Category: Running Log

may 19/RUN

4.75 miles
veterans’ home loop
50 degrees

Wore my orange sweatshirt today. Partly cloudy, cooler, some wind. My legs felt like logs until I warmed up, about a mile into the run. Listened to some blue jays screeching, kids laughing, old guys talking. Forgot to look at the river or listen for the falls. Avoided a BIG school group above the falls — 4 or 5 full-sized school buses in the parking lot. Didn’t stop to walk up the small hill at the veterans’ home. Kept running until I reached 4 miles then walked while I put in my headphones. I listened to Lizzo for the last minutes of the run — Hi motherfuckers, did you miss me? I’ve been home since 2020. I’ve been twerkin’ and making smoothies. It’s called healing and I feel better. I love Lizzo.

Mary Ruefle and the madness of wasting time

continuing my discussion of her lecture, “Madness, Rack, and Honey.”

before the run

A few of the poets/writers Ruefle cites talk about nothing — the Great Nothing (Tess Gallagher), doing nothing (Gertrude Stein). I’m thinking about Auden and Ross Gay and the idea of making nothing happen, which I recently wrote about on march 29, 2023.

during the run

Every so often during the run, I thought about nothing and being useless — at least if usefulness is measured by capitalism and its values. At one point I thought about my running and writing practice — how much time I’ve put into it, or how much time I’ve wasted on it. Here I’m thinking about wasting time as something a poet (or someone who writes poetry) needs, desires.

after the run

I’m revising a few of my mood ring poems in order to submit all of them for a chapbook contest, so I don’t ave a lot of time to spend on reading Ruefle. For now, here’s a little bit on madness:

madness

The madness of poetry is that it creates sweetness, so that the flies might come and eat till it is gone. “To endlessly make an end of things,” says Paul Celan in a poem, and that’s it, inexplicably and exactly. ”

*

If the flies keep feasting, the honey will be gone. Then the flies will go away. And there will be nothing sweet. The poet has to either begin again–poor Creature!–or write a poem that goes on forever, and what a torment that would be! Even the long poem ends.

140

may 17/RUN

6 miles
annie young meadow and back
55 degrees

The perfect temperature for a spring run. The light looked strange. Filtered through trees, clouds, haze? it looked almost pink or light orangish-pink. I liked it. Everything, everywhere thick with green.

note, 19 may, 2023: talked with Scott and RJP about the strange light, which has continued: forest fires

I greeted the Welcoming Oaks and good morninged Mr. Morning! and another regular — did I ever name him? Maybe it was Mr. Holiday?

I chanted in triple berries to keep a steady rhythm — strawberry blueberry raspberry — and tried to stop thinking or noticing anything, to just be on the path, moving and breathing. What did I notice anyway?

10 Things I Noticed When I Wasn’t Noticing

  1. 2 stones stacked on the ancient boulder
  2. down in the flats, the river was moving fast. I tried to race it
  3. white foam on the river, under the I-94 bridge I thought (or hoped?) it was a rowing shell
  4. a fat tire bike sped down the franklin hill, abruptly turned at annie young meadow and almost ran into a parked car, then called out to the guy in the car — his friend — Hey!
  5. the bucket of a big crane curled under the franklin bridge with a worker in it, studying the underside of the bridge
  6. a guy walking on edmund in a bright yellow vest, no other vest wearers or official vehicles in sight
  7. a runner coming down the other franklin hill — the one near the dog park — then entering the river road trail 25 yards? ahead of me
  8. smell: pot, down in the flats
  9. a woman stopped at the edge of the trail, looking through a camera lens at a tree on the other side of the road. I thought about calling out, what’s in the tree?, but didn’t
  10. the weeds on the edge of the trail, poking out of cracks in the asphalt looked monstrous — now I can’t remember what I thought they were at first, just not weeds
  11. bonus: a turkey! chilling in the grassy boulevard between edmund and the river road

I don’t really remember what I heard as I ran without headphones toward franklin. After stopping 3/4 of the way up the hill to walk, I put in music. I thought I put in Lizzo’s Special but I must have forgot to tap something because when I hit the play button it was Dear Evan Hansen again. Oh well.

Mary Ruefle, “Madness, Rack, and Honey”

Last night during Scott’s community jazz band rehearsal, after our regular community band rehearsal, when I sit for an hour and try to read or write or think about my poetry, I started Ruefle’s titular lecture (is that the correct way to use titular?). Now, after my run, I’m back at it again. This lecture is a chewy bagel and I’m determined to not spend too much time on it.

The title is strange — what does she mean by madness, rack, and honey? — and I was pleased to discover that she devotes the lecture to explaining the title. She begins with a Persian poem:

I shall not finish my poem.
What I have written is so sweet
The flies are beginning to torment me.

honey:

It is so simple and clear: the “figurative” sweetness of the author’s verse has become honey, causing “literal” flies to swarm on the page or in around the autor’s ead. This is truly the Word made flesh, the fictive made real, water into wine. That is the honey of poetry: the miracle of its transformation, which is that of creation: once there was a blank page–scary!–now there is something in its place that is attracting flies. Anyone who has not experienced the joy, pleasure, transport, and who has not experienced the joy, pleasure, transport, and sweetness of writing poems has not written poems.

pages 130-131

rack:

Enter the flies who feast. For the poem clearly reminds us that honey has complications–those flies are beginning to torment the poet. Torment, pain, torture, is what I mean by the rack.

page 134

It is what poetry does to the world, what poets do with words, and what words will do to a poet. And that’s the rack of it. And if you have never experienced the rack while working on a poem then you have have never worked on a poem. Have you never put language in an extenuating circumstance with dangerous limits until an acute physical sensation results?

page 135

And, if I have time, I’ll return for madness later today.

One more thing to post before I go eat lunch. Instead of posting the poem, which I also like, I’m only posting the poet’s explanation of it.

About This Poem (Evening)

“Sometimes you hear a word as if for the first time, a word you’ve been saying your whole life. I don’t know what in the brain allows the word, in that moment, to reveal itself, but it always makes me feel very smart and very foolish at once. This poem was written during the period when I had just gotten into gardening and was gaining a new appreciation for everything—food, nature, and time. I wonder what else is waiting to reveal itself to me in such a way, and whether I’ll be distracted enough to receive it.”
—Jeremy Radin

Now I’m thinking of the opening lines from Marie Howe’s “The Meadow”: As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them…is this idea of walking into words similar to words (and new meanings) revealing themselves to us? As I write this question, I’m reminded of a Mary Ruefle piece in My Private Property: “In the Forest”

When I wander in the forest I am drawn towards language, I see meaning is quaintly hidden, shooting up in dark wet woods, by roots of trees, old walls, among dead leaves…

page 74

And these lines helped me to remember a thought I had as I ran this morning on the part of the pedestrian path that dips below the bike path, the two separated by a slight rise and some bushes. When I first started to run this trail, almost 10 years ago, I was a little afraid of taking this lower trail. It was hidden from the road and other people and I wondered if someone might be lurking, waiting for me. Today I thought, how could I have been afraid of this short part of the path, only hidden from view for a few seconds? It does seem ridiculous.

may 15/RUN

3.45 miles
locks and dam #1 hill
57 degrees

Wow! A beautiful spring morning. Sunny, low wind, birds. Favorite part of the run was hearing, then seeing, the geese under the ford bridge. Honking as they flew low then landing in the river, their feet skimming the water — what a beautiful sound that is — not sure how to describe the sound of a bird coming in for a landing.

Listened to the birds, no specific bird, just BIRDS!, as I ran south, then put in “Dear Evan Hansen” at the top of the hill and listened to that as I ran north.

Mostly my body felt strong and sore, especially the big toe on my right foot.

Mary Ruefle, “On Fear”

before the run

The second form of dread is the anticipatory dread of pain, either physical, emotional, spiritual, or psychological, and that, folks, covers nine-tenths of the world’s surface.

Ruefle lists Julian of Norwich’s 4 forms of dread:
dread form 1 = emotion fear — your very first response to smell of smoke
dread form 3 = doubt or despair
dread form 4 = hold dread with which we face that we which we love the most

Dread. I like it better than the word fear because fear, like the unconscious emotion which is one of its forms, has only the word ear inside of it, telling an animal to listen, while dread has the word read inside of it, telling us to read carefully and find the dead, who are are also there.

For some reason, this word play reminded me of a delightful poem I read by Kelli Agodon Russell a few months ago:

Believing Anagrams/ Kelli Agodon Russell

—after being asked why I write so many poems about death and poetry

there’s real fun in funeral,
and in the pearly gates—the pages relate.

You know, i fall prey to poetry,

have hated death.

all my life,
literature has been my ritual tree—

Shakespeare with his hearse speak, Pablo Neruda, my adorable pun.

So when i write about death and poetry, it’s donated therapy

where i converse with
Emily Dickinson, my inky, misled icon.

and when my dream songs are demon’s rags,
i dust my manuscript in a manic spurt

hoping the reader will reread because i want the world

to pray for poets as we are only a story of paper. 

This poem is from her collection, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room. It seems fitting to read and post this poem on Emily Dickinsons death date — May 15, 1886. I love her anagram for Emily Dickinson: inky, misled icon

during the run

I thought about reciting Dickinson poems as I started running, but forgot about it before I even reached the river. Near the end of the run, while I listened to “Dear Evan Hansen,” I thought about fear and dread and wondered where worry fit in.

after the run

I’m slowly reading more of Ruefle’s “On Fear”:

She talks about the difference between emotions (instinct) and feelings (cognitive), and emergencies of feeling. She lists what other poets have said about fear, then lists her fears. And she returns to Julian of Norwich:

“Fear and dread are brothers,” says Julian of Norwich. As desire is wanting and fear is not-wanting.

After this mention of Norwich, Ruefle devotes several pages to Keats and his idea of negative capabilities. I’ll leave a discussion of that for another day, when I have time.

She ends with a reference to Emily Dickinson, which, like Russell’s poem seems fitting to include:

What has life taught me? I am much less afraid than I ever was in my youth–of everything. That is a fact. At the same time, I feel more afraid than ever. And the two, I can assure you, are not opposed but inextricably linked. I am more or less the same age Emily Dickinson was when she died. Here is what she thought: “Had we the first intimation of the Definition of Life, the calmest of us would be Lunatics!” The calm lunatic–now that is something to aspire to.

The passage from ED comes from a letter and also includes these wonderful lines:

There is a Dove in the Street and I own beautiful Mud – so I know Summer is coming. I was always attached to Mud, because of what it typifies – also, perhaps, a Child’s tie to primeval Pies.

Letter from Emily Dickinson to Mrs. JG Holland (about March 1877)

Two more things I found from an early (1862) letter from Dickinson to Higginson. The first fits with Ruefle’s discussion of fear and poets:

I had a terror-since September-I could tell to none-and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground-because I am afraid-

The second I’m including because I find it delightful:

You ask of my Companions Hills- Sir-and the Sundown-and a Dog-large as myself, that my Father bought me-They are better than Beings-because they know-but do not tell-and the noise in the Pool, at Noon – excels my Piano. 

may 14/RUN

4.35 miles
marshall loop to cleveland
52 degrees
humidity: 80%

Wet air, wet ground. Everything bright green or muddy brown. Overcast. Ran up the marshall hill and past Cretin to Cleveland. As I approached St. Thomas, I wondered if I’d hear the bells. Yes! Dum dum dum dum at 11:15. Encountered a few other runners, some walkers, bikers, a dog. Scanned the river for rowers, saw a paddleboat! A Mother’s Day brunch? Heard a black-capped chickadee calling out fee bee fee bee, then some blue jays screeching ha ha ha ha. Running right past a bush, a red bird suddenly flew out if it, a whirr of red in my face. Later, heading down the Summit hill, heard the shimmering (or tinkling or fluttering or ?) of water falling over the limestone ledge at Shadow Falls. Noticed near the end of my run that the forest below the tunnel of trees is hidden by a veil of green. I thought about how nice it was that the gnats and mosquitoes hadn’t arrived yet — or the catkin fluff from the cottonwood trees.

A very relaxed run. A nice way to spend a Mother’s Day morning. I don’t feel too sad today, but I don’t like Mother’s Day — especially since I lost my second mother last fall. My current take on the day: it irritates me. Anyway, here’s a beautiful mother poem that I was happy to find this morning:

I Inherit the Whims of my Mother As I Prepare to Trash This Draft/ Donna Vorreyer

I discover a piece of stationery, bordered with red-gold

leaves. In the center, her cramped hand reads simply

The snow is so so white today.

How odd to read these words in June, air hung with 

humidity, sweat jeweling my lip. Just that one line,

stuck in an old calendar underneath a stack of books.

I upend each one, fanning the pages to search for more

and out they flutter like doves, each one scribbled like

urgent messages from some simpler beyond–

That red bird is back, crashing into the window.

Railroad tracks are the saddest things.

The wood is pretty where it is rotting.

If I could revise our lives, make her survive the cancer

that burned fast and bright through her insides,

I would tell her how wrong she was to say she couldn’t 

write, how much I am like her with my mundane

notes, my daydreaming observations, post-its 

congregating in each bag, notebooks on each surface,

and I would sit with her and notice every moment,

rebuke her for thinking she was not good enough, 

a mistake I still make, one that I am making right now 

as I question and regret each line I add to this poem. 

I want to talk to her. I want to tell her that cardinal 

is back, flying straight at the window again and again.

These lines:

If I could revise our lives, make her survive the cancer/that burned fast and bright through her insides,

After stopping my run at the ancient boulder and crossing the river road, I pulled out my phone and recited a poem that I memorized a few years ago and am memorizing again as part of my 100 poems memorized goal: The Meadow/ Marie Howe. I listened to my recording while looking at the poem just now. Not too bad, only a few missed words, one mixed up line.

may 12/RUN

2.4 miles
2 trails
72 degrees
humidity: 70%

Another hot, sticky morning. Listened to “Dear Evan Hansen” running south, so I don’t remember much about the first half of the run, except waving at the older man sitting on the seat on his walker at the edge of the trail. I’ve seen him before — in fact, I knew I had written about him before, so I searched my log. Here’s what I found from sept 12, 2022:

For a few months, I’ve noticed an older white man with white hair and a white beard (at least, I think he has a beard), using a walker when I run south on the river road. Sometimes he’s using the walker to help him walk pretty swiftly along the trail, and sometimes he’s using it as a chair. Today, we was sitting. We greeted each other as I ran by. He’s a friendly guy. It makes me happy to see him out there, continuing to walk with a walker, enjoying the beautiful trail. I think I’ll call him Mr. Walker.

from log entry on 12 sept 2022

Mr. Walker is too boring of a name. I think I’ll call him Mr. Walker Sitter instead. My happiness about his still walking had something to do with my hope that Scott’s parents would use their walkers and get out in the world. I wrote these lines less than 3 weeks before Scott’s mom died. I don’t think we knew she would be dead by the end of the month — that understanding came a week later.

When I reached the 44th street parking lot, I ran down the hill to the south entrance to the Winchell Trail where I encountered 2 walkers.

me, approaching 2 walkers: Excuse me. Right behind you.
a kind woman looks back, and moves out of the way: Oh, sorry, didn’t see you — you’re so quiet!
me, slowly passing: No worries. Thanks.

I always marvel at other people’s ability to speak in gentle, kind tones in situations like these, to have a default of being relaxed and open to others even when they’re surprised. I’m sure it comes naturally to some, and it might have for me when I was younger, but now I see it as an achievement and a goal.

Heard: the water falling out of the sewer pipe and down the ravine at 42nd, kids playing at the school playground, some loud talkers up above, some sort of banging across the river, on a pipe, at a construction site?

Avoided: thick, slick mud on the part of Winchell right before the oak savanna that always gets muddy in the spring. It happens so often that people have created a sort detour above it that curves through some tree. As I walked it new leaves brushed my arm

Forgot: to check the river for rowers. Scott spotted some the other day.

Mary Ruefle “On Fear” and “In the Forest”

Before I went out running, I skimmed through “In the Forest” and started “On Fear.” I planned to try and think about my fears as I ran on the more isolated Winchell Trail, but after encountering the kind woman walker at the entrance to the trail, I couldn’t imagine being afraid. Now writing this, I got distracted — I needed to eat, then start the dishes — and I’ve run out of time. Maybe later today I’ll try to read more of “On Fear” and add in some things from “In the Forest.”

may 11/RUN

5.85 miles
ford loop
62 degrees
humidity: 77%

Too hot, too humid, tired. I tried running earlier today (9 am instead of 10:30), but it was still too late. Even so it was a good run that I’m glad I did. Ran the ford loop and spent the first 3.5 miles convincing myself to keep going, to not stop until I reached the overlook near the ford bridge. (I did it!) Then I put in “Dear Evan Hansen” and started running again, or should I say struggle running. Stopped a few times to walk, feeling wiped out, but kept running again. Whew.

At the start of my run, I heard the robin’s cheer up! cheer up! and a woodpecker’s knock. Later, I heard a pileated woodpecker’s laugh, not sounding exactly like Woody the woodpecker, but close enough.

Smelled wet cinnamon — dripping blossoms? — and thought about chewed-up Big Red.

Felt too hot, my face burning, probably bright red. The drip drip drip of sweat from my ponytail on my neck.

Greeted the Welcoming Oaks, noticed the floodplain forest was hidden in green.

Mary Ruefle, White, Brown

before the run

I’d like to do one color at a time, but I couldn’t decide between her white or brown color poems so I’m including both of them. I think I’ll let running Sara decide. Will she choose to focus on white things or brown things, both or neither?

from My Private Property/ Mary Ruefle

White sadness is the sadness of teeth, bones, fingernails,
and stars, yes, but it is also the sadness of cereal, shower
caps, and literary foam, it is the sadness of Aunt Jenny’s
white hair covering her body like a sheet, down to her toes,
as she lay on the sickbed, terrifying the children who were
brought in one by one to say goodbye. It is the sadness of
radio waves traveling through space forever, it is the voice
of John Lennon being interviewed, his voice growing
weaker and weaker as the waves pass eternally through a
succession of galaxies, not quite there, but still . . .

*

Brown sadness is the simple sadness. It is the sadness of
huge, upright stones. That is all. It is simple. Huge, up-
right stones surround the other sadness, and protect
them. A circle of huge, upright stones–who would have
thought it?

Ruefle’s line about the stars and galaxies in her white sadness poem, makes me think of the new word I learned this morning from the title of a poem: sidereal

sidereal: (adj) of or with respect to the distant stars (i.e. the constellations or fixed stars, not the sun or planets).

pronounced: cy deer e ul

during the run

Running Sara tried to think about both white and brown and it worked, mostly, but green kept declaring, I’m here! Notice me! Green Green Green! So much green everywhere and all of a sudden. There I was, on the trail, running and noticing white sweatshirts tied around waists or brown leaves littering the ground, when green would hijack my thoughts. brown trunk GREEN leaves pale white sky GREEN air

5 Brown Moments and 5 White Ones

  1. river: brown with light brown foam
  2. same river from the other side: deep blue with white foam
  3. brown tree trunks
  4. a brown sound: the knocking of a woodpecker on a dead tree
  5. a flash of the white, almost silver, river through the trees
  6. a limestone wall, the part of it illuminated by sunlight was white
  7. white sands beach, viewed from the other side of the river
  8. the brown trail leading down to Shadow Falls
  9. a white sound: the vigorous tinkling of the falls falling
  10. the brown boulder with 4 small stones stacked on its top

I like listening to “Dear Evan Hansen” while I run. Together they — the emotional lyrics/music combined with how I soften as I exert myself — make me feel things: sad, tender, hopeful, a deep aching joy. I thought of how Ruefle’s color poems can be read as sadness or happiness, which then made me think of Ross Gay’s understanding of joy as both grief and delight.

Another thought I had about brown while running: Thinking about the brown sadness of Ruefle’s huge upright stones, I suddenly thought: the gorge. The gorge, with its huge limestone, sandstone walls is both brown sadness and brown happiness.

after the run

White happiness is the happiness of crisp sheets hang-
ing on the line just to the side of the farmhouse, of soft
shimmering salt pouring out of a cheap salt shaker, of a
button-down oxford reluctantly worn.

Here’s the poem about the white stars that I mentioned earlier in the post:

Sidereal/ Debra Albery

Consider this an elegy with silo and fever.
Call it barn and gravel and gone. Grasses’ obeisance

in the wake of a pick-up, sun searing the leaves
green to gold in the season’s time-elapse.

Where does it go, the Sunday angle of sunlight
once only yours, wide and open as a window?

Here’s what I remember: the flaking mural
on the brick wall of neighborhood grocery, saying

Food for the Revolution for twenty-five years.
Stacked landscapes in my rearview, blank as a calendar

until a bend in the road brought the Blue Ridge;
the pocked metronome of tennis balls outside

while I harnessed what I had lost and missed
in minor-key pentameter. So what, my mentor

talked back to his tercets in draft after draft:
so what so what so what. “This essay is accurate

but never ignited,” the Derridean scrawled
in red ink when I was writing about Bishop writing,

I can scarcely wait for the day of my imprisonment.
Her keen eye ever cast on the homely unheimlich.

Call this a road story about the slow burn of foliage,
about containment, what conspires against arrival.

Astonish us, Diaghilev said to Cocteau,
but all I ever wanted was to consider

its roots in the auguries of our shifting stars.

About This Poem

“‘Sidereal’ is, as the poem declares itself, a road story, a cross-country retrospective traversing decades. It is, as it also states, an elegy—in part honoring a past teacher, Larry Levis. The ‘so-what-so-what’ refrain is his, handwritten above a line on an early draft of his poem ‘Caravaggio: Swirl & Vortex.’ That self-interrogation set in motion a poem of motion that longs for dwelling—as did the swirl and vortex of etymology, sidereal and consider both deriving from sidereus, meaning ‘star,’ itself of uncertain origin.”
—Debra Allbery

words I looked up, which I mostly knew, but wanted to be precise:

obeisance: deference
auguries: omens
unheimlich: uncanny

I like the line, barn and gravel and gone. Reading it again, and thinking about this poem about restlessness and belonging, I’m reminded of a time in my life when I tried to (still) belong to a farm that was barn and gravel and gone — a family home place, sold.

may 10/YARDWORK

1 hour
mowing, raking, pulling weeds
70 degrees

After almost 2 months of preparing for, then waiting, then watching it happen, the house is finally painted. Now I can mow and garden and bring out the umbrella for the deck. Hooray! Since I knew I should have a day off from running — having run 4 days in a row, I decided to do yardwork today.

Yardwork. And now the yardwork is over (it is never over), today’s
Stint anyway. Odd jobs, that stretch ahead, wide and mindless
–“Hymn to Life”/ James Schuyler

Today it feels like summer but the backyard looks like early spring. Tulips in full bloom, peonies popping up with their green shoots that look like asparagus — at least to me. Big bare patches from where robins had dropped crabapple seeds in late winter. Dandelions, garlic mustard, creeping charlie, the half-mulched leaves left over from late fall.

I listened to a Maintenance Phase episode — Oprah v. the beef industry — while I mowed and raked and swept up scattered mulch.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. everywhere, in the back and front yards, the ground seemed soft — too soft. is it the ants?
  2. right next to the front step, a giant mound — an ant hill
  3. the soft metallic whirr of the reel mower blades
  4. the distinctive thunk of the blade getting jammed from a small twig
  5. strange — bare vines by the yucca bushes — is this ground cover dead/dying, or have the leaves not appeared yet. is it the ants?
  6. the sloped front lawn, soft and bare, a few patches of weeds, some suspicious looking soft dirt. is it the ants?
  7. weeds infiltrating the red and yellow tulips on the south side of the house
  8. a few bright green leaves growing on the hydrangea twigs
  9. some small maple leaves poking out from the spirea
  10. small asparagus-like stalks emerging from the earth — time to put the cages around the peonies before they get too big to tame!

Mary Ruefle and Washing Dishes

In the opening lines of “Towards a Carefree World,” Ruefle writes:

Many of the most astonishing writers in the world had ser-
vants. It is doubtful they ever really washed the dishes.
Which is too bad; I think they would have enjoyed wash-
ing the dishes, especially after dinner. Repetitive motion
can take your mind off things. By things I mean the cares
of this world.

With these lines, I decided to think about washing dishes.

1

Mother, Washing Dishes/ Susan Meyers

She rarely made us do it—
we’d clear the table instead—so my sister and I teased
that some day we’d train our children right
and not end up like her, after every meal stuck
with red knuckles, a bleached rag to wipe and wring.
The one chore she spared us: gummy plates
in water greasy and swirling with sloughed peas,
globs of egg and gravy.

Or did she guard her place
at the window? Not wanting to give up the gloss
of the magnolia, the school traffic humming.
Sunset, finches at the feeder. First sightings
of the mail truck at the curb, just after noon,
delivering a note, a card, the least bit of news.

2

What the Living Do/ Marie Howe

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

3

Mostly I like washing dishes. It’s a chance to move after a meal, or as a break from writing. I listen to a podcast — Maintenance Phase, Ali on the Run, Vs., Between the Covers — or an audio book while I soak then scrub then rinse. Sometimes I look out the window at the trees swaying in the wind or the sky glowing orange or a squirrel taunting my dog. Occasionally, but not often, I shatter a dish on the granite countertop.

Usually I can see well enough to properly clean the dirty dishes. Sometimes I rely on feel — if it’s smooth, it’s clean; if it’s rough, it’s dirty. My biggest struggle is with the metal cheese grater. I hold it under the light, tilt it in different directions, trying to see if I missed any streaks of cheese. Almost impossible for me to tell.

We have a dishwasher but it hasn’t been working properly for 2 or 3 years now so I hand wash the dishes. Sometimes I wish our dishwasher worked, sometimes I don’t care. Often I wonder if washing dishes will be one more thing lost to me once all of my central vision is gone.

I don’t remember washing too many dishes with my mom, but I do remember drying them for Scott’s mom and dad after dinner. They always had to do the dishes right after eating. It took me years (15? 20?) to finally feel comfortable enough to help them. They were very particular about how you should wash dishes — don’t waste water, make sure they are absolutely dry before putting any dishes away, use a drying cloth that doesn’t leave lint but also doesn’t dry anything. When they both stopped caring about the dishes and how they were done, I knew we were entering the final stage.

Our kitchen faucet had been dying for three or four years. First, it dripped when you turned it off. Sometimes, if I jiggled it just right, it would almost stop. For at least 3 years this happened. Then, the retractable hose started getting stuck. You could pull it out, but not put it back in. Then you couldn’t move it from one sink to the other. Finally, the whole faucet — base and all — wouldn’t stop moving and leaking water into the cabinet below. When this happened Scott abruptly declared it was time, right this minute, to go out a buy a new faucet. So we did. And when we returned home Scott removed the old faucent, which was hard to get out, and put in the new one, which slid in without a problem. Why, I wondered, had we waited so long to get a new faucet?

may 9/RUN

5 miles
bottom of franklin turn around
66 degrees
humidity: 70%

Just as I started my run, one bird then another flew right across my path. Were they sparrows? Heard the squawk call of the downy woodpecker several times. Smelled a smell like Big Red cinnamon gum. I know it’s a flowering bush or tree, but every year I forget what it is. Tried looking it up; I still don’t know. I was tired and sore so the run was hard. I should probably take a break tomorrow. I remember looking at the river but not what it looked like. Heard a dog collar clanging below then something — a dog, I assume — running through the bushes. Noticed a few cars and bikes with headlights on.

No sun today. Everything a rich green, thick and quiet.

Since last week, painters have been painting the outside of our house. A dark gray (gibraltar) with white trim and a bright green (parakeet) door. Very nice. Not only does it look good but by fixing the rotting boards on the garage, scraping away the peeling paint just below the kitchen, and sanding and painting the deck railing, they have eliminated several of the worries that have simmered on low on the back burner in my brain for years. Of course they’ll be replaced with new worries — bothersome ant hills, a yard with more weeds than grass — but I always like to acknowledge the passing of worries so they don’t continue to haunt me.

Listened to cars, my breathing, birds as I ran north, “Dear Evan Hansen” on headphones as I ran north.

Mary Ruefle, “I Remember, I Remember”

Today’s Ruefle selection is the lecture, “I Remember, I Remember.” Each one of Mary Ruefle’s series of recollections about poetry and writing and childhood begins with the phrase, I remember.

I remember, I remember refers to the a poem by Thomas Hood in the first poetry book she ever owned.

Ruefle remembers sending a poem to the publishing company, Little, Brown, and Company as a child and learning from them that Laura Ingalls Wilder was dead and that one of her favorite characters from the book series had died in a threshing accident.

Ruefle remembers reciting “Ode to a Nightingale” to cows in a field when she was 18 and weeping because she loved the poem so much.

Then she remembers many other things — 16 more pages of them — about writers she encountered and poetry.

before the run

I only read the first page of this lecture before going out for my run.

during the run

I remember, about a mile and a half in, I had a thought about remembering and forgetting. I remembered it and then, when I reached the bottom of the hill, I stopped to record what I remembered into my phone:

Thinking about “I Remember” and remembering, origins and when things began. I thought about how there is a sort of origin point to all of this (my writing poetry) and it’s my eye doctor diagnosing me with a rare eye disease then saying, you should write about it which prompted me to want to work on my writing so I could better explain what I was experiencing. But, I had already been writing and already had those desires, so it was really more of a slight shift, a stutter step or a quick stumble off the path, just briefly, which changed the trajectory, slightly, incrementally. Difficult to pinpoint what all changes your path.

after the run

Ruefle’s recollection of reciting a poem in a field to some cows reminds me of how I liked to memorize poems, especially by Shakespeare, and recite them to 3 of my friends as we trudged through Iowa cornfields de-tasseling corn the summer before heading off to college. At that point, I didn’t think I liked poetry. I guess I did.

I remember when I turned 40 and was trying to remember what happened to me as a child, I felt like I had forgotten everything. I wondered how other people could remember so much, me so little.

I remember reading an article about Marilou Henner and how her brain doesn’t forget anything that happens to her, she remembers every detail of every day. I remember thinking that sounded miserable.

I remember writing the phrase, “remembering to forget” and “forgetting to remember” in two different log entries and thinking those were interesting ideas.

I remember the moment of struggle, trying to remember a word from a poem that I had just memorized, then the moment of awareness, realizing what the word was — the moment when forgetting became remembering. Then thinking that the moment of remembering was invigorating and strange and magical — how suddenly something lost was found.

I remember trying to find someone else’s poem that expressed similar feelings about the joy of remembering, but all I could find were poems of sorrow about forgetting.

may 8/RUN

4.5 miles
veterans’ home loop
61 degrees
humidity: 78%

Went out for my run too late (10:30 am) and paid for it. Very hot. I could feel it in my legs, thick and heavy. I was okay for the first half, but needed to walk a few times in the second half. Too much green air. I could feel it in my lungs, heavy and thick.

I could still see the river through the light green leaves, but I don’t remember what it looked like. Was it blue? Probably. Did I see my shadow? I don’t remember. I didn’t hear or see any rowers.

Lots of people at the falls. I ran up the steps by the bridge right above where the creek water falls, two at a time. Looking down from the high bridge that delivers you to the Veterans’ home, everything looked green. I thought I saw one of those stone bridges below but it looked strange — had it fallen into the rushing water? Not sure. On the grounds of the Veterans’ home, I smelled the freshly mowed grass, noticed the dark streaks of wet grass smeared on the sidewalk. Stopped to admire the water rushing over the concrete at the locks and dam #1. Put in my Sara 2020 playlist.

Listened to birds and shuffling feet as I ran south, Lizzo and Billie Eilish and Nur-D on the way back north.

Mary Ruefle and Green

before the run

As spring happens, the sudden shock of new life everywhere, I’m thinking about green, which makes it a good time to read Mary Ruefle’s prose poem about green sadness:

from My Private Property/ Mary Ruefle

Green sadness is sadness dressed for graduation, it is the
sadness of June, of shiny toasters as they come out of their
boxes, the table laid before a party, the smell of new straw-
berries and dripping roasts about to be devoured; 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 weighs no more than an unused handkerchief, it
is the funereal silence of bones beneath the green carpet
of evenly cut grass upon which the bride and groom walk
in joy.

funereal: having the mournful, somber character appropriate to a funeral.

Reading about Ruefle’s “color spectrum of sadness,” somebody else pointed out her final words about her color poems in the last sentence on the last page of her book:

Author’s note: In each of the color pieces, if you substitute the word happiness for the word sadness, nothing changes.

Another thing to note about her note: she describes them as pieces not poems. I wonder if she talks explicitly about how/why/what she names them in an interview somewhere? Answer? I found a 2015 interview with her where (I think) she’s discussing My Private Property and she suggests that it contains fiction, essays, and prose poems, which I’m thinking refers to the color pieces. So I’ll stick with calling them prose poems.

I’m also thinking about green because of the Robin Wall Kimmerer story I encountered in the amazing journal, Emergence. I started listening to her reading of it — she has such a wonderful voice! — but it’s 35 minutes, so it will take some time.

Ancient Green / Robin Wall Kimmerer

One wonderful line I’ve already heard:

Mosses, I think, are like time made visible. They create a kind of botanical forgetting. Shoot by tiny shoot, the past is obscured in green. That’s why we have stories, so we can remember.

Yes, the idea of green obscuring/concealing things. I often think about that as I’m running beside the gorge, unable to see the river or the other side because of so much green.

On today’s run, I hope to think about green.

during the run

My green goal was off to a good start when I spotted a bunny in the alley just before starting to run and thought, the bunny from the line about green sadness, little girls who, in imitation of their grandmothers, decide who shall have their bunny when they die.

10 Green Moments and Feelings

  1. At the start of the run, just above the oak savanna, floating through light green air, both in color and weight
  2. Midway through the run, in Wabun, above Locks and Dam #1, plodding through bright green air, thick and hot
  3. green grass in the boulevard — growing fast
  4. green light shining through the trees — glowing soft
  5. green sinuses, closing up my nose
  6. green voices — kids at the playground
  7. green-stained sidewalks — the whispers of grassy sadness
  8. green sky instead of clean blue air
  9. green weeds pushing through pavers, joining the orange tulips beside Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” at the park
  10. green curiosity — how much of this green am I actually seeing and how much am I conjuring from when I had more cone cells?

As I ran, I also thought about a mood ring poem that I’m revising: incurable. I’m trying to contrast my disdain for searching for a cure for my vision loss which I’m linking to images of pickling, preserving, curing, with my relief in knowing, with some certainty, that there is no cure — this I’m envisioning as being outside in fresh, open spaces with wider views. As I write this description, I think I need to tighten up my fresh images. Anyway, as I ran, I thought that if these images correspond to colors, then curing would be green and fresh would be blue — or should it be another shade (or is it tint) of green?

after the run

a few passages from Ancient Green / Robin Wall Kimmerer:

If success is measured by widespread distribution, they occupy every continent, from the tropics to Antarctica, and live in nearly every habitat, from desert to rainforest. If success is measured by expanse, consider the vast peatlands of the north, blanketed by sphagnum moss. If success is colonization of new places, mosses are the first to occupy new places after an eruption or a forest fire or a nuclear meltdown. If creativity and adaptation are the metrics, mosses have diversified to fill every niche, generating more than eleven thousand uniquely adapted species, an outpouring of biodiversity. If success lies in beauty—well—just look.

Mosses make minimal demands on their surroundings. All they need is a little light, a sheer film of water, and a thin decoction of minerals, delivered by rainwater or dissolution of rock. If they are hydrated and illuminated, they will exuberantly photosynthesize and expand the green carpet. But when times are tough, most simply stop growing and wait until water returns. They don’t die, they just crinkle up and pause, following the rhythms of the natural world, growing in periods of abundance and waiting through periods of scarcity: a wise strategy for life that is in tune with uncertainty.

Moss lifeways offer a strong contrast to the ways we’ve organized our society, which prioritizes relentless growth as the metric of well-being: always getting bigger, producing more, having more. Infinite growth is ecologically impossible and exceedingly destructive, as it demands the transformation of the lives of other beings into raw materials to feed the fiction. Mosses show us another way—the abundance that emanates from self-restraint, from enoughness. Mosses have lived too long on this planet to be seduced by the nonsense of accumulation, the delusion of permanence, the endless striving for productivity. Maybe our heartbeats slow when we sit with mosses because they remind us that contentment could be ours.

Green teachers. Green patience resilience. Green enoughness.

may 7/RUN

3.1 miles
marshall to dogwood loop
57 degrees

Scott and I ran a slightly shorter version of the marshall loop that ended at dogwood coffee. No coffee today, too crowded. Everything is getting green. No fuchsia funnels yet, but some white blossoms, violets (are they violets, or just violet flowers?), tulips. Chirping birds. A downy woodpecker squawking in a tree. I was just about to write that I didn’t remember looking at the river, but then I remembered: lots of white foam everywhere — swirling in the center, collecting on the edges. No rowers again. Anything else? Muddy, wet, humid, hot when the sun was out, very little breeze.

I told Scott a boring story about noticing runners sprinting on the other side of the road as we ran down cretin. He told me that he felt like he was plodding along, that his legs were like logs thumping down on the ground. Then I imagined his legs as logs, which was fun to do — his legs started as thick logs with rough bark, then after a 1/2 block of awkward steps, they peeled off and his human legs appeared.

Another strange story: running down the hill on the east river trail, beside shadow falls, I saw something up ahead. What it actually was was a big white, fluffy dog. What I saw was the bottom half of very broad hipped person walking towards us. This is an example of how my brain tries (and sometimes fails terribly) to guess what my eyes are actually seeing. After telling Scott what I thought I saw, I said, headless and torsoless hips walking towards me? that’s not even a real thing. Come on, brain!

Mary Ruefle

No time to read from My Private Property or Madness, Rack, and Honey, so here’s one of her poems. I remember reading it sometime in the last few years, but not why or when.

The Bench/ Mary Ruefle

My husband and I were arguing about a bench we wanted to buy and put in part of our backyard, a part which is actually a meadow of sorts, a half acre with tall grasses and weeds and the occasional wild flower because we do not mow it but leave it scrubby and unkempt.  This bench would hardly ever be used and in summer when the grasses were high would remain partially hidden from view.  We both knew we wanted the bench to be made of teak so that it would last a long time in the harsh weather and so that we would never have to paint it.  Teak weathers to a soft silver that might, in November or March, disappear into the gray hills that are the backdrop of our lives.  My husband wanted a four foot bench and I wanted a five foot bench.  This is what we argued about.  My husband insisted that a four foot bench was all we needed, since no more than two people (presumably ourselves) would ever sit on it at the same time.  I felt his reasoning was not only beside the point but missed it entirely; I said what mattered most to me was the idea of the bench, the look of it there, to be gazed at with only the vaguest notion it could hold more people than would ever actually sit down.  The life of the bench in my imagination was more important than any practical function the bench might serve.  After all, I argued, we wanted a bench so that we could look at it, so that we could imagine sitting on it, so that, unexpectedly, a bird might sit on it, or fallen leaves, or inches of snow, and the longer the bench, the greater the expanse of that plank, the more it matched its true function, which was imaginary.  My husband mentioned money and I said that I was happier to have no bench at all, which would cost nothing, than to have a four foot bench, which would be expensive.  I said that having no bench at all was closer to the five foot bench than the four foot bench because having no bench served the imagination in similar ways, and so not having a bench became an option in our argument, became a third bench. We grew very tired of discussing the three benches and for a day we rested from our argument.  During this day I had many things to do and many of them involved my driving past other houses, none of which had benches, that is they each had the third bench, and as I drove past the other houses I could see a bench here and a bench there; sometimes I saw the bench very close to the house, against a wall or on a porch, and sometimes I saw the bench under a tree or in the open grass, cut or uncut, and once I saw the bench at the end of the driveway, blocking the road.  Always it was a five foot bench that I saw, a long sleek bench or a broken down bench, a bench with a slatted back or a bench with a solid, carved back, and always the bench was empty. But I knew that for my husband the third bench was only four feet long and he saw always two people sitting on it, two happy or tired people, two people who were happy to be alive or two people tired from having worked hard enough to buy the bench they were sitting on.  Or they were happy and tired, happy to have reached the end of some argument, tired from having had it.  For these people, the bench was an emblem of their days, which were fruitful because their suffering had come to an end. On my bench, which was always empty, nothing had come to an end because nothing had begun, no one had sat down, though the bench was always there waiting for exactly that to happen.  And the bench was always long enough so that someone, if he desired to, could lie all the way down.  That day passed.  Another day followed it and my husband and I began, once more, to discuss the bench.  The sound of our voices revealed a renewed interest and vigor.  I thought I sensed in him a coming around to my view of the bench and I know he sensed in me a coming around to his view of the bench, because at one point I said that a four foot bench reminded me of rough notes towards a real bench while a five foot bench was like a fragment of an even longer bench and I admitted it was at times hard to tell the difference.  He said he didn’t know anything about the difference between rough notes and fragments but he agreed that between the two benches there was, possibly, just perhaps—he could imagine it—very little difference.  It was, after all, only a foot we were talking about.  And I think it was then, in both of our minds, that a fourth bench came into being, a bench that was only a foot long, a miniature bench, a bench we could build ourselves, though of course we did not.  This seemed to be, essentially, the bench we were talking about.  Much later, when the birds came back, or the leaves drifted downwards, or the snow fell, slowly and lightly at first, then heavier and faster, it was this bench that we both saw when we looked out the window at the bench we eventually placed in the meadow which continued to grow as if there were no bench at all.