RUN! – Page 49 – sara lynne puotinen

april 8/RUN

3.85 miles
marshall loop
42 degrees

Less layers this morning! Bright sun and lots of noisy birds. Hooray for Spring! By next Saturday will all the snow be melted and lake nokomis be iced out? I hope so. Speaking of birds, I heard a caw-cophony near the river. Yes, a bad pun. Not crows, but seagulls, I think. I’ve heard seagulls in grocery store parking lots, but rarely down by the river.

And here’s another story about birds. This one’s from yesterday. Walking Delia the dog with my son FWA in the afternoon, I noticed 2 crows, high in the sky, harassing another bird. They seemed to be running into it mid-air while cawing furiously. A block later, we saw them again, still at it. Then, a few blocks further, just one crow, which both FWA and I assumed was one of the combative crows. It flew by, cawing, then perched on a lamp post and looked down at us. It had something in its mouth. FWA quipped, the other bird’s eyeball. My response: Yes! In my world, that’s exactly what it is. As we kept walking the caw continued to look at us, almost to say, watch out or I’ll take your eyeballs next!

Anything else about today’s run? Wet, muddy, filled with fast moving cars, other runners in bright orange running shirts, and walkers. Smelled waffles as I passed by Black Coffee and Waffles. Heard kids down by Shadow Falls.

A.R. Ammons’ garbage

before the run

Starting with section 3 today. Here are some thoughts:

In yesterday’s post, I wanted to distinguish humility from humiliation, which was inspired by these lines:

where but in the very asshole of comedown is
redemption: as where but brought low, where

but in the grief of failure, loss, error do we
discern the savage afflictions that turn us around:

where but in the arrangements love crawls us
through, not a thing left in our self-display

unhumiliated, do we find the sweet seed of
new routes

This morning, reading through my post for april 8, 2022, I was reminded of dirt and decomposition and a Ross Gay interview where he describes our entanglement (interconnectedness/dependence) with the world and the decomposition of the self, not as a loss, or a humiliation, but a recognition of our connections and dependence on each other. Humility in terms of vulnerability and openness instead of just humiliation and weakness.

Reading these lines again, I’m also reminded of CAConrad’s “Ignition Chronicles” and the idea that it is not grief/loss/despair that enables new routes, but how that grief disrupts our routines and forces us to focus. The key is focus not despair. So, we don’t need grief, or in the case of Ammons humiliation/breaking down, for new routes. We need focus, which maybe is another word for attention here?

One reason I’m reading this poem is to learn more about how poets write. Poetry is not just a matter of line breaks and rhymes, poetry is about how you approach stories, subjects, the way you use language to make something or do something. For me, this means studying lots of lines (I’m a slow thinker, a ruminator, and mostly new to poetry, so I need lots of lines) to see how poets use language in ways that are very different than I’m used to with my decades of training in academic writing. One small example, here’s how Ammons describes dead/decomposing worms in a puddle after the rain:

young earthworms,

drowned up in macadam pools by spring rains, moisten
out white in a day or so and, round spots,

look like sputum or creamy-rich, broken-up cold
clams.

I particularly like the idea of puddles as macadma pools, but this whole description is delightfully gross!

Studying poets and poems is also about thinking about what they’re doing and making. In section 3, Ammons writes:

no use to linger over beauty or simple effect:
this is just a poem with a job to do: and that

is to declare, however roundabout, sideways,
or meanderingly (or in those ways) the perfect

scientific and materialistic notion of the
spindle of energy

I love all of Ammons’ discussion of roundabouts, sideways, meanderings, and the periphery:

keeping the aberrant periphery worked

clear so the central current may shift or slow
or rouse adjusting to the necessary dynamic

But, even as I love this idea of wandering and the periphery, I’m a bit overwhelmed by the length of his roundabouts and sidetracks. So many words! So many pages! Too many doors opened by too many ideas! I might need to read through these sections faster or I’ll get too tired or too lost and never make it to the end!

All of Ammons talk about garbage and poetry makes me wonder about his book’s connection to eco-poetry. I found a helpful article to read: The Semiotics of Garbage, East and West: A Case Study of A. R. Ammons and Choi Sung-ho

april 7/RUN

3.5 miles
locks and dam #1
39 degrees

Tomorrow starts the warmer weather. A high of 59, then 78 by Wednesday. I’m sure this spring weather won’t last, but at least we are getting some warm days.

A good run. I was overdressed. Ran south to the locks and dam #1 parking lot, then down the hill to the entrance to the dam and back up it. A quick walk break to put in my headphones, Bruno Mars Essentials on apple music, and to admire the river. Then back north to home.

Running south, I heard some birds singing. It sounded like the melody to Weather Report’s Birdland. Is that possible? The song is about the nightclub and Charlie Parker, but is also about birds? Probably not. Oh well, today that’s what I heard: some birds singing the melody to Birdland.

Anything else? More melted snow, sharp shadows, sandy grit. More time on the walking trail. Heard kids on the playground, felt my hands bumping against the zipper pull on my pockets, saw a kid sitting on the top of a big boulder.

A. R. Ammons’ garbage

written before the run:

Yesterday I wrote about wanting to revise my mannequin poem and submit it to a journal. Yesterday I was enthusiastic. Today, I am not. I’m stuck. Instead of staying stuck, I’m returning to my other project: reading Ammons’ garbage. It’s an intimidating poem — long (17 sections, 121 pages), strange. I’m not sure if I will (or can) read the entire thing, but I decided to start it, at least. I read section 1 the other day, so today I’m starting with section 2. I did this same, starting with section 2, thing when I read Schuyler’s Hymn to Life. Is a new approach?

Starting a poem like this, or maybe any poem, involves a moment of mild panic — what the hell is he talking about? I don’t understand! — then a deep breath and a belief that something will make some sort of sense if I just keep going. One foot in front of the other, step by step, bird by bird, word by word. In the case of section 2, it took a lot of words to find a way in, two whole pages of them.

I read about garbage as the poem of our time, then trash in Florida, then a question about how to write the poem. Finally, at the top of page 20, I found a phrase that I wanted to look up: “the poem/is about the pre-socratic idea of the/dispositional axis from stone to wind, wind/to stone” I think I was compelled to look it up because I took a class on the pre-Socratics almost 30 years ago in college and I wanted to remember what I had forgotten. As I understand it, Ammons is referring to the pre-socratic foundational belief (sloppy shorthand for dispositional axis) in material monism, or that everything can be reduced to one element. Water (Thales), limitlessness (Anaximander), Air (Anaximenes). For Ammons, it’s garbage. Is this right? Some of my research for this comes from Wikipedia, almost none of it from my memory of that Intro to Philosophy class with a wonderful adjunct professor (Corinne Bedecarre) who referred to animals as critters.

Anyway, looking up this line and thinking about garbage as the single element, encouraged me to slow down and wonder about more of Ammons’ words. I started writing in the margins, wandering in more directions with my thoughts. Thinking about Mary Oliver’s eternity, Elizabeth Bishop’s fish eye, and humility as not the same as humiliation (unlike Ammons, it seems).

His discussion of eternity and the other “heaven we mostly/want, though, is this jet-hoveled hell back,/heaven’s daunting asshole,” reminds me of Mary Oliver and her distinction between ordinary and eternal time. Much of his connection between ordinary/garbage time and writing poetry reminds me of Mary Oliver’s The Leaf and the Cloud. I’d like to read them together.

After his line about garbage as the element, and his questions about how he should write this poem — short, a small popping of/duplexes, or long, hunting wide, coming home/late, losing the trail and recovering it, he writes this:

I needn’t
myself hurry into brevity, though a weary reader

might briefly be done: the axis will be clear
enough daubed here and there with a little ink

or fined out into every shade and form of its
revelation

As I read this long poem, I want to remember these lines and look for what’s daubed here and there or fined out into every shade in order to describe his basic principle: garbage has to be the poem of our time or, everything is/comes from garbage.

after the run:

As an aside to hopefully return to: I appreciate the turn to garbage. When I was a professor, teaching queer ethics to grad students, I was intrigued by some theories that focused on shit, both literally and metaphorically as excess, waste, what we consume and expel. I don’t have time to look for sources right now, but maybe I can later?

a few more things to remember:

a new word: macadam, aggregate road surface, compacted stone held together with a binder, like asphalt or concrete…not mixed in. Or, tar, as in tarmac. Nice!
the line that inspired my search: “young earthworms/drowned up in macadam pools” instead of potholes filled with water, macadam pools. I might have to use that with asphalt.

april 6/RUN

5.5 miles
franklin loop
25 degrees

Brr. It’s cold today, with a cold wind. Wore my winter layers: long sleeved green shirt, black running tights, purple jacket, black winter cap, gray buff, black gloves. The 12 mph wind felt stronger, especially when I was running into it. My favorite part of the run: the river. Running east over the franklin bridge, it was blue with a wide strip of sparkling silver. Later, running west over the lake street bridge, it was a deep shiny bronze. When I reached the 36th street parking lot, I walked over to the bluff and admired the silver water glittering through the trees.

Heard a woodpecker, its loud knock echoing through the gorge. Also heard some honking geese. Saw the white flash of plane then the broad wingspan of a flying goose.

Smelled cigarette smoke as I passed by a parks worker in a bright orange vest.

Got a side stitch on the east side. Tried to run though it for a few minutes, then stopped near the railroad trestle to walk.

Parts of this run were difficult. At first, my back, then my left hamstring were a little sore. Later, feeling the wind in my face, a thought flashed: can I really keep running for another 2.5 miles? But most of it felt good, and I’m glad I went out there to be with the river and the birds and the bare ground. And, Mr. Morning! who I was able to good morning! for the first time in at least a month.

the mannequins return!

Last night I got the idea that I wanted to turn my mannequin poem (about the mannequins at the state fair) into a strange, uncanny prose poem and submit to a great literary journal I just discovered, Hex. Before I went out for my run, I was working on it and hoping to think about it while I ran. I probably did have a thought or two, but I don’t remember — too busy trying to stay relaxed and notice the river.

Before the run, I was thinking about the mannequins as delightful Crones, including one with Tammy Faye eyes who presides over an uncanny valley of other past-their-prime mannequins and vanquishes an army of J-Lo looking mannequins that arrive one fateful summer.

I looked up “crone” on the poetry foundation site and found some wonderful lines that I won’t use, but that I’d like to remember:

And when she laughs she makes a sound like things
That children are afraid of on the stairs.
(from Crone/ George O’Neil)

These lines remind me of a favorite memory from when RJP was a little girl — maybe 6 or 7? We were at a local coffee roastery. An old man who worked there was at the roaster and when RJP asked him what he was doing he replied, roasting little girls. I laughed and loved that he said that (it didn’t scare RJP).

And here’s a poem I found last week, part of a series on curse poems, that inspires me:

Misty Eyed Woman At The Carnival Tells Me I’m April’s Fool/ Lemmy Ya’akova

you will live long! it will not always feel like living.
if you put your hands on top of your need
you will remember what it is you are about to do.
this is completely normal behaviour.
these are your mad works, you must protect
your madness! all of it, yes you heard me, is forgivable!
it may or may not be who you want to be,
it is who you are in that moment.
one day the heron will arrive all long legged & blue—
you will know why it chose the water.

april 4/RUN

5.6 miles
hidden falls loop (short)
35 degrees

The first time running the Hidden Falls loop since nov 7th. Windy, overcast, brisk. Off and on, it started to snow sharp pellets. Very glad I brought my buff to cover my ears. The river looked bronze again today, metallic brown with a soft shine. Had a rare sighting of Santa Claus — the tall runner with the longish white beard. Encountered several other runners, including one coming from behind, running much faster than me. I could feel, in my own steps, how much faster his cadence was. Passed the pine tree that fell in last weekend’s snowstorm and had been blocking the trail. Not anymore; someone had moved it off to the side. Heading east over the ford bridge, I heard some gushing water. I stopped to check it out — a cascade seeping out of the limestone! Running above the gorge on east river parkway, I glanced down at the gorge and saw trees with a white floor. Will it melt by next week? Near hidden falls, the wind picked up. I could hear it rushing through the pine trees.

Listened to the wind, my breathing, cars, and fragments of conversation as I ran to hidden falls. Put in “Summer 2014” playlist on the way back.

A breakthrough in my orange poem! This morning I recorded myself reciting a draft of it, then listened to it right before I headed out the door for my run. Not quite finished, but getting closer. Working on word choice and what to title it. In terms of the title, I trying to use it to help with my indirect reference to the story of the butterfly. One option:

When I Can’t See the Orange Buoy on the Lake, I Imagine it’s the Missing Mountain and I’m the Monarch

Yesterday, one of my favorite poetry people, Heather Christle, posted a question about a poem: “If you had to pick 1-6 lines from David Berman’s “Self-Portrait at 28” to share with someone who knew nothing of his work in order to tantalize them into reading the poem in its entirety, what would they be?” Of course I read the whole thing and it was amazing! Can I pick only 1-6 lines out of so many wonderful ones? Nope, but I can pick 3 sets of 1-6 lines:

You see, there is a window by my desk
I stare out when I’m stuck,
though the outdoors has rarely inspired me to write
and I don’t know why I keep staring at it.

I’m just letting the day be what it is:
a place for a large number of things
to gather and interact —
not even a place but an occasion,
a reality for real things.

The hill out my window is still looking beautiful,
suffused in a kind of gold national park light,
and it seems to say,
I’m sorry the world could not possibly
use another poem about Orpheus
but I’m available if you’re not working
on a self-portrait or anything.

Self-Portrait at 28/ David Berman

I know it’s a bad title
but I’m giving it to myself as a gift
on a day nearly canceled by sunlight
when the entire hill is approaching
the ideal of Virginia
brochured with goldenrod and loblolly
and I think “at least I have not woken up
with a bloody knife in my hand”
by then having absently wandered
one hundred yards from the house
while still seated in this chair
with my eyes closed.

It is a certain hill.
The one I imagine when I hear the word “hill,”
and if the apocalypse turns out
to be a world-wide nervous breakdown,
if our five billion minds collapse at once,
well I’d call that a surprise ending
and this hill would still be beautiful,
a place I wouldn’t mind dying
alone or with you.

I am trying to get at something
and I want to talk very plainly to you
so that we are both comforted by the honesty.

You see, there is a window by my desk
I stare out when I’m stuck,
though the outdoors has rarely inspired me to write
and I don’t know why I keep staring at it.

My childhood hasn’t made good material either,
mostly being a mulch of white minutes
with a few stand out moments:
popping tar bubbles on the driveway in the summer,
a certain amount of pride at school
everytime they called it “our sun,”
and playing football when the only play

was “go out long” are what stand out now.
If squeezed for more information
I can remember old clock radios
with flipping metal numbers
and an entree called Surf and Turf.

As a way of getting in touch with my origins,
every night I set the alarm clock
for the time I was born, so that waking up
becomes a historical reenactment

and the first thing I do
is take a reading of the day
and try to flow with it,
like when you’re riding a mechanical bull
and you strain to learn the pattern quickly
so you don’t inadvertently resist it.

II.

I can’t remember being born
and no one else can remember it either
even the doctor who I met years later
at a cocktail party.

It’s one of the little disappointments
that makes you think about getting away,
going to Holly Springs or Coral Gables
and taking a room on the square
with a landlady whose hands are scored
by disinfectant, telling the people you meet
that you are from Alaska, and listen
to what they have to say about Alaska
until you have learned much more about Alaska
than you ever will about Holly Springs or Coral Gables.

Sometimes I’m buying a newspaper
in a strange city and think
“I am about to learn what it’s like to live here.”
Oftentimes there’s a news item
about the complaints of homeowners
who live beside the airport
and I realize that I read an article
on this subject nearly once a year
and always receive the same image:

I am in bed late at night
in my house near the airport
listening to the jets fly overhead,
a strange wife sleeping beside me.
In my mind the bedroom is an amalgamation
of various cold medicine commercial sets
(there is always a box of tissue on the nightstand).

I know these recurring news articles are clues,
flaws in the design, though I haven’t figured out
how to string them together yet.
But I’m noticing that the same people
are dying over and over again,
for instance, Minnie Pearl
who died this year
for the fourth time in four years.

III.

Today is the first day of Lent
and once again I’m not really sure what it is.
How many more years will I let pass
before I take the trouble to ask someone?

It reminds me of this morning
when you were getting ready for work.
I was sitting by the space heater,
numbly watching you dress,
and when you asked why I never wear a robe
I had so many good reasons
I didn’t know where to begin.

If you were cool in high school
you didn’t ask too many questions.
You could tell who’d been to last night’s
big metal concert by the new t-shirts in the hallways.
You didn’t have to ask
and that’s what cool was:
the ability to deduce,
to know without asking.
And the pressure to simulate coolness
means not asking when you don’t know,
which is why kids grow ever more stupid.

A yearbook’s endpages, filled with promises
to stay in touch, stand as proof of the uselessness
of a teenager’s promise. Not like I’m dying
for a letter from the class stoner
ten years on but…

Do you remember the way the girls
would call out “love you!”
conveniently leaving out the “I”
as if they didn’t want to commit
to their own declaration.

I agree that the “I” is a pretty heavy concept
and hope you won’t get uncomfortable
if I should go into some deeper stuff here.

IV.

There are things I’ve given up on
like recording funny answering-machine messages.
It’s part of growing older
and the human race as a group
has matured along the same lines.
It seems our comedy dates the quickest.
If you laugh out loud at Shakespeare’s jokes
I hope you won’t be insulted
if I say you’re trying too hard.
Even sketches from the original Saturday Night Live
seem slow-witted and obvious now.

It’s just that our advances are irrepressible.
Nowadays little kids can’t even set up lemonade stands.
It makes people too self-conscious about the past,
though try explaining that to a kid.

I’m not saying it should be this way.

All this new technology
will eventually give us new feelings
that will never completely displace the old ones,
leaving everyone feeling quite nervous
and split in two.

We will travel to Mars
even as folks on Earth
are still ripping open potato chip
bags with their teeth.
Why? I don’t have the time or intelligence
to make all the connections,
like my friend Gordon
(this is a true story)
who, having grown up in Braintree, Massachusetts,
had never pictured a brain snagged in a tree
until I brought it up.
He’d never broken the name down to its parts.
By then it was too late.
He had moved to Coral Gables.

I’m watching my dog have nightmares,
twitching and whining on the office floor,
and I try to imagine what beast
has cornered him in the meadow
where his dreams are set.

I’m just letting the day be what it is:
a place for a large number of things
to gather and interact —
not even a place but an occasion,
a reality for real things.

Friends warned me not to get too psychedelic
or religious with this piece:
“they won’t accept it if it’s too psychedelic
or religious,” but these are valid topics
and I’m the one with the dog twitching on the floor,
possibly dreaming of me,
that part of me that would beat a dog
for no good reason,
no reason that a dog could see.

I am trying to get at something so simple
that I have to talk plainly
so the words don’t disfigure it,
and if it turns out that what I say is untrue,
then at least let it be harmless
like a leaky boat in the reeds
that is bothering no one.

VI.

I can’t trust the accuracy of my own memories,
many of them having blended with sentimental
telephone and margarine commercials,
plainly ruined by Madison Avenue,
though no one seems to call the advertising world
“Madison Avenue” anymore. Have they moved?
I need an update on this.

But first I have some business to take care of.

I walked out to the hill behind our house
which looks positively Alaskan today,
and it would be easier to explain this
if I had a picture to show you,
but I was with our young dog
and he was running through the tall grass
like running through the tall grass
is all of life together,
until a bird calls or he finds a beer can
and that thing fills all the space in his head.

You see,
his mind can only hold one thought at a time
and when he finally hears me call his name
he looks up and cocks his head.
For a single moment
my voice is everything:

Self-portrait at 28.

Weather update: As I sit at my desk watching a frantic squirrel run by and the reflection of branches swaying in the wind on the glass top of my desk, I’m struck by the strange weather. Hail, then sun, then thunder, then quiet. This cycle has happened a few times already.

april 3/WALKYARD WORK

walk: 40 minutes
neighborhood with Scott and Delia
40 degrees

Feeling springier every day. Scott and I discussed how this last snow on Friday moved the twin cities up to the 3rd snowiest winter in history. Too much snow. It’s melting fast. Will everything be green by the end of next week, when we’re supposed to have a stretch of 50s and 60s? As we walked through the neighborhood, we looked at the colors of all of the houses; we’re getting our house repainted next month and trying to decide on which dark gray and whether to have a raspberry red, parakeet green, or copper harbor orange door. Mostly, I can’t really see the color on the door, but I’m fine with any of these three. It would seem fitting, though, to paint the door orange since I’m so obsessed with the color. And, copper harbor orange — where I was born in the UP!

Speaking of orange, I’m still working on my orange poem. Such a struggle. Not quite able to find the way in yet. For inspiration, I decided to search for orange songs, settled on Frank Ocean’s channel ORANGE. Will it help or distract?

Also trying to take a different approach to this poem. In my notes and on this log a few days ago, I wrote I orbit the orange. In terms of open water swimming, this is literally true. I loop around the orange buoys all summer — or 5-6 times a week, more than 100 loops. It is also true as a metaphor: in trying to write about the color orange, I circle around it again and again, wanting to make sense of what orange means to me, searching for ways to be able to see it or to sense it or to find a way around or through it when seeing it is not possible. This orbiting also provides one definition for poetry, which I also wrote about last week:

One thing poetry is about is orbiting things that you can’t quite find the words to describe or pin down with meaning. Becoming obsessed with them. Writing around them again and again.
log entry from march 31, 2023

Later, I wrote in my notes a possible title for an orange poem, Orange, an ars poetica. Orange as more than a color, but a method, the void that my words are trying to encircle. Not white space or blank space on a page, but orange space, orange breaths, an orange too full to rhyme or offer back an echo. A source, a center, the place where I practice learning to be without seeing or to see in new ways.

I want to channel the orange, conjure it into existence, inhabit its invisible space, learn to see it new ways.

Think citrus fruit leaves in late fall turmeric
Think cheese puffs Planters cheese balls extra sharp cheddar cheese
Think candied slices from the Sears candy counter sherbet Betty Crocker au gratin potatoes
Think surprise pumpkins growing in the back yard candy corn pumpkins before a swim meet
Think construction cones road closed signs for races spray paint around cracks in the asphalt
Think almost red 1974 VW bugs
Think buoys butterflies missing mountains
Think orange orange orange orange orange

yard work: 30 minutes
backyard
43 degrees

After all the discussion about yard work (Schuyler) and everyday chores (Ammons), I decided to document my yard work today. While Scott tried to figure out a way to straighten are tall trees (arborvitae) which are leaning too far to stage left (if you’re looking from inside the house and out the window), I was on poop patrol. In past winters, I’ve tried to stay on top of this relentless task, watching where Delia pooped and digging it out of the snow. Not this year. Did I ever pick it up? I don’t think so. As a result, the yard is filled with poop, and because everything is thawing now, it’s soggy, gooey poop. Gross, I guess. It doesn’t really bother me. I filled up entire Target plastic bag with poop, then decided I might wait until it all dries out a bit more. At one point, in awe of the amount of poop on the ground, I called out to Scott without thinking, Holy shit! Literally.

I looked through a few more A. R. Ammons poems this morning, but they were all so long. Garbage should be arriving in the mail today, so I’ll wait for that to study him more. Instead, here’s a great poem by Gary Snyder from is collection Riprap, which I’ve been thinking of buying for a few years now.

Thin Ice/ Gary Synder

Walking in February
A warm day after a long freeze
On an old logging road
Below Sumas Mountain
Cut a walking stick of alder,
Looked down through clouds
On wet fields of the Nooksack—
And stepped on the ice
Of a frozen pool across the road.
It creaked
The white air under
Sprang away, long cracks
Shot out in the black,
My cleated mountain boots
Slipped on the hard slick
—like thin ice—the sudden
Feel of an old phrase made real—
Instant of frozen leaf,
Icewater, and staff in hand.
“Like walking on thin ice—”
I yelled back to a friend,
It broke and I dropped
Eight inches in

april 2/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
38 degrees
99% clear path

Yesterday we woke up to more than 1/2 foot (7 inches?) of wet, heavy snow. I opened the curtain and our service berry bush, which looks more like a tree to me, was so weighed down with snow that it drooped over the deck and blocked the steps down to the yard. Back by the garage, the four tall, narrow trees were bent over, looking like an ice spider. Scott took a video:

the aftermath of April snow

Of course, because this is April snow, it was all melted by the time I went out for a run this morning around 10:30. Hooray! By the end of next week, it might be close to 60. I am ready for spring.

Before I went out for my run, I read this poem by A. R. Ammons:

Grassy Sound/ A. R. Ammons

It occurred to me there are no sharp corners
in the wind
and I was very glad to think
I had so close a neighbor
to my thoughts but decided to sleep before
inquiring

The next morning I got up early
and after yesterday had come
clear again went
down to the salt marshes
to talk with
the straight wind there
I have observed I said
your formlessness
and am

enchanted to know how
you manage loose to be
so influential

The wind came as grassy sound
and between its
grassy teeth
spoke words said with grass
and read itself
on tidal creeks as on
the screens of oscilloscopes
A heron opposing
it rose wing to wind

turned and glided to another creek
so I named a body of water
Grassy Sound
and came home dissatisfied there
had been no direct reply
but rubbed with my soul an
apple to eat
till it shone

some favorite lines:
there are no sharp corners in the wind
after yesterday had come clear again
wind as grassy sound with grassy teeth speaking grassy words
it rose wing to wind

I gave myself a task for my run on a windy (12 mph) day: observe how the wind speaks. I tried, but all I could hear was the wind rushing past my ears as I ran east toward the river. It didn’t speak as grass or swaying trees or wind chimes, just hissing whispers in my ears. By the time I reached the river I had already forgotten the task.

Running south to the falls, I listened to the birds, shuffling feet, and the fragment of a conversation that I hoped to remember, but have forgotten. On the way back, I put in a Taylor Swift playlist.

10 Things I Noticed

the cardinal’s torpedoed call (a line from Didi Jackson’s “Listen”), not coming in slow waves, not coming in waves at all, but one rapid trill — too many notes coming too fast to count
the river, a beautiful shiny bronze
right after I reached the river, encountering 2 walkers pushing strollers, taking up almost the entire path
at least 2 fat tires
almost everywhere, the path was clear and dry, except for at the double-bridge where it was almost completely covered with lumpy snow
a big pine tree down at locks and dam #1, blocking the running path. As I ducked under it, I noticed where it the trunk had split — was that the only tree that was down? Had there been more, or had they already cleared them?
at the falls, someone was driving a giant snowblower and shooting snow off to the side of the trail. I could see a blur of white, hear the whirr of the snow flying through the air
I know I stopped to look at the falls, but I can’t remember what it looked like, or how it sounded
at least one runner (male) in shorts
no mud or dirt or bare grass, everything covered (again) in snow

Back to Ammons’ poem:

oscilloscopes a device for viewing oscillations, as of electrical voltage or current, by a display on the screen of a cathode ray tube.

I’m thinking about how the narrator in Ammons’ poem is dissatisfied that the wind didn’t answer his question directly. My thought, did you really expect the wind to reveal its secrets? Such arrogance! Then I thought about a poem I read the other day by Denise Levertov:

The Secret/ Denise Levertov

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

I love the contrast between the Ammons and Levertov poems, their different perspectives on indirect communication — Ammons’ disappointed arrogance, Levertov’s grateful delight. Here, I’m on team Levertov. How boring to receive a direct, final answer. Much better to perceive incomplete answers that are soon forgotten and must be discovered again and again.

I’ll forgive Ammons for his arrogance though because of his wonderful image of the wind speaking as/with/through grass. I’d like to learn to speak as grass too or learn to listen for it. And, sometime when I’m running beside a field of tall grass, I’d like to recite his beautiful lines back to it:

The wind came as grassy sound
and between its
grassy teeth
spoke words said with grass

march 31/WALKRUN

walk: 20 minutes
around the block with Delia
36 degrees
light rain with snow coming later

A chance for 6-10 inches of snow later tonight. Before that, rain and thunderstorms. Maybe the snow won’t come? Decided to take Delia out for a quick walk before the rain began falling more heavily. The boulevards are still buried in walls of gray, cratered snow, but the alley is finally clear and our backyard is as much mud as it is snow.

run: 3.15 miles
north/lake street bridge/south
37 degrees

A few hours after my walk. Wasn’t planning to run, but when it stopped raining, I decided this was my chance before the paths are covered in snow and ice again. As always, I’m glad I decided to go. Everything was wet and windy. Big puddles, little puddles, deep puddles. The river seemed to be preparing itself for more weather. Noticed a few runners and walkers, but not too many.

Saw orange everywhere. Orange signs, orange construction cones, dead orange leaves.

Heard the wind, my headphones case banging around in my zipped purple pocket, cars. Smelled smoke from a fireplace. Noticed another new house going up. Soon, the neighborhood will be overrun with the same stupid over-sized houses on every block. Boo.

Near the end of the run, I thought about orange and a phrase popped into my head: keep orbiting around the orange, which means: when you can’t, like me, see the orange, look for what’s happening around where it should be. Is there movement, people acting oddly, anything unusual near a spot where you think orange is? This orbiting works on a literal level, but it’s also more. One thing poetry is about is orbiting things that you can’t quite find the words to describe or pin down with meaning. Becoming obsessed with them. Writing around them again and again. This reminded me of the Frank O’Hara poem about orange, “Why I Am Not a Painter,” and the lines:

One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES.

A possible title for my poem: Orange, an ars poetica Excellent!

A. R. Ammons

Yesterday, i found, read, and posted a wonderful poem by Elizabeth Bishop, “The End of March,” which reminded me of some lines from an A. R. Ammons poem, “Corsons Inlet,” that I’ve admired for some time. So today I’ve started spending some more time with Ammons. I just ordered his 1993 long poem, Garbage, and re-read a New Yorker article that I first read when it came out in 2017. The title of the article, “The Great American Poet of Daily Chores,” makes me think of James Schuyler and all his talk of laundry and yard work and washing dishes in “Hymn to Life.”

A book of Ammons that I haven’t ordered yet, but I might, is The Really Short Poems of A. R. Ammons. Here’s a few poems from it that I especially like:

Weathering/ A. R. Ammons

A day without rain is like
a day without sunshine.

Mirrorment/ A. R. Ammons

Birds are flowers flying
and flowers perched birds.

Equilibrium/ A. R. Ammons

If you walk back
and forth

through a puddle pretty
soon

you wet the whole
driveway but of

course dry
the puddle up.

And here are two Ammons’ poems I found in the New Yorker article:

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.

Love how the line breaks — still the wind still. Also, the strange idea of proving the invisible wind’s existence, which made me think of a poem I’m writing about orange and my faith in it, even though I rarely see it. This faith — an orange faith — is different than a belief in the wind. The wind is invisible to everyone, but most people can see orange, don’t need to believe in it the way I do. And the evidence I have for orange’s existence is less straightforward than evidence of the wind. These lines perhaps only make sense to me right now, but they’re a start of something interesting.

Poetics/ A. R. Ammons

I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:

I look for the forms
things want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:

not the shape on paper — though
that, too — but the
uninterfering means on paper:

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours.

Wind-glittering, possibility, being available to any shape summoning itself. Love these ideas!

march 30/WALKRUN

walk: 45 minues
neighborhood, with Delia the dog
30 degrees

Took Delia out for a walk around the neighborhood. North, then east past Cooper School and the giant mounds of snow plowed somewhere else then deposited on this field. Past the house that had been half-finished then abandoned a few years ago and is now finished and on the market for almost $900,000. Past the new Minnehaha Academy, which replaced the old one that blew up a few summers ago because of a gas leak — I heard it happen when I was out in my backyard mowing the lawn. Such a strange, loud BOOM!

Then south near the spot where some of the best fall color trees used to reside until they were marked for death with orange spray paint then chopped down — the brightest, most wonderful yellow every year. Under the huge, towering trio of cottonwood trees — the Cottonwood 3. Past the house with the oddly terraced lawn and the big windows, rarely covered with curtains or blinds in the evening so we were able to see, when returning by car in the evening from a baseball game or a clarinet recital, all the way to the back wall where letters hung on a shelf spelling out a word that none of us — not me or Scott, RJP or FWA — could ever decipher.

West, past the house with the wonderful butterfly garden on the boulevard, and the house that used to string bright lights around their giant — higher than the house — fir tree every winter. Was 2022/23 the first year they didn’t? Past the house with the bushes that, the first Christmas we lived in this neighborhood suddenly stopped their exuberant chatter when we walked by and Scott started talking. I noticed that those same bushes, birdless today, were a strange orangey, yellowy green. My guess is that they are dying, but maybe it’s just new growth that is confused by the return of the cold winter weather. Past the house that has one of the best gardens in the neighborhood and where I saw/heard someone giving a backyard cello lesson during the first year of the pandemic.

When we started the walk, the sky was blue and it was bright enough for sunglasses. Within a few blocks the sky was a grayish white. Still, quiet, no one around. Thought some more about color and how I still (mostly) see it, but that it doesn’t mean much anymore. It doesn’t mean nothing, just not much (this line is inspired by a line from the Bishop poem below that I read before my walk and run). Color doesn’t brighten or enhance what I see. Everything is soft and subdued. About halfway through the walk, I stopped to record some of my thoughts, including:

orange, which has been the most important color for me practically, doesn’t matter as much anymore
orange sounds (inspired by hearing some dead orange leaves rustling in the wind): sizzle, crackle
The only color that matters to me now is the silver flash of the bottom of the lifeguard’s boat on the other side of the lake; I use the silver flash for navigating during open swim

run: 3.1 miles
turkey hollow
33 degrees

While walking, I noticed at least 3 people running, which inspired me to go out there myself after I dropped Delia off at home. I felt a little stiff as I ran. My hip again? Otherwise, the run was fine. Ran turkey hollow but didn’t see any turkeys. Ran most of it without headphones. Put in a Taylor Swift playlist for the last mile. Was able to run on the walking path a lot of the time. Noticed more people heading below to the Winchell Trail. Sped up to pass a walker and a dog moving fast. Heard some sharp dog barks, saw some car headlights, their reflections flashing on a window.

(before the run)

This poem popped up on my twitter feed this morning. I was drawn to it because of its description of a walk — it’s a walk poem! Also: her use of color and of the phrase, “nothing much,” and how marvelously sets up the scene in the first stanza.

The End Of March/ Elizabeth Bishop (June 1974)

For John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read: Duxbury

It was cold and windy, scarcely the day
to take a walk on that long beach
Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,
indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,
seabirds in ones or twos.
The rackety, icy, offshore wind
numbed our faces on one side;
disrupted the formation
of a lone flight of Canada geese;
and blew back the low, inaudible rollers
in upright, steely mist.

The sky was darker than the water
–it was the color of mutton-fat jade.
Along the wet sand, in rubber boots, we followed
a track of big dog-prints (so big
they were more like lion-prints). Then we came on
lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string,
looping up to the tide-line, down to the water,
over and over. Finally, they did end:
a thick white snarl, man-size, awash,
rising on every wave, a sodden ghost,
falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost…
A kite string?–But no kite.

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house,
my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box
set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?),
protected from spring tides by a palisade
of–are they railroad ties?
(Many things about this place are dubious.)
I’d like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.
At night, a grog a l’américaine.
I’d blaze it with a kitchen match
and lovely diaphanous blue flame
would waver, doubled in the window.
There must be a stove; there is a chimney,
askew, but braced with wires,
and electricity, possibly
–at least, at the back another wire
limply leashes the whole affair
to something off behind the dunes.
A light to read by–perfect! But–impossible.
And that day the wind was much too cold
even to get that far,
and of course the house was boarded up.

On the way back our faces froze on the other side.
The sun came out for just a minute.
For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand,
the drab, damp, scattered stones
were multi-colored,
and all those high enough threw out long shadows,
individual shadows, then pulled them in again.
They could have been teasing the lion sun,
except that now he was behind them
–a sun who’d walked the beach the last low tide,
making those big, majestic paw-prints,
who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.

colors

The sky was darker than the water
–it was the color of mutton-fat jade.
Mutton-fat jade = white to pale yellow, so it must refer to the color of the water, not the sky.
wet, white string
my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box
set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?)
diaphanous blue flame
would waver, doubled in the window
the drab, damp, scattered stones
were multi-colored

a line I like

I’d like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much,

Thinking about the difference between nothing and nothing much. Nothing seems bigger and grander, more dramatic — too dramatic. Is it even possible to do nothing and still be alive? I like nothing much. There’s nothing grand or dramatic about it, yet it still undercuts the idea that we should be Doing Something! all the time. Nothing much is mundane, routine. You’ve done some things but nothing special or worth making a big deal out of.

I like this poem. Even so, the more I read it the darker and heavier it seems. The gross colors (mutton fat jade? boiled artichoke?), the icy wind, everything gone or almost beyond repair. And here’s something else I just realized: according to an essay I read about this poem, it was written after a visit in June. June! (And no random June, but June of 1974, the month and year I was born.)

In June of 1974 Elizabeth Bishop and her partner Alice Methfessel stayed at the Duxbury, Massachusetts beach house belonging to Bishop’s friends John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read. Bishop reported that she initially wrote “The End of March” as a kind of thank-you note to her friends (Biele 55).
“The End of March”: Bishop and Stevens on the Sublime—Union or Relation?

If Duxbury, Massachusetts is anything like the UP (where I was born and visited a lot in the summer until the early 2000s), Bishop could be describing a summer’s day. Icy wind, too cold to walk for long, sunless? Yuck.

In the article I ~~read~~ skimmed, the author puts Bishops’ poem into conversation with Wallace Stevens, specifically his poem, “The Sun this March” but also other poems of his. I kept thinking about it in relation to A. R. Ammons’ “Corsons Inlet”, another walk poem by the sea. It’s long, so here’s just the opening:

I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning
to the sea,
then turned right along
the surf
rounded a naked headland
and returned

along the inlet shore:

it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high,
crisp in the running sand,
some breakthroughs of sun
but after a bit

continuous overcast:

the walk liberating, I was released from forms,
from the perpendiculars,
straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds
of thought
into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends
of sight:

Both poems have wind and only a little bit of sun. Ammons seems warmer, at least at the beginning with its muggy sun and crisp wind. And both involve not doing much. Here’s how Ammons concludes the poem:

I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will
not run to that easy victory:
still around the looser, wider forces work:
I will try
to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening
scope, but enjoying the freedom that
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

Their different perspectives on how a walk, and the world by the sea that they move through, inspire them and their writing is fascinating to me. Bishops is narrow and restraining and finished?, while Ammons is all over the place and almost too free, too formless. And, it’s alive, new, continuously renewed day after day.

I’ve wanted to study A.R. Ammons poetry for a few years now. I think finding the Bishop poem, then being reminded of Ammons, is the nudge I need to make this a mini-project! I’ll end March/begin April with Ammons!

march 29/RUN

5.3 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
18 degrees

Yes, 18 degrees. Brr. Yesterday the weather app predicted 20 inches of snow for next week. Thankfully today it’s predicting 2 inches of rain instead. Who knows what will actually fall (please, please, no snow!).

A nice run. Mostly relaxed, although my left hip/knee was a little tight. No headphones for the first 3 miles, then a playlist for the last 2.

Noticed the river — open and brown just off to the side as I ran down Franklin hill, a bright blue far off in front of me. Also noticed an orange sign announcing a road closure for a race this weekend at the bottom of the hill and to the left. I kept moving my eyes — straight ahead, then off to the right, off to the left — to see how that would change what I saw. Not much, although the orange did seem to disappear in my peripheral a few times. Strange.

Heard the knocking of a woodpecker on some dead wood in the gorge. Ran on more of the walking path. Shuffled on some grit. Felt a cold wind on my face.

Look!

Just restarting my run near the top of the hill, a woman stopped me and asked if I wanted to see a baby screech owl. It was 10 or 12 feet up in a small hollow in a tree. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to see it, but I did! It looked like a little bat to me. I thanked the woman for stopping to show it to me, wished her a great morning, then began running again with a big smile on my face. I have wanted to stop and answer someone’s kind look! for some time now, but I’ve never managed to do it; I’ve just kept running, too intent on keeping moving. Today I stopped and it felt good.

Happy Birthday to my 2 wonderful kids, FWA (20) and RJP (17), born on the same day 3 years apart. I rarely mention their birthdays on my blogs — I just spent the last 5 minutes looking through Trouble, Story, and RUN! and found only 2 instances of it. It’s hard to believe that I started this log, and found poetry again, when FWA was 14 and RJP 11.

before the run

I’m still trying to work on a series of color poems. Right now: orange, later in May: green. It’s a lot of showing up, sitting in front of the page, trying to find a way into ideas about orange as the color that takes up the most space in my practical life. Orange, everywhere. Rarely bright orange — no pops of vermillion or citrus — but orange as usually (not always) the only color that registers as color, something other than gray or dark. In the midst of trying to figure this out, I returned to an essay I remembered reading last year (see: april 16, 2022) about poetry and the void. I thought of it because so much of seeing orange, especially when swimming across the lake in the summer, is about feeling its absence.

sometimes when I’m swimming across the lake I feel a presence that I can’t see — the idea of orange, a hulking shape…I look but nothing is there…yet, I feel its absence…something is there — the trees don’t look quite right

june 26, 2022: hardly ever saw the orange of the orange buoy, mostly just a hulking shape or a void surrounded by a “normal” view — there was no buoy, just an empty space that disrupted the expanse of sky and trees.
from my notes for Orange

Elisa Gabbert offers this interesting line about poetry:

I think poetry leaves something out. All texts leave something out, of course — otherwise they’d be infinite — but most of the time, more is left out of a poem.
The Shape of the Void: Toward a Definition of Poetry/Elisa Gabbert

At this point, I was planning to write more, but it was already 10:45 and I wanted to go out for a run before it got much later, so I stopped. If I had kept writing, I would have included more from Gabbert, like this:

Verse, by forcing more white space on the page, is constantly reminding you of what’s not there. This absence of something, this hyper-present absence, is why prose poems take up less space than other prose forms; the longer they get, the less they feel like poems. It’s why fragments are automatically poetic: Erasure turns prose into poems. It’s why any text that’s alluringly cryptic or elusive — a road sign, assembly instructions — is described as poetic. The poetic is not merely beauty in language, but beauty in incoherence, in resistance to common sense. The missingness of poetry slows readers down, making them search for what can’t be found.

The hyper-present absence of something (orange orange everywhere) as poetry. Its inability to reveal itself in “normal” and straightforward ways to me (as in: look with my eyes and see orange). Its missingness makes me notice/attend to it even more.

In the next line, Gabbert suggests that the frustration of incoherence, mystery, not being able to make sense of something is alluring, erotic. It’s why many of us are drawn to poetry — to slow down, notice, get the chance to dwell in the unknown. Before I left for my run, I was thinking about how my perspective is slightly different. I don’t need to be encouraged to slow down or given the chance to embrace incoherence, resist common sense. Because of failing vision and my overworked brain, I am already slow. Much of what I see is incoherent — or never quite coherent. Common sense ideas of how we see or how to be in the world have already been upended for me. I see poetry, and its way of navigating or negotiating or communicating/finding meaning not as desirable, but as necessary, practical, useful, a way to be that speaks to where I already am.

during the run

I started out thinking about the hyper-presence of an absence as I ran in terms of the open space of the gorge, but these thoughts didn’t last long. I became distracted by my effort. Did I ever return to them? If I did, I can’t remember.

after the run

After highlighting two delightful letters by poets Emily Dickinson and Rainer Marie Rilke, Gabbert writes:

In these letter-poems, poetry reveals itself as more a mode of writing, a mode of thinking, even a mode of being, than a genre. The poem is not the only unit of poetry; poetic lines in isolation are still poetry. The poem is a vessel; poetry is liquid.

Poetry as a mode of writing, thinking, being. Made of more than just poems. Yes! I do feel that often my way of navigating losing my vision, finding a way to be when I cannot see, is through the approach of poetry and embracing uncertainty and the unknown.

The architect Christopher Alexander thought big plate glass windows were a mistake, because “they alienate us from the view”: “The smaller the windows are, and the smaller the panes are, the more intensely windows help connect us with what is on the other side. This is an important paradox.” To state the Forsterian obvious again, adding breaks to a paragraph is not always going to make an interesting poem — but most poets don’t write that way. They 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.

To write, to think, to be in the company of the void — the absence that leaves a residue or that can’t be seen but is always felt.

This idea of communicating nothing (with nothing not as no thing but as something in and of itself) reminds me of something else I read earlier this year about “making nothing happen” but couldn’t remember where I had read it. It took me almost an hour to track it down yesterday. The “make nothing happen” is in W. H. Auden poem for Yeats:

from In Memory of W. B. Yeats/ W. H. Auden

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

And the reading about it comes from Ross Gay and one of his incitements in Inciting Joy, which I first read as an essay for the October 2022 issue of Poetry:

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard conversations about W. H. Auden’s famous line from his poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”: “poetry makes nothing happen.”…At some point, probably I heard someone else say it,⁷ it occurred to me that all these poets, and all these conversations, were misreading Auden’s line, and that he was really talking about (inasmuch as a poem is him talking about something) what poetry makes, the sometimes product or effect or wake or artifact of poetry, of a poem. Granted the line feels emphatic, grand, provocative even—seriously, I can’t tell you how many tweed-jacketed refutations to Auden’s line I have endured; no one has ever explained to me the elbow patch—but what the line makes made is not nothing, but nothing happening. Or rather, nothing happening. The happening it makes is nothing. In other words, a poem, or poetry, can stop time, or so-called time at least. First of all, what a good reminder it is that a poem is an action, and as Auden has it, a powerful one, too. Secondly, and not for nothing, this is one of the suite of poems Auden wrote in the late thirties and early forties, a period when one might have wanted so-called time—the clock, the airplanes, the trains, the perfectly diabolical synchronous goosestep rhythm of time itself—to stop.
Out of Time (Time: The Fourth Incitement)/ Ross Gay

He adds:

you, too, might’ve been praying for a way to stop the march of so-called time, and poems, sometimes, might do that. Poems are made of lines, which are actually breaths, and so the poem’s rhythms, its time, is at the scale and pace and tempo of the body, the tempo of our bodies lit with our dying. And poems are communicated, ultimately, body to body, voice to ear, heart to heart.⁹ Even if those hearts are not next to one another, in space or time. It makes them so. All of which is to say a poem might bring time back to its bodily, its earthly proportions. Poetry might make nothing happen. Inside of which anything can happen, maybe most dangerously, our actual fealties, our actual devotions and obligations, which is to the most rambunctious, mongrel, inconceivable assemblage of each other we could imagine.

Perhaps I’m wandering too far away from the orange void here? Poetry as speaking the void, making Nothing happen, existing outside of the normal/rational/obvious/taken-for-granted. Gay’s explicit connection to time and against capitalism resonates deeply for me. Stop those clocks, those planes, that machinery we’re using to destroy the planet, the future.

The poem’s lines as breaths, as bodily rhythms. In a poem about the color gray I mentioned gray breaths. What are orange breaths? Orange time, orange rhythm?Orange devotions and obligations?

One last thing, and a return to Gabbert’s essay. Gabbert claims that the mystery of poetry is not simply metaphor or making things strange, but how we use or don’t use language to shape our relationship to the Void. And, she suggests it 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 no longer visible orange buoy is still there too.

added a few hours later: Trying to find a source for this cool butterfly fact, I discovered that it was written about in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

Monarchs are “tough and powerful, as butterflies go.” They fly over Lake Superior without resting; in fact, observers there have discovered a curious thing. Instead of flying directly south, the monarchs crossing high over the water take an inexplicable turn towards the east. Then when they reach an invisible point, they all veer south again. Each successive swarm repeats this mysterious dogleg movement, year after year. Entomologists actually think that the butterflies might be “remembering” the position of a long-gone, looming glacier. In another book I read that geologists think that Lake Superior marks the site of the highest mountain that ever existed on this continent. I don’t know. I’d like to see it. Or I’d like to be it, to feel when to turn.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, page 253-254 in the 1988 edition

Even as I’m disappointed that Dillard didn’t offer any sources for her facts here, I LOVE her last lines: I don’t know. I’d like to see it. Or I’d like to be it to feel when to turn. Not to see, but to be it, to feel it. Wow — this idea is going in my orange poem, for sure. Not to see orange, but to be it, or to feel when to turn around it. I do feel that, but can I ever put it into words?

march 27/RUN

5 miles
veterans’ home loop
32 degrees

Feeling tired after these 5 miles. Is it because this is the 5th day in a row that I’ve run, or because I waited until 11:00 to start, or because there was a cold wind? Probably it was because of all 3. Sitting here, 30 minutes after I finished, at my warm desk, my ears are still burning from the cold.

Still glad I ran. I don’t remember hearing the falls, but I do remember admiring the beautiful river and thinking it looked almost bronze in the sun and with all the brown that’s replacing the white snow.

Running south, I listened to my headphones case banging in my pocket, kids playing on the school playground, grit under my feet, and some woman tell another that she needed to fill out some paperwork for her 401k. At the halfway point, in Wabun park, I stopped and put in a playlist, Summer 2020.

Image of the day to remember

Running across the high bridge that leads to the Veterans’ Home peninsula, I looked down for my shadow. My first glance was of a big dark spot on the gorge floor that almost looked like my shape from the side– my shadow? Nope, too big and too far down. Even though it wasn’t actually my Shadow, I like imagining that she was that big and that close to the creek, listening to the rushing water.

The other day I checked out Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets and I’ve been (definitely not slowly enough) reading through the sonnets. So painfully ugly and beautiful and raw, and necessary, I think, to be read at least once all together. Wow! I’ve already posted a few of them on this log over the past year. Here’s one for today:

[from this bench I like to call my bench]/ Diane Seuss

From this bench I like to call my bench I sit
and watch my tree which is not my tree, no one’s
tree, the quiet! Except for barn swallows which are
not loud birds, how many exclamation points can I
get away with in this life, who was it who said only two
or maybe seven, Bishop? Marianne Moore? Either way
the world is capable of quiet if everyone stays indoors
and no jet planes, my tree, it just stands there
in the middle of everything in a meadow on the bay
looking what Barthes called “adorable,” then I drove
the mile west to the sea which had decided to be loud
that day, the sunset, oh, ragged and bloody as a piece
of raw meat in the jaws of some big golden carnivore,
and I cried a little, for none of it! none of it will last!

After reading this sonnet, I tried unsuccessfully to pin down the exclamation point line — was it Bishop or Moore? Still not sure. In the process of searching, I found some interesting stuff about Emily Dickinson and exclamation points, including that she used 384 in her writing! Does there need to be a limit on the number of exclamation points we use — maybe in writing, but in life? I hope not. When I was an academic, and writing in my TROUBLE blog, I loved the question mark. It was, by far, my favorite form of punctuation. I still love it, but now it’s rivaled by the exclamation point. Sure, I like to wonder about things (?), but I also like to be in wonder of them (!). Right now I can’t imagine it, but there could be a time when I love the period too, although that seems impossible, which means it will definitely happen.

I couldn’t find the exclamation point source, but I think I found the Barthes quote for adorable. I found it on Goodreads:

Adorable
Yet, at the same time that adorable says everything, it also says what is lacking in everything.

I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds, but of these hundreds, I love only one.

The choice, so vigorous that it retains only the Unique, constitutes, it is said, the difference between the analytical transference and the amorous transference; one is universal, the other specific. It has taken many accidents, many surprising coincidences (and perhaps many efforts), for me to find the Image which, out of thousand, suits my desire.

Herein a great enigma, to which I shall never possess the key: why is it that I desire so-and-so? Why is it that I desire so-and-so lastingly, longingly? It is the whole so-and-so I desire.

In that case, what is it in this loved body which has the vocation of a fetish for me? what perhaps incredibly tenuous portion — what accident? The way a nail is cut, a tooth broken slightly aslant, a lock of hair, a way of spreading fingers while talking, while smoking? About all these folds of the body, I want to say that they are adorable. Adorable means: this is my desire, insofar as it is unique.

The adorable is what is adorable. Or again, I adore you because you are adorable, I love you because I love you
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

I haven’t studied sonnets. Well, early on, I wrote one for a class, but I haven’t studied them closely. Not Shakespearean sonnets, or Terrence Hayes’ “American Sonnet for my past and future Assassin.” Maybe I should. I know that the basic form includes 14 lines and a volta. A volta is a turn of thought. I think Seuss’s ragged and bloody sunset is the volta in this poem.

3.85 milesmarshall loop42 degrees