Note from 2023: I wrote this entire page and published it before realizing that I had already written about this day last year in 2022. It’s fun to see my different takes on some of the same entries. Instead of combining them on one page, I’ve decided to keep both pages.
dec 4, 2017 / 5.25 miles / 45 degrees
On this day in 2017, I wrote about discovering the East River Flats. I ended the entry with an abecedarian poem:
Lower East River Parkway Trail
After seeing the paved path
Beckoning me from below, how
Could I resist? How could I not
Descend into the
East River
Flats on the St Paul side of the
Gorge? I
Had seen the steps near the Franklin bridge before but
Ignored them
Just running by, never needing to
Know where they went. Never
Looking down to the river but only across to
Minneapolis.
Never stopping—if
Only for a moment—to
Pose the
Question, what is beneath me on this side of the
River?
Surely something more than
Trees and
Under that, sand and dirt and dead leaves, dwells below my
View across? I had never asked but on Monday, I looked down at the
Water of the Mississippi and saw a flash of something
uneXpected—a paved path
Yearning to be traveled,
Zigzagging through the floodplain—and suddenly I wanted to know everything.
A first draft, for sure, with some try-hard lines. Yet, there are a few moments, especially the line about the question never asked and the ending, that have potential and that I’d like to return to. I like how abecedarian poems can help you find a way in.
dec 4, 2020 / 2.5 miles / 38 degrees
A poem and then an accompanying “about this poem” that is also a poem is such a cool idea. I would like to bring some of this into one of my poems.
Richard Siken is the Best
I think it was last year that poets.org began including an “About this poem” author’s note with the poem-of-the-day. I find them helpful and interesting and always look at them after my initial reading of the poem. Richard Aiken’s “About this poem” note for today’s “Real Estate” is the best, most delightful one I’ve ever read. It offers an explanation that helped me to (start to) understand the poem, which is great, but it also offers itself up as another poem to place beside the first one. How cool to turn the note into a poem! I want to experiment with doing this, especially since I am so resistant to offering explanations for what I’m doing (even as I feel I should and/or long to).
Real Estate/ Richard Siken
My mother married a man who divorced her for money. Phyllis, he would say, If you don’t stop buying jewelry, I will have to divorce you to keep us out of the poorhouse. When he said this, she would stub out a cigarette, mutter something under her breath. Eventually, he was forced to divorce her. Then, he died. Then she did. The man was not my father. My father was buried down the road, in a box his other son selected, the ashes of his third wife in a brass urn that he will hold in the crook of his arm forever. At the reception, after his funeral, I got mean on four cups of Lime Sherbet Punch. When the man who was not my father divorced my mother, I stopped being related to him. These things are complicated, says the Talmud. When he died, I couldn’t prove it. I couldn’t get a death certificate. These things are complicated, says the Health Department. Their names remain on the deed to the house. It isn’t haunted, it’s owned by ghosts. When I die, I will come in fast and low. I will stick the landing. There will be no confusion. The dead will make room for me.
ABOUT THIS POEM
“I had a stroke and forgot almost everything. My handwriting was big and crooked and I couldn’t walk. I slept a lot. I made lists, a working glossary. Meat. Blood. Floor. Thunder. I tried to understand what these things were and how I was related to them. Thermostat. Agriculture. Cherries Jubilee. Metamodernism. I understand North, but I struggle with left. Describing the world is easier than finding a place in it. Doorknob. Flashlight. Landmark. Yardstick.”
—Richard Siken
I want to experiment with adding these notes to my mood ring poems–and maybe my earlier Snellen chart ones too. Is that too much?
dec 4, 2021 / 3.75 miles / 33 degrees
Currently (dec 4, 2023), I’m thinking/writing about the ground and writing from the ground up, feet first. It might be fun to add in the refrain, Back to the rough ground!, a few times in my haunts poem/s.
All I remember from my run is thinking about how running on uneven ground can be good for my muscles, making them work more to find balance and stability….
Rereading the bit above about the dirt trail being good for muscles, a phrase from Wittgenstein popped into my head: rough ground. The need for rough ground you can feel and dig into, as opposed to smooth ice that you slide across with no traction. I have written about this before on this log — about the ice, that is. What can I do with it?
We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!
from Philosophical Investigations
dec 4, 2022 / 2.2 miles / 34 degrees
In this entry, I want to remember and revisit my summary of Ross Gay’s ideas about joy and my desire to connect with the world — this connection is an important part of my experience “haunting” the gorge:
To define joy, he begins by saying what it’s not: it’s not sparking joy or capitalist-joy-as-acquiring-better-stuff-or-doing-big-things. It’s not the happy place where you go to be safe or comfortable — a sanctuary protected with a heavy lock, keeping out all the bad stuff: heartbreak, sadness, worry. It’s not unserious or frivolous to talk about (or experience), even as we are made to think it is, and it’s not separate from pain and suffering:
But what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks?
effloresces = blossoms
He suggests that instead of avoiding/ignoring/quarantining sorrow that we invite it in, and invite others in too so they can meet our sorrow, and we can meet theirs. Then he offers a vivid description of what that party might look like, all of us bringing a dish for a potluck, along with our sorrow, breaking bread together (and some furniture, I guess):
…and the thud skips the record back to the beginning of Sly Stone’s “Family Affair” and the dancing, which has been intermittent, just blasts off, all of us and our sorrows, sweaty, stomping and shaking, tearing it up, the pictures falling off the walls, the books from the shelves, some logs ablaze even spilling from the stove, riotous this care, this carrying, this incitement, this joy.
At the end of the chapter, he describes the goal of his book: to investigate what stuff we think/do/believe that incites joy and to wonder what joy might incite. He has a hunch — it might incite solidarity, which incites more joy, and then more solidarity — not over the same sorrows but over the shared experience of sorrow. This sharing of sorrow might lead us to discover what we do or might love together, which might help us survive.
I deeply appreciate this idea of joy as connected to suffering and that, when shared and cared for, might lead to love. Did that last sentence make sense? I’m excited to read the rest of these incitements. I think I might add my own incitement: gray days. Or, I might develop my own idea of gray joy?
Gay’s vision of a raucous party, overflowing with people meeting each others’ sorrows, seems a bit overwhelming to me. I’m not sure I would find joy in caring and developing solidarity in such a big, messy crowd. But, there are others ways, I think, in which we can invite sorrow in too. Gay’s discussion reminded me of another psalm poem I read by Julia B. Levine, especially her last lines:
Psalm with Wren in Daylight Saving Time/ Julia B. Levine
Late afternoon, I chop onions by feel,
listening to crows cry to each other across the ridge.
Gone now, white recipe card on the white floor,
green sea glass found on a Humboldt beach.
But this hour I have been given back, carried out
of gorse, red flash of maples, finches in our cedar.
Meaning, today I returned for the first time
to the moment I understood I was going blind.
Months I hid from myself that the V of geese
flying over the valley extinguished too soon into fog,
a darkness fine as sugar sifted over the chard, the roses.
Now I hear the soft tick of a bird landing on the counter.
Feel her gaze turn away from mine. When she hops
table to chair to floor, I open all the windows and doors.
Sometimes we must drag our grief out of the river
and put our mouth on it. And then a loosening comes.
One morning I rose and sat outside on my lawn
under budded glory vines. There is no hurry, I say
to the stirrings of one so small it has to be a wren.
Once I let the missing in, there was possibility.
There was a heavy rain in sun—every blade of grass
blurred, and for a moment after, only shine.
—
Let that missing in! Open those doors and windows! Drag the grief out of the river! I imagine this opening up to grief as more than a solitary practice. It’s an opening up to and connecting with the world.
Open those doors and windows! This is key refrain for me in my efforts to find connection by opening up.