, I count on you seeing the flimsy slats tacked into squares and painted white,
like a French door propped in a garden with a blue condensed from many skies pressed up against the panes. I count on
you knowing that remarkable blue, shaped into the fluted amplifying horns of Edison cylinder record players.
What? Come on, you know exactly what I’m talking about. I didn’t need to describe them like that, but I like to
however a little over my words, dabbling the end of my finger in the white throats of those __. You fill it in.
I could go on, but all I really needed to do was to give you the name in the title. I knew you’d put in the rest, maybe
the smell of a straw hat hot from the sun; that’s just a suggestion. You know exactly what else goes into a picture like this
to make it seem as if you saw it first, how a person can lean on the warm hoe handle of a poem, dreaming,
making a little more out of the world than was there just a moment before. I’m just the guy who gets it started.
Do I know that remarkable blue he’s writing about? Does he see the same blue that I do? Do we need to imagine the same blue to make his poem meaningful?
Reading “Making Life on a Palette” and “Morning Glories,” I’m thinking about the different work they ask of the reader, or, of this reader, me. “Palette” is filled with green words with histories that I don’t know; I had to do a lot of googling to dig into the poem. “Morning Glories” asks me to build an image from the name he offers, to draw upon the shared understanding/image of the flower that I already have.
Lately, I keep coming back to the question, how little data can we have and still “see” what something is? Not much, I think. Yet, to assume that we all see the same thing — the thing as it is — excludes a wide range of experiences and detail and ways of seeing. It leaves out a lot of different shades of green.
Speaking of green, I remembered that I had collected ideas about green in my plague notebook vol 3, June 2020:
13 years of running today. I had been planning to celebrate it with a long run, but even before I went outside I knew it wouldn’t happen. Mostly because it already felt too warm and too crowded (at 8:30 am). A rule I should remember to follow: no long runs on the weekends. Too many bikers and runners out on the trails. I also felt tired. During the first mile I chanted triple berries and tried to convince myself I could run 8 miles. By the time I reached Beckettwood, a mile in, I knew it wouldn’t happen. I ran down to the overlook and admired the river for a few minutes. Wow! A circle of white light in one spot, sparkles in another. I watched the light dance on the water through the trees and breathed.
The green and the sparkling water reminded me of a line in “Bein Green” by Kermit the Frog. Yesterday I started working on a color playlist and that was the first song I added:
It’s not easy bein’ green It seems you blend in With so many other ordinary things And people tend to pass you over ‘Cause you’re not standing out Like flashy sparkles in the water
This blending in and not being flashy makes me think of the line from Wallace Stevens that I posted yesterday:
It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
rhapsody: a portion of an epic poem adapted for recitation
When green is all there is to be It could make you wonder why But, why wonder? Why wonder? I’m green and it’ll do fine It’s beautiful, and I think it’s what I want to be
An epic poem about green as green as mundane, ordinary, everywhere? These days, green is especially ordinary for me. Often I can’t tell the difference between brown and green or gray and green or blue and green.
green
yesterday while waiting to pick up my lexapro at the pharmacy, I noticed an unusual green in the vitamin aisle. A whole section with white and green bottles. Branding. I asked Scott what color green he thought it was, but he didn’t have any answer. Somewhere between jungle green and olive green? I forgot to check what brand of vitamins was using this color. update 28 june 2024: a few days later, I was back at the pharmacy and I did check — Walgreen store brand
overheard on the winchell trail: (a woman describing her breakfast to her friends) and a shit ton of arugula
(from The Secret Lives of Colors) Scheele’s green: named after Swedish scientist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1773 when he discovered the compound, copper arsenite. Scheele’s green was used to print fabrics and wallpapers; to color artificial flowers, paper; and as an artist’s pigment. By 1863, it was all over England. Then people started dying and it was determined that copper arsensite was very poisonous — one 6 inch square sample of paper containing the compound could kill 2 men.
