nov 26/RUN

5.5 miles
franklin hill turn around
22 degrees

Colder. A double tights day. Sunny, not much wind, clear. I love running in this weather, even if it was harder during the first mile because of lingering congestion. I wasn’t sure how much I could manage, but once I warmed up, I was fine.

Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker — hi dave! — and looked down at the floodplain forest — almost all bare branches. Heard some geese. Noticed the pink graffiti under the I-94 bridge. Passed another lone black glove on the ground, and a black jacket draped over a tree, making the tree look like a person. Was tricked again by the stone slabs under franklin that look like someone sitting. Avoided the uneven asphalt halfway up and out of the tunnel of trees. Saw that there were stones stacked on the boulder, but forgot to count them. I know I looked down at the river many times, but the only thing I can remember about it was the thin line of icy foam at the edge of longfellow flats.

Thought about breathing and whether or not running in this cold was good for the crud in my throat. Tried to keep my shoulders relaxed and my left arm swinging forward more, my right swinging backward.

Found this quotation yesterday. So much of my writing centers on counting syllables and using syllables to guide my lines. And not just any syllables, but syllables that mimic my breathing pattern while swimming (5) or running (3/2).

The most important thing I find is to live by the syllable. When I’m writing, I don’t think about sentences, lines or words, I’m totally living by the syllable.

Rowan Rocard Phillips

The poem of the day on poems.com had a line that made me smile because it’s almost one of my favorites from Anne Sexton’s “The Nude Swim” — the real fish did not mind.

Returning to the Village/ Stephanie Niu

That gray hut is where I first learned to swim. They pushed us
through a gap in the floorboards. Dropped down a rope
to hold. It took us several panicked kicks to find

that we knew how to do it. Once under, our eyes adjusted
to the salt’s burn and gleam. The fish did not care. 
They turned their long bodies and became something’s dinner. 

At home, toweled off, we ate from plates of tasteless crackers
bought from the only supermarket with sides salt-faded
to white. The woman who owns it still lives inside. 

She has no sons; the fish she sells comes frozen
in boxes from the mainland. I once saw her crouch
on the jetty at dawn and place a basket into the water,

raise it again full of leathery fish flopping against her arms.
She gutted them. They were so small. I watched
her toss what was left of them back to the ocean.

nov 24/RUN

2 miles
river road, north/south
38 degrees

Another run with Scott. We were planning to go for coffee after a short run, but both places we tried were too crowded. Another gray morning with difficult light. Everything felt hazy, dreamy. Also, it was harder to breathe. For the past week, I have had a sore throat off and on and some congestion. I’ll take another covid test today, but it could be a reaction to flonase or allergies. Whatever it is, I wish it could go away. Because of my difficulty breathing, Scott did most of the talking. He talked about his upcoming gig and what would be on the set list. I remember looking down at the floodplain forest and pointing it out to Scott. The tree branches were bare enough that you could see the forest floor. Beautiful. Scott pointed out a roller skier to me.

I don’t remember looking at the river or hearing any geese or black-capped chickadees or rowers in the river. No regulars to greet. I didn’t count the stacked stones.

At the end of the run, I commented on how the sun looked like it wanted to pierce through the thick clouds. Behind the grayish-white was light. Now, writing this at my desk, the sun is trying even harder and everything — sky, grass, ground — is brighter.

nov 23/RUN

3.1 miles
trestle turn around
36 degrees

Another wonderful almost winter morning! Sunny, hardly any wind, clear paths. In January, a day like this would feel tropical and offer hope for a coming spring. Ran with Scott to the trestle and back. We talked about the Love Supreme arrangement he’s doing for the jazz combo he’s in and how he’s learning a lot about the form of its 4 movements. I talked about my “And” poem and wondered if there was a 3 syllable word that might convey sudden understanding. Scott answered, Eureka! Nice, but not quite the right feel for my poem. I could use clarity, but I don’t want to — clarity is more the mood of the moment that the reader feels without it being spelled out for them, I think.

A mile later, Scott described how you code and in css (where and means both this and that must exist to make a statement true) and how you code or (where or means either this or that can exist to make a statement true). I was fascinated by how and was restrictive and narrowing in the code while or was expansive. In my poem, I’m understanding and as generous and open and allowing for more possibilities not less. I told Scott that I might need to write an or poem now. And is accumulation, more layers while or is a stripping down.

And = all these things can be true, and more
Or = at any give time, any one of these things could be true

Am I getting too far into theory here, trying to be too clever?

Speaking of or in poetry, here’s a great or poem I just found:

Or / Thomas Sayer Ellis

Or Oreo, or
worse. Or ordinary.
Or your choice
of category

        or   
        Color

or any color
other than Colored
or Colored Only.
Or “Of Color”

        or   
        Other

or theory or discourse
or oral territory.
Oregon or Georgia
or Florida Zora

        or
        Opportunity

or born poor
or Corporate. Or Moor.
Or a Noir Orpheus
or Senghor

        or   
        Diaspora

or a horrendous
and tore-up journey.
Or performance. Or allegory’s armor
of ignorant comfort

        or
        Worship

or reform or a sore chorus.
Or Electoral Corruption
or important ports
of Yoruba or worry

        or
        Neighbor

or fear of . . .
of terror or border.
Or all organized
minorities.

And here’s what Robyn Creswell writes about the poem:

There is no doubt that Thomas Sayers Ellis’s “Or,” is a poem, but it is one of the few that feels to me like a rap—an especially good one. This is because of the way it establishes a pattern and then continually breaks away from it. The poem is based on the repetition of or, but as we read through it, what seemed like a formal constraint becomes a principle of transformation, a hinge that keeps flexing. The poem begins, as I read it, by riffing on the either/or logic of identity questionnaires (“You could get with this, or you could get with that,” as Black Sheep once put it, in a different context). But it quickly ramifies into geography, history, poetics.

Thomas Sayer Ellis’ “Or,”/ Robin Creswell

10 Things

  1. Hi Dave! How ya doing? / Well, I’m out here . . . is Dave sick too? (I’m congested but tested negative for covid twice)
  2. a runner in shorts with bare legs
  3. for a few blocks, at the start of the run, the only wind was the wind we made with our moving bodies
  4. June’s white bike hanging from the trestle
  5. bare branches mixed with bright green leaves
  6. a table with an orange water jug set up on top of it — is this for a group run (I didn’t see any group), or for anyone running by?
  7. the long, jagged crack on the new asphalt just past the trestle seems to be growing longer
  8. a trace of smoke smelled on the way to the gorge — from a fire pit or a chimney?
  9. our faint shadows briefly ahead of us
  10. stopping at the bench right above the steep slope — like I did the other day, Scott wondered how long before it fell into the gorge

nov 22/RUN

5.5 miles
franklin hill turn around
34 degrees

Perfect running weather. Cold, but not too cold, calm, overcast. Clear paths, a dreamy, detached feeling. As I ran, I thought of a goal for this winter: continue working on running with a slower heart rate. I started this during the summer/fall with marathon training, and I think it helped me avoid injuries. This winter I’m thinking I should target 155-160. I wonder what fun experiments I can do while trying to keep my heart rate low?

10 Things

  1. as I ran, I gave attention to my arms — when my form was good, I felt like my arms were blades scissoring the air
  2. the river was half bronze, half pewter
  3. 2 walkers who were not together were both 
    wearing bright RED jackets
  4. 3 stones were stacked on the boulder — the one on top was barely balanced
  5. the yellow leaves were thick on the part of the path that descends into the tunnel of trees
  6. a roller skier bombing down the hill
  7. a noisy squirrel rooting through the dry brush
  8. the slabs of stone stacked under the franklin bridge always look like a person to me — they did again today, looking like a sitting person as I passed them on my way down, just stones on my way back up — I imagined someone playing a trick on me, first sitting there, but then after I passed, putting the stones down
  9. some regulars I haven’t named yet, but that I’ve encountered for years: 3 older white men, walking, stretched across the whole walking path — is it the same guys every time, or different ones, all of them man spreading? That’s what I could call them: the man spreaders
  10. rotting sewer smell in the tunnel of trees, close to where the city is doing some work

More work this morning (and afternoon), on my “And” poem. So far, I’ve written about the formation of the gorge (wanting to be somewhere else) and the designing of the Mississippi River Gorge park (to protect from overdevelopment and sell the gorge as a symbol of the water city). Now I’m getting into my love of the view, which is about what I see — softened, elemental forms, like tree line or water or white sand beach — but also what I feel — open, a veil lifted, a little clarity, freer and more able to breathe and move, to the other side (which stands in for many things, including St. Paul where my mom lived until she was 18, the place where people who died dwell, the normal-sighted and real world that I feel distanced from. I think the view is also about how standing above the gorge enables me to witness how it holds all of these things together, that it doesn’t divide but connects. There is not a gap between girl and world, but a space that can hold them together, along with water and stone, mothers and daughters, hear and there, now and then. These are all references to past sections of the poem.

nov 21/RUN

4.15 miles
minnehaha falls and back
37 degrees
wind: 30 mph gusts

Windy and colder. I wore my full winter uniform: black running tights, long-sleeved green shirt, purple jacket, black fleece-lined cap, black gloves, buff. I overdressed — or did I? I can’t decide. It snowed yesterday, but by the time I went out for my run (noon), it had all melted. All that was left were a few puddles.

10 Things

  1. at first I thought the river was blue, but then I decided it was pewter
  2. gushing falls
  3. (almost?) empty park
  4. dark rocks sticking out of the creek — why don’t I remember seeing them before?
  5. the hollow sounding recording of bells from the light rail train across the road
  6. all of the walkers were bundled up like it was winter, which it almost is — winter coats, hats, scarves
  7. a red car in the parking lot, loud talking — a phone call? — coming out of the rolled up windows
  8. a faint smell of smoke from a fire in the gorge
  9. the sound of kids playing on the school playground — a soft din of laughing, talking, shrieking
  10. the stretch of brown wooden fence between folwell and 38th is in rough shape. Today I noticed one section with a broken slat and leaning out into the open air

nov 20/BIKE

30 minutes
basement
31 degrees / flurries

This afternoon, I decided to do my first indoor bike ride of the season. Not because it’s too cold or because it’s snowing, but because I’ve run 3 days in a row and I wanted to bike instead. Cross-training in the winter isn’t nearly as fun as it is in the summer. Maybe this year, I’ll actually try some winter-specific activities, like snow-shoeing or ice-skating. I re-watched part of the women’s triathlon from the 2016 Rio Olympics. Love that race. I’ve already written about it back in 2017.

Another reason I didn’t run this morning was because, Scott and I took RJP to the post office to renew her passport. Between the lack of music, the surly workers, the flickering light, and the clueless customers, it was a vibe. (am I using that right?) At first, I thought the woman behind the counter was just rude, but when she was nice to us because we had our shit together, I realized that it was more that she didn’t suffer fools — like the woman who didn’t make an appointment, or the woman who could have but didn’t fill out her paperwork ahead of time and didn’t have her old passport or remember the number for it.

Another random thing for future Sara to remember: Pointing at some stamps, I thought Scott said, I like these Leonard Nimoy ones, but what he actually said was, I like these Lunar New Year ones.

Today, I’ve been trying to work on the “and’ section of my Haunts poem, but I’ve been a little stuck. This section is about open space and possibility and the place between beats and breaths and foot strikes. It’s about the gorge as a container holding everything and holding Nothing (air, the void, mystery). It’s about thresholds and room to move/breathe/be and the space created from absence (of land, words, functional cone cells, mothers). Wow, just typing up this summary has given me some ideas!

nov 19/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls
49 degrees
wind gusts: 25 mph

Wet. Windy. Slick leaves. Squeaks. A light gray sky. Singing pines. The usual puddles. White foam falls. Gushing sewer pipes. Brisk air. Mud.

Greeted Santa Claus (the regular runner whose long white beard reminds me of Santa Claus). Passed a man walking with one leg up in a boot on a scooter. Gave directions to 2 walkers — which way to the falls? follow the path, it’s over there.

The creek was a steel blue and rushing to reach the limestone ledge. A kid at the main overlook was jumping in a puddle. The green gate at the top of the steps leading down to the falls was still open.

Wore shorts and a pink hooded jacket. My legs were only cold for a few minutes. Too warm for mid-November. Today is the last day of warmer air. Tomorrow, below freezing.

I started working on the section of Haunts poem that I’m titling, And. Came up with a few lines while running north. Recited them in my head until I stopped near the Folwell bench and spoke them into my phone:

Before a Victor-
ian’s great love for
ventilation, there
was water wanting
to be something and
somewhere else.

The ventilation bit is taken from an article about the origins of the Grand Rounds, and the Victorian is Horace W.S. Cleveland:

The concept of The Grand Rounds was born from Cleveland’s “preference of an extended system of boulevards, or ornamental avenues, rather than a series of detached open areas or public squares.” This was not only an aesthetic consideration: Cleveland had lost many possessions in the 1871 Chicago fire, and saw parkways as an effective firebreak in built-up urban areas. In addition, Cleveland stressed the
sanitary benefits derived from parkways. Cholera, typhus, and other diseases plagued cities in the late nineteenth century. Parkways could save land from unhealthy uses and, reflecting the Victorians’ great
love for ventilation, carry “winds . . . to the heart of the city, purified by their passage over a long stretch
of living water, and through the foliage of miles of forest.”

The History of the Grand Rounds


nov 18/RUN

3.35 miles
trestle turn around
45 degrees

Another beautiful, late fall morning! Sun, blue skies, hardly a breeze. Running north, my shadow leading me, occasionally drifting to the side and off into the woods. Running south, hiding behind me. I saw her only once when I turned around to check. Everything calm, quiet. Everyone enjoying being alone together. An open view of air and the bare-branched tree line on the other side. Blue river. An inviting bench perched on the edge of the bluff. I saw it as I ran toward the trestle. When I turned around, I stopped at it. Right on the edge, a steep brown slope down to the white sands beach and the river. How many more seasons before this bench, already on the edge, tumbles down? The sour-sweet smell of the sewer — a hint of sharp spice. Pounding hammers–not in a fast, steady rhythm, but in bursts and trading off. A great run.

As I ran, I couldn’t imagine how it could rain this afternoon. So much sun and blue skies! But already, less than an hour later, clouds. Rain is coming.

I’m still working on a section of my poem about progress and time and conservation. The ending turns to a vague reference to conversation of matter, where nothing is lost or gained, just transformed. Somewhere after the tunnel of trees, I suddenly thought, exchanged, and imagined oxygen being traded between lungs and leaves.

Made-up Walking Tours

Here’s an article that I found the other day about the poet, Mathias Svalina’s, surreal walking tours in Richmond: Surrealistic Zillow. Here’s how the tours work:

You show up at the appropriate time and place and look for a man with a bullhorn. “Because I’m a man who owns a bullhorn now,” Svalina says. “[Then] I’ll point to buildings and lie about them for 90 minutes.”

and part of its purpose:

“I’m particularly interested in civic history because of the ways that cities use, rewrite, and often weaponize their histories as promotional agents, or as ways of ignoring populations,” he explains. “So, I like the idea of inventing histories that could not have ever existed.”

nov 17/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
43 degrees

Sun! Sharp shadows. Blue sky. The river burning white — wow! Rushing falls. A leaf-littered slope down to the river. A clear view across. Crowded trails, mostly walkers. At least one roller skier. People emerging from the oak savanna near the big rock shaped like an armchair. A little kid on a bike in the parking lot. The usual smell of smoke coming from some house on edmund or from the gorge; every fall/winter I can’t quite tell. My ponytail forcefully swinging in the wind. I don’t remember hearing any birds or dodging any squirrels. Where are the geese?

I also don’t remember what I thought about. I wanted to work through a part of my poem about progress and conservation of matter and the entanglement of decay/rusting/softening of the gorge and my shifting eyesight. But, if I did, I can’t remember.

This Kay Ryan poem was the poem of the day on Poetry Foundation:

Surfaces/ Kay Ryan

Surfaces serve
their own purposes,
strive to remain
constant (all lives
want that). There is
a skin, not just on
peaches but on oceans
(note the telltale
slough of foam on beaches).
Sometimes it’s loose,
as in the case
of cats: you feel how a
second life slides
under it. Sometimes it
fits. Take glass.
Sometimes it outlasts
its underside. Take reefs.

The private lives of surfaces
are innocent, not devious.
Take the one-dimensional
belief of enamel in itself,
the furious autonomy
of luster (crush a pearl—
it’s powder), the whole
curious seamlessness
of how we’re each surrounded
and what it doesn’t teach.

nov 16/RUN

3.1 miles
trestle turn around
52 degrees
wind gusts: 36 mph

Ran with Scott in the afternoon. Windy but warm. Wore shorts and a sweatshirt that I took off a mile in. Sunny. We talked about progressive things: insurance (Scott), glasses and degenerative diseases like progressive cone dystrophy (me).

10 Things

  1. still a few YELLOW leaves clinging to the trees
  2. a beautiful almost purple blue river
  3. soft brown trunks
  4. a whining leaf blower, disrupting everyone — runners, walkers, roller skiers, squirrels
  5. a twin mattress with a ripped cover next to a trash can
  6. another runner in dark tights (purple?) with a green shirt
  7. in the tunnel of trees the path was covered with leaves
  8. adjusting my cap, worried the wind would knock it off
  9. a navy blue glove propped on a branch
  10. the water-logged black stocking cap still on the post above the steps

I’m working on a section of my Haunts poem that plays with the idea of progress and challenges the belief that progress is always better and that our lives move in strictly linear ways. I’ve written about progress before, on 7 feb 2022.

nov 14/RUN

4.1 miles
trestle turn around
45 degrees

Moist this morning. Wet sidewalk, wet leaves, wet air. Something was squeaking — my shoes on the leaves or the leaves on my shoes? Only one stone on the boulder, looking lonely and flat. The black stocking cap I mentioned yesterday was still there on the pole. Today I remembered that it was above the old stone steps. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker with a good morning Dave!, greeted Daddy Long Legs with a wave. He was with his walking partner again. Smiled and gave a head nod to another walker who I think I’ve mentioned before. They always wear a long skirt with tights, and most of the year, a blue puffer jacket. They have gray hair in a long braid. I looked it up, and when I wrote about them before (26 jan 2024), I described them as wearing a dress and tentatively named them, All Dressed Up.

Anything else? I’m pretty sure I looked at the river, but I don’t remember what I saw. No fat tires or roller skiers or geese — where are all the geese? — or turkeys. More YELLOW leaves, falling fast. Some sour sewer smells, puddles, empty benches.

I listened to squeaking leaves and thudding feet as I ran north, then my Color playlist returning south: “Not Easy Bein’ Green,” “Roxanne,” “Mellow Yellow,” and “Let’s Go Crazy.” Speakig of color, I discovered this excellent color poem yesterday afternoon:

Night Comes and Passes Over Me/ Carl Phillips

There’s a rumor of light that
any dark starts off as. Plato speaks
here and there of colors, but only
once, I think, does he break them
down into black and white, red,
and a fourth color. By then they’d
reached for California high country
where, knowing none of the names for
all the things that grew there, they

began to make names up. But to have
trained an animal to come just a bit
closer because here, here’s blood,
doesn’t mean you’ve tamed it. Trans-
lations vary for what Plato calls his
fourth color: what comes closest
to a combination of (since they
aren’t the same) radiant and
bright–what shifting water does,

with light? Violence burnishes
the body, sometimes, though we
call it damage, not burnishing, more
its opposite, a kind of darkness, as if
to hide the body, so that what’s been

done to it might, too, stay hidden,
the way meaning can, for years, until
some pattern by which to trace it
at last emerges. There’s a rumor of light.

I need to give more time to this poem; there’s so much I don’t quite get. But I love the discussion of Plato and color and what shifting water does to light.

nov 13/RUN

5.85 miles
ford loop
42 degrees / humidity: 78%

November! A day for singing a song of gray. A pale, sunless sky, some wind, lots of bare branches. The tree outside my window and a few others by the gorge were YELLOW! Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker — hey Dave! Almost tripped on a few rocks on the dirt path next to the trail on the east side. Admired the waves from the bridges: from ford, little scales and from lake, a slight current down the center — from a sandbar? Heard a chickadee — chick a dee dee dee dee — and the constant grumbling of the city beneath everything.

Thought about different time scales and how time works for me while I’m running — encountering memories of past Saras, echoing their movements. Imagining the gorge before Cleveland created the Grand Rounds, before Longfellow was a neighborhood, before the gorge was a gorge. Having no idea how much time had passed — never hearing the bells of St. Thomas or looking at my watch. Having no memory of small stretches of the trail — being lost in a thought or the motion or my effort.

10 Things

  1. the fast slapping of a runner’s feet passing me from behind
  2. the clear open view from a bluff on the east side of the river, looking over to the west side
  3. 3 stacked stones on the boulder
  4. a black stocking cap placed on the top of a pole beside the trail
  5. the frantic bark of a dog, bothered by a nearby leaf blower
  6. the barricades blocking the sidewalk in front of Governor Walz’ house
  7. the ravine near Shadow Falls, mostly yellow from leaves on trees and the ground
  8. voices from below, near Longfellow flats beach
  9. a sour sewer smell near the Monument
  10. a man call out a command — drop it! — to his dog near the south entrance of the winchell trail

While looking for something else, I came across this beautiful poem by Minnesota’s first indigenous poet laureate, Dr. Gwen Westerman:

Breathe Deep and Sing/ Gwen Westerman

We sing for the mussels,

we, the otters and beavers, the frogs and dragonflies,

the waterbirds and songbirds, the coyotes too.

We breathe deep, and sing for the mussels

who are the lungs of the Mississippi River.

Our river—polluted by

sewage and wastewater,

dredged and dammed,

pockmarked by dead zones

of chemicals and dyes,

banked by the edge

of destruction.

Our river—

A global super-flyway,

it flows through the heart of us,

flowed through the heart of us

for centuries, beyond centuries,

beyond memory.

Through wetlands and backwaters,

communities and economies,

plagued by invasive species,

invasive humans—

environmental degradation

that flowed through the heart of us.

Our river—

It calls to us, it beckons us,

our dreams flow along with it.

So, we sing for the mussels,

we, the otters and beavers, the frogs and dragonflies,

the waterbirds and songbirds, the coyotes too.

We breathe deep and sing for the mussels

who are the silent sentinels of our river.

They hold the stories and the pain of

our river—40, 70, 200 years ago.

Like the trees above them

along the banks of

our river, the rings of the mussels’ shells

are a living record of our environment

and of our river.

They mark the resilience,

the struggles, the restoration

of floodplains and river bottoms,

the restoration of health and hearts.

How do we heal our river

without healing ourselves?

Our river—

It calls to us, it beckons us,

our dreams flow along with it.

Its water shapes us, embraces us,

and is our first medicine.

So, we sing for the mussels,

we, the otters and beavers, the frogs and dragonflies,

the waterbirds and songbirds, the coyotes too.

Breathe deep and sing with us for the mussels.

nov 11/RUN

5.45 miles
franklin hill turn around
38 degrees
wind: 13 mph / gusts: 27 mph

Sunny, windy, cooler. Wore one of my mild winter combinations: running tights, shorts, long-sleeved shirt, sweatshirt, vest, gloves, headband that covers my ears. I overdressed. Had to take off the sweatshirt near the top of Franklin. A good run. I’m running 30 seconds faster per mile and feeling stronger in the cooler weather than I did when it was warmer.

Yesterday, I woke up feeling not quite right. I slept a lot during the day. Almost a sore throat. Took a covid test: negative. Still feel a little off today. Is it a cold? Should I cancel my annual check-up that’s scheduled for tomorrow?

I deactivated my twitter account and haven’t checked the news since the election. Mostly I’m not thinking about what is coming, and instead focusing on writing, trying to help my kids with their struggles, and living (temporarily?) in the world I’ve built through my practice.

10 Things

  1. the surface of the river was burning white through the bare trees
  2. forest branches creaking and moaning in the wind
  3. one or two trees in the floodplain forest still green
  4. bright pink bubble-letter graffiti under the 1-94 bridge
  5. 4 stones stacked on the ancient boulder
  6. Daddy Long Legs walking with someone today — I think every other time I’ve seen him, he’s been alone
  7. a pale blue sky with one or two puffs of cloud
  8. a biker slowing climbing the franklin hill on the road, a car following behind impatiently then hastily passing him
  9. an empty bench facing an open view — so much air and sun and softness
  10. walking up the hill close to the trees on the slope, I noticed a blanket spread out, hidden in the grass — was someone sleeping in it?

For the first half of the run, I listened to the gorge and my feet and the wind. For the second half, I put in my “It’s Windy” playlist.

nov 9/RUN

5.25 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
47 degrees

A great November morning. Most of the trees bare, almost everything light brown and steel blue. A few yellow leaves still on the trees. I felt relaxed and was able to run without stopping — until I needed the port-a-potty. Found a freshly cleaned one at the bottom of the hill, then ran back up it all the way without stopping. For the last 2 miles I felt strong and resilient and ready to resist.

10 Things

  1. roller skiers — at least 3 of them, not together. All of them looked graceful and strong and ready for it to snow
  2. the awkward slapping of oars on the water from a rowing shell far below
  3. the bells of St. Thomas ringing briefly
  4. more awkward slaps from oars, this time from a shell with 3 people. I heard them when I was at the bottom of the hill and watched as they angled across the river. One of them had on a bright yellow — or was it orange? — shirt
  5. a man sitting on a bench, his back to the gorge, reading a book
  6. faint voices getting louder — was it runners or bikers? both
  7. the floodplain forest is open — no more leaves — I glanced down the steep slope to the forest floor
  8. a runner on the other side of the road in black shorts and white tights
  9. 4 stones stacked on the ancient boulder
  10. a walker bundled up in a coat with a scarf

I had a thought about my Haunts project near the start of my run. I’m writing a lot about looping and orbiting, but I haven’t written about pacing back and forth — all of my out and back or turn around runs, when I cover the same ground twice, and stay on one side of the river. I’m thinking about the difference between restless pacing and cycles/loops/orbits.

I didn’t see any eagles or hear any geese. No regulars or fat tires or music blasting from car or bike speakers. No one singing or doing something ridiculous. Only one honking car horn. No chainsaws or sirens or leaf blowers.

Today I checked out Carl Phillips’ poetry collection, which won the Pulitzer Prize, Then the War. Here’s an early favorite of mine:

The Enchanted Bluff/ Carl Phillips

You can see here, though the marks
are faint, how the river must once have coincided
with love’s most eastern boundary. But it’s years now
since the river shifted, as if done with the same
view both over and over
and never twice, which
is to say done at last with conundrum, when it’s
just a river—here’s a river . . . Why not say so,
why this need to name things based on what
they remind us of—cattail and broom, skunk
cabbage—or on what

we wished for: heal-all;
forget-me-not. Despite her dyed-too-black hair
wildly haloing her soulders, not a witch, caftanned
in turquoise, gold, turning men into better men,
into men with feelings—instead, just my mother,
already gone crazy a bit, watching the yard fill
with the feral cats
that she fed each night.
Who says you can’t die from regret being all
you can think about? What’s it matter, now, if she
learned the hard way the difference finally between
freedom and merely
setting a life free? As much
as I can, anyway, I try to keep regret far from me,

though like any song built to last, there’s a
rhythm to it that, once recognized, can be hard
to shake: one of by fear, with its double flower—
panic, ambition; two if by what’s the worst thing
you’ve ever done?

I love these lines:

But it’s years now
since the river shifted, as if done with the same
view both over and over
and never twice, which
is to say done at last with conundrum, when it’s
just a river—here’s a river . . .

I’d like to use, as if done with the same/view both over and over/and never twice.

I want to fit it into my 3/2 form and use it my Haunts section about looping and doubling back. Maybe something like this:

Occasionally
the girl does not run
on the rim, changes
her route, as if done
with the same view, both
over and over and
never twice.

nov 7/RUN

3.1 miles
trestle turn around
48 degrees

Ran with Scott around 3:30. Love that late afternoon fall light! Soft, with long shadows. Do I remember anything else?

10 Things

  1. lots of leaves on the path
  2. a woman bundled up with a winter cap and scarf
  3. a cute dog — small and brown
  4. the pungent smell of poop as I walked by a woman picking up after her dog
  5. feeling cold as the wind pushed up under my sleeves
  6. no stones stacked on the boulder
  7. the long, lean shadow of a tall tree cast on the road
  8. a quick glance down the wooden steps just past the trestle: bare branches
  9. pale yellow leaves on a tree near the lake street bridge
  10. a big crack and deep hole on the edge of the river road — that’ll pop a tire! (Scott)

And here’s part of a November poem I found in some notes for Haunts. It’s by A.R. Ammons, one my favorite poets:

Configuration/ A.R. Ammons

1

when November stripped
the shrub,
what stood
out
in revealed space was
a nest
hung
in essential limbs

2

how harmless truth is in cold weather to an empty nest

3

dry
leaves
in
the
bowl,
like wings

4

summer turned light into darkness and inside the shadeful shrub the secret worked itself to life

icicles and waterpanes:
recognitions:

at the bottom, knowledges and desertions

5

speech comes out,
a bleached form,
nest-like:

after the events of silence the flying away of silence into speech—

6

    the nest is held
    off-earth

by sticks;

so, intelligence stays out of the ground

erect on a
brittle walk of bones:

otherwise the sea, empty of separations

7

leaves
like wings
in the Nov
ember nest:

wonder where the birds are now that were here:
wonder if the hawks missed them:
wonder if
dry wings
lie abandoned,
bodiless
this
November:

leaves— out of so many
a nestful missed the ground

nov 6/RUN

4.1 miles
minnehaha falls and back
45 degrees

Even as I knew deep down it was possible, it’s shocking that Trump won and that after all of the terrible things he promised, so many people would vote for him. I started my practice of writing and moving not too long after Trump was elected in 2016, and now I will need to lean on it as I endure another 4 years.

As I ran, I kept trying to remember Lorine Niedecker’s geologic time: slow, long, layered. This terrible moment, a blip. Limestone, sandstone, shale, holding evidence of when Minnesota was part of the Ordovician sea millions of years ago. Glacial boulders still standing, indifferent to humans. The endless dripping and seeping and wearing down of ancient water. Not untouched (or left unharmed) by humans, but on a scale so much bigger than us or what we can comprehend.

When I started the run, there was still fog, but by the end, sun. It felt warmer than 45 degrees. I was overdressed in running tights, shorts, gloves, and my sweatshirt. It felt good to move and to almost forget everything for 40 minutes. When I passed by walkers, I listened for words about the election, but I didn’t hear any. I wondered how other people are feeling today.

The creek was a deep grayish blue and moving fast. The falls were foamy white. I heard a woman calling out a license plate number to a man at the parking kiosk. Tried to use the port-a-potty, but it was out of toilet paper. Noticed that the green gate at the top of the stone steps leading down to the falls was still open.

No geese or turkeys or roller skiers. One fat tire e-bike zooming by. Several dogs. Wet, slippery leaves.

nov 5/RUN

2 miles
edmund south/river road, north
45 degrees / drizzle

Election day. Read an accurate description of how today feels: like we all are waiting for the results from a biopsy. I’m hopeful.

Did a quick 2 miles with Scott before the rain started. Throughout we felt drizzle but it wasn’t until we reached our alley that it began to rain. Everything gray and heavy. Most of the leaves on the trees have fallen — except for the one in front of our house — full and green. We talked about a color video that Scott had just watched. Texture and wine dark seas and having no names for blue but many for green were discussed.

My favorite view: bare trees means more open air and the other side visible! I admired the tree line on the east side of the river. It gave off the feeling of being a straight line stretching across. Of course, nothing is completely straight for me; it’s all approximation.

10 Things

  1. a cluster of headlights — stuck behind a slow-moving street sweeper
  2. a thick trunk pushing through the bottom of the fence above the ravine
  3. running past Dowling, hearing faint laughter from kids somewhere
  4. the water was a blueish-gray, the sky almost all white with gray smudges
  5. stopping at the overlook, noticing how uneven and slanted the paving blocks have become
  6. a house on the corner, all black or dark green or dark something, no contrasting trim, difficult for me to see anything but a hulking shape or a dark void, absent of color
  7. running past a water fountain and wondering if it was still turned on
  8. the welcoming oaks have lost all of their leaves
  9. passing above the savanna, seeing something white below — was it a hiker in a white shirt or the information sign?
  10. something remembered from yesterday: the sound of chainsaws in the savanna

Working on a section of my haunts poem tentatively titled, And. It’s inspired by a line from the first section: a gap grew/between girl and world. I realized that the and here is the gorge, and it’s more than a gap; it’s the place that be/holds girl ghost here there now then water stone. It’s also the absence around which I orbit. It’s not empty but filled with open air and possibility. Anyway, I was reminded of a Community clip from Troy and Abed:

Here I’m reading Troy’s and as making more space for the story Abed is telling. I love how Donald Glover delivers the ands.

I’m also thinking about this bit from a wonderful Maggie Smith poem:

If I list everything I love

about the world, and if the list
is long and heavy enough,

I can lift it over and over—
repetitions, they’re called, reps—

to keep my heart on, to keep
the dirt off. Let’s begin

with bees, and the hum,
and the honey singing

on my tongue, and the child
sleeping at last, and, and, and—

nov 4/RUN

5.75 miles
franklin loop
59 degrees / mist and drizzle

Wow, wow, wow! What a cool (vibe, not temp) morning beside the gorge. Everything damp and dripping, bright orange leaves, mist. I first noticed the mist in the floodplain forest, then on the river. Looking to the north while crossing the franklin bridge, the river disappeared into it. I greeted Daddy Long Legs — good morning! Saw a rowing shell on the river, gliding. From high above I couldn’t hear their awkward oars slapping the water. Noticed the reflections of trees in the water near the east shore.

10 Things

  1. drips of water tinkling from the trees — or was it wind moving through leaves?
  2. leaves + puddles = muck: yuck!
  3. the bright white boat glowing on the dark river
  4. a broken slat on a freshly painted fence
  5. a group of glowing orange trees near the base of the bridge
  6. walkers with raincoats, their hoods up
  7. no stones stacked on the big boulder
  8. a dirt trail leading down near meeker dam, just past a wrought-iron fence
  9. a sandbar just below the surface, under the lake street bridge overlook
  10. white sands beach, glowing through the bare trees on the other side of the river

As I ran, I was thinking about water and stone and how I feel like both. Water, flowing and carving out new possibilities, and stone, slowly being worn down, transformed, losing layers. I also thought about air and its relationship to water and stone. Octavio Paz has a wonderful poem, Wind, Water, Stone. I also kept returning to the idea of erosion.

Reading through past entries tagged with “water and stone,” I found this bit from march 13, 2024. Some of the same thoughts I was having this morning! Such loops and repeated cycles of thoughts!

restless water satisfied stone erosion movement 

not 1 or 2 but 3 things: water and stone and their interactions
erosion, making something new — gorge

Then: Water as a poet / stubborn Stone yields, refuses, resists
water = poet / stone = words/language
erosion = absence, silence, making Nothing
me = eroding eyes / stone being shaped / a form of water shaping stone

I wear down the stone with my regular loops

Add a variation of this line, originally in my mood ring, Relentless, somewhere:

I am both limestone and water. As I dissolve my slow steady flow carves out a new geography.

In other rock-related news, FWA is planning to play the epically awesome bass clarinet Concerto for a Aria competition this spring. It’s called Prometheus and the four short-ish movements are based on Kafka’s short story about the myth:

There are four legends concerning Prometheus:

According to the first, he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed. According to the second, Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it. According to the third, his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years, the gods forgotten, the eagles, he himself forgotten. According to the fourth, every one grew weary of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily. There remained the inexplicable mass of rock.—The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of a substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable.

Prometheus / Franz Kafka

What to make of that inexplicable rock?!

nov 2/RUN

6.1 miles
hidden falls loop
54 degrees

Sunny and warm! Ran in the afternoon in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. What a view! Running over the ford bridge, I enjoyed looking at the river — almost flat, dark blue, small ripples that made me think, and not for the first time, of fish scales. There wasn’t much wind, just enough to create the fish scale effect. The bluff on the way to hidden falls was open and broad and beautiful — so much air! so far above the valley floor! Near hidden falls I heard some kids’ voices below.

10 Things

  1. running past the new skateboarding park, seeing a group of people skating, hearing some funky music playing from somewhere — a phone?
  2. 2 skateboarders attempting to do tricks on the path
  3. a runner ahead of me in a bright yellowish-green shirt
  4. a fat tire! biking on the bridge
  5. running through wabun, hearing chain links rattle from a frisbee on the frisbee golf course
  6. yesterday I mentioned the stinky mulch on the side of path had been removed — nope, still there, still stinky
  7. my shadow beside me, faint in the afternoon light
  8. a small tree with bright orange leaves
  9. looking far down at the ground, noticing the all the rocks around the bridge
  10. something in a tree that looked like a big owl to me but must have been a balloon or a bag or a dark sweatshirt

nov 1/RUN

5.6 miles
ford loop
40 degrees

I overdressed this morning in a long-sleeved shirt, sweatshirt, tights and gloves. The sun was warmer than I thought. Most of the leaves are off the trees and on the ground. The ravine near Shadow Falls was a beautiful rusty red. The thin creek running through it shimmered in spots.

It helped to get outside and be beside the gorge. It’s an exhausting time. Both of my kids are supposed to be in college this semester, neither of them are. They are each working on their mental health. It’s hard to see them suffer. On top of that, the impending election is terrifying. While I ran, I forgot about all of this.

10 Things

  1. the bells of St. Thomas tolling twelve times as I crested the Summit hill
  2. 2 small bowls on a neighbor’s front steps, filled with full-sized reese’s peanut butter cups
  3. a man walking a dog listening to talk radio without headphones — I couldn’t tell if it was about politics or sports
  4. water falling softly from shadow falls
  5. the river from lake street bridge: gray, rippled, a shimmering line of light near the east shore
  6. a graffitied port-a-potty with the door very slightly ajar — was it open, or was the door unable to fully close?
  7. the trees on the west side of the river near locks and dam no. 1 were bare and a fuzzy brown
  8. the sudden start of sirens close by — a fire truck coming up the hill from the locks
  9. the stinky mulch that had been piled on the edge of the path was gone
  10. an opening on the bluff — what a view of the river and the other side!

Yes, That’s When/ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I like my body when I’m in the woods
and I forget my body. I forget that arms,
that legs, that nose. I forget that waist,

that nerve, that skin. And I aspen. I mountain.
I river. I stone. I leaf. I path. I flower.
I like when I evergreen, current and berry.

I like when I mushroom, avalanche, cliff.
And everything is yes then, and everything
new: wild iris, duff, waterfall, dew.

oct 31/RUN

3.5 miles
trestle turn around
38 degrees / drips then drizzle then freezing rain

Happy Halloween. Snow later this morning. Wanted to get in a quick run before that happened. When I started it was only dripping but as I finished, freezing rain. Wore black running tights, a pink hooded jacket, a black winter vest, and black gloves. Running north I had the wind in my face. Running south, to my side. I enjoyed this run. Hardly anyone else out on the trail and cool temperatures. Winter running is coming!

Since I’m trying to finish an audio book that’s due in 2 days, I listened to it instead of the rain — except for in the last minutes of the run. I took out my headphones and heard water falling steadily.

10 Things

  1. the usual puddles on neighborhood sidewalks: just past the alley, a stretch on the next block, a big one covering entire slab on 46th
  2. bright headlights cutting through the trees on the other side of the ravine
  3. a few stones stacked on the big boulder
  4. under the lake street bridge: a red blanket stretched on the uneven limestone with a person under it, an empty wheelchair nearby
  5. a small stretch of the river road between lake street and the trestle was flooded. It almost was cresting the curb
  6. most cars slowed down for the flooding, but one didn’t — splash! — thankfully not on me
  7. only one other runner out there
  8. roaring wind
  9. light gray sky
  10. a steady, strong rhythm of striking feet

That wheelchair broke me open for the rest of the run.

Yesterday, Scott, RJP, and I voted early! Everyone at the polling place was happy and nice and excited to be voting. A great experience, even as it was difficult because of my failing vision. Before voting, we were required to fill out an absentee ballot form. Only the highlighted parts, the person who handed us the form instructed. The problem: I can’t see yellow, and that was the color of the highlighted text. RJP had to point out the sections. Scott was unsettled as he was reminded of how bad my vision is getting. At first, when I looked at the ballot, I couldn’t quite make sense of it, but after a moment, slowly, I could read the different categories and names. I thought I was filling in the entire bubble (Harris/Walz, OF COURSE!), but when I double- then triple-checked it, I had only filled in half of it. Another few times, and I finally filled it all in.

water section of haunts

Wrote this bit about the hidden cut-off wall in downtown Minneapolis that was put in place in 1876 and still holds the river back from breaking through the last bed of limestone:

A century and
a half later, the
concrete, hidden deep*,
still stands and the river,
ever restless*, has
not stopped trying to
move past it. Water
will flow where water
wants to go, under
over through. Near the
gorge the girl beholds
its quiet refusal
to be contained.

*should I cut these extra bits?

I thought about the idea of water going where it wants to go as I ran through the rain, navigating the streams and puddles.

oct 29/RUN

3.1 miles
locks and dam no. 1 and back
61 degrees / humidity: 80%

High today of 78. Tomorrow 72. Halloween 49. As Scott says, It’s always cold on Halloween. I felt overheated during the run. Face burning and dripping sweat. I had been planning to do a 10k — the Hidden Falls loop — but it felt too warm. Maybe on Thursday. I wore black shorts and a darkish blue short-sleeved shirt. The same thing I wore for the marathon.

I listened to an audio book, The God of the Woods, so I was distracted as I ran. Can I remember 10 things?

10 Things

  1. an intense, sweet and sour and woody smell as I ran by a pile of wood chips at the edge of the trail
  2. tall piles of wet leaves at the end of the street, waiting for the city workers to return and scoop them up in their truck
  3. beep beep beep — a city truck backing up
  4. 3 or 4 stacked stones on the ancient boulder
  5. a group of bikers, all wearing bright yellow long-sleeved shirts
  6. crunch crunch crunch — my feet running through a blanket of leaves on one side of the trail
  7. a faint shadow on the sidewalk, cast from the light of a weak, cloud-covered sun
  8. someone sitting on a bench near the overlook, wearing dark clothing
  9. the water fountain near 36th appears to still be on — the st. paul ones are already turned off, when do they turn off the minneapolis ones?
  10. the clicking and clacking of a roller skier’s poles and the bright blue of their shirt — did I see this today or on my walk yesterday afternoon?

more on the water section of haunts

I’m still gathering ideas and resources for my water section. Here’s another one:

Though the river has always been dynamic, it looks very different than it did just a few centuries ago. In the past 175 years, people began making major engineering changes to the river in attempts to harness it for industry. Before we started building mills, dams and locks, the Mississippi here was a wild and free-flowing river.

Rather than the series of dammed reservoirs we have today, the river was a braided channel with at least a dozen islands between the falls and Bdóte, where the Minnesota River enters the Mississippi. The river had rocky rapids, gravel bars and beaches, fast and slow spots, deep and shallow spots and floodplains.

Meet our twin cities locks and dams

Possibly to put beside this, a line from a poem I revisited this morning:

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am
(from Let this darkness be a bell tower/ Rainer Maria Rilke)

oct 28/RUN

1 mile
river road, north/32nd/edmund, south
57 degrees

Even though I ran on Saturday and Sunday, it’s beautiful this morning, so I decided to go out for a quick run. Wow! The floodplain forest was almost all golden. And it was warm enough to wear shorts! The mile was easy, relaxed — my average heart rate = 137. I recited my favorite Halloween poem in my head — A Rhyme for Halloween — and tried to think about the latest section of my haunts poem. It’s about restlessness and water and control and the idea of enough and the army corps of engineers and locks and dams and hydroelectric power and energy and constant movement and . . . . Did I have any helpful thoughts? I can’t remember. Did I look at the river? I can’t remember that either. I think my view of it was still blocked. All I saw was open air.

The air over a gorge is different than the air over a field. Why? Sometimes when I’m being driven* on the river road and I can see the air but not the river, I think about this question. If I were seeing this for the first time and didn’t know anything about it, would I still be able to tell the air I could see was over a gorge and not a big open field? What’s different?

*usually I write driving and not being driven, but I don’t drive anymore because of my vision. I haven’t driven in 3 years and only briefly. I haven’t driven regularly in at least 5 years.

I was feeling good as I walked back through the neighborhood, happy to be outside, and then it happened. No warning, out of the blue: my kneecap briefly slid out of its groove. It went back in right away, but not before reminding me that it could do it again whenever it wanted. I recovered and wasn’t too anxious, but was cautious with every step, wondering if it would happen again. Sigh. One reassurance: while these slips and slides are still disruptive, they don’t bother me nearly as much as they used to. I will be fine, my knee will be fine.

water, preliminary thoughts

I mentioned above that I’m working on a new section of my haunts poem. It’s about water and restlessness. Before my run, I was free-writing about it: relentless, obsession, wearing down, transforming, constantly moving, never still.

Then I wrote this: the falls never stopped, just put on hold, all that restless energy built up. This is a reference to the fact that the falls didn’t run out of rock and peter out, but was stopped by a concrete apron under the water, built over 100 years ago. I can’t quite remember the details, so I better review the history.

My notes continue: dammed, locks and dam, hydroelectric power, tamed, removing the dam, letting water flow freely. Then I remembered reading about efforts to restore creeks and streams that have been buried in concrete as cities built up. It’s called daylighting. Yes! I could include something about that, too!

For some time, people and organizations (like Friends of the Mississippi River) have been advocating for removing some of the locks and dams (there are 3) and restoring the river. Here’s a description that I might like to use in my poem:

The Mississippi River, one of the most iconic, important waterways in the world, is also one of the most altered. Dams drown once-vibrant rapids, levees stop the river’s meander, and dredging and river-training structures keep the Mississippi locked into a prescribed path.

Restore the River

I’m particularly interested in the river-training bit and the efforts to lock the river into a prescribed path. To contrast this, I might also want to include my work/thinking around seeps and springs and their ability to leak and find ways through rock and asphalt.

Whew! I’ll need to edit and whittle it down to something manageable, but it’s fun to let the ideas take me wherever I want to go — to flow freely, not be locked in a certain path!

Thinking about all of these ideas, I was reminded of how the poet Wang Ping describes restoring the dam in their poem, And the Old Man Speaks of Paradise:

Do not dam me. To move freely is to evolve is to live
Lock feeds fear feeds hate feeds violence to the base of paradise

added a few minutes later: I love Tim Walz and I love this interview he did while running:

When he said, about Minnesotans, “we run in the winter,” I yelled out to the screen and the empty room, Yes!

oct 27/RUN

6.25 miles
flats and back
45 degrees

I’ll take this weather every day. Sunny and cold enough to not overheat but not cold enough to feel cold. Wore shorts, a short-sleeved shirt, and a sweatshirt. Took the sweatshirt off at mile 3. Ran much faster and for longer without stopping than I have recently. Was greeted by Mr. Holiday near the beginning of the run — good morning! Heard some voices down below — rowers? hikers? My right kneecap shifted a few times as I ran. At first, I was worried and thought, usually that only happens when I walk, but then I remembered that in the fall my kneecap can move around some. Is it the colder weather?

I ran the first 5k without stopping, then walked a little before starting again. I turned on the metronome at 175 and listened to it as I ran up the hill. Then I switched to a Billie Eilish playlist. I was hoping that listening to the metronome would get me inside of the beat and open me up to noticing and feeling more, but I couldn’t quite get there. I could hear that I was in time with the steady click, but I couldn’t feel that moment when we were fully in sync, when the striking of my feet was the beat happening.

10 Things

  1. more leaves off the trees, more open air above the gorge to view — bright and looking almost hazy. Was that the air or just an effect of how bare and un-green the other side was?
  2. the bright, silvery reflection of the sun off a bike’s mirror — the bike was not moving, but was parked by a bench and 2 people
  3. fluttering leaves in front of me, showing me that the wind was at my back
  4. the leaves hovered in the air, one of them long enough for me to touch it
  5. a roller skier in all black
  6. another roller skier in a bright yellow long-sleeved shirt
  7. signs and port-a-potties left over from yesterday’s race
  8. the seep in the flats was seeping enough to have left a big wet spot on the road
  9. vision error: got too close to the edge of the trail and hit my face on a branch, then ran right over another pile of branches and almost tripped
  10. so many leaves on the path, covering holes and cracks and bumps — rolled my ankle on a bump that I couldn’t see

Before the run, I listened to a recording of a draft of a section of the poem I’m working on and had some good ideas for revisions. Very excited about how my Haunts poem is coming together!

oct 26/RUN

4.75 miles
minnehaha falls and back
36 degrees

Scott and I were supposed to run the Halloween Half this morning, but we both decided it was too much — for Scott it was his feet, for me my gastro-stuff. I was not interested in stopping at every port-a-potty along the route. Instead, I decided to go out for a much shorter run to the falls and back. Mostly I felt good, but halfway in, a growing need to go the bathroom. Boo. I hope I can figure out/fix this problem soon. Other than that, I enjoyed the run. Not too cold, clear, hardly any wind. A beautiful morning!

10 Things

  1. the tree 2 doors down from me, which was red a few years ago, is a bright yellow this year
  2. stretches of the sidewalk covered in leaves
  3. the falls were roaring and misting
  4. the tinny recording of bells coming from the light-rail train across Hiawatha
  5. the view! open air, bluffs on the other side
  6. rowers below — heard the coxswain’s voice
  7. only a few leaves fluttering to the ground
  8. empty benches
  9. the sound of plastic wheels — no chance to look, what was it? A crappy stroller? roller skates?
  10. the smell of pine needles

oct 24/RUN

3.1 miles
duluth lake front
55 degrees

Took a quick drip to Duluth with Scott and FWA. Lots of walking and talking and being by the lake. Great weather! Peak color. Wore shorts and a sweatshirt on our morning run. Ran north (I think?) by the lake, past Leif Erickson park. Lots of short, steep hills. Just before the turn around, I realized that we had had the wind at our backs. Uh-oh. The wind was in our face for the second half. which didn’t really matter because we were running mostly downhill. I said to Scott, can you imagine if the wind had been in our faces as we ran uphill?

The water was almost smooth with no waves. I could hear the rocks gently shivering when the water washed over them. Speaking of shivering, while we were shopping in a kitchen store, FWA and I both overheard an older woman exclaim, wow, it’s shivery in here. It was a little chilly, but shivery?

10 Things

  1. a tiny bird so small I thought it was a dragonfly — a hummingbird?
  2. cooing pigeons near the wall
  3. sparkling water — circles of light on the lake’s surface
  4. no clouds
  5. no big boats
  6. entire trees with orange leaves, a few bushes with slashes of red
  7. a machine across the way making a noise that reminded me of the sound the black monster in Lost made when it was hovering or hunting
  8. so many inviting benches on top of the hill, high above the water
  9. the constant buzz of the hospital helicopter, landing on the roof, then taking off again
  10. a little boy and his older sister on the path — come on, Whitley, it’s time to start our grand adventure!

oct 22/RUN

3.1 miles
2 trails
65 degrees

A quick run after getting my flu and COVID shot and before taking FWA to an eye exam. Another beautiful, warm morning. Everything yellow and crunchy. The Winchell trail was crowded with hikers admiring the leaves and the view. Heard kids on the playground. Smelled the sour sewer. Felt the soft sand. The theme of the morning: leaves. Brittle leaves covering the trail, making it harder to see roots or rocks. Fluttering leaves falling from the trees. Absent leaves giving me a better view of the other side. And that sound! Before starting my run, yellow locust leaves near the curb sizzled after a car drove by. A few blocks later, a cluster of leaves — or was it a plastic bag? — crackled and crunched in the slight wind.

Near Folwell, after climbing the short, steep hill, I stopped to record a few lines for the next section of my poem. The section is called Nobody and it’s about bells and mom-ghosts and dead cone cells.

In the gray morning
the few cone cells that
remain are starved for
light, everything lacks
form — no edges, no
bodies, just blurs

Here’s a beautiful poem I encountered this morning. I’m adding it to my collection of dirt/dust poems.

Housekeeping/ Natasha Trethewey

We mourn the broken things, chair legs
wrenched from their seats, chipped plates,
the threadbare clothes. We work the magic
of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes.
We save what we can, melt small pieces
of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones
for soup. Beating rugs against the house,
we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading
across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw
the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs
out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie.
I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,
listen for passing cars. All day we watch
for the mail, some news from a distant place.

It’s 14 lines. Is it a sonnet? Is there a volta? Is it the dust, lit like stars?

oct 20/RUN

10.2 miles
downtown loop*
61 degrees / humidity: 70%

*river road trail, north — past the trestle, down franklin hill, in the flats, up the I-94 hill, past the Guthrie and Stone Arch, under Hennepin, over Plymouth, through Boom Island, up to the 3rd avenue Bridge, winding down to river road, heading south.

Warm this morning. Sun, sweat. Wore shorts and short-sleeved shirt. Ran with Scott; we’re running the Halloween Half next Saturday. My legs and lungs were fine, my gut not so much. Unfinished business at mile 6, then again at mile 9. Hopefully I can figure out a way to fix it soon. I remember that Scott talked a lot more than I did, but about what? Music — he subbed for a community jazz band and he’s hoping they ask him to join. I talked about shadows and afternoon moons and my admiration for fit runners and good form — so graceful and pleasing to watch!

We greeted Mr. Holiday — good morning! — and encountered a few roller skiers. We also encountered Vikings Fans between Stone Arch and Hennepin. Enjoying the nice weather before the game, I guess. I heard train bells and some biker calling out to the other bikers he was with: we’re going to whip down this hill. I sang to Scott, whip it good! The steps up from St. Anthony Main to the 3rd Avenue bridge were tough, but the view of downtown was amazing. I mentioned Spirit Island to Scott, which is the sacred Dakota Island that was quarried by white settler colonists, then removed by the Army Corps of Engineers, and we wondered where it had been exactly (south of the Locks and Dam).

Looking up where Spirit Island was in relation to Stone Arch and the 3rd avenue bridge, I found a brief article that mentioned how the island had bald eagles and spruce trees, In my poem, I say the trees are oaks — did I remember it wrong, or were there spruce and oaks? To be safe, I’ll change it in the poem:

Among eagled spruce,
rock by sacred rock
hauled off in horse-drawn
carts, few records of
where. Not gone, scattered,
displaced, their origin
as island erased.

11 Things

  1. the shadows of the railing on the Plymouth bridge — straight, sharp
  2. the bright, sparkling water at the edge of Boom Island
  3. the railing shadows at another spot on the bridge — the shadows they cast on the sidewalk made me think the sidewalk was broken
  4. the pattern of the shadows of a chain-link fence — sharp but soft, geometric
  5. 2 shirtless runners passing us, running past and fluidly, their feet bouncing up down up down, spending more time in the air than on the ground
  6. rowers, 1: the voice of a coxswain giving instructions
  7. rowers, 2: an 8-person shell on the river
  8. slashes of deep red leaves from the bushes beside the path
  9. the quick suggestion of an afternoon moon: a flash of white in the bright blue sky. Was it the moon or a cloud? I checked with Scott: the moon!
  10. a sour smell rising from below: sewer gas
  11. falling leaves! reds and yellows, fluttering in the wind — sharp, brittle, hitting my cap hard

Earlier this week, RJP and I took an overnight trip to Red Wing and stayed at the old/haunted hotel, the St. James. It was wonderful — the hotel more than the town. As part of it, we hiked up the bluff — He Mni Can-Barn Bluff. A great view of Red Wing and the river, and a good workout! 90 minutes of ascending and descending. We saw a Vikings cruise, 5 stories tall, docked at the river. RJP looked it up: an 18-day cruise from St. Paul to New Orleans, $12,000 per person. Wow. The next day, at a bakery getting doughnuts and coffee, we overheard a woman ask for a Trump cookie. Yes, they were selling cookies that spelled out Trump with icing. They also had Harris cookies. RJP said that there were more Harris cookies left. We were both disturbed by the idea that someone would want to buy a Trump cookie and that a bakery would be selling them.

oct 16/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
39 degrees

Wonderful weather for running! Not too cold, but cold enough to not overheat. The color of the day: yellow. I’m sure there were orange and red leaves, but all I remember were the bright yellow ones. Another color I remember: glitter — on the water, among the fluttering leaves. Seeing the low water in the creek on Monday, I wondered if the falls would even be falling. They were, but no gushing or roaring.

10 Things

  1. laughing kids at Dowling Elementary
  2. the oak savanna is still mostly green
  3. a sidewalk covered in dry, yellowed pine needles
  4. a person taking a selfie with their dog by my favorite overlook at the falls
  5. the man who empties the parking kiosks — I’ve seen him several times before and wondered why he comes in a regular (unmarked) car and how many coins he collects
  6. the creek was higher than in past falls when bare rock was exposed
  7. instead of a rope blocking the steps down to the falls, which is easy to climb over, Minneapolis Parks has added a green metal gate
  8. the shadow of some leaves falling to the ground, looking like the shadows of birds
  9. those same falling leaves looking like brown snow
  10. the swinging shadow of my ponytail

pines and Basho

I ran over yellow pine needles covering the sidewalk at the start of my run and thought about Basho. So I looked up “basho pine” and found this line:

Learn about the pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo.
Don’t follow in the footsteps of the old poets, seek what they sought.

from Basho on Poetry

A poem I was working on yesterday (and submitted to a journal for consideration), starts this way:

It begins here: from
the ground up, feet first,
following.

The following I am referring to is not simple repetition, even as it literally is about following trails already made by past feet, but seeking what past feet sought: connection, contact, familiarity with the ground/land and how it has been shaped.

ghosts and zombies

My plan for this month was to focus on Zombies, but between a kid crisis, the marathon, and a poem that insisted on being reworked, I haven’t given much attention to them. Maybe two other reasons: I don’t really like zombies, and I’m still thinking about ghosts.

from Circle / Dana Knott 

human obits in the process
of being written
ghostly obits in the process
of being read

Here’s what I wrote on August 1, 2024 that got me thinking about zombies:

On Ghosts V. Zombies/ Suzanne Buffam

Soul without a body or body without a soul?
Like choosing between an empty lake
And the same empty lake. 

For the past few years, I’ve devoted a lot of attention to ghosts and haunts, but I’ve rarely thought about zombies. This poem is making me want to think about them now. So many directions to go with it — the relationship between the body and the soul or the body and the spirit or the body and the mind; how, because I can’t see people’s faces or make eye contact, they look soulless to me — I’m a ghost among zombies; Alice Oswald and the Homeric mind — our thoughts traveling outside of our bodies; Emily Dickinson and the soul that wanders; the fish in us escaping (Anne Sexton) or the bees released, returned to the hive/heaven (Eliot Weinberger). 

I clicked on the ED link and read my entry from march 19, 2024. There’s a lot of good stuff in it, including a reference to Homer, but not the poet, the cartoon character, Homer Simpson. It’s the clip where his brain escapes his body to avoid listening to Ned Flanders talking about the differences between apple juice and cider (if it’s clear and yella, you got juice there fella, if it’s tangy and brown, you’re in cider town). Wow.

taking it slow

Reading the “about this poem” for poets.org’s poem of the day, Dead Reckoning, I encountered this line:

This poem began as a long sequence but arrived at this stripped-down form after fifteen years of off-and-on revision.

Hyejung Kook

15 years of off-and-on revision! I’m only on year 3 of my Haunts revisions. I’m glad to know that other poets sit with some of their poems for a long time.

After finding this, I read an old entry from October 16, 2021, and found this:

“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

This slow time reminds me of Lorine Niedecker and what she writes in a letter to her poet-mentor, Cid Corman, while working on her poem, “Lake Superior”:

Cid, no, I won’t be writing for awhile, and I need time, like an eon of limestone or gneiss, time like I used to have, with no thought of publishing. I’m very slow anyhow . . . . I’m going into a kind of retreat so far as time (going to be geologic time from now on!) is concerned . . . .

Lorine Niedecker

oct 14/RUN

9 miles
lake nokomis and back
37 degrees / humidity: 83%

Cooler weather! I wore my winter running tights under my shorts this morning! Fall! Even though it was cool, I was dripping with sweat. All the walkers I passed were bundled up in winter coats and stocking caps. Winter is coming.

I felt strong as I ran, able to keep going. Scott and I signed up for the Halloween Half on the 26th. We might even try to wear costumes. FWA suggested Bob and Linda Belcher. Yes!

My favorite fall tree this morning was next to the double bridge. It was bright yellow with a hint of orange. My second favorite fall tree was a RED one near the Longfellow House. Cherry red. About half of the trees are still green.

The lake was still with sharp reflections. A few people were at the beach, but no one was in the water. Any boats on it? Running past the boat landing, I saw one boat being dropped off.

Pickleball! Even in 30 degree weather, people were out there. I could hear the thwacking of balls being hit as I ran by the courts.

A mom dropping her kid off for preschool at Lake Nokomis Rec Center. I thought about taking FWA to classes here when he was 4.

The creek was very low. There was still enough water for the ducks.

Crossing the pedestrian/bike bridge near Lake Hiawatha, I heard a noise that was in time with my feet. I thought it was a truck or some type of machine, but later, heading back from the lake I ran over it again and realized the noise was coming from me. The bridge was squeaking every time my foot struck the ground!

added, 15 oct 2024: I forgot about the pine needles! A block from my house, yellow pine needles covered the sidewalk. I can’t remember now how it felt to run over them, I just remember that I loved it and somewhere, deep within, I imagined the sound of wind moving through the needles still on the tree.

oct 12/RUN

5.7 miles
ford loop
52 degrees

Peak fall this morning. Orange! Yellow! Red! Made even more vibrant by the gray sky. Wow! I felt strong and relaxed and dreamy. No sharp lines, everything soft and fuzzy and dissolving into the gray. It was dark enough for street lamps and headlights. Heard the rowers and the clicking and clacking of a roller skier in a bright yellow shirt, a squirrel cracking a nut. Smelled the sewer. Felt a few raindrops at the very end. Crossing the ford bridge, the tree line was oranges, yellows, reds on the st. paul side, but still a lot of green on the minneapolis side.

At the End, There Is Always a House / Sara Eliza Johnson

These days I move from room to room looking for a thing to
haunt. The filaments inside my teeth glow in the dark,
thirty-two beacons no one will see, except the mirror I
return to again and again, hoping for it to swallow me, to
find anything there but my face. Mirror is another word for
hunger. Hunger is another word for dead. Anyone would be
tired of hearing from me, the kind of woman — this repulsive
word — who’ll never have a garden or greenhouse, only a
fridge crisper full of broccoli and kale and lettuce, all
rotting to sludge, bananas on the counter blackening like
frostbitten skin. I used to quarter an apple with such
perfection I could have been autopsying my own heart. The
thing is there’s no way out of this house. Memory circles
like flies. Even the dead need to eat. Even the dead dream. I
left a note in the memory: You deserve so much more than
desire.

Wow, this poem!

oct 10/RUN

5.1 miles
bottom of franklin hill
55 degrees

My first run after the marathon! I wasn’t sure how much I would do, but I felt good, so I ran to the bottom of franklin hill and back, and I did it without stopping to walk. I haven’t done that for several months. Almost perfect weather, calm and cool. Wore my bright orange sweatshirt and managed to take it off while running down the franklin hill. No roller skiers or rowers or Dave, the Daily Walker. But shadows and blue water and fluttering leaves.

As I ran, I chanted: I am flying/I am free/and I am where/ I want to be. I felt some soreness/tightness in my left hip, a slight pang in my right foot, but nothing in my knees.

I tried to think about my haunts poem and girls, ghosts, and gorges. I’m trying to put together a draft to submit for a journal that’s due on the 15th. Like in the past, I’m struggling — too many ideas and threads. I keep getting stuck and lost and in a rut of repetition. I started chanting, girl girl girl ghost ghost ghost gorge gorge gorge.

10 Things

  1. red leaves on bushes — or are they young trees? — at the edge of trail, a red that burned dark and deep and seemed to yell out, I am RED!
  2. yellow leaves, like lemon sugar
  3. orange leaves, with a hint of pink
  4. the occasional dead leaf fluttering down
  5. the sound, somewhere above, of a nut being cracked open
  6. most of the leaves are still green
  7. a stinky, sewer smell above the ravine, a faint sourness
  8. a man on a bench — I think it was Daddy Long Legs — calling out, hello!
  9. a quick glimpse of something sitting under the franklin bridge — was it a person, sleeping? No. On the way back up the hill, I could see it better: stacked limestone blocks
  10. 2 black garbage bags, full, beside the trash can near the lake street bridge — did they come from the gorge?

26 Marathon Things: r-z

river. Crossing the Franklin bridge near 2 other runners, I heard one of them look at the river — a blue ribbon sparkling in the sun — and say something like, this marathon is hard, but we get to see this! And I thought, yes! this is the beautiful river I get to run beside almost every day!

strong. During the last 10 miles of the race, I regrouped. It was still difficult, but I ran more than I thought I could. And every time I ran, I felt strong. Several of the spectators called to me, you’re looking so strong! you’ve got this. Once when I stopped for a walk break, a kind runner passed me, gently touched my back, and said, I’ve been watching you and you look so strong. You can do this! Keep going!

t-rex. At least twice, I saw someone dressed in a t-rex costume by the side of the road. The first time, Scott pointed them out to me, but the second time I saw them on my own. What’s the deal with t-rexes? (I asked Scott and he said the t-rex has been a thing for several years).

unreadable. It didn’t bother me, because I’m used to it, but with my bad vision I couldn’t read any of the fun or encouraging or strange signs that people were holding up. When Scott laughed at one, I asked what it said. Run bitch!

vikings. In past years, I’ve enjoyed watching football, but recently I’ve lost my love for it, especially for the Vikings who always seem to disappoint. Even so, this year they are undefeated, and hearing spectators calling out the score as we ran, 10 – 0, 20 – 0, or listening to the game while they cheered, was fun and distracting and felt very Minnesotan. Scott’s dad, a big vikings fan, would have loved the season so far if he were still alive. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I enjoyed hearing the score; it reminded me of his dad.

walz. At mile 20, you run by gov. walz’s house. I thought I heard someone cheering there and imagined how cool it would be if it were gov walz. I don’t think he was there when I passed by but later Scott told me that he had been outside cheering on runners.

eXhilarated. At the beginning of the race, during the first 2 miles, Scott was so excited. He talked about running this race again and how pumped up he was. I was happy to be there, but couldn’t match his enthusiasm. I was not exhilarated, I was waiting for the moment when it got very hard.

you can do hard things. So much support from spectators. Most of it straightforward encouragement, you’ve got this, you can do hard things, you’re amazing. Some of it slanted: you’re crazy! or look at you out here running and look at me enjoying my bagel! The one sign I could actually read just said, Why?

zephyr*. While the wind wasn’t gentle, it was blowing from the west. In the first mile, it almost blew my hat off. Then it was at our backs. Then I forgot about it until we reached the east side of Lake Nokomis where it was really blowing. A woman’s signs, stacked on a table, blew off and into the road. I briefly thought about stopping to help her then remembered I was racing and should probably keep going.

*I was struggling to come up with a z. Thankfully Scott thought up zephyr, which means west wind

oct 8/postMARATHON

Here’s some stuff that (maybe) only future Sara will appreciate: 48 hours ago, I was in mile 4 or 5 of the marathon, near Bde Maka Ska. This morning, I’m sore, but it’s not that bad. Right after finishing, my calves ached and I limped — waddled? no glimping for me! As I walked, they loosened up, hurt less, but getting up after sitting for a few minutes made them hurt again. Yesterday, I woke up with a stiff left knee and sore obliques. Occasionally my right foot hurt. In the midst of telling Scott about my foot while we took Delia on a brief walk, my right kneecap slipped out of the groove and I had to push it back in. As usual, there was no warning. My sentence interrupted with a shift then a gasp. I’m used to it by now, so are the tendons surrounding my knee. None of us remembered the slip for long. All in all, I’m in fairly good shape! I can’t wait until I feel good enough to get back out by the gorge.

26 Things, i-q

impossible dream. Running between the lake street bridge and the railroad trestle, I heard some singing — to dream the impossible dream/to fight the unbeatable foe — a male voice, lots of vibrato. I thought it might be someone actually singing and not a recording. Wow, I was impressed. But when Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” came on next I decided it was only a recording. When I reached the source of the music I realized it was the house that puts up bleachers every year for watching and cheering. What a party!

jingle bells, the farts version. Somewhere along minnehaha parkway a speaker was playing a version of jingle bells where each note was a fart. I told Scott that we should remember to tell RJP (I did); the two of them love listening to fart playlists on spotify and apple music.

kids. My favorite kid was on Summit. He was holding a microphone that was hooked up to a speaker, calling out, We have to share! It’s my turn to use it now! then, Who doesn’t like mac and cheese?

lakes. Lake of the isles, Bde Maka Ska, Lake Harriet, Lake Nokomis. As we finished each lake, I called out to Scott, another lake done! I wasn’t able to do that with Lake Nokomis because we split up right before we got to it. Lake Nokomis was the hardest lake to run around — windy and long. I remember walking by the little beach and thinking about open swim.

music. There were rock bands and concert bands and drummers and sousaphones and some brass instrument that sounded like a bellowing elk. And music from “official” speakers and make-shift speakers and smartphone speakers. “Eye of the Tiger,” “We are the Champions,” “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” “The Impossible Dream.” A group of runners behind us, changing the words of a Gwen Stefani song to This race is bananas B A N A N A S! In past years, I might have listened to a playlist through my headphones. Not today.

neighborhoods. One of the reasons I wanted to run the twin cities marathon is because the course passes through all of my old neighborhoods. Downtown, not too far from the apartment we lived in when we moved back here in 2007. Lake of the Isles and Bde Make Ska: where we lived the first time we moved here from California in 1998, when we fell in love with Minneapolis. I roller-bladed, biked, and walked around these lakes a lot in my early 20s. Around Lake Nokomis where I swim all summer. On Minnehaha Parkway, only 2 blocks from our first house. The falls, the river road, 4 blocks from my current house. Most of the rest of it, until mile 21 at the start of Summit, followed my regular running route for the last 10 years. Some of it looked familiar, some of it made strange by the effort of running for so long.

other-worldly. Out there on the course for 5 1/2 hours, I was somewhere else. Familiar places became unfamiliar, time stopped passing or passed so strangely with no steady beat. I was no longer Sara, but aching calves, blistered feet, sore forearms, feet moving forward. I didn’t think about poetry or the meaning of life or what to do to help FWA grieve for the loss of his beloved community.

poop. I’ve struggled with constipation for a few years now, and in the last month, it got worse, making my long runs harder. Before the race, I was worried — in a state of preoccupooption as RJP and I have named it. The morning of the race, I couldn’t finish my business before we left. I used the port-a-potty twice before the race and twice during the first 10 miles*. It didn’t help much, but it was enough to prevent any incident that would later be recounted as my “poop story.” Pooping is an obsession for a lot of runners. Ask them about their poop story. At one point during the race, I remember hearing a racer talking to someone else: I read that you need to get up several hours before the race to eat something so you make sure you are able to poop in time. Yes, she said poop, and more than once, and not quietly. You need to poop. I had a bagel so I could poop. I managed to poop. I don’t have a problem with her saying poop; pooping is a wonderful thing and the word poop should be said more, and without shame, maybe sometimes with reverence.

*according to Scott, I stopped FOUR times during the first `10 miles. Yikes.

quest. Post-race, I’m disappointed that I didn’t push myself more, but I need to remember that that was never what I was aiming for. I wanted to be able to start the race, and once I started, to finish, then to recover quickly so I can enjoy fall running.

oct 6/MARATHON

26.2 miles / 5:35:27
twin cities marathon
50 degrees

I did it! It was hard. I was slow, but I did it. And I smiled and sometimes felt strong and had a deep love for everyone else out there — racers and spectators. I never thought of quitting, even though I knew it was going to be a long day when, at mile 11, I had to use the port-a-potty and felt like I might pass out (a combination of constipation and failing to drink enough water in the first 10 miles, I think).

I never cried or neared my breaking point which, as I write this the next morning, is a little disappointing. It’s been a very difficult fall — one kid deferring their first semester of college, the other shutting down in their last year of college. I was hoping to have a big moment of release. It never came. What held me back? I never allowed myself to push closer to my physical limits. If it felt too hard, I walked.

Uh oh. Writing about my disappointment, then talking to Scott about it, I realized something: I want to do another marathon. I want to dig deeper and break down that wall I’ve built around myself — the one that keeps everyone and everything at a (slight) distance. I want another chance to figure out my fueling and my pooping and to not be afraid that my body will fail me.

I am proud of myself and this accomplishment. And I’m grateful to have made it to start and finish line. And, wow, what a beautiful marathon course!

26 Things: a-h*

*Instead of creating a very long entry with all 26 marathon things, I’ve decided to break it up over several entries.

asphalt. For the first half of the race, the road was cracked and cratered and rutted. A few of the biggest holes were marked with bright orange or green spray paint. The asphalt was the worst at Bde Maka Ska.

brrr. The weather was wonderful during the race, but chilly before it started. So much wind! Most people had on extra sweatshirts that they planned to donate at the start line — me too. A few brave runners were in tank tops. Even with extra layers, it was cold. A woman ahead of me in the port-a-potty line who was wearing running tights and a running jacket was violently shaking.

caboose. I was not at the very end of the race — I finished ahead of 450 people — but I was near the end. The winner finished in 2 hours and 10 minutes. I finished in 5 hours and 37 minutes. That’s a long time for people to be out on the course cheering. The spectators were still amazing, but I could tell the energy was not at its highest level. In the last few miles I noticed people leaving the course, their signs tucked under their arms. Walking through the finish area, volunteers were packing up and most of the food was already gone.

dogs. Some spectators brought dogs. The only dog I recall seeing was a GIANT ball of black fur asleep next to a guy sitting in a lawn chair on the edge of the road. I do remember hearing lots of runners calling out, dogs! or puppies! or your dog is so cute! or hi, puppy!

electrolytes. At the hydration stops, you could grab a cup of water or a cup of electrolytes. Almost always, I grabbed water, but once I foolishly grabbed electrolytes. Yuck! Not sure why, but I was expecting something that would taste like Gatorade. It did not. It tasted like salt water and made me feel sick.

finish line. Miles 22-25ish are on Summit, high above the capitol. For the last stretch, you run down a hill, the finish line in sight. You’re almost there!, people were calling out, you can see the finish line! Yes, I could see the finish line, but it didn’t feel like I was almost there. It looked so far away, and it was, until it wasn’t, and I was done and Scott was waiting there for me.

glimping. After the race, I mentioned to Scott that I would probably be limping the next day (yep, I am), and he thought I said “glimping” which led us both to try and imagine what glam limping (think, glamping but for limps) might look like.

hat. At the beginning of the race, we were following behind a guy in a pink hat. He looked relaxed and smooth and Scott said, look for the chill guy in the pink hat and run like him. We were near him until Bde Maka Ska, but lost track of him when he stopped to use the port-a-potty.

oct 5/RUN

1 mile
river road, north to loons coffee
56 degrees

A final shake-out run before tomorrow’s marathon with Scott. My left hip is still a little tight/sore, but I’m believing it will be okay, especially once I warm up and run more miles. It’s supposed to be windy — 15+mph. When Scott mentioned this I replied (and with no sarcasm), great! I can recite some of my favorite wind poems while we run! I am the wind and the wind is invisible. All the leaves tremble, but I am invisible.

Yesterday we picked up our bibs and shirts at the expo and the line to go through security was ridiculously long, stretching the entire length of the River Center then curving through 2 hallways. Scott panicked and briefly wanted to rage quit the line (and the marathon!), but I remained calm and a nice guy behind us started commiserating with us about how long the line was. Scott got over it and the line started moving. Even with the long line, it only took us 15 minutes to get in. Whew!

I am nervous and excited and ready to push at my limits. To be broken open and find out how I respond. To feel grief and delight and wonder and whatever else 26.2 miles will pull out of me.

oct 3/RUN

5 miles
bottom franklin hill and back
50 degrees / humidity: 75%

In 4 days, I’ll be running the marathon! Today’s run was mostly fine; my left hip was a little tight, but I think it will be okay. Otherwise I was relaxed. It was cool, but humid, so I sweat a lot. For several of the miles I chanted in triple berries: strawberry / blueberry / raspberry. For the last mile, I put on my metronome, set to 175, and synched up my feet. So cool! When I lock in with the center of the beat, I know it. I become the beat, or my feet become the sound of the beat. I feel a soft buzz throughout my legs that spreads to the back of my head. I am running without effort — not floating, but bouncing off the ground. I wasn’t locked in the whole time. Sometimes I was ahead of it or behind because I got distracted by another runner, but when I locked in again, bzzzzzzz. I might try putting on the metronome during a later mile of the marathon, if I need some focusing and motivation to keep going.

10 Things

  1. rowers! running north, the coxswain’s voice seemed to be following me
  2. music coming from a bike — I think it was a song by Regina Spektor, but I’m not sure — I almost called out, hey! are you listening to Regina Spektor? I love Regina Spektor
  3. greeted Mr. Holiday — good morning!
  4. more red leaves, some yellow
  5. someone in running shorts standing beside the porta potty. Were they waiting — to use it, for a friend?
  6. a line-up cars — maybe 10 — behind a car turning left onto 32nd
  7. a biker zooming by — fast! — with a kid in a trailer
  8. under the franklin bridge, looking up at an opening above — not for the first time, I thought someone might be staying up there, but I can’t see well, so I could be wrong, and could anyone climb up to it — it’s 15-20 feet up?
  9. running through the dark tunnel of trees, looking ahead and seeing an opening: bright, white, glowing
  10. no sun or shadows or geese or goldenrod or acorns

Today’s Zombie poem:

To Live in the Zombie Apocalypse/ Burlee Vang

The moon will shine for God
knows how long.
As if it still matters. As if someone
is trying to recall a dream.
Believe the brain is a cage of light
& rage. When it shuts off,
something else switches on.
There’s no better reason than now
to lock the doors, the windows.
Turn off the sprinklers
& porch light. Save the books
for fire. In darkness,
we learn to read
what moves along the horizon,
across the periphery of a gun scope—
the flicker of shadows,
the rustling of trash in the body
of cities long emptied.
Not a soul lives
in this house &
this house & this
house. Go on, stiffen
the heart, quicken
the blood. To live
in a world of flesh
& teeth, you must
learn to kill
what you love,
& love what can die.

I want to think more about how darkness and light work in this poem, and the last line about killing what you love and loving what can die.

oct 1/RUN

3.1 miles
2 trails + extra
51 degrees

Finally, fall weather! Wore my bright orange sweatshirt today, which was too warm during the last mile. Ran above on the paved trail heading south, below on the Winchell trail heading north. Sunny, breezy, cool, dreamy. Tree shadows. My left hip was a little sore, but otherwise I felt strong and relaxed. I chanted Emily Dickinson for part of the run: life is but life/ and death but death/ bliss is but bliss/ and breath but breath then life is life/death is death/bliss is bliss/breath is breath then life life life life/death death death death/bliss bliss bliss bliss/breath breath breath breath.

Thought about the marathon and how long it’s been since I ran on the winchell trail and FWA and My Neighbor Totoro, which Scott and I watched last night. Also thought about zombies, which is my theme for October. Mostly I thought about bodies without minds and feeling like you’re trapped in a body and soul-less, indifferent, relentless bodies.

10 Things

  1. heading down to the Horace Cleveland Overlook, I was blinded by a circle of light on the river — so bright! impossible to see anything else
  2. the sharp crack of a squirrel opening an acorn
  3. kids on the playground — laughing, yelling
  4. water trickling out of the sewer pipe at 44th
  5. a few more slashes of red, a golden feeling*
  6. the surface of the winchell trail is in terrible condition — cracked, slanted, cratered
  7. bikers on a bench, taking a snack break
  8. a woman on the narrow winchell trail with a dog, off to the side and facing me, talking on a phone I couldn’t see, saying something about walking after 60
  9. someone sitting on the bench in a blue shirt near the overlook
  10. big trees on the ground, cut into sections and stacked beside the trail

*For the past few weeks, I’ve been seeing trees turning yellow everywhere, but when I mention it to Scott he says that they look perfectly green to him, not yellow at all. Since my color vision is questionable, I’ll take his word for it. I’ve decided to believe that I’m seeing the yellow that is coming, or the slightest idea — the inkling — of yellow that has arrived but only as a feeling or the whisper, yellow. This morning, as I stood at the kitchen counter, about to make my coffee, I noticed the reflection of my neighbor’s tree on the granite countertop. Yellow! Wow, I said to myself out loud, has that tree turned when I wasn’t looking? I looked out the window and checked the real tree: a golden feeling, but nothing more.

Another gold/en thing: Admiring the sun spilling through the treetops, feeling the crisper air, W.S. Merwin’s line from “To the Light of August” popped into my head: Still the high, familiar, endless summer, yet with a glint of bronze in chill mornings. I thought, not bronze, but gold.

some marathon experiments

During and after my run, I had 2 ideas for things to try while running 26.2 miles. First: pick 26 poems I’ve memorized to recite in my head as I run. One for each mile. The problem with this idea is not memorizing all the poems. I’ve already done that. The problem is remembering which poems I picked and for which mile! I imagined attempting to write a list on my arm, which seemed ridiculous and too unruly.

Second: for each mile, notice things that begin with one particular letter. Do this in alphabetical order. So, mile 1 = a, mile 2 = b, etc. I could also make a list of as many words that start with that letter as possible. This experiment might be fun, but it could also get tedious.

In addition to these experiments, I’ve been thinking that I need a mantra and/or a few lines from favorite poems to chant in difficult moments or when I want to be distracted. Yes! I’ll have to make a list today. Of course, ED’s life/death/bliss/breath is on this list!

zombies!

Today is the first day of Zombie month! I’m excited to explore this topic, which I don’t know that much about. Since the marathon is this Sunday and I’m also thinking a lot about that, I’ll ease into zombies this week.

When I think of zombies, I think: relentless, indifferent, hungry, mindless, brainless bodies. And this makes me think of Jaws as a relentless killing machine. Here’s a great poem I found on poetryfoundation:

Jaws/ Emma Hine

I don’t realize I’m starved
for the color until the blood

washes up on the beach.
I’m craving red but still

haven’t seen the creature,
just the quick whip and slither

of its tail in the wake
—and then there I am,

facing the skin side
of the animatronic shark.

The slick apertures of its eyes.
The mythic teeth.

The anvil nose beating
the deck, cracking windows.

The shark, like the moon, is
pockmarked, unstoppable,

never showing its hidden side.
Surely space is just another underwater,

the messages we send from satellites
a bleeding haze of infrared:

This is my blood type,
this is where I keep my body at night,

and I tell no one about the times
my body, taking over,

stands waist-deep in the surf,
some wild need inside me

ticking into place.

The slick apertures of its eyes. Yes — Jaws’ eyes are the worst: huge, empty, black. Is much made of zombies’ eyes? Anything distinctive, or do they just look dead and empty?

sept 30/MARATHON WEEK

The first day of marathon week. The 15th anniversary of my mom’s death. 11 years after witnessing the marathon near Lake Nokomis, feeling the magic of it, and knowing that one day I wanted to run this race. In 2013, I had been running for 2 years, not that long but long enough to believe that this distance was possible.

The horrible way my mom died in 2009 — slowly, painfully, her strong body prolonging her suffering for more than a year– forced me to confront a truth I hadn’t yet, even though I was 35: our bodies will fail us.

note, 1 oct, 2024: Instead of fail, I first wrote betray, our bodies will betray us. It seemed too strong, but fail doesn’t seem strong enough. Maybe: our bodies can betray us? Or, instead of “forced me to confront” I could say, The horrible way my mom died in 2009, transformed my understanding of my body; I began to fear it, to believe that one day it would betray me.

For me, training for and getting to the start line of this marathon, especially not being able to do so in 2017, is an acceptance of that failing and an expression of deep (and complicated) love for my body.

I love how athletes believe in the body and know it will fail them.

Love/ Alex Dimitrov

Inspired by a writing prompt, I just checked out Marianne Moore’s collection, Observations. Another color poem!

In the Days of Prismatic Color/ Marianne Moore

not in the days of Adam and Eve but when Adam
was alone; when there was no smoke and color was
fine, not with the fineness of
early civilization art but by virtue
of its originality; with nothing to modify it but the

mist that went up, obliqueness was a varia-
tion of the perpendicular, plain to see and
to account for: it is no
longer that; nor did the blue red yellow band
of incandescence that was color keep its stripe: it also is one of

those things into which much that is peculiar can be
read; complexity is not a crime but carry
it to the point of murki-
ness and nothing is plain. complexity
moreover, that has been committed to
darkness, instead of granting it-

self to be the pestilence that it is, moves all a-
bout as if to bewilder us with the dismal
fallacy that insistence
is the measure of achievement and that all
truth must be dark. Principally throat,
sophistication is as it al-

ways has been — at the antipodes from the init-
ial great truths. “Part of it was crawling, part of it
was about to crawl, the rest
was torpid in its lair.” In the short legged, fit-
ful advance, the gurgling and all the
minutiaæ — we have the classic

multitude of feet. To what purpose! Truth is no Apollo
Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may
go over it if it likes.
Know that it will be there when it says:
“I shall be there when the wave has gone by.”

I do not understand this poem or get many of its references, but it’s about color and there’s something in her mist and murkiness and the dark that is inviting me to read it a few more times.

sept 29/RUN

10 miles
downtown and back
57 degrees

The last long run before the marathon next Sunday. Just one more week and then I’ve made it to the start line! Not easy, but not hard either. My first time running this far into downtown — past the Stone Arch Bridge — in years. Already crowded at 9 am on a Sunday morning. Sunny, warm. Lots of sweat.

Listened to an audio book, The Marlow Murder Club, so I was distracted. Can I remember 10 things I noticed?

10 Things

  1. near the seep/spring in the flats, the road was all wet
  2. rowers! heard: coxswain’s voice
  3. some more red leaves higher in the trees
  4. the St. Thomas bells chiming at least 2 different times
  5. roller skiers: a pair + a few individual skiers
  6. running straight into the sun — difficult to see anything
  7. the soft sand on the dirt path near the Hennepin Bridge
  8. a single, brown leaf fluttering to the ground in front of me
  9. thin foam on the surface of the river
  10. blue, cloud-free sky

No music blasting from bikes, no Doppler effect, no sirens, no stinky trash or sewer smells, no geese, no darting squirrels, no turkeys, no Dave the Daily Walker. No chafing (my old running bra was scratchy me up — lots of small cuts and little scars, but no bleeding), no unfinished business, no bathroom or water stops. No thoughts, no lines of poetry popping into my head, no epiphanies, no problems solved. No yelling, no getting irritated, no sliding kneecaps. No goldenrod, no swarming gnats, nobody calling out encouragement. Just me and legs and lungs and hips and river.

sept 26/RUN

10k
flats and back
59 degrees

Warmer than I thought this morning. Lots of sweat. Sun. Shadows. Sparkling water. Ran past the road closed on Oct 6 (that’s for the marathon!) and smiled. Not long now. I felt fine. My big toe on my right foot stung a little. My right foot is a bit of a mess: an in-grown big toenail, a blackish-purplish second toe, another possible in-grown toenail on the fourth toe. I think it will all be fine — nothing’s infected and it doesn’t hurt that much.

10 Things

  1. a coxswain’s voice, calling out instructions
  2. a motorboat’s wake, leaving soft ripples on the surface of the river, moving upstream and contrasting with the motion of the water heading downstream
  3. ahead of me, under the 1-94 bridge, the river sparking silver
  4. water seeping out of the limestone below the U of M’s west bank, wanting to be a waterfall
  5. my shadow, running ahead of me: sharp and solid
  6. several of the benches were occupied — one person at each
  7. a few more red leaves — a bright, fiery red
  8. the rhythmic snap of a fast runner’s striking feet
  9. cracks in the asphalt just north of the trestle — they just patched these in late spring and the entire stretch was redone 2 or 3 years ago — in 10 years will you even able to run on this section, or will it have slid into the gorge?
  10. someone left the lid of the trashcan below the lake street bridge open — wow, it stinks!

Here’s a poem I read yesterday that I liked to add to my collection of shadow poems — I might also add it to my growing group of moment poems too:

On a Walk/ Heather Christle

My child is upset that they cannot jump over their shadow.
They want me to help them. They want me to teach them
how it’s done. The best I can do is an invitation

to jump over each other’s shadows instead. This satisfies them
for a moment and then the moment is gone. In sunlight
my shadow loves to give me a little dose of sorrow,

the beams having traveled so far only for the lump of me
to get between them and the ground. They came so close.
If I were the earth I would resent me too. My child

has gone into the next moment. I have to catch up. They say
they are riding a horse. They point and it drags them away.

I read this wonderful quote from Hanif Abdurraqib the other day in one of my favorite former grad student’s newsletter. It’s about the ekphrasis form and is helpful for thinking about my “How to See” project:

Many of us live in an ekphrasis mindset. We are often executing ekphrasis storytelling…creating a story based off of that witnessing. I don’t ever want to move beyond that desire to say, I saw something and I know that you were not there to see it. But I can build the world wherein you felt like you have witnessed it alongside me.

via rachael anne jolie

I want to build a world about how I see with my dead-coned eyes in my poems, partly to feel less alone and isolated and partly to invite people to think more what it means to see (and to not see).

Last night, Scott and I were watching “Escape to the Country” and one of the escapees (Carol from Hertfordshire) was registered blind. She sometimes used a white cane and had some help from her husband in navigating, but she could make eye contact and see some of what was going on. When the host (Jules) asked her to explain her vision, she said she could see about 20% of what he could, enough to get a sense of the space, but not clearly. I appreciated that Jules had asked her to explain her vision (and impressed with the positive, non-tragic way they depicted her throughout the episode), but I wanted more. I wished she (and/or the show) had had an ekphrasis mindset and offered additional details about what seeing/not seeing is for her. The host, Jules, suggests, “Fundamentally, understanding how she sees the world is going to be crucial to finding properties that will absolutely deliver.” Even a sentence or two more might have helped in that understanding.

I wondered what someone who had never thought about the process of seeing or the spectrum of no-sight to full-sight made of her description and how she (fairly) easily/”naturally” moved through the world. After my run, I decided to google the episode and see if I could find more information about the woman, like what her condition was, etc. I was disappointed to discover headlines describing her blindness as “heartbreaking” or that she told of it, “with tears in her eyes.” That’s not how I perceived it. Admittedly, I can’t see faces clearly enough to grasp slight facial expressions, but this woman did not seem heartbroken and if she had any tears in her eyes, it was because she was looking into the sun. This was not a tragic episode; she and her husband were excited to move. These headlines seem to be typical examples of writers projecting their own fears and negative understandings of blindness onto blind people (or people with low vision, or people who see differently). Blind = tragic = heartbreaking = pity.

Scott and I watched the brief, 10 second clip that this “heartbreaking” description is based on, and he agreed that she wasn’t upset or crying. Her description was neutral and matter-of-fact. Sigh.

At the beginning of my run, I thought more about the ekphrastic mindset and asked myself, what is art? I didn’t come up with an answer — a task for another run!

one more thing to add: Talking with RJP about my various projects, she introduced me to a new phrase for describing the dirt trails that walkers/runners make in the grass: desire paths. That should be a title for one of my gorge poems, for sure!

sept 24/RUN

3 miles
trestle turn around
54 degrees
13 days until the marathon!

Overcast, cool. A steady stream of cars. I was planning to greet the Welcoming Oaks, but I forgot. Encountered many runners, walkers, someone (I think) was heading to the rowing club, and at least one roller skier. I noticed a few streaks of red and yellow, but mostly everything is still green.

Since I ran 20 miles on Sunday, today I only did 3 miles. My legs were slightly sore, but not too bad. I’m pleased with my recovery. I was especially pleased that I pushed through the moments when it felt a little harder. To keep my heart rate below 170, I chanted in triple berries in mile 3: strawberry/blueberry/raspberry.

10 Things

  1. in the first mile, encountered a woman’s cross country team — a core group of 12? then pairs of slower runners trailing behind, one final runner at the very back — as I passed them I could hear their labored breathing — they were all running fast!
  2. happy, excited voices rising up from the rowing club
  3. a car pulling out right in front of another one at the top of the lake street hill — the second car honked once, but no yelling or repeated honks or crash sounds
  4. click clack click clack — a roller skier’s poles
  5. in the third mile, encountered the team again — still fast, still jagged breaths
  6. no sparkle on the water, flat featureless blue
  7. running south, I could feel the faintest outline of my shadow — was I imagining it?
  8. more spray paint on the path — bright green and orange, looking sloppy
  9. the sharp crack of an acorn hitting the asphalt
  10. above the ravine, at the wooden fence — all thick green, no view, one of the fence slats had been pushed away from the others by a leaning tree

Before and after my run I listened to a recording I did this morning of myself reading 4 of my water poems. I’m proud of them.

Watched a short video with Hanif Abdurraqib while I at my breakfast (peanut butter toast). I love this definition of writing:

I think about writing as being in the pursuit of beautiful language to extract or shake out a curiosity that’s been long haunting me in a pleasurable way. And I’ll do as much as it takes and seek out as much language as it takes to get there.

Windham Campbell Prize, 2024, Hanif Abdurraqib

I want to remember an idea I encountered in an explanation of yesterday’s poem of the day on poets.org. The poem was “Villany” in LA by Gabrielle Civil. Here’s their explanation:

About this Poem

“More than just rendering something in another language, the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries remind us that translation is ‘the process of moving something from one place to another.’ What better way to signal that than a poem about public transit? In their book Villainy, Andrea Abi-Karam moves love and grief for those who died in the 2016 Ghost Ship [warehouse] fire in Oakland to me [as I’m] riding the train in Los Angeles. As with most translations, I move my reading into something else: this time, a new poem, which receives the original and carries it like a holy relic into a different city.”

Gabrielle Civil

I’d like to think more about translation and this movement and how I might play with it in my writing about running and swimming and my running/swimming-as-writing.

sept 22/RUN

20 miles
bde maka ska and back*
52 degrees

*river road, south/minnehaha falls/minnehaha creek path — past lake hiawatha, lade nokomos, the bunny/lake harriet/william berry parkway/bde maka ska and back

20 miles! The first half of it was fine, then I had some unfinished business and no porta potty for miles. I had to wait 3, or was it 4?, miles before I reached one at lake harriet. Then I went to another one at bde maka ska. I should have returned to the lake harriet one again before heading out into the porta potty dead zone, but I didn’t. Soon, it was difficult to run, so I did more walking than running for the rest of the time. Finally at the lake nokomis pickleball courts, another porta potty! As I waited to use it, I appreciated how lively and crowded it was: packed pickleball courts and playground. It’s great to see people using the park so much. In terms of the unfinished business, why is it such a problem? It is the cliff blocks I’m taking every 3 miles?

I listened to a cozy murder mystery — The Marlow Murder Club — which seems like a pale imitation of the Thursday Murder Club, but was a good distraction. I took out my headphones between the bunny and lake harriet and listened to the creek and a wailing kid.

20 Things

  1. sparkling river water through the trees
  2. heard, not seen — laughing kids across the creek — joyful exuberance
  3. minnehaha creek — first calm and flat, then bubbling, then gushing
  4. the path by nokomis, which was closed for the summer, has reopened — no more running on sharp gravel!
  5. early, around 8:30, the pickleball court was already filled
  6. a few barks from a dog, then a strange, terrible whining noise that I think (hope) was a machine and not an animal
  7. a hopping squirrel — so graceful and fast, moving across the shaded grass
  8. 2 adults, an upset kid, and a stroller under the bridge
  9. more slashes of red, but not much color anywhere else
  10. heard, not seen — more laughin exuberant kids playing at the creek at the spot where the tall, pedestrian bridge crosses over to the other side of the creek
  11. lake harriet was crowded — difficult to dodge walkers with dogs coming both ways
  12. a beach with no buoys, an empty lifeguard’s chair
  13. a woman adjusting her hiking poles, almost whacking me with them
  14. taking william berry parkway to reach bde make ska, running down a steep hill
  15. a striking contrast: waving blue water with bright green grass
  16. images of butterflies imprinted in the sidewalk
  17. a honking noise, sounding like a big ship — what was that?
  18. a flotilla of sailboats, all with white sails
  19. a real bunny hopping through the grass / a bronze bunny beside the creek path trail
  20. a single, small leaf, floating under the duck bridge as I crossed it

20 miles was difficult and uncomfortable, but not terrible. I can definitely go farther in 2 weeks. During the last mile, I kept smiling, proud of myself for what I was accomplishing and how far I’ve come since getting injured during marathon training in 2017.

sept 20/RUN

10 miles
confluence loop
65 degrees

Such a beautiful morning! I marveled at it with a woman we passed on the stairs down to the east river road. Sunny and still with sharp, satisfying shadows. The first 5 miles were, as I said to Scott, not hard but not easy either. Just one foot in front of the other, moving forward. I had some unfinished business (which is my euphemism for needing to poop) that I had tried to finish before the run started, but couldn’t. Around 5 miles, we stopped at a porta potty — the last one for several miles — but it was locked and it didn’t seem like anyone was coming out anytime soon. I’m not even sure anyone was in there. So I kept going and it got a lot harder. Some stomach cramps and muscle clenching made the run more of a struggle, mentally and physically. But I did it and I don’t feel terrible now that I’m done.

10 Things

  1. flat, still, blue water with dozens of single leaves sitting on the surface
  2. clear, sharp shadows on the bridge — the railing slat shadows were a series of thin parallel lines
  3. the sun reflecting off of the water and through the railing slats was very bright and trippy — so many flashes of light as the shine shot through the slats in a steady rhythm
  4. at first we couldn’t hear shadow falls, but as we neared the monument, I heard the tiniest trickle
  5. pleasing contrast — the bright blue of the sky against the green leaves of a maple tree
  6. slashes of red and orange in the bushes at knee-level
  7. running across the highway 5 bridge, the cars were loud but a speeding motorcycle was louder
  8. more leaping grasshoppers, landing on our legs and feet
  9. a group of people standing in a circle near coldwater springs
  10. a screaming bluejay

Scott and I didn’t talk as much on this run. With my unfinished business, I was trying to focus on moving and didn’t have much to say. Mostly I talked about that or the condition of the path — I rolled my ankle twice (mildly, I hope). Scott talked about where we were (distance/time) in terms of the marathon and how he needs to practice for his gig on Saturday night. I also talked about how the Minneapolis Parks have very specific guidelines for the paved paths along the river — how level they must be, how much distance is required from the road. Scott said that that doesn’t seem to be the case in St. Paul and that he prefers to run on Minneapolis trails.

liquid looking

I’ve started writing around the idea, from Alice Oswald, of liquid looking. I need to gather the different definitions in one space (a job for later today?), but for now I want to mention what I was writing yesterday. It’s about the fish in me escaping (from Anne Sexton), a school of minnows at my feet as I entered the water, and imagining those fish as the insects, the spirits of sight, that Dante describes and that Alice Oswald understands as the light that travels and returns, making it possible for us to see. Here are a few lines from AO (Nobody):

There are said to be microscopic insects in the eye
who speak greek and these invisible
ambassadors of vision never see themselves
but fly at flat surfaces and back again

In my version, the ambassadors of vision are little fish, and they speak in bubbles, not Greek, and they bubble-whisper the colors of things, like the water. I need to work on bringing in just a little bit more of the origin — Dante’s/Oswald’s idea of light spirits/insects — so that it makes sense for the reader. Here’s another passage from an interview with AO that might help:

I was just thinking an awful lot about light and vision and the way … well, light as an insect, really, which is not just Homer, it’s also Dante. I always loved this part of Dante where he talks about the spiriti visivi, I think they’re called. And this idea that when you look at things, what’s happening is these kind of, you know, these creatures are sort of moving out from your eye to the world and moving from the world back into your eye. I was trying to sort of slow down my senses while I wrote this poem and imagine even a sort of passage between myself and the world was a creature, living creature of some kind . . . .

A Conversation with Kit Fan and Alice Oswald

Here’s what I wrote yesterday:

I enter water

and the fish in me

escape — a school of
minnows who dart past
lunging kids before
disappearing in-
to the murk beyond
the buoys. I won’t
see them again but
they are there flashing
below returning
to speak in bubble-
whisper all the names
of water’s colors
silver pewter bronze
copper’s weathered green
reddish-purple rust

Reading this again, I’m thinking about the next line from Anne Sexton’s poem, “The Nude Swim”: The real fish did not mind. I’m really interested in this distinction between the real fish and my fish escaping and what it means and I think I’d like to bring that in here. It fits with something Scott was saying about the poem last night when I read it to him — something about beyond metaphor. I can’t remember, but I think it speaks to what real might mean here.

I enter water
and the fish in me
escape — perhaps they
will join that school of
minnows who dart past
lunging kids before
disappearing in-

OR

I enter water
and the fish in me
escape. The minnows
do not mind as they
dart past lunging kids
on their way to what’s
beyond the buoys.
I won’t see my fish
again but they’re there.

I could also end the poem with an altered version of AO’s, There are said to be microscopic. . . There are said to be tiny fish in the eye/who speak Bubbles . . .

sept 18/YARDWORK

30 minutes
cutting back moldy peonies
78 degrees

Every late spring, the peonies return. First shoots that look like asparagus to me, and which I try (and usually fail) to wrangle into wire hoops before they get too unruly. Then big bulbs. Then ants crawling on the big bulbs. Then red, pink, and white blooms that last only a few days — and less when it rains. Then ugly brown clumps that I eventually prune. Then white-ish, gray-ish mold on the leaves. When they get to the mold stage, I usually cut them down; the mold could be the reason Delia-the-dog itches in the summer. A few days ago I noticed mold, so this late morning I cut down the last of the peonies. Winter is coming.

7 Things

  1. some bug has been feasting on the hosta leaves, so many ragged holes!
  2. our crab apple tree seems to be dying — withered leaves, bare branches too soon — is it the ants?
  3. stepping around the yard, trying to find Delia’s poop, the ground was riddled with craters and divots and soft spots — is it the ants?
  4. often they hydrangea leaves are dropping and sprawled and tangled — this year at least two stalks are standing up straight and nearing the top of the fence — are they trying to avoid the ants?
  5. no matter how hard I try, I can’t ever see wasps flying in or out of the giant, papery nest they’ve built at the top of the crab apple tree — Scott does and it always stresses him out
  6. a greeting from a neighbor — hello! hi!
  7. there is a daycare next door and almost every day this spring and summer, 2 little kids have had recess, which involves shouting and non-stop running back and forth across the neighbor’s front yard and our side yard. It is strange and a bit haunting to see these short figures dart across my vision — sometimes I feel almost, but not quite, like I’m watching a horror movie

I was listening to a podcast (Nobody Asked Us), so 7 things was all I could remember.

Still Water/ Patricia Fargnoli

“What times are these when a poem about trees is almost a crime because it contains silence against so many outrages.” – Brecht

And why not silence?
Ahead of me, Goose Pond parts pale water
and my canoe slides through into June sun, cathedral quiet,

      soft plums of cloud.

A thin gauze of rain stalls over Mt. Monadnock.

This is the way I drift

from each skirmish with the world
to the diplomacy of light
as it flares off the water,

  flickers among the flute-notes

of birds hidden in the leaning birches.

Would you condemn me?

I’ve already held the old bodies of grief
long past morning; leave them
to the ministrations

  of the dirt-borers

who work what is finished back into the earth.

Some atrocities are beyond redemption–

you know them already–
the world will be the world no matter.
I want the blinding silver of this small pond

      to stun my eyes,

the palaver of leaves to stop my ears.

sept 17/RUN

5 miles
bottom of franklin turn around
70 degrees / dew point: 63

So much sweat! The bill of my cap, the end of my ponytail, the tip of my nose dripping before I finished the first mile. Ran 3 without stopping, then walked until my heart rate was down to 135. Started running again to the metronome at 175 and finished with my winter playlist — time for a new playlist!

I liked running to the metronome (through my headphones, from the metronome/tuner app on my phone). I was able to match my foot strikes with the beat fairly quickly, but it took a few minutes for it to lock in. When that happened, I could feel the transformation from the edge of the beat (just before or after it) to the deep center of it. My foot strike seemed different, more solid and strong. The beat sounded different, less generic and more connected to a physical source (my foot). And I felt different, inside the beat, no longer a body but that steady clicking sound. Very cool.

It’s not quite the same, but I’m thinking of myself as Annie Dillard’s bell being struck. Also, Emily Dickinson and these lines:

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here –

10 Things

  1. slashes of red in the bushes
  2. a pinkish-orangish clump of leaves
  3. almost all green in the floodplain forest
  4. a shimmering circle of light: the sun on the river through a gap in the trees
  5. a steady stream of commuting cars
  6. mostly overcast, with occasional sun, enough sun for me to see my shadow as I walked home
  7. at the beginning of my run, a for sale sign in a front yard, by the end of my run, it was gone
  8. running down franklin, the trees were a yellowish green
  9. at least one roller skier — maybe 2, unless it was the same skier
  10. the bright, generous smile of a woman walking past me

Yesterday, I came across this cool poetry project, The BardCode Project:

In the BardCode Project Gregory Betts has analysed and mapped the rhyme patterns within Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. Shakespeare built his famous sonnets by a unique sound pattern of rhymes in the final syllable, the tenth column, of each line. Betts asks, and answers, the question: What was Shakespeare doing in the rest of the sonnet?

The BardCode project maps out the full sound pattern of rhymes in all ten columns across all of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Colour coding these sound-codes results in a visual text rich with the sonic patterns of the poems. Suddenly, for the first time, you can see the BardCode.

BardCode Projects

sept 15/RUN

14 miles
randolph to the river / crosby farms / confluence
75 degrees / dew point: 68

And now it seems you are still summer. Still the high, familiar, endless summer. . . A warm September day. We started later than we should (9:30), but Scott and I both wanted to sleep in. Sun, some shade, an occasional breeze.

We took a new route: south on the west river road, over the ford bridge, north on the east river road, west on randolph — past st. kate’s, a walgreens, trader joes, a cool coffee place, a-side public house — to shepherd road and the river. Through crosby farms and past 2 lakes — crosby lake and ? lake, up a STEEP hill to the confluence, above hidden falls, over ford bridge again, and finishing north on the west river road. Wow, such different terrain. Randolph is a very cool avenue. Near 7th street, there are some great restaurants and quirky houses, their yards stuffed with flowers and sculptures and other whimsical thing.

It was hot! An hour in, we were both soaked. So much sweat! Tough conditions.

Mostly we were quiet, conserving eneergy, but we talked about the hills and the heat. Scott sang the song from his favorite childhood movie, Midnight Madness. Then he mentioned how he wanted to study its composition and explore what chords make a song a disco song. I recited W.S. Merwin’s “To the Light of September” at one point. I also talked about wanting to check out Phillip’s Aquatic Center with RJP this fall.

update, 17 sept: Reading a past entry (from 17 sept, 2023), I remembered that Scott talked about an article he read about how they (St. Paul? Minneapolis?) has been handling the ongoing problem of people stealing wires out of street lamps for copper. They’ve replaced the copper with aluminum and put signs on the posts that say something like, these wires contain aluminum and have no value. Scott added that aluminum isn’t as efficient as copper, but it’s helping with the theft problem. Typing this up, I also remember a random thought I had about street lamps vs. street lights. I was suggesting to Scott that we should start running again at the streetlight ahead of us in the parking lot. I thought, why did I call this a street light and not a street lamp? Is it because it’s much taller? A boring thought, I know, but I could imagine using it in a poem.

update, 21 sept 2024: I also forgot about the surrey! Finishing up the last miles of our run, entering the pedestrian side of the double bridge, we witnessed a surrey biking through the narrow bike part of the path. I have always wondered what happens when surreys (which aren’t supposed to travel this far from the park) reached the double bridge. How could they make it through? It was tight, but they did it. Not nearly as dramatic as I had imagined.

14 Things

  1. some poop smeared on the sidewalk — someone must have stepped in it and then dragged it for several feet
  2. passing by, but not stopping to read, several st. paul sidewalk poems near st. kate’s
  3. the patio at carbone’s pizza place, looking very inviting with its chair in the shades and its planters creating some space from the road (mentioned this to Scott and he said there was also a sign that read, caution pizza crossing)
  4. the loud beeping of a crosswalk sign (scott said it sounded more like the rapid fire of a machine gun, and I agree)
  5. up and down and up and down — so many hills on randolph!
  6. a few small leaves fluttering in front of me as we ran on the trail next to shepherd road
  7. a woman on the ground, stretching, her bike nearby. as we ran by, she called out, way to go runners! you can do it!
  8. the cool shade of the cracked trail in crosby farms
  9. overheard: a walker to another walker — tomorrow we’re going to tum rup thai. they moved locations into a bigger space. I said to scott, where did they move? I want to go! just looked it up, and I can’t find the new location anywhere
  10. the delightful knocking of a woodpecker on dead wood, echoing in the quiet forest
  11. a group of high school cross country runners taking over the trail by the confluence. one kid was swinging his leg out onto the path
  12. lots of bikers calling out, on your left
  13. crossing the ford bridge again, looking down at the water, noticing the bumpy texture created by small waves
  14. a guy (a dad?) on a bike blasting some music, two little kids sitting behind him in a safety seat

sept 12/RUN

10k
duluth lake walk
63 degrees / humidity: 89%

Windy, muggy, hilly. Mostly, the lake looked pewter a few times like oxidized copper — a rusty, tarnished green. Fluttering, falling leaves, leaf by leaf. Slashes of red and gold. Up north smells — pine? wildflowers? Up and down over little rises beside Lake Superior. Kids laughing and yelling in Leif Erickson Park. Morning! — a greeting from another runner. A woman with 2 dogs, wearing bright yellow pants, not looking as she stepped back on the trail in front of us. Rocky beaches below, echoes of hollow, metallic stones knocking against each other.

Textiles: soft sand, cracked and puckered asphalt, pliable springy wood slats, unyielding concrete.

Overheard, one woman walker to another — and we’d get ALLmost two days!

A good run with Scott on our quick trip to Duluth with RJP. We did 9 minutes run / 1 minute walk the whole way. The marathon is less than a month away. Next week: a 20 miler!

sept 10/RUN

5 miles
bottom franklin hill and back
68 degrees

A relaxed run. Warm, windy. Thought about wild as the (not quite) opposite of still. At the beginning of my walk, an idea: wild is not only a place, but a feeling — movement, untamed, uncontrolled, frantic frenzied jittery non-stop, restless. Stillness is controlled, steady, a nothing that is something, the core, a straight spine. Then I started thinking about my diseased eyes as wild — uncontrollable — which led to the idea that my eyes aren’t wild but undergoing a re-wilding. The aftermath of a catastrophe — a forest fire — where new (and different) growth occurs. Here I’m thinking about fungi and how they grow in places that have been destroyed, especially how Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing describes them in Mushrooms at the End of the World: On the Possibility of LIfe in Capitalist Ruins.

For the last mile and a half of my run, I put in my headphones and synched up my steps to a metronome set at 175 bpm. It took a minute to settle into the stillness at the center of the beat. At first, I was on the edge, my foot striking slightly before or just after the beat. Then I locked in and it felt like my feet were making the clicking noise. click click click click. No effort, no thinking, no doubting, just moving and being and breathing and singing a steady song.

10 Things

  1. screaming bluejays
  2. chirping crickets
  3. a tweeting bird, repeating tweet tweet tweet tweet
  4. buzzing cicadas
  5. 2 shirtless runners — runner 1: I need to stop at the porta potty
  6. chalked on the trail, honor the river
  7. goldenrod on the edge
  8. water, seen but not studied — did it sparkle? was it blue? empty? moving? I didn’t notice
  9. a few slashes of red and orange in the bushes
  10. voices below — rowers? hikers?

I was inspired to think about the wild because of a recent book I just finished reading, Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds. So good! Here are a few passages I marked to remember. I checked this ebook out from the library, but I’m wondering if I want to buy it — so many good passages.

what seems to be scattered by nature was not

She wondered why she could see the beautiful rise of old trees all the way up and down the hills, and why there was no bramble or brush to grab at her and tear holes in her clothing. But she could not find an answer.

For nothing in her ken would allow her to imagine that it was the piscataway, the people of these parts, who so carefully burned the small brush away, and the saplings, too, to better see their game through the trees. She did not know that many of the trees around her were hickory and chestnut and hazelnut and walnut, and that, should she dig below the leaf litter, she would find ample nuts to sustain her even in these hungry times after the winter and before the full bursting-forth of spring. And that these trees, too, had been planted by the gardeners of this place. For here understanding of gardeners was limited to the ones of the city, and the ones of the city loved a straight line and a neat border, and looking out upon the trees seeming scattered there by the hand of nature itself, she did not recognize the human genius and planning in the wild abundance.

The Vaster Wilds/ Lauren Groff

the slow movement of stones

And the stones, with their lives so slow that to all impatient moving creatures of animated life they did appear unmoving, but even the stones she understood now did meet and mate, did erupt and splinter, did rub to powder stone upon stone and stone upon water and stone upon air, so that in the long scale of their lives the stones saw within themselves incredible vitality.

The Vaster Wilds/ Lauren Groff

Back to stillness, especially as nothing. Yesterday the poem of the day on poets.org was by a friend and amazing poet, Carolina Ebeid. Here’s a fitting excerpt from it:

No, nothing, no thing, no where—  
the o of no blinks open 

Assume the Role of Cassandra, Wearing a Mask, Speaking into the Camera/ Carolina Ebeid

The o of no blinks open. The openness of no — not a closing off but an opening into. Into what? This line was in my head at the end of my run and I thought, the gorge. No rock, just open air space a place filled with birds and bugs and possibilities and that shapes my stories of running outside and noticing.

Here’s another line that I love:

Can you hear the low pulse tree-growth consuming the fence?

Assume the Role of Cassandra, Wearing a Mask, Speaking into the Camera/ Carolina Ebeid

More than leaves or vines, I imagine this tree-growth as the trunk, rings thickening, growing through the chain-link fence on the Winchell Trail. I love the idea of becoming still enough to hear the pulse of this growth, to dwell in a time scale impossible for us restless humans. What is the rate of a tree’s heartbeat? Not in beats per minute, but beats per day or month or year?

This line also reminds me of a favorite poem that I memorized a few years ago, Push the button, hear the sound/ HELEN MORT:

Can you hear the call of the mynah bird?
Can you hear the flamingos in the water?
Can you hear your small heart next to mine
and the house breathing as it holds us?
Can you hear the chainsaw start, the bones
of our neighbor’s eucalyptus breaking?

excerpt from Push the Button/ Helen Mort

sept 8/RUN

18 miles
river road / minnehaha creek / lake harriet / lake nokomis / minnehaha falls
56 degrees

18 miles! I’m tired now, but it wasn’t terrible and I felt good for much of it. The last 4 miles were harder, but not impossible. When I finished, I felt like that was all I could do, but I know I’ll be able to do more when I run my 20 miler in a few weeks. My average pace was 75 seconds faster per mile than last week during my 16 miler. Nice!

While I ran, I listened to Death on the Nile. Almost 3 1/2 hours of it and the main character hadn’t even died yet! Well, her body was just about to be discovered when I turned it off at the end of my run. Maybe I’ll listen to the rest of it on my 20 miler?

I think this is the first time I’ve run all the way to Lake Harriet since I was training for the marathon in 2017. As I ran, I thought about how grateful I am to be still running and to have another chance to run the marathon. It’s taken 7 years, and almost 7000 miles, to get here. Wow!

18 Things

  1. a crowded trail, with lots of runners and 2 roller skiers, under the ford bridge and nearing the falls
  2. creak creak creak — the sound of the wood on the duck bridge as I ran over it
  3. several dogs barking frantically on the other side of the creek
  4. the bronze bunny — no scarf or t-shirt or anything on it today
  5. a rushing, high creek at one spot, a calm sparkling creek at another
  6. passing over the creek on a tall bridge, looking down at the rushing water
  7. hearing some kids laughing on the other side of the creek, crossing and bridge and seeing them jumping around
  8. loud cheers at Lake Harriet — a running race — decided to turn around early to avoid it
  9. a person sitting on the wall of the weir near lake nokomis, fishing
  10. 2 more people fishing on the shore of the lake nokomis — one in a portable chair, the other on a cement bench
  11. a paddle boarder in the water just off the little beach
  12. giant images of monarch butterflies on the pickleball fence for yesterday’s monarch festival
  13. view from cedar bridge — lake nokomis in a blue shimmer
  14. a young kid on a bike, waiting at the top of the hill near 28th. after I passed by, he called out to his friend, it’s clear now, you can go!
  15. running over gravel near nokomis avenue, my foot striking down on a sharp rock — ouch!
  16. encountering 2 surreys near 38th
  17. an event — maybe sponsored by Friends of the Mississippi River? — at the welcoming oaks. there were tents and people and signs and (maybe) ice cream
  18. after finishing my run I could hear drums playing across the road at the welcoming oaks

added an hour later: I just remembered the sound of the wind in the trees. In certain stretches, it sounded like water falling. Briefly I wondered, is that wind or water, but then I noticed that where I was there wasn’t any water that would make the noise. No falls or ravines or seeps. A beautiful, comforting, calming sound, that wind!

sept 6/RUN

10 miles
confluence loop*
57 degrees

*lake street bridge / east river road to confluence / highway 5 bridge / fort snelling / past minnehaha dog park / minnehaha falls / west river road

Ran with Scott on a loop I’ve wanted to do ever since we tried part of it last November. Because there are several isolated stretches, I’ve never wanted to do this run by myself. I’m glad Scott could come with me today. It’s a great loop.

Near the beginning of the run, I recited the poem I just memorized, “To the Light of September” and we talked about blue plums and whether we’ve ever eaten them (no). Scott wondered where Merwin was writing about — the landscape seemed familiar. I know Merwin ended up in Hawaii, but I thought he might have taught at Iowa or on the east coast. Looked it up and he was born in NYC and lived there — and in Spain and France too — in his early adult years. In the 70s, he moved to Hawaii.

10 Things

  1. the fee bee of a black capped chickadee
  2. bright red leaves in the low bushes
  3. all the yellow leaves on a the tree near Marshall last week are gone this week
  4. the shshshsh of the sandy dirt with every foot strike
  5. what a view of the mississippi from high above as it rounds the bend!
  6. crossing the highway 5 bridge, admiring my shadow down below, running over the treetops
  7. the disorienting effect of the sun coming through the railing slats as we ran
  8. a cloud of grasshoppers at fort snelling — jumping out of the way just before we reached them
  9. a man walking above the falls in BRIGHT yellowish-orange shorts
  10. a cloud of dust, which I thought was smoke at first, stirred up by construction work at the site of a new house

During mile 6, we ran up a long hill that wasn’t too steep but was in the sun and faced the wind and seemed to stretch on forever. At the start of it I thought I wouldn’t be able to keep going, but I put one foot in front of the other and didn’t stop, and I made it. At the top there was shade and I called out, Victory!

For the first 8 miles, Scott and I ran for 9 minutes, then walked for 1. Our pace was at least a minute faster than when I’m running on my own. Nice! I’ll have to do more 9/1 on my 18 mile run on Sunday.

added a few hours later: I almost forgot about the gnats! So many gnats swarming us as we ran from Fort Snelling to the falls. Scott was particularly bugged by them. Mostly I didn’t care, but at least one or two flew into my mouth. Thankfully, not down my throat!

I love anagrams and the spell they cast on words, and I love this poem, which was the poem of the day on the poetry foundation site:

Anagrammer/ Peter Pereria

If you believe in the magic of language,
then Elvis really Lives

and Princess Diana foretold I end as car spin.
If you believe the letters themselves

contain a power within them,
then you understand

what makes outside tedious,
how desperation becomes a rope ends it.

The circular logic that allows senator to become treason,
and treason to become atoners.

That eleven plus two is twelve plus one,
and an admirer is also married.

That if you could just rearrange things the right way
you’d find your true life,

the right path, the answer to your questions:
you’d understand how the Titanic

turns into that ice tin,
and debit card becomes bad credit.

How listen is the same as silent,
and not one letter separates stained from sainted.