Windy and warm and green. Nearing the crosswalk that leads to the 36th street parking lot and the winchell trail, an intense smell: cannabis. After crossing, 2 guys near the bench, with scooters, talking: dogs are the coolest. I love dogs! and wanna keep going? I’ve got plenty of charge! So chill and enthusiastic and generous to the world.
Delia and I descended the split and worn wooden steps into a strange, green world. Something seemed different down here today. What was it? Some trees leaning over the trail, three trees right up against a chainlink fence that I’ve admired before seeming taller. A tree trunk mixed in with the riprap.
Delia managed to poop right near a trashcan. Nice work! And then again, close to home. A new trend for her: double poops on walks. Better on a walk than hidden in grass in our yard! While leaning over to pick up her poop, something flew into my eye. I thought of Katie Farris’ “What Would Root.” I was hit simultaneously in both eyes with some sort of flying detritus (pollen or seed). Love that poem. Ever since I connected her poem with the image of a tree as a person upside and nuzzled into the earth, I can’t unsee it. All around the neighborhood, people planted in the ground, their legs sticking out. I thought about what it would be like to have your head/mind in the dirt, among the roots and nets of trees and fungi, and your body in the air. The opposite of Alice Oswald’s idea of the mind/body split in swimming with your body immersed in the water and your head in the air.
I was planning to take the old stone steps down to the river, but Delia wasn’t interested in that today. We kept walking on the trail above and I admired the blue of the water below. No sparkles or rowers or speed boats or paddle boats or canoes.
suspension / pause / hesitation / a moment
Before my walk, I read Siddhartha Menon’s thoughts on his poem, “Captivity,” which I posted a few days ago. It is sparking many different thoughts and is returning me to one of my obsessions: the moment.
Though “Captivity” ends in something like paralysis (as does “Liberation”) I now slightly regret its final line: “You are paralyzed.” It suggests the fatal indecision of a rabbit caught in a hunter’s flashlight, and snaps the poem shut. This is a plausible way for the poem to conclude but I was actually more interested in the kind of creative suspension in which an either/or gives way to a neither. You are with the bird in the moment, seeking to neither see it more clearly nor shutter it into your camera, seeking indeed nothing at all that would interfere with the moment. This is less paralysis than a kind of shimmering equilibrium.
either/or gives way to neither, no choice is necessary seeking nothing, or Nothing — the space/time beyond judgment or decision or the need to act
Thinking about this idea, I recalled a line from Georgina Kleege in Sight Unseen and wrote about it in my Plague Notebook, vol. 25:
Everyone has a blind spot, mine is just bigger than yours.
I added, the moment between seeing and sight, between receiving light and comprehension, between signal and image. Everyone has a moment between seeing and sight, mine is just longer than yours.
Now I’m thinking about Radiolab and their episode about how long it takes for sight to happen. I found where I last mentioned it, on 16 july 2024
4.15 miles minnehaha falls and back 68 degrees dew point: 59
Even though it was warm and the dew point was high, my run was good. Managed to bring my heart rate back down and keep it under 170 until I reached my favorite spot at the falls — 2.25 miles in. Excellent. I’m feeling stronger, mentally and physically.
10 Things
a turkey in the middle of the road, honking? squawking? yelling? at the cars unwilling to stop and let him cross
a hazy green above the gorge
the sun hitting the light green leaves so intensely in the distance that I thought it was a bright yellow crossing sign instead of a tree
the falls were rushing, all white foam framed by green trees
a steady procession of cars on the road
roots and rocks hidden in the shadows on the trail — I lightly twisted both ankles, one from a root, the other a rock
the tree that feel in the creek sometime last year was gray — will they remove it?
a line of a dozen or more cars backed up on the parkway, stuck at the stop sign
a crowded trail heading north — bikers and walkers, a few runners, strollers
the water fountains have been turned on again! I stopped for a drink and to wet down my hat
Listened to the hum of traffic as I ran south, my “Doin’ Time” playlist heading back north.
before the run
Thinking about LN’s poem — that I posted yesterday — about standing in the north woods with birch, which led me to think about becoming a tree, like in Katie Farris’ “What Would Root” and Linda Pastan’s “In The Orchard” — I shall come back as a tree.
I’m also thinking about Mary Oliver and “Can You Imagine” — surely you can’t imagine trees don’t dance from the roots up, wishing to travel a little, not cramped as much as wanting a better view, or sun, or just as avidly, more shade.
during the run
I don’t remember thinking about becoming a tree or rooting or stillness while I ran, but I remembered right after I finished and as I walked back home I recited “What Would Root” in my head. I need to practice the second half of the poem. Then I thought about the illusion of stillness and how nothing, not even rocks or trees, stand still. They’re sinking and shifting and swaying and responding to (being changed) by the world around them.
after the run
Still as not not moving but being stuck in a rut, doing the same thing again and again, as in, you’re still doing that?
Still as not needing more, content, at peace, satisfied, stilled desire or anxiety.
If Socrates drank his portion of hemlock willingly, if the Appalachians have endured unending ages of erosion, if the wind can learn to read our minds and moonlight moonlight as a master pickpocket, surely we can contend with contentment as our commission.
Deer in a stubble field, small birds dreaming unimaginable dreams in hollow trees, even the icicles, darling, even the icicles shame us with their stoicism, their radiant resolve.
Listen to me now: think of something you love but not too dearly, so the night will steal from us only what we can afford to lose.
walk: 1 hour winchell trail / edmund 77 degrees
Remembered to take Delia the dog for a walk before it got too hot. We walked to the Winchell trail than sauntered, me studying the leaves with my fuzzy vision and fingers, and Delia sniffing them with her snout. Warm in the sun, cool in the shadows.
10+ Things
clumps of tallish grass growing through the mulch — a vibrant green
even taller grasses growing among the flowers on the hill, creating a visual effect that was dizzying as my eyes tried to land on anything solid
little bits of some sort of plant scattered along the top of the fence. It looked like it was growing there — a form of lichen? — but I couldn’t tell. It might have just fallen from a tree
the pleasing, easily identifiable shape of the maple tree on the trees close to the trail
sparkling, blue water
blue water, blue sky, green trees
the laugh of a woodpecker
a yard with several bleeding heart bushes, all in bloom
sprawled tree shadows on the grass
the crotch of a tree — standing beside a tree that branched off into two equally sized limbs which looked like thighs to me. I imagined a person planted head first in the ground, which is what happens in “What Would Root”
walking near Hiawatha Elementary, watching as a gym class “ran” around the block, studying the different approaches to “running” — a steady jog, sprint then stop then sprint, skipping, arms flailing and screaming while moving
As I walked with Delia, stopping at almost every tree or tuft of grass or clump of dirt, I thought about the differences between walking and running, this time in relation to a sense of self. Does one enable you to lose yourself or step outside of yourself more easily? I haven’t decided, but I think while walking you can be more aware of what you are doing, how you are attending to the world and noticing what is going on. While running, the attention is less deliberate; you’re too busy managing your effort to carefully study things. There was more to that thought but I lost in the time that it took me to get home.
Went out earlier today. Already warm. High in the mid 80s today. At the beginning of the run, my body felt awkward. Stiff neck, plodding feet — no, not plodding, but feet that were landing wrong, not pushing off of the ground easily. Gradually my body warmed up and I felt smooth by the third mile. Started my run a little after 7 and enjoyed a different vibe than at 9 or 10. Softer, fuzzier, cool green glow instead of harsh blue light.
My favorite view today was when I turned down from the 44th street parking lot to enter the winchell trail. A path winding down a small hill to a stone wall then hazy, glowing air framed by trees and water. The river was below that sky but I don’t remember noticing it, just knowing it was there.
surfaces: dirt, dead leaves, grass, rubbled asphalt, rutted and slanting asphalt, concrete, smooth asphalt
number of stones stacked on the ancient boulder: 6
bird, heard not seen: woodpecker — a deep, hollow knocking bird, seen not heard: a little sparrow darting into a bush as I ran by
No rowers, no roller skiers, no turkeys. No thoughts or lines of poetry popping into my head. No shadow, no memories of my mom. Nothing interrupting me.
Chanted triple berries in my head to keep a steady beat: strawberry / blueberry / raspberry.
Listened to the gentle buzz of cars, dripping water, voices as I ran south. Put in my “Doin’ Time” playlist on the way back north. Two versions of “What Time is It?” came on, one from The Spin Doctors, the other from High School Musical 2.
restraint and the work of being still
Yesterday, I found a wonderful podcast episode on Lorine Niedecker and a close reading of her poem, “A Poet’s Work.” So much of the episode was great. Today I’m thinking about the discussion of stillness and restraint in LN’s work, which includes another LN poem:
For best work you ought to put forth some effort to stand in north woods among birch
I thought about movement and moving through a place instead of standing still in it, which reminded me of a passage from Cole Swensen:
Then sitting still, we occupy a place; when moving through it, we displace place, putting it into motion and creating a symbiotic kinetic event in which place moves through us as well.
Walk/ Cole Swensen
And now I’m thinking of something I posted, and then condensed, from Wendell Berry:
The slops along the hollow steepen still more and I go in under the trees. I pass beneath the surface. I am enclosed, and my sense, my interior sense, of the country becomes intricate. There is no longer the possibility of seeing very far. The distances are closed off by the trees and the steepening walls of the hollow. One cannot grow familiar here by sitting and looking as one can up in the open on the ridge. Here the eyes become dependent on the feet. To see the woods from the inside one must look and move and look again.
A Native Hill/ Wendell Berry
finding a stillness in movement?
Thinking more about moving and how it does/doesn’t fit with stillness — as in, an inner stillness — I turned to Brian Teare and his discussion of writing while moving in En Plein Air Poetics:
I’m heading up the AT to the North Trail, the kind of hike during which my mind goes from translucent to luminous, its usual wash of thought polished to a transparency that lets in the world with a force I adore. After a mile on foot, details come into focus with an oxygenated crispness. Thought can be a block to feeling the intertwining of self and world, the mesh of phenomena and the qualia of self, and hiking unblocks that feeling by muting my mind and allowing it to flood with a kind of proprioceptive ecstasy. My sense of self disappears into smell, color, sound, touch.
Have I ever heard of qualia? Not sure. Here’s a helpful explanation:
Feelings and experiences vary widely. For example, I run my fingers over sandpaper, smell a skunk, feel a sharp pain in my finger, seem to see bright purple, become extremely angry. In each of these cases, I am the subject of a mental state with a very distinctive subjective character. There is something it is like for me to undergo each state, some phenomenology that it has. Philosophers often use the term ‘qualia’ (singular ‘quale’) to refer to the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives.
proprioceptive: “of, relating to, or being stimuli arising within the organism”
Here’s something else helpful from Teare about shifting away from vision as the primary sense:
Paying attention to a fully intercorporeal relation to a specific site in the field dethrones eyesight as the most valued sense through which we acquire knowledge of nonhuman bodies—the eye is no longer the portal of empiricism through which the rational mind accesses the world.
For instance, hearing and touch are senses rarely accused of the kind of imperialism associated with vision; they are powers that alert other parts of the brain to our embodied relationships with the world.
A listening, touching human mammal is an embodiment that is not all eye and mind, a sensate creature whose language—its rhythms and structures—is derived in part from encountering the sonic landscape, felt textures, and the human and nonhuman bodies that populate and constitute the field.
After all, each ecosystem produces a unique biophony that envelopes us, and writing itself is haptic, a specialized kind of touch.
Took Delia the dog on a walk to the river. So much green everywhere. Birds, blue sky, soft breeze. Everything out of focus. Walked above the winchell trail and the ravine. Made note of the angle of the leaning tree on the wooden fence. Couldn’t see anything below through the thick leaves. Encountered 2 women with coffees deliberating whether or not to descend the old stone steps. Let’s go further and take the road down. I took the steps down to the trail that leads to the river. The river was blue and sparkling with small waves lapping the shore. A boat must have just come through — I didn’t see it. I wish I could have stayed there for longer but Delia wanted to keep moving. Returned to steps and waited for someone descending. At the bottom, they turned around and walked back up. Did they change their mind, or were they doing a stair workout?
For the rest of the walk Delia was difficult. Refusing to go in certain directions, wanting to stop and pee near every tree, slowing down right in front of me. I want to forget my irritation and remember what a beautiful morning it was, how the river looked, how the air felt. Breathing it in, a sense of calm and euphoria enveloped me.
before the run
Yesterday I came across this call for submissions:
What does it mean to be a poet engaged with the physical material of the world around us? How does poetic form change in the encounter with other beings? How do we write collaboratively with—rather than about—nonhuman beings and ecologies?
For the Fall 2025 issue, Arc is seeking experimental eco-poetry that engages with the possibilities of organic form. We welcome experiments with lyric, visual poetics, material poetries, and sound poetries.
I want to spend today (at least) exploring what this might mean for my writing around/beside/within the gorge. And, if I can manage it, I’d like to find another home for some of my favorite lines: it begins here, from the ground up: feet first, following. I started to write, finally find a home, but then I remembered that I’ve actually used the line in a poem that was published earlier this year: Girl Ghost Gorge
My organic form is based on breathing and foot strikes: 1 2 3 breathe in/ 1 2 breathe out. Is this experimental enough?
How do write collaboratively with the nonhuman? Does my form, based on foot strikes, impose an order on the nonhuman? Does it offer a way outside of myself and into somewhere else?
How does poetic form change in the encounter with other beings? I’m thinking about water and stone and wondering how they inform my poetry about the gorge.
during the run
I tried to think about my form as I walked. Mostly, it’s easier for me to think about the words/content than about form and shapes of the words. I wondered about absence and the gorge as eroding/eroded and how that affects the page. An blank space that is not empty but open. Yes, can I push at the idea more?
after the run
I think some inspiration would help in thinking through how form can be inspired by place. Time to revisit Susan Tichy and her collection North | Rock | Edge.
distills somatic observations down their bones. Tichy describes an immersive, granular experience exploring the contours, rocks, winds, and waters of Shetland, a remote northern archipelago between Scotland, the Faroe Islands, and Norway. In isolated yet accumulative images and line breaks, she details the distances and resonances between geology and language, minutely mutable coastscapes, and how to write and walk in a time of planetary change.
The islands’ bays, rugged edges, and jagged protrusions correlate with the way the poems look on the page, a varied right margin, short lines, and a proliferation of line breaks. There are few stopping points in the poems, no periods, and sparse punctuation generally, so that pacing and rhythm are made with line, as if the reader is part of one continuous yet staggered experience.
In my poems about the gorge, I’m less interested in having the words look like the place, but I like the idea of the few stopping points, lack of punctuation and a poem that is part of a continuous experience. Maybe a mostly continuous experience with a few pauses?
There are rhythms to walking on rough ground, a step-after-step persistence that swallows obstacles, like irregular lines that nonetheless carry forward through the poem. There’s also a sensory excitement in a sea-rock-light-wind-bird-flower-seal-seep-peat-rain-salt—oh look, there’s a whale!—environment that subsumes attention to any one thing into the press of the whole.
I like this idea of the sensory excitement that doesn’t subsume attention to any one thing, even as there is one thing: the gorge as gap, gash, bowl.
Tracy Zeman: you also eschew the “I.” I feel that the lack of “I” allows the reader to experience the place as the poem’s speaker does, and that the landscape stays primary and the human secondary in the action. Can you explain why you made this choice and what effect you hoped it would have on the reader’s experience of the text?
Susan Tichy: To me, the poems feel so intensely somatic and personal that the grammatical sign felt unnecessary. Here and there, I drafted other people’s words to express the sensation more directly, such as Robert Macfarlane’s thought diffusing /at body’s edge in “Eshaness | Is It Force Failure.”
Where do I/the poet fit into my poems? I wrote in Plague Notebook, no. 25: To be with the gorge, to witness/behold it, demands participation not observation. It is intimate — contact, meeting, interfacing — and transforms you. You transform it (the gorge world), too.
I feel like this poem that read today on Poetry Daily (poems.com) speaks to and against that:
it is impossible to kill and question at the same time. —Louise Glück, “Liberation”
Or to watch and at the same time to capture. A restive robin in your path flew onto a low cable and you had to choose between binoculars and camera. You knew it would not stay for both. So near: a killing to capture it forever here. Only to watch is a kind of questioning. You are paralyzed.
captivate = to hold something’s attention captivated = rapt, enthralled, cannot look or turn away
Ran earlier today, which helped. The first half was windy. Windy enough that I needed to take my cap off on the ford bridge. Sunny. A mental victory: thought about stopping on the bridge but then just kept going. Made it through the hard moment. The second half of the run, I felt stronger, everything was easier.
I don’t remember noticing the river sparkling, but I did see scales on its surface as I ran west on the bridge. No rowers, no roller skiers, only a few bikers. One small pack of shirtless runners.
Ran up the steep hill that starts under the ford bridge and ends in Wabun park. At the top, I stopped at the fence and looked down at the dam. I studied the tall grass pushing up against the fence. I thought about fences for a moment, how many I encounter while I run by the gorge, some maintained, some abandoned, many damaged by leaning trees or critters or hikers. Wooden, chainlink, iron, stone. Noticed another fence at the ford overlook: chainlink.
Listened to the wind and birds until I reached the ford overlook, then I put in my “Wheeling Life” playlist. Started with “Windmills of Your Mind,” ended with “Watching the Wheels.” Thought about FWA and how he might appreciate John Lennon’s song.
Speaking of playlists, I forgot to mention this in my entry 2 days ago. Listening to my “Slappin’ Shadows” playlist and Cream’s “White Room” came on. I wanted to remember this description of eyes:
Silver horses, ran down moonbeams In your dark eyes
Is this a gleam? Or is she crying?
suburban lawns
I’m still thinking about grass. If I were to make a list of grassy things, which I should and will, the suburban lawn would be on it. I’ve thought about it before, imagining my version of Lorine Niedecker’s growing in green (from her poem, “Paean to Place,”) as the lawn and the patches of green that grow on the edge between suburbs and the few remaining farms they haven’t yet consumed. That was my childhood. Here’s a poem I found this morning to add to the image of the lawn:
In the wilds of our suburban lawn, the natural world inclines to fable: Gray squirrels, unperturbed by rain, jockey for position at what our landlord speaks of, nominally, as the bird feeder. Below, dark-eyed juncos peck at fallen millet, masked like hangmen from another time. The great, unwritten order of it all scrambles when Max, our landlord’s aging chow, starts loping toward the scene. This is his work, so in a sense, he’s adding order, too.
One squirrel has shifted to a fencepost where it twitches its tail and rearranges in quarter turns like a guard. In total, there’s more movement than the eye can account for, all of it framed in the window’s tic-tac-toe. The glass weeps condensation. It’s early, but already the dog has slumped down for a nap. There’s plenty of time to lumber after thoughts that rise and disperse, dark-feathered things returning when I manage to be still.
A near perfect morning. Wow! Sunny with a slight breeze. Blue sky. Quiet. A slow walk with lots of stops for Delia. We walked to the winchell trail and took the worn, wooden steps down to the oak savanna, then another set of wooden steps up to an overlook. So much green everywhere — new trees popping up, tufts of grass, moss. We walked behind the mesa along the abandoned chainlink fence and I marveled at the bright green moss. At one point, I bent down and touched it — almost like carpet, but better.
10 Things
the odd curve of the abandoned chainlink fence on the dirt trail behind the mesa
that same fence, buried deep in the dirt and leaves, only the top was visible
rowers! not seen, only heard — the coxswain calling out instructions
a speed boat moving fast near the opposite shore
tall grass in clumps and tufts and patches
someone sitting by a tree stump, hidden in the green until they were right in front of me
the clicking and scraping of a roller ski’s poles
two runners, running by single-file, talking about a video game
a big bird flying high in the sky
on the boulevard between the river road and edmund, the grass was uneven and bare in many spots, studded with dandelions in others
The moment of the walk was when I stopped to let Delia sniff — more like she demanded to stop — and I stood on the edge of the bluff looking out at the blue water and feeling the soft, cool breeze. All around bright green leaves were fluttering. Below, the river surface was glittering. The movement was mesmerizing, meditative.
The midnight streetlight illuminating the white of clover assures me
I am right not to manicure my patch of grass into a dull
carpet of uniform green, but to allow whatever will to take over.
Somewhere in that lace lies luck, though I may never swoop down
to find it. Three, too, is an auspicious number. And this seeing
a reminder to avoid too much taming of what, even here, wants to be wild.
manicure – patch – carpet – uniform Great words to describe an over-managed lawn. Last night Scott and I were talking about lawns and the moral imperative to maintain your lawn to a certain standard. That is not the case as much in our neighborhood. Most people’s yards don’t have manicured grass. Partly because we live in a quirky neighborhood in the city, and partly because we’re near the river and people know that lawn chemicals get into the groundwater and then travel through the sewer to the river. I mentioned to Scott that I don’t judge people if their lawn isn’t manicured, I judge them if it is because it can only be that way if they’re treating it with chemicals — and if they’re not using chemicals, they’re still wasting water on their laws. But, I don’t want to judge anyone, so I’m trying to work on that.
Somewhere in that lace lies luck. . . What a great line!
a reminder to avoid too much taming of what, even here, wants to be wild.
I’m always returning to this question of what it means to be wild and where the gorge fits into that. In the spring, when left alone, the small patches of grass on the bluff want to be wild. Tall blades and dandelions and little trees everywhere. Unruly, sometimes almost menacing as they creep closer to the trail, blocking out the view. Not wild, but re-wilding.
Felt like summer today. Hot! A common refrain: I need to get up earlier and get out there before it gets too warm! Difficult. I can tell that the 2+ week break got me out of cardio shape. My heart rate got higher faster. I’m sure the heat had something to do with it too. After a mile, I decided to switch from 9/1 to walking every time my heart rate went above 170, then running again when it went down to 135. A did a lot of walking.
At first, I listened to the traffic and the kids at the church daycare and my feet, but after a few miles, I put in my shadows playlist — if I could find the shadows on the path, I’d find them in the music!
From the Franklin bridge the river was beautiful — so many sparkles. I noticed a few sandbars just below the surface. No rowers. They were probably here earlier in the morning — another reason to get up and run early!
I smelled the flowers — a hint of Big Red cinnamon gum. Heard the birds and construction trucks backing up. Gave attention to the grass, filled with clover and dandelions. At the end, nearing the corner of my block, I watched the shadows of leaves dancing on the grass and dirt — a big patch that was more dirt than grass. Ants? We have several of those in our backyard.
As I looked at the grass and thought about the blade and the sheath, I remembered/realized something: I can’t really see individual grass. Not enough cone cells for that. I write really because I can sometimes see an individual leaf, but just barely, and more the idea that there’s a blade, but definitely not the sheath.
I forgot to post this earlier: I stopped at the sliding bench, noticed how much green there was, and decided to take a picture in order to compare it to a pre-green picture:
sliding bench / may 2025sliding bench / dec 2024
grass roots and astroturfing
Looking through my Plague Notebook, Vol 25 notes from yesterday, I saw this: grass roots — origins of the phrase. So, I looked it up and found this on wikipedia:
A grassroots movement is one that uses the people in a given district, region or community as the basis for a political or continent movement. Grassroots movements and organizations use collective action from volunteers at the local level to implement change at the local, regional, national, or international levels. Grassroots movements are associated with bottom-up, rather than top-down decision-making, and are sometimes considered more natural or spontaneous than more traditional power structures. * The earliest origins of “grass roots” as a political metaphor are obscure. In the United States, an early use of the phrase “grassroots and boots” was thought to have been coined by Senator Albert Jeremiah Beveridge of Indiana, who said of the Progressive Party in 1912, “This party has come from the grass roots. It has grown from the soil of people’s hard necessities”.
In the entry, it also mentioned astroturfing, which is an organization that presents itself as grassroots, but is really lead by an outside organization/corporation.
Astroturf — I wanted to find the origins of this term:
The synthetic grass product that eventually became known as AstroTurf® was originally designed as an urban playing surface meant to replace the concrete and brick that covered the recreation areas in city schoolyards. During the Korean War, the U.S. Army had found urban recruits to be less physically fit than rural recruits. Attributing this to lack of green space in cities, the Ford Foundation funded research for Monsanto to create a synthetic grass replica in 1962. It had to be wear-resistant, cost efficient, comfortably cushioned, and traction tested. Two years later employees of the Chemstrand Company, a subsidiary of Monsanto Industries, developed a synthetic surface called ChemGrass and installed it at the Moses Brown School, a private educational facility in Providence, Rhode Island.
The first outdoor bike ride of the year. I’m always nervous, not knowing how it will go. Can I still see enough to bike? Will it be too scary? Yes, I can see! No, I wasn’t scared! I was a bit disoriented with all of the dappled light and I had to take some deep breaths a few times, but it went well. It’s a combination of: a memorized path — all of the cracks and bumps and tricky spots from years of biking; a familiarity and acceptance of not knowing or seeing everything; a few still-working cone cells and the ability to compensate with peripheral vision and other senses; and a belief that I can bike. Oh — and biking a little slower.
The lake was beautiful. I can’t wait to swim across it in a month. I signed up for open swim yesterday — signed FWA and RJP up too. Summer is almost here.
7 Grassy Things
there’s a certain stretch of grass on the bike trail that separates it from the road and helps me to see where to go — I need because the gray of the trail can blend in with the gray of the road
had to bike through the grass when I turned off the trail too early — I remembered biking through this grass with FWA 2 summers ago
an open field between the duck and echo bridges — a beautiful green studded with bright yellow dandelions
someone spread out a blanket and is sitting in that grass — how buggy is it?
what a bright blue sky! a great contrast with the green trees and grass
shadows of new leaves waving in the wind on the grass near lake nokomis
a bright yellow trailer and half a dozen cars parked on the grassy hill between lake hiawatha and lake nokomis — they’re redoing the path and (I had to look it up) adding a pedestrian bridge: “A new pedestrian bridge over Minnehaha Creek next to Lake Hiawatha is scheduled to be installed May. The bridge will be delivered in pieces, assembled onsite and then set in place with a crane.”
Other things: someone listening to a song on their phone as they walked — a new one from Lorde?; the bog near my favorite part of the path was completely dry; a sign, loose gravel — thankfully there wasn’t any; bird shadows on the path; lots of people walking around the lake
a grounding, a frame, a context
I mentioned in my entry for 7 may that I would post a quotation from Jenny Odell about context here:
I think a really interesting mental exercise to do with anything or anyone is to think about whether they have been afforded experience, the ability to experience, which means like having a past and a future. So one of the most fascinating things that I came across in researching the book, that I talk about somewhere in the middle of the book, is a study about the lesser minds bias. It’s not something you would immediately think has to do with time, but it’s a bias that other people, especially people in out-groups—so people you don’t identify with—don’t have as rich of an emotional inner life as you do. And so in this study that I referenced, the people running the study ask the participants to think about houseless people and show that the part of their mind that has to do with theory of mind, and imagining that someone has an inner life, is not lighting up when they’re thinking about these people. And then they ask them the question, what kind of vegetable do you think they would like, this person? Just imagine that and then suddenly it is lighting up, right? And my interpretation of that in the book was, well, someone who wants something and has desire must have a past and must have hopes for the future. For something to have desire, it has to exist in time. And so it’s almost like—that participant who’s thinking about them—it’s almost like this person has entered a time with them. Like this person is now also an actor. This person has wants and needs and regrets. And I think that kind of flipping is a really helpful and interesting way to think about why we do or don’t afford that to, you know, the nonhuman world, and also many groups within the human world—like out-groups, as they were talking about in the study. And it is that relegating of part of life to the realm of the timeless—like it might be cyclical, but it’s considered timeless—that is so much at the root of the logic of extracting it. It’s lifeless. But it’s the same mechanism that’s behind dehumanizing someone, because you’re seeing a person as almost like an instance. To go back to people without housing, it’s interesting that people don’t think about how someone might go in and out of housing within their life. You know, what led to that? What might be in their future? They’re just sort of seen as they’re just there. And so I think that’s an example of what happens when you take something out of time, or it doesn’t seem to inhabit time in the same way you do.
As I write this, I’m listening (by pure accident) to the Rolling Stones, “Time is on my side” and now I’m thinking about returning to time. Reviewing past entries for 2025, it seems like I’m all over the place. Maybe, but I’m also orbiting around a cluster of ideas related to the gorge and my larger poem, or series of poems, about haunting the gorge. At some point, something will stick and I’ll stop to write, but for now I’ll keep moving and circling ideas.
is a really helpful and interesting way to think about why we do or don’t afford that to, you know, the nonhuman world
What is desire to the grass? And, what is the grass as a subject? One blade/leaf? A lawn? A clump in a sea of dirt? I suddenly thought about the smell of freshly cut grass, a frequent scent in May. As a kid, it was one of my favorite smells, then I read or heard somewhere that it was the grass crying or bleeding, and I stopped liking it. I decided to look it up and found a PBS segment, That Fresh Cut Grass Scent is Really a Signal of Distress. But, according to PBS, the grass isn’t crying, it’s communicating, sending out a message to other plants, or other parts of themselves, to be prepared for trouble.
The idea that the grass is crying, or screaming, still abounds. Here’s the opening line from an article for Lawnstarter, a lawn care company:
Inhale deeply. That heavenly fresh-cut grass smell you savor while mowing your back 40 is actually your lawn screaming in pain from the hell of a hurtful haircut.
Science (not scientists, or a scientific study), says? Wow. Anyway, I’m struck by how the idea that grass is communicating (the PBS clip) offers more agency to the grass than depicting them as shrieking or screaming in despair (the article). The article offers some of the science, then moves onto a discussion of why we might like the smell of freshly mown grass and then gives examples of how that love is depicted in song.
I wrote in my Plague Notebook, vol. 25, what is the root system for grass. Looked it up and found this helpful resource: How does Grass Grow?
Grass typically has a fibrous root system, characterized by a dense network of fine, thread-like roots that spread outward and downward.
Fibrous? I posted something a poet said about being fibrous a year or so ago. Can I find it again? No. It had something to do with someone thinking of themselves as made up of fibers, of their idea of the self as fibrous? I wish I could remember!
One last thing: Over the past weeks, I’ve encountered references to Dads and their obsessions with the lawn, how lawn maintenance is gendered male. I found this interesting site when I searched “gender lawn” from Lady Science: Liberate Your Lawn from the Legacy of Masculine Science.
In Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, Kenneth T. Jackson shows that the American Neighbor’s attachment to his lawn, since its takeover of the suburban consciousness after the Second World War, is the result of the affluence and financial security that the lawn represents. The lawn is a simple status symbol that signals to the little-n neighbors that The Neighbor has achieved a level of economic comfort that affords him both the money to pay his exorbitant water bill and the free time to mow thrice weekly in the summer. I think, however, if we want to break the American Neighbor of the lawn — and we should, because it’s not good for the environment that 2 percent of the land in the U.S is taken up by monocultural swathes of ornamental grass — we might consider that the lure of the lawn is deeper.
Today I tried the walk/run method: 9 minutes of running, 1 minute of walking. As usual, I followed this method approximately. Run 9:30/Walk 1:30, 8:30/1 — I can’t remember after that. It was good. It’s still difficult, but I’m pushing through more. I greeted 2 regulars! Dave, the Daily Walker and Daddy Long Legs. I noticed how green the floodplain forest was, only the narrowest sliver of river to see. And the view from the sliding bench? Green green green. If someone was walking below, would I even be able to see them? Ran on the grass and the dirt a lot. Thought about taking the short dirt trail that cuts behind a tree nearing the trestle, but didn’t. Next time? Admired someone’s raspberry red running shoes. I used to have shoes that color. Now they’re boring dark gray/almost black.
Ran through gnats. Most of them went in my eye, one in my throat. Also ran through cottonwood, or some white flowery thing that I thought of as cottonwood fuzz. Usually the cottonwood arrives at the beginning of June, so maybe it was something else?
No rowers, no roller skiers, no turkeys or geese or bird shadows. One fat tire. One little kid. Several runners and walkers and cars.
I don’t remember what I heard for the first half of the run, but for the second half, I listened to my windy playlist (it was windy out there!).
edges / middles / context
I started the morning thinking about surfaces and the places where things meet and textures and skin and feet. And then I remembered Emily Dickinson’s love of the circumference and the wonderful site, out of Dartmouth, all about ED in 1862. It has a blog post on ED and circumference.
I was excited to read this bit:
Laura Gribbin argues that Dickinson’s conception of Circumference rejects Emersonian expansion, revises the patriarchal conceptions of the (male) poet’s encompassing consciousness, and resists being taken over by an outside power. It does so by calling attention to “the circle’s necessary boundary or perimeter without which it has neither shape nor meaning.” In Gribbin’s reading,
“Circumference marks the borderline of symbolic and linguistic order. This border is a highly charged point of convergence where oppositions are collapsed, boundaries are explored, and meaning originates. Circumference is also the space within a circle where life is lived, pain is felt, and death is observed.”
In what amounts to a powerful critique of Romanticism, Dickinson stands not at the center but on the periphery, at the outer limits of knowledge and language, replacing, as Gribbin notes,
“the Romantic impulse toward transcendence with an alternative concept of knowledge gained within the limits of experience.”
Instead of the Emersonian emphasis on sight and specularity, Dickinson emphasizes touch and what can be felt. Because
“Circumference delineates that region where the imagination comes into play, [it] is thus the source of poetry itself.”
While reading my “on this day” posts yesterday, I encountered a discussion of middles from 6 may 2023. It’s in the middle of my summarizing of Mary Ruefle’s essay “On Beginnings”:
It’s about beginnings and how there are more beginnings in poetry than endings. The first note I jotted down in my Plague Notebook, Vol 16 was about the semicolon, which is a punctuation mark that I particularly like. Ruefle has just introduced an idea from Ezra Pound that each of us speaks only one sentence that begins when we’re born and ends when we die. When Ruefle tells this idea to another poet he responds, “That’s a lot of semicolons!” Ruefle agrees and then writes this:
the next time you use a semicolon (which, by the way, is the least-used mark of punctuation in all of poetry) you should stop and be thankful that there exists this little thing, invented by a human being–an Italian as a matter of fact–that allows us to go on and keep on connecting speech that for all apparent purposes unrelated.
then adds: a poem is a semicolon, a living semicolon, and this:
Between the first and last lines there exists–a poem–and if it were not for the poem that intervenes, the first and last lines of a poem would not speak to each other.
At some point as I read, I suddenly thought of middles. The in-betweens, after the beginning, before the end. How much attention do these get, especially if we jump right in and start with them. It reminds me of a writing prompt/experiment I came up with for my running log: Write a poem about something that happened during the middle of your run–not at the beginning or the end, but the middle (see 27 nov 2019).
the MIDDLE
mid-motion mid-walk, mid-run Activity: notice and record what you notice in the midst of motion. Pull out your smart phone and speak your thoughts into it.
Not how you got there or where you’re headed, but here now in-between
the middle: Lucille Clifton’s unfenced is, Alice Oswald’s purpled sea
I like the idea of being dropped in the middle — no need to endure a beginning or an ending, but what’s lost when we’re floating in the middle? Something that grounds or frames the experience: context.
aside: writing that last bit, I recalled a few lines from Jorie Graham’s “Still Life with Window and Fish”:
The whole world outside…. I know it’s better, whole, outside, the world—whole trees, whole groves–but I love it in here where it blurs, and nothing starts or ends, but all is waving, and colorless, and voiceless….
This morning, I came across a learning prompt on Poetry Foundation: Context.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines context as “the parts of a discourse that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning.” The word itself comes from the Latin contexere, which means “to weave or join together,” which I interpret as “to make sense of” what we’re reading, particularly when we’re not familiar with the author’s background and/or work. Knowing a poem’s context can give us a sense of place, culture, politics, gender dynamics, etc., and situate us in a specific time and place using concrete references. . . .
A sense of place, a connection, an anchor, a way to ground ourselves and our understandings.
a few hours later: I just remembered Kamala Harris’ coconut tree comment, which RJP loved to quote during the campaign:
context
added the next day: As I read through this entry again the next morning, I suddenly remembered something I posted earlier this spring about how not knowing or acknowledging a person/community’s history is to de-humanize them, to turn them into an object and not a subject. I can’t find where I wrote about it or what I was referencing. After a lot of searching, I found it! It’s in an interview with Jenny Odell about her new book on time, Another Kind of Time. Instead of posting the lengthy quotation here, I’m putting it in my entry for 8 may.
ground contact time
The Apple watch has all sorts of data points, most of which don’t matter to me or are meaningless because I don’t know what to compare them too. One such data point is “ground contact time.” Mine is almost always between 235 and 240 ms. It’s cool to think about how little time my foot is on the ground — and how much time I’m flying! — but what does this number mean? I suppose the fact that it is consistent is good, but should I be spending more time or less on the ground? I found a helpful primer on GCT (ground contact time) that has a chart — and plenty of caveats about that chart — to use for evaluating your ground contact time:
< 210 ms: Great
210 – 240 ms: Good
241 – 270 ms: Room for improvement
271 – 300 ms: Needs improvement
> 300 ms: Lots to work on
The bottom line: less time on the ground is better. It makes you a more efficient, less injury-prone, faster runner.
So, mine is good, but barely. Ways to improve it include: picking up the cadence, being lighter on your feet, dynamic hip exercises — plyometrics or hill repeats, more deliberate arm swing. Maybe I’ll try some of it; I’d like to fly more! I think I’ll start with hill repeats. I’ve been wanting to do those for some time.
All of this talk about surfaces and edges where things meet — seams — and middles and shortened time on ground is making me want to reread Wendell Berry’s “A Native Hill.” I finally have a physical copy of it. I think I’ll read it and mark it up this afternoon!
It was nice and I felt good, so I decided to go for a short run this morning. Hot! I wore my summer attire: tank top and shorts. Sunny. Sharp shadows, still air, not much shade. Ran right by the Minnehaha Academy playground and heard all of the kids shouting and shoving and having fun. I peeked at the river through the trees: a flat blue. No turkeys or roller skiers or gushing water. No headphones either. Instead, I listened to the kids and the cars and the loud rumbling of a truck. Also heard: someone’s workout program on their phone, you have complete 3 miles — or something similar to that.
before the run
This morning, I’m reading another chapter of RWK’s Gathering Moss: The Advantages of Being Small: Life in the Boundary Layer. I was excited/please/inspired to encounter this passage:
Mosses inhabit surfaces: the surfaces of rocks, the bark of trees, the surface of a log, that small space where earth and atmosphere first make contact. This meeting ground between air and land is known as the boundary layer. Lying cheek to cheek with rocks and logs, mosses are intimate with the contours and textures of their substrate.
Gathering Moss/ Robin Wall Kimmerer
surfaces / where earth and atmosphere meet / boundary layer / intimate / contours / textures
I’m interested in surfaces, both ground surfaces by the gorge and water surfaces at the lake. I’ve gathered poems and thought about them before. And there is a line from my Haunts project that I’m still trying to write around/beside/through: It begins here: from the ground up, feet first, following. Today, I want to think about surfaces and boundary layers and textures and the intimacy that is created when air and land, foot and ground, meet.
things we did on grass
When you lie on the ground on a sunny summer afternoon to look up and watch the clouds go by, you place yourself in the boundary of the earth’s surface. When you are flat on the ground, the wind speed is reduced, you can scarcely feel the breeze that would ruffle your hair if you were standing up.
Things we did on grass is a line from an XTC song. I’ve been wanting to experiment with it. RWK is inspiring me!
still
the air becomes progressively slower and slower until, immediately adjacent to the surface, the air is perfectly still, captured by the friction with the surface itself. It is this layer of still air that you experience while lying on the ground.
Such a rich word and idea, still. I’ve been orbiting around it for years. And yet, the opposite of restlessness, something I can’t do: sit still, a calmness and willingness to stop and just be.
during the run
Since I’m thinking of surfaces, especially grass, I decided to run on the grassy boulevard between edmund and the river road. After the run, as I was walking home, I recorded some thoughts:
[transcript] may 6th. I’m thinking about surfaces and moss and where air and ground meet and these little spaces that are sheltered, that are a little warmer and still and allow for friction without total erosion. Then I was thinking about how I like those spaces — those small spaces, those enough spaces. Then RWK’s bit at the end of the chapter, about how moss still need to germinate and seed and they can’t in these sheltered spaces so they have to expose themselves. Also thinking about the back deck as a sheltered space. It’s interesting to put this in a context of the pandemic because of how the surfaces and how this dirt trail is surely wider because people were running and walking and using it during the pandemic. All the different ways that (the pandemic) is written on this surface, this boundary layer.
Earlier in the run, I was also thinking about friction in relation to surfaces meeting. In particular, my feet and the ground, but also RWK’s example of free flowing air being disrupted and altered by rock. My thought: we need that friction to feel bodies, to feel our bodies. A flash of Wittgenstein and his rough ground (as opposed to smooth ice) flashed through my head.
I thought about the benefits of being small and a discussion I had with FWA the other day when he was suggesting that humans are resilient in the way that small trees that can bend and lean with the wind during a heavy storm are.
after the run
Ideas to give some attention:
Intimacy and Forrest Gander and Anne Pringles’ conversation about intimacy as an encounter that transforms you and Scott describing two trees growing out of the same spot and intertwining as intimate
the texture of wind when encountering objects, makes me think of light on surfaces and how the ancient greeks took that into account in their understandings of, and names for, color
surfaces and feet first, following — the encounter between foot and ground is the space where a poem can be written and offered
the boundary layer visible to our eye as the horizontal lines I mentioned last month: the line between blue and brown
where earth and atmosphere meet = violet
grass as threshold (a boundary space): the threshold between neighborhood and park, between life and death — grass as a space where the dead and living can meet
the dirt trail through the grass as a record of the pandemic
