Took a walk with Delia the dog through the neighborhood. The sky was very blue, with no clouds. Had the wind blown them all away?
A beautiful contrast: a silvery birch (or aspen?) with no leaves against the bright blue sky
Earlier today, I bent over too far and tweaked my back (see below). As I walked, I felt stiff and too cautious. Everything tight and anxious, like when I’m walking on a sidewalk covered with ice.
A favorite moment: turning a corner and walking under the bright green leaves of an enormous willow tree
before the walk
No tornadoes! No 85 mph wind! No golf ball sized hall or thunder or giant trees crashing down! No damaged roofs or freaked out dogs or power outages! Not even rain. Several tornadoes touched down in southern Minnesota, south of FWA, but by the time the line of storms reached the edge of the twin cities, it split in two, with one section angling north of us, and one angling south. Whew.
Whatever has been happening with my back/piriformis/glutes/? seems to have turned a corner. Not fully healed, but feeling much stronger. A new problem: a dull, restless ache in my left hamstring. It doesn’t hurt that much, just feels uncomfortable. If it’s a muscle, I think it’s my semitendinosus or maybe the satorius?
20 minutes later: Ever since I bent over and experienced a burst of sharp pain in my lower back 2 days ago, I’ve been trying to avoid bending over with my legs straight. Reaching down to put a baking sheet away, I forgot. Ouch! oh oh oh oh oh oh — that’s what I chanted after it happened. Damn, that’s some pain. Now, reverberations. Boo. Decided to call and make an appointment with a spine specialist — May 23rd. I hope everything is better before then!
Doing some more research about running and herniated discs (I think that’s what I might have), I read that low-impact running might help — something about the movement producing spinal fluid? So, with some trepidation, I decided to go out for a short run —
run: 2.4 miles 2 trails 54 degrees
I was very nervous to take the first few steps, but after a block, I started to feel good. My back and legs didn’t hurt at all and it was wonderful to be out moving beside the gorge. No pain at all during the run! (I walked some, too)
10 Things
a turkey on the edge of the path near the Horace Cleveland Overlook
a roller skier and a biker
several of the benches along the trail were occupied
the soft, sprawling shadows of tree branches
a runner moving fast, working hard with slapping feet and jagged breaths
kids laughing and yelling at the playground across the road
swarming gnats near the 42nd entrance to the winchell trail
someone in a big white hat, below me, on a path closer to the river
a bird — but not a cardinal — calling out the same note in quick succession, maybe 15 or so times
soft purple flowers on the edge of the trail — not Siberian squill
The Bog Wife
Down to the wire. I had to finish this wonderful book by the end of the day before it was automatically returned. I did it! What a wonderful ending, and so fitting for my thinking about entanglement. A beautiful story about a history of compacts with the land.
compact: an agreement or covenant, to knit or draw together
50 minutes neighborhood / edmund / river road trail 64 degrees
Took a walk in the late morning with Scott and Delia. A few hours ago it rained, so everything is wet and green and gray. Puddles, mud, dripping leaves. Scott talked about irritating AI generated images on facebook and how he hardly ever notices the trees. I talked about orange and my back and pointed out interesting looking oaks. When I pointed out a gnarled, leafless one, Scott said, now that tree is a hot mess! I also mentioned D.H. Lawrence’s poem, “The Enkindled Spring,” and the idea of green spreading like a fire all over the forest. We saw tulips and explosions of green and several trees growing closely beside each other — expressions of intimacy (Scott described them as intimate). Intimacy is a key topic in the conversation between Forrest Gander and Anne Pringle that I mention below.
We heard a woodpecker laughing in the gorge and some robins encouraging us to cheer up! cheer up! in the neighborhood. On the river road trail, Scott suggested that it smelled very porky. A fire perhaps? I sang, or tried to sing, the Woody Woodpecker Show and Friendship from Anything Goes, which irritated Scott. Don’t get those dumb songs in my head!
My back didn’t hurt, but it felt tight. I need to relax.
before the walk/bike
Orange! The poem of the day at poets.org is a fabulous poem about orange!
If I have a gender, let it be a history learned from orange Freak Sun Sucker Queer Orange Boy
Rumor of 6th grade sunrise, dressed in you I was a child of unspeakable obsession. Archaic language, Giolureade
Until Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots. Her lips unlocked your sarcenet line, my fingers knew taste before the orange The earliest known use of orange as a colour name in English was in 1502, in a description of an item of Margaret Tudor’s clothing. By the 17th Century, the fruit and its colour were familiar enough for ‘orange-coloured’ become ‘orange’ as an adjective. Sarcenet line: thin, soft lining often in bright colors and used in elaborate dresses
Dared on Norwood apartments, Dutch colonies hunted man straight into your family crests of orange the color, Dutch Orange
Scraped from dust to crown our bruises, warriors we stared directly into the sun, Tainos dyed in orange
As if we always knew we were history. Amber hardened into gold tricking mortals, mortals tricking gods asking Was it the fruit or the color?
First, Tibbets’ grove, millions of fruits grafted instead of born, from two parent orange trees
The key to a philosopher’s stone: Colormen flirting with volcanos to retrieve your arsenic orpiment
Forever in danger of sliding into another color, I ran after you, tracing rivers and creeks and streams of citrus
The Washington Navel Orange, a second fruit protruding: not a twin, nor translation, but a new name every season.
Wow, this poem! I love how the poet weaves in interesting facts about orange. I started looking some of them up, but I don’t have time to finish right now.
The risk of severe weather in the late afternoon and early evening — tornadoes, strong thunderstorms, high winds. Hopefully nothing will happen.
Yesterday afternoon while leaning down to take off my compression sock, something suddenly hurt — OUCH! Was it a pop or a slide or a snap? I’m not sure. All I know is that after it happened, my leg/back hurt and it was difficult to find a position that wasn’t uncomfortable. I think the pain started in/near my piriformis. Within an hour, it was slightly better. I was worried that I would have trouble sleeping, but it was fine. Now today, everything is back to how it has been for the past 2 months — manageable and occasional pain and stiffness. I checked this log and the first time I mentioned back pain was on 25 feb. About 2 months. If it is my piriformis, which I think it is, it looks like (according to several sources online) that I can run as long as it isn’t painful. Thought about running today, but I think I should stick with my original plan to not run again until May.
motion/movement
Reading my 28 april post from 2021, I came across this:
Mary Oliver’s ethical poetics of noticing, being astonished, and telling others about it involves a lot of standing back and still, staring, stopping, taking notes, sitting at a desk and writing. Yes, becoming connected or immersed in what you are noticing does happen, but the emphasis is on observing/seeing/staring at the world at some sort of distance and when you have stopped moving or doing anything. You stop to notice, or notice then stop, observe or behold (this makes me want to revisit Ross Gay and the idea of beholding), then sit and write. What if you didn’t stop? What if you observed while moving (while running?) Took notes while moving? Wrote while moving? I wonder how far I can push at the limits of writing about the gorge while running at the gorge–not running and noticing then writing, but running while noticing while writing.
A sudden thought: for May as I read more of CA Conrad, I want to create rituals that involve writing while moving/moving while writing. I’d also like to play around with the word/idea/feeling of still — yet, motionless, still life paintings. And I want to explore different ways motion/movement matter: movement in poetry — associations, rhythms, movement in diagnosing injuries, motion = energy, restlessness, the color of motion — not green (like Carl Phillips suggests in a poem) but silver.
Speaking of silver, 2 lines came up in the 28 april 2021 entry: ED’s too silver for a seam and MO’s gathering up the loose silver.
Getting back to MO’s practice/ethics of noticing:
But nothing you ever understand will be sweeter, or more binding, than this deep affinity between your eyes and the world.
So I’m thinking about this in relation to my quote about the difference between looking and listening at the beginning of this post, and in terms of my own desire to feel with senses other than sight, or with sight not as Sight (as an objective, unfiltered way of being in and with the world). This idea of sight not as Sight, comes out of my thinking about how I see through my damaged eyes. I can see, but not with sharp focus or precision or mastery–I don’t look and See, as in, capture/own what I see with my eyes. My seeing is softer and involves more fluid waves and forms being felt. Returning to MO’s poem, I could definitely be delighted by the terns as I watched them moving—sweeping and plunging and thickening–because you detect motion in your peripheral vision and my peripheral vision is great. But I probably couldn’t see how many terns there are or how their thin beaks snapped. And I wouldn’t be able to see their hard eyes happy as little nails. But, seriously, can anyone see bird eyes in this way, other than MO?
28 april 2021
This discussion of sensing beyond vision, reminds me of something I heard yesterday while listening to an interview with the poet Forrest Gander and the mycologist Anne Pringle:
At 18:30, Pringle says:
I think a lot about humans being visual creatures. We study with our eyes almost as much as — almost more in a way — than with any other sense. But fungi, for example mushrooms, don’t see each other. I know that will be a shock and a revelation to your audience. So I’m constantly thinking about interpreting Visual Evidence and what it means to use your eyes to study something that doesn’t see.
What does it mean to use your eyes to study something that doesn’t see?
In my 28 april 2023 entry, I read about A.R. Ammons and his book garbage. And now I want to read it again and think about it in relation to motion. Here’s a recap I wrote using Ammons’ own words:
Energy and motion. The spindle of energy, motion as spirit, all forms translated into energy: value systems, physical systems, artistic systems, from the heavy (stone) to the light (wind) and back again. Loops, returns, the constant recycling of stone to wind to stone, waste into something new then returning to waste, using words to find a moment of the eternal, losing it again, the words becoming waste to break down and rebuild. Always motion, flow, decomposing, returning. Always behind it all, the relief of indifferent stars: twinkle, twinkle: just a wonder. And old people dying, bodies falling apart, individual existence ending. All of it happening, whether we believe in or not. All of us motion: a whirlwind becoming gross body, all navel and nipple and knee, then vaporized, refined, distilled into a place not meaning yet or never to mean.
Began watching a documentary about an upcoming 250 mile ultra running race. The doc = The Chase, the race = Cocodona in Arizona. Wow, that’s a lot of miles, and a lot of hallucinations!
The biking didn’t bother my legs or back.
I’m not watching The Residence while I bike anymore because Scott and I are watching it together. It’s helpful to watch it with Scott because he picks up on things I can’t see and/or the person doing the audio description doesn’t mention, like that Jane Curtain is playing the alcoholic mother-in-law (I couldn’t recognize her) and Bronson Pinchot is the pastry chef.
It’s beautiful out there today, but I think it’s too crowded on the trails for me to bike outside with my failing vision. Plus, I didn’t want to miss the live coverage of Ironman Texas, so I biked in the basement while I watched it. It felt good to move my legs, which were restless from less activity. No pain while I biked, only a slightly stiff left knee 20 minutes in.
Before I biked, some pain in my lower glutes/upper hamstrings — a dull ache? Not sharp, but constant, a little uncomfortable.
injury spells
Yesterday I found the scrabble tiles for P I R I F O R M I S S Y N D R O M Eand put them on my table. This morning I worked on them some more, trying to find a way to use all the tiles to make a phrase. The idea is that once I do, I will have a spell to break open or through my latest injury. Here are some of attempts:
Do I personify? [MMIRRS]
Miss Fiery Moon Drip [R]
Or is my form inspired? — all tiles used!
O sir, my form inspired! — all tiles used!
I inform my spired rods — all tiles used!
Miss Merry Porfirio [DN] — porfirio = purple-clad person, surname in Spanish/Portuguese
Is my sniper mood fir? [R]
Sir, spin my fired room — all tiles used!
Rim mood: spiny fires [R]
I spy: red moon, fir rims — all tiles used!
I spy: fir moon, red rims OR I spy: fir’s moon, red rim
(dry form) I sin, I’m prose! — all tiles used!
I might like this last one the best.
yes, that is an upside down W. We’re missing an M.
On Thursday I FINALLY picked up CA Conrad’s Ecodeviance, which I requested on march 4 and was planning to use that month. In the book, Conrad is interested in making it impossible to not be present in place by performing rituals that access the “extreme present.” A quick, perhaps half-baked, thought about Conrad’s soma(tic) rituals: from the ones I’ve read so far, a key element seems to be making other people uncomfortable.
Example: (Conrad riding an elevator repeatedly) “At the top and bottom of each ride I would show photographs of myself to strangers and ask, “EXCUSE ME, have you seen this person?”
I laughed out loud when I read this, but I also wondered about other ways of accessing the extreme present were possible that didn’t involve confronting strangers.
Conrad performs these rituals for days/weeks and take notes. From the notes, they write poems. A line from one reminded me of a delightful image from Mary Oliver that I read yesterday:
Six/ CA Conrad
a golden needle stitches my head to my knee leaving me aching along the river
from The Book of Time/ Mary Oliver
those silver sheets, with the occasional golden staple,
A great afternoon walk with Delia the dog. Sometimes there was sun, but mostly it was cloudy and overcast. Some wind. Bright green everywhere, even on the felled trees in the floodplain forest. Heard lots of singing birds, people talking, a sharp clanging noise. When it was sunny, I admired the soft shadows of tree limbs and Delia’s stubby legs and long body.
10 Things
creeeaakkk — the tall trees in the floodplain forest were swaying in the wind and some branches were rubbing together to make a soft (and sinister) creaking noise
the top step of the stone steps had a big puddle of water — watch out!
stopping to wait for a trail runner to pass before heading back up the steps. They looked too warm and had a sweatshirt wrapped around their waist
the soft lapping of the water against a log on the edge of the shore
someone in a bright orange jacket following behind, talking to someone on a phone
the sky above the forest was more open than usual, the ground more cluttered with tree trunks
the gentle curve of a tree trunk, almost like an arched back
a loud splash in the water, then a flash of movement — a fish jumping out of the water?
a retaining wall in the oak savanna, across the ravine, was painted bright colors — blue, yellow, red
someone on a scooter, someone else on a bike, both masked and on the walking trail
before the walk
Woke up stiff and sore, which I’ve been doing for the past month. Most of me is okay, only my lower glutes and hips and hamstrings hurt, especially when I leaned down to throw something away in the organics. Ouch! After a few minutes, it should get better. Is it worse this morning because of yesterday’s biking? I don’t think so.
Other things I woke up to:
a thought: I have to wheel the recycling bin down before the truck comes!
a rejection: “After careful consideration, we decided this submission is not the right fit for us”
green green green grass from all the rain yesterday and early this morning
Rejections are not fun. Even though I know how difficult it is to get something published — less than 5% acceptance rate + your poem needs to fit with the others already selected — it still stings. But only for a few minutes. Now I’m thinking about grass and spring and noisy birds outside my window — the torpedoed call of a cardinal. I wish I would have counted their repeated chirps — 10 or 12 or more in a row!
A video came up on YouTube about piriformis syndrome, which I may or may not have, but probably don’t because it’s very rare — 6% chance: Piriformis Syndrome — STOP Stretching. I checked it out, and I’m willing to try the 2 exercises it suggests for contracting/strengthening my piriformis muscle instead of stretching/lengthening it. Will it work? I’m not sure, but I don’t think it will hurt to do them as I wait for my far off doctor appointment.
I’ve come a long way in my reactions to injury over the years. I’m not freaking out or in despair, even though I haven’t been able to run for 10 days. The pain isn’t making me anxious, like it did last year with my calf. I’m sure my more relaxed attitude is partly due to more experience with injury, less fear over tight glutes than knots in calves, and the lexapro. Whatever it is, I’m grateful to not be in constant panic mode.
So, is it piriformis syndrome? Who knows. What else could it be? Time to get out the scrabble tiles and make some anagrams!
P I R I F O R M I S S Y N D R O M Eis tough one —
In moss drip form (not used: I R E Y)
Permission from Id (not used: Y R)
Osprey mind forms (not used: R I I)
Spry of mind, I rise (M O R)
after the walk
I’m continuing to read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry. I think I might need to buy it. The part I’m currently reading is about ecological economics.
We’ve created a system such that we self-identify as consumers first before understanding ourselves as ecosystem citizens. In ecological economics, the focus is on creating an economy that provides for a just and sustaianable future in which both human life and nonhuman life can flourish.
The Serviceberry/ RWK
competition is not the primary force regulating evolutionary success
competition only makes sense when we consider the unit of evolution to be the individual. When the focus shifts to the level of a group. cooperation is a better modle not only for surviving but for thriving.
since competition reduces the carrying capacity for all concerned, natural selection favors those who can avoid competition. Oftentimes this avoidance is achieved by shifting one’s needs away from whatever is in short supply, as though evolution were suggestion “If there’s not enough of what you want, then want something else.”
A little cooler today, but not cold. Overcast, with rain coming. I could have brought my bike up and gone for a ride outside, but I wanted to watch more of The Residence, and my hip was hurting a little so I thought it would be hard to carry my bike up the stairs. I had a good ride. Hardly any pain — only the regular kind for less than a minute in my left knee. I finished episode 2 and started episode 3. Realized halfway through that the titles of the episodes (I had hardly noticed them before) mean something. Episode 3 Knives Out. Does it go deeper than the fact that this episode is about the pastry chef and the bloody knife? I need to watch the rest of the episode. And I need to convince Scott to watch this show. He will like it.
I pushed a little harder on the bike and got my heart rate up in the 130s for at least some time. I worked hard enough to sweat. Hooray! This is my first time sweating from exercise in over a week — last Tuesday. I’ve missed it. If my body feels okay tonight, I’ll have to do more biking tomorrow. Maybe it would help me recover to get a little more exercise? Future Sara, let me know.
Before I biked, I archived some things I read this morning:
1
Entanglements, connections, understandings of self in relation to others — it keeps coming up. Today, I found it in the poem of the day on Poetry Foundation, Speakers/ Dimitri Reyes
About this Poem
This poem finds me in my early twenties, being mentored by an owner of a thrift store in Newark, New Jersey, who became a father figure to my wife and me. Pete was the first Puerto Rican elder I knew who showed me that you can be connected to Ricanness while shuffling setlists between Metallica, Ozomatli, John Coltrane, and Joe Bataan; who showed me that it was cool to enjoy art and philosophize for the sake of dreaming. He is no longer here with us, but I am still philosophizing and dreaming. Currently, I am intrigued by how character sketches teach us how to live, to survive, to love. If life and time are indeed our teachers, the interactions we have among one another are the ever-changing curriculum.
I have been playing around with the idea of creating a curriculum for my experiences with poetry. I guess that is what my How to Be project is. It might be fun to work on it a little more, to fit in the form of a curriculum with syllabi, learning outcomes, etc.
2
I’m in the process of memorizing Emily Dickinson’s wonderful poem, “The Mushroom is the Elf of the Plants.” I’m looking at it on Poetry Foundation. At the bottom of the page, I read this:
Dickinson technically misuses the apostrophe in the poem “A Route of Evanescence, (1489)” and makes similar errors in other poems. Some of these can be explained as unintentional errors and some scholars have made this case. Other scholars, however, contend that Dickinson often intentionally played with typos and other errors as a sort of linguistic mischief-making in her poems and in her considerable correspondence.
The error ED makes is using it’s when she should have used its. This is a huge pet peeve of Scott’s. Just as I was reading this passage, he came downstairs, so I explained the note and paraphrased the key part for him: she’s fucking with you! Ha Ha. I love Emily Dickinson.
3
I was disappointed to check and find that I hadn’t written about mushrooms and entanglement on april 24, 2022. But then I was grateful to find that I had posted a beautiful Mary Oliver poem on april 24, 2021. Thanks past Sara and Mary Oliver! That ending!
Listen, everyone has a chance. Is it spring, is it morning? Are there trees near you, and does your own soul need comforting? Quick, then—open the door and fly on your heavy feet; the song may already be drifting away.
And here’s a moment of connection and community:
first, I stood still and thought of nothing. Then I began to listen. Then I was filled with gladness— and that’s when it happened, when I seemed to float, to be myself, a wing or a tree— and I began to understand what the bird was saying, and the sands in the glass stopped for a pure white moment while gravity sprinkled upward like rain, rising, and in fact became difficult to tell just what it was that was singing— not a single thrush, but himself, and all his brothers, and also the trees around them, as well as the gliding, long-tailed clouds in the perfectly blue sky—all, all of them were singing. And, of course, so it seemed, so was I.
4
Yesterday I started reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry. Today I encountered her offering of a definition of economics outside of the scarcity model and within an understanding of gifts and abundance:
Economics is “the study of scarcity, the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives.” (the American Economic Association)
With scarcity as the main principle, the mindset that follows is based on commodification of goods and services.
Economics is “how we organize ourselves to sustain life and enhance its quality. It’s a way of considering how we provide for ourselves” (from the U.S. Society for ecological Economics).
The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.
Even better than yesterday! What a wonderful late morning. Delia and I walked to the Winchell trail, then up to the mesa in the oak savanna. More winchell until the folwell bench, then across the road through the 1960s neighborhood and into the community garden. So many birds! Lots of green and white flowers too, blooming all over the hillside in the oak savanna. I found out what these white blossoms were called a few years ago, but I can’t remember — maybe it’s one of these?
10 Things
a steady dripping down in the ravine
2 dark holes — caves in the rock
more of the chainlink fence is ripped away from the posts
yesterday I noticed ugly red graffiti on the 38th street steps. Was it still there today? I forgot to check, but surely I would have noticed, right?
less mud, more dirt
sometimes sunny, sometimes overcast / sometimes blue, sometimes light brown
in a wood near the community garden: 2 (or more?) birds making a racket up in a tree, sounding like the drum at the beginning of Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” — nice!
the river: patches of smooth water, patches of rougher water — not from wind, but from sandbars?
calm, still, the water was barely moving — only after staring at it for a moment could I see a slight shimmer out of the corner of my eye
a woman in bright pink, sitting near the 38th street steps, silent except for the repeated clearing of her throat
before the run
Reading through my entries from april of 2022, I’m returning to thoughts of entanglement and mushrooms and precarity and ruins. Here is today’s inspiration from 23 april 2022:
a different sort of We, not a me or an I, but a we, an us
a different way of looking/sensing/becoming aware: not seeing straight on, but feeling, looking across and to the side, down, beneath and below
stop looking up to the heavens, start feeling/sensing what’s below
a hope that is not predicated on evidence, when evidence = seeing and Knowing and fully understanding (seeing things as parts or discrete categories or individual things)
entangled is not separate or pure but messy and enmeshed
this is why we are all here — from my haibun and what I heard coming out of the little old lady’s phone
this why we all here
why = curiosity, wonder
The why is not an explanation — this is why/this is THE reason — but an invitation to imagine differently, expansively, wildly.
we all = ecosystems, organisms, networks, asemblages
Organisms are ecosystems. I find myself surrounded by patchiness, that is, a mosaic of open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, with each further opening into a mosaic of temporal rhythms and spatial arcs (Tsing, 4) .
here = a place, located in history, a specific place, not transferable or easily translatable, can’t be scaled up or turned into assets
I picked up Mushrooms at the End of the World, and found this in the preface:
The time has come for new ways of telling stories beyond . . . Man and Nature . . , such stories might be simultaneously true and fabulous. How else can we account for the fact that anything is alive in the mess we have made?
The Mushrooms at the End of the World/ Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (viii)
fabulous = resembling or suggesting a fable : of an incredible, astonishing, or exaggerated nature
invented and true
[about this book] what follows a riot of short chapters. I wanted them to be like the flashes of mushrooms that come up after a rain: an over-the-top bounty; a temptation to explore; an always too many.
explosion / too much, too many / after the rain eruptions of excess
This explosion bit reminded me of Arthur Sze in an interview with David Naiman:
I began to think I love this idea that the mycelium is below the surface. It’s like the subconscious, then when the mushroom fruits pops up above ground, maybe that’s like this spontaneous outpouring of a poem or whatever.
during the run
I thought about something else I read in the entry with this Sze passage. It’s a fragment of a poem I wrote in response to Sze and a few Mary Oliver lines:
Maybe like mushrooms, we rise or not rise, flare brief burst from below then return to swim in the dirt…
I was thinking about not wanting to swim in the dirt, but be out in the air, exposed, vulnerable to erosion and rust/ing.
after the run
In The Mushrooms at the End of the World, Tsing discusses how matsutake mushrooms develop their fungi networks in locations of ruin — edges of volcanos, forest destroyed by logging and lumber companies. So, there’s a relationship between the flare/the fruit (the mushroom) and decay/ruin/erosion. Now I’m thinking about my version of what the moment of ruin can produce, where the moment of ruin = ruined eyes. What poetry might burst forth as I reckon with my dying/dead cone cells?
Mushrooms came up in the fiction book I’m reading, too: The Bog Wife.
But when he returned to the bog, he found a row of trespassers sprouting where the swale met the hinged door to the Cranberry River. These trespassers retained their heads, and Percy knew as soon as he saw them that his suspicions were correct; they were mushrooms. His heart sank. He sometimes saw mushrooms in the sparse forest on the west end of the property, modest white-headed clumps strewn across the soil or fringed gray dishes sticking out like frills from the trunks of trees. But he had never seen any of their ilk here, where the soil was not mushroom soil because it was bog soil, a dense wet batter that supported only the shallow-rooted and perpetually thirsty.
They would never tolerate any of the mushrooms, Percy thought. The mushrooms had all been trespassers. He tore out the orange mushrooms and gathered up the torn stems for burning, but he knew it wouldn’t make a difference. Mushrooms could not be dug up. They could not be evicted.
The Bog Wife/ Kay Chronister
I’m reading Emily Dickinson’s “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants” and refreshing my memorizing of Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms.” Nobody sees us, stops us — SP envisions mushrooms as trespassers.
And here are a few more passages from Mushrooms at the End of the World, that I want to archive:
a network of (mostly) invisible influences
Below the forest floor, fungal bodies extend themselves in nets and skein, binding roots and mineral soils, long before producing mushrooms. All books emerge from similarly hidden collaborations.
The Mushrooms at the End of the World/ ALT
a gift and a guide
The uncontrolled lives of mushrooms are a gift — and a guide — when the uncontrolled world we thought we had fails.
promise and ruin, promise and ruin
This is a story we need to know. Industrial transformation turned out to be a bubble of promise followed by lost livelihoods and damaged landscapes. And yet: such documents are not enough. If we end the story with decay, we abandon all hope—or turn our attention to other sites of promise and ruin, promise and ruin.
bike: 20 minutes basement
It was definitely nice enough to bike outside today, but I wanted to test out how riding a bike would feel on my back/hips/glutes for taking my bike off the stand and carrying upstairs. Plus I wanted to watch more of The Residence. Great show!
Almost 2 hours later, my back feels okay. We’ll see how it is when I want to go to sleep. If it’s okay, I might try biking outside tomorrow!
45 minutes winchell trail south / folwell bench 58 degrees
Wow wow wow! Spring. Little explosions of bright green everywhere — out of sidewalk cracks, under fences, on slender branches. I think explosion is the right word — not pops or flashes, well maybe flares. Almost overnight, green! Not yet annoying or oppressive; I still have my view of the gorge and the other side. I could see fuzzy details, branches, rippling water, houses, but what I felt was the horizons of gray (river), brown (shore/trees), and blue (sky). 3 distinct lines dividing my view into 3 colors.
Delia and I walked to the river then down the uneven wooden steps to the trail. We walked even slower than usual to let two walkers move past. One of them was talking about a friend (or a partner?): we’re both from the same town, and we went to the same school! I smiled and greeted a friendly runner, called out Hi Dave! to Dave. Delia jumped up and walked all of the walls on the trail. We ended at the folwell/the WWDD bench (see below) and sat for a moment, taking in the view.
10 Things
the air was hazed with humidity, making everything look even fuzzier, more distant
minneapolis park workers have cleared out old trees in the savanna, turned them into mulch that they put on the trail
the small rise up to the paved trail is more visible now — all dirt and dead leaves and stubs of tree trunks
the cave below the limestone ledge in the ravine seems to be expanding — how long is this process? how long before the ledge collapses?
mud on the part of winchell on the hill between the savanna and the 38th street steps
the repeated honk from a lone goose, below us. It always seemed the same distance from us. Was it following us, or taking a walk with us?
a loud, rhythmic clanging above us that I couldn’t quite place. A thought: was it someone banging on a fire hydrant to open it up? Near the end of my walk, I saw one open and gushing water
sitting at the folwell bench, overheard — an older walker to a younger one: we haven’t even gone 20 minutes yet
someone pushing a walker through the grass on the boulevard between edmund and the river road, stopping to check out each tree
the husk of some big trees leaning at awkward angles in the oak savanna
A wonderful walk! I felt relaxed and calm and grateful to be outside and moving (without pain) this morning.
before the run
Reading through my “on this day” entries from past april 22nd entries, I was inspired by Mary Oliver and a little old lady walking and listening to a radio and a bench dedicated to a woman who fell through the ice one winter and a fragment overheard on the little old lady’s radio — this is why we are all here — especially the this, which is echoed in Marie Howe’s poem, The Gate. Instead of trying to explain these connections–entanglements?– I’ll gather them here:
1 — the little old lady
For the third time, encountered the little old lady walking with her hiking poles listening to a radio show or an audio book or something. Today I heard, “which reminds us of why we are all here.” Decided that I should create a poem or some piece of writing around this phrase. This phrase could be the title or the ending line of the whole poem or a sentence or a refrain (5 aug 2019).
…the little old lady slowly shuffling by, swinging her hiking poles, a voice TED-talking out of her phone’s speaker reminding you that this is why we are all here. Do not bother the bench resting on the rim of the gorge to ask what this is (22 april 2022 — a draft of my poem).
note: reviewing these entries, I’m noticing how I changed what I heard from “reminds us why” to “this”. I’m almost prefer the original — the reminder, that doesn’t have to be the answer, just a pointing to it — a finger pointing! a definition of poetry!
2 — The Gate
from The Gate/ Marie Howe
This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me. And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What? And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.
3 — This is why we are all here
which reminds us why we are all here…
We are here. Me and joints and muscles and bones and ligaments and lungs. Us. me and blood and cells and electrolytes and sweat and saliva. we. me and hands and feet, a heart, two diseased eyes, a knee that displaces. we. me worn out running shoes, threadbare worries. we. me and those oak trees, that wrought iron fence, this rutted, dirt path, that short, steep hill. we. me river. that we are here with the old woman who slowly shuffles in her straw hat with her hiking poles and a voice that calls out from her radio speakers, “which reminds us why we are all here.” here. above the river and the gorge and the floodplain forest, below the bike path and the road, the cars and the boulevard. here. in this heat and humidity and haze. here. on a monday morning. here.
We are all here.
(from 22 april 2022)
4 — Mary Oliver
Reading MO, I’ve noticed, and have been trying to articulate, a tension in her poems between the I, the World, Nature, God, Eternity, Work. This tension seems to take many forms and MO imagines it to be endlessly intriguing and part of the process of living. Never to be resolved but to be puzzled over. One element of this tension involves the plight of the human—born to doubt and argue and question what it all means, to be both brought closer to and further away from the world by language and the power and beauty of words, which are never as powerful or beautiful as the world itself. To want a name and a useful place, to claim a life, but also to belong to the world, to be “less yourself than part of everything.”
(from 22 april 2021)
From The Book of Time in The Leaf and the Cloud
5. What is my name, o what is my name that I may offer it back to the beautiful world?
from “Gravel” in The Leaf and the Cloud
6. … It is our nature not only to see that the world is beautiful
but to stand in the dark, under the stars, or at noon, in the rainfall of light,
frenzied, wringing our hands,
half-mad, saying over and over:
what does it mean, that the world is beautiful— what does it mean?
5 — the words/reminder
from “Work” in The Leaf and the Cloud
3. Would it be better to sit in silence? To think everything, to feel everything, to say nothing?
This is the way of the orange gourd. This is the habit of the rock in the river, over which the water pours all night and all day. But the nature of man is not the nature of silence. Words are the thunders of the mind. Words are the refinement of the flesh. Words are the responses to the thousand curvaceous moments— we just manage it— sweet and electric, words flow from the brain and out the gate of the mouth.
We make books of them, out of hesitations and grammar. We are slow, and choosy. This is the world.
Words can help us to remember a beloved but long dead dog:
And now she’s nothing except for mornings when I take a handful of words and throw them into the air so that she dashes up again out of the darkness,
5 — the bench
I have run by this bench hundreds of times, stopped and sat once or twice, even wrote about it, but I’ve never noticed this small plaque on it. How did I see it today? I love these little surprises, just waiting to be found! I had no idea what this plaque meant — WWDD? I looked it up and found a facebook page for the Rachel Dow Memorial. Wow. She was loved by so many. I read a little about her life — a passionate, social justice minded, free-spirit — and her death — she fell through the ice at the river and died of hypothermia. Maybe I’ll write a poem about her and the others I’ve found through their plaques. All of them share with me a deep love for this river. And maybe one day, I’ll have a plaque there too (from 8 sept 2022).
So far the house still is standing. So far the hairline cracks wandering the plaster still debate, in Socratic unhurry, what constitutes a good life. An almost readable language. Like the radio heard while traveling in a foreign country— You know that something important has happened, but not what.
What to do with all of this? I’m not quite sure yet.
during the run
Occasionally, I thought about these ideas as I walked, and when I sat on the folwell bench. What did I think? I hardly remember. Once, I thought about how words were not the most important part, that being out there by the gorge, feeling everything was.
*43rd ave, north / 32nd street, east, past Minnehaha Academy / edmund, south / 34th street, west, past 7 oaks / home
Before taking a walk with Delia and Scott, I “watched” the Boston Marathon, where watching = tracking runners on the app, listening to the Citius Mag watching party, and watching the last 5 minutes of the women’s race on an unofficial YouTube feed. Wow, they were fast!
It looked warm and sunny, but it felt colder than 50. It was the wind, I think. For the first half we talked about kids and wanting to be empty-nesters and how to have hard conversations about the future and the series finale of The Americans — we finished it last night. In the second half, Scott pointed out a strange mash-up of a garage and I pointed out the Siberian Squill. I wondered if we were seeing it more now because we’ve named it, but we agreed that it has become more abundant in the past few years. There was a particularly impressive patch of it in the yard of the house on the south corner of edmund and 34th. Taking in the entire patch, it looked blue. Focusing on a flower, it looked purple.
10 Things
siberian squill, everywhere, including at the edge of our yard
a loud dog in a fenced-in backyard
an empty parking lot at minnehaha, no school for Easter
a metal sign at Cooper School, bent and leaning to the side
a security guard car parked in front of the gate to the field at minnehaha academy
the boulevard on the edge of the academy that used to have a small line of aspensmwith aspen eyes, now only has one aspen
a woman stapling a poster to a pole
mud on a boulevard — Delia, stay out of the mud! — a deep brown
the wind chimes chiming at the house with an Easter Island head on the front stoop
looking over at the river road and seeing/feeling the open space between the west and east banks
Back/hip/leg update: today it is a little uncomfortable to sit in the chair at my desk. Is that because I went down and up the old stone steps to the river?
Spring! Hello black capped chickadees! Hello drumming woodpeckers! Hello bikers and runners and walkers with dogs! Hello green shoots and damp earth and soft air! Water gently lapping the shore, echoing voices, ringing bells! Hips (hopefully) healing and backs growing stronger! A wonderful morning for a walk through the neighborhood and to the river.
I wasn’t willing to stop and stare, so I could be mistaken, but it looked like a woman was taking her dog on an easter egg hunt — with the dog searching for the eggs while the woman encouraged them. If that wasn’t what I saw, I will still believe it was. Is that a thing, people arranging egg hunts for their dogs? I hope so!
I’m continuing to work on crown of color sonnets. I’m on the final one, no. 7, blue. I want to link this sonnet back up with the first one, so I’m ending with green. I’m thinking of returning to the green poem I drew from a lot, Oread by H.D.. Something about the sky not being pure blue but a mix of blue and green, or sometimes just green — especially in the spring and summer when green takes over the gorge. I’m leaving these last few sentences in, but as I worked on it more, I decided to go in a different direction. I’m taking lines from a beautiful essay about a blue wall in Leadvilleand writing about my efforts to make blue meaningful even though I can’t always see it.
Walked with Scott and Delia the dog. My hips feel a little sore, but otherwise I’m okay. Not in pain, not stressed about taking a break from running. I know I need this break. Scott and I noticed more Siberian Squill, taking over. I admired the big turtle in someone’s front yard, Scott critiqued some out of place columns holding up a trellis-like porch at the front of a house. He asked, how have I never noticed these columns before? My response: Really? These columns are the defining characteristic of this block for me. Scott wondered if a robin, standing still in a yard, was dead. Nope, we saw it move its head. I pointed out a house that was very big. The wind was coming at us from almost every direction — not quite stiff, but irritating. Even with the chilled air, it felt like spring was here to stay. Hooray!
