Category: Running Log

may 6/RUN

3.75 miles
mississippi river road path, north/south
53 degrees

Another beautiful spring day. Windier but not too warm. Greeted the welcoming oaks at the beginning of my run, the Daily Walker at the end. It felt difficult–my legs were sore, my nose was stuffed up. Don’t remember much about the run except for that it was hard to be inspired and enjoy it when it felt difficult. Many more leaves on the trees. Bright, light green. Turning around, heading back, I took off my sweatshirt. As I ran I tried to remember what I noticed when I ran through one particular stretch of the path. I couldn’t remember anything. That minute or two lost forever. Saw the silver roof of the maintenance building on the St. Paul side–at least, I think that’s what it is. I noticed it a few times this year, so bright and blinding. Chanted my usual a few times: raspberry strawberry blueberry creme brûlée.

After finishing and walking back, I came up with a 3 beat chant:

I run through
the oak grove
and call out
to each oak
good morning
good morning
good morning
good morning
they call back
hello friend

experiment

Create 3 beat phrases, mostly based on the run. Write them on slips of paper, put them face down on the desk, pick twelve. Make a poem, using them in the order they were picked. Rearrange the phrases to make another poem.

too much green
difficult
mystery
take the steps
aching legs
in the gorge
climate change
up so high
be right back
old stone steps
good morning
stop and walk

hmmm…I’ll have to work on this experiment. Not great so far. Thinking about the old stone steps, this afternoon I took Delia for a walk down them to the river. First, we waited for a woman to come up. She paused about three steps down and gazed at the river, the forest, the deep gorge. As she left I remarked, “It’s beautiful.” She said, “like another world.” So true. Taking those steps down to the forest floor is magical. And that view–gorg(e)ous (groan).

Here’s a cool map poem I found this morning in an article about concrete poetry and poems as maps.

I’m thinking it might be fun to try one of these for a running route poem.

may 4/RUN

2.25 miles
mississippi river road, north/south/north
71 degrees

Is everyone in Minneapolis out biking today? It seems like it. I’m glad I ran instead. I would have been scared to be on such crowded bike trails with my bad vision today. Not being able to bike as much as I’d like sucks. Did a combination of running and walking because I just ran 6 miles yesterday. So warm and sunny! My legs felt sore. Do I remember much of the run? Big groups of bikes on the road and the path. Not too many runners. Lots of traffic. The river was beautiful. What a day!

some 3 beat phrases:

what a day
it’s so hot
lots of bikes
stopped to walk
sun beats down
not much wind
green abounds
afternoon
legs are sore

eat my shorts
dive right in
shut your mouth
eat your greens
take the steps
on your left
river road

Summer Haibun
Aimee Nezhukumatathil

To everything, there is a season of parrots. Instead of feathers, we searched the sky for meteors on our last night. Salamanders use the stars to find their way home. Who knew they could see that far, fix the tiny beads of their eyes on distant arrangements of lights so as to return to wet and wild nests? Our heads tilt up and up and we are careful to never look at each other. You were born on a day of peaches splitting from so much rain and the slick smell of fresh tar and asphalt pushed over a cracked parking lot. You were strong enough—even as a baby—to clutch a fistful of thistle and the sun himself was proud to light up your teeth when they first swelled and pushed up from your gums. And this is how I will always remember you when we are covered up again: by the pale mica flecks on your shoulders. Some thrown there from your own smile. Some from my own teeth. There are not enough jam jars to can this summer sky at night. I want to spread those little meteors on a hunk of still-warm bread this winter. Any trace left on the knife will make a kitchen sink like that evening air

the cool night before
star showers: so sticky so
warm so full of light

I’ve talked about it for a while but I’d finally like to try writing a few haibuns about my running routes. A goal for this month! This example from Aimee Nezhukumatathil is beautiful. I love the line, “There are not enough jam jars to can this summer sky at night.”


may 3/RUN

6 miles
franklin hill turnaround
54 degrees

Almost an hour long run–my goal amount of time. An hour is not too long to be worn out but long enough to really sink into a run. I’d love to run an hour almost every day. Will my body ever let me?

I don’t really remember what I thought about but I do remember:

  1. small, light purple (lilac?) flowers blooming in some bushes at the side of the path…I noticed them through my peripheral vision
  2. the smell of warming earth, slightly fragrant (not too much or too little, just right)
  3. a bald eagle perched on the branch of a tree in the flats…it stayed motionless the whole time I ran by it, almost as if it was doing it just to make sure I could positively identify it, even with my bad vision…once I had, I lost track of it either because it flew away or because it got lost in the dead zones in my central vision that my chaotic cones create
  4. 2 different runners, one near the beginning of my run the other at the end, passing me, running effortlessly, inspiring me to pick up my knees more and try to spend more time flying, less time shuffling
  5. unlayering: removing my orange sweatshirt mid run and tying it around my waist as I ran down the franklin hill
  6. a group of school kids biking south on the river road…encountered them first in the flats, later past franklin, then again under the lake street bridge…one kid called out, “greetings pedestrian!”
  7. so much green in the gorge!
  8. a biker calling out to me as I ran up the steep, long franklin hill, “you’re doing a great job on a tough hill!”
  9. a walker calling out to me as I walked at the top…not sure what he said, something about my legs?
  10. chanting raspberry/strawberry/blueberry/creme brule to steady my tempo
  11. chanting there’s a bridge/there’s a bridge/at the top/at the top/look at it/look at it/never stop/never stop to keep me running up the hill
  12. trickling, gurgling water in the flats near the limestone hill where the mudslide occurred a few years ago
  13. glancing at the beautiful blue river
  14. running with my shadow, first at my side, then leading me

Speaking of chanting, I have a new exercise I want to try. First, I want to think up a bunch of 3 syllable phrases (down the hill, walk to work, eat down town, out the door, sunday best, monday worst, turnip greens, climate change, just say please, in and out…). Then I’ll write these on small slips of paper and put them in a hat or a bowl or a bag. I’ll randomly pick out 8-10 and turn them into a poem (either in the order I select them or in an order of my choosing). Maybe the phrases should be a mixture of things from the run and popular or whimsical expressions? So much fun!

Oh, this poem! “We are engorged, gorging, and gorgeous”

Life is Beautiful/ DORIANNE LAUX

                             and remote, and useful,
if only to itself. Take the fly, angel
of the ordinary house, laying its bright
eggs on the trash, pressing each jewel out
delicately along a crust of buttered toast.
Bagged, the whole mess travels to the nearest
dump where other flies have gathered, singing
over stained newsprint and reeking
fruit. Rapt on air they execute an intricate
ballet above the clashing pirouettes
of heavy machinery. They hum with life.
While inside rumpled sacks pure white
maggots writhe and spiral from a rip,
a tear-shaped hole that drools and drips
a living froth onto the buried earth.
The warm days pass, gulls scree and pitch,
rats manage the crevices, feral cats abandon
their litters for a morsel of torn fur, stranded
dogs roam open fields, sniff the fragrant edges,
a tossed lacework of bones and shredded flesh.
And the maggots tumble at the center, ripening,
husks membrane-thin, embryos darkening
and shifting within, wings curled and wet,
the open air pungent and ready to receive them
in their fecund iridescence. And so, of our homely hosts,
a bag of jewels is born again into the world. Come, lost
children of the sun-drenched kitchen, your parents
soundly sleep along the windowsill, content,
wings at rest, nestled in against the warm glass.
Everywhere the good life oozes from the useless
waste we make when we create—our streets teem
with human young, rafts of pigeons streaming
over the squirrel-burdened trees. If there is
a purpose, maybe there are too many of us
to see it, though we can, from a distance,
hear the dull thrum of generation’s industry,
feel its fleshly wheel churn the fire inside us, pushing
the world forward toward its ragged edge, rushing
like a swollen river into multitude and rank disorder.
Such abundance. We are gorged, engorging, and gorgeous.

may 2/RUN

3.4 miles
mississippi river road path, south/mississippi river trail, north
46 degrees

About half of this run was on the paved path above the Mississippi River. I ran faster, listening to my latest running playlist, looking down at the river, leaning into the wind. The other half, after I turned around and made my way back up the hill and over the double bridge, was on a (mostly) abandoned trail midway above the gorge. First it was dirt, then broken chunks of asphalt mixed with mulching leaves, then slightly cracked asphalt sloping to one side. I put away my headphones and listened to water trickling. I watched the river flowing down to the falls. Studied the trail, trying not to twist my ankle or slip on some wet leaves. The first half was flat and faster, the second undulating mini hills winding around the gorge. I encountered runners and walkers and dogs and their owners. My most memorable interaction was with a chipmunk that darted out in front of me. A first–usually only squirrels cross my path. I can recall one other time a chipmunk darted in front of me. Biking with my daughter on the 5 mile wooded trail to Fort Snelling, a chipmunk scurried across the path and right into my wheel. Did it make it through the spokes or was it hit and then flung to the side? Just talked to my daughter about this story and she says that the chipmunk definitely made it through the spokes. I’m not sure, but it was knocked out or dead, lying on the side of the trail. Sad and strange.

Why are they called chipmunks? Here’s what Merriam Webster has to say: alteration of earlier chitmunk, probably from Ojibwa ačitamo·nʔ red squirrel

I call them chippies and, like squirrels and other rodents, find them to be irritating. They used to live in the garage of our old house and now, at our new one, they like to get trapped in the gutter on the side of the house, chirping and chipping and freaking out the dog.

I love this poem I found on The Rumpus for many reasons, including: the repetition and expansion and the flipping (and critique) of the nature poem about a mountain.

ANOTHER POEM ABOUT A MOUNTAIN/joseph rios

Another poem about a mountain
that wants to be about a Mexican
fertilizing the lawn at a ski resort
at the foot of a mountain.

Another poem about a mountain
that wants to be about a Chicano
attending a holistic retreat
at a ski resort looking out a window
at a Mexican fertilizing the lawn
at the foot of a mountain.

Another poem about a mountain
that wants to be about a boy
who mows lawns with his father
then grows up to be a poet
looking out a window
at a Mexican fertilizing the lawn
at the foot of a mountain.

Another poem about a mountain
that wants to be about a gardener
mowing the lawn outside a hospital
in Fresno, which, like this, sits
between two rows of mountain,
where the boy cried for his father
and his brother, the convicted felon
with dog paws tattooed to his neck,
hugged him for the first time, long before
the boy came to the ski resort to write about
the man fertilizing the foot of the mountain.

april 30/RUN

5.5 miles
franklin loop
40 degrees
light rain

I love running when it’s lightly raining. I could hear the drops falling on the bill of my cap but didn’t really feel them. The wind was barely blowing so the drops fell straight down and not into my face. Passed the Daily Walker early on. Encountered a few other runners and walkers. Heard some geese high above. Some voices down below me–were they rowers on the river? Not sure. Felt relaxed and strong. Chanted some triplet rhythms: strawberry/raspberry/blueberry. Thought about the summer and other things that I can’t remember. Noticed that the turnoff to a street that I’d like to run up is 2.6 miles from my house. Marveled at the beautiful green down in the gorge and the slivers of river that I can still see. Listened to the shuffling of the sand under my feet. Almost forgot–I could really smell the rain: chemicals, earth, warmth.

Wanted to find a poem about spring rain. Love the imagery in this one:

Two Sewing
Hazel Hall

The Wind is sewing with needles of rain.
With shining needles of rain
It stitches into the thin
Cloth of earth. In,
In, in, in.
Oh, the wind has often sewed with me.
One, two, three.

Spring must have fine things
To wear like other springs.
Of silken green the grass must be
Embroidered. One and two and three.
Then every crocus must be made
So subtly as to seem afraid
Of lifting colour from the ground;
And after crocuses the round
Heads of tulips, and all the fair
Intricate garb that Spring will wear.
The wind must sew with needles of rain,
With shining needles of rain,
Stitching into the thin
Cloth of earth, in,
In, in, in,
For all the springs of futurity.
One, two, three.

april 29/RUN

3.2 miles
mississippi river road path, north/south
56 degrees

An early evening run (or late afternoon, depending on when you think the afternoon ends and the evening begins). Really helped my mood and energy level. Wonderful to get some fresh air and move around. I’ve always been restless, needing to move, starting to pace if I stayed in the same spot too long, but now my body is revolting even more. Sitting in a chair for an hour or more, I get stiff and sore and my kneecap shifts slightly out of place. Boo. An aging body is no fun….Ran without headphones. Didn’t hear much, even though the river road was busy. Lots of cars commuting home. Runners, bikers, dogs and their humans. I felt overdressed in shorts and a jacket, but many walkers were wearing winter coats–one lady had on ear muffs. Ear muffs?! It was 56 degrees. By the end of my run, I had unzipped my jacket and had stripped down to a tank top. I noticed a lot of green, but not much of the river. Saw a bunch of people heading down to the road to the rowing club. A rowing class? I’ve been thinking that that might be fun to do. When I reached the turn around point at the greenway, I heard some loud bellowing just below the railroad trestle. What was going on? I didn’t stick around to find out.

What a poem:

Anti-Elegy/cameron awkward-rich

She was:

33, bullet.
35, bullet.
20, bullet.
25, stabbed to death & run over by a car.
66 blade.
22 bullet.
17 fist.
36 blade.
blade.
blade.
bullet.
bullet.
bullet
stone
found dead in a field
overdose
bullet
unknown
rope
stone
stone
bullet
oncoming traffic
his own good hands…

…

& it becomes a kind of music, doesn’t it?
Senseless litany, field of roses, blood red
upturned skirts. I open my mouth & here,
the pith of me. Here, a flock of names, a girl
spilling out onto the street.

…

The trouble with elegy
is that it asks the dead

to live, it calls them back.
& who am I to say rise?

Walk again among those
who could not bear

the sight of you? Your body.
Your one good dress.

Today, someone will walk into the night
& then become it. Someone’s heart

will crowd with beloved ghosts
& who am I to say, dance

with me here a little longer? Never mind
the bloodshed darling, never mind.

Never mind.

…

Once, a man said mine
& a woman became an empty room.

Once, a man said mine
& the ocean split & the endless passage.

Once, a man said mine
& there’s a genocide –

how strange. To make the world
with language. To wield desire

as a weapon. To watch one nation burn
& another rise up at your feet.

Once, a girl looked in the mirror
& called herself, said my name is

said I am / I am & a man said
mine / mine / mine

…

I have so many questions:

Who are

What does

Why

How does it feel to

I’m sorry, I just think

I

And, define

I’m sorry

Your anger

You’re afraid of

Can fear be

Define

knife

Define

Fear is

Please

Forgive

me

Wow. This whole poem, and especially these lines: the trouble with elegy/is that it asks the dead/to live, it calls them back./who am I to say rise?

april 28/RUN

3.5 miles
mississippi river road path, south/mississippi river trail, north
41 degrees

What a wonderful run! Sunny. Hardly any wind. Cool. No headphones. Ran south towards the falls but turned around before I got there then decided to take the lower trail on the way back. The first part of it wasn’t paved. The second part, barely paved. The third, paved but hilly. More interesting and distracting. Couldn’t think too much about how far I had left to run because I was concentrating on avoiding cracks or holes or unexpected dips. I liked it. I should try more trail running. More green today. A few geese. Lots of walkers and bikers.

Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?
BY TRACY K. SMITH

1.

After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span
Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like
Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman
Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see.
And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure

That someone was there squinting through the dust,
Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only
To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then,
Even for a few nights, into that other life where you
And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy?

Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my
Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove?
Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep
Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old,
Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired

And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen
That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life
In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky
Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands
Even if it burns.

      2.

He leaves no tracks. Slips past, quick as a cat. That’s Bowie
For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play
Within a play, he’s trademarked twice. The hours

Plink past like water from a window A/C. We sweat it out,
Teach ourselves to wait. Silently, lazily, collapse happens.
But not for Bowie. He cocks his head, grins that wicked grin.

Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives
Before take-off, before we find ourselves
Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?

The future isn’t what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts
For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky
Like migratory souls.

      3.

Bowie is among us. Right here
In New York City. In a baseball cap
And expensive jeans. Ducking into
A deli. Flashing all those teeth
At the doorman on his way back up.
Or he’s hailing a taxi on Lafayette
As the sky clouds over at dusk.
He’s in no rush. Doesn’t feel
The way you’d think he feels.
Doesn’t strut or gloat. Tells jokes.

I’ve lived here all these years
And never seen him. Like not knowing
A comet from a shooting star.
But I’ll bet he burns bright,
Dragging a tail of white-hot matter
The way some of us track tissue
Back from the toilet stall. He’s got
The whole world under his foot,
And we are small alongside,
Though there are occasions

When a man his size can meet
Your eyes for just a blip of time
And send a thought like SHINE
SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE
Straight to your mind. Bowie,
I want to believe you. Want to feel
Your will like the wind before rain.
The kind everything simply obeys,
Swept up in that hypnotic dance
As if something with the power to do so
Had looked its way and said:
Go ahead.

april 27/RUN

4.2 miles
mississippi river road path, north/south
45 degrees

A good run. Could feel that my cadence was faster. More flying. Enjoyed listening to music. Not too many people out on the path. In southern Minnesota they’re expected to get 4 to 8 inches of snow but here barely even a drop of rain. Nice. I’m done with snow. Don’t remember much from the run except for enjoying going faster. Did my left thigh feel a little tight towards the end? I think so. Noticed all the green in the gorge. Pretty soon, my view will be covered. Looked at the river but don’t remember anything about it–brown, I think. Counted different layers of clothing left by the side of the path–overdressed runners? A black stocking cap. A black sweatshirt. Anything else?

I love this poem about remembering a dead mother. Such a beautiful capturing of that feeling–a sudden rush of remembering!

Wondrous/sarah freligh

I’m driving home from school when the radio talk
turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit
the here and now of the freeway at rush hour,

travel back into the past, where my mother is reading
to my sister and me the part about Charlotte laying her eggs
and dying, and though this is the fifth time Charlotte

has died, my mother is crying again, and we’re laughing
at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math,
how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief

multiplies the one preceding it, how the author tried
seventeen times to record the words She died alone
without crying, seventeen takes and a short walk during

which he called himself ridiculous, a grown man crying
for a spider he’d spun out of the silk thread of invention —
wondrous how those words would come back and make

him cry, and, yes, wondrous to hear my mother’s voice
ten years after the day she died — the catch, the rasp,
the gathering up before she could say to us, I’m OK.

This poem is one sentence. What a sentence!

april 25/RUN

5.45 miles
ford loop
60 degrees

Spring running! Overcast, so no hot sun. Hardly any wind. Low humidity. Decided to run the Ford loop for the first time in months. Reached the river, turned right instead of left, climbed up the hill just past Locks and Dam #1, ran over the Ford bridge, up the east side of the river road, up the hill just past Summit, down the other side, over the Lake Street bridge, then south on the west river road. Stopped at the Lake Street bridge and noticed the water again. A dark olive green this time instead of brown. Still cloudy–looks like the river has cataracts?–moving very slowly. I watched a big log drift down towards the falls. No birds or boats or other debris on the river. A nice, steady run. Managed to hold onto a few thoughts about the poem I’m working on but only for a minute. Lost again. Noticed my shadow. Heard some birds. Avoided a lot of cracks on the St. Paul side. Greeted at least one runner with a “good morning,” others with a smile. Became annoyed by the buzz of a leaf blower. No bugs flew into my eyes. Saw some hikers below me. Wondered about a lone bike propped up against a bench. Counted 2 runners with bright yellow, glowing shirts.

I have decided I am tired of writing “birds chirp” or trill or sing. I want to know more about bird calls, have more specific words for describing their various songs and calls. So I looked it up and found a great series on the Audubon Society’s site. Will this interest in bird calls last past this post? Not sure, but I would like to try to listen more carefully to them. Here’s a passage that was particularly enticing in part one of the series:

Are there American Robins in your yard or local park? In addition to their rich, caroling song, robins have a surprising number of different calls. Spend some time with them and study their repertoire; the knowledge will be useful practically anywhere you go in North America. Plus, it’s a method you can repeat with other familiar species.

To speed up the learning process, don’t just listen passively: Focus and analyze what you’re hearing. Describe the sound to yourself, draw a diagram, or write it down. If it’s a complicated song, figure out how many notes it has. Do all the notes have the same tone and vibe? Does the tune rise or fall? Can you adapt the “syllables” into words and make a mnemonic? The Barred Owl, for instance, hoots Who cooks for you, and the Common Yellowthroat sings Wichity-wichity-wichity. But you don’t have to just settle for published mnemonics; listen carefully and then invent your own. Little memory hooks like these will make birding easier the next time around. And as always, repetition helps.

How to Identify Birds by Sounds

april 23/RUN

5.4 miles
franklin hill turn around
49 degrees

Intended to think about the light (so bright today) or green but didn’t. Listened to my new playlist, including a few songs from Lizzo’s new album, and forgot about almost everything. When I want to get lost in the run and make time meaningless (and nearly measureless), I listen to my headphones–it also usually helps me to experience a superficial runner’s high. I did manage to think about a few things: No green above the forest floor. Greeted the Daily Walker. Felt strong and steady and hot–one too many layers. Can’t remember smelling anything or looking at the river more than once. Noticed two runners ahead of me. One walking, then running, then walking again. The other always running. Both faster than me. Studied the uneven path, making sure not to twist my foot. Encountered one goose, down near the flats, sitting in the grass.

Spending a few more minutes thinking about what I do/don’t remember from this run, I remembered something else. As I listened to Lizzo’s “Like a Girl” I thought about femininity and being bad ass (I sped up a little during this song) and what it means to be “like a girl.” For me, I’m not sure. I identify more as Sara than as a gender, but as a former feminist/queer theorist, I’ve thought a lot about performances of gender–read and taught Iris Marion Young’s iconic essay, “Throwing Like a Girl” and Judith Butler’s line from Gender Trouble (citing Aretha Franklin) about feeling like a natural woman. Lizzo has a line in the chorus: “if you feel like a girl, then you real like a girl.” So packed with meaning, powerful! Then I found a quote from her, which really speaks to why I noticed the line and like it so much:

When we got to the bridge, I realized there was an important piece missing: What if you identify as female but aren’t gender-assigned that at birth? Or what if you’re male but in touch with your feminine side? What about my gay boys? What about my drag queens? So I decided to say, If you feel like like a girl/Then you real like a girl, and that’s my favorite lyric on the whole album.

Lizzo on Apple Music

Found my notes for April 23, 2018 in my running notebook. All about layers and inner and outer weather. I’ve been trying to write about layers for over a year now. Will it ever click? Not sure. At the top of the page, I wrote: attention distraction/ distraction attention/ wandering between/ boundary/ border/ layer Two years ago, wrote a lyric essay about attention and distraction. Maybe I should turn it into a poem?

Discovered this beautiful poem this morning:

The End and the Beginning
BY WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA
TRANSLATED BY JOANNA TRZECIAK

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

april 21/RUNHIKE

2 mile run/.5 mile hike
mississippi river gorge above and below, north/south
72 degrees

Ran a mile with Scott to the Lake Street bridge then hiked below to the river for 1/2 mile, climbed up some stone steps by the greenway, then ran 1 mile back. Beautiful. Everything was brown–almost looked like fall but felt like summer. I’d like to do more run/hikes like this. This side of the gorge is similar to the east side, except the east side has paved paths, an abandoned parking lot and benches/picnic tables. Scott and I encountered some dirt mounds, halfway up the gorge, and wondered if they were burial mounds.

Spent some time looking through the archives of Boaat and found this cool poem: DRIFTING/aya satoh

april 20/RUN

3 miles
stone arch/pink bridge/river road/stone arch
62! degrees

Ran with Scott while FWA was in his clarinet lesson. Warm. Sunny. Windy. Crowded. Instead of our regular run through Boom Island, we decided to take the service road to the U and run across the pink bridge. That loop is only 2.2 miles so we added one more trip across Stone Arch bridge.

This week in my poetry class we talked about the caesura (a stop of pause in the metrical line). Here’s a great poem, by a wonderful person, about the caesura. Love it!

WEIGHT
by Carolina Ebeid

(hush listen)

Is a caesura a quiet hallway

in a church? Is it a silence

with commandments to hush,

listen? Was it composed for

two voices? Is that silence

like the time you said stop it

wait to the boys, how you

should have said stop, but

you said nothing behind

la carnicería that sold live

chickens? When a boy picked

up the brick throwing it at

the hen—wait— from a near

distance? Is the caesura that

near distance a brick travels

from hand to head? Is white

space like piano keys playing

softer & softer until zero

decibels? Is it the cleared

sweep after a missile falls

no more green? Does it share

the pull of gravity? Is it the living

body of Ana Mendieta? Dropped

—stop—out of a window?

Is she in a kind of white now?

Is it composed of no & no?

Wouldn’t you say the white

is like the space of an envelope?

Where the postage must go?

Dear person who won’t write

back, Most esteemed ghost

matter, My darling inventory

of nature? The white lie

white whisper hearsay flickering

all reaching the moment of

a candle blown out? Is the white

break like a hospital door

swinging open & there your father

delivered back to you? Linen

white muzzle across the face?

Does the break assemble into

a waiting room? One woman asks

for the housekeeper’s name

while her friend replies:

aren’t they all named Maria?

Is the white space clean

with the smell of ammonia?

Is there dizzying laughter? Say

stop it, wait. Is it like a hurricane

with the same name? Has it become

marble-quite like a wall

for interning ashes? Is it the sound

of rubble? Isn’t the empty white

more like moons growing brightest

from right to left? Right to left

like a message in the Arab

side of town, spray-painted

on a curfew night? Won’t you say

it’s composed for more than two

voices? Like a chorus that speaks

in unison there? Aren’t they all

named Maria? Do they make

the sound of rubble? The nothing

you say, is it dressed in white

like the guy in your group punching

the girl from the rival group who

talks trash at us & he hits her

because a woman is liberated just

like a man? Liberation?

Is it blurred & blank with flight?

Wasn’t it composed for a pyro-

technic finale? Whites of eyes

like the white of a room you walk into

& no one seems to be grieving?

Isn’t the white, the whites of human

teeth glossed with blood

on the concrete?

april 19/RUN

5.25 miles
franklin bridge loop
52 degrees!

Spring! Shorts, sun, Shadow, sparkling water, slight soft breeze. A wonderful run, even though it felt hard at times. Saw the Daily Walker but couldn’t greet him because we were running the same way. Encountered 2 separate groups of kids on bikes–one on the east side, one on the west. Heard some birds. Saw lots of brown. Noticed the white beach in the gorge, midway between the lake street bridge and the greenway. Watched my shadow for a while. Mostly she was friendly but she irritated me on the franklin bridge right before I turned and she fell behind. Did a lot of counting: 1 2 3 45 1 2 345 then 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8…thought about how 7 is the only number with 2 syllables. Why is that? Convinced my self to not stop to walk until at least mile 4 and managed to do it. I think I saw the man in black in shorts and not all black! Looked for the eagle on the dead tree under the marshall side of the bridge.

Above all else, tried to stay focused on the river. Glad I could still see it–the leaves haven’t returned yet. At first it seemed still, not moving. But by the Franklin bridge I noticed its slow descent to the falls. I stopped on the lake street bridge to watch it more closely. Decided to talk into my smart phone. Maybe I can shape some of this into a poem? I’d like to try recording more of these moments this spring. A good way to force myself to slow down my runs.

looking at the mississippi/lake street bridge

transcript from recording:

standing here
on the lake street bridge
watching the river water
as it slowly moves
at certain spots it’s shimmering
at other spots
it almost looks like a pale ghost
ghostly ice just under the surface
or muddy swirls near the bottom
the dirt just being loosened
and brought up to the surface
the river is mostly brown and then blue
and everything’s brown
and the water just slowly moves
earlier it seemed
almost dead lifeless so still
and now I can see it’s just slowly
moving closer to the falls

With practice, I’m hoping to get better at these brief recordings. It was hard to capture with words the strange beauty of the river’s slow movement in many different forms. Part of the surface was sparkling, shimmering, undulating. Some was smooth, flat. A few vees were visible–was something in the water disrupting it? And then, the ghostly swirls. Speaking of vees, right after I finished recording, a skein of geese flew overhead, not too far above the bridge.

Here’s a poem I just found about the river (and Heraclitus!):

SAME SUN, SAME MOON, SAME RIVER
BY NEIL CARPATHIOS

It is easy to imagine Heraclitus
walking stone streets witnessing
life in Athens with no permanence,
stopping strangers to explain about the river,
being laughed at as they moved
from point A to point B fearing Apollo
and Hades then at dusk drinking wine,
waiting for the happy obliteration alcohol brings,
not realizing how lucky they were
to be stupid and so deep
in their bodies even the sun
and moon trading places over and over
meant nothing.

april 17/BIKERUNBIKE

18 min bike/.75 mile run/4 min bike
basement

It’s raining outside. Glad it’s warm enough not to snow. Decided to warm up on the bike and then record myself running to check out my form. Pretty good. I think my right hip is slightly lower. Just looked it up and this “hip drop” is caused by a weakness in the opposite leg, which makes sense because it is my left leg/hip/back giving me problems right now. Back when I started running, I never thought about my body. It worked fine, so why pay attention to it? Now, I have aches and pains and injuries. These are frustrating and painful and scary but I do appreciate the new, more informed, relationship I’m having with my knees and hips and back and the rest of my body. It’s difficult growing older and having to try harder to not hurt but, at the same time, I’m enjoying learning more and having the chance to pay attention to my body. So helpful and interesting!

a fuzzy screenshot from my recording

Since, I’m thinking about hips, here’s one of the best hips poem ever:

homage to my hips
BY LUCILLE CLIFTON

these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!

Also, when I was biking, I watched the first episode of Shrill and I’m excited to watch the rest of the season. Hooray for unruly, excessive bodies making trouble!


april 16/RUN

3.5 miles
mississippi river road path, north/south
51 degrees

What a day! Sunny. Light breeze. Warm. So long snow. Passed a woman early on, breathing heavily. Her loud gasps, almost echoing above the gorge, followed me for a few minutes. Celebrated with my shadow, both of us so happy to be outside this morning. Wondered what the workers in yellow vests were waiting for near the lake street bridge. Heard that same barking dog–the one I heard a couple of times a few months ago–pass by me in that same white truck. Weird. Stopped at the railroad trestle and took the steps down, below the trestle, still above the river. Hiked for a few minutes, climbing a few small hills–more like mounds. Heard a few woodpeckers. Turned around and had a wonderful view of the underbelly of the railroad bridge. Then started running again. When I was almost done, a squirrel decided to race me, not darting out in front of me but running beside me through the dead leaves. Was able to say good morning to the Daily Walker.

Here’s one other poem that I marked to remember from The Collected Works of James Laughlin:

THE LONGEST YEAR/james laughlin

Began with snowstorms, one after another.
In March a frantic night of wind took down
The huge sugar maple that showed a hundred
Rings when it was cut up for firewood.
Spring was dubious and too short, a hot
Summer too long. A child drowned in Tobey
Pond, it was horrible. Only in October
Were there a few perfect days with the leaves
Ablaze. Again before its time, baleful winter
Set in. Cars skidded on the icy roads.
At Christmas a false thaw deceived us
For a week before a deadly ice storm had
The branches of the trees cracking like
Rifle shots as they broke off all night.
It was a battlefield in the woodlot
Next morning. I didn’t count the days
Of that malevolent year, I only wished
Never to see such another. . . until,
Blessed miracles, it was true spring,
the lilacs blooming, the daffodils
Nodding, and you, Persephone, came up
From the world below to seek me out.

april 15/RUN

2.15 miles
mississippi river road path, south/north
52 degrees

Watched the Boston Marathon this morning. Last year, when I was watching it, we were getting 17 inches of snow. This year, sun and above freezing temperatures. Did a short run with Scott this afternoon. Windy and overcast but warmer with a clear path. Felt pretty easy, like I was bouncing on the path.

Found a draft of a poem that I wrote a few years ago. It’s inspired by what I’d recently read on how different writers remember their thoughts when they’re walking or running.

How do you keep

an idea from running away? Grab a stick
and etch it in your arm? Pin a piece
of paper to your clothes? Jot it down
in a pocket-sized notebook? Speak it
into your smart phone? Why
not let it run away
instead of immobilizing it with words.
You might be able to follow it
into the woods or
over the creek or
down by the river or
under the bridge.
Words may not be fast enough to follow
but you might
with your flying feet.

And here’s a poem I read (and heard) this morning on the Poetry Foundation site. What a poem! I love the title and so many of the images–especially describing the field after harvest as a man’s unruly face. Even better than describing it as stubble (which I’ve often thought and read before).

Thinking of Frost
 Major Jackson, 1968

I thought by now my reverence would have waned,
matured to the tempered silence of the bookish or revealed
how blasé I’ve grown with age, but the unrestrained
joy I feel when a black skein of geese voyages like a dropped
string from God, slowly shifting and soaring, when the decayed
apples of an orchard amass beneath its trees like Eve’s
first party, when driving and the road Vanna-Whites its crops
of corn whose stalks will soon give way to a harvester’s blade
and turn the land to a man’s unruly face, makes me believe
I will never soothe the pagan in me, nor exhibit the propriety
of the polite. After a few moons, I’m loud this time of year,
unseemly as a chevron of honking. I’m fire in the leaves,
obstreperous as a New England farmer. I see fear
in the eyes of his children. They walk home from school,
as evening falls like an advancing trickle of bats, the sky
pungent as bounty in chimney smoke. I read the scowl
below the smiles of parents at my son’s soccer game, their agitation,
the figure of wind yellow leaves make of quaking aspens.

april 14/RUN

4.75 miles
to top of franklin bridge and back
32 degrees
5% snow-covered

The snow is melting. The birds are chirping. The path is almost all clear. So quiet and calm today. Mostly cloudy, making the river look gray. The floodplain forest was all white. Occasionally the sun sat on the surface of the river leaving a bright circle of shimmering light. Saw a few squirrels. Heard some geese. Any crows? I don’t think so. A few voices below–a family hiking through the snow on the gorge. I wonder when the rowers will return?

Yesterday morning I started reading through The Collected Poems of James Laughlin. What a big book! 1214 pages. I’m reading through them quickly, marking the ones I especially like. In general, I like his simple, clear style. Brief lines. A quirky voice. Here are a few that I marked:

THE POET TO THE READER/james laughlin

These poems are not I
hope what anyone ex-

pets and yet reader
I hope that when you

read them you will say
I’ve felt that too but

it was such a natural
thing it was too plain

to see until you saw
it for me in your poem.

IN THE SNOW/james laughlin

The track of the ermine
the track of the mouse

tracks of a deer in the
snow and my track that

wanders and hesitates
doubling and crossing

itself stops to burrow
and circles trees this

track I made twists like
the veins in a leaf or a

crack in a mirror and it
cries seems to cry cries

to the sun cries sun sun
touch and burn cries sun

touch and save cries to
the snow–and then snow

falls covering everything
new snow covers my track

covers the track of the
ermine mouse and deer.

LITTLE BITS OF PAPER: AN ARS POETIC/james laughlin

Most of them began with a few words
read in some book or a phrase over-

heard scratched on a bit of paper
these chits go into the side pocket

of my jacket usually they stay there
until the coat is so spotted it must

be sent to the cleaners when I empty
the pocket most of the slips go into

the wastebasket but a few are pasted
with Scotch tape on the bathroom mir-

ro where I see them when I’m shaving
some stay there a long time but with

some there is an urgency they come
into my head when I wake to pee in

the middle of the night more words
come with them almost faster than I

can scribble on the yellow pad on the
bedtable the words beget other words

(it’s like spilled milk spreading on
the kitchen floor) words making other

words I don’t make them they make
themselves into the poem but some-

times in the morning I can’t read
what I’ve written (because I wrote

in the dark) so that’s the end of
that one it’s had its say and it

won’t come back I write in darkness.

I picked this last one because it made me think of Susan Howe and her story about Jonathan Edwards and how he would pin ideas he had on scraps of paper to his clothes as he was riding around on his horse. A couple of years ago, I was thinking a lot about how runners hold onto the ideas that they have as their running–scribble it on pieces of paper, carry a small notebook, scratch it in their arm with a stick, talk into their smart phone. Maybe I should experiment with this some more? As I was trying to recall who Howe had been talking about (I had forgotten), I discovered that she wrote a book about Emily Dickinson, My Emily Dickinson. I might have to check it out of the library. Apparently, Dickinson wrote many of her poems on scraps of paper.

april 12/RUN

2 miles
basement, treadmill

Snowing again today. Wet, sloppy paths. But soon the snow will melt and it will turn green. Too green. Time to take up my project of collecting poetry about green and thinking about the Mississippi River Gorge in the spring.

Just found a wonderfully named essay, Green I Love You Green and this fabulous poem:

Inside Out/Bill Yake

trees are our lungs turned inside out
& inhale our visible chilled breath.

our lungs are trees turned inside out
& inhale their clear exhalations.

Love these ideas of trees and breathing and inside/outside!

april 11/RUN

2.8 miles
basement, treadmill

Winter storm warning outside. High winds, heavy snow, falling branches, covered path. School cancelled. So glad we have a treadmill. Although, if it weren’t so windy, I might have enjoyed running outside and hearing the satisfying squeaks and crunches of the heavy, water-logged snow. I’m not happy about this snow, but I also don’t really care. It will melt within a few days.

Ballad in A
BY CATHY PARK HONG

A Kansan plays cards, calls Marshall
a crawdad, that barb lands that rascal a slap;  
that Kansan jackass scats,
camps back at caballada ranch.

Hangs kack, ax, and camp hat.
Kansan’s nag mad and rants can’t bask,
can’t bacchanal and garland a lass,
can’t at last brag can crack Law’s balls,

Kansan’s cantata rang at that ramada ranch,
Mañana, Kansan snarls, I’ll have an armada
and thwart Law’s brawn,
slam Law a damn mass war path.

Marshall’s a marksman, maps Kansan’s track,
calm as a shaman, sharp as a hawk,
Says: That dastard Kansan’s had
and gnaws lamb fatback.

At dawn, Marshall stalks that ranch,
packs a gat and blasts Kansan’s ass
and Kansan gasps, blasts back.
A flag flaps at half-mast.

What a poem! I love writing under constraint, although limiting all vowels to A seems extra hard. (here’s a guide to the poem.) This technique of eliminating all vowels but A is a OuLiPo technique. Here are some others I found on Wikipedia–I’ll have to try them out.

S+7, sometimes called N+7
Replace every noun in a text with the seventh noun after it in a dictionary. For example, “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago…” becomes “Call me islander. Some yeggs ago…”. Results will vary depending upon the dictionary used. This technique can also be performed on other lexical classes, such as verbs.

Snowball
A poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer.

Lipogram
Writing that excludes one or more letters. The previous sentence is a lipogram in B, F, J, K, Q, V, Y, and Z (it does not contain any of those letters).

april 10/BIKE

28 minutes, bike stand
basement

After running four days in a row, decided to bike in the basement. Watched another Father Brown episode and had fun pedaling faster as Father Brown chased the murderer on a train. Before biking, took the dog for a walk on the Winchell trail. Before we got there, I looked up in the sky and saw a huge bird soaring high in the sky. After studying the Birds of the Mississippi River Gorge, I’m pretty sure it was a turkey vulture. Close-up this bird would probably not enchant me, but I loved seeing it’s wing span way above me. I stopped walking, looked up and stared until my neck hurt. Of course I briefly wondered what others might think of me, looking up so intently into the sky.

It is snowing right now. All the sun’s hard work, melting the snow for weeks, undone. No one is quite sure how much we will get. 3 inches? 5? A foot? Will it stay snow or turn into rain?

I’ve been working on a series of eye chart poems. Today I had a revelation. Sometimes images don’t make sense to me. They’re unformed. But how to explain what this feels like? Then it hit me. Sometimes images are only a cluster of dots, like standing too close to an impressionist painting–a Monet or Renoir. This sort of thing usually happens when I’m trying to make sense of a billboard image.

I love this poem by Jane Yeh. The overzealous/Cockatoo of her impatience/Flap flap. So great!

Bel Canto
BY JANE YEH

The opera
In her head

Runs with no interval,
A lot of people singing tunelessly

About the same things.
An overheard

Comment like
A rotting peach.

The overzealous
Cockatoo of her impatience,

Flap flap. The slab
Of blue behind her

Is a sea of
Her doubts. The squirrel

In her stomach
Trying to get out—

They say you have to be
Twice as good. They say

There are pills
For everything now. Enamel

Eyes to see all
The better with, my

Dear. Fur coat
For your tongue—

And, since it’s snowing in April, I decided to find a “snow in April” poem. There are many. Here’s one from 1941 that I like:

Snow in April/Leonora Speyer

I watched the blind attack,
The white invade the green,
I saw the green strike back,
A bough shake off the foe,
While on the ground below
The sharp young blades of grass,
A million strong,
Surged up and through . . .

The battle was not long:
I seemed to hear a shout,
And all the flags were out!

april 9/RUN

3.1 miles
mississippi river road path, north/south
52 degrees

Decided to run again this morning because tomorrow winter returns: ice, snow, blizzard conditions. Hopefully it will melt quickly but if not, at least I was able to run just above the gorge today. It’s sunny and windy. My legs felt sore–not injured sore, just sore sore–and it was hard to just be in the run, not thinking. I tried chanting a little and that helped. Strawberry blueberry raspberry. Haven’t seen the Daily Walker in a while. Enjoyed listening to the grit scratch scratch scratch. Noticed a few stray patches of snow down below the lake street bridge. Marveled at the beauty of the floodplain forest, bare and brown. Didn’t really look at the river. Encountered a few dogs and their owners.

The daily poem over at poems.org is amazing:

Holdfast
Robin Beth Schaer

The dead are for morticians & butchers
to touch. Only a gloved hand. Even my son
will leave a grounded wren or bat alone
like a hot stove. When he spots a monarch
in the driveway he stares. It’s dead,
I say, you can touch it. The opposite rule:
butterflies are too fragile to hold
alive, just the brush of skin could rip
a wing. He skims the orange & black whorls
with only two fingers, the way he learned
to feel the backs of starfish & horseshoe crabs
at the zoo, the way he thinks we touch
all strangers. I was sad to be born, he tells me,
because it means I will die. I once loved someone
I never touched. We played records & drank
coffee from chipped bowls, but didn’t speak
of the days pierced by radiation. A friend
said: Let her pretend. She needs one person
who doesn’t know. If I held her, I would
have left bruises, if I undressed her, I would
have seen scars, so we never touched
& she never had to say she was dying.
We should hold each other more
while we are still alive, even if it hurts.
People really die of loneliness, skin hunger
the doctors call it. In a study on love,
baby monkeys were given a choice
between a wire mother with milk
& a wool mother with none. Like them,
I would choose to starve & hold the soft body.

I think I was that one friend to my mom. We would sit in the two matching chairs in her bedroom, watching bad tv–mostly The Real Housewives of New York–and good tv–the barefoot contessa–and laugh and talk, forgetting about how she was dying from stage four pancreatic cancer.

april 8/RUN

4.6 miles
to downtown
69 degrees
wind: 6 mph, gusts up to 30 mph

Not sure how much wind there was but I was running into all of it the whole way. It made it much harder. I stopped to walk several times but I still made it to downtown. Do I remember anything other than feeling sore and tired? The river was beautiful. I was able to make a satisfying shshshsh sound on the grit at the edge of the path. My back felt fine. I saw my shadow, running beside me. What a fabulous late afternoon. It is hard to believe that we are supposed to get over a foot of snow on Thursday.

Sitting by the open window writing this, I hear birds chirping and cooing and trilling. So I decided to look for a poem about birds and this is what I found:

Words are Birds
BY FRANCISCO X. ALARCÓN

words
are birds
that arrive
with books
and spring

they
love
clouds
the wind
and trees

some words
are messengers
that come
from far away
from distant lands

for them
there are
no borders
only stars
moon and sun

some words
are familiar
like canaries
others are exotic
like the quetzal bird

some can stand
the cold
others migrate
with the sun
to the south

some words
die
caged—
they’re difficult
to translate

and others
build nests
have chicks
warm them
feed them

teach them
how to fly
and one day
they go away
in flocks

the letters
on this page
are the prints
they leave
by the sea

april 7/RUN

3.25 miles
mississippi river road path, south/north
53 degrees/84% humidity
shorts again! too warm!

A beautiful morning. Sunny. Warm. Not too windy. Ran towards the falls instead of downtown. Tried to hang onto some thoughts about my vision diagnosis from 2016. What did I feel when the doctor told me I was losing my central vision? Relief, mostly. Finally I knew what was wrong with me. It wasn’t something I was making up and it wasn’t neurological (my big fear). Now that I knew I could deal with it. This relief lasted for a few months and then the doubt crept in as I wondered if my vision was really as bad as the doctor said it was or if my easy acceptance of the diagnosis was too easy. Then, I discovered that what I had been diagnosed with (Best’s disease) was not actually what I had. Instead, I had a rarer, more vague form of cone dystrophy–pinpointing the exact disease might not be possible, wouldn’t change anything and would involve annoying, costly test. I had a great thought about this just as I was starting my run, but then forgot it. I should have stopped to speak it into my phone. Something about knowing and not knowing, embracing the uncertainty of never really knowing and accepting that knowing exactly what my vision problem is won’t make a difference in my treatment (there is none) or the speed at which my central vision deteriorates. And, in fact, knowing is not possible. This not knowing is not ignorance–more like never knowing enough, having perpetually incomplete knowledge, the impossibility of KNOWING.

As I was trying to think about what word to use for this phenomenon, I remembered “bewilderment”–first read in Fanny Howe’s great essay of the same name. Here are a few other sources that I bookmarked way back in August about bewilderment (confusion, uncertain, unknowing, wonder):

And here’s a source I found today: Unknowing Lyric

While looking through my old journal, I found this beautiful poem:

april 6/RUNBIKE

1.75 miles
basement, treadmill

30 minutes
basement, bike stand

Wanted to run outside this morning but it kept raining. Of course, now that I’m done, it has stopped. Still gloomy and wet. But my back doesn’t hurt and I feel good and I found a new show that I love watching–Father Brown–and I’m in the midst of an exciting writing project and open water swimming is only 2 months away, so I’m fine.

I love my poetry class. Amazingly, I feel totally fine about not being very good at analyzing poems or giving other people feedback about their poems. There is so much I don’t know or I can’t quite get (yet) about line breaks and rhythm and ending lines on strong words or soft words. The trick for me is to study these techniques without having them take over my writing.

Introduction to Poetry
BY BILLY COLLINS

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

april 4/BIKE

basement, bike stand
30 minutes

I wanted to run today but decided to rest my back and bike in the basement. I suppose I could have biked outside but its only 42 and windy and I’m not ready to take my bike off of its stand yet. I was planning to write about how I’m struggling today, worrying about my back and what might be wrong with it, but then I remembered: Taking a walk with Delia, I heard a wedge of geese (more on wedge in a moment) flying above me. Dozens or more. So high in the overcast sky. Then I heard another, smaller, group. So cool to watch. So exciting to see because they signal warmer weather.

About wedge: I was wondering what to call the group of geese so I googled it and found this wonderful answer:

If you come upon geese on land, you would refer to them as a gaggle. Gaggle, as we learned last time, was also recorded by Juliana Berners in the Book of Saint Albans to describe a group of swans. This is much the same as we would use ‘herd’ for a group of cows or deer. We can also refer to a group of geese on the ground as a herd and a corps.

If the geese are on water, they are a plump.

If in flight, geese are referred to as a skein. The online resource Dictionary.com defines skein as: a flock of geese, ducks, or the like, in flight.

A skein of geese would be a random in pattern in the sky – perhaps small clusters. If geese are in flight, and flying in a V formation, you would refer to them as a wedge, probably inspired by the shape.

Collective Nouns for Birds Near and Far

This small moment of beauty/joy/distraction/wonder reminds me of one of my favorite Robert Frost poems:

Dust of Snow
BY ROBERT FROST

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

And, this idea of small delights, reminds me of Ross Gay’s new book of essays (which I just requested from the library): The Book of Delights. Thinking about of all of this has made me feel so much better–less anxious, energized–and I have decided that finding ways to avoid darker thoughts by marking and meditating on the joys is what works for me. Maybe I should buy the Ross Gay book so I don’t have to wait a month or two for it to be returned? While I try to decide, I’ll read his essay in the The Paris Review, Loitering is Delightful.

april 3/RUN

3 miles
mississippi river road path, north/south
49 degrees
bare legs!

Took a few days off of running. Partly because my back was sore, partly because we took a mini trip to Duluth. All the snow is melted, all the paths are clear. Listened to my playlist and didn’t think about much. Looked down and noticed the white sand beach way below the path, between the lake street bridge and the greenway. I will have to explore it this spring. Wore shorts and wasn’t too cold. No gloves. No buff. Next Monday the high is supposed to be 71!

Encountered this poem a few weeks ago and wanted to remember it. Love the repetition and the exploration of metaphors and similes.

Neighbor Sweeping His Porch
Keith Leonard

He sweeps, and gray plumes of pollen
cloud waist-high behind him.
My neighbor sweeps the porch as slowly
as a gondolier rows at sunset.
His tie is loose at the neck
but still fastened to his shirt by a clip.
At the edge of the porch, he sweeps
in quick spurts like a telemarketer
before the customer quits.
He sweeps possibly without thinking.
He wears the crown of forgetting.
His kingdom is the name
of that actress in that movie.
He has swept so long
he is last September’s sunlight.
His broom replaces the wet leaves
with order, a second thing like snow.

march 29/RUN

3.2 miles
mississippi river road path, south/north
43 degrees

Turned right instead of left and ran in the afternoon instead of the morning today. Felt harder. Hotter. A few more people out on the trail. Stopped at the halfway point to take off my sweatshirt then spent the second half of the run fiddling with the sleeves tied around my waist. Listened to headphones so I didn’t hear my shuffling feet or trickling water or barking dogs, chirping birds, whirring wheels or anything else.


march 28/RUN

4 miles
mississippi river road path, north/south
41 degrees

Today I tried to listen. Some sounds I heard: the scratching of a metal rake on the bare pavement; a buzzing plane up above; birds chirping and cooing–any cawing? I can’t remember; the crunch crunch crunch of my striking feet on the gritty path; another plane roaring; dead leaves shuffling in the wind; car wheels whooshing. Then I forgot to listen and marveled at the earthy brown gorge. Why do I find this color so appealing? Looked through the floodplain forest all the way to the sliver of river. Greeted the Welcoming Oaks. Noticed a number of branches gone–must have been what the Minneapolis parks crew was doing in January with their chainsaws. Said good morning to the Daily Walker towards the end of my run. Chanted triplets. Wanted to stop and take a break at the 2 mile mark but didn’t. Decided that 40 degrees and slightly overcast are some of my favorite conditions for running.

I’m reading Craig Morgan Teicher’s lovely book, We Begin In Gladness: How Poetry Progresses and I just found this line:

It’s my puzzle to work out, and yours, and Szybist’s too, and where those bubbles overlap, where one interior meets another, and where inner meets outer, is poetry (29).

Again, the inner and outer. Where inner meets outer. Inside outside. Inner weather outer weather.

Lately I’ve been briefly waking up at 5:30 and then going back to sleep until 6:15 when the alarm goes off. This up too early then back to sleep again produces some vivid dreams. This morning, I dreamed about my mom, before she was sick. She was healthy and happy and wearing just the right shade of bright orange pants and red lipstick. We looked at each other and smiled. I woke up happy, thinking about how wonderful it was to see her again, especially in bright orange pants.

Are you sewing, Mom?
Angeline Schellenberg

my mother asks as
Grandma twines
her fingers through hospital sheets.
I’m planting marigolds,
she answers with a childish
grin. And tomorrow
you and I will bake
meat buns for Christmas.

I love this little poem that I discovered the other day.

march 26/RUN

5.1 miles
franklin loop
39 degrees
clear path!

Finally, after more than 2 months I was able to run the franklin loop! I checked and the last time I ran it was on January 7th. A wonderful morning for a run. It felt much warmer than 39 degrees. Sunny. I watched my shadow in front of me. Checked out the floodplain forest below me. Listened to the satisfying sounds of gritty sand crunching under my feet and the cars slowly approaching on the road from behind. Noticed several squirrels, too busy to dart out in front of me. Recited a few triplet melodies (raspberry/strawberry/chocolate) and a line or two from “Sick” by Shel Silverstein (I cannot go to school today/said little Peggy Ann McKay). Crossed the Franklin bridge and ran on a sidewalk stained white from salt. Glanced down at the East River Flats and a giant rock, almost taller than me, lodged in the grass between the walking and biking path. Made note of the terrible condition of the road between the Franklin bridge and the railroad trestle. So many potholes! Wondered if the eagle that used to perch on a branch near the marshall/lake street bridge was back (they weren’t). Decided to walk up the steps instead of running up the hill and crossing the road at the spot where a runner was hit by a car and killed two years ago.

Since it’s Robert Frost’s 145th birthday, I thought I’d post my favorite Frost poem. I read it in high school and I think it was one of the first poems I ever memorized. It helped me through my injury two summers ago.

Out, Out–
Robert Frost, 1874 – 1963

The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside them in her apron
To tell them “Supper.” At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
He saw all spoiled. “Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

march 25/RUN

4.1 miles
mississippi river road path, north/south
99% clear walking path

Colder, causing an occasional slippery spot. Still felt like spring. Again, bright sun. Bare, brown ground. Open paths. Was able to mostly run on the walking path for the first time in months. I enjoyed the run but was always worried about my back. It didn’t hurt while I was running, but it’s been sore off and on for a few months. I don’t remember hearing the grit on the path or any rustling leaves. Too cold for dripping water. I think the most memorable thing about my run was the river. Dozens of ice floes slowly moving down the river. Beautiful and calming. At the halfway point, I stopped to watch their graceful progression towards Minnehaha Falls. As I ran back I wondered about our relative speeds–mine and the ice.

Layers: too many! 2 shirts, a vest, gloves, a buff, running tights, visor. The gloves came off after mile 1. My orange shirt, after mile 2. Pretty soon, I’ll be wearing shorts.

Shedding Skin
Harryette Mullen, 1953

Pulling out of the old scarred skin
(old rough thing I don’t need now
I strip off
slip out of
leave behind)

I slough off deadscales
flick skinflakes to the ground

Shedding toughness
peeling layers down
to vulnerable stuff

And I’m blinking off old eyelids
for a new way of seeing

By the rock I rub against
I’m going to be tender again



march 23/RACE

Hot Dash 5K
26:10
river front Minneapolis
30 degrees

Most of the races I run these days are on this route. St. Anthony Main to the Plymouth bridge, south on the West River Road, Stone Arch Bridge. A nice route, even if the cobblestones at St. Anthony Main are terrible. Avoided the many potholes and missing cobblestones, but ran into a big orange cone. Orange is one of the colors I struggle to see. Just happy I didn’t fall or injure myself. Perfect weather for a race–sunny, hardly any wind, cool but not too cold. Didn’t even consider running with headphones, which is funny because for the first few years of running I couldn’t imagine running without them. Don’t remember hearing any conversations or exuberant cheering. There were some drums banging near the Stone Arch Bridge. About 2.5 miles in there was a hill that I hated. Then another hill. Then, thankfully, the finish. I never wanted to stop and walk, but I was glad to be done.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BvWuWhXFmsa/

march 22/RUN

3.2 miles
mississippi river road path, south/north
41 degrees
feels like spring!

We are more than midway through the Great Melt of ’19 and everything is starting to feel springy. Sunshine. Warm air. Brown ground. Even though it’s only 41 degrees it still felt warm enough to be in short sleeves for the second half of my run. It’s been a long time since my arms have had direct contact with the sun. Slowly, I’m losing layers. The river was completely open. The path, clear. I went to the right instead of the left today so I didn’t see the Daily Walker or the Man in Black. Encountered a few dogs and their humans. Some bikers. A runner in shorts and a tank top. At least, I think he was wearing a tank top–it was the color of his flesh, so it was hard to tell. I don’t remember hearing much as I ran–a few voices, approaching me from behind. I wondered if they were running or biking (they were biking). And some kids having fun at the playground. I don’t remember dripping or airplanes overhead or the hum of traffic on the other side of the river or grit crunching under my feet or my heavy breathing or crows cawing. Forgot to think about anything else but how beautiful it was and how my back was a little sore. Someday soon, I should record myself talking as I run or give myself something to try and think about.

addendum: I almost forgot about the black glove I saw lying on the edge of the path looking forgotten. Why is it always black? How long has it been there–was it buried under the snow or lost today? Is it missed? Was it dropped right on the spot where I saw it or had it traveled from somewhere else, carried by the snow? Did a runner lose it? A walker? At night? In the morning? During a snowstorm? So many questions!

I’ve started checking out Poetry Daily every day. Last week, I discovered the poem, Hearing Loss by Noah Balding. They cannot hear the human voice, but only other, peripheral sounds. This reminds me of my vision problems and my inability to see faces.

march 20/RUN

4 miles
mississippi river road path, north/south
38 degrees
99% clear path

The first day of spring! The snow continues to melt, the path continues to get clearer. Listened to my playlist so I didn’t hear any birds or melting snow or gabbing geese. Ran faster. Smiled more. Felt overheated–too many layers. Sometimes the sun was out, sometimes it wasn’t. Never enough for me to see my shadow. Everything is still brown. No green yet. Definitely no flowers. Hopefully no more snow.

Before going out for my run, worked on a poem I’m doing about vision and my inability to see when/if people are trying to make contact with me. Mostly I can see people’s eyes–at least that they have them and the whites and the pupils. But I can’t see when the pupils move, when they shift, expand, contract. So I can’t always tell when people are looking at me. It makes reading people difficult.

As I’ve been think/write/research more on vision, I’ve encountered some interesting stuff, including a few articles about Emily Dickinson and how her temporary vision problems influenced some of her poetry, like this poem:

Before I got my eye put out – (336)
BY EMILY DICKINSON

Before I got my eye put out –
I liked as well to see
As other creatures, that have eyes –
And know no other way –

But were it told to me, Today,
That I might have the Sky
For mine, I tell you that my Heart
Would split, for size of me –

The Meadows – mine –
The Mountains – mine –
All Forests – Stintless stars –
As much of noon, as I could take –
Between my finite eyes –

The Motions of the Dipping Birds –
The Morning’s Amber Road –
For mine – to look at when I liked,
The news would strike me dead –

So safer – guess – with just my soul
Opon the window pane
Where other creatures put their eyes –
Incautious – of the Sun –

march 19/RUN

4.25 miles
mississippi river road path, north/south
39 balmy degrees
1% super slick barely frozen slippery spots, 5% puddles

Officially, spring starts this week. And, unlike many past Minnesota Marches, it feels like spring is starting too. Still barely reaching the 40s. Still snow on the ground. But birds and bright sun, more melting snow and a vague sense of warmth/warmish air is all around. A good run but one tinged with some worry. Scott has arthritis and unless he’s able to change the way he runs, he might have to stop running altogether. Most likely he won’t be able to run the marathon. I am sad for him and for the possibility of not running with him. And worried, wondering if the marathon might be too much for my body too. Before my run, I felt every ache–in my lower back, my right calf and knee, my left foot–more acutely.

What do I remember from the run? Slip-sliding over barely visibly shiny slick spots. Hearing the birds. Marveling at the river’s surface shimmering in the sun. Watching my shadow run ahead of me. Getting passed by someone running much faster than me and watching their graceful gait. Thinking about my form, trying to keep my feet straight and my arms even. Listening to the dripping and melting. Feeling too warm. Encountering a runner in shorts. Tried to think about what I had been pondering pre-run after finding a fun poem by Sharon Bryan: the body and the soul. What is their relationship and what is a soul? Walt Whitman says the body is the soul and Michel Foucault claims the soul is the prison of the body. And here’s how Bryan imagines it:

Body and Soul
BY SHARON BRYAN

They grow up together
but they aren’t even fraternal

twins, they quarrel a lot
about where to go and what

to do, the body complains
about having to carry

the soul everywhere as if
it were some helpless cripple,

and the soul snipes that it can go
places the body never dreamed of,

then they quarrel over which one of them
does the dreaming, but the truth is,

they can’t live without each other and
they both know it, anima, animosity,

the diaphragm pumps like a bellows
and the soul pulls out all the stops—

sings at the top of its lungs, laughs
at its little jokes, it would like

to think it has the upper hand
and can leave whenever it wants—

but only as long as it knows
the door will be unlocked

when it sneaks back home before
the sun comes up, and when the body

says where have you been, the soul
says, with a smirk, I was at the end

of my tether, and it was, like a diver
on the ocean floor or an astronaut

admiring the view from outside
the mother ship, and like them

it would be lost without its air
supply and protective clothing,

the body knows that and begins
to hum, I get along without you

very well, and the soul says, Listen
to that, you can’t sing worth a lick

without me, they’ll go on bickering
like this until death do them part—

and then, even if the soul seems to float
above the body for a moment,

like a flame above a candle, pinch
the wick and it disappears.

Love these lines: the diaphragm pumps like a bellows/
and the soul pulls out all the stops— /sings at the top of its lungs, laughs/at its little jokes

I tried to think about the body and the soul while I ran, but I mostly thought about my body only: my knees, back, shoulders, toes, feet. Were they sore? Was I landing on my foot correctly? How’s my right knee? Are my shoulders too tense?

The other day, I wrote about running in the fog. Here’s a poem someone posted on twitter this morning. It’s from The New Yorker, May 2012.

Confessions of a Nature Lover
By Bob Hicok

Back then I was going steady
with fog, who could dance
like no one’s business, I threw her over
for a leaf that one day fluttered
first her shadow then her whole life
into my hand, that’s a lot
of responsibility and a lot
of relatives, this leaf
and that leaf and all the other leaves
hung around, I told her
I needed space, which was true,
without it I’d only be a soul,
and no one’s sure that wisp
is real, that’s why we say
of real estate, location, location,
location, and of speech,
locution, locution, locution,
and of live, yes, yes, yes,
I am on my knees, will you have me,
world?

So much to think about in this poem. For now, I’m just thinking about his reference to fog. After running in the fog last Thursday, I did some free writing around fog and my log entry. Here’s a draft of a poem:

march 14/4 miles/heavy fog/43 degrees

Liquid-y layers
drip drop drape

the Forest’s floor. Fog
reaches Road’s ribbon,

the river’s edge.
Everything is enveloped.

Shrouded. Cocooned. Consumed.
Light, devoured.

Only a single bike lamp carves out
a bright circle in the thick air

while several sirens sing
an invisible song.


march 16/RUN

3 miles
mississippi river road path, north/south
25 degrees
20% super slick thin ice covered

Birds! Sun! Almost clear path! 50 degree weather next week! Finally. This last month of winter has been rough. Too much snow. Too much cold. Too much ice. It’s still cold. And there’s still snow and ice. But spring is coming someday soon. My run today felt good. Hardly any wind. Long stretches of clear path. Heard some trickling water and lots of disembodied voices. Behind me on the path. Below me in the gorge. The river was completely open, sparkling in the sunlight. Do I remember anything from the run? Taking my gloves off around mile 2. Pushing up my sleeves too. Feeling my ponytail flapping as I picked up the pace. Running/gliding/sliding over a short stretch of sheer ice between the lake street bridge and the greenway. Passing lots of pedestrians.

My poem for today is WS Merwin’s Sight. He died yesterday. A wonderful poet. I love the form of this poem. 5 quatrains. Each one starting with a one syllable word.

SIGHT
W. S. Merwin


Once
a single cell
found that it was full of light
and for the first time there was seeing

when
I was a bird
I could see where the stars had turned
and I set out on my journey

high
in the head of a mountain goat
I could see across a valley
under the shining trees something moving

deep
in the green sea
I saw two sides of the water
and swam between them

I
look at you
in the first light of the morning
for as long as I can

march 15/RUN

2.75 miles
basement, treadmill
100% icy sidewalks outside

Back to the treadmill today. After the Great Melt of 2019–9 inches of snow gone in just 2 days!–it got cold again. Too icy on the sidewalks for me. Maybe someday the treadmill will inspire great thoughts or provide awesome runner’s highs, but not today. That’s okay. I’m just happy to be moving.

Last night I had my first advanced poetry class. The best! I am so excited to be taking it and to get to be with other writers. In our first session, we read and discussed Naomi Shihab Nye’s prose poem Yellow Glove about a girl who loses one of her yellow gloves. I was reminded of a little poem I wrote about a black glove that I used to see running south on the river road:

black glove

for the past month
every time I run south
on the river road I greet
one black glove
fitted over a branch
upright and open
waving hello.
where did the runner go
who left this here?
don’t they miss it? and
why not leave the pair
together to keep each other company?
maybe the glove isn’t saying hello
but pleading with me to stop
to listen to its lament
to look for its partner.
someday I’d like to find the trail
with the right one—
the one that isn’t left
on the path I run regularly—
and rescue it
reuniting it with its twin.

I’d like to do more with this idea of abandoned gloves and other items of clothing on the trail. What might they be doing when we’re not looking?

Here’s a poem I encountered this morning. What a poem. I love her use of the abecedarian form. So many wonderful lines: “wherever he stops, kids grow like gourds from women’s bellies””some white god came floating across the ocean” and “You better hope you never see angels on the rez. If you do, they’ll be marching you off to
Zion or Oklahoma, or some other hell they’ve mapped out for us.”

Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation
BY NATALIE DIAZ

Angels don’t come to the reservation.
Bats, maybe, or owls, boxy mottled things.
Coyotes, too. They all mean the same thing—
death. And death
eats angels, I guess, because I haven’t seen an angel
fly through this valley ever.
Gabriel? Never heard of him. Know a guy named Gabe though—
he came through here one powwow and stayed, typical
Indian. Sure he had wings,
jailbird that he was. He flies around in stolen cars. Wherever he stops,
kids grow like gourds from women’s bellies.
Like I said, no Indian I’ve ever heard of has ever been or seen an angel.
Maybe in a Christmas pageant or something—
Nazarene church holds one every December,
organized by Pastor John’s wife. It’s no wonder
Pastor John’s son is the angel—everyone knows angels are white.
Quit bothering with angels, I say. They’re no good for Indians.
Remember what happened last time
some white god came floating across the ocean?
Truth is, there may be angels, but if there are angels
up there, living on clouds or sitting on thrones across the sea wearing
velvet robes and golden rings, drinking whiskey from silver cups,
we’re better off if they stay rich and fat and ugly and
’xactly where they are—in their own distant heavens.
You better hope you never see angels on the rez. If you do, they’ll be marching you off to
Zion or Oklahoma, or some other hell they’ve mapped out for us.

march 14/RUN

4 miles
mississippi river road path, north/south
43! degrees
100% soaked socks 25% deep puddles

Decided I was done running in the basement. I needed to get outside and be by the gorge and I didn’t care that everything was saturated with snow or ice or cold water. I’m very glad I went even if my socks got soaked before I left my block. My right shoe made this really cool squishing sound every time I took a step. Too bad I didn’t get a recording of the noise. Everything everywhere was so wet. Dripping. Gushing. Trickling. Seeping. Even the air. Almost 100% humidity. And the fog–wow. Thick. The river looked so beautiful with the fog hovering above the water that I actually gasped as I ran above it. Got to say good morning to the Man in Black. Encountered only one biker, their bike light cutting through the thick air. Heard some sirens but couldn’t see the flashing lights until they were almost right beside me. It started raining around the 2 mile point. A light rain that I hardly noticed. What I remember most about the run: the haunting, hovering fog

Fog
BY CARL SANDBURG

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

I do also remember encountering 2 dogs with their human, walking in the rain.

The Rainwalkers
Denise Levertov

An old man whose black face
shines golden-brown as wet pebbles
under the streetlamp, is walking two mongrel dogs of dis-
proportionate size, in the rain,
in the relaxed early-evening avenue.

The small sleek one wants to stop,
docile to the imploring soul of the trashbasket,
but the young tall curly one
wants to walk on; the glistening sidewalk
entices him to arcane happenings.

Increasing rain. The old bareheaded man
smiles and grumbles to himself.
The lights change: the avenue’s
endless nave echoes notes of
liturgical red. He drifts

between his dogs’ desires.
The three of them are enveloped –
turning now to go crosstown – in their
sense of each other, of pleasure,
of weather, of corners,
of leisurely tensions between them
and private silence.

Love the last sentence: “The three of them are enveloped–turning now to go crosstown–in their sense of each other, of pleasure, of weather, of corners, or leisurely tensions between them and private silence.” Enveloped. Such a better word than surrounded or consumed or covered or layered. In what was I enveloped today above the gorge?

march 13/RUN

2.5 miles
basement, treadmill
100% huge puddles hiding invisible slick spots outside

Happy to have the treadmill again today but disappointed in the weather. As Scott pointed out when I complained, it could be worse. Farther west today in the Plains and Denver winter storm Ulmer–yes, that’s what they’ve named it–is hitting. A nasty blizzard. Even so, the conditions here suck. We have flood warnings. Rain + melting snow + clogged sewer drains = yuck. So dreary to look out of my upstairs window and see a grayish brownish sludgy soup on the street. Managed to walk the dog for one block and almost fell at least 3 times. Deep puddles hiding sneaky slick spots. Didn’t think about much on the treadmill. Just stared at the letters on a box on a ledge in front of me and listened to my running playlist. Well, I did think about how much faster I thought I was running than the treadmill or my watch say. Also wondered how the gorge was doing today.

My poem for today comes from Didi Jackson. I heard it on Tracy K. Smith’s wonderful podcast, The Slowdown. It’s called Listen, which is something I’ve been working on doing ever since I was diagnosed with a degenerative eye disease in 2016. It’s even more important now since I found out from my eye doctor on Monday that my central vision has gotten worse. In my left eye, my central vision is 98% gone. The 2% remaining is in the very center and is almost gone too. I saw it on a scan of my retina–a pale yellow dot in a sea of darkish grayish black. My right eye is a little better. Only 70% totally gone. My doctor’s prediction: My central vision will be totally destroyed within the next 5 years. His suggestion: “Get your hearing checked. You’re going to need it.” So, I will listen. I read a tip on a low vision site for how not to spill when you’re filling up a cup: Listen. You can hear when the cup is full. I’ll have to practice that.

Listen
by Didi Jackson

Like a hundred gray ears
the river stones are layered

in a pile near the shed where mourning
doves slow their peck and bobble to listen

to a chorus of listening.
Small buds on the lilac perk up.

A cardinal’s torpedoed call comes
in slow waves of four,

round after round. It’s a love call;
a call to make him known to himself.

The stones listen harder,
decipher the song; attempt

to offer back its echo.
But fail.

This is not a poem of coming Spring.
This is a poem well aware

that gray flesh is dead flesh.
All of the ripe listening

comes at a cost. The first
sky is in all skies.

The first song
is in all songs.

march 12/RUN

2.5 miles
basement, treadmill
100% cold, gloomy, icy rain outside

Scott finally decided he was over this winter. So he bought a treadmill. I hope I don’t have to use it very often, but it was nice today. Give me 15 below and blowing snow. I’ll go running. But freezing drizzle, blustery wind, jagged ice rutted paths, and slippery sidewalks? Nope. Too dangerous. And miserable. What a mess outside! And so dreary.

Cell
BY NAOMI COHN

The blood of language moves through the word cell from monk’s cell to prison cell to biological cell. I don’t know why a Braille cell is called a cell. I don’t know how many blood cells Louis Braille lost when the awl he was playing with as a small child slipped and injured his eye.

Red blood cells live some hundred days before they are worn out by their silent hustle—looping and looping, pounded through the heart’s chambered cathedral, rushing out to the farthest reaches of the body with the good news of oxygen, squeezing single file along capillaries, like anxious deer probing their tracks through the woods. Rushing, silent, looping the circuits of the body. Again, again, again. Load iron. Dump iron. Load dump squeeze hustle.

Red blood cells pushed through the capillaries that pushed through my 
retinas. They broke loose to run a green swarm in the corral of my eye. But that is history. Today cells still push through the capillaries fenced off by my calloused fingerprint. This one that I run over the Braille cell, the pattern of bumps.

—

A red blood cell is measured in microns. A solitary prison cell is measured in feet. Six feet by nine feet or less. I don’t know what the unit of measure is for how living in solitary changes a person. We know that living in a confined space, without access to the long view or landscape, changes the eye. The eye, for lack of practice, loses its ability to make out what lies in the distance. I don’t have a unit of measure for what this does to the heart.

—

A Braille cell is measured in spaces in a grid—two across by three down—that can be filled with a raised dot or bump. Different combinations of dots represent different letters, punctuation, symbols, shorthand.

—

The oldest cell I find in the dictionary is the monastic cell, a place for contemplation. From the concealed place where wine was stored. As in cellar. I find Braille contemplative. I touch my index finger to a bumpy piece of paper. My hand advances slowly left to right, the touch receptors in my finger triggered by the uneven contact of paper and skin. Messages run along nerves, finger-to-brain, brain-to-finger. Cognition sizzles. Mind notices this feels different than the pathway of sound in ear to auditory processing. Listening pulls me out into the world in an infinity of directions. Touching my reading educates me on my exact location in the world, feet in shoes, weight of foot on ground, weight of bones and flesh in chair.


march 11/RUN

3.2 miles
mississippi river road path, north/south
24 degrees
65% snow-covered
25% rough, ice shard covered

Oh beautiful sun! It seemed much warmer than 24 degrees. Too bad it snowed a heavy, wet snow this weekend that melted and then refroze in sharp, jagged ruts or almost refroze in glassy, slippery surfaces on the path. So treacherous! I slipped a lot, but never fell. The hardest part was navigating the sidewalks for the 4 blocks to the river. Once on the river road path, it was easier. Some bare pavement and only a few stretches of jagged ice. It is very difficult to notice anything or think about anything or sink into a deeper layer of connection with the world when you have to focus so much attention on avoiding ice shards or mini ice rinks or deceptive puddles that are deeper than you think or slicker than you think. I did hear the geese honking. Smelled some almost burnt toast. Saw that the river was open along the east shore. No Daily Walker or Man in Black. Did see the older woman who walks with ski poles and a few speedy runners. A dog and its human. A bike–can’t remember if it was a fat tire.

The Chairs That No One Sits In
BY BILLY COLLINS

You see them on porches and on lawns
down by the lakeside,
usually arranged in pairs implying a couple

who might sit there and look out
at the water or the big shade trees.
The trouble is you never see anyone

sitting in these forlorn chairs
though at one time it must have seemed   
a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.

Sometimes there is a little table
between the chairs where no one   
is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.

It might be none of my business,
but it might be a good idea one day
for everyone who placed those vacant chairs

on a veranda or a dock to sit down in them
for the sake of remembering
whatever it was they thought deserved

to be viewed from two chairs   
side by side with a table in between.
The clouds are high and massive that day.

The woman looks up from her book.
The man takes a sip of his drink.
Then there is nothing but the sound of their looking,

the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird
then another, cries of joy or warning—
it passes the time to wonder which.

I want to place my deck chairs on my deck and look out at the tree down the alley and try to hear the sound of me looking. What does that sound like? Also, I wonder, are the chairs forlorn? Maybe they are relieved to not have the burden of some human’s butt sitting heavily on them?

march 8/RUN

3.1 miles
mississippi river road path, north/south
24 degrees
75% snow-covered

Sun! Sun! Sun! Birds. Warmer air. Melting ice. Impending snowstorms. Soft, shifting, slick snow. A gaggle of gabbing geese. Good mornings exchanged with the man in black. 5 seconds of bare pavement–a jagged strip in the middle of the path. Ran without headphones. What did I hear? The geese, my ponytail gently hitting my jacket. What did I think about? How draining it was to run on the path, slipping in the snow. How much nicer it will be once the path is clear. Don’t remember smelling anything–no burnt toast drifting down from the grill on lake street.

Thinking again about layers. After a winter of double shirts and double running tights, I’m ready to have less of them. What freedom! But what layers can we never lose?

march 7/RUN

3.2 miles
mississippi river road path, north/south
95% snow-covered
16 degrees/feels like 16

Wow, the birds really think it’s spring. So chatty! I guess nobody told them we’re getting a foot of snow this weekend. Didn’t wear my yaktrax, which was a big mistake. The path was extra snowy because the plows had come through again, moving out more snow and making little mountains in the process. Greeted the Daily Walker and a few other runners. The soft, small mounds of snow all over the path made it much harder to move my legs. Listened to a playlist and felt a happy buzz around mile 2. Jamie Quatro’s first layer of the runner’s high (from “Running as Prayer”). I think I only get these highs when I’m listening to music–the ones where I feel intensely euphoric, invincible. Glanced at the river but I can’t remember what it looked like–was it open? I think I heard the geese honking at some point, but it was hard to tell with Fleetwood Mac singing about mountains and getting older and needing to change and snow-covered hills.

clothing layers: black shirt, orange shirt, vest, buff, gloves, visor. A rare occasion of wearing just the right amount of layers.

path layers: the smallest sliver of bare pavement near the lake street bridge, slick ice, hard packed snow, soft not quite settled or compressed snow, snow ledges on the edges of the path, big chunks of old snow, little mounds of snow scattered all around

I’ve been mentioning hearing geese honking a lot lately. Here are 2 very different poems that feature geese:

Wild Geese/mary oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Seasons/John Haag

1

Clouds so thick
they put down
roots

Young aspen
practising
quakers

Incoming geese
Periwinkle sign passports
brings remission with a V
of the blues

Feel the sun
butting the buds
open

Blossoms
Trout lilies nod expand
they know the sky
they know

Lilac
a scent by which
we mark the calendar

Weather report
May? showers
By all means and fresh rainbows
Yes. You May

2

Crickets
ventriloquists
of summer

Loon cries
increase the loneliness
of lakes

It’s untrue
They leave that that bats
to the silence make it darker
of owls

Morning warblers
refresh
the joy of hearing

Comes the hedgehog
And the bumblebee who lives on pins
non-aerodynamic and needles
existentialist

Horses stand
awash
in the setting sun

Anticipate
Nighthawks if you can
swoop the firefly’s flash
gathering the evening

3

Prophetic winds fill
the graveyard
with signposts

Then a scurry
of stormspurred
sparrows

A lamentation of geese
Hummingbird leaves in the early
to cruise dusk
the Carribean

Squirrels
pad
their acorn accounts

Cedar waxwing
Blue jay insists feathered scholar
it’s never too late knows his berries
to scold

Grackle
predicts a turn
for the worse

Flies buzz
in this cast-iron against the chill
autumn pane
stained with rust

4

Fly husks on sills
reflect
the year’s demise

Ptarmigan advises
“kuk-kuk-kuk
go back-goback”

Deer bundle
Coyote lingers in the laurel
to school us thickets
in survival

Fashionable spruce
knows how
to wear snow

Strange angels
Frostfeathers leave their three-D
lace shadows
the cabin glass

Cabin Fever
medicine
runs low

As
Days does
begin the woodpile

Oliver’s “Wild Geese” was one of the first poems I memorized while I was injured 2 summers ago. I still love it. Today is my introduction to John Haag–I did a search on poetry foundation for “geese.” So much fun. They only had one other poem of his online. It’s great too.

march 6/RUN

5.3 miles
franklin hill turn around
95% snow-covered
16 degrees/feels like 5

More sun. Blue sky. Birds chirping. But no snow melting. No bare pavement. No running on the walking path, dipping below the road, above the floodplain forest. Only running on the bike path right by the road. Wasn’t able to greet the Daily Walker because we were both running the same direction. Did get to say “good morning” to the man in black. Wow, he’s tall and lean and friendly. Heard the geese by the railroad trestle. Saw a nervous squirrel dart across the road and the path. Listened to my vest rustling as I moved. Sounded like a soft brush on a snare drum. Wore my yaktrax again. The path was slick and slushy, making it harder to fly, especially as I ran up the franklin hill. The river was mostly covered with snow but as I neared the franklin bridge, it opened up and I could see gaping black holes. Encountered 2 fat tires and a walker–a woman bundled up with a mask over her mouth. No dogs. No snow blowers or trucks backing up. No cars revving their engines or disembodied voices traveling up from the gorge. I don’t remember thinking about anything as I ran–did I?

layers: green shirt, orange shirt, black jacket, black vest, hood, buff, gloves–which came off around mile 2.

Almost forgot–at some point, it started snowing big fluffy flakes. In my face as I ran south. Running under the interstate bridge I looked up and thought I saw them swirling like static–was it too much sun in my eyes or did they actually look like that? Watched a truck barrel across the interstate and wondered: do they see this staticky snow too? I liked the snow–looking at it, but not when it landed on my eyelashes. By the time I was done running, I think the sun was out again. Can you believe we might get another foot of snow this weekend?

I recently discovered Linda Hogan. She is amazing. Here are two poems from her collection, Rounding the Human Corners:

from Eucalyptus

Some of the religious say the five senses are thieves
so let’s say I am stolen
and like the tree I can lose myself
layer after layer
all the way down to infinity
and that’s when the world has eyes and sees.
The whole world
loves this unlayered human.

The Way In

Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body.
Sometimes the way in is a song.
But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding,
and beauty.
To enter stone, be water.
To rise through hard earth, be plant
desiring sunlight, believing in water.
To enter fire, be dry.
To enter life, be food.

march 5/RUN

3.35 miles
mississippi river road path, north/south
10 degrees/feels like -3
100% snow-covered

Cold. Windy. Wonderful! It was tough running straight into the wind on the way out, but it felt great being outside above the gorge. The river is frozen over. The path is still completely covered. Wore my yaktrax today. Imagined that I was tall, strong. Wanted to think about how the cold felt but it was difficult because I had so many layers on.

layers: green shirt, orange shirt, black jacket, gray jacket, 2 pairs of running tights, 2 pairs of socks, buff, hood, visor, mittens, gloves

Didn’t feel the cold. Not even in my fingertips. Just warm. And encumbered by layers. Too many sleeves. Bulky, heavy gloves. A jacket zipped up too high. What will it feel like without the layers? Bare legs? Hopefully in a month or two I’ll get to remember.

Before heading outside, I read the article, Counting Feet: On Running and Poetic Meter. Love the ending line:

both running and poetry are ways of feeling, inside ourselves, that steady beat of being human—the marker that, yes, we are alive, and living, and carrying ourselves forward on ever-moving feet.

I can’t stop thinking about inside/outside and their complicated relationship.

Last night, I read a new poem that I don’t quite understand yet but with which I am enchanted. It’s about salt–which, by the way, is something I can feel right now on my face, caked post run. I am a salty sweater.

Salt
BY HUANG FAN
TRANSLATED BY HUANG FAN AND MARGARET ROSS

Grain by grain, salt’s frozen tears
Help me count history’s disasters
I can’t blame salt for telling food
You’re full of wounds

Salt misses the freedom of the ocean
Remembering waves, salt jumps into a soup
But it finds there only my reflected face
It hides by making itself too soft to chew

Sometimes, salt follows a cold sweat
Waking me from a nightmare
Dreamed blood tastes like salt
As if in human failure lay the silence of God

Having swum in the ocean
Salt considers soup a shallow pond
For salt, every meal is a jail

One day, an extra salty flavor
Makes me cough and cough
It feels like cold fish bones scraping my throat
Maybe it’s salt telling me
I’m going to prison in your body
Don’t ever forget who I am!

Translated from the Chinese

I almost forgot to mention that it was my mom’s birthday. If she were alive, she’d be 77. I imagine she wouldn’t have wanted to run today in this cold and wind, but she might have gone cross country skiing. Oh to be out in the wintery world with her, talking and laughing and admiring the snow decorating the trees!

march 4/RUN

4 miles
mississippi river road path, north/south
6 degrees/feels like -3
100% snow-covered

Totally snow-covered path. According to my log, the last time the path was half covered was feb 2 and 0% covered, jan 25. That’s a long time (for me at least) to be running on snow. There’s a possibility of another 7 inches on Saturday. Wow. The run started slow and I felt cold. Right around the time I reached the railroad trestle, when I was planning to turn around, I suddenly felt really good. So I kept going for 1/2 mile longer. Heard some geese–and saw them in a flash–somewhere between the lake street bridge and the railroad trestle. Also heard my feet crunching on the path. Watched my shadow. Didn’t see another runner or the Daily Walker. Did see one walker. No fat tires or skiers. Just me and the ice chunks scattered on the side of the path. The other day, when Scott and I were running, we saw a brown mouse unsuccessfully try to scale a mountain–probably 4 feet high–of snow. I wondered what happened to it. It scampered up the side but then fell backwards onto the path.

march 2/RUN

1 mile
mississippi river path, south/north
20 degrees
100% snow-covered

Was planning to run 3 miles with Scott but the path was terrible. Mushy, uneven, slick. Yuck!

From a Window
BY CHRISTIAN WIMAN

Incurable and unbelieving
in any truth but the truth of grieving,

I saw a tree inside a tree
rise kaleidoscopically

as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.
I pressed my face as close

to the pane as I could get
to watch that fitful, fluent spirit

that seemed a single being undefined
or countless beings of one mind

haul its strange cohesion
beyond the limits of my vision

over the house heavenwards.
Of course I knew those leaves were birds.

Of course that old tree stood
exactly as it had and would

(but why should it seem fuller now?)
and though a man’s mind might endow

even a tree with some excess
of life to which a man seems witness,

that life is not the life of men.
And that is where the joy came in.

march 1/RUN

3.35 miles
mississippi river road path, north/south
12 degrees/feels like 12 degrees
99% snow-covered

It’s March. Finally. The month of many birthdays.

Dear March – Come in – (1320)
Emily Dickinson, 1830 – 1886

Dear March – Come in –
How glad I am –
I hoped for you before –
Put down your Hat –
You must have walked –
How out of Breath you are –
Dear March, how are you, and the Rest –
Did you leave Nature well –
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me –
I have so much to tell –

I got your Letter, and the Birds –
The Maples never knew that you were coming –
I declare – how Red their Faces grew –
But March, forgive me –
And all those Hills you left for me to Hue –
There was no Purple suitable –
You took it all with you –

Who knocks? That April –
Lock the Door –
I will not be pursued –
He stayed away a Year to call
When I am occupied –
But trifles look so trivial
As soon as you have come

That blame is just as dear as Praise
And Praise as mere as Blame –

A wonderful run that helped my mood tremendously. Very gray–one of those pewter mornings that Margaret Atwood mentions in “February.” You could tell snow was coming. It started when I reached the turn around. Big flakes. No sharp daggers. Wore my yaktrax today and it helped. I hardly slipped at all. Still difficult to run in certain stretches where the snow was sloppy. Felt strong and free and grateful to be outside moving. Greeted the Daily Walker and a few other runners. No fat tires. Heard some geese honking near the lake street bridge. They like to congregate there.

from The Black Maria
Aracelis Girmay

Body of sight. Body of
breaths. Body of trying.

Beloved, to
day you eat,
today you bathe, today
you laugh

Today you walk,
today you read,
today you paint, my love,

Today you study stars,
today you write,
today you climb the stairs,

Today you run,
today you see,
today you talk,

You cut the basil
You sweep the floor

& as you chore, touch
the ankles & hairs of your befores
who look up from their work
in the field or at the chisel
to tell you in their ways: You Live!

What a poem! Here’s a blurb about Girmay’s book:

Taking its name from the moon’s dark plains, misidentified as seas by early astronomers, the black maria investigates African diasporic histories, the consequences of racism within American culture, and the question of human identity. Central to this project is a desire to recognize the lives of Eritrean refugees who have been made invisible by years of immigration crisis, refugee status, exile, and resulting statelessness. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry, Girmay’s newest collection elegizes and celebrates life, while wrestling with the notion of seeing beyond: seeing violence, seeing grace, and seeing each other better.

feb 28/RUN

5.1 miles
Franklin hill turn around
10 degrees/feels like -1
100% snow-covered

feels like: an ice rink then loose sand on the beach then too hard concrete; spring if you close your eyes so you can’t see the snow and you just feel the bright sun, hear all the birds warbling and cooing and chirping

Scott and I signed up this morning for the Twin Cities Marathon next October. It’s happening!

Even though the path was difficult–slippery, loose, hard–I had a good run. Ran 5 miles. I haven’t done that much since Jan 12th, when I ran a 10k. Very bright. Saw my shadow, her tassels fluttering in the wind. Looked down at the river: open water. Listened to my feet snapping on the path. Greeted the Daily Walker. Ran up the Franklin hill for the first time in a few weeks. Noticed how blue the sky was. So bright! Wore my sunglasses the entire time, wondering how much bluer the sky and the snow looked through these lenses. Was passed by a runner after the turn around. Such a beautiful gait. So relaxed and rhythmic. Gracefully bobbing up and down. I love watching a good runner’s feet as they rise and fall, up down, up down, up down. Started chanting my numbers again. First, 123/45 then 123/45 It’s interesting how much easier it was to get the rhythm straight when I was moving. Sitting here now at my computer, I’m struggling. After chanting numbers I added some words: mystery is solved/suspects are captured/Shaggy & Scooby/Velma too

On the final day of February, here are 2 poems entitled February:

February
BY JACK COLLOM

It is all kind of lovely that I know
what I attend here now the maturity of snow
has settled around forming a sort of time
pushing that other over either horizon and all is mine

in any colors to be chosen and
everything is cold and nothing is totally frozen

soon enough
the primary rough
erosion of what white fat it will occur
     stiff yellows O
beautiful beautifully austere
     be gotten down to, that much rash and achievement that
             would promote to, but

now I know my own red
network electrifying this welcome annual hush.

I must admit, after reading this poem–both out loud and in my head–many times, I still don’t understand these lines: “what white fat it will occur/stiff yellows O/beautiful beautifully austere/be gotten down to/that much each and achievement that would promote to” Guess I’ll have to read it a couple dozen more times–I like that he’s making me work for it. The confusion is a nice contrast to the pleasing/easy/comfortable/welcoming rhymes: know/snow, chosen/frozen/erosion

February
BY BILL CHRISTOPHERSEN

The cold grows colder, even as the days
grow longer, February’s mercury vapor light
buffing but not defrosting the bone-white
ground, crusty and treacherous underfoot.
This is the time of year that’s apt to put
a hammerlock on a healthy appetite,
old anxieties back into the night,
insomnia and nightmares into play;
when things in need of doing go undone
and things that can’t be undone come to call,
muttering recriminations at the door,
and buried ambitions rise up through the floor
and pin your wriggling shoulders to the wall;
and hope’s a reptile waiting for the sun.

Many February poems focused on signs of spring. I read one that featured the green tips (or leaves or something) of a crocus on Feb 28! Where is this magical land of flowers in February? Certainly not in Minnesota. I like my February poems bleak, bemoaning the endless winter, with barely any hope of spring ever coming.

feb 27/BIKE

30 minutes
bike stand

Snowed another 2.5 inches last night. Wow. So much snow. Thought about going out for a run but it feels like -2 and I already ran yesterday and the day before. So I biked and watched the Super League Triathlon Championships. Before biking, worked on adding words to the beats I created while running on Monday: 123/45, 123/45, 123/45, 123 and 54/321, 54/321, 54/321, 321. Decided to make them about the cold.

0 degrees/feels like -11

i.
Up from the gorge floor
Down from the gray sky
Under a jacket
Cold sharp air

Even through layers
it comes to linger
right on the surface
of warm skin

Suddenly shocking
jolting those deadened
deeply distracted
dazed and dumb

Sober up quickly!
Sharpen your senses!
Notice the river!
Smell! Hear! See!

ii.
Cold air heavy sky
Hard path muffled steps
Trees sing lullabies
Go to sleep.

Not sharp only soft
Dense thick covering
All thoughts frozen, stopped
Shhhhh. Hush. Dream.

Sink deep settle in
Dull numb blanketed
Wrapped in frigid air
Hibernate.

Took me a long time to select a poem for today. Finally decided on one about winter branches, which are some of my favorite things to study in winter.

Winter Branches
Margaret Widdemer

When winter-time grows weary, I lift my eyes on high
And see the black trees standing, stripped clear against the sky;

They stand there very silent, with the cold flushed sky behind,
The little twigs flare beautiful and restful and kind;

Clear-cut and certain they rise, with summer past,
For all that trees can ever learn they know now, at last;

Slim and black and wonderful, with all unrest gone by,
The stripped tree-boughs comfort me, drawn clear against the sky.

feb 26/RUN

3.3 miles
mississippi river road path, north/south
2 degrees/feels like -8
100% snow-covered

Snow again. All set to go, heading out the door, looked down at the sidewalk and it was white. What? Looked up at the sky: falling snow. Wasn’t expecting that. Oh well, went out for a run anyway, wondering what the people in the cars driving by were thinking about me running and slipping on the icy sidewalks, scaling tall, misshapen mounds of snow created by the snow plow. Listened to my playlist today, which was a nice distraction from the wet, sharp shards of snow hitting my face and settling on my eyelashes. Didn’t feel much wind, but the light snow was always in my face, coating the slightly unzipped part of my jacket and the tops of my gloves. Greeted the Daily Walker and a few other runners. Encountered at least 2 fat tires. Quickly glanced at the river. All I could see was grayish white, whiteish gray. Devoted a lot of attention to watching the path and avoiding big ice chunks or slick spots. Wanted to think about the cold today and how it feels but it was hard because I didn’t really feel that cold. Maybe because of all of the layers?

layers: green shirt, orange shirt, black jacket, gray jacket, 2 pairs of running tight, extra long light weight fish scale socks, shorter heavier dog paw socks, a buff, a hood, a visor, gloves, mittens, headphones

I don’t remember breathing in the cold deeply. And it wasn’t cold enough for the snot to freeze in my nose. My face burned a bit but my fingers were fine. So were my toes. I guess the thing I remember most about the cold is how it lingers. Taking off my running layers when I got home, my torso was very cold, so were my legs. Now, an hour later, I still feel cold.

Listening to a poem about winter by Mark Strand (Lines for Winter), I wrote a few phrases in my journal that I liked:

“gray falls from the air” “the dome of dark” “the tune your bones play” What tune do my bones play?

Yesterday I mentioned the rhythms I started chanting at the end of my run: 1 2 3/45 or 54/321. I wrote them in my journal and translated them into meter: 1 2 3/45 becomes an anapest/troche or unstressed unstressed stressed/stressed unstressed. This afternoon, as I look out my upstairs window–the half of it that isn’t yet blocked by packed snow on the porch roof–at the snow, I’ll try adding words to the beats.

My poem for today is a wonderful Ars Poetica (a poem about the art of poetry):

To the New Journal
Susan Rich

after W. S. Merwin

Let’s just listen—

before the spent words and the hidden nests
of sentences begin, before the musical count

of vowels and consonants, the ink

not yet slippery with wild grief
or souped-up grandeur.

I wish to arrange you—

with a few half-formed couplets—
inquiries without answers.

But what can we do? These mountains are still

young and rising, I write. Yet,
even the fields call to an orchestra of stars.

Even the birds sing to-do lists.

Even the birds sing to-do lists. Love this line.