Reading through these past entries, several themes came up that I’m still working on and thinking about. It is always fascinating to return to these entries and see what I was doing and thinking about in past years. Often, my memory of when things happened is off; I either remember it happening much earlier, or just a few months ago. And, of course, some of it I don’t remember until I read about it.
oct 16, 2017/ 3 miles / 41 degrees
On this day in 2017, I was thinking about words and thoughts and what it means to take words on walk — either, I take them, or they take me:
A word walk
Yesterday
I took my words for a walk.
Down the block
to the river gorge
through the oak savanna
on the trail that hovers above the mississippi
I didn’t know I was taking them,
I thought they’d stayed behind
still in bed
but
there they were
just sitting on my tongue
waiting to be spoken
into my phone
into the air
onto a page somewhere.
Today
i think
I’ll take them
for a run
but
will they come?
A Walk in the Words
for Marie Howe.
Walking into words
isn’t the same as
walking in the woods
but sometimes
they can be done
at the same time and
sometimes
they help each other:
the words bring the woods or
the woods bring the words.
Stepping into the floodplain forest
maples and oaks and aspens towering
I encounter
words falling as gently as leaves.
words scattered on the path
words waiting,
just behind a tree
to jump out
and surprise me
with their clarity.
How right they feel!
How much they understand!
How little I knew before they came!
Difference between words and thoughts
I.
Are thoughts just words waiting to happen?
Words not yet woken up?
Words that want desperately to be
out there in the world
yet can’t quite get there
so they wander and wander and if and
when they aren’t used
wilt or
weep like that willow near the walking path?
II.
Why is it that some thoughts seem so brilliant
until they meet words?
Realizing only then
that they mean nothing
or not yet something
and not nearly enough to be worthy of words?
III.
How do you keep a thought from running away?
Grab a stick and etch it in your hand (Jamie Quatro)?
Put it on a piece of paper and pin it to your clothes (Jonathan Edwards)?
Jot it down in a small notebook that fits in your pocket (Mary Oliver)?
Speak it into your smart phone?
Why not let it run away
instead of trapping it in words.
You might be able follow it
into the woods or
over the creek or
down by the river or
across the bridge.
These little fragments need to be tightened up a lot, or maybe stay as fragments for further inspiration? I’m happy to have them. It reminds me of some questions that I return to frequently: what do I think about when I’m running/moving? What happens to those thoughts? How can I hang onto them? How do words work while in motion? What happens to thoughts when they meet words? What happens when I leave thoughts alone to be what they want to be instead of trying to pin them down with words?
Reading these lines, also makes me want to re-memorize Marie Howe’s “The Meadow.”
oct 16, 2019/ 4.5 miles / 45 degrees
In 2019, I posted this wonderful poem:
Practice
Ellen Bryant Voigt
To weep unbidden, to wake
at night in order to weep, to wait
for the whisker on the face of the clock
to twitch again, moving
the dumb day forward—
is this merely practice?
Some believe in heaven,
some in rest. We’ll float,
you said. Afterward
we’ll float between two worlds—
five bronze beetles
stacked like spoons in one
peony blossom, drugged by lust:
if I came back as a bird
I’d remember that—
until everyone we love
is safe is what you said.
The first stanza of this beautiful poem! To weep, to wake, to wait for the whisker on the face of the clock to move the dumb day forward. Five bronze beetles stacked like spoons is pretty pleasing too. Also, floating between two worlds is nice. I’ve been thinking about that a lot with the gorge and a line from the gorge management plan about how the west river parkway road/trail is the transition between two worlds: the longfellow neighborhood and the gorge. How can I write about this in a poem?
Still waiting for the poem that can hold this image of the transition between two worlds. I feel it coming, soon.
oct 16, 2020/ 3 miles / 36 degrees
Even now, 2 years later, I’m still trying to find a better word than beautiful. The other day, as I ran through the Welcoming Oaks, I had a thought about this quest: maybe I don’t need to find a “better” word, one that’s more interesting or precise or specific. Maybe “beautiful” indicates the ineffable? It’s a generous word that means more than we have the ability to imagine? To use beautiful could be to indicate that there are no words to capture the feeling of what I’m sensing? Do this work? Not sure.
Today the gorge was beautiful. I need a better word than beautiful. Too generic and frequently used. What do I mean by beautiful? Alluring? Calming? Handsome, dazzling, delightful, fine, resplendent? The word beautiful is not the problem. The problem is my lack of specificity. Why was it beautiful? I think it was beautiful today because there was a clear, open view with pleasing, recognizable, calming forms: tall, almost leafless brown trunks with a few slashes of red or yellow; blue-gray water winding like a serpent towards the falls; a mass of fuzzy treetops, greenish-orangish-reddish-yellow, across the way on the other bank. Looking up definitions of beautiful in the online OED, there was frequent mentioning of perfection. I didn’t find the gorge or the forms I saw to be perfect. Maybe they were splendid or gorgeous instead?
Also on this day, I introduced a mission: to put into words why seeing the other side matters so much to me. I’m still working on it — thinking about it, writing into it.
I want to continue to push myself to express why the open view of the gorge moves (pleases, satisfies, amazes, delights) me so much. Maybe this expression won’t come in specific words but in images and feelings? A project for late fall and early winter?
oct 16, 2021/ 3 miles / 41 degrees
This 10 Things I Noticed list is particularly evocative for me:
10 Things I Noticed
- The river, part 1: crossing the lake street bridge. Out of the corner of my right eye, barely below the railing, I kept thinking I was seeing a rower. Not the shell, but the wake or trail of the boat gliding through the water
- The river, part 2: crossing back later, I realized it had not been a rower or the trail from a boat but something else — the current, ripples from a something just below the water, scum on the surface?
- The floor below the Welcoming Oaks was covered in a dead leaf carpet. No visible grass or dirt, just crunching leaves
- Still no stones stacked on the ancient boulder
- Near the bottom of the marshall hill looking up at the red stop light at the top, seeming far and close at the same time
- Hearing voices as I ran above Shadow Falls on the St. Paul side — were they coming from the falls or The Monument?
- The women runners I encountered wearing pants or tights; the male runners shorts
- The huge empty lot near Summit on the St. Paul side that I’ve seen on zillow. Asking price: 2.75 million just for the land
- Right before greeting Dave, the Daily Walker, I heard a bike that had just passed brake loudly — not a squeal but a loud compression of air, or sneakers rubbing on a gym floor– then turning around and passing me again
- The river, part 3: Running south on the west river road, nearing the old stone steps, I glimpsed the river, on fire from the sun, burning bright white through a break in the trees
Last year, I was working on a long poem about traces and trails. I would often think about the project as I ran, sometimes having insights, like here:
Something about seeing the river burning white made me think more about ghosts and traces and why I am interested in trails and flashes. Right after I finished my run, I recorded my thoughts. In this recording, I can’t remember what prompted these thoughts and I say lake when I mean river. Also, I keep intending to use notes on my phone when dictating my ideas because it can transcribe them. One day, I’ll remember.
In the original entry, I just posted the recording. Here’s a transcript:
“I can’t remember what prompted this discussion of trace or why I was thinking about the trace — oh, was it the trace across the water? I don’t know but the idea that my job as a poet is to take the ephemeral, the feelings and pin them down loosely with words. And not hard, final words, but words that just give a suggestion, an approximation. That is the importance of the trace. The trace is that faint trail. And I’m more interested in the faint trails (dirt), not the hard ones (asphalt), even though the hard ones eventually erode, dissolve, crumble into dust.”
Speaking of traces, here’s something I encountered on twitter this morning:
“I am slow and need to think about things a long time, need to hold onto the trace on paper. Thinking is adventure. Does adventure need to be speedy? Perhaps revising is a way of refusing closure?…”
Rosemarie Waldrop
Reading this quotation again today, on oct 16, 2022, I’m thinking about it in relation to this idea of using this blog to hold onto traces that I slowly (very slowly — over 5 years now!) work on. So, this log is a trail too — a messy, somewhat meandering one!