may 14/RUN

7.5 miles
lake nokomis and back
59 degrees

Whew, that was hard. Running to the lake wasn’t too bad but on the way back, my legs were tired and I was hot and thirsty. I managed to bargain with myself — just keep going until you get to the water fountains or the light or the top of the hill — and do more running than walking in the second half. I think I needed to start earlier and bring some water.

I’m wiped out now, writing this, but I don’t care. It was worth it to get to run to Lake Nokomis and watch the glittering water, hear the seagulls, feel the lake air. Summer and open water swimming is coming! I signed myself, and FWA and RJP up for open swim this year! Will either of them swim? Hopefully at least once or twice. One more thing to note: looking out at the water, then to the little beach, I noticed the lifeguard boat — the main marker I use to navigate when I can’t see the buoys — has been moved. Hopefully it will be moved back again or I’ll have some difficulty sighting this summer.

Listened to the birds and the traffic and a song drifting out of a car window as I ran to the lake. Put in my “Slappin’ Shadows” playlist on the way back:

Moonshadow
Golden Years
The Shadow of Your Smile
I’m Beginning to See the Light
I’m Shadowing You
Shadow Dancing
If You Go Away
Hot Lunch Jam
Watching the Wheels / John Lennon

The last one about the wheels was just added last night. In addition to watching the wheels going ’round, he’s also doing time, watching the shadows on the wall. After he’s done singing, the song ends with random street noise: clopping horses, a person’s foot steps, someone talking. The clopping horses made me think of one of the rooms in an exhibit at Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA). You sit on a bench in the room as a day cycles through, complete with the light changing throughout the day to simulate dawn, midday, dusk, evening, and with a recording of sounds outside of the room, including . . . horses clopping. I recall having some deep thought about shadows and my relationship to them as I listened to this song, but I can’t remember what it was. I recall having a general feeling of agreement: letting it go and just watching the wheels go ’round or the shadows on the wall sounds good to me!

One other random shadow thing I remember: In the middle of the night, during one of 3 or 4 sessions of being restless and getting out of bed, I looked around the room and noticed the shadows. The moon must have been bright last night because there were lots of shadows even though we have the blinds closed. At one point, a car drove by and their headlights looked cool and strange traveling across the wall.

As I ran along the creek and switched from sun to shade to sun again, I thought about how welcome shade is on a too sunny day. When I’m running in the spring and summer, I almost always cheer for the shadows and the coolness they offer.

Yesterday I picked up a book I requested from the library, Margaret Livingstone’s Vision and Art. Very cool. I got it so I could read more about how artists have used luminance and shadows and light to create images that look real.

Another thought I recall as I drifted in and out of sleep last night: I’d like to think about how the way artists manipulate light and shadow to create their illusions of realness, might be similar to how the brain does it for us. The brain as an artist — filling in, filtering, transforming signals into images that we can use and admire.

Yesterday I revisited Jorie Graham’s poem, “Still Life with Shadow and Fish” and understood it in a way I hadn’t before. Wow! I decided to listen to/read something else by her. Listening to this recording helped me to understand it a little better.

Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt/ Jorie Graham

Although what glitters
on the trees,
row after perfect row,
is merely
the injustice
of the world,

the chips on the bark of each
beech tree
catching the light, the sum
of these delays
is the beautiful, the human
beautiful,

body of flaws.
The dead
would give anything
I’m sure,
to step again onto
the leafrot,

into the avenue of mottled shadows,
the speckled
broken skins. The dead
in their sheer
open parenthesis, what they
wouldn’t give

for something to lean on
that won’t
give way. I think I
would weep
for the moral nature
of this world,

for right and wrong like pools
of shadow
and light you can step in
and out of
crossing this yellow beech forest,
this buchen-wald,

one autumn afternoon, late
in the twentieth
century, in hollow light,
in gaseous light. . . .
To receive the light
and return it

and stand in rows, anonymous,
is a sweet secret
even the air wishes
it could unlock.
See how it pokes at them
in little hooks,

the blue air, the yellow trees.
Why be afraid?
They say when Klimt
died suddenly
a painting, still
incomplete,

was found in his studio,
a woman’s body
open at its point of
entry,
rendered in graphic,
pornographic,

detail—something like
a scream
between her legs. Slowly,
feathery,
he had begun to paint
a delicate

garment (his trademark)
over this mouth
of her body. The mouth
of her face
is genteel, bored, feigning a need
for sleep. The fabric

defines the surface,
the story,
so we are drawn to it,
its blues
and yellows glittering
like a stand

of beech trees late
one afternoon
in Germany, in fall.
It is called
Buchenwald, it is
1890. In

the finished painting
the argument
has something to do
with pleasure.

may 12/RUN

3.1 miles
turkey hollow
67 degrees

Too hot this morning! My usual refrain: get up and go out earlier! Lots of shadows, birds — several turkeys in the neighborhood just past turkey hollow! None of them menacing today. I decided to put together another shadow playlist with all my favorites. Called it “Slappin’ Shadows.” I listened to it for the whole run instead of the birds.

I remember these lyrics from “Moonshadow” especially:

Did it take long to find me?
I asked the faithful light
Oh, did it take long to find me?
And are you gonna stay the night?

I’m bein’ followed by a moonshadow
Moonshadow, moonshadow

10 Surfaces I Ran Over

  1. sidewalk
  2. street — smooth
  3. street — cracked, rutted
  4. grass
  5. roots
  6. soft, sandy, slippery dirt
  7. soft dirt that was mud 2 day s ago
  8. curb
  9. paved trail
  10. edge of road, slanted, over a grate

Last week, I checked out Dorianne Laux’s new collection, Life on Earth. I especially love this poem:

Mugged By Poetry/ Dorianne Laux    

—for Tony Hoagland who sent me a handmade chapbook made from old postcards called OMIGOD POETRY with a whale breaching off the coast of New Jersey and seven of his favorite poems by various authors typed up, taped on, and tied together with a broken shoelace.

Reading a good one makes me love the one who wrote it, 
as well as the animal or element or planet or person 
the poet wrote the poem for. I end up like I always do, 
flat on my back like a drunk in the grass, loving the world.  
Like right now, I’m reading a poem called “Summer” 
by John Ashbery whose poems I never much cared for, 
and suddenly, in the dead of winter, “There is that sound 
like the wind/Forgetting in the branches that means 
something/Nobody can translate…” I fall in love 
with that line, can actually hear it (not the line 
but the wind) and it’s summer again and I forget 
I don’t like John Ashbery poems. So I light a cigarette 
and read another by Zbigniew Herbert, a poet 
I’ve always admired but haven’t read enough of, called 
“To Marcus Aurelius” that begins “Good night Marcus
put out the light/and shut the book For overhead/is raised 
a gold alarm of stars…” First of all I suddenly love 
anyone with the name Zbigniew. Second of all I love 
anyone who speaks in all sincerity to the dead
and by doing so brings that personage back to life, 
plunging a hand through the past to flip off the light.  
The astral physics of it just floors me. Third of all 
is that “gold alarm of stars…” By now I’m a goner, 
and even though I have to get up tomorrow at 6 am 
I forge ahead and read “God’s Justice” by Anne Carson, 
another whose poems I’m not overly fond of 
but don’t actively disdain. I keep reading one line 
over and over, hovering above it like a bird on a wire 
spying on the dragonfly with “turquoise dots all down its back 
like Lauren Bacall”. Like Lauren Bacall!! Well hell, 
I could do this all night. I could be in love like this 
for the rest of my life, with everything in the expanding
universe and whatever else might be beyond it 
that we can’t grind a lens big enough to see. I light up 
another smoke, maybe the one that will kill me, 
and go outside to listen to the moon scalding the iced trees.  
What, I ask you, will become of me?

may 11/RUN

5.25 miles
ford loop
60 degrees

Shorts, tank top, sun! Only one rower on the river. Under the bridge the water was sparkling — was it because of the sandbar? There was some sort of informal running event — no signs, but a stream of people, adults and kids, running and people on the edge of the trail cheering.

I ran on the soft dirt trail beside the pave path a lot. Gritty and fun to slide on — not slide as in slip but as in glide.

Encountered other runners, walkers, one rollerblader who kindly said, on your left, as he passed me. I could hear the metallic clunking of his wheels before and after he passed.

Birds, of course. The run began with the haunting coo of a mourning dove. I don’t hear mourning doves that often. I didn’t know, or if I did I forgot, that they are also called turtle doves. Also heard some black-capped chickadees. At the end of the run as I walked back home through the neighborhood, I heard a little kid call out, bird!, and the adult with him say, sparrow.

Lots of shadows: tree trunks, leaves, fence railings, birds, me, beside rocks, under benches. My favorite shadow was mine — running close to the railing, overlooking the gorge and the river on the east bank, my shadow was way down in the trees, near the water. I kept moving closer to the railing, trying to get my shadow in the water. I never got close enough for her to swim.

Another memorable shadow: the sidewalk was almost all gray shade, with just a little light, where the leaves hadn’t filled in it. I imagined doing an erasure poem that mimicked this form. Most of the text shaded out with just a few words sprinkled around — dappled? I want to try it! Speaking of dappled, the other day I was describing all of the shadows in my plague notebook (vol 20!). I noticed the speckled light under the crabapple tree and wrote: crabapple dapple. Told Scott about it and he responded, ugh!

Almost 4 miles in, on the ford bridge, I stopped to put in my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist. Put it on shuffle: “The Shadow Knows,” “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” “We Will Become Silhouettes,” and then a song I haven’t heard yet while running: “Shadows and Light”/ Joni Mitchell. I’ll have to think about her lyrics some more.

Here’s a poem that mentions shadow, and is about questions! Last year, I listened to a wonderful podcast with Alabi: Kemi Alabi vs. Divinity. It’s not available right now; is it because the hosts are protesting Poetry Foundation’s refusal to make a statement against the genocide in Palestine? (added, 15 jan 2025: the episode is back online).

44 Questions to Ask While Bingeing/ Kemi Alabi

After Benji Hart

  1. How many hands have touched this food?
  2. What were their intentions?
  3. How vast is the range?
  4. What makes them hands at all?
  5. How many seeds survived their birth for this?
  6. Did you count yourself?
  7. From sprout to pluck, how many breaths old was the oldest?
  8. What’s become of its homeland?
  9. How many breaths will it add to yours?
  10. Or is this a thing that takes?
  11. Which things were born dead for this?
  12. Did you count yourself?
  13. Which born free?
  14. Which born food?
  15. Is there a state in-between?
  16. How old was the well of that answer?
  17. If governments and their signed scrolls are Plato’s cave wall shadows, where is the real sun?
  18. What’s become of its homeland?
  19. How many generations removed from the land are you?
  20. What floor takes its place?
  21. What is it built on top of?
  22. Are the people who tended that place still alive?
  23. Are there any living descendants?
  24. Is their language still spoken on earth?
  25. If you heard it, would your feet twitch?
  26. Or does dead mean gone?
  27. How many gone things in your place?
  28. Did you count yourself?
  29. What does your body and the day it makes cost?
  30. What is its price, in gone things?
  31. Is this sustainable? Better—regenerative?
  32. Or will this make you the most gone thing alive?
  33. Is god or the human the cave wall shadow?
  34. Who says the shadow is nothing at all?
  35. Are you still eating?
  36. Who?
  37. What for?
  38. What have you grown in its place?
  39. How much is enough?
  40. Is enough a place or a count?
  41. Is there a state in-between?
  42. Or does enough mean gone?
  43. Did you enough yourself?
  44. In the language of the oldest gone thing, how do you say devour?

Who says the shadow is nothing at all?
Did you enough yourself?

So good!

may 9/RUN

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
53 degrees

Overcast, then sun, then overcast again. This cycle happened throughout the run. Enough sun to admire the soft shadows — leaves stirring in the wind, tree trunks, fence slats, me. Went out earlier today and noticed more cars on the river road. No kids on the playground yet. No big turkeys. Greeted Mr. Morning! and smiled at a roller skier. Said good morning to a few other runners. Saw lots of light, glowing green, the small dark form of a flying bird.

Listened to car wheels whooshing and birds chirping as I ran to the falls. Put in my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist on the way back and kept working my way through the songs.

White Shadow/ Peter Gabriel
Glamour Professional/ Steely Dan
Hot Lunch Jam/ Irene Cara
We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me)

It’s hard to tell black from white
When you wake up in the middle of the night

I thought I heard the line as, in the middle of the light, which makes more sense to me. Maybe I can’t see “white” at night, but I can see contrasts, light from dark, very easily. It’s color I can’t see. Waking up in the middle of light would be far more blinding, I think.

Reading the lyrics for “White Shadow” I was turned off by the rhymeiness of it all; he even did that annoying thing of altering the words a little to make them fit the rhyme. Ugh. But, dammit, when I listened to him singing them again, he made them sound cool. How can you make No one knew if the spirit died/All wrapped up in Kentucky Fried sound cool?

“Glamour Profession” was Scott’s addition. I kept waiting to hear where shadow fit in, but didn’t. I missed it; maybe because I was distracted by the name, Hoop McCann:

6:05 p.m., outside the stadium 
Special delivery for Hoops McCann 
Brut and charisma poured from the shadow where he stood 
Looking good, he’s a crowd-pleasing man

Shady Sadie/Serving Lady skimming off the top, making the same cheap and barely edible lunch for those Fame kids and pocketing the rest of the money. I always thought Irene Cara sang, southern lady. If it’s yellow, then it’s yellow/if it’s blue it could be stew

I want to include all of the lyrics for “We Three”:

We three, we’re all alone
Living in a memory
My echo, my shadow, and me

We three, we’re not a crowd
We’re not even company
My echo, my shadow, and me

What good is the moonlight
The silvery moonlight that shines above?
I walk with my shadow
I talk with my echo
But where is the one I love?

We three, we’ll wait for you
Even till eternity
My echo, my shadow, and me

“We three we’re all alone. Seems like we’re livin’ in a memory. 
That’s my echo my shadow and me. 
We three we ain’t no crowd. 
Fact is we ain’t even company. 
That’s my echo my shadow and me.
You know I been wonderin’ what good is the
moonlight that silvery moonlight that shines way, way up above? 
Yeah, I walk with my shadow, I talk with my echo, but where is that gal that I love?”

We three, we’ll wait for you
Even till eternity
My echo, my shadow, and me

I really like this song and thinking about the relationship between a self, its echo, and its shadow, although I think more positively of these three than the Ink Spots do.

At some point during the run, I remember thinking about how some shadows are still, frozen, sharply formed, while others stutter or flutter or vibrate like echoes.

When I heard the line, Seems like we’re livin’ in a memory, I thought about how I mostly can’t see people’s faces clearly and that I’ve either learned to tune it out and speak/look into the void, or I just fill in the smudge with the memory of their face. I’m used to it, and often forget I’m doing it until suddenly I wonder as I stare at the blob, am I looking in the right place, into their eyes, or am I staring at their chin? I don’t care, but I imagine the other person might, so I try to find their eyes again.

Almost home, the playlist returned to the beginning and I hear, “I’m shadowing You” again. This time I thought about shadowing as obsessing over something. To shadow someone or something is to be obsessed with it.

silhouette theory

Read about the silhouette theory this morning —

The Silhouette Theory of character design. What you do is take your lead character (or characters) and reduce them down to a silhouette — plain old black and white — and see how distinctive they look.
    It’s a common technique in animation. One of the initial decisions in creating a character is to choose a shape (before contour or even color) that is eye-catching and conveys attitude, so the character ‘lands’ in the animated world, has impact, and is easy to track.
    It works because our minds tend to register size, posture, shape and body language before processing other cues, like facial expressions or actions.

There is poem in here. Time to write it!

may 8/RUN

4 miles
trestle+ turn around
60 degrees

Okay spring. What a glorious morning! Birds, sun, shadows, green. Ran north, past the trestle. Didn’t see the river (too much green), but said Hi! to Dave and waved to Daddy Long Legs. Encountered, twice, a trio of very fast runners, someone on an eliptigo, and a roller skier.

Thought about shadows as the world of almost — echoes and reflections too. Welcome to the world of almosts not quites nearly theres. Glad you could join me. Some day, I’ll write a poem, or a series of poems, about the almost world I inhabit, where the shadow of a fence feels more real than the fence. As my mind wandered, I also thought about one of my favorite books as a kid: The Shades. I should read it again — just requested it from the library. I would buy it, but it must be out of print: a used copy is $300!

On the way back, I put in my “I’m Shadowing You” and listened to more of my shadow songs:

  • I’m Beginning to See the Light
  • Twlight
  • The Shadow Knows (just the beginning)
  • Yesterday
  • Moon Shadow
  • Golden Years
  • Candle Mambo
  • If You Go Away
  • We Will Become Silhouttes

So many interesting thoughts about shadows, some of them already gone: used to ramble through the park/shadowboxing in the dark — twilight as a time when shades are drawn and silhouettes appear on them — there’s a shadow hanging over me —

And if I ever lose my eyes
If my colors all run dry
Yes, if I ever lose my eyes
Oh if, I won’t have to cry no more

Yes, I am bein’ followed by a moonshadow
Moonshadow, moonshadow
Leapin’ and hoppin’ on a moonshadow
Moonshadow, moonshadow

When this part of “Moonshadow” played I got excited. Yes! Losing my eyes? Color running dry? That’s me. It didn’t make me sad, but almost, strangely (I suppose), joyful in my recognition of my experience. And, yes, I will always have the moonshadow. In fact, as my vision diminishes, shadows are even more meaningful.

Run for the shadows/Run for the shadows

I wondered if the singer in “Candle Mambo” was dancing with his own shadow in the candlelight.

Listening to Neil Diamond’s version of “If You Go Away,” I was struck by the absence of shadows — when the person he loves goes away, all dark; when they’re there, all light. No in-between — either nothing matters, or it matters too much. Neil needs some shadows to temper all his drama.

Just as I reached home, “We Will Become Silhouettes” came on. Very fitting for what I was thinking about before my run:

silhouettes

    Thinking about shadows and light, I was reminded of a video I watch 10? years ago on Steven Spielberg and his use of shadow and light. I couldn’t find it, but found something else. Near the end, on a segment featuring shadows, I heard this line:

    A rule in comic books is that a character should be recognizable just by looking at their silhouette.

    Immediately I thought about forms and my interest in experimenting with how little visual information we need to recognize something — the silhouette as form. I also thought briefly about Platonic Forms. Then I thought about silhouettes, especially the ones I remember making in elementary art class. I looked up “silhouette” and found an article from the Smithsonian: Q and Art: Silhouettes. It mentions the influence of silhouettes on current artists like Kara Walker — Yes! I remember seeing an exhibit of her work at the Walker — in 2007 (I looked it up). Very cool.

    I found this video about Walker’s work that I’d like to watch after my run.

    The silhouette lends itself to an avoidance of the subject, you know, not being able to look at it directly.

    [about Stone Mountain, GA, where Walker grew up, after moving there from Stockton, CA] So that place has a little more resonance. It’s so in-your-face. There’s just no hiding the fact of what black stands for in white america and what white stands for in black america — they’re all loaded with our deepest psychological perversions and fears and longings.

    I was tracing outlines of profiles and thinking about physiognomy and racist sciences and minstrelsy and shadow and the dark side of the soul. And I thought, you know, I have black paper here, and I was making silhouette paintings, but they weren’t the same thing. It seemed like the most obvious answer, it took me forever to come to, was just to make a cut in the surface of this black thing. You know I had this black surface and if I just made a cut in it I was creating a hole. It was like the whole world was in there for me.

    Discussing her work Insurrection, she describes how overhead projects were used so that the shadows of visitor’s moving through the exhibit would be projected on the work, “so maybe they would feel implicated” in the scene, the history.

    I began to love the kind of self promotion surrounding the work of the silhouette artist. They would show up in different towns and advertise their skills, sometimes very overblown language describing their incredible skills: able to cut in less than a minute, 10 seconds, for your likeness, your accurate likenesses. I also began to question this whole idea of accurate likenesses.

    vision moment: While watching the video on my iPad, I paused it to transcribe what she was saying. When I put my finer on the iPad to scroll back a little and start again, my finger had disappeared. Georgina Kleege talks about this happening to her in Sight Unseen, but I didn’t remember experiencing it until today. It’s very localized, in one spot, and only if the contrast is bad. Am I mis-seeing this? Is it just the lack of contrast?

    a thought about the monthly challenges

    I’ve done monthly challenges about individual poets — Mary Oliver, Emily Dickinson, Linda Pastan — or single books — Dart, garbage — or a single poem — Hymn to Life. I’ve studied birds, water, wind, windows, ghosts, shadows. Sometimes, these studies lead to poem, and sometimes they’re the chance to care about something new, something I’ve never noticed or bothered to think about. I love these challenges. Today I loved thinking about silhouettes and remembering art projects I did as a kid and having a chance to think again about art work that I saw years ago but didn’t quite understand.

    may 7/WALK

    30 minute walk
    neighborhood, with Delia
    65 degrees

    Walked around the neighborhood on a beautiful, windy morning. A few hours before, it had been raining. Puddles everywhere. Mud, too. Birds, laughing kids, yellow and orange and red tulips all around. Also: overgrown weeds, dandelions, unruly grass. Oh — and pollen! I know that it could be much worse, but I still felt it: scratchy throat, itchy eyes, fatigue.

    This morning I renewed my driver’s license. For me, it was a big deal. I was diagnosed with cone dystrophy in 2016, two months after I had barely renewed my license because I couldn’t initially read the Snellen chart. The woman behind the counter was generous — I remember her looking at me strangely after I said the wrong letters and then asking, Do you want to try that again? Slowly? For years I had been nervous about the vision test without knowing why.

    When the ophthalmologist first told me I would probably lose all of my central vision, I felt relief — I just renewed my license so I don’t have to worry about doing the vision test until 2020! — and worry — What’s will happen in four years? As 2020 approached, my anxiety increased. But, because of the pandemic, I was able to renew my license online. No vision test! Another reprieve for four years!

    Next month I turn 50 and it’s time to renew my license again. I decided to do it early, partly to get it over with and partly because Scott and FWA had both renewed their license’s two months ago and the person behind the counter didn’t make them take a vision test. Could I be so lucky? I hoped so.

    This morning I was anxious. I tried to convince myself that it would be fine if I had to take the test — I told Scott, it’s great material for a poem. But the same guy was there and I didn’t have to take the test and now I have another four year reprieve.

    10 Small Things I Remember

    1. the woman at the front desk was wearing blue gloves
    2. before we entered, a group of teenagers were called in — Anyone planning to take the test should follow me!
    3. I heard those same teenagers giggling a few minutes later
    4. my number, ended with a 54
    5. when it was called, I was told to go to A14
    6. the guy who issued my license asked me to meet him around the corner at A17 for my picture
    7. he had two thick textbooks on the counter — did he ever have time to study? I couldn’t read the titles
    8. for the first time, I wore glasses for my picture — before he took it he said, look at the blue dot. I couldn’t see any blue dot, but the picture turned out fine
    9. earlier, nearing the entrance to the building, a man held a door for a woman as she walked out. She apologized when she almost ran into him and said, I’m sorry, I’m in my own head right now
    10. also nearing the building: birds! so much birdsong!

    I am not planning to drive. I haven’t for five or six years. It’s too scary and dangerous. Still, it’s nice to have my license, just in case.

    My anxiety over the vision test has some layers, I think. It’s not just about failing it, or even primarily about failing it. I think it’s time to do some digging.

    the allegory of the cave, part 2

    Yesterday Scott and talked about Plato’s Cave and what we remembered from when he first heard/read about it. Then I watched a few more videos about it, all of which connected the cave and the shadows to a hero’s quest and being enlightened by a Philosopher King. Thought about writing against that and decided I didn’t want to. Instead, I attempted to read Jack Collum’s hard-to-understand-poem, Arguing with Something Plato Said. Some of it, I think I understand and some of it, I don’t. Learned a new word: chiaroscuro

    This is an Italian term which literally means ‘light-dark’. In paintings the description refers to clear tonal contrasts which are often used to suggest the volume and modelling of the subjects depicted.

    Artists who are famed for the use of chiaroscuro include Leonardo da Vinci and Caravaggio. Leonardo employed it to give a vivid impression of the three-dimensionality of his figures, while Caravaggio used such contrasts for the sake of drama. Both artists were also aware of the emotional impact of these effects.

    Nice! With my interest in ekphrastic poems, I plan to think about this concept some more.

    may 6/RUN

    7 miles
    st. kates and back
    60 degrees

    Ran with Scott on a beautiful spring morning. Sun, shadows, a welcome breeze. We ran over to St. Catherine’s University, across the river. RJP has almost decided to go there (hopefully she makes up her mind tonight) and we wanted to check it out. I’m impressed and excited to visit her next year. We talked a lot more in the first half of our run; we were both tired the last 2 miles. Scott talked about some Threads exchange involving Drake, Kanye West, and a diss track. We heard a creaking tree and I said it sounded like the squeaking gate we heard yesterday afternoon while we were walking. The mention of the gate reminded me of Marie Howe’s poem, “The Gate,” which I recited for Scott (of course I did). We talked about many other things but I just remember discussing what a wonderful campus St. Cates is and how great it will be for RJP.

    On the sidewalk just outside of campus, we encountered several sidewalk poems that are part of the Public Art Sidewalk Poetry project. Scott took a picture of one:

    November/ Marianne McNamara and Scott’s feet

    November/ Marianne McNamara (2009)

    Autumn winds drag leaves from the trees,
    clog the streets in dreary finale.
    Bare branches crisscross the heavy sky.
    Icy rain spatters, ink-blots the pavement.
    I settle at the window, stare into the black flannel, search the woolly lining of the night for winter.

    I was unable to read this on the sidewalk, so I’m glad I could find it online. How hard is it for someone with good vision to read? I like the idea of this project, but in practice, it doesn’t quite work. Scott suggested they should use black paint on the letters, to make them stand out.

    10 Things

    1. smell: lilac, intense
    2. tree shadows, more filled in than last week
    3. a loud leaf blower
    4. a safety patrol on the corner near Dowling saying I hate you, I hate you — who was he talking to?
    5. the soft trickle of water falling from the sewer pipe near the 44th street parking lot
    6. mud and ruts filled with water at a construction site on the edge of campus
    7. feeling a fine film of dust on my face near the end of the run
    8. more than a dozen signs in the grass outside a liquor store, each one said the same thing: wine sale. Scott: I guess they’re having a wine sale
    9. running down Randolph encountering 3 or 4 sidewalk poems, none of them marked on the map
    10. noticing a faint white thing flying through the air, high above us: a bird? a plane? a trick of the light or corrupted data from my eye to my brain?

    the allegory of the cave, part 1

    I want to read the cave parable and think about its shadows, but I want to read it in the context of The Republic so I’ve been searching my shelves for my copy. Which class in college did we read this for? Probably The Individual and Morality. Maybe a philosophy class? Anyway, it is very hard for me to find one book among almost a thousand. When we moved in I organized them, but over time, books have moved. Also, it’s dim in our living room and I have a lot of trouble reading book titles with my bad eyes. Yesterday I asked RJP to help, and she found it! Maybe I’ll try reading some of it out on the deck this afternoon. Reading physical books, as opposed to e-books, can be hard; there’s never enough light unless I’m reading it under my special lamp (designed for sewers and cross-stitchers and 80 year-olds with bad eyes and me). Reading outside in natural light helps.

    an hour spent outside reading and dozing off and reading again . . .

    First, two links that connect Plato and his cave with poetry:

    Reading through the allegory, I came accross these lines:

    . . . the eyes may be confused in two ways and from two causes, namely when they’ve come from the light into the darkness and when they’ve come from the darkness into the light. . . whether it has come from a brighter life and is dimmed through not having yet become accustomed to the dark or whether it has come from greater ignorance into greater light and is dazzled by the increased brilliance.

    518a, The Republic / Plato, trans. G.M.A. Grube

    Of course, I immediately thought of two of my favorite vision poems (what I’m calling them) by Emily Dickinson. And of course I have both of them memorized — but not her punctuation.

    We grow accustomed to the Dark
    When light is put away
    As when a neighbor holds the lamp
    To witness her goodbye.

    A Moment — We uncertain step —
    For newness of the Night
    (We Grow Accustomed to the Dark/ ED)

    Too bright for our infirm Delight
    The truth’s superb surprise

    . . .

    The truth must dazzle gradually
    Or every man be blind.
    (Tell all the truth but tell it Slant/ ED)

    I remember Plato’s cave and the shadows and the inability to access Truth, but I didn’t remember him discussing how both too little light and too much light blind us. The emphasis, as I recall, was always on darkness = bad, ignorance, the problem. Was I just not paying attention in philosophy class?

    Searching for “plato cave,” I came across a video about it and decided to watch it:

    The School of Life

    I’d like to write more about what I find to be missing (also what’s helpful) in this account, but I’ve run out of time. Here’s one more video for comparison that I just started watching. When I have time, I’ll reflect on both:

    After Skool

    may 5/RUN

    3.1 miles
    turkey hollow loop
    60 degrees

    Late morning felt hot today. Bright sun, not much shade. The river road was closed off for the annual Walk MS charity event so I ran on the dirt/mud trail between it and edmund. Listened to my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist for the whole run:

    (skipped Shadow Song/Screaming Trees, Shadows and Light/ Joni Mitchell)
    Silver Shadow/ Atlantic Starr
    Total Eclipse of the Heart/ Bonnie Tyler
    Help Me Make It Through the Night/ Kris Kristofferson
    Sunshine in the Shade/ The Fixx
    The Shadow of Your Smile/ Astrud Gilberto
    Evening/ The Moody Blues
    White Room/ Cream

    I wondered what a silver shadow might look like, then I wanted to see one. The silver outline of the sun behind the clouds? My shadow on the blue-white snow? I know — it’s Eamon Grennan’s birdsong in his poem, Lark-Luster:

    . . . when summer happens, you’d almost see the long silver ribbons of song the bird braids as if binding lit air to earth that is all shadows, to keep us (as we walk our grounded passages down here) alive to what is over our heads—song and silence—and the lot of us leaning up: mind-defeated again, just harking to it.

    Then I got distracted by mud and people and the sun and didn’t give close attention to the lyrics for the next three songs, only briefly registering that Bonnie Tyler was singing to someone whose love is like a shadow on her, keeping her in the dark; Kris Kristofferson was comparing someone’s hair “laying soft upon his skin” to the shadows on the wall; and The Fixx were declaring that they were the sunshine in the shade of life.

    Off the grass, back on the road, I thought about Astrud Gilberto’s affection for the shadow of a smile — was the shadow cast by a very bright smile? Looking at the lyrics now, I understand the shadow to be the wonderful (but haunted?) memory of a love that didn’t last.

    I am really digging The Moody Blues, “Evening.” That flute! Shadows on the ground/never make a sound/fading away in the sunset/Night has now become/Day for everyone

    I thought about the white curtains in Marie Howe’s dark room instead of Cream’s black curtains in a white room. where the shadows run from themselves.

    This is fun! I like thinking about silver shadows as birdsong, and shadows softly caressing the wall, and what it would be like to see shadows running from themselves.

    Near the end of “Shadow of Your Smile,” I saw something ahead of me, in the middle of the road. A big black dog? No — it’s that menacing turkey again! The one I wrote about on april 30th and april 11th. Just standing there in the middle of the road, his feather fanned out. This time I didn’t turn around, but walked by him, at a safe distance. I also took a picture:

    RJP has named this big turkey Jon.

    Zooming in, I see a brave person on the sidewalk, nearing Jon.

    Recounting the story to Scott when I returned home, I decided that I wanted to imagine this turkey as a friend, not an enemy — or a frenemy? I also began to believe that he’s trying to tell me something: write about ME! And I will. Well, I already wrote one poem:

    Unsettled

    by noise

    I stop to
    witness

    a dark shape
    draw near

    too big for

    a squirrel

    too small for
    a bear.

    The moment
    suspends

    unresolved
    until

    the shape turns —
    pale beak

    red wattle
    framed by

    tail feathers.
    This Tom

    wants trouble.

    What if this turkey is my shadow-self? Will he be around for my next run? I guess it’s the spring of the turkey — maybe the summer, too? I will add Jon — I might name him myself if he appear again — to my list of Regulars!

    Inspired by another turkey sighting, and deciding that I will embrace these visits, here’s another amazing poem from Diane Seuss’s Sill Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl:

    Still Life with Turkey/ Diane Seuss

    The turkey’s strung up by one pronged foot,
    
the cord binding it just below the stiff trinity
    
of toes, each with its cold bent claw. My eyes

    are in love with it as they are in love with all
    
dead things that cannot escape being looked at.
    
It is there to be seen if I want to see it, as my

    father was there in his black casket and could not

    elude your gaze. I was a child so they asked
    if I wanted to see him. “Do you want to see him?”

    someone asked. Was it my mother?
    Grandmother? 
Some poor woman was stuck with the job. 

    “He doesn’t look like himself,” whoever-it-was

    added. “They did something strange with his mouth.”

    As I write this, a large moth flutters against

    the window. It presses its fat thorax to the glass.

    “No,” I said, “I don’t want to see him.” I don’t recall
    
if I secretly wanted them to open the box for me
    
but thought that “no” was the correct response,

    or if I believed I should want to see him but was
    
too afraid of what they’d done with his mouth.
    I think I assumed that my seeing him would

    make things worse for my mother, and she was all
    
I had. Now I can’t get enough of seeing, as if I’m paying
    
a sort of penance for not seeing then, and so

    this turkey, hanged, its small, raw-looking head, 

    which reminds me of the first fully naked man
    
I ever saw, when I was a candy striper

    at a sort of nursing home, he was a war veteran,
    
young, burbling crazily, his face and body red
    as something scalded. I didn’t want to see,

    and yet I saw. But the turkey, I am in love with it, 

    its saggy neck folds, the rippling, variegated
    
feathers, the crook of its unbound foot,

    and the glorious wings, archangelic, spread
    
as if it could take flight, but down, 
down
    ward, into the earth.

    may 3/RUN

    4.25 miles
    minnehaha falls and back
    58 degrees

    Warm, too warm. I need to remember to start these runs much earlier and to wear a tank top. A beautiful morning. All sun. Perfect for giving attention to shadows. Noticed many, cast from: new leaves on trees, tree trunks, lamp posts, a swooping bird, a parks truck, me.

    Listened to water — dripping then trickling then gushing, vigorous rustling in the brush, some frogs in the marshy meadow near the ford bridge as I ran south to the falls. Put in my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist on the way back north.

    I’m Shadowing You/ Blossom Dearie
    Me and My Shadow/ Frank Sinatra
    Shadowboxer/ Fiona Apple
    My Shadow/ Keane
    Shadow Dancing/ Andy Gibb

    I didn’t think too much about the first two songs, but when I got to “Shadowboxer” it hit me: shadow box. I wrote the following before the run:

    May is for shadows and I was thinking that I’d like to reread/study Plato’s Cave until I read this line in Readers recommend: songs about shadows — without them everything would be a floating morass of light and colour — drop shadows bring a third dimension to the 2D world. It made me think about one of my ongoing obsessions: ekphrastic poems and visual art. Just yesterday afternoon, I was reading Diane Seuss’ Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl. (The title is a reference to Rembrandt’s “Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl“) In several of the poems I read, Seuss describes the dark and light in some famous paintings — does she ever mention shadows? Here’s one of my favorites, both her poem and the painting:

    Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber/ Diane Seuss

    Anything can be a marionette. A quince, a cabbage, a melon, a cucumber,
    suspended against a black background, illuminated by a curious
    white light. In this little show, the quince plays a full gold moon. The cabbage
    is the antagonist, curled outer leaves fingering the charcoal void.
    Cucumber’s the peasant, nubby belly to the ground like a frog.
    That leaves melon, center stage, rough wedge hacked out of her butter side.
    Each object holds its space, drawing the eye from quince to cabbage, melon
    to cucumber, in a left to right, downward-sloping curve. Four bodies
    hang in the box of darkness like planets, each in its private orbit.
    It’s a quiet drama about nothing at all. No touch, no brushing
    up against each other, no oxygen, no rot, so that each shape, each
    character, is pure, clean in its loyalty to its own fierce standard.
    Even the wounded melon exudes serenity. Somewhere, juice runs
    down a hairy chin, but that is well beyond the border of the box.

    This poem is about a painting by Sánchez Cotán: Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber

    What would these four objects look like without the shadows around the curves, in the cracks, below the belly? Would they look more real? Less real? This painting is strange and haunting, and both difficult and easy for me to see. Can I remember it on the first part of my run? I’ll try. I’ll also try to notice how shadows offer depth, make things seem real, substantial, not just dots or flat objects.

    side note: These fruits and vegetables as subjects reminds me of a movie that Scott and I rewatched the other week: The Four Seasons, with Alan Alda, Rita Moreno, and Carol Burnett. One of the other characters, Anne, has taken up photography and has spent the last 2? years photographing vegetables, one at a time. Her husband thinks this is ridiculous and offers it up as evidence for how little she does, and as one of the reasons he’s divorcing her. Reading Seuss’ poem and staring at Sánchez Cotán’s painting, I am far less judgmental of her choice than my 7 or 8 year old self was when she watched this movie, over and over, on HBO.

    I searched for a clip from the movie and found it! Unfortunately it starts right after the photographs of the vegetables are shown.

    Still Life with Vegetables and an Asshole Husband

    During the run, I kept thinking about the painting and the objects painted in a box. How each of them were separated from each other, isolated, with some amount of light shining on them to display them. I thought about how sometimes I feel like I’m on display, a bright light shining on me, blinded, unable to see other people clearly even as I know they can see me. Disconnected from the world by the box. The shadow box, which brings me back to the Fiona Apple song, “Shadowboxer.” I started wondering about shadowboxing as a verb that didn’t mean boxing at shadows, but the act of putting someone on display, isolating them, turning them into a keepsake in a box on a wall, like the set of small boxes my mom had hanging in our many houses when I was growing up. I also thought about how there’s no reference point for size in the painting. What if the box was a small shadow box, and what if the fruit were miniatures, made out of wood or silk or plastic? (my mom loved wooden fruit) These thoughts made me want to study the history of shadow boxes.

    Okay, just looked up shadow box origins and found some interesting stuff, which I’ll get to in a minute.

    But first, any connection between Apple’s song and my version of shadowboxing? These lyrics seem promising:

    Oh, your gaze is dangerous
    And you fill your space so sweet
    If I let you get too close
    You’ll set your spell on me

    Now, the history of shadow boxes. I had no idea —

    Sailors were the first to create shadow boxes. They made them out of wood salvaged from their ships. They made them out of fear. Sailors believed that if their shadow reached shore before they did, their life on land would be cursed. The box, containing the sum total of a sailor’s personal effects, protected their true self.

    Shadow Box — The Art of Assemblage

    In this post, Karen Kao also mentions Cornell Boxes, named after Joseph Cornell who collected objects then arranged them in whimsical and weird ways in little wooden boxes. Adam Gopnik wrote about for the New Yorker in 2003: Sparkings.

    Kao opens her post with an intriguing way to think about shadow boxes:

    Think of a literal box, perhaps protected by a glass front, inside of which resides a world of whimsy. Think of it as found poetry in three-dimensional form.

    Interesting, but what does this have to do with shadows? Not much, or at least not much in the way I expected. Shadow boxes don’t involve literal shadows, but figurative ones — the shadow-self as embodied through cherished objects. Am I getting that right? This shadow-self, serving as proxy for the real self, needs to be protected, plucked out of the world and made safe, preserved, in its own little box.

    The idea of the shadow-self and the shadow as the property of the self bothers me a little. Even as I imagine my shadow to be connected to me, I don’t see it as me, mine. This leads me to a question for another day: what is the relationship between an object and the shadow it casts?

    I want to return to the painting and Seuss’ poem and the shadows and dark and light within them, but I also want to finish this entry so I can go outside and sit in the sun.

    Okay, I sat (and napped) in the sun for about an hour. I’m looking at the painting of the quince, cabbage, melon, and cucumber and thinking about light and darkness and shadows. Then, color. I think that this painting would look the same to me if it were in black and white — I searched for a black and white version, but couldn’t find one. Okay, back to shadows. They offer texture, especially on the cabbage. They also suggest that the light source is coming from the left side — a window? Anything else? I’ll keep thinking about it.

    may 1/RUN

    4 miles
    veterans home and back
    57 degrees
    wind: 14 mph / 28 mph gusts

    Ran with Scott. What did we talk about? I remember Scott talking a lot at the beginning — it was something he was excited about — but I can’t remember what it was. I do remember him complaining about Spotify and how some of their new policies hurt independent musicians like him. I talked about shadows and wind and marveled at a tree branch creaking in the wind. Oh — and I complained (again) about my new yellow shoes. I tried them one more time and they still hurt my feet and make my calves ache. I need to remember: no more yellow shoes!

    The water was gushing at the falls. We could smell something being fried at Sea Salt — it’s open for the season! I heard and saw a cardinal. I was dazzled by the bright white paint on the locks and dam no 1 sign — we both wondered if it was a reflective paint that made it so bright. A mile later, I could barely make out the bright yellow sign at 38th — the one I referred to as a bee last month. It was dull and blended in with the greenish-yellow trees behind it.

    My favorite thing today: the wonderful shadows the new leaves made on the sidewalk. Tiny little jagged dots or points, making the tree shadow look like something other than a tree. What? Not sure. A strange, magical sculpture? Glitter shadow? The leaves made the shadows strange, the shadows made the path strange. First encountering them on the double bridge, I didn’t think they were shadows but some sort of blob on the asphalt.

    During the run I had mentioned that I didn’t know what my May challenge would be but that it would be fun to have a theme that I could make a playlist for. By the end of the run, after witnessing the wonderful shadows, I had my topic: Shadows! As we walked back, I was already creating my playlist.

    I’m Shadowing You

    1. I’m Shadowing You / Blossom Dearie
    2. Me and My Shadow / Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.
    3. Shadowboxer / Fiona Apple
    4. My Shadow / Keane
    5. Shadow Dancing / Andy Gibb
    6. Shadow Song / Screaming Trees
    7. Shadows and Light / Joni Mitchell
    8. Silve Shadow / Atlantic Starr
    9. Total Eclipse of the Heart / Bonnie Tyler
    10. Help Me Make It Through the Night / Kris Kristofferson
    11. Sunshine in the Shade / The Fixx
    12. the Shadow of Your Smile / Astrud Gilberto
    13. Evening / The Moody Blues
    14. White Room / Cream
    15. Shadow Stabbing / CAKE
    16. I’m Beginning to See the Light / Ella Fitzgerald
    17. Twilight Time / The Platters
    18. The Shadow Knows / Link Wray
    19. yesterday / The Beatles
    20. Moonshadow / Cat Stevens
    21. Golden Years / David Bowie
    22. Candle Mambo / Captain Beefheart
    23. If You go Away / Neil Diamond
    24. We Will Become Silhouettes / The Postal Service
    25. Crepuscule With Nellie / Thelonious Monk

    Discovered this poem on the Slowdown before my run. Oh, Dorianne Laux, what a gift your poem is today!

    Life On Earth/ Dorianne Laux

    The odds are we should never have been born. Not one of us. Not one in 400 trillion to be exact. Only one among the 250 million released in a flood of semen that glides like a glassine limousine filled with tadpoles of possible people, one of whom may or may not be you, a being made of water and blood, a creature with eyeballs and limbs that end in fists, a you with all your particular perfumes, the chords of your sinewy legs singing as they form, your organs humming and buzzing with new life, moonbeams lighting up your brain’s gray coils, the exquisite hills of your face, the human toy your mother longs for, your father yearns to hold, the unmistakable you who will take your first breath, your first step, bang a copper pot with a wooden spoon, trace the lichen growing on a boulder you climb to see the wild expanse of a field, the one whose heart will yield to the yellow forsythia named after William Forsyth—not the American actor with piercing blue eyes, but the Scottish botanist who discovered the buttery bells on a highland hillside blooming to beat the band, zigzagging down an unknown Scottish slope. And those are only a few of the things you will one day know, slowly chipping away at your ignorance and doubt, you who were born from ashes and will return to ash. When you think you might be through with this body and soul, look down at an anthill or up at the stars, remember your gambler chances, the bounty of good luck you were born for.

    april 30/RUN

    5.15 miles
    bottom of franklin hill
    54 degrees
    wind: 3 mph

    The sun is back! And so are shorts without tights. And rowers and roller skiers and laughing woodpeckers! A beautiful morning for a run. I remember looking down at the river: smooth and still. Heard a creaking noise under the trestle, almost like an old swing. Did someone hang up a swing down there? Smelled urine just above the flats — yuck! Encountered other runners and walkers and dogs and e-bikes — one was powering up the Franklin hill playing a classic rock song . . . I think it was AC/DC.

    Running back through the tunnel of trees, almost done, I saw a dark shape up ahead. I assumed it was a dog. Nope, it was that big turkey again and this time he gobbled at me. The trail was narrow with no choice but to run right past him unless I turned around. Since I’m a wimp and he was staring menacingly at me, I turned around and ran until I reached the end of the fence. Then I climbed up to the bike trail. I’m fine with being a wimp.

    Listened to the rowers as I ran north. After turning around and running up most of the hill, I put in Beyoncé’s new album, Cowboy Carter. Earlier today I was posting things about bees on a new resource page, Bees, so I have bees on the brain. Listening to Beyoncé, I heard a line with the word honey in it and thought, Queen Bee! Yes, more bees. I’ll have to add Beyonc´e to my bee page!

    Before the run, I read this poem by James Schuyler that I’ve wanted to post ever since I discovered it a few weeks ago. I wanted to wait until it was green. Today it is, so I’m posting it:

    A Gray Thought/ James Schuyler (1972)

    In the sky a gray thought
    ponders on three kinds of green:
    Brassy tarnished leaves of lilacs
    holding on half-heartedly and long
    after most turned and fell to make
    a scatter rug, warmly, brightly brown.
    Odd, that the tattered heart-shapes 
    on a Persian shrub should stay
    as long as the northern needles 
    of the larch.  Near, behind the lilac,
    on a trunk, pale Paris green, green
    as moonlight, growing on another time scale
    a slowness becoming vast as though
    all the universe were an atom
    of a filterable virus in a head
    that turns an eye to smile
    or frown or stare into other
    eyes: and not of gods, but creatures
    whose size begins beyond the sense of size:
    lichens, softly-coloured, hard in durance,
    a permanence like rock on a transient tree.
    And another green, a dark thick green
    to face the winter, laid in layers on
    the spruce and balsam or in foxtail
    bursts on pine in springy shapes
    that weave and pierce
    the leafless and unpatterned woods.

    I know this is a poem about 3 different greens in the fall, nearing winter. I’m posting it because I love his descriptions of green and wanted to use it to think more about different greens today. That was my plan, at least, as I ran. All I managed to do was chant a few 3-beat greens:

    emerald green
    army green
    jungle green
    pear green —
    lime green —

    Mid-chant I noticed the dandelions on the edge of the trail and condensed the 4-syllable word, dan de li on into 3-syllables: dan dy lines

    Dandy lines? Love it. Maybe the title of a poem — a cento with flower lines, or is that too much?

    The green I remember most was possibly not even green, depending on who you ask. A biker biked by, wearing the brightest yellow-green (or maybe just yellow?) shirt I’ve been able to see in a long time. Usually yellow or yellow-green is muted for me. Not this shirt. Wow! So bright it almost made my eyes hurt. My vision is so strange. How was I able to see the bright color this time, when I usually can’t see it?

    added a few hours later: I almost forgot to mention the little wren that I saw as I was walking back to my house. First, a flash — or flutter or flurry or small explosion* — of movement on the street. Something, I could not tell what, ascending. Then a scan, all around until the source was found: a tiny brown bird on the top of the fence. They stayed long enough for even me to see their little face. Such a tiny bird! What miracle today allowed me to see them?

    After lunch, while doing the dishes, I listened to the New Yorker Poetry podcast and heard David Baker read his wonderful poem, Six Notes (notes refers to taking notes for a poem, six sections, and the notes of different birds). The beginning of his poem reminds me of my bird sighting, even though my little wren didn’t make a sound and was rising, not falling:

    from Six Notes / David Baker

    Come down to us. Come down with your song,
    little wren. The world is in pieces.

    We must not say so. In the dark hours,
    in the nearest branches, I hear you thrum—

    —

    Come up to us. Come up with your song,
    little wren. The world is in pieces.

    We must not say so. In the dark hours,
    on the nearest fence post, I see you thrum–

    *Having suddenly added explosion of movement as one of my word options, I feel compelled to add the source of that inspiration. It’s from a Chen Chen interview I read yesterday and had been planning to post sometime soon. Here’s what he said:

    Poems are the opposite of habits. They are explosions. Sometimes they are small explosions. But loud. Or huge, quiet explosions.

    Chen Chen Interview

    So, was this little wren’s small explosion up and off the street a poem? Yes!

    april 29/RUN

    4.2 miles
    minnehaha falls and back
    49 degrees / drizzle
    wind: 7 mph / gusts: 14 mph

    When I left for my run, I thought the rain had stopped. I was wrong, which was fine, because I don’t mind running in a drizzle, especially when it’s not too cold. Was it a drizzle? Maybe I’d call it a mist — a steady, soft spray that soaked my orange sweatshirt and mixed with the sweat on my face. Mostly I couldn’t see it; I just felt wet or damp or . . . I’ve got it: Moist! That’s how I felt as I ran today, moist. Scott hates this word, but I don’t mind it. What words do I detest? The only one I can think of immediately is nummy. Is that even a word?

    So, everything, including me, was moist. Moist sidewalks, moist trails, moist air, moist shorts, running tights, socks. Other words for moist: soaked, damp, dank, saturated, humid

    10 Moist Things

    1. the paved path — big puddles everywhere — the biggest puddle was right after the locks and dam no. 1 parking lot heading south
    2. the strip of dirt next to the paved path — muddy ruts
    3. the oak savanna — covered in leaves, light green and dripping
    4. the thick, gray air
    5. the laughing, water-logged voices of kids on the playground
    6. the slick road
    7. my running shoes
    8. my pony tail
    9. my orange sweatshirt
    10. the grass — a sponge . . . squish squish squish

    A good run. I felt strong and springy — both because of the weather and my bouncy feet. I listened to the water gushing out of the sewer pipes and over the ledge as I ran to the falls. I put in my “It’s Windy” playlist on the way back. Most memorable song: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (11 on the Beaufort Scale for violent storm).

    before the run

    It’s almost the end of April (wow) and this morning, before my run, I finished my Beaufort Scale in Verse:

    Beaufort Scale in Verse

    0 — The Moment/Marie Howe

    The whir of I should be, I should be, I should be

    slows to silence,

    the white cotton curtains hanging still.


    1 — Long Life/Mary Oliver

    We may be touched by the most powerful of suppositions—even to a certainty—as we stand in the rose petals of the sun and hear a murmur from the wind no louder than the sound it makes as it dozes under the bee’s winds. This, too, I suggest, is weather, and worthy of report.

    2 — Nature Aria/Yi Lei

    Autumn wind chases in
    From all directions
    And a thousand chaste leaves
    Give way.

    3 — And All Visible Signs Swept Away/Carl Phillips

    I am stirred, I’m stir-able, I’m a wind-stirred thing

    3 — When the Fact of Your Gaze Means Nothing, They You Are truly Alongside/Donika Kelly

    the dry
    sound of applause: leaves chapped/falling, an ending

    4 — Enough/Jeffrey Harrison

    The rising wind pulls you out of it,/and you look up to see a cloud of leaves
    wheeling in sunlight, flickering against the blue
    and lifting above the treetops, as if the whole day
    were sighing, Let it go, let it go,
    for this moment at least, let it all go

    5 — Love Song for the Square Root of Negative One/Richard Siken

    I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble and I am invisible

    6 — Wind/Emily Dickinson

    When winds go round and round in bands,
    And thrum upon the door,
    And birds take places overhead,
    To bear them orchestra

    7 — Who Has the Wind?/Christina Rossetti

    Who has seen the wind?
    Neither You nor I:
    But when the trees bow down their heads,
    the wind is passing by

    8 — Fall/Edward Hirsch

    Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless
    Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:
    It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies

    9 — Plea to the Wind/Alice Oswald

    Unglue the fog from the woods from the waist up
    And speak disparagingly of leaves

    10 — Plea to the Wind/Alice Oswald

    Whip the green cloth off the hills

    11 — Postscript/Seamus Heaney

    So that the ocean on one side is wild
    With foam and glitter. . .
    As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
    And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

    12 — Wave After Wave/M. Bartley Seigel

    In a heartbeat, rollers mass two stories
    trough to insatiate tempest, unquelled
    by prayer nor cigarette, careless, mean,

    a cold-blooded indifference so pure,
    a strong swimmer won’t last ten wet minutes.
    At the Keweenaw, surf pummels the stamp
    sands with ochre fists, ore boats stack up lee

    of the stone, and entire beaches stand up
    to walk away.

    april 27/RACE

    10k
    Get in Gear
    55 degrees
    92% humidity

    This morning, Scott and I ran the Get in Gear 10k. We haven’t run this race since before the pandemic. It’s right by our house and follows the ford loop route. We didn’t run fast, but it felt good and I felt strong. Strong enough to pick it up at the end. For years I’ve wanted to be able to enjoy the race as I ran it, instead of pushing hard and feeling miserable. This year, I’m doing it! Much more rewarding than a PR.

    10 People

    1. Bethany had a loud voice with a strong Minnesota accent that cut through the wind. I know her name is Bethany because she introduced herself to someone about 25 yards ahead of us. I bet she was nice, but that voice! As we tried to figure out where to line up Scott said, not near Bethany! After finishing the race, Scott noticed her and her bright yellow shirt — oh look, there’s Bethany. As we ran, I mentioned how frustrating it might be to have a loud voice like that. Scott said: Bethany’s don’t care how loud they are
    2. a tall man in a bright yellow shirt who kept sprinting then stopping, sprinting then stopping. For almost 4 miles, he would run past us, then stop and walk until we caught up, then start running fast again. We dropped him on some hill — finally
    3. a shorter man taking deep, noisy breaths every few steps — I think he made a noise with the exhale — whoooooooooo whoooooooooo whoooooooooo
    4. a man before the race doing a lot of stretching and warming up — I don’t know the names of the stretches, but I’m sure they have names — he was almost skipping forwards, then sprinting, then skipping backwards. I wonder how fast he ran?
    5. a woman standing at a distance from the porta potties. Another woman asked, are you in line? and even though we thought there was no way she would say yes because she was so far from the line, she said yes, I think so
    6. the enthusiastic, slightly unhinged, volunteer handing out water — you’re so fast! great job! woo hoo!
    7. an older couple standing beside the course, cheering us on. When I said, thank you, one of them said, no, thank you!
    8. a woman just behind us, scuffing her foot on the road with every strike, scrape scrape scrape
    9. a guy cheering, good job! you’re almost there, when we still had 2 miles left
    10. 2 little girls before the race, meeting up, the one squealing in delight at seeing her friend arrive, Irene!
    11. remembered 2 days later: a woman, stopped, either coughing or dry heaving vigorously

    april 26/YOGACORE

    yoga: 20 minutes
    core: 10 minutes

    Downward facing dogs and crescent moons and cat backs and cow mountain rag doll child poses. Dead bugs and side planks and bird dogs and push-ups and reverse crunches. And other things I can’t remember the names of right now.

    some things I heard watched read today

    HEARD most of an amazing Tinhouse podcast interview with the poet and multi-media artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen. After I finish, I’d like to read the transcript and pick out some passages that were particularly moving.

    WATCHED some advice from Billy Collins on how to write poetry: Read poetry, lots of it, thousands of hours of it. Read Wordsworth.

    read poetry

    READ parts of Mary Oliver’s Long Life:

    And that is just the point: how the world, moist and bountiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?” This book is my comment.

    Long Life/ Mary Oliver

    and a review of collection that I want to check out, Wonder About The that references a useful essay by Forrest Gander, What is Eco-Poetry?:

    Aside from issues of theme and reference, how might syntax, line break, or the shape of the poem on the page express an ecological ethics? If our perceptual experience is mostly palimpsestic or endlessly juxtaposed and fragmented; if events rarely have discreet beginnings or endings but only layers, duration, and transitions; if natural processes are already altered by and responsive to human observation, how does poetry register the complex interdependency that draws us into a dialogue with the world?

    What is Eco-Poetry? / Forrest Gander

    and also references Angus Fletcher:

    In his magisterial 2004 study A New Theory for American Poetry, Angus Fletcher posited that “environmental sensitivity demands its own new genre of poetry” and argued that environment poems “are not about the environment, whether natural or social, they are environments.” 

    and discusses how Wonder About The mentions eyes frequently:

    The peculiar art of perceiving the environment is often a subject of Wonder About The, whether it’s acknowledging that a farmer’s “bright Deere” is “a part of / the field’s design” or the urgent command, presented in progressively larger type, to “look up / look up / look up.” Eyes, in fact, are mentioned often, from “the sense record” being visited “upon our eyes / our ears” to a hard-earned vision of a waterfowl:

    my winter eye
    unlayers all frost
    anneals what distance
         takes

    rank glorious muck
    rot palimpsesting rye
    the duck
    the living eye

    april 25/RUN

    4 miles
    dogwood run
    52 degrees

    Did a run with Scott to Dogwood Coffee on a beautiful spring morning. Wore my new running shorts. They’re blue and very comfortable, which is a big deal because it’s difficult to find good running shorts. We ran north to the bottom of the franklin hill, then back up it until we stopped to walk for the last stretch. I know we looked at the river, but I don’t remember what it looked like. Was it smooth? Blue? Any foam? I have no recollection. I do remember that there weren’t any rowers on it. No geese either.

    I talked about a video I watched earlier today on how to write poetry for beginners by a poetry influencer. (I didn’t like it). Scott talked about some drama happening in the big band he’s in.

    After the run, waiting in line at Dogwood, I overheard the woman ahead of us tell the barista her name was Sara. She asked his name: Scott. I just had to chime in that we were a Sara and Scott too! She mentioned that she just met someone the other day who had the same birthday as her. The only 2 people I know that have the same birthday as me are two of RJP’s former frenemies.

    Anything else? Not that many people running . . . just remembered that we saw two people running up the franklin hill. One of them was accompanied by a roller skier.

    Also: as we ran under the trestle something was crossing the tracks above us. A train? Nope a truck with special wheels for riding on the track. I turned around and ran backwards to watch it for a minute and discovered that running backwards is kind of nice. I liked how it worked by leg muscles differently.

    random etymology: Happened upon the origins of gnarled:

    We owe the adjective gnarled and other forms of the word to our friend Shakespeare, who created it in 1603. In Measure for Measure, he writes, “Thy sharpe and sulpherous bolt splits the un-wedgable and gnarled oak.” But gnarled didn’t come into use again until the 19th century. In any case, word experts believe it’s related to the Middle English word knar which means “knot in wood.”

    gnarled

    Today is Ted Kooser’s birthday. I’m happy to report that although I thought he was dead — having posted about it on 22 april 2022, he is not! I’m not sure why I thought he was, but all the results on my google search indicate that he is still alive. He’s a wonderful poet, and person according to what I’ve read from poetry people on 2022 twitter. Here’s a poem I read this morning on poetry foundation:

    So This is Nebraska / Ted Kooser

    The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
    over the fields, the telephone lines
    streaming behind, its billow of dust
    full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.

    On either side, those dear old ladies,
    the loosening barns, their little windows
    dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
    hide broken tractors under their skirts.

    So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
    afternoon; July. Driving along
    with your hand out squeezing the air,
    a meadowlark waiting on every post.

    Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
    top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
    a pickup kicks its fenders off
    and settles back to read the clouds.

    You feel like that; you feel like letting
    your tires go flat, like letting the mice
    build a nest in your muffler, like being
    no more than a truck in the weeds,

    clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
    or holding a skinny old man in your lap
    while he watches the road, waiting
    for someone to wave to. You feel like

    waving. You feel like stopping the car
    and dancing around on the road. You wave
    instead and leave your hand out gliding
    larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

    Oh, I love so much about this poem — everything?! You can listen to him read it at poetry foundation (poem title is link). I want to spend more time with his writing.

    april 24/RUN

    10k
    juno and finn, st. paul
    44 degrees

    A beautiful morning! Perfect temperature for running. Sun. Shadows. Hooray! Tried my new adventure: running to poems that are part of St. Paul’s Sidewalk Poetry project. Fun! Ran south on the west river road, up the hill to the ford bridge, north on the east river road, east on hartford, north on juno, east on finn. It took me a little while, but I found both poems — my navigating skills were not the greatest before my vision loss, but now they’re pretty bad. Difficult to read signs and hard to keep a map in my head. Made a few bad choices on the way back, and probably added an extra mile because of it. Oops.

    First impressions — wow, these poems are really hidden — a nice surprise as you walk or run along. Also, there’s not enough contrast for my bad eyes. I couldn’t read the poems at all. I’m glad that you can look them up online because otherwise, I’d have no idea what they said.

    Overall: great idea, but not that accessible. Also, how soon before these poems wear away? Even with my (small) criticisms, I love this project and am excited to run to some more!

    This was a fun way to run a 10k — I was able to get a nice break in the middle and I was distracted from the effort by my task. Also, it’s good for me to practice navigating. I need to build up those skills so I can get out in the world to new places by myself more.

    I wasn’t only focused on finding these poems. I also gave attention to the world:

    10 Things

    1. kids at Minnehaha Academy, lower campus, were playing Red Light/Green Light. Green light . . . Red light.
    2. one gutted street lamp on the ford bridge — the one next to it was still on
    3. several streets with no sidewalks, or sidewalks only on one side in Highland Park
    4. bright blue river!
    5. a racket! geese honking beneath the ford bridge
    6. a bright white paddleboat near the shore on the west bank
    7. passed 2 park workers about to put fresh tar on the river road trail
    8. later, running over tar that was put down earlier in the week
    9. fee bee fee bee
    10. bright blue sky, cloudless

    Sidewalk Poems — poem + my picture

    1

    SE corner of Juno Ave and Finn

    Dementia/ Naomi Cohn (2008)

    I reach for a name, a song, a tune
    and memories scatter,


    minnows fleeing

    
a toothy pike.

    I catch a few


    laggards.

    
But know these are nothing
    to the hundred fish that fled.

    2

    S. side of Juno Ave, bet. Finn and Cleveland Ave

    Untitled/Louis Disanto (2011)

    Life magazines for shin guards.
    Skates too big, stick cracked and old,
    jacket patched and tattered.
    I ignored the smirks and winter’s cold,
    love of hockey was all that mattered.

    A note about this second poem: This is not the poem that is supposed to be here, according to the map.

    earlier today

    While drinking my coffee, I read about different places along the river to view birds during the migration and found this line:

    You can also see a whole hillside of the spring ephemeral bloodroot along the trails near 36th Street.

    Must-see FMR spring birding sites along the river

    Bloodroot? What’s that, and why is it called bloodroot? This was a useful site for answering my questions.

    • an herbaceous perennial native to eastern North America, from Florida up into Canada 
    • found in undisturbed woodlands, on flood plains and on slopes near streams or ponds
    • the reddish sap that exudes from all parts of the plant, but especially the root, when cut is what prompted the common name of bloodroot
    • used as a natural red or yellow-orange dye
    • the brilliant white – or rarely light pink – flowers up to 2 inches across open in early spring. The blooming period lasts about 2 weeks
    • each flower stalk produces a solitary flower with a number of delicate, elongate petals surrounding the numerous yellow stamens and central green pistil, with a pale yellow, two-lobed stigma at its apex. The flower usually has eight symmetrically arranged petals, with four large petals and four smaller ones

    april 23/WALK

    walk 1: 30 minutes with Delia, neighborhood
    walk 2: 75 minutes to the library

    I haven’t walked to the library in a long time. 5 or 6 or 7 years? Why has it been so long? Partly the pandemic and the library almost being burned down and then closed for a long time are to blame, but it’s also all the running and having a dog. If I have any time or energy left to walk, I need to take Delia the dog along, and the library is too far for her. Also, she’s not allowed inside.

    It’s more than a mile, but less than 2 one way. It was great. I listened to Taylor Swift’s new album on the way there, and Beyoncé’s on the way back (Cowboy Carter). Wow! The Tortured Poets Department was good but Cowboy Carter was amazing.

    10 Things

    1. a big white dog sitting quietly and calmly in a dirt back yard next to a chain link fence
    2. a cedar fence that looked almost new, with shiny wood, bulging out towards the sidewalk — what happened?
    3. red tulips in full bloom right up against the foundation of a house
    4. a big tree with a full set of yellowish-green leaves
    5. a terraced yard, all dirt, looking neat and ready to be filled with flowers
    6. a little free library packed with books, its glass door wide open
    7. music blasting from an open door at the Trinity Church, playing “Shake It Off”
    8. 2 squirrels winding up a tree, one chasing the other, their nails scratching the rough bark
    9. my favorite stone lions in front of a house wearing purple flower headbands in honor of spring
    10. a big moving truck backed into a driveway blocking all of the sidewalk and half the street

    earlier today

    This past Saturday, I took a class on public art and ekphrastic poetry with the new poet laureate of Minneapolis, Heid E. Erdrich. A great class. When I signed up for it, I was just interested in taking a class with Erdrich and learning more about ekphrastic poetry; I didn’t realize that public art would also be a part of it. Very cool. Anyway, the class inspired me to think more deeply about public poetry projects. I have several ideas for my own, with very little understanding of how to make them happen. Perhaps studying other examples will help educate and inspire me. Plus, studying them is another way to learn more about the place I live. First up: Sidewalk Poetry St. Paul

    Sidewalk Poetry, St. Paul

    Sidewalk Poetry is a systems-based work that allows city residents to claim the sidewalks as their book pages. This project re-imagines Saint Paul’s annual sidewalk maintenance program with Public Works, as the department repairs 10 miles of sidewalk each year. We have stamped more than 1,200 poems from a collection that now includes 73 individual pieces all written by Saint Paul residents. Today, everyone in Saint Paul now lives within a 10-minute walk of a Sidewalk Poem. 

    This art project began with previous Public Art Saint Paul City Artist Marcus Young in 2008 under the name “Everyday Poems for City Sidewalks,” and continues today with evolved stamping approaches, as well as poetry submission and review processes. Our 2023 Sidewalk Poetry accepts poetry submissions in Dakota, Hmong, Somali, Spanish, and English. The poetry on our streets celebrates the remarkable cultures that make our City home and that makes our City strong. With this as a beginning, other languages may be added in years to come.

    Sidewalk Poetry St Paul

    I think the first step for me in getting to know this project is to visit some of the poems. I’d like to start running to them! Here’s a map to help me out: Public Art Sidewalks

    I think I’ll start (tomorrow) with a favorite poet of mine, Naomi Cohn. She has one on the Southeast corner of Juno and Finn. Very close to it is one by Pat Owen, on the southside of Juno between Finn and Cleveland.

    Almost forgot to post this: the first song on Beyoncé’s album, “American Requiem” sings about the wind!

    Can we stand for something?
    Now is the time to face the wind (Ow)
    Coming in peace and love, y’all
    Oh, a lot of takin’ up space
    Salty tears beyond my gaze
    Can you stand me?

    Can we stand for something?
    Now is the time to face the wind
    Now ain’t the time to pretend
    Now is the time to let love in

    april 22/RUN

    3.8 miles
    river road, north/south
    62 degrees
    wind: 16 mph / gusts: 30 mph

    62 in bright sun with very little shade feels warm, too warm. Time to start running much earlier in the day. Other weather-related gripes? Had to hold onto my cap several times so it wouldn’t blow off.

    Everything is slowly turning green, especially the floodplain forest. The trees are coming into leaf/like something almost being said.

    Noticed some cool bird shadows, one on the road from a bird high up in the sky, another on the side of a house.

    Heard something beeping as I ran under the trestle — was a train coming soon? Not that I could tell.

    Listened to the wind running north, my “It’s Windy” playlist running south. Heard “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Wind of Change” and thought about how an answer blowing in the wind could mean two contradictory things at once: 1. the answer is coming, change is coming, a better, freer world is coming and 2. the answer is just blowing in the wind, out of reach, as futile/pointless as talking to the wind.

    back to the Beaufort Scale

    Last week I came up with a great plan to create a Beaufort scale out of poetry lines, but it stalled when I couldn’t figure one out for 1. Today I’ll try again.

    But before I do that — I think it stalled also because I got side tracked by metaphor and figurative language. The Beaufort scale mostly uses literal language, describing the effects of wind on various things, like umbrellas or people trying to walk. Occasionally metaphor creeps in with the use of white horses to describe white caps on waves. Is this the only use of metaphor in the scale? No.

    Use of metaphor in Beaufort Scale:

    0 — “sea like a mirror”
    1 — ripples like scales
    2 — crests like glass
    3 — foam like glass
    4 — white horses

    If I’m reading correctly, the for use on land section is all literal descriptions of wind’s effects: leaves rustling, trees being uprooted, roof tiles ripping off, inconvenient then difficult to walk. I like how 7 is inconvenient to walk, while 8 is difficult.

    Okay, now back to a poem scale. Instead of literal descriptions, I think I’d like figurative ones. It’s more fun!

    when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by — “Who Has Seen the Wind?”/ Christina Rossetti

    Would this be 5, “small trees in leaf start to sway”? or 6, “large branches in motion”? or 7, “whole trees in motion”?

    I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble and I am invisible — “Love Song for the Square Root of Negative One” / Richard Siken

    2? “leaves rustle”? or 8, “”twigs break from trees”?

    I am stirred, I’m stir-able, I’m a wind-stirred thing — “And All Visible Signs Swept Away” / Carl Phillips

    Okay, think I know this one: “Leaves and small twigs in constant motion” (3).

    Autumn wind chases in/From all directions/And a thousand chaste leaves/Give way. — “Nature Aria” / Yi Lei

    I think this should be 2, “leaves rustle”

    Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless/ Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:/It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies — “Fall” / Edward Hirsch

    7, “inconvenient to walk against the wind”

    the dry/sound of applause: leaves chapped/falling, an ending. — “When the Fact of Your Gaze Means Nothing, Then You Are Truly Alongside” / Donika Kelly

    3: “leaves in constant motion”

    Unglue the fog from the woods from the waist up/ And speak disparagingly of leaves — “Plea to the Wind” / Alice Oswald

    This is a tough one for me. Is ungluing the fog violent or gentle? To speak disparagingly of the leaves seems less forceful than yelling at them — I think I’ll go with 4 “wind raises dust and loose paper, small branches move” but I could also go with 9, chimney pots and slates removed

    Whip the green cloth off the hills — “Plea to the Wind” / Alice Oswald

    10: “Trees uprooted, considerable structural damage occurs”

    When winds go round and round in bands,/And thrum upon the door,/And birds take places overhead,/To bear them orchestra, — “Wind” / Emily Dickinson

    6 — whistling in telegraph wires, umbrellas used with difficulty

    So that the ocean on one side is wild/With foam and glitter. . ./As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways/ And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. — “Postscript” / Seamus Heaney

    11: the sea is covered in foam, widespread damage

    So, I already found a line last week for 0. With these lines above, I’m only missing 12. Although some of the lines above are used for multiple levels. I’ll fine tune that in a future entry. This was fun!

    Here they are in order, so far:

    0 —- the white cotton curtains hanging still

    1 —

    2 — Autumn wind chases in/From all directions/And a thousand chaste leaves/Give way. — “Nature Aria” / Yi Lei

    3 — I am stirred, I’m stir-able, I’m a wind-stirred thing — “And All Visible Signs Swept Away” / Carl Phillips AND the dry/sound of applause: leaves chapped/falling, an ending. — “When the Fact of Your Gaze Means Nothing, Then You Are Truly Alongside” / Donika Kelly

    4 —

    5 — I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble and I am invisible — “Love Song for the Square Root of Negative One” / Richard Siken

    6 — When winds go round and round in bands,/And thrum upon the door,/And birds take places overhead,/To bear them orchestra, — “Wind” / Emily Dickinson

    7 — when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by — “Who Has Seen the Wind?”/ Christina Rossetti

    8 — Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless/ Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:/It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies — “Fall” / Edward Hirsch

    9 — Unglue the fog from the woods from the waist up/ And speak disparagingly of leaves — “Plea to the Wind” / Alice Oswald

    10 — Whip the green cloth off the hills — “Plea to the Wind” / Alice Oswald

    11 — So that the ocean on one side is wild/With foam and glitter. . ./As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways/ And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. — “Postscript” / Seamus Heaney

    12 —

    april 21/RUN

    2 miles
    edmund (grass), south/edmund (road), north
    52 degrees
    wind: 10 mph

    A beautiful morning — sun! shorts! Felt sluggish and tired and heavy — heavy legs and thick torso. The dirt trail was soft and uneven. I listened to Taylor Swift’s new album so I didn’t many birds or conversations. I think I heard a few black-capped chickadees, maybe a blue jay? Feeling blah or bleugh today in a way that a run couldn’t fix. No anxiety, just blah.

    Before the run, I wrote about yesterday’s image of the gutted street lamp:

    Yesterday I offered up an image of the run: the row of street lamps with their wires cut. I want to spend some more time with this image, use it as opportunity to think about image and metaphor, and to give attention to the trails above the river that I run on and the communities — in St. Paul and Minneapolis — that I run through.

    So many thoughts prompted by things I’ve been reading lately! Where to begin?

    1 — literal and figurative, part 1

    the relationship between metaphor and realism—specifically how a poem’s use or rejection of metaphor might double as a commentary on the poet’s relationship to testimony, to bearing witness to the actual world.

    When Metaphor Gets Literal

    Bearing witness to the actual world. Describing an image in ways that don’t remove it from its context and history and its specificity. Because I’m a poet of place who is dedicated to noticing and documenting the Mississippi River Gorge, I want the specific and concrete in my images. Grotz offers up Czesław Miłosz’s “Blacksmith Shop” as a good example of a literal poem, grounded in concrete reality.

    Deep image has had its day, though its ahistorical premises have been taken up in this new method’s assumption that style is merely a manipulable function, easily disconnected from the individual poet’s personal and historical circumstances. . . . In order to record the shocks of contemporary life, the poet must be willing to enter into history, to conjure it not merely as chronological sequence, but as unique texture and feel, what Walter Benjamin called “aura.” Deep image, however, was committed to locating itself in a world of prehistory, as if the mind were a direct conduit to the eternal collective unconscious

    Too Much of the Air

    What does this “entering into history” and “bearing witness to the actual world” mean to me and the image of the gutted street lamp? It seems important to connect these lamps with the recent spread (for the past 2 years) of copper wire theft across Minneapolis and St. Paul. Scott, RJP, and I have been noticing it for more than a year: all of the lights lining the west river road were out for months, making the river road too dark and dangerous to drive on or run beside at night. The Lake Street Bridge lights and Lake Nokomis lights too. I googled “street lamps cut wires minneapolis” and found a ton of articles about the problem and how difficult and expensive it is to stop the theft. Too many lights, too few police. Possible solutions include enlisting community members — someone has crowd-sourced a map of gutted lamps in Como Park — or targeting the sellers with legislation (imho: a much better solution, especially since it worked with the catalytic convertor thefts a few years back).

    Of course, putting this in a historical context also requires thinking about why people might feel compelled to steal wires (economic precarity, addiction) and recent reimaginings of the role of the police in communities. How to recognize this context without reducing the image to it? How to still allow for the figurative in the midst of this literal? How to move beyond chronology and “facts” to texture and feel? Tough questions, I think. Michael Kleber-Diggs offers an answer with his amazing poem, Here All Alone, which I posted on RUN! a few years ago. Wow!

    this land, once yours, was flooded and dammed
    the same day our Rondo was cleaved for a highway.

    the bees are back

    I read this suggestion from John Ashbery the other day — “It’s important to try to write when you are in the wrong mood or when the weather is wrong.”– so I have decided that because I am in the wrong mood — the blah bleugh mood — I should try to write something. And I have decided that that something should be about the bees being back in the service berry tree on my deck. Every spring when the tree (or is it a bush? or a bush imitating a tree? wanting to be a tree?) is blooming, the bees come and hover around it. When I sit in my adirondack chair (which I mistakenly called an “andriodak” 25 years ago on St. Simon Island in Georgia and which Scott and I reference every so often) under the tree, I see their shadows crossing over my notebook or my book or my pants. Usually just one or two, today a dozen. Circling and circling, making me almost dizzy. Sometimes I wondered if it was a shadow I was seeing or the actual bee. Then I wondered if they wanted me to move — would they sting me? What a delightful moment! I can’t remember if it was in a poem or an essay or an interview, but I recall reading Ross Gay delighting in the shadow of a bee crossing over his page*. I know I already delighted in these bees before it was endorsed by Gay, but somehow those bees began to matter more once I knew delighting in their shadow was something I could share with one of my favorite writers.

    *update, 4 may 2024: I found it! Gay mentions the bees in his delightful poem, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude:

    And thank you the tiny bee’s shadow
    perusing these words as I write them.

    composed under the tree/bush, with the bees above

    Beneath the
    bush that

    tries to be
    a tree,

    below the
    almost

    white blossoms — shadow

    bees hover,
    dizzy

    the air, pass
    over

    my page, write
    this poem.

    Am I happy with this poem. For now.

    april 20/RUN

    4.5 miles
    marshall loop (cleveland)
    35 degrees
    wind: 12 mph

    Woke up this morning to snow on the back deck. Only a dusting that melted before Scott got up a few hours later. Cold. Wore my running tights, winter vest, and gloves. It felt windier than 12 mph, especially on the bridge. I took my cap off so it wouldn’t blow away.

    10 Things

    1. cold wind in my face, making my eyes water
    2. little ripples on the river, looking like scales
    3. running past street lamps on the st paul side, noticing the wires at the base pulled out
    4. an empty white kitchen trash bag draped over a bench
    5. 2 teen aged boys jumping the fence near the lake street bridge steps
    6. rowers on the river! how do they row in this wind?
    7. the clicking and clacking of roller ski poles
    8. the clicking and clacking of a woman’s running gait — she had a hitch and stepped down in a strange way that made a scraping noise — they way she contorted her body with each step made my hips hurt just watching!
    9. volunteers on earth day just above the floodplain forest, picking up trash — I was almost taken out by little Giovanni — Giovanni! Watch out! an adult called
    10. little birds — sparrows? — swooping, low to the ground, just in front of me

    Before I went out for my run, I was reading about images and metaphors and literal and figurative language. As I was finishing up my run, I was thinking that my image of the day — the image I’d like to think about and write around — is the street lamp on the side of the paved trail, its door open and wires hanging out . . . or maybe the image is not just one of them, but lamp after lamp all the way down the hill above shadow falls, all of them gutted or disemboweled, their wire guts hanging out. The idea of them being gutted seems too easy as a metaphor — perhaps I need to think about who or what gutted them? Or something more specific about the guts as veins or tendons? Now I’m thinking about cut wires and losing the circuit and being disconnected.

    This afternoon, I took a 3 hour zoom class on ekphrastic poetry. I wrote most of this entry before it; I’m finishing now, after it. A great class with Heid E. Erdrich. Lots of inspiration for public art and responding to art. Erdrich mentioned writing poems or finding poems that fit as labels for artwork in museums. This made me think of my interest in alt-text. I’d like to explore this connection more. Very cool.

    april 19/RUN

    4.9 miles
    veterans’ bridge and back
    36 degrees / snow flurries
    wind: 16 mph / gusts: 31 mph

    Windy, some snow flurries. They started when I started. At first, they looked like glitter falling from the sky, later they felt like sharp pins pricking my face. Difficult conditions, but I didn’t mind — well, not that much.

    Saw a BIG turkey heading for the edge of the park. Also saw a bird — a robin, I think — running fast across the grass. It’s fun to watch birds run. Had a sudden thought: Where on the Beaufort Scale would you fit the description, birds opt for running instead of flying or flying is inconvenient for birds? In my head, I began composing lines for a poem that features this bird. Another description to add to the scale: a fallen leaf will outrun you — that’s not quite right, but something about how I noticed a leaf in front of me being pushed by the wind so fast that I couldn’t catch up to it.

    Was too busy battling the wind to notice the river. I wonder, were there any foam or white horses on it?

    Running south, I listened to the howling wind. Heading back north, I put in Taylor Swift’s new album: The Tortured Poet’s Department

    Another 5 on the Beaufort Scale. As I ran I wondered about factors other than wind speed, like wind direction — head winds, tail winds, crosswinds. I never really thought about crosswinds before I started watching cycling races. Now, like many others, I look forward to windy days of a tour when there’s a chance that some bikers will get “caught out by the crosswinds” and the peloton will splinter.

    Eula Biss, Pain Scale

    Before moving onto level 2 on Biss’ pain scale, I’m trying to think more about 1 and what lines of poetry might fit it. Can’t find anything yet, but I’m imagining level 1 to be the type of pain so minor, so barely there, that we doubt its existence. If 0 is faith, then 1 is doubt.

    2

    The sensations of my own body may be the only subject on which I am qualified to claim expertise. Sad and terrible, then, how little I know. “How do you feel?” the doctor asks, and I cannot answer. Not accurately. “Does this hurt?” he asks. Again, I’m not sure. “Do you have more or less pain than the last time I saw you?” Hard to say. I begin to lie to protect my reputation. I try to act certain. Okay, so 2 is also doubt. That gray area when we’re not certain. I don’t mind not knowing, when knowing is not possible — embracing the mystery — but not being certain, not knowing when you feel like you should know, are supposed to know, is very difficult.

    And here Biss introduces the Beaufort Scale!

    Wind, like pain, is difficult to capture. The poor windsock is always striving, and always falling short. There’s the difficulty of describing, and there’s the difficulty of feeling, knowing, experiencing accurately . . .

    It took sailors more than two hundred years to develop a standardized numerical scale for the measure of wind. The result, the Beaufort scale, provides twelve categories for everything from “Calm” to “Hurricane.” The scale offers not just a number, but a term for the wind, a range of speed, and a brief description. Creating a standard — a common language from which to communicate and connect with others, a scale that is practical

    A force 2 wind on the Beaufort scale, for example, is a “Light Breeze” moving between four and seven miles per hour. On land, it is specified as “wind felt on face; leaves rustle; ordinary vanes moved by wind.”

    3

    Left alone in the exam room I stare at the pain scale, a simple number line complicated by only two phrases. Under zero: “no pain.” Under ten: “the worst pain imaginable.” Too much is contained between these numbers. . . . This idea of “the worst pain imaginable” produces anxiety. I don’t want to even imagine what the worst pain imaginable might be.

    “Three is nothing,” my father tells me now. “Three is go home and take two aspirin.”

    “You are not meant to be rating world suffering,” my friend in Honduras advises. “This scale applies only to you and your experience.” At first, this thought is tremendously relieving. It unburdens me of factoring the continent of Africa into my calculations. But the reality that my nerves alone feel my pain is terrifying. I hate the knowledge that I am isolated in this skin—alone with my pain and my own fallibility.

    The more I read of Biss’ essay, the more I’m thinking about the purpose of these scales and what other purposes descriptions/words/language can offer. The wind scale is for utility: to help sailors estimate the wind speed using visual observations. The pain scale’s purpose: to better understand and care for patients.

    4

    conflating physical and emotion pain — is there actually a distinction? hurting vs. feeling?

    pain as seen in a face — Biss wonders, no face, no pain? Then she describes how there are no visible markers of her pain — there was nothing to illustrate my pain except a number, which I was told to choose from between zero and ten. My proof. I’m thinking about how invisible my vision problem often is to others and also, how the doctors could tell immediately that something wasn’t right: I got a diagnosis. What relief! I’m also thinking of a New Yorker article I read recently about gaslighting that mentions how the gaslit crave a diagnosis because it offers irrefutable evidence of something being wrong.

    Okay, more of the pain scale in the next entry. I’m thinking about a key distinction between the Beaufort and Pain scales: the Beaufort offers brief descriptions to accompany the numbers, not just the numbers.

    And, returning to point of these scales: they’re practical, which would seem to make them, at least to some, not poetry. Poetry is impractical and about making strange what we thought was familiar. It removes the utility of language, making it delightfully useless. Of course many poets disagree with this simplistic assessment, myself included. One reason I’ve turned to poetry is because it is useful; it gives me language and a method for describing my strange ways of seeing to others.

    I found the following poem in an entry from aug 1, 2019. I think the descriptions might offer a more compelling and practical way than numbers on a scale to understand what pain feels like.

    Let us for a moment call this pain by other words/Dominik Parisien

    Ask, How many roses does the hammer weigh

    when it bears down on your skull? 

    Does the sword seem toothed like a toddler’s smile

    or sharp as your first ice skates?

    On a scale of anglerfish to northern lights

    how bright are the flashes in your head? 

    When I touch this, here, which constellations

    light the sky behind your eyes?

    Would you say that pulsing is the flicker of a satellite 

    or the stubborn heartbeat of a newborn chick?

    Ask, Can we for a moment make of beauty

    the measure of our pain? and I will answer.

    april 18/CORERUN

    core: 10 minutes
    walk: 45 minutes
    wind: 15 mph / gusts: 28 mph

    Did 10 minutes of core, which I’ve been doing almost every day for the last week, or longer, I can’t remember. Later, took Delia on a walk to the winchell trail, then over the grate, up the gravel, down through the floodplain forest, across the road, up to edmund, around the rim of 7 oaks, then home. Breezy enough that I needed to hold onto my hat several times.

    beaufort scale: another 5, I think. Today’s 5 was storm window rattling, hat raising, branch dropping*, door howling.

    *climbing the gravel out of the ravine, I stopped for Delia to sniff. Heard some loud not-quite-cracking noises then a crash behind me: I didn’t see them, but I think it was a few smaller branches. Glad they didn’t hit me on the head!

    So much green in the floodplain forest, but not enough to hide my view of the floor. Caught a glimpse of a black biggish dog on the trail, their owner a few steps behind.

    the Pain Scale / Eula Biss, 0 and 1

    Since I’m diving deeper into the Beaufort Scale for the rest of the month, I thought I’d look at another scale, the pain scale, and the essay about it that introduced me to the Beaufort Scale a decade ago: Eula Biss’ “The Pain Scale.”

    The essay is organized around the 12 levels of pain, starting with 0 and ending at 12. Within each level she offers stories about her own pain, the history of pain management in the West, and various reflections that wander and wonder about pain and whether or not it is scaleable. That’s the most summary I’ll give, I think. Summarizing takes too long and uses up energy that I’d like to devote to engaging with Biss’ ideas. Instead of a summary, here are my notes about the essay, starting with 0 and 1 on the scale:

    0

    0 as something we must believe in without proof. It requires faith. A good place to see how religion and science have points of connection.

    0 as no pain? Is it even possible to not have pain? Is that desirable? I’m thinking about how dangerous it is to not be able to feel pain. It makes us reckless, unable to prevent us from hurting ourselves. I’m reminded of the book, The Covenant of Water and the leper colony — the key problem for the lepers was their inability to feel pain when they cut themselves or broke something. This led to infections and loss of limbs and worse.

    0 is not a real measure, but fulfills the need for a fixed point on the scale.

    The concept of 0, as a fixed point on temperature scales, differs according to the scale — Fahrenheit, Celsius, Kelvin — and who’s using it. 0 can indicate the point of freezing, but it used to indicate the boiling point. 0 is a construct — human-made, fallible, sometimes arbitrary.

    0 on the Beaufort Scale is calm, still, no (evidence) of wind. At 0 is it just air? atmosphere?

    1

    This pain scale was introduced by the hospice movement in the 70s; it’s designed to quantify pain. To make what’s inner — our feelings, which are subjective — visible to the outer world and to make them more objective.

    Minor pain, pain that doesn’t matter, that’s no big deal.

    Where does pain worth measuring begin?

    Hospice nurses are trained to identify five types of pain: physical, emotional, spiritual, social, and financial. The pain of feeling, the pain of caring, the pain of doubting, the pain of parting, the pain of paying.

    1 in the Beaufort Scale is light, barely ripples, hardly any disruption.

    april 17

    5.15 miles
    franklin loop
    44 degrees
    wind: 15 mph / gusts: 30 mph

    So windy! A crosswind heading north towards Franklin, then straight into it heading west over the Lake Street bridge. Cooler too. Wore my running tights and my orange sweatshirt. My left knee felt tight for the first few minutes, then fine for the rest of the run.

    Wet and green. Noticed that the floodplain forest is filling in. Last week, bare and brown. Today, an outline of green. The river was gray with ripples. When I looked down at it from the bridge I could tell by the ripples that it was blowing south.

    All of the pedestrians I encountered were bundled up in hats and winter coats. One runner was in shorts and white shoes. After he passed me I was mesmerized by his heels floating up and down, up and down, up and down. So smooth and rhythmic.

    No eagle on the dead tree branch. Spotted 2 lone black gloves discarded at different parts of the path. Heard one woman talking to another. She said something strange, but I can’t remember what. Heard lots of black capped chickadees but no geese or woodpeckers.

    more on wind: According to the Beaufort Scale, today was a 5 — fresh breeze. Brisk? Bracing. Stiff. Not breath-taking but ponytail whipping and energy sapping and eye watering. A few times, it howled in the trees. No dust in eyes or big branches falling from trees, but leaves whirling on the ground. At one point, running across the bridge, I felt like I was being held up by the wind — both slowed down and suspended in mid-air. Running south, with the wind at my back, it felt easier, like the wind was pushing me along.

    beaufort scale

    Thinking about wind some more and wondering if I shouldn’t narrow my focus to the Beaufort Scale? Maybe try to play around with my own Beaufort Scales. Today, while reviewing Marie Howe’s “The Moment” I thought about gathering lines from poems that fit with the scale. The line in Howe’s poem that Inspired this was the last one:

    the white cotton curtains hanging still

    The poem is about that moment when everything stands still and is silent. No to-do lists. No traffic. No I-should-bes. With these curtains, I think Howe is referencing sitting silently in her brother’s room, as he was dying. I imagine this moment of stillness as 0 on the Beaufort Scale.

    And here’s another stillnes from Rime of the Ancient Mariner / Samuel Coleridge

    Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
    ’Twas sad as sad could be;
    And we did speak only to break
    The silence of the sea

    All in a hot and copper sky,
    The bloody Sun, at noon,
    Right up above the mast did stand,
    No bigger than the Moon.

    Day after day, day after day,
    We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
    As idle as a painted ship
    Upon a painted ocean.

    Water, water, every where,
    And all the boards did shrink;
    Water, water, every where,
    Nor any drop to drink.

    a bird moment, possibly for my bird project: After I finished my run, walking back on Edmund, I heard 2 black capped chickadees calling back and forth. Their notes were slightly different than I usually hear. By the time I got out my phone to record them, only one chickadee was calling. No response. They kept trying their fee bee call, maybe 5 or 6 times, but no reply.

    april 16/BIKERUN

    bike: 16 minutes
    run: 2.3 miles
    basement
    outside: 54 degrees / rain, wind

    Before I started writing this but after my workout, I got up from my chair and my right kneecap missed the groove and slipped out hard. So hard that I uncontrollably yelled, “God Dammit!” No pain and it went right back in, or I was able to pop it back in. But it was shocking — mentally and physically. My LCL or meniscus seem as reticent to walk as my brain does — a strange sentence to write: can you imagine ligaments feeling something independent of the brain? Now I’m nervous about when this might happen again. As is usually the case, I had absolutely no warning. I didn’t do anything abrupt or dramatic; I just stood up and turned. I’ll get over it in a few minutes and stop imagining different scenarios in my head when the kneecap suddenly slides and it hurts and I can’t get it back into place. For now, I’ll breathe and attempt to remember how happy I was to work out before my subluxation.

    It’s raining today, and there’s a wind advisory. Decided to go to the basement and do a bike run combo. After pumping up the air in my tire — it is still leaking air even though I got new tires last spring — I found the SuperLeague e-tri championships. I’ve been watching SuperLeague while biking in the basement since it started — when? 2018? Then I ran for 22.5 minutes while I listened to a “If Books Could Kill” podcast and then a playlist.

    I don’t remember thinking about much except for that I had to go to the bathroom. Scott and I have new euphemism for it: unfinished business. Anything else? I recall looking straight ahead at the water heater and I remember feeling like a badass when I increased my cadence to try and match the bikers I was watching.

    Here’s a victory: I didn’t think at all about the text exchange I had with FWA about what “fun” or “interesting” or “non-music” classes he could take to fill up his pretty bare schedule for senior year. No double major or minors for him. Just music, which he’s very good at, but still . . . . I’m trying to let him figure out his own way, but it’s so hard to watch him make choices that seem foolish or short-sighted. Sigh. Parenting is hard; backing off is hard; trusting is hard. When I worry too much, I’ll go back and watch his recital from Sunday and remember how proud I am of him and that he can (and is) creating an exciting future for himself.

    update: I didn’t need to worry; he figured out some great classes on his own: Japanese!, Environmental Geography, and Criminology.

    before the bike and run

    Yesterday was the poet, Tomas Tranströmer’s birthday. He would have been 92. I’ve posted a few poems from him on here before. While looking for “air” poems, I found this one. It’s an ekphrastic! Those ekphrastic poems keep appearing. Are they trying to encourage me to keep working on my ekphrastic project? I’d like to believe so. Anyway, here’s the Tranströmer poem I found:

    Vermeer / Tomas Tranströmer

    translated by Robert Bly

    It’s not a sheltered world. The noise begins over there, on the other side of the wall
    where the alehouse is
    with its laughter and quarrels, its rows of teeth, its tears, its chiming of clocks,
    and the psychotic brother-in-law, the murderer, in whose presence
    everyone feels fear.

    The huge explosion and the emergency crew arriving late,
    boats showing off on the canals, money slipping down into pockets
    — the wrong man’s —
    ultimatum piled on the ultimatum,
    widemouthed red flowers who sweat reminds us of approaching war.

    And then straight through the wall — from there — straight into the airy studio
    in the seconds that have got permission to live for centuries.
    Paintings that choose the name: “The Music Lesson”
    or ” A Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.”
    She is eight months pregnant, two hearts beating inside her.
    The wall behind her holds a crinkly map of Terra Incognita.

    Just breathe. An unidentifiable blue fabric has been tacked to the chairs.
    Gold-headed tacks flew in with astronomical speed
    and stopped smack there
    as if there had always been stillness and nothing else.

    The ears experience a buzz, perhaps it’s depth or perhaps height.
    It’s the pressure from the other side of the wall,
    the pressure that makes each fact float
    and makes the brushstroke firm.

    Passing through walls hurts human beings, they get sick from it,
    but we have no choice.
    It’s all one world. Now to the walls.
    The walls are a part of you.
    One either knows that, or one doesn’t; but it’s the same for everyone
    except for small children. There aren’t any walls for them.

    The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall.
    It is like a prayer to what is empty.
    And what is empty turns its face to us
    and whispers:
    “I am not empty, I am open.”

    I love this poem and how it imagines the world outside of the painting and its relationship to the world inside of it. Starting with the first line: It’s not a sheltered world. The noise begins over there, on the other side of the wall . . . . That alehouse, that psychotic brother-in-law. The explosion, the money being dropped into the wrong man’s pocket. Then the airy studio and the seconds that have got permission to live for centuries — the differences between what we notice and try to remember and what we ignore or try to forget — what is worthy of attention, a painting, and what is not.

    What is worth noticing in a poem describing a painting, and what is not? The Vermeer painting the poem is titled, “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter,” but there’s no mention of the letter or the woman’s expression, and the blue described by Tranströmer is the blue fabric on the chair, not of the woman’s jacket.

    This poem is about the wall, the other side of the wall, the pressure that the other side creates, pressing in on us. The wall between our interior and the exterior world. The edge of the void, the abyss. All of this is kind of, almost, not quite making sense to me. I should spend some more time rereading Tom Sleigh’s“Too Much of the Air: Tomas Tranströmer“.

    I’m struck by the last lines:

    The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall.
    It is like a prayer to what is empty.
    And what is empty turns its face to us
    and whispers:
    ‘I am not empty, I am open.’

    I’m thinking of the gorge here and the limestone walls that contain it and how it is both empty of land/rock and filled with air and openness. To think of the void — the unknowable, unsayable, mystery — as both frightening (emptiness, nothingness) and inviting (openness, possibility).

    Yesterday I talked about believing in the unseen. Today I’m thinking about what it could mean to be believe in the unseeable. Unseen could mean, not-yet-seen or unnoticed, but unseeable suggests that seeing is never possible.

    Before writing this, I was reviewing an old log entry from April 16, 2022. In it, I discuss Elisa Gabbert’s article about poetry and the Void.

    They [poets] write in the line, in the company of the void. That changes how you write — and more profoundly, how you think, and even how you are, your mode of being. When you write in the line, there is always an awareness of the mystery, of what is left out. This is why, I suppose, poems can be so confounding. Empty space on the page, that absence of language, provides no clues. But it doesn’t communicate nothing — rather, it communicates nothing. It speaks void, it telegraphs mystery.

    By “mystery” I don’t mean metaphor or disguise. Poetry doesn’t, or shouldn’t, achieve mystery only by hiding the known, or translating the known into other, less familiar language. The mystery is unknowing, the unknown — as in Jennifer Huang’s “Departure”: “The things I don’t know have stayed/In this home.” The mystery is the missing mountain in Shane McCrae’s “The Butterflies the Mountain and the Lake”:

    the / Butterflies monarch butterflies huge swarms they
    Migrate and as they migrate south as they
    Cross Lake Superior instead of flying

    South straight across they fly
    South over the water then fly east
    still over the water then fly south again / And now
    biologists believe they turn to avoid a mountain
    That disappeared millennia ago.

    The missing mountain is still there.

    The Shape of a Void / Elisa Gabbert

    This past weekend, Scott and I watched the 2 part documentary about Steve Martin, STEVE! I really enjoyed it. I remember responding to this idea offered by one of Steve Martin’s artist friends:

    How to close the void. I think that’s the nature and the drive in art, it comes from that deep awareness of that void.

    STEVE! — 53:30, part 2

    I agree with the second part of that statement, about the deep awareness of the void, but not the first — at least how it’s worded. It’s not to close the void, but to navigate it, develop a relationship to it, engage with it, learn how to live with it. I mentioned this to Scott and he argued that the void in this quotation is not the unknown or mystery, but something else. Maybe lack or longing? A desire to be whole? To have/feel meaning? I still don’t like the word close. Can you ever close the void? Tranströmer doesn’t think so; it’s always on the other side of that wall. Even with a wall between you and it, you feel its pressure in your ears. And it’s this pressure that drives/shapes/enables your art — that makes each fact float/and makes the brushstroke firm.

    A final (for now) word on this ekphrastic poem: I like how Tranströmer is responding to the work of art in this poem, how we uses the image to reflect on the abyss/void, history, interior/exterior, and why we make art. I want to think about it some more and try to write something for my “How to See” project inspired by his approach.

    april 15/RUN

    5k
    trestle turn around
    67 degrees

    Ran in the afternoon with Scott. Wore my warm summer attire: black shorts and tank top. Wow. Feels like summer. Tried my new bright yellow running shoes — Saucony Rides. Love the color, but not the fit. My feet and right calf hurt now. Guess these shoes will just be for walking. Oh well.

    There was some wind, but mostly it felt refreshing. There was only one stretch where it made running more difficult.

    We talked about how the first mile is the hardest, how my shoes weren’t working (poor Scott had to listen to that a lot), and what a badass Helen Obiri is — moderate pace for most of the marathon then unleashing a 4:40 mile near the end.. Then I mentioned an edited version of my birding poem that I’m planning to submit to some journals.

    Right before descending below lake street, we encountered another, older runner. I said that I liked his orange shirt and then asked Scott if the shirt was actually orange. It was a gradient, Scott replied. It started orange then magenta then red — at least I think that was the order of colors. Well, I just heard ORANGE in my head, I said. Then: orange shirt
    old guy
    struggling

    Scott pointed out that it was in my running rhythm — 3/2, with an extra 3. Nice.

    Random Thoughts Recorded Earlier Today on a version of the wind: air

    from Living Here/ Cleopatra Mathis

    In the world of appearances, teach me
    to believe in the unseen.

    from long entry dated 16 august 2022

    Of course, appearances refers to more than vision or looking; it’s about “the world of sensible phenomena” (Merriam-Webster). And, to be seen or unseen, can mean much more than what we perceive with our eyes. But how often is appearance/seen reduced to vision and sight? (rhetorical question — my answer: too often or all the time or most of the time).

    To appear can mean to be present, to attend, to show up for something.

    To believe in the unseen — believing in that which we can’t prove? Believing in something that I know is there but that I cannot see? An orange buoy?
    What does it mean to be unseen? To not be seen with our eyes? To not be consciously aware of what some part of us might be seeing or sensing?

    belief trust faith confidence acceptance conviction

    Mostly, we can sense the wind, or at least see the evidence of it all around us — swaying trees, swirling leaves, flapping flags. But what about air? Air, which we often mis-identify as emptiness?

    april 13/RUN

    10k
    hidden falls and back
    66 degrees
    wind: 13 mph / gusts: 25 mph

    Another run with Scott. Today, too hot! We ran around 11, which was too late. So much sun and no shade. It’s time to adjust to running much earlier.

    Of course, I’m writing this right after the run, when I’m feeling wiped out, so my perspective on it is skewed.

    We talked about the Beaufort scale and songs that might fit with the different levels of wind. Scott recounted the history of the man behind Chef Boyardee. That’s all I remember.

    10 Things

    1. wind — strong enough that I took my hat off on the ford bridge and held it so it wouldn’t blow off my head
    2. ripples on the river — I mentioned to Scott that they were referred to as scales on the Beaufort scale
    3. wind chimes, all around the neighborhood chiming
    4. soft shadows
    5. after months of not being lit, the street lamps along the river road are finally lit again
    6. on your left! a biker passing us on the bridge
    7. the water fountains aren’t working yet — we kept stopping to check, but no water yet
    8. a few LOUD blue jays
    9. swarming gnats!
    10. bright yellow and orange and green running shirts on other runners

    before the run

    Reviewing a link I posted earlier this month — Historical and Contemporary Versions of the Beaufort Scale — I started thinking about different versions of the Beaufort Scale that I could do. On the run, I’d like to talk with Scott about a wind song Beaufort scale that describe/ranks the wind using song lyrics. I’m thinking that Summer Breeze might be on one end and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald on the other.

    Other versions of the Beaufort Scale might include poetry lines — yes, a wind cento! — and things experienced while running.

    Beaufort Scale

    force / name / for use at sea / for use at land

    • 0 / calm, still / sea like a mirror / smoke rises vertically
    • 1 / light air / ripples on water / direction of wind shown by wind
    • 2 / light breeze / small wavelets / wind felt on face, leaves rustle
    • 3 / gentle breeze / crests begin to break, scattered white horses / leaves and small twigs whirl, wind extends small flags
    • 4 / moderate breeze / small waves, fairly frequent white horses / wind raises dust and loose paper, small branches move
    • 5 / fresh breeze / moderate waves, many white horses, some spray / small trees in leaf start to sway, crested waves on inland waters
    • 6 / strong breeze / large waves, white foam, spray / large branches in motion, whistling wires, umbrellas used with difficulty
    • 7 / near gale / breaking waves blow in streaks / whole trees in motion, inconveniant to walk against the wind
    • 8 / gale / moderately high waves / twigs break from trees, difficult to walk
    • 9 / strong gale / high waves / slight structural damage, roof slates removed
    • 10 / storm / very high waves / trees uprooted, considerable structural damage
    • 11 / violent storm / very high waves / widespread damage
    • 12 / hurricane / air filled with foam, spray / widespread damage

    I’m struck by how mild the wind is here in Minneapolis by the river gorge. The roughest wind I’ve run (or swum) in is 6, which is about 31 mph. That’s only a strong breeze and when umbrellas are used with difficulty. And that’s only halfway up the scale! I’m a wimp, I guess.

    Looking at this a different way, I think there’s a lot more levels between light breeze and strong breeze. maybe I should try to notice and describe the differences between leaves rustling and leaves in a whirlwind? Or wind felt on my face as a soft kiss versus wind whipping my hair?

    during the run

    Scott was excited about the idea of creating a Beaufort scale with songs/song lyrics. So far:

    0 / In the Still of the Night / Dion
    1 / In the Air Tonight / Phil Collins
    2 / Summer Breeze / Seals & Croft
    3 / Sailing / Christopher Cross
    4 / Dust in the Wind / Kansas
    5 / Breezin’ / George Benson
    6 / Blowing in the Wind / Peter, Paul & Mary
    7 / Windy / The Association
    8 / They Call the Wind Maria / Paint Your Wagon
    9 / Ride Like the Wind / Christopher Cross
    10 / Tear the Roof Off the Sucker / Parliment
    11 / The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald / Gordon Lightfoot
    12 / Rock You Like a Hurricane / Scorpion

    This was fun and a great distraction as we ran!

    april 11/RUN

    3.1 miles
    edmund, south/river road, north/edmund, south
    56 degrees
    wind: 12 mph/ gusts: 22 mph

    Shorts and bare legs again today. Hooray! Was planning to do the 2 trails, but when I reached the entrance to the winchell trail I heard some very noisy rustling of leaves. Too big for a squirrel. A dog? A bear? A human? I tried to look ahead but all I saw was a black blob. I thought it was a person with a stroller so I moved a little closer. Nope — a male turkey with its tail spread like a peacock, a red wattle glowing, even for me with my bad color vision. Wow. I mentioned it to a man walking down the hill and he said, well, this is the way I’m going! and slowly and calmly walked toward the turkey. A showdown. After 30 seconds or so, the turkey relented and the man walked past. Not me, I climbed the hill and ran on the trail next to the road. This encounter will be my birding poem for the day!

    10 Things Other Than Tom Turkey

    1. a woodpecker cry — pileated, I think
    2. another woodpecker cry a few minutes later — was this bird following me?
    3. loud kids at the playground, mostly having fun
    4. 2 bikers heading north — we can ride the wind now. I thought this meant that they would have the wind at their backs, so I would too, when I turned around. No. Wind was in my face heading north, later in the run
    5. admiring the view of the river from the overlook — the water on the other shore was sparkling
    6. mud and roots on the dirt trail between edmund and the river
    7. the clickity-clack of roller skiers poles behind me
    8. several of the benches had people on them — more than half?
    9. bird shadows
    10. a shrieking blue jay above me

    After turning around because of the territorial turkey, I put in my “It’s Windy” playlist: They Call the Wind Maria/ the furies; Dust in the Wind/ insignificant or fleeting

    The wind wasn’t overpowering but it was everywhere, coming from every direction. I remember noticing how it played with my hair, making my ponytail bob and my little loose strands fly around my face. Only once did I need to adjust my hat for fear that the wind might blow it off. I don’t remember hearing any skittering leaves or getting dust in my eyes, grit in my teeth. The wind didn’t sing or howl. It did push me forward and hold me back. And I think it made the whole run harder.

    Earlier this morning, I checked out Mary Oliver’s West Wind and found this delightful part of a poem about wild turkeys. It seems fitting to include today after seeing several hens — being guarded by the male turkey on Winchell.

    from Three Songs/ Mary Oliver

    1

    A band of wild turkeys is coming down the hill. They are coming
    slowly—astheywalkalongthey look under the leaves for things to 
    eat, and besides it must be a pleasure to step alternately through the
    pale sunlight, then patches of slightly golden shade. they are all hens
    and they lift their thick toes delicately. With such toes they could
    march up one side of the state and down the others, or skate on water,
    or dance the tango. But not this morning. As they get closer the sound
    of their feet in the leaves is like the patter of rain, then rapid rain. My
    dogs perk their ears, and bound from the path. Instead of opening their
    dark wings the hens swirl and rush away under the trees, like little
    ostriches.

    Returning to my birding poem for the day. I’m having a little difficulty finding the focus, so I thought I’d write a little more around this little poem. What are the details that I remember, that I might want to write about?

    • First thing noticed: an unusually loud rustling sound that I thought was too big for a squirrel, too much for a human
    • the moment of seeing something but not knowing what it was — a bear? a dog? a stroller? Not feeling scared, but feeling like I should stay back until I figured it out, feeling that it was something unusual. This moment last a long time, which was fine because I had time, but wouldn’t have been if I had needed to make a quick decision, like if the turkey was running towards me
    • the turkey was so big! its tail was up and spread out like a peacock, making him look even bigger and framing his face
    • the face — fuzzy but clear enough to know that this turkey was telling me to back off! I couldn’t make out his eyes, but I could see — or, maybe I guessed a little — when he was facing me — yes, it was the contrast of light and dark — when he was turned away, he was just a dark, hulking shape, when he was turned toward me I saw a pale beak
    • the red wattle — was it bright? I can’t quite remember, but I know it was red and big
    • when I felt fairly certain it was a turkey, I still couldn’t see details — just a small, light head with red, framed by broad dark tail feathers — how much of his bigness was because of his tail, how much his body? the form — menacing and comical at the same time, with its big circle for a body and its tiny head
    • the approaching man — I said to him, there’s a big turkey down there! He said something like, well, THIS is the way I’m planning to go! His tone wasn’t too jerky, just matter-of-fact. When he approached the turkey he called out sternly but not too aggressively — hey hey move! At first, the turkey wouldn’t budge and the guy looked back at me, but after some time, the turkey moved

    Reflecting on these details some more, I’m thinking that the guy, albeit interesting, is unnecessary for my purposes. I think adding him might take the poem in a different direction. . . although, I am struck by the encounter between me, him, and the turkey. The guy didn’t seem like a jerk, but he did give off some older white guy energy — this is the way I’m going turkey! Your puffed up feathers can’t stop me! I was happy to stand back and observe the turkeys from a (respectful?) distance, while he was ready to keep moving through the turkeys.

    The uncertainty from not being able to see what the turkey was is what I’d like to focus on, although I want to weave in the strange mix of menacing and comical too. Here’s a long passage from Georgina Kleege that is helpful in explaining my own process of seeing things. She is able to see most things because she expects to see them; it’s the unexpected things that make it difficult. oh — I like this idea of bringing surprise in here!

    Expectation plays a large role in what I perceive. I know what’s on my desk because I put it there. If someone leaves me a surprise gift, it may take a few seconds to identify it, but how often does that happen? . . . . I can recognize most things through quick process of elimination. And that process is only truly conscious on the rare occasions when the unexpected occurs, as when my cats carry objects out of context. A steel wool soap pad appears in the bath tub. I see it as a rusty, graying blob. Though touch would probably tell me something, it can be risky to touch something you cannot identify some other way. . . . I once encountered a rabid raccoon on a sidewalk near my house. I learned what it was from a neighbor watching it from his screened porch. What I saw was an indistinct, grayish mass, low to the ground and rather round. It was too big to be a cat and the wrong shape to be a dog. Its gait was not only unfamiliar but unsteady. It zigzagged up the pavement. I moved my gaze around it as my brain formed a picture of raccoon. The raccoon in my mind had the characteristic mask across its face, a sharply pointed nose, striped tail, brindled fur. Nothing in the hazy blob at my feet, no variations in color or refinements in form, corresponded with that image. Its position was wrong. The raccoon in my image was standing up on its haunches, holding something in its front paws. And what does a rabid raccoon look like?

    Sight Unseen/ Georgina Kleege (105-106, print version)

    Kleege grew up, from age 11, with a big blind spot in the center of her vision. That was roughly 50+ years ago, so she’s had time to learn how to guess and eliminate and handle identifying unexpected objects. I’m still learning. Mostly, it doesn’t bother me, although i occasionally worry about my safety. Anyway, I find Kleege’s description of her process helpful in enabling me to describe what I did. Kleege saw “an indistinct, grayish mass, low to the ground and rather round.” I saw an indistinct, dark mass, somewhat low to the ground and rather round. My dark mass moved slowly but not awkwardly and was accompanied by a loud racket. I might have guessed turkey earlier if he, and his hens, hadn’t been so loud, and if he hadn’t been so big and round.

    How many times have I seen a male turkey with its feathers puffed up? Looking it up, I read that this puffing could be a courtship ritual or a sign of intimidation — in my encounter, was it both? The courtship version involves a strut and a gobble — oh, I wish I would have heard him gobble! The only noises my turkeys made were with their beaks or feet as they rooted around for food. And, maybe his low, un-awkward (graceful?) gait was a strut that I couldn’t quite see?

    possible ideas, images, descriptions to add: gobble-less, unexpected and unusual for this regular route, rotund (or round or a puffed up dark dot/circle), rooting racket.

    clues to choose from: a dark mass too big for a bird (or so I thought), too small for a bear, a slow strut.

    Something to think about: was it just the puffed up feathers that made seeing turkeys strange? I think so.

    I almost forgot. I took a picture! Look at me, at a safe distance!

    turkey sighting / 11 april 2024

    april 10/RUN

    5.1 miles
    bottom of franklin and back
    61 degrees
    wind: 8 mph / gusts: 18 mph

    Ah, spring! Sun and shorts and short sleeves! Birds — black-capped chickadees, pileated woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers, a turkey! I looked at the river but I don’t remember what I saw. Too distracted by blue sky and sharp shadows and the spring breeze — which is less relaxed than a summer breeze, but still pleasant — a word my mom used to say, or did she say it just that once when I was barely four and was talking with her in our new backyard in Hickory, North Carolina as she hung laundry out to dry. It feels pleasant out here or It’s a pleasant day. It’s a terribly bland word, but I love it because I always think of her and that moment.

    Encounters:

    • Dave: Hi Sara!
    • while running up a hill, a woman walking down it: Looking good! me: Thank you!
    • two women walking towards me after I finished my run: Well, you look springy!

    overheard:

    • from talk radio across the road: Don’t you think I think about it? Don’t you think it keeps me up at night?
    • distorted music coming out of a bike radio

    Listened to birds, my breathing, and the smooth wheels of a rollerblader as I ran north. Ran up the franklin hill and sang, Running up that hill, in my head. Put in “It’s Windy” playlist: Let’s Go Fly a Kite: not childish but childlike; Don’t Mess Around with Jim: karma; Ride Like the Wind: haul ass; You’re Only Human (Second Wind) — be generous to yourself; Summer Breeze: relax

    my birding moment: running north, listening to Billy Joel, distracted by the song or memories or some thought, something suddenly appeared in front of me — a turkey! It wasn’t too close, but close enough that I was able to watch it awkwardly run across the path. For the poem: distraction, interruption, awkwardness, dragged out of the inner into the outer

    Stuck inside
    a thought

    Unaware
    seeing

    only bare
    path when

    Poof! Bobbing
    head sleek

    body move
    past me

    faster than
    I thought

    possible
    I watch

    then admire
    this show

    grateful to
    be dragged

    out into
    the world.

    a breeze

    Before I run, I decided today’s version of the wind would be: breeze.

    breeze 1

    The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors,
    White curtains softly and continually blown
    (from The Work of Happiness/ May Sarton/May Sarton)

    breeze 2

    definition of breezy: pleasantly wind; airy, nonchalant — as in, breezy indifference

    breezy 3

    Easy breezy beautiful cover girl
    Beautiful skin can be a breeze with sea breeze — or, what my sister Marji used to sing, Beautiful skin can be a breeze with sea grease

    breeze 4

    Yet again, the ekphrasis appears!

    How to Look at Pictures/ Rebecca Morgan Frank

    title after Robert Clermont Witt, 1906

    Refuse to make eye contact with the subject.
    He has been following you around the gallery.
    You are certain that he can see down your shirt.
    Look at other subjects, but know that they, too,
    are not of primary interest. Even when they watch
    you. Try not to consider what happened
    to the small girl staring furiously, the thin-faced
    woman wanly looking away. Do not think about
    what they had for breakfast, if the bread was hard.
    Certainly do not consider the odors underneath
    their arms and skirts. Do not allow a breeze into
    the room they sit in. Do not assume I am talking
    about any painting: step away from the subject.
    All subject. Was the painter in love? Do not ask
    the question. Imagine you are the painter,
    blocking out everything you don’t want to see.
    Everything is out of the picture. Stop looking.
    Stop seeking what isn’t there. Tuck your narratives
    back in your pocket. Look for perspective, light,
    shade. Let your eyes wander back to the girl.
    She is trying to say something but her mouth
    has been painted deliberately shut. Her lips, thin.

    april 8/RUN

    10k
    the flats and back
    48 degrees
    wind: 10 mph

    Because of the ran yesterday, Scott and I did our long run today. It was wet and dark and so humid that we could see our breaths. First we talked about anxiety — Scott’s was about missing some notes at a rehearsal, mine was about waking up with it, feeling it in cramped feet. Then I described a New Yorker article I was reading before we left about forensic linguistics. My description included misplaced apostrophes, devil strips, and Sha Na Na. Wow. Scott spent the last mile of the run trying to remember the name of the guy who was always on 70s game shows, had curly yellow hair, and shot out confetti — Rip Taylor.

    We greeted Dave the Daily Walker — Hi Dave! — and listened to some cool-sounding bird. Heard a seep that had turned into a little waterfall below the U. Smelled the sewer. Watched the river move so slowly that it didn’t look like it was moving. We walked part of the franklin hill then ran the rest.

    According to my watch, the wind was 10 mph 18 mph gusts. I don’t remember feeling much wind, or hearing it in the trees, of seeing it move the leaves. In fact, the wind was so calm that the water looked still. Not smooth, but no waves, not even ripples. Am I forgetting?

    Here’s a wonderful little poem about wind by A. R. Ammons that I found on a favorite site, Brief Poems:

    Small Song/ A. R. Ammons

    The reeds give way
    to the wind

    and give
    the wind away

    A note about the total eclipse: it didn’t really happen here in Minnesota — it was overcast and we weren’t in the path of the eclipse. Oh well. Here’s a pdf of Annie Dillard’s “Total Eclipse” which I must have read for a writing class but that I can’t find a copy of in my files.

    april 7/RUN

    3.3 miles
    trestle turn around
    41 degrees
    wind: 15 mph / 35 mph gusts

    More wind. Ran between raindrops and beside a 10 mile race. The wind was at my back running north, in my face south. Those racers were hardcore, running the first 5 miles into that wind — yuck! Puddles and mud and an over-sized green rain jacket puffing up like a balloon about to float away:

    Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

    from Ode to the West Wind/ Percy Bysshe Shelley

    Listened to the racers, spectators, a drummer drumming, a runner giving a motivational speech as he ran — good job! you can do it! the finish line is almost here! you got this! — which might have been inspirational or insufferable depending on how you felt six miles into a race that started with rain and cold and continued with wind. At the turn around I stopped and put in my wind playlist. Today: Wind it Up — sexual empowerment (I know he thinks you’re fine and stuff, but does he know how to wind you up?). Classical Gas – the 70s, Bohemian Rhapsody – fate, and Don’t Mess Around with Jim – street smarts

    After I finished running, as I was walking back, I noticed the flash of a bird fly up from the street to the top of a sign, then 3 or 4 other small birds fly out of the tree and into the air. The small dark dots against the smudged sky looked like static or the stars I see when I’m dizzy or had too much caffeine, or (sorry not sorry to be gross) dropped a big deuce — am I the only one that happens to? I decided that these birds would be the subject of my birding poem for today.

    Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is

    from Ode to the West Wind/ Percy Bysshe Shelley

    Yesterday, Scott and I met up with FWA in St. Peter. After taking him shopping for his clarinet recital next week, we went back to campus and took a walk through the Arb. So windy! I didn’t have a hair tie and my hair was swirling around my face as we walked on the uneven dirt trail in the open field. Later, winding through the pine trees we had some shelter. Scott saw the tiniest bird, then I saw it too, first as a flash of movement, then as a small dark form on a low limb. FWA guessed that it was a warbler, which it probably was. We listened for birds and heard a creak: one tree rubbing against another — Shelley’s forest lyre! I told Scott and FWA that I knew a beautiful poem that I wish I had memorized for this occasion — Cello by Dorianne Laux

    april 6/WALK

    1 mile with Delia
    neighborhood
    40 degrees

    A second day of taking Delia for a walk in the morning, and what a morning! Not warm, but sunny and calm. Birds, a slight breeze, blue sky. Did a lot of deep breaths as I walked. This morning, I was anxious, but I recognized it as a phase that I could endure, and that recognition helped. Slowly I’m getting a little better at navigating perimenopause.

    Wind in Leaves or, Leaves in Wind

    This entire poem by Donika Kelly is great and I want to return to it, but for now, I’ll just post the opening and its description of wind in leaves through the seasons. Such a fun way to think about wind — how it sounds in leaves in spring or summer or fall.

    from When the Fact of Your Gaze Means Nothing, Then You Are Alongside/ Donika Kelly

    late spring wind sounds an ocean 
    through new leaves. later the same 
    wind sounds a tide. later still the dry 

    sound of applause: leaves chapped 
    falling, an ending. this is a process.

    What does it mean that the wind sounds an ocean, and how does that differ from that wind sounding a tide?

    Thinking about leaves and wind I’m remembering a line from “Dear One Absent this Long While” by Lisa Olstein:

    I expect you. I thought one night it was you
    at the base of the drive, you at the foot of the stairs,
    you in a shiver of light, but each time
    leaves in wind revealed themselves

    How do I describe the leaves in wind? Something to think about on my run.

    april 5/RUN

    3.1 miles
    trestle turn around
    54 degrees
    wind: 5 mph

    What a day! Took Delia out for a walk this morning. An hour later, sat on the deck and was inspired by the birds to write a beautiful little poem conjuring my mom. Then, around 12:30, went for a run by the gorge. Okay spring! The run wasn’t easy, but wasn’t hard either. My legs are sore from running every day since Tuesday. Tomorrow I’ll take a break.

    Listened to birds running north, my “It’s Windy” playlist on the way back south. Wind songs heard today: “Ride Like the Wind” — fast? frantic? under pressure? and “You’re Only Human (Second Wind); — forgiving and resilient and a reprieve

    I’m sure I looked at the river, but I don’t remember doing it, or what it looked like. I do remember that the floodplain forest looked open and brown and full of trees that had been through a flood or two. No roller skiers or rowers. No radios or impatient cars. Did hear a few unpleasant goose honks near the lake street bridge.

    Beaufort Scale

    The History of the Beaufort Scale

    Before the run I reviewed the Beaufort Scale and rediscovered a Beaufort Scale poem by Alice Oswald. Gave myself the task of trying to describe the wind today:

    running north: make your own wind — or breeze?
    south: hair raising . . . leg hair raising . . . calf hair raising
    east: no need to shield the microphone; a welcomed air-conditioning after a hard effort; still leaves still; the branches moving so slightly my cone-dead eyes cannot detect their movement — no trees waving to me today . . . rude; flag flapping but no wind chiming

    Alice Oswald on wind:

    Everything you write about the wind really has to be about something else, because the wind itself is so non-existent. I like the way the Beaufort Scale [a system used to estimate wind speed based on observation of its effects] categorizes something so abstract and undefinable. That is partly what drew me to the project. I regard the words as secondary to the silences in my poetry, so I’m drawn to write about things that will exist without the words. The poems are full of gaps and silences through which something that isn’t linguistic can be heard.

    A Poem A Day

    wind will exist without the words

    Beaufort Poem Scale – Alice Oswald

    As I speak (force 1) smoke rises vertically,
    Plumed seeds fall in less than ten seconds
    And gossamer, perhaps shaken from the soul’s hairbrush
    Is seen in the air.

    Oh yes (force 2) it’s lovely here,
    One or two spiders take off
    And there are willow seeds in clouds

    But I keep feeling (force 3) a scintillation,
    As if a southerly light breeze
    Was blowing the tips of my thoughts
    (force 4) and making my tongue taste strongly of italics

    And when I pause it feels different
    As if something had entered (force 5) whose hand is lifting my page

    (force 6) So I want to tell you how a whole tree sways to the left
    But even as I say so (force 7) a persistent howl is blowing my hair horizontal
    And even as I speak (force 8) this speaking becomes difficult

    And now my voice (force 9) like an umbrella shaken inside out
    No longer shelters me from the fact (force 10)
    There is suddenly a winged thing in the house,
    Is it the wind?

    april 4/RUN

    4.25 miles
    minnehaha falls and back
    45 degrees
    wind: 12 mph / 21 mph gusts

    I thought it was supposed to be less windy today, but it didn’t feel like it. Heading north, I was running straight into the wind. Sometimes it felt fine, and sometimes it felt hard. Listened to birds, especially black capped chickadees but also the faint knocking of a woodpecker somewhere near a house being built. Admired some gnarled shadows from the oak trees I passed by in the park. Heard rushing water at the falls and the recorded ding of the light rail across the highway. Managed to step in almost every pothole without twisting or rolling anything. Remembered to look at the river and notice how it sparkled in the sun.

    Listened to the birds and the wind and the water as I ran south. Listened to my new “It’s Windy” playlist, and a LOUD kid on the playground, as I ran north.

    wind!

    A lot pf wind outside today, and more inside, at my desk (and no, I don’t been gas). Started with a playlist:

    It’s Windy

    1. Windy/ The Association
    2. Summer Breeze/ Seals & Crofts
    3. I Talk to the Wind/ King Crimson
    4. Dust in the Wind/ Kansas
    5. The Wind Cries Mary/ The Jimi Hendrix Experience
    6. Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow/ Frank Zappa
    7. Summer Wind/ Frank Sinatra
    8. Wind of Change/ Scorpions
    9. Blowin’ In the Wind/ Peter, Paul & Mary
    10. In the Air Tonight/ Phil Collins
    11. The Chain/ Fleetwood Mac
    12. Ride Like the Wind/ Christopher Cross
    13. Wind Beneath My Winds/ Better Midler
    14. Break Like the Wind/ Spinal Tap
    15. Listening Wind/ Talking Heads
    16. You’re Only Human (Second Wind)/ Billy Joel
    17. Wind Chimes/ The Beach Boys
    18. The Long and Winding Road/ The Beatles
    19. They Call the Wind Maria/ Paint Your Wagon
    20. The Zephyr Song/ Red Hot Chili Peppers
    21. Wind It Up/ Gwen Stefani
    22. Shining Star/ Gwen Stefani
    23. Shining Star/ Earth, Wind & Fire
    24. Runnin’/ Earth, Wind & Fire
    25. Classical Gas/ Mason Williams
    26. Bohemian Rhapsody/ Queen
    27. You Don’t Mess Around with Jim/ Jim Croce

    Here are the songs that I listened to today as I ran:

    Windy/ The Association
    Summer Breeze/ Seals & Croft
    I Talk to the Wind/ King Crimson
    Wind of Change/ Scorpion
    Blowin’ In the Wind/ Peter, Paul & Mary*

    *I started with the Bob Dylan version but when he busted out the harmonica I had to switch to the version I remember when I was kid

    Somewhere between Summer Breeze and Wind of Change I thought about what words I might associate with these songs: Windy – capricious; Summer Breeze – carefree; I Talk to the Wind – indifferent; Wind of Change – hope; Blowin’ In the Wind – possibility

    Listening to Blowin’ In the Wind, I thought about all of the questions posed in it and was reminded of a line I recited earlier this morning from Rita Dove: Someone once said: There are no answers/just interesting questions. I thought about the idea of questions being spoken into the wind and how there are no certain answers to them but that doesn’t mean they’re just rhetorical. Oh — now I’m thinking about the unanswerable questions and the koan.

    other things noticed: the word straight was used several times — In I Talk to the Wind: said the straight man to the late man and Wind of Change: The wind of change blows straight into the face of time. In Windy, the wind is tripping down the street. I wonder if the swirls or whirls in any of my songs?

    first definitions of wind from the OED: Air in motion; a state of movement in the air; a current of air, of any degree of force perceptible to the senses, occurring naturally in the atmosphere, usually parallel to the surface of the ground.

    • with specific reference to direction from which it blows
    • in reference to navigation, as means of propulsion
    • to take, have, get, gain the wind of, to scent or detect by or as by the wind
    • As a thing devoid of sense or perception, or that is unaffected by what one does to it — talk to the wind, spit into the wind
    • a type of violence, a fury: swiftness, freedom or unrestrainable character, mutability or fickleness, lightness or emptiness — the furies? fates and furies?
    • air in general, as a substance or element
    • gas
    • air inhaled and exhaled by the lungs
    • air as used for blowing or sounding an instrument

    So many directions in which to go!

    Revisiting a poem from a past entry:

    Project/ A. R. Ammons

    My subject’s
    still the wind still
    difficult to
    present
    being invisible:
    nevertheless should I
    presume it not
    I’d be compelled
    to say
    how the honeysuckle bushlimbs
    wave themselves:
    difficult
    beyond presumption.

    As I wrote about on this log before, wind is a great counter to the claim, what you see is what you get or seeing is believing.

    wind thoughts

    Early on in this log I was obsessed with the wind, particularly in terms of my run. How much wind was there outside? Would I have to run into it? I disliked running into the wind; it made it so much harder and I needed it to be as easy as it could be. At some point, I’m not sure when (maybe I’ll try to find it?), I stopped caring so much about how windy it was. It’s never really that windy in Minneapolis, not like St. Peter or Rochester. High winds freak me out.

    I’d like to search back through my archive, but I have a problem: I mention the wind a lot, over 700 times. I often record the wind speed, or make a brief reference to it in the first lines of the entry like, it was windy today or so windy! Is this an impossible task, to read through and tag all of these entries? Perhaps. I think I might just start looking through entries and see what happens. . . . A few entries in and I’m already remembering some thoughts about and experiences of the wind:

    • shaking the leaves in the trees
    • sounding like sizzling bacon
    • unnoticed, forgotten at my back, but when I turn around I remember!
    • trying to rip my hat from my head — it’s only happened once!
    • making the tassel on my hat tap me on the shoulder, making me think of my mom
    • rushing past my ears, almost forgotten when I have my ears covered
    • making waves on the water, making the river sparkle
    • in the lake, making the waves so choppy — the past few summers it’s been windier
    • summer breeze — on a playlist

    two more random wind thought that just popped into my head:

    1. FWA and his love of the Zelda video game, Wind-waker
    2. FWA telling me one day when he was 8 or 9: I hate the wind. When I grow up I want to invent a device that gets rid of the wind

    Walking back to the house after my run, I thought about how fun it is to explore an image like wind and how helpful it is to give so much attention to it and to be open to so many possibilities. Future Sara will appreciate all of the wind options I’m giving here, I think.

    april 3/RUN

    3.15 miles
    2 trails
    41 degrees
    wind gusts: 35 mph

    Windy! Overcast. Quiet. A good run. Slow and relaxed until I reached a runner ahead of me with a dog who stopped then started then stopped again. At this point, I passed them and picked up the pace, hoping to avoid any more encounters. It worked! I felt good enough to keep running faster and faster. Fun!

    Listened to the wind and some yelling in the gorge running south and on the winchell trail. Put in my winter playlist for the last mile, heading north on the trail.

    10+ Things

    1. wind 1: soft, gentle, haunting wind chimes
    2. wind 2: a small branch of a pine tree with some green needles on the sidewalk
    3. wind 3: a swishing ponytail
    4. an empty playground, or a quiet playground
    5. nearing the Cleveland overlook: the memory of the very LOUD knocking of a woodpecker
    6. an open view of the river — can’t remember what the river looked like, just that it was wide and open
    7. mud on the trail
    8. empty benches
    9. the strong smell of weed in the 36th street parking lot
    10. wind 4: leaves scratching the street
    11. wind 5: a white plastic bag rolling across the street, then stopping in the middle, once side being lifted up
    12. wind 6: a waving bush

    before the run

    The difference between a sunset and a sun set/ting.

    or, the moment or the space that exists between a sun set/ting and a sunset. Ever since I read James Schuyler’s “Hymn to Life” and misread a sunset for a sun set, I’ve been thinking about the difference between them — one is a object (sunset), the others an action (sun set) or a process (sun setting). The difference between something fixed and something happening, moving, doing. Why does a sun set/ting appeal to me more? One obvious reason: understanding the sun as a subject, the natural world as an actor. Another reason: movement. A sunset is a fixed image, a sun set/ting moves. Poetry is about movement — associations between ideas, the flow of words and rhythms, the refusal to land (stand still) on one meaning or ending for too long or at all. My life is about movement — restlessness; the practice of running and writing; a difficulty in ever seeing objects as fixed, always slightly fuzzy, buzzing like static, not flickering but bouncing or shaking (or something like that). (quick thought: I’m drawn to light, but just as much to motion. How true is that for people with all of their cone cells?)

    note: writing about this sparked new ideas, including a tentative focus for April, and some thoughts for a artist statement — more on that below.

    Since last month, I’ve been playing around with a poem that attempts to describe the differences between a sunset and a sun set/ting. It’s slow-going. Here’s something to add to my already swirling, meandering thoughts: it’s a poem by Nikky Finney from Ross Gay’s discussion of her work in his talk, Be Camera, Black-Eyed Aperture. It’s not about a sun set/ting, but one rising. The italics are Gay’s; I’m keeping them because they’re helpful for seeing the connections to the movement of a sun set/ting:

    The Squatting Sun/ Nikky Finney

    6:38, flying east, I witness birth,
    pushing out of the blushing vaginal rim

    like some wide cherry-dropped child.
    All the colors that make red have come

    to the only straight line on the earth.
    Ghostly, I blink, my eyes tweak her nipples,

    she releases and the head does not wait
    for my awe.

    I thought I knew what red looked like.
    Believed I had seen this daily drama before;

    the earth in morning-mother motion,
    the first bowl of earth-bread sipped,

    but never had I been asked
    inside the sun’s womb so deep.

    What I see has so much to do
    With the permission to look    .

    My egg-white eyes labor to midwife
    this moment out all the way.

    The baby day pushes clean,
    a quarter rim of cherry-spilled earth

    lands in a head-back wail
    inside my ladling pupils,

    the first rising brightness, its long
    equatorial head bursts, then crests;

    new life passed on
    to a pan of waiting salted water.

    Some thoughts on the poem by Ross Gay:

    . . .this poem witnesses the quiet interior horizon of experience, during which the unfathomably beautiful emerges, and is the contemplation of it. As Finney says, “I thought I knew what red looked like, / believed I had seen this daily drama.” Indeed, it’s the quiet looking that brings the sunrise, the day, wailing into the speaker’s eyes. 

    Be Camera, Black-Eyed Aperture/ Ross Gay

    Gay’s mention of quiet looking here is about black interiority and comes from Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet. I’m thinking about the quiet looking as the labor it takes to see something — the process from light to cell to signal, from retina to optic nerve to brain, from being distracted to quieting to noticing. Usually, this labor is invisible; we believe we just see things, they are just there for our camera eye or eye-as-camera to see.

    Whew — that’s a lot to think about and to try to make sense of. Anyway, back to what this sunset and sun set/ting thread inspired. An April challenge: wind! And, some thoughts for an artistic statement:

    To describe the world (primarily in poetry) from the perspective of the peripheral and from where some central vision exists but is not/no longer centered. . . . new ways of writing about noticing the world that don’t center central vision or that rely on but don’t center peripheral vision (because peripheral vision, by virtue of how it works, can never be centered in the same way that central vision was/is). . . . a few images I’m currently obsessed with: birds, wind, the idea of the Form, not as Platonic but as vague, basic, lacking the specificity of focus — Tree Bird Cloud. 

    after the run

    After I finished the run, I took out my phone and recorded some thoughts, including:

    Somewhat similar to sunset vs. sun set/ting: windblown vs. wind blowing
    windblown = evidence that wind existed, witnessed, after the fact
    wind blowing = moving through a seemingly invisible force that is happening right now

    another example: the absence of birdsong — very quiet, which could have been caused by the birds not singing in the wind, but also by the wind carrying the sound elsewhere

    birding: thought about the memory of the woodpecker’s knock near the overlook

    i.

    an echo
    almost

    memory
    of dead

    wood hit hard
    somewhere

    across the
    ravine

    ii.

    Quiet. Not
    absence

    of singing
    birds but

    the presence
    of wind

    carrying
    their notes OR their tune

    somewhere else.

    A good start. I don’t think I should use somewhere for both.

    wind!

    So many possibilities for this monthly challenge!

    1. Gathering all of the wind poems I’ve already collected.
    2. A wind playlist.
    3. Tagging related entries with “wind”.
    4. Reading The Wind in the Willows, which I was reminded of by Mary Ruefle when she described it as one of her favorite book on a podcast.
    5. Exploring the idea of wind as both a noun for a weather condition and a verb for wrapping something around something else — a scarf around a neck — or for traversing a curving course.
    6. Returning to the Beaufort Scale

    april 2/RUN

    5.2 miles
    ford loop
    38 degrees
    snow flurries into rain drops

    Woke up this morning to snow. What? A little stuck on the deck but nowhere else. Sometime during the run it turned into rain. Or, was that sweat? I think it was rain.

    A good run. Right before I left the house, I had a little calf pain — a few flares of dull pain. Why? Not sure, but I decided it would be fine. In fact, it might help to go out and move. It was and it did. Whenever my calf grumbled, which it didn’t do very often, I sang the song, “Old Friends” from Merrily We Roll Along in my head. Hey old friend/ are you okay old friend? I’m trying to shift my perspective and remember to think about my body, pain, worry as old friends.

    Before the run, I was adding some things to my “How to be” project on Undisciplined about not looking away:

    An occasional poem by Danni Quintos:

    Once I wrote a poem on a bridge
    because you told me to find my ghosts.
    I remembered you once said, Our job as poets
    is to not look away. I looked & wrote
    the scariest thing I could think & after
    you read it, you gave me a book
    (to borrow) which I hugged so hard
    that the million synonyms inside
    could hear my heart beating.

    This looking, described above by Finney and Quintos, this black-eyed opening—this not looking away—is a poetics, yes, but as any poetics is, it is also an ethics. What we look at, what we see, and how, and if we say what we see, is an ethics.

    Be Camera, Black-Eyed Aperture / Ross Gay

    Unable to see faces, often staring into a void or a smudge or a darkness, it is hard to see, difficult to not look away. How do I reimagine this ethical beholding in ways that I can practice? What might not looking away mean without the looking? Not turning away? 

    This is a problem of language, and more than a problem of language, I think. 

    Behold is to eyes as ___ is to ears?
    An ear-witness?

    While I was running, I wanted to think about how I could reframe this not looking away. What does being present, noticing, witnessing mean for me? A thought popped into my head: be with the bird. To be with the bird — to notice them, not try to identify or know or classify them. Ever since I heard J Drew Lanham discuss this concept with Krista Tippett, I’ve loved it. Today I tried to be with the birds. Mostly I was, except for when my calf flared or when I smelled burnt toast —

    The other day, I told my son that it smelled like coffee or burnt toast outside. He asked jokingly, are you having a stroke? Maybe I’ve heard this before and had forgotten, but the smell of burnt toast is, according to Scott and FWA, the sign of a stroke. . . . Just looked it up, and there’s no evidence to support that claim. Whew. Anyway, it is irritating and ridiculous and embarrassing to admit that I did contemplate whether or not I might be having a stroke as I smelled the burnt smell. Fairly quickly I concluded: no fucking way. It’s just smoke from somewhere.

    Be with the Bird, 10 Things

    1. the soft, sharp knocking on wood somewhere
    2. a flicker from a tree branch, flight, then a shower on my head, then birdsong
    3. an eagle-less tree by the bridge
    4. tweet tweet tweet
    5. chirp chirp
    6. fee bee
    7. a thought: could it be what I’m hearing is not birdsong, but bird warning calls alerting others to my presence?
    8. birds singing in the far off trees
    9. birds calling in the bushes beside me
    10. another thought: do birds like the rain?

    a few poetry inspirations

    1 — my weather description: snow flurries into rain drops. This transformation of states reminded me of a poem I read in an entry of april 2, 2020:

    Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry/ Howard Nemerov – 1920-1991

    Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
    That while you watched turned to pieces of snow 
    Riding a gradient invisible
    From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

    There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
    And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

    Of course today, the water went the opposite way, snow to rain. So poetry to prose?

    2 — to rain, raining. As I ran beside the gorge, I frequently heard water falling below me. The snow/rain was creating waterfalls on the limestone and through the sewer pipes, making it sound like it was raining. Suddenly I thought: there’s no rain, but it’s raining, which reminded me of a poem I posted a few days ago:

    an excerpt from Raining, Outlined/ Margarita Pintado Burgos

    Translated from the Spanish by Alejandra Quintana Arocho

    The forest. To say the forest. To suggest some music.
    To carve the breeze.
    To see a landscape. See it raining. Without rain but with raining.

    march 31/RUN

    5.5 miles
    marshall loop, variation
    38 degrees

    Back to the running-with-Scott-on-the-weekend tradition. Today a variation of the marshall loop that we probably won’t try again. Over the lake street bridge, up the marshall hill, right at cleveland past St. Thomas and Summit, right on St. Clair, then down to the east river road. St. Clair was mostly a long downhill which sounds nice but was a little too steep.

    For the first mile, we talked about the differences between Big Bang (which we don’t like) and Community (which we do). My theory: many of the differences are about the shows relationship to what it means to be normal.

    The river looked so cool today — brown, mostly calm but with slight ripples. A bright circle of light and wavy texture — the sun and clouds reflected on the water.

    The river was calm enough to see the bridge’s upside down smile reflected on its surface.

    Heard the St. Thomas bells, some birds, a squeaking squirrel. The trails weren’t crowded because today is Easter.

    added a few hours later: before and after the run (also after dropping FWA back off at college), I worked on my latest birding poem. Will I try to get these published? Maybe, but I’m more interested in them as the opportunity to work on how to turn my daily observations, mostly using peripheral vision and/or senses other than sight, of birds into poems. Something was missing in my poem from yesterday, so I thought about it some more this morning. Yesterday, I kept thinking about how the birds’ singing didn’t hesitate at all as the plane flew above them. This morning I suddenly thought: what if their song was the response to plane — a warning song? I looked up birds and their reactions to planes and found this article, with a line that conjured an image for me.

    the line:

    Using modern electronic instruments, it is possible to measure the heart rate of brooding birds. Measurements show that these birds often react to the appearance of airplanes with a marked increase in heart rate, in other words they become nervous, even if no outward reaction is visible.

    the image: tiny heart beats beating out a rhythm underneath the trill and buzz tune.

    A plane’s buzz
    mixed with

    frantic trills
    in trees.

    Underneath
    this tune

    tiny hearts
    beat in

    a rapid
    rhythm

    ancient and 
    modern. 

    march 30/RUN

    4 miles
    river road, north/south
    36 degrees

    Hello spring! Much of the snow has melted and the sun was out. There were rowers on the river — not seen, but heard. Passed so many happy runners — Hi! Good Morning! Heard lots of birds. Felt strong and happy and free, able to forgot about the bad mood I woke up with. No calf pain today, hooray!

    Listened to the birds running north, my winter playlist running south.

    10 Things

    1. the river, sparking and burning a bright white
    2. only a few clumps of snow on the trail
    3. a squirrel that I first thought was a dark tuft of grass — or maybe a ripped up bit of weed blocker, which makes no sense because this was above the gorge, not near someone’s lawn
    4. the coxswain’s voice, calling out instructions
    5. a group of women running, talking about tempos and repeats
    6. the floodplain forest — open, bare, a white floor
    7. voices on the old stone steps
    8. bright blue sky
    9. stopped at the trestle — someone moving just below
    10. at the very beginning, birds calling out — can’t remember how they sounded, just that I felt like they were telling me to have a good run

    Walking back, heard more birds. Stopped to record them just as a plane roared above — a duet? Watched the silvery white plane, its nose up, cutting through the blue sky. Listened to the recording. Not a duet, more like layers of sound, disconnected, no noticing of each other. The birds kept on singing their song, the plane buzzing its buzz.

    noisy trills
    in trees

    the buzzing
    of a

    plane — neither
    seem to

    notice the
    other

    I see a
    silver

    nose rising
    but no

    small throats . . . ?

    Not quite finished with this little birding poem. I’ll try to come back to it later today.

    Raining, Outlined/ Margarita Pintado Burgos

    Translated from the Spanish by Alejandra Quintana Arocho

    The forest. To say the forest. To suggest some music.
    To carve the breeze.
    To see a landscape. See it raining. Without rain but with raining.
    With that raining that I always conjure when slowly, softly,
    filled to the brim with tiny traces of an air that’s weightless,
    I say to myself I’ll see it rain. I say it again, beside the window,
    that it’s going to rain. That I’m going to see it rain.

    To put forth the idea of rain before. The downpour plants
    all its doubts.

    To pour oneself on the raining. Allow oneself to rain.

    To see raining. To say I see it’s raining.
    Until the raining.
    Until the rain.
    Until then.
    Until.

    I love this poem and idea of rain/to rain versus raining.

    I’m thinking about the connection between a rich green or heavy gray and the word, raining, appearing in my head — maybe, it’s about to be raining? I’m also thinking about my interest in the difference between the sun setting (raining) and a sunset (rain).

    To see a landscape. See it raining. Without rain but with raining.
    This line makes me think of looking off in the distance and seeing it raining, or have Scott tell me its raining — and not having rain where we are. Raining without rain.

    march 28/RUN

    4.15 miles
    minnehaha falls and back
    28 degrees

    Back outside! There were a few patches of ice and some of the walking trails were covered in snow, but the rest was clear and dry. So bright, not just the sun but the sun reflecting off of the snow. My calf continues to make noise — mostly gentle whispers or soft, short groans. Today I didn’t wear the calf sleeves during my run. Maybe I should next time.

    Did my usual thing: ran south listening to the world, north to music — Winter 2024

    Heard lots of chirping and tweeting birds. Sharp squirrel claws on rough bark. A noise that I thought was a bird or a drill but decided was a dog that wouldn’t shut up — bark bark bark bark bark bark

    The favorite shadow I (thought I) saw: approaching a tree, I suddenly saw a shadow moving up the trunk, then realized it was actually a squirrel climbing up the tree.

    birding:

    Right after my lower calf near the ankle — or was it a tendon? — tightened a little and I was worried, I saw the shadow of a small bird flying over the snow, almost like it was saying, don’t worry; notice me instead.

    tweeting birds. I heard: TWEET tweet tweet tweet tweet — Walking back, this tweeting mixed with water dripping from a gutter, a squirrel’s nails scratching tree bark, a kid across the street squealing with delight.

    One mixed with
    many

    the drips and
    squeals and

    scratching feet
    and the

    Tweet tweet tweet
    tweet tweet

    That’s the version I spoke into my phone. I’ll work on it some more.

    before the run

    one

    Red Shoulder Hawk by Ciona Rouse was the poem of the day on poets.org. Instead of just posting the poem, as I usually do, I

    We met in the middle of the street only to discuss 
    the Buteo lineatus, but we simply said hawk 
    because we knew nothing of Latin. We knew nothing 
    of red in the shoulder, of true hawks versus buzzards, 
    or what time they started their mornings, 
    what type of snake they stooped low 
    and swift to eat. We knew nothing.

    I like how we meet in the middle sounds. The discussion of not knowing the latin name of the bird reminds me of J Drew Lanham and his interview with Krista Tippet — you don’t have to know the name, just be with the bird. It also makes me think of Robin Wall Kimmerer and how she navigates her scientific and indigenous ways of knowing, how she values the Latin names but also the names beings call themselves. And it makes me think of May Swenson and section 7 of her wonderful poem, “October,” which is part of my My 100 list of memorized poems: His shoulder patch/which should be red looks gray. I like how this first sentence unspools.

    Or, I should say, at least I knew nothing, 
    and he said nothing of what he knew that day 
    except one thing he said he thought, but now I say 
    he knew: I’m going to die soon, my neighbor said to me 
    and assured he had no diagnosis, just a thought. He said it 
    just two weeks before he died outdoors just 
    twenty steps away from where we stood that day— 
    he and I between the porch I returned to and twisted 
    the key to my door to cross the threshold into my familiar 
    like always I do and the garage he returned to 
    and twisted some wrench probably on a knob of the 
    El Camino like always he did every day when usually 
    I’d wave briefly en route from carport to door 
    sometimes saying “how’s it going,” expecting 
    only the “fine” I had time to digest.      

    I knew nothing, and he said nothing of what he knew. Is this a chiasmus, where the order of the words is reversed for dramatic effect (I wrote about this device on 13 nov 2023)? Again, the unspooling of the story is wonderful: how the neighbor’s death is revealed, the details that help us to imagine the scene. There is punctuation in these lines, but there are also a lot of lines that are written in a way that make sense without punctuation. I’m reminded of June Jordan’s rules for critiquing other people’s poems:

    Punctuation (Punctuation is not word choice. Poems fly or falter according to the words composing them. Therefore, omit punctuation and concentrate on every single word. E.g., if you think you need a question mark then you need to rewrite so that your syntax makes clear the interrogative nature of your thoughts. And as for commas and dashes and dots? Leave them out!)

    June Jordan

    I don’t know if I completely agree with her, and I know Emily Dickinson wouldn’t, but I do like the idea of trying to focus on each word and trying to have them work without punctuation.

    I think I like, to cross the threshold into my familiar like always I do. Do I? I like the use of threshold into my familiar instead of home, but is it too wordy, and awkward with the like always I do?

    Except today 
    when I stepped out of my car, he waved me over to see 
    what I now know to call the Buteo. When first I read its 
    Latin name, I pronounced it boo-TAY-oh 
    before learning it’s more like saying beauty (oh!).     
    I can’t believe I booed when it’s always carrying awe.

    Booed instead of awed? Love it.

    Like on this day, the buzzard—red-shouldered and 
    usually nesting in the white pine—cast a shadow 
    upon my lawn just as I parked, and stared back at us— 
    my mesmerized neighbor and me—perched, probably hunting, 
    in the leaning eastern hemlock in my yard. Though 
    back then I think I only called it a tree because I knew nothing 
    about distinguishing evergreens because I don’t think I ever asked 
    or wondered or searched yet. I knew nothing about how they thrive 
    in the understory. Their cones, tiny. And when they think 
    they’re dying, they make more cones than ever before. 

    A bird casting a shadow — a favorite of mine. The way time works in this poem is interesting. I didn’t know yet. How far in the future is the narrator telling their story? How long after the neighbor’s death did they begin learning trees? note: I keep wanting to refer to the narrator as he — why? I can’t distinguish evergreens and I’m constantly calling pine trees fir trees and all evergreens fir. Will I ever learn? Something in my brain resists this sort of specificity, and not just because of my bad vision. A line from Diane Seuss in “I look up from my book and look out at the world through reading glasses: All trees are just trees/ death to modifiers

    How did he 
    know? Who did he ask and what did he search to find 
    the date that he might die, and how did he know 
    to say soon to me and only me and then, right there 
    in that garage with his wrench and the some other parts 
    unknown for the El Camino and the radio loud as always 
    it was, stoop down, his pledge hand anxious against his chest,
    and never rise again?     

    I’m always fascinated by how people know certain things, like, how did Truman in The Truman Show know that something wasn’t right? What enabled him to trust that knowing and not discount it? Or, another perspective: how do our wandering brains lead us to knowing? I like tracing the strange circuits I take to arrive at ideas.

    There are many details in this poem, but also many details left out. What kind of loud music is coming out of the radio?

    And now the hemlock, which also goes 
    by     Tsuga canadensis, which is part Latin, part Japanese, 
    still leans, still looks like it might fall any day now, weighed 
    down by its ever-increasing tiny fists. And the     Buteo returns 
    each winter to reclaim the white pine before spring.

    The passing of time, vague: now, still, returns each winter

    Most hawks die by accident—collision, predation, disease. 
    But when it survives long enough to know it’s dying, it may 
    find a familiar tree and let its breath weaken in a dark cranny.

    to know it’s dying — Back to Swenson’s “October”: this old redwing has decided to/ stay, this year, not join the/ strenuous migration. Better here,/ in the familiar, to fade.

    And my neighbor’s wife and I now meet in the middle, 
    sometimes even discussing birds but never discussing 
    that day. And I brought her roses on that first anniversary 
    without him because we sometimes discuss a little more 
    than birds. And the     Buteo often soar in twos, sometimes solo. 
    So high I cannot see their shoulders, but I know their voices 
    now and can name them even when I don’t see them. No matter 
    how high they fly, they see me, though I don’t concern them. 
    They watch a cottonmouth, slender and sliding 
    silent in tall grass.     

    Birding by ear, the indifference of nature. Another line, this one from Frederic Gros: You are nothing to the trees. To me, this is a good thing.

    And the cardinals don’t sing. 
    They don’t go mute, either. They tink. 
    Close to their nests and in their favorite trees, they know 
    when the hawk looms. And their voices turn 
    metallic: tink, tink, tink.

    A metallic tink as warning call? I’ll have to listen for that. I like how the poem ends with the robins and the narrator-as-transformed-through-curiosity. The narrator has been changed by their neighbor’s death, they have learned to notice and to listen. As I write this, I realize that these last few lines are all about listening and not looking. Very cool!

    two

    I keep returning to the ekphrastic poem, or ideas close-by/near-enough to the ekphrastic. Thinking about made things and things being made and makers and the world somewhere between wild (as “untouched”?) and civilized (culture/made). Landscapes as not just there, but the living beings/systems, crafted through various “hands” — three in particular: the brain and its way of filtering and guessing and shaping visual data into something I can see; the Minneapolis Parks Department (and maybe other actors in and of the city, too: Army Corps, with its locks and dam and timber and flour industries) and how they’ve managed the land and created the paths I run on, the views I admire — and also created illusions of the “wild”; and water — the river, seeps, springs, drips down to limestone ledge, all carving out and slicing through rock, making: a gorge, rubbled asphalt, cracks, rust, waterfalls.

    With all of this I wonder, What is Art? Who is/can be an artist? What is the difference between art and the everyday? There are too many things I could read about how other artists/poets have approached this — that would be the work of past Academic-Sara. And maybe I don’t want to answer these questions, just pose them through my juxtapositions? Or, maybe I should try to stop asking these questions, and just start writing!

    march 27/BIKERUN

    bike: 4 minutes
    run: 3.5 miles
    outside: feels like 13

    Snow and ice on the ground. Wind. Feels like 13. Inside today. I would have done more on the bike, but my calf started to feel a little strange — tightening, but no pain.

    The run was good — a few flares, then my heel made some noise at the end, again, no pain, just tight, I think. I locked into a steady, slow pace and listened to the latest episode of Nobody Asked Us. Des told a story about her recent NY 1/2 marathon and how she should have woken up 30 minutes earlier in order for the coffee to do its job — iykyk. The story was funny — I laughed several times — and also fascinating. She talked about how she couldn’t push the pace because if she tried, it would have been a big mess. She was able to control it by managing her effort and working with her body, not against it.

    Later, giving a pep talk to Kara for her upcoming race she said something like, You’ll be running along and then suddenly someone in a banana costume will pass you and you’ll say, “hell no, that ridiculous thing can’t beat me!” and you’ll speed up. Thinking about our encounter with the fast banana in our 10k race I wonder, are bananas a thing in races now? Will I see more bananas next month?

    before the run

    Yesterday I mentioned that it was Robert Frost’s 150th birthday, but I forgot to mention 2 things.

    First, when I told FWA about it, he said, And I took the road less travelled and that has made all the difference — or something like that. A few minutes later, as we were walking to the garage to leave for the airport he called out, Mom, look — then walked off the sidewalk into the grass, looped around a bush, then returned to sidewalk and said, See, the road less travelled. Wow.

    Second, in honor of Frost’s birthday Poetry Foundation posted his poem, Acquainted with the Night, which I recall first reading through Edward Hirsch’s essay, “The Pace Provokes My Thought.” Acquainted. Another word for familiar with, know of or known to, on friendly terms. I want to add this word to my list of alternatives to know/ing, along with ED’s accustomed, as in We grow accustomed to the Dark. I like the friendliness of acquainted, which is slightly different than the “getting used to” of ED’s accustomed. I also like that it’s friendly, but not too friendly; there’s still some distance from whatever it is that you are acquainted with — an acquaintance not an old friend.

    Now I’m thinking about the word familiar. Two immediate thoughts. First, an idea from Alice Oswald that I revisited the other day:

    citing Zizek: we can’t connect, be one with nature. It’s extraordinary, alien. It’s this terrifying otherness of nature that we need to grasp hold of and be more courageous in our ways of living with it and seeing it.

    Landscape and Literature Podcast: Alice Oswald on the Dart River

    So, familiar is bad for poetry? We need to make the familiar strange, fresh.

    Second — I just spent 15 or 20 minutes attempting to find the log entry and poem that made think of this second thing and couldn’t, so I am very reluctantly giving up on it. — thinking about poems and how they can also take the strange and make it familiar, or take strangers and make them friends. I recall reading a poem — I think it was something about ROBINS! — I’m keeping this strange sentence in as evidence of my mind at work. After I gave up on finding and just tried to remember what I said, suddenly I recalled what the poem I was searching for was about and how reading it connected me to a stranger: robins. So I searched back through my posts for “robins” and finally found it. Hooray!

    Lately I’ve been reading a lot about how poetry makes the familiar strange, but I think poetry can also make the strange familiar. Give us a door into the unfamiliar so we can get to know someone else and their experiences. The door in for me with this poem was all the robins. This past week, I saw so many fat robins on my crab apple tree, swaying and bobbing and getting drunk off the shriveled up apples. 

    log from 14 jan 2023

    Here’s the line from the poem that helped me get acquainted with its author, David Eye:

    Cousin–When a dozen robins blew into the yard yesterday–
    I’d never seen so many–I watched them hop, cock their heads,
    grab the thaw’s first worms. Such a pleasure, those yam-
    colored breast feathers.
    (from Letter from the Catskills/ David Eye)

    And now I’m thinking about the different ways that poetry has helped make the strange familiar to me, especially in terms of my vision. Since I rediscovered poetry in 2017, I’ve been reading, studying, and writing it as a way to better navigate my strange and uncertain and difficult experiences of slowly losing my cone cells. I’m building a new world and a new way to be that’s heavily populated with poetic lines, ideas, methods.

    Last year, I wrote a cento in which I gathered lines from poets invoking color. The original title of it was, “When Poetry Replaces Dead Cone Cells, a cento”

    The world mostly gone/ Sara Lynne Puotinen

    The world mostly gone,
    I make it what I want.


    I empty my mind. I stuff it with grass.
    I’m green, I repeat. I grow in green,


    burst up in bonfires of green, whirl and hurl
    my green over the rocks of this imaginary life.


    Meanwhile the wild geese, high
    in the clean blue air, are heading home


    again. (Isn’t sky-blue brighter than any sky
    you really see? Canned sky, Crayola blue.)


    The sun is the yellowest squash. More yellow,
    I think, of course more yellow.


    A shiny switch plate in the otherwise ongoing green
    flickers like a match held to a dry branch


    and the whole world goes up in orange. Orange
    as pumpkins in a field humming.


    I write a line about orange.
    Pretty soon it is a whole page


    of words, not lines. Then another page.
    And that orange, it makes me so happy.

    march 26/SHOVEL

    25 minutes
    4 or 5 inches?
    still snowing
    25 degrees

    earlier today: As I write this, it is 9 am and snowing. We (Scott, me, FWA, RJP) are about to leave for the airport — the kids are flying to Chicago. . . . Happy 150th birthday Robert Frost! Recited “Out, Out –” to RJP in honor of it. I don’t get it, was her response. Oh well.

    now — 12:40: Just finished shoveling. Such heavy, wet snow and still coming down. Decided to do a pass now for future Scott and Sara. Plus, I wanted some exercise.

    The kids are at the airport, waiting for their flight; it was delayed by an hour and a half. That sucks, but it’s a good reminder to them of how flying sometimes works — lots of delays and getting to the airport way too early and sitting around.

    look them in the eye

    Wanted to archive some more examples of “looking people in the eyes” that I heard on a podcast and read in a book yesterday:

    During the pandemic I had started saying hello to people and looking people in the eyes. We had masks on and gloves on, so you really had to connect with people by looking them in the eye. And one of the things I started to notice was people who are down on themselves — and, you know, they sort of taught us how to see if someone was smiling through eyes — and so, when someone was having a bad day to really make sure I connected with their eyes and be like, here’s a little bit of my light. You’re having a tough day, I want to pass something to you. . . . And I find connecting with people, for me, really reduces my anxiety.

    episode 156

    I like archiving these examples because sometimes I wonder if I’m making a bigger deal out of losing the ability to make eye connect and see people’s faces. I also like archiving them because I am a former academic who needs evidence and examples to prove my points. Now that I’ve done more reading and thinking about eye contact, I know that making eye contact, even during the masked faces of the pandemic, is not the only way we can connect with others, but it still is alienating and exhausting and anxiety-inducing not to be able to do it.

    And here are two other “eye-looking” examples, both from the book I just finished, The Thursday Murder Club:

    You can really see in the eyes of the couple which one wants to move, and which one is just going along with it.

    describing the show, Escape to the Country

    You know when you look into someone’s eyes for the first time and the whole world breaks apart? And you just think, “Of course, of course, this is what I’ve been waiting for all this time”?

    telling a story about “love at first sight”

    This idea of being able to see who wants to move by looking in someone’s eyes reminds me of a great chapter from Georgina Kleege, in Sight Unseen, “Here’s Looking At You Kid.”

    When the sighted describe facial expressions, the eyes are more central and more active. Eyes glow, twinkle, sparkle, shimmer, smoulder, flicker, projecting emotions the viewer readily understands. But what I know about the visual system tells me the eyes cannot do all this. They receive and respond to light but cannot emit it. The “flash of recognition” or “spark of understanding” the teacher sees in his students’ eyes is merely a trick of lighting. The lids rise, in wonder and surprise, exposing more of the slick surface of the eyeball to reflect light back to the beholder. Illumination. The downcast eye beneath half-lowered lids cannot catch and throw back the light, and so seems dull and unenlightened. The eyes themselves are passive. Without the context of the mobile face around them, and the play of light upon them, they remain unchanging and vacant. But in the language of the sighted, where seeing is believing, the eyes must be the focal point of every expression. All the wrinkles and crinkles of emotion occur only to funnel meaning into the eyes.

    And this:

    I worry that the sighted delude themselves, and put themselves at risk. Because when most of them look into my eyes, they see me as sighted. If eye contact matters so much surely it should be harder to fake. Perhaps it is only the expectations of the sighted. When I aim my eyes in more or less the right direction, the sighted see it as close enough. But if a mere millimeter could make an inquiring look into a menacing stare, shouldn’t my fraud be instantly obvious?

    Be honest. Look at me when I’m talking to you. Do you really see all that you say? Or is it a convenience of language to ascribe to my eyes those qualities, emotions, messages you derive from the rest of my face, our surroundings, or the words I speak? Aren’t you projecting your own expectations, interpretations, or desires onto my blank eyes? And if you’re really being honest, really looking closely, my eyes are no more vacant than a sighted person’s eyes. My eyes and their eyes send back the same reflection. Of course this hypothesis comes full circle. If I see your eyes as blank, it is only because I am projecting what I see (or don’t) onto you. But only you can say for sure. Go ahead. Take a good look. Pull the wool off your eyes. Tell me what you see.

    march 25/RUN

    3.5 miles
    treadmill
    outside: rain

    Yesterday snow, today rain. Slick and slushy. Yuck! Decided to skip the bike and go straight for the treadmill. Listened to a Hit Play Not Pause podcast about fixed and open mindsets during perimenopause. In the past, I’ve been critical of the mindset concept, especially how it was preached to my daughter who was struggling with crippling anxiety in elementary school, but I appreciated the episode. I like the idea of excavating the fixed ideas we tell ourselves — but I prefer story or narrative — and transforming them. Many of these stories are buried deep and take some work to uncover. As I was listening to it, and agreeing with a lot of it, I was also thinking: it’s hard to do that work when you’re coming undone with anxiety. I remember my daughter feeling so frustrated and overwhelmed and pissed off when some adult would tell her, Just open your mind! Don’t be so fixed and stubborn! I know when I feel like I can’t breathe because I’m all worked up for something, I don’t have the ability to expose intractable beliefs!

    Here are some fixed stories I’ve been telling myself for a while about doctors, some of which I inherited from a mother who had been traumatized by doctors as a kid: They can’t understand what’s happening with me. They won’t believe me. They will just give me useless advice or advice that makes me worry even more or want to do a bunch of unnecessary tests. I’m better off figuring it out for myself — you’re on your own, kid. Some of this is true, but not all of it. And there are doctors who can help me, at least sometimes; I just need to find them. And, if not doctors, there are other people too, like physical therapists. Which is all to say: my calf still feels strange and I should look into scheduling an appointment!

    Okay, no more writing. I have 10 hours left to read my wonderful book — The Thursday Murder Club — before it is automatically returned. Can I do it? With my eyes, it will be close.

    update: I finished the book! It wasn’t a long or difficult book, but still a challenge for me to read with so few cone cells. Yesterday, when I was trying to read, I kept falling asleep after every sentence. But I did it.

    march 24/BIKERUN

    bike: 15 minutes
    run; 1 mile
    basement
    outside: snowing

    A big storm, just starting, but not quite. Now, light snow. We’re expecting 5-9 inches. I wasn’t sure how icy the sidewalks were or how ready my calf was to run, so I decided to work out in the basement.

    calf update, for future Sara (and maybe her physical therapist?): during the race yesterday, my calf felt a little strange a few times — a slight tightening? no pain — but was otherwise fine. After the race: some soreness and tightness. today during the bike: a few more flares, an occasional twinge with a little pain. during the run: started feeling sore about 8 minutes, then a little strange. It’s so hard to know what the right thing to do is — stop running? ignore it as nothing, or as a calf that cramped and is now recovering? schedule a pt appointment? If I can get an appointment, I’d like to see a pt. Even if the calf is nothing, it would great to be checked out before serious marathon training begins.

    Watched the women’s road race (cycling) from Tokyo while I biked. When the silver medalist, Annemiek Van Vleuten, crossed the line, she thought she had won gold; she didn’t realize that someone in the breakaway had stayed away. background: A. Van Vleuten had been about to win the gold in Rio but had a horrific crash into a cement barricade. She put off retiring for another 5 years just to try and win the gold in Tokyo. Wow. How do you recover from that disappointment? I’m always amazed at the resilience of athletes.

    While I ran, I listened to a winter playlist. Other than my calf, I felt good.

    Earlier today, I found an article about James Schuyler and this wonderful poem, which I may have read before, but was delighted by today:

    The Bluet/ James Schuyler

    And is it stamina
    that unseasonably freaks
    forth a bluet, a
    Quaker lady, by
    the lake? So small,
    a drop of sky that
    splashed and held,
    four-petaled, creamy
    in its throat. The woods
    around were brown,
    the air crisp as a
    Carr’s table water
    biscuit and smelt of
    cider. There were frost
    apples on the trees in
    the field below the house.
    The pond was still, then
    broke into a ripple.
    The hills, the leaves that
    have not yet fallen
    are deep and oriental
    rug colors. Brown leaves
    in the woods set off
    gray trunks of trees.
    But that bluet was
    the focus of it all: last
    spring, next spring, what
    does it matter? Unexpected
    as a tear when someone
    reads a poem you wrote
    for him: “It’s this line
    here.” That bluet breaks
    me up, tiny spring flower
    late, late in dour October.

    The analysis in this essay is all helpful to me, but I was particularly struck by this bit:

    . . . Schuyler’s description of the flower transforms it into art, and that this kind of transformation is his signature poetic activity; it happens again and again in his poems: he describes what he sees before him as if it were a painting so that observation of the natural world becomes ekphrasis. That’s why—to skip down a little—the leaves are likened to a rug, crossing outside and inside, nature and culture, and those leaves “set off” the gray the way a painter or sharp dresser uses one color to set off or complement another, why the air is like a made thing, too, if one you eat, and why the bluet is called “the focus,” the way art critics say something is “the focus of the composition.” Schuyler’s words are paintbrushes, what he describes becomes a painting (though he treats it as already painted)—paint, a medium that splashes and then holds. There are examples of this everywhere in his books. In “Evenings in Vermont,” for instance, a rug again mediates between inside and outside, art and nature: “I study / the pattern in a red rug, arabesques / and squares, and one red streak / lies in the west, over the ridge.” In “Scarlet Tanager,” the bird in the tree provides “the red touch green / cries out for.” In “A Gray Thought,” “a dark thick green” is “laid in layers on / the spruce …” And so on. Touches, layerings: color as paint, natural phenomena perceived as art.  

    It’s This Line / Here” : Happy Belated to Birthday James Schuyler

    This idea of natural phenomena as art and of Schuyler as describing flowers with painting terms and of him doing ekphrastic poems might be a way into my “How I See” ekphrasis project!

    march 23/RACE

    10k
    Hot Dash
    18 degrees

    Not a fast run, but I felt relaxed and strong, and I powered up the big hill. No difficulty at all. I picked it up a little at the end and enjoyed crossing the finish line. A victory! Maybe the hardest thing about the race was holding back — I kept wanting to go faster than Scott, but I kept it slow and relaxed. My goal is not a fast time, but to be able to run the marathon with Scott.

    For most of the race I recounted stories — probably the same stories — about past races: having to run ahead to get water for FWA in our 5k, RJP being very disturbed by a runner who was dry heaving as he neared the finish line, a wheezing runner dying on a hill, running way too fast in the first 5k of a 10k then dying and having to stop and walk several times for the second 5k.

    10 Things

    1. 2 women behind us lamenting how they were both such bad singers — I played an instrument, but I just can’t hear the notes. I turn the radio way up to drown out my own voice. I wanted to turn aroudn and say, Me too!
    2. the crappy pre-recorded version of the national anthem before the race
    3. cold, cold fingers and toes for the first mile
    4. Scott yelling, Banana!, when a guy in a banana costume ran by
    5. Overheard: Oh right — I get a beer when I’m done with this! note: our bibs had a ticket for one free beer at the end
    6. Overheard: runner with a 1/2 mile before she would reach the turn around: where is the turn around anyway? I wanted to say, a long way, but didn’t
    7. a few patches of snow and ice near the edges of the road
    8. snow on the grass
    9. the cobblestones at the end were in bad shape — lots of holes, rough, uneven
    10. on the cobbles, I heard someone behind sprinting and yelling but they never passed. What happened? did they think the race finished sooner? did they sprint too soon and run out of gas? I’ll probably never know

    march 22/SHOVELWALK

    20 minutes
    3? inches
    28 degrees

    3 or 4 inches for round 1 of winter. We might get more snow in last night’s snowfall, combined with expected snow on Sun/Mon/Tues, than in all of Jan and Feb. Of course, that’s not saying much because our total prior to today was 7.3 inches. I wonder if what we got today will be melted by Monday? Future Sara, let us know!

    six hours later: The snow has already melted off of the deck, the sidewalks, the road. Will the snow on the grass be gone before Sunday? Still not sure.

    the secret life of plants

    sources:

    Yesterday afternoon, driving back from picking FWA up for spring break, we were talking about trees and how they communicate and their underground networks and how much sentience they have, and I remembered, and tried (unsuccessfully) to explain, the 1970s talking-to-plants craze. I mentioned how Stevie Wonder did an album about it. Scott didn’t remember the album. This morning I looked it up and . . . jackpot! Stevie Wonder’s album: Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants. I’m listening to it right now — ah, 1979! It is the soundtrack for a documentary, The Secret Life of Plants, which may or may not be a reliable source of “accurate” information about plant science (botany?) discoveries in the 1970s — wikipedia doesn’t seem to think so. I dug a little deeper and found an article about the plant craze of the 1970s — The 1970s plant craze / Teresa Castro

    In the early 1970s, a general plant craze caught on in visual and popular culture alike. Against the background of New Age spirituality and the flourishing of ecological thinking, the 1970s plant mania came as an eccentric blow to the belief that sentience and intelligence are a human prerogative. It also relied massively on the cybernetic paradigm: envisaged as self-regulating biological systems, plants were recognized as communication systems in themselves. In this essay, I sketch a brief portrait of this complex cultural moment, as visual culture, and in particular film, came to be permeated by references to plant communication, plant sentience and plant intelligence.

    intro to 1970s plant craze

    In the first line she mentions a 1972 video, Teaching a Plant the Alphabet. Love it!

    In her discussion of “The Secret Life of Plants,” Castro describes the author as a “botanist and science vulgarizer” and places the work in the context of a large anti-science and anti-intellectual moment; a hippy desire to heal the crisis in human/nature relationships; and significantly for this article, the mediation of visual and other technologies, like the lie detector. The book takes up the “experiments” of Cleve Backster in 1966 in which he hooked a plant up to a lie detector and noticed a surge in electrical activity similar to a human’s emotional response when he watered the plant. Then, an even greater one when he imagined setting fire to the plant and watching it burn. His conclusion: This plant could think! It “could perceive and respond telepathically to human thoughts and emotions.”

    Her conclusion about the book/documentary and its impact:

    The Secret Life of Plants badly impacted serious scientific research on plants’ sensory and perceptual capacities. Widespread press coverage of Backster’s pseudo-experiments contributed to this backlash. Work on plant communication and plant signaling “was somewhat stigmatized, and the limited availability of funding and other resources constrained further progress.”

    In our present dire ecological crisis, to acknowledge the richness and complexity of plant-life is an invitation to withdraw from a centric reason that separated humans from “nature,” situating human life outside and above it. In what constituted a striking ecological critique of Enlightenment science and its holy dualisms, “hippy times” attempted to tell a different kind of story about “Man” and “Nature” and grappled with a fundamental epistemological shift. Most of all, they experimented widely with alternative modes of engagement with what poet Gary Snyder described as “the most ruthlessly exploited classes”: “animals, trees, water, air, grasses.” As we emerge shell-shocked from a global pandemic, what are we to do now? Maybe we can learn from the past: instead of imagining that “plants are like people”, as suggested by “America’s Master Gardener” in 1971,57 we can focus instead on what it means to be human on a shared planet.

    This discussion of plants and communication reminded me of a study I read during my mushroom month: April, 2022. Looked it up and found the entry: 10 april 2022

    After a discussion of study about fungi language, I posted this quotation from Alice

    Oswald:

    I exert incredible amounts of energy trying to see things from their own points of view rather than the human point of view.

    It’s a day long effort to get your mind into the right position to live and speak well.

    citing Zizek: we can’t connect, be one with nature. It’s extraordinary, alien. It’s this terrifying otherness of nature that we need to grasp hold of and be more courageous in our ways of living with it and seeing it.

    Landscape and Literature Podcast: Alice Oswald on the Dart River

    Instead of “plants are just like us; they can think and feel!” of the 70s plant craze, Oswald is holding onto the strange otherness of plants. I wonder what Oswald, a former professional gardener, thinks about the sentience of plants?

    I googled the question, but before I could find an answer, I found her amazing lecture on the tradition of rhapsody, the litae women in the Iliad, back doors, and Marianne Moore. Wow!

    Sidelong Glances: Oblique Commentary on the Poetry of Marianne Moore / Alice Oswald

    I listened to the lecture, going back again and again to try and transcribe some of her brilliant words. Her “obliquely, slightly, slowly” approach to Moore with a description of rhapsody and the “squinting, limping old women” of the Iliad (litae) and the need for coming through the back door and repeated image (and sound) of iron bell resounding like the voices of dead poets that came before us was amazing. I’ll have to listen to it again, I think.

    a few passages to remember

    The poet, especially the female poet, must labor not only to hear the voices of the literate dead, but my leaning and hushing and listening beyond listening to hear the illiterate, anonymous, marginal voices of rhapsody.

    Literature has a front door and a back door, and the labor of moving through poems, opening the back doors to let in the fresh air of the unwritten, if you do it for long enough, finally compels you to leave the house altogether, since the tradition inherited by the oral tradition goes right back into birdsong, windsong, heartbeats, footsteps, rivers, and thickets. Not to mention all the oscillating sounds of tides and seasons and waves and why shouldn’t rhapsody include the stitch work of plants?

    Go in through the back door?! Love this idea and what it mean for how I understand doors being opened through poetry! And connecting it to birdsong and wind song and all those amazing sounds heard while running above the gorge! And plants!

    [not nature poetry but] natural pattern which includes and aligns the poem making habits of the mind with the metrical structures of physics. That is what I mean by rhapsody and that is what I want you to listen for when you put your ear to a written-down poem: backwards and beyond male literature, as far as the first repetition of a leaf on the first repetition of a morning.

    Aligning the poem-making habits of the mind with the metrical structures of physics: the biomechanics of running, the drip drip dripping of water due to gravity, air being forced out of and welcomed into the lungs. And the repetitions — the first repetition of a leaf on the first repetition of a morning — very cool.

    And, where to place Robin Wall Kimmerer within this conversation? I think I have an answer, but I decided to read another section of Gathering Moss about the Standing Stones. After writing about scientific names for mosses and reflecting on the power in self-naming, she writes:

    I think the task given to me is to carry out the message that mosses have their own names. Their way of being in the world cannot be told by data alone. They remind me to remember that there are mysteries for which a measuring tape has no meeaning, questions and answers that have no place in the truth about rocks and mosses.

    Gathering Moss

    As I typed up the title of RWK’s book, I just realized something great about the title: gathering moss can refer to us (readers) gathering up stories and lessons from the moss, but it can also mean moss gathering — an image of a complex community of mosses and the agency of moss to gather themselves, independent of us. Nice.

    random: Last night I discovered that a cartwheel is named after the wheel of a cart. When you are doing a cartwheel, you are acting like a wheel of a cart. Duh — I guess it seems obvious, but I associated the words so strongly with my memories of gymnastics as a kid that I never thought about it referred to outside of that.

    march 20/RUN

    4 miles
    trestle+ turn around
    22 degrees
    wind: 21 mph gusts

    Straight into the wind running north. Not fun, but not nearly as bad as yesterday. Felt stronger, faster for parts of it. Running up the hill just south of the lake street bridge my calf tightened up a little. I stopped, walked, then started again, more cautious this time. Thought about Thomas Gardner and Poverty Creek Journal and his brief descriptions of sore calves after a tough session of hill repeats. After lots of anxiety for weeks, calf pain is now just a normal/regular part of my running. I’m glad — not for the off and on pain, but for the everydayness of it.

    Some shadows — soft, crooked, in motion: birds, gnarled tree branches, broken fence rails. Other shadows — dark, on trees, looking like someone standing there. Don’t remember seeing the river but I do remember the floodplain forest — open, bare, beautiful. No chain across the top of the old stone steps. Wondered what will happen in a few days; big snow predicted, well, possible.

    Listened to birds and cars and grit on the trail running north, my winter playlist running south.

    before the run

    Encountered these lines on twitter this morning, from Charles Wright:

    When what you write about is what you see, what do you write about when it’s dark?

    Charles Wright

    I like thinking/reading/writing about the dark. Imagining it otherwise, not as the absence of light, where light = life and happiness and safety, but as where more things are possible, outside the scrutiny of those watching and judging and classifying. The dark, soft. The dark, no need for sharp vision or eye contact. The Dark, where Emily Dickinson’s little men hurry home to their house unperceived and robins in a trundle bed try and fail to hide their wings under their nightgowns. Where Carl Phillip’s willow wants more for compassion than for company. The dark: the moon, the stars, louder silence. The dark, where reds and greens and blues and yellows are no longer necessary —

    A strange thing I’ve realized about my color vision. I can still see colors — the light green placemat my computer sits on, the purplish-reddish-blueish of my computer desktop, my bright blue hydroflask. And I can still see when things are in color. But, when something lacks color, like a movie in black and white or the middle of the night in my bedroom, I can’t tell that there isn’t any color. It looks and feels the same.

    4 moments when I noticed this:

    one and two: from a log entry on 13 nov 2022

    1 Yesterday afternoon, in the chapel at Gustavus, which was not dim but not bright either, I started to notice that looking one direction, toward the far window on the other side, the only color I could see was an occasional red square embedded in the walls (I double-checked with Scott; there were also a bunch of blue squares too). The hymnals 15-20 feet away, which I know are red, looked dark but colorless. Staring out at the crowd of people, everyone looked like they were dressed in dark or light — not quite black or white, just dark clothes or light clothes. No variation, no purples or blues or oranges or anything but dark and light. It was strange, partly because it didn’t feel strange. It wasn’t like I thought, where is all the color?

    2 It felt more like when I wake up in the dark and, after my eyes adjust, I see the room and it looks like the room, but just darker, dimmer and without color. And, usually I don’t think there’s no color — sometimes I might even think I see color because I know my robe is purple or the pillow is yellow, or I don’t see yellow, but I recognize the pillow on the couch as that yellow pillow because I already know it’s yellow.

    three: from a log entry on 12 jan 2024

    The other day, Scott, FWA, and I were discussing the scenes in Better Call Saul that are set in the present day and are in black and white. Scott and FWA both agreed that those were harder to watch — they had to pay more careful attention — because they lacked color, which is harder because visual stories often rely heavily on color to communicate ideas/details. I said I didn’t realize that they were in black and white; they didn’t look any different to me than the other scenes, which are in vivid color (at least that’s what they tell me). I realized something: it’s not that I don’t see color, it just doesn’t communicate anything to me, or if it communicates it’s so quiet that I don’t notice what it’s saying.

    four: this week

    A few days ago, we decided to finally watch Maestro. Wow! We haven’t finished it yet, but Scott and I are really enjoying it. The first scene is in color, which is intended to represent the present, at least the present as it exists in the movie. The second scene is in black and white and represents Bernstein just before his big break. After watching it for a minute or two Scott said, you see that this in black and white, right? And I said, oh, is it? I didn’t notice. I was focused on the contrast — the dark, closed-curtain window and the outline of brightness around it.

    Color exists, it just doesn’t speak to me in the same ways (as it used to, or as it does to other people). It’s not a foreign language, it is just turned down, whispering. Yes, it does make it harder to understand visual stories that rely on color to tell part of the story — a favorite: present times = color; the past = black and white — but it doesn’t bother me that much. Instead, I find it fascinating, the opportunity to notice the constructs of color and to see the world (and color) differently.

    Okay, that was a long ramble about color and black and white, but I think I’d like to write another color poem about it.

    Now back to the quote from Charles Wright on twitter. As is often the case, there was no mention of where it came from, other than it was from Charles Wright. I always find this frustrating. But, I found it easily enough: Littlefoot, 32 in The New Yorker, 2007. Such a wonderful poem!

    Back yard, my old station, the dusk invisible in the trees,
    But there in its stylish tint,
    Everything etched and precise before the acid bath
    —Hemlocks and hedgerows—
    Of just about half an hour from now,
    Night in its soak and dissolve.
    Pipistrello, and gun of motorcycles downhill,
    A flirt and a gritty punctuation to the day’s demise
    And one-starred exhalation,
    V of geese going south,
    My mind in their backwash, going north.

    my old station: love this way of describing a usual spot to sit
    the stylish tint: oh, the softness of near-night!
    everything etched and precise: I love walking at night in the winter and noticing the contrast between the sky and the bare branches, which I can see more clearly than at any other time. During the day, those branches are a fuzzy blur, but at night they are etched!
    Hemlocks and Hedgerows: sounds like a musical act or a comedy duo Scott adds: proto Prog rock/psychedelic band, Margaret’s Electric Forest or Garden, first album: Hemlocks & Hedgerows
    a pipistrello is Italian for bat, or “small mouse-like animal that flies”
    sounds of day’s demise: a flirt of a bat, the gritting punctuation of a motorcycle’s gun downhill
    one-starred exhalation: me, almost every night — o, look at the stars!
    I love hearing, then seeing, a V of geese in the evening. The choice of backwash instead of wake is interesting — and flying south/mind going north is a wonderful way to suggest being out of sync

    Wow, that is one packed first stanza! I’ll skip the next one to get to the quoted lines:

    When what you write about is what you see,
    what do you write about when it’s dark?
    Paradise, Pound said, was real to Dante because he saw it.
    Nothing invented.
    One loves a story like that, whether it’s true or not.
    Whenever I open my eyes at night, outside,
    flames edge at the edge
    Of everything, like the sides of a nineteenth-century negative.
    If time is a black dog, and it is,
    Why do I always see its breath,
    its orange, rectangular breath
    In the dark?
    It’s what I see, you might say, it’s got to be what my eyes see.

    I’ll have to think about these lines some more. Right now I wonder, when your peripheral vision is fraying, do you see strange things, like flames, at the edges? What do edges look like to me in the dark? I’ll try to remember to notice when I wake up in the middle of the night tonight, like every night. In the light, they are fuzzy and dance a soft shimmy.

    It’s real because we see it? Different ways to respond to this. I’m thinking about how so much of what our eyes see is illusion or guessing based on habits and repeated practice and context and other brain tricks. Even so, most people believe that what they are seeing is real. If they believe, and act as if what they are seeing is real, why can’t I believe and act as if what I’m seeing is real too? All those soft, generous things; those strange headless and legless torsos walking towards me; that river burning with a white heat that sets the trees on fire?

    Okay, it’s almost 11 am. I need to go out for my run before I finish this!

    during the run

    Did I think about this poem at all while I was running? I can’t remember.

    after the run

    During the run, I noticed bird shadows crossing my feet, both of us flying, the birds in the air, be just above the trail. I decided to add it into a fun poem I’m writing called “Birding.” It’s a series of small verses in my 3/2 form in which I describe how I see birds with my cone-dead eyes.

    Not sure if this works:

    vi.

    a shadow
    travels

    over feet
    running

    downhill — flight
    4 ways:

    the moving
    shadow

    the descending
    runner

    a belief
    shadows

    signal some

    thing and

    the small form
    gliding

    closer to

    the sun.

    shadows

    1

    And just like that, my plan to return to Wright’s poem will have to wait. Instead, I’m thinking about shadows, which is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I realized, earlier this month, that shadows see more real to me (as in, having more substance, easier to see as solid) than the object from which they’re cast — is that the most awkward way to say that? Here’s what I wrote on march 9, 2024:

    As I was admiring the fence railing shadows I thought about how clear and real they seemed to me. Much more there than the actual fence railing, which was staticky and vague.

    log / 9 march 2024
    2

    So, in the draft of my poem, I wrote: a belief/shadows/signal some/thing. In a different version, I wrote: a belief/shadows/have substance. Do I like that better? I can’t decide. I think it was inspired by a passage I read in Becoming Animal (which was a recommendation from my super smart niece):

    One of the marks of our obliviousness, one of the countless signs that our thinking minds have grown estranged from the intelligence of our sensing bodies, is that today a great many people seem to believe that shadows are flat. If I am strolling along a street on a cloudless afternoon and I notice a shapeshifting patch of darkness accompanying me as I walk, splayed out on the road perpendicular to my upright self, its appendages stretching and shrinking with the swinging of my limbs, I instantly identify this horizontal swath as my shadow. As thought a shadow was merely this flatness, this kinetic pancake, this creature of two dimensions whom one might peel of the street and drape over the nearest telephone wire.

    Becoming Animal / David Abram

    I haven’t finished the chapter yet, but I was able to access it through the reading sample on amazon — so I’ll return to finish later.

    3

    The line about draping the shadow over a telephone wire enabled me to remember a delight poem I read by Paige Lewis a few years ago:

    When I Tell My Husband I Miss the Sun, He Knows/ Paige Lewis

    what I really mean. He paints my name

    across the floral bed sheet and ties the bottom corners
    to my ankles. Then he paints another

    for himself. We walk into town and play the shadow game,
    saying Oh! I’m sorry for stepping on your

    shadow! and Please be careful! My shadow is caught in the wheels
    of your shopping cart.     It’s all very polite.

    Our shadows get dirty just like anyone’s, so we take
    them to the Laundromat—the one with

    the 1996 Olympics themed pinball machine—
    and watch our shadows warm

    against each other. We bring the shadow game home
    and (this is my favorite part) when we

    stretch our shadows across the bed, we get so tangled
    my husband grips his own wrist,

    certain it’s my wrist, and kisses it.


    march 19/RUN

    4.2 miles
    minnehaha falls and back
    43 degrees
    wind: 31 mph gusts

    So windy today! My legs felt heavy. I wonder if part of the problem is that I’m running so late in the morning? I didn’t start until almost 11:30. Still glad I went for a run, but I wish it would have felt a little easier and I would have worn less layers — maybe skipped the buff?

    Listened to kids on the playground, birds, random voices, falling water for the first half of the run. Put in headphones and listened to Taylor Swift for the second half.

    before the run

    Reading through an entry from March 19, 2017 about the new poetry class I was taking, I found this:

    In the editor’s note it’s mentioned that Mayer writes hypnogogic poems. I looked up the word and found the definition (a state between waking and sleeping, when drowsy) and an interview with Mayer about how, after suffering a stroke, she experimented with using a tape recorder to record her thoughts in this drowsy/dreamy state. So cool. Currently, I’m writing about running and I’d like to experiment with ways to express the dreamlike state I sometimes enter during long runs.

    Reading this bit, I got an idea, which I typed up in my “Notes for Haunts, fall 2023” pages document:

    the dream like state of running, when the mind is shut down
    haunting = possessing or being possessed — what if haunting was not just being taken over by someone/thing else (possessed) or taking over someone/thing else (possessing) but becoming untethered or loosely tetered from your body — floating on the path in-between in that strange empty space between banks between sky and ground between worlds between You and I? this could be another form of haunting — what if I started writing small-ish poems that offered different definitions of haunt? 

    A few definitions of haunt I’m thinking about right now: feeling disembodied, having an out-of-body experience and being obsessed/preoccupied/consumed by a thought or idea — having a bee in your bonnet.

    bee in your bonnet

    Here’s an article about the origins of the phrase. According to the article, the phrase is still being used in popular culture. I use it, usually when I notice Scott hell-bent on some task — and usually it seems like a task, or idea, that is fool-hardy but that he needs to work through and figure out for himself.

    Sometimes instead of saying, bee in your bonnet, I say that someone (or me) is hellbent. Of course, writing that immediately makes me think of Jackie from the 1979 Death on the Nile:

    Jacqueline De Bellefort : One must follow one’s star wherever it leads. 
    Hercule Poirot : Even to disaster?
    Jacqueline De Bellefort : Even to Hell itself.

    When I envision a bee in my bonnet, I see something that is relentless, impossible to ignore, urgently needing to be dealt with. That’s not quite how I imagine my preoccupation with haunts and ghosts and writing about the gorge. Still, I like the idea of bees in bonnets, and bees in general, so maybe I’ll spend more time with them this morning?

    Reading through several ED “bee” poems, I suddenly had a thought: could the bee in your bonnet be your soul, trying to escape the confines of the body?

    This thought was inspired by a poem I wrote about in an On This Day post: Body and Soul/ Sharon Bryan. I didn’t mention it in the post, but the description of the soul in the poem, as leaving the body at night to roam around, reminded me of an ED poem I read a few weeks ago, when I was thinking about the difference between the brain and the mind:

    If ever the lid gets off my head/ Emily Dickinson

    If ever the lid gets off my head
    And lets the brain away
    The fellow will go where he belonged —
    Without a hint from me,

    And the world — if the world be looking on —
    Will see how far from home
    It is possible for sense to live
    The soul there — all the time.

    So much to think about on my run (I’m writing this before I headed out). Will I see any bees about by the gorge? Very unlikely, I think.

    during the run

    Thought about a bee in my bonnet as an obsession that I wanted to release, so I imagined opening the top of my head like the door of a cage and letting the bee fly free. What would/could happen if I did this? Would I find some new ways to think about my experiences?

    Also, randomly remembered something about bees in a horror movie, then remembered the movie, Candyman. Looked up, “gothic horror bees” and found this 1978 movie, The Bees.

    Not too far into the run I think I forgot about the bee. I was too distracted by my heavy legs and wondering if my calf would do something strange, and the wind. No escape from my body today.

    after my run

    Now, ED’s poem about the lid of her head coming off makes me think of a favorite Homer Simpson bit:

    Homer reluctantly listens to Ned Flanders drone on about the differences between juice and cider. A voice says, You can stay, but I’m leaving, and Homer’s brain exits his head and floats away as we hear a slide whistle. A few seconds later his body collapses on the floor and we hear a thud.

    I love the image of the brain floating away. And, instead of a daydream where Homer’s brain gets to wander while his zoned-out body stays and pretends to listen, his body collapses, unable to continue without the brain. This idea brings me back to the Sharon Bryan poem I mentioned earlier:

    then they [body and soul] quarrel over which one of them 
    does the dreaming, but the truth is, 

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

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

    sings at the top of its lungs, laughs 
    at its little jokes . . .

    . . . the soul 
    says, with a smirk, I was at the end 

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

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

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

    Okay — I’ve been thinking about a few things here: being weighed down/preoccupied with ideas/thoughts/subjects (obsessed); a desire to be released from the body and obsessions; images of bees in bonnets and bees in general. Maybe I’d like to explore some different images of bees, especially in Dickinson? Also, here are 2 other ways to think about obsessions as repetition and habit:

    Camille: Some of the obsessions are never going to leave you, and to me, that was part of what I loved. With each page I thought, Oh, I’ve seen this before, but how is she going to manage it differently? It reminded me of the Miles Davis quote about John Coltrane that was a guiding force for me as I was writing my first book, when I was really worried that I was doing the same thing over and over and over again. And I read the liner notes where Davis wrote about Coltrane’s first solo album. He said, “I don’t understand why people don’t get John Coltrane’s music. All he is trying to do is play the same note as many ways as he possibly can.”

    Writing a Grove: A Conversation with Poet Laureate Ada Limón

    FADY JOUDAH: There is no life without repetition, beginning at the molecular, even particle level. There is no art without life. To remain viable, art, inseparable from the circularity of the human condition, also repeats. What is a life without memory? And what is memory if not repetition. But not all repetition guarantees what we call progress, a euphemism for wisdom. Repetition with reproducible results, for example, is a foundational concept of the scientific method. Yet science can be an instrument for the destruction of life as for its preservation. This suggests to me that repetition in art is our unconscious memory at work: art mimics the repetition of the life force within us. All art is a translation of life. Take Jackson Pollock’s so-called action painting. What is it if not a rhythm of a life force in all of us? In those paintings, the pattern is recognizable yet unnamable. It’s like watching electrons bounce off each other. The canvas contains entropy. We understand this at a cellular or quantum level.

    When It Takes Root in the Heart: Conversations with Fady Joudah

    march 18/BIKE

    30 minutes
    basement

    A 10k run yesterday on a recovering calf means no running today. Decided to bike in the basement just so I could move a little. I should have watched Dickinson, but I watched an old Ironman instead.

    All day, I’ve been reading my old Haunts notes, trying to pick one thing to write about. Am I getting somewhere? Maybe. Maybe not.

    Here’s a beautiful poem I just discovered from Terrain. Wow!

    Prayer of a Nonbeliever/ Tim Raphael

    Cathartes aura—purifying breeze—
    is one name for a turkey vulture,
    and what if prayer is like that—
    praise song for a scavenger?
    What if prayer is like this walk,
    the same one every day,
    a mantra of footsteps on mesa rock,
    raptors in the wind?
    What if it begins as a hint
    on the piñon stippled hills,
    unfurls like a scent the dogs sense
    with raised snouts?
    I suspect there’s prayer in the primrose
    come into flower,
    flake-white blossoms
    blanketing the path,
    in the rhythm of my quickened pulse
    on the climb.
    And if prayer takes its time on ridgelines,
    in scant shade,
    if it lingers by a petroglyph picked
    into basalt—two figures with hands on hips
    as if ready to dance—
    then perhaps I am learning to pray.
    Today, another friend’s diagnosis,
    and who am I to scoff at believers?
    I too like the idea of prayer as a stand-in
    for clumsy words like hope,
    wonder and love—for this green
    green valley slaked on spring runoff,
    for the whorl of dihedral wings
    and the uneven heat of rising air.

    that turn — another friend’s diagnosis — wow, those 3 words recalibrating the poem! I’d like to do something like that with my poems about the gorge!

    march 17/RUN

    6.2 miles
    minnehaha dog park and back
    wind: 13 mph / gusts: 27 mph

    Another weekend run with Scott. We talked about Ada Limón’s National Park project and I recited Scott’s favorite line from one of the poems featured in the project. The line — Surely you can’t imagine they just stand there loving every minute of it. The poem — Can You Imagine/ Mary Oliver. Scott likes the line because it’s also a line from the Loverboy song, “Loving Every Minute of it.” As we ran into the wind I mentioned the terrible wind (and rain and cold) in the 2018 Boston Marathon. Scott talked about a dream he had last night that he went to a friend’s gig and how, when he woke up, he realized that that friend did actually have a gig last night. He also talked about birds — wild turkeys and his favorite encounter with them when he saw two walking side-by-side down a busy sidewalk near lake street.

    When we started running, it was snowing — small flurries. At some point it stopped, but it stayed cold and windy. Writing this now, a half an hour later, I’m still cold.

    image of the day: a robin on the edge of path, hopping along then flying across the path. Having noticed the leaves skittering in the wind on the other side of the path, at first I thought the robin was a leaf. But then, when it landed on the fence, I could tell it was a bird. After mentioning it to Scott, I recited a line from ED’s “A bird came down the Walk –“. I think I’ll write a little birding poem about this Robin!

    10 Things

    1. skittering leaves
    2. a robin — first on the ground as a dark form that could be anything and that I thought was a bird, then fluttering across the path, then landing on the top of the fence
    3. flurries in the air — steady, then swirling, then a clump of them dumped
    4. water falling at the falls, a few bits of ice near the edge
    5. the creek, mostly flowing, but still on the edge, and low
    6. a walker with an unleashed dog, wandering around the trail
    7. the view of the river obscured by a screen of thin, unleafed branches
    8. the fake bells of the light rail on the other side of Hiawatha
    9. the curve of the river below us as we ran south toward fort snelling
    10. a steady cadence — the lift lift lift of my feet, slightly slower than Scott’s

    march 16/RUN

    2.2 miles
    neighborhood
    39 degrees / feels like 30
    wind: 16 mph / 30 mph gusts

    Windy! Colder. Winter layers: black running tights, black shorts, black shirt, purple jacket, pink ear band, black gloves, hat. Thought about running more but remembered that Scott and I are doing a 10k tomorrow. So I ran 2 miles through the neighborhood. My restraint was partly due to the wind, which I ran almost straight into heading north.

    10 Things

    1. some dull wind chimes — it wasn’t the clunk clank of wood chimes, but also not the tinkle-tingle-shimmer of metal ones — an unpleasant cacophony
    2. right before starting: a crying kid on the next block — by the time I reached then and their entourage (mom, dog, stroller) — they were laughing — oh to be a kid and to shake anger or disappointment or whatever bad feelings they were having off that quickly — my 8 year old self used to be that way
    3. the trail on edmund between 32nd and 33rd started muddy then turned into hard, packed dirt
    4. heavy gray sky — the type of light that makes it hard for me to see anything completely
    5. the sky was dark enough that a house had on their garage light — I felt a flash of light! as I ran by
    6. harder to see the dirt trail and the roots
    7. voices across the road and below, on the trail — next to me, then ahead of me, then gone
    8. smoke from a chimney on edmund — reminder that winter is still here
    9. a loud rush of noise — an approaching car? No, the wind moving through a pine tree
    10. the swishswishswish of my ponytail hitting the collar of my jacket

    Thinking about the wind, I reread ED’s poem, “The Wind.” Here are some ways she describes the wind:

    • old measure in the boughs
    • phraseless melody
    • fleshless chant

    Searched “wind” on poems.com and found this amazing poem by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, “All Wild Animals Were Once Called Deer“:

    High up a plane droned, drone of the cold, and behind us the flag
    In front of the Bank of Hope’s branch trailer snapped and popped in the wind.
    It sounded like a boy whipping a wet towel against a thigh

    Or like the stiff beating of a swan’s wings as it takes off
    From the lake, a flat drumming sound, the sound of something
    Being pounded until it softens, and then—as the wind lowered

    And the flag ran out wide—there was a second sound, the sound of running fire.
    And there was the scraping, too, the sad knife-against-skin scraping
    Of the acres of field corn strung out in straggling rows

    Around the branch trailer that had been, the winter before, our town’s claim to fame
    When, in the space of two weeks, it was successfully robbed twice.
    The same man did it both times, in the same manner.

    This whole poem is amazing, but too long to post here. What a storyteller BPK is! I should read her collection, Song.

    more Lorine Niedecker and “Lake Superior”

    On Thursday and Friday I read more of “Lake Superior.” I came to these lines and stopped:

    Ruby of corundum
    lapis lazuli
    from changing limestone
    glow-apricot red-brown
    carnelian sard

    Greek named
    Exodus-antique
    kicked up in America’s
    Northwest
    you have been in my mind
    between my toes
    agate

    Huh? I am not an agate expert, so I had to look up everything but the last three lines. Without explaining it all (if I even could), I noticed how fascinated she is with language and culture and the history of the agate as it traveled across cultures.

    Of course I might have understood more of the references if I had read her journal first, LN opens her travel journal with this:

    The agate was first found on the shores of a river in Sicily and named by the Greeks. In the Bible (Exodus) this semi-precious stone was seen on the priest’s breastplate.

    A rock is made of minerals constantly on the move and changing from heat, cold, and pressure.

    On the next page, she writes: So—here we go. Maybe as rocks and I pass each other I could say how-do-you-do to an agate.

    Then, a few pages later:

    The North is one vast, massive, glorious corruption of rock and language—granite is underlaid with limestone or sandstone, gneiss is made-over granite, shales, or sandstone and so forth and so on and Thompsonite (or Thomasonite_ is often mistaken for agate and agate is shipped in from Mexico and Uruguay and can even be artifically dyed in the bargain. And look what’s been done to language!–People of all nationalities and color have changed the language like weather and pressure have changed the rocks.

    And then:

    I didn’t miss the Agate Shop sign. Woman there knew rocks. whole store of all kinds of samples, labelled. Sold them cheaply too, i.e. agates mounted on adjustable rings cost $1.75. I bought one of these, not the most beautiful but a Lake Superior one, I was told. Also bought . . . a brilliant carnelian from Uruguay. There were corundum samples—also from Canada, the stone that is next to diamonds in hardness. (Deep red rubies, which are corundum minerals, are valued more than diamonds.)

    and:

    The pebble has traveled. Long ago it might have been a drop of magma, molten rock that oured out from deep inside the earth. Perhaps when the magma coooled it formed part of a mountain that was later worn down and carried away by a rushing stream. Of the pebble may have been carried thousands of miles by a slowly moving glacier that finally melted and left it to be washed up for someone to pick up.

    I love how LN took all of her notes and ideas about rock and language and culture and commerce and turned them into this small chunk of the poem. So much said, with so little words! And then to end it with: you have been in my mind/between my toes/agate Wow!

    The trails above and beside the gorge have not been between my toes but under my feet and in my mind — maybe I could add a variation of this line to the first section of my poem?

    march 14/RUN

    4 miles
    beyond the trestle turn around
    50 degrees

    Another 50 degree day! The right number of layers: black shorts, blue t-shirt, orange sweatshirt. Some wind, but not too much. Noticed (probably not for the first time) that they removed the porta potty by the 35th street parking lot. Why? There aren’t any porta potties — for runners or bikers or anyone who needs one — on the Minneapolis side between ford and franklin. Did they remove the one near Annie Young Meadow too? I’ll have to check next time I run down into the flats.

    A good run. More soft shadows, other runners, one walker in a bright orange sweatshirt — just like me.

    Near the beginning thought about the ringing of a bell as the signal of a ceremony starting. Then ED’s lines popped into my head: As all the Heavens were a Bell/And being, but an Ear — In the earlier versions of my Haunts poem, I begin with a bell. I could return to that, or maybe that is the start of another poem?

    I ran north without headphones. I can’t remember what I heard. Running south I put in my Windows playlist.

    After I finished my run, I listened to a podcast about perimenopause as I walked home. On this log over the past seven years, I’ve mentioned moments of increased anxiety and ongoing constipation. Present Sara (me) really appreciates that past Sara documented these. It’s helping me to understand my body better as I move into perimenopause. Last week, I discovered a great podcast about perimenopause, menopause, and beyond for active women (runners, ultra runners, cyclists, etc) called: Hit Play Not Pause. So far, I’m on my second episode — the first one was about anxiety, this one is about symptoms of perimenopause other than loss of a regular period. So helpful, especially since it seems there’s so little known about perimenopause!

    Lorine Niedecker and Lake Superior

    I’ve decided I’d like to do a line-by-line read through of Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior.” Such a good poem, one that I appreciate more as I give more attention to poetry and the gorge.

    Iron the common element of earth
    in rocks and freighters

    Sault Sainte Marie—big boats
    coal-black and iron-ore-red
    topped with what white castlework

    The waters working together
    internationally
    Gulls playing both sides

    This is the second verse? section? fragment? of the poem, with some blank space and an asterisk dividing each short section. I’ll get back to the first section a little later.

    coal-black and iron-ore-red — I’d like to put some more color, my versions of color, into my lines — topped with what white castlework — I think I’m being dense, but what does she mean here? Like, (oh) what white castlework!

    the waters working together — between Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, and Lake Huron — internationally — Canada and the US

    Gulls playing both sides — I love how she phrases this with such brevity, the idea of gulls not being subject to the lines/border humans have created. Reading through her notes for this poem, she writes about having to wait in Sault Ste. Marie, Canada until the banks opened in order to exchange money. Was she envious of the gulls who could freely travel between Canada and the US?

    opening lines: Yesterday I posted the opening line of “Lake Superior.” Here’s the whole first section:

    In every part of every living thing
    is stuff that once was rock

    In blood the minerals
    of the rock

    Two other sources of inspiration for my place-based poem are Alice Oswald’s Dart and Susan Tichy’s North | Rock| Edge. Here are their opening lines:

    Dart/ Alice Oswald

    Who’s this moving alive over the moor?

    An old man seeking and finding a difficulty.

    North | Rock | Edge/ Susan Tichy

    If you can, haul-to within

    the terms of anguish :

    this rough coast a gate

    not map, no compass rose

    sketched in a notebook

    with certain positions

    of uncertain objects

    marked—

    Reviewing the three sets of lines, I’m noticing how they move differently. LN offers brief, ordered chunks — little rocks? — that you travel between, while AO’s words wander and run into each other. Sometimes she has sentences, sometimes fragments — it flows like a river? ST shares similarities with AO, in terms of wandering and not stopping, but each word almost seems to have equal weight — is that the right way to put it?

    In terms of distance, LN is far away, abstract; MO is closer, as we observe a man near the Dart; and with ST, we are right there, on the edge of the rock, moving beside the sea.

    Is this helpful to me? To read these three poems closely and together? I’m not sure. Perhaps I should return to LN first. For today, just one more “chunk”:

    Radisson:
    “a laborinth of pleasure”
    this world of the Lake

    Long hair, long gun

    Fingernails pulled out
    by Mohawks

    I like how LN weaves in some of the “facts” that she discovered in her research — almost like notes, but carefully selected for effect. I think the contrast between Radisson’s pleasure comment and his fingernails being pulled out says a lot. How can I weave in facts? Do I want to?

    The poem “Lake Superior” is in two books that I own: Lorine Niedecker Collected Works and Lake Superior. Lake Superior includes a journal with LN’s notes and some critical essays by others. It’s fascinating to read how she transformed her journal notes into these brief lines.