Tag: 10 things

feb 14/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
18 degrees / feels like 6

The bike path was clear and not crowded. The air was cold. I heard a few birds, kids on the playground, dry leaves still on the trees imitating the waterfall. My legs felt heavy, my lower back a little sore. Waved a greeting to almost everyone I encountered. Thought maybe I heard some kids on the sledding hill at minnehaha park but couldn’t see anyone.

About a mile in, I started thinking about how purple represents both very hot temperatures and very cold ones. Purple = extreme. Then I thought about Basho’s line about poetry as “a fireplace in summer, a fan in winter.”

small victories: thought about stopping to walk under the ford bridge but kept going until I reached my favorite observation spot, stopped to put in a playlist, then kept running until I reached the double bridge. also: have mostly reached my winter goal of lowering my average heart run to under 160 — today it was 157.

10 Things

  1. cloud-covered sun
  2. yellowed leaves on an otherwise bare tree — a compliment to the violet air
  3. the river was covered in white and looked wider and colder than usual
  4. at least 10 people were standing near my favorite observation spot by the falls
  5. through the slats of the double bridge on the walking side I noticed bright blue graffiti
  6. one car was parked in the far parking lot at the top of the sledding hill
  7. the bright pink plastic bag I mentioned last week was further in the woods today — was it filled with snow?
  8. the falls were frozen and not falling
  9. stopped at the bench above the edge of the world: open, empty, a few tracks in the snow
  10. a small part of the fence near 38th is missing a panel

the purple hour — 2 days

3:18 am (bedroom floor) / 13 jan 2025

Still life painting
Heavy shadows and light

Sitting in the dark, wanting to keep the quiet and how I’ve adjusted to the dark, I’m reluctant to take out my iPad and write or to speak into my phone. Now, later (10:00 am) in the morning, I remember the moon (a full moon!) coming through the slats — not as dramatically as the past few nights — and the window-sized square of light with its soft slat shadows and the deep, solid shadow of the couch and the dark almost emptiness of the closet — almost empty because I could see the hint (inkling?) of the exercise ball with the slightest outline of light. The image of the ball just barely emerging from the shadow reminded me of a still life painting — the one that Diane Seuss writes about in Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber/ Diane Seuss (see 3 may 2024).

At night, when others are asleep and it’s more dark than light, the world stills for my restless eyes. The static stops. Finally objects freeze. Mostly I do too. A chance to look for longer, to stare and study.

I like “seeing” the darkness in the closet — its accordion doors wide open — as a deep purple. It’s not pure black; there’s color there but it’s dark and deep.

Writing this last sentence prompted me to search for Monet and purple. Why? I can’t remember now, a few minutes later. Jackpot. First, a quotation wrongly attributed to Claude Monet on the search, but actually spoken by Manet — poor Manet. How often is he overshadowed by Monet? Anyway, here’s the quotation:

I have finally discovered the true colour of the atmosphere. It’s violet. Fresh air is violet. I found it! Three years from now everyone will do violet!

found in The Secret Lives of Color, which sites Bright Earth: The Invention of Color, 208.

Bright Earth? This books looks great. Just requested it from my local library!

The impressionists were enamored with violet. Critics claimed they were afflicted with violettomania. Some theories on why:

  • a belief that shadows were never merely black or gray but colored — this sounds familiar!
  • complementary colors: bright yellow and soft purple. Robin Wall Kimmerer and Goldenrods and Asters!
  • vision problems — Monet and cataracts

*

Talking with my sister on the phone in the afternoon about my purple hour, she mentioned a paint color made from human remains. I think she meant this one:

Caput mortuum, Latin for “dead head,” is a dark brown paint that looks violet in some lights, maroon in others. It is earthy and intense, and like many browns, it can run in opposite chromatic directions when diluted. Some versions of caput mortuum paint tend toward the yellow end of the spectrum, while others wash into a light, yet slightly murky lavender. Despite its foreboding name and strange history, it is a rather simple, homey color. The substance reached the height of its popularity in the 18th and 19th centuries. It gets its hue from pulverized, mummified bodies (both human and feline) and its name from alchemy.

source

2:06 am / dining room / 14 feb

That moon! noticed a thin line of light on the kitchen floor then went over to the side (south facing) window and noticed the moon through the thick wooden slats. wow!
sitting at the dining room table, the heat kicked in — creaking everywhere through the vents. I have a short, repeated passage from one of our community band pieces running through my head. looking off to the side I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror, my face-blob glowing from the computer screen — wistful wisteria — all parts of wisteria are toxic to humans — small purple flowers

I’m not sure why the phrase “wistful wisteria” popped into my head. Where do I know wisteria from? Searched for poetry wisteria and found a poem by Lucie Brock-Broido, Extreme Wisteria

Wisteria is, first: a hardy, deciduous, capable-of-earnest-grasping shrub which bears small flowers. After that, it can be pressed (violently if you will) into an attar of its former self. In this poem, wisteria is also a state (of mind), the place one heads toward when feeling wistful.”

QA with Lucie Brock-Broido

7:53 am / dining room / 14 feb

  • aubergine, agitated, almost/approximate
  • bathos, bruised
  • cancer: pancreatic, cough medication
  • Dino or Daphne, deep
  • eggplant, emperor, Easter dress
  • fibs faint falsehoods, fake fruit flavor, FWA’s favorite color
  • Grape Ape, grief, (ornamental) grass
  • heliotrope, haze, heaviness, hair color?!
  • iris, ink, iffy, iodine
  • jealousy, jazz, jackets
  • kingly, Kristen’s post-college car
  • lilac, lavender, Lumpy Space Princess
  • mauve, magenta, mold, mystery, magic
  • non (binary/entity/sense)
  • orchid, outrage(ous)
  • pansy, petunia, plum (fruit and Professor)
  • queer, question
  • restless, rusty/rusted
  • shadows, slant, snail-snot, scar
  • Tyranian, tantrums, teletubby, toe
  • unfenced, undulating, underwater, unique, uncertain, undecided
  • violet, violence, vapor
  • wisteria, wispy, whelk, wood with soft inhabitants, wet, wild
  • eXcessive, exasperated, extremities — oxygen-starved, excess
  • yellow’s compliment, yelling
  • zeal

10:30 / front room, my desk / 14 feb

Wandering with purple: Part of this purple hour project, part of any of my projects really, is to find reasons to wander and wonder about new, unexpected things that I might not otherwise encounter or care about. Mission accomplished! It started last night with a random phrase that whispered to me, wistful wisteria. This led to reading about the purple-flowered vine, wisteria, then Lucie Brock-Broido’s poem, then her Q&A about the poem in which they discuss Emily Dickinson, especially her poem, “Essential Oils — are wrung –“. Then the idea of ED as a hard nut to crack. Then this line from some commentary on ED:

When I read Walt Whitman, we jauntily walk side by side down the road within his multitudinous world of wonder. When I read Dickinson, I don’t know if I am inside her mind or if she is inside mine. But I am always in a mysterious, perplexing, deeply thought-provoking, sometimes scary but always beautiful place.

source

Which led me back to the Q&A:

I think we’re all in conversation on the page with that which came before us, or even during us. We inherit whatever canon we’re in the midst of, a great collective influenza.

*

What I mean to say is that, in my own work, often, I may have been with Dickinson, but she was not with me.

feb 12/RUN

5.5 miles
bottom of franklin hill
6 degrees
100% snow-covered

A fine mist of snow. A few patches of ice, some slight slips. Cold. Fresh air. Sun behind clouds. For the first mile I didn’t see anyone else on the trails. Then, a few runners and walkers. No bikers or skiers. Sometimes I felt strong, sometimes I felt sore, all the time I was happy to be out there by the gorge.

today’s small victories: wasn’t sure how far I’d run but made it to the bottom of the hill. Almost stopped to walk near the top for a minute, but didn’t, kept going until the bottom. Ran from the bottom to under franklin — 3/4 of the hill — instead of walking like I planned

10 Wintery Things

  1. patches of ice on sidewalk that wasn’t shoveled
  2. cold air on my face — not quite cold enough to give me a brain freeze or to freeze the snot in my nose
  3. small, soft flakes or freezing rain freezing on my eyelashes
  4. the sharp thrust, grinding noise combo of feet walking on snow
  5. the river: a mix of white ice and dark (purple?) open water
  6. white, heavy sky
  7. bird song: cheese burger cheese burger
  8. the bluff on the other side of the river: a mix of white with bare brown branches
  9. all of the walking trails were covered in a few inches of snow, some of it untouched, some marked by tracks — feet and skis
  10. leaned over the wall in the flats and listened — a soft, sharp tinkling of snow hitting the ice on the surface of the river

Discovered Lee Ann Roripaugh’s awesome collection #string of pearls yesterday through her poem, #meteorology on poems.com. I’m thinking of buying the collection. Here are a few bits of it — it’s all tankas — that I thought of during my winter run:

from #meteorology/ Lee Ann Roripaugh

yesterday’s snow sleeps :: late this morning in quiet :: white sheets / while rickety
trees comb out fog’s heavy shanks :: of tangled, unruly hair

*

as gusted leaves buzz :: and whorl over snow-sugared :: roofs / but oh! this blown
fluttering’s not a swirling :: of leaves, but winter sparrows

~

ugh! snotted hoody :: pinkened tinge faint litmus stain :: (yes or no / minus
or plus) watercoloring :: blown-through tissues / torn storm blooms

*

wet-dark tree beaded :: in pearled bits of wintry mix :: excited finch swoops
in manic parabolas :: to sip from the leaky eaves’

icicle /

the purple hour

2:40 am — dining room

too restless to notice or think about anything . . . purple mauve lavender orchid magenta is this restlessness a light or dark purple? whatever it is, it’s thick

3:15 am — bedroom floor

shadows slats moon carpet
the slats are soft, barely visible
the shadow of the lamp, its long neck, and something else. the cup? tin of nuts? nope the arm of the sofa
the moon — so bright! how many more days of this moon? this clear sky?

*

  • grape jelly
  • eggplant, japanese
  • eggplant, italian
  • plum
  • pansy
  • Daphne’s dress (Scooby Doo)
  • Violet’s turning violet!
  • purple banana
  • hubba bubba (grape)
  • grape juice
  • raisins
  • easter dress
  • FWA’s favorite color
  • purple toe
  • vikings
  • Barney
  • Dino (Flintstones)
  • Professor Plum

feb 10/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
7 degrees
75% snow-covered

Sun, not much wind, cold. Wore by yaktrax today. Even though there were big stretches of bare pavement I still think it was a good idea; lots of icy patches. At least once, I felt the yaktrax help me stay upright. Encountered walkers, runners, one bike, dogs. One dog was with a runner and tried to lunge at me. Luckily the runner had a tight hold on their leash.

10 Things

  1. sharp street lamp shadows
  2. strong smell of tobacco from a passing car
  3. tinted snow — usually I’d say it was a bit blue, but I thought purple today
  4. kids laughing and yelling on the playground
  5. tracks through the snow at the park, skipping the sidewalk and taking a shortcut
  6. tracks on the walking path — skis and human feet
  7. minnehaha creek at the falls was slow, thick, frozen, only one dark and open spot
  8. couldn’t see the falls falling, but heard their quiet dripping muffled behind the thick columns of ice
  9. empty benches
  10. empty falls — I don’t think I saw a single person by the falls today

About halfway to the falls, while thinking about purple I suddenly remembered mimeograph machines and the purple ink on the handouts we get copies of in elementary school. Later, on a walk break, I tried to think of as many purple things as I could. I had a list of at least a dozen, but all I can remember is purple Kool-aid. At the end of my run I thought about the Vikings and how purple is strongly associated with Minneapolis because of them and Prince. Prince made me think of a local radio station, the Current, and how they pull the “purple lever” for the first snow of winter: purple lever = a marathon of Prince music.

the purple hour

12:46 am — dining room
to leave a mark, to be marked, bruised, purpled

silence, then a hollow knock, but not silence, buzzing or ringing in my ear, like static
cold air (hear turned down at night)

periwinkle, heather, thistle, lilac, lavender, mauve, grape

purple purple purple purple violet violent violence silence silvery lilac plum plumb — the depths — plump — soft plums of cloud — plume of purpleish smoke

three white lights illuminating the outlet — not night lights plugged into the outlet, but lights embedded in the outlet — they are white and bright at the top, then fading out at the bottom, giving off gray light that reads as pale purple to me — got up to look closely at the lights and realized I was never looking directly at the light, the white and purplish gray shadow were all reflections on the wall, the lightbulbs were at the bottom of the outlet — what is the real light? where it originates, or where it casts?

3:00 am (remembered later) — bedroom
closed blinds, bright moon beaming through in the form of a strange double circle on my hand in light and dark purple

a thin line of light near the closet door

*

My description of the moon light made me think, purple moon, so I looked it up. A video game developer, a type of cheese, a modern furniture company, the name of a dispensary in Oklahoma, a variety of gourmet kale, the cycle when you start your period during a waning moon, the second full moon in April, a Chardonnay, a preschool, an arrangement of flowers with “lavender roses, purple carnations, and cheerful daisies”, a band, a branding company, a color evoking mystery.

Left my desk briefly to tell Scott about the purple moon and he asked, Have you mentioned “The Purple Rose of Cairo” yet? Wow, no! I haven’t seen that movie in almost 30 years. I think it was my favorite in my early 20s — this was before I knew what a creep Woody Allen was. Anyway, I want to watch it today.

This note, “to leave a mark, to be marked, bruised, purpled,” makes me think of two things:

1

This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring.
The light of autumn: you will not be spared.

You will not be spared, now will what you love be spared.
(from October/ Louise Glück)

2

According to the second, Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.

Kafka on Prometheus

Not becoming one with the gorge, but striving to press deeper and deeper into it, to leave a trace/mark on it, and be marked by it (from log entry on 29 dec 2024).

Another purple thing I just remembered: on a weather map, purple represents very cold temperatures.

a screenshot from local weather forecast for this week

feb 9/RUN

3.
under ford bridge and back
9 degrees / feels like 0
100% snow-covered trail

Winter running! Sun, low wind, shadows, snow. I wouldn’t say it was an easy run, but it felt great to be outside and above the river. I don’t remember breathing in the cold air, but I do remember hearing the strange crunch of my foot as it struck the ground. Maybe not a crunch. Some noise that sounded like my foot was slipping or sliding on the snow. A thrust then a momentary stuck-ness before lifting off.

10 Things

  1. the sharp shadow of the street lamp with its pointy top
  2. my shadow crossing over and through another street light shadow
  3. the smell of weed down below in the oak savanna
  4. the thin, crooked shadow of a small tree cast on the snow
  5. an equal mix of solitary and paired runners
  6. the river was mostly covered in still white snow with a few patches of darker ice
  7. a few walkers below on the winchell trail
  8. a bird, singing
  9. a bird, laughing
  10. the sky, a very bright blue

I chanted triple berries — strawberry/raspberry/blueberry — then: purple grape/grieving loss.

today’s small victory: Instead of stopping at the turn around — which is what I usually do — I ran through it and back north, past locks and dam no. 1, past the part of the trail that dips below the road, and up the hill.

With the bright blue sky and the fresh white snow, I would have described the light as blue, but today I saw it as a faint purple. Another purple thought: purple grief is grief tinged with and/or beside joy. Dark, difficult, but more than that, too.

the purple hour

Up twice last night/this morning for the purple hour. Here are my notes:

12:04 am dining room

  • too many naps today? rich dinner? restless legs
  • uncomfortable purple
  • purple gas, purple ache, purple discomfort
  • the purple buzz of the refrigerator
  • the purple clicking of the coputer keys
  • everything chilled, a heavy stillness — not still, as in resting, calm, quiet, but still as in trapped — a purple pause
  • a memory from a run by the gorge: l.e.d. car headlights — not white but bright and purple, or the suggestion of purple

2:01 bedroom

  • Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender (Alice Walker)
  • The color purple — should I read it again?
  • The lavender menace — Betty Friedan’s homophobia
  • 2 sets of snores: dog, Scott
  • purple light — the air in the room almost gray, but not, soft, dull, patches of very deep purple, and in-between shadows that are lighter than deep purple, but darker than the purple air

morning reflections: Sitting at my desk, bright from the cold sun, I look around and see blue and green and red and yellow and cream. Purple demands a different sort of light, or lack of light. I thought, suddenly, purple is peripheral. Then I remembered standing in front of a mirror this morning, looking directly into it, not seeing my face, but a purplish gray glob. So, purple is my central vision. Maybe it’s both, but in different ways?

Looked up “purple peripheral” and the first page of search results were all about cyanosis and a lack of oxygen to the extremities (hands, feet).

Somewhere in this search I remember something else about purple: it’s the color associated with pancreatic cancer. You wear a purple ribbon to support pancreatic cancer research. My mom died from pancreatic cancer. Looked it up and it’s a purple ribbon in honor of the founder’s mother whose favorite color was purple and who was diagnosed with and died from pancreatic cancer in 1996.

feb 7/RUN

5.3 miles
bottom franklin hill
16 degrees
10% snow and ice covered trail

Less wind today. Cold, but not as cold as yesterday and still. Ran north on the bike trail. My lower back was still a bit tight and sore, my neck too, at least for the first mile. Then things loosened up. Mostly I felt relaxed and strong and glad to be outside on a clear path. I tried running on the snow-covered walking trail for a minute, but it was too uneven. Greeted Dave the Daily Walker, although it took me a little too long to say Hi Dave because I didn’t quite recognize him. Has his arm swing become less pronounced, or has my vision become worse? Chanted triples, first berries, then the world around me: big old tree/big pine tree/red stop sign/motorbike/rumblin’ truck/passing car

10 Things

  1. a strong smell of weed when I stopped at a bench above franklin
  2. orange — or was it pink or red? — bubble lettered graffiti under the 1-94 bridge
  3. the river was mostly covered, but the surface ice was uneven — some thick, some thin, some white, some gray — I thought I saw a few footprints on it — is that what they were?
  4. chickadeedeedee
  5. empty benches
  6. the faint jangle of a dog collar somewhere below me
  7. for a few stretches, the trail had strips of snow or ice or both — none of it slick or wet or a problem
  8. thought about how long the hill was from the bottom of lake street to the top — is it as long as franklin? how much less steep is it?
  9. mostly solitary male runners, one trio of women
  10. the air was cold and crisp and felt clean as I inhaled it through my nose, exhaled it through my mouth

purple hour

Before writing about last night’s purple hour, a thought: At some point early in the run I realized I was wearing a purple jacket. Of course I know it’s purple and I’ve noted that on this log lots of times, but today it clicked that it was purple. I started imagining my time by the gorge in the winter as another purple hour. Then a George Sheehan passage echoed in my head:

I must listen and discover forgotten knowledge. Must respond to everything around me and inside me as well….The best most of us can do is to be a poet an hour a day. Take the hour when we run or tennis or golf or garden; take that hour away from being a serious adult and become serious beginners. 

Running / George Sheehan, 1978

There’s something cool about how I (unintentionally) wear purple during these purple hours — a purple jacket during winter running, a purple robe during winter nights. It’s also interesting to me that I didn’t choose this color, both of them were chosen by my mother-in-law. When she died, I inherited her purple jacket; the purple robe was a christmas present from her years ago.

I like this idea of multiple meanings of the purple hour and how I can call these purple hours just because they involve me wearing purple — my purple habit (get what I did there? habit = a regular practice and clothing worn, like a nun’s habit).

Later in my run, I thought about dark purple and how closely it resembles, at least to me, dark brown tree trunks or dark water. Purple as another name for dark.

And now onto last night’s purple hours: two of the times I woke up in the middle of the night (how many times did I wake up and get out of bed?), I wrote about purple. Once on the ball in my bedroom (1:49 am), one at the dining room table (3:06).

1:49 am

  • Dark purple door (open closet)
  • Rustling dog
  • Droning fan layers of noise

3:08 am

  • midnights (tswift) lavender haze
  • violet purple lilac lavender
  • tints/shades of purple = mauve, orchid, eggplant, heather, iris
  • purple noise inside my ear — when the heat turns off
  • the house settling, unsettling
  • the other room, not illuminated by the light of my computer screen: deep ,dark purple
  • rhw (note: what is rhw? what word was trying to write?) hum, buzz from inside me stirring up the air
  • purple robe/comfy

Reviewing this list this morning, a thought: does anything rhyme with purple? Looked it up: hirple, to walk with a limp. I can envision purple as the color of limping. Now I’m thinking of having a hitch in your step which reminds me of un-hitching and Mary Ruefle and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

unhitching: to crudely paraphrase Lévi-Strauss, unhitching happens in brief moments when we can step outside of or beside or just beyond — below the threshold of thought, over and above society — to contemplate/experience/behold the this, the what it is, the essence of everything, Mary Oliver’s eternity. In your run above the gorge, near the river, below the trees, can you unhitch? (from log entry on 31 may 2023)

unhitching

The possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists … in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society; in the contemplating of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.

Lévi-Strauss quoted MRH page 52

Purple/ Margaret Steele Anderson

A pigeon walking dainty in the street;
The morning mist where backyard fences meet;
An old Victoria—and in it, proud,
An old, old woman, ready for her shroud:
These are the purple sights for me,
Not palaces nor pageantry.

purple prose

I just learned about purple prose: excessive, overly verbose, wordy, too many metaphors, similes, adverbs, adjectives, language that calls attention to itself and lacks substance, a drama bomb. Just realized that Lumpy Space Princess, who coined “drama bomb” is lavender. Also, remembering Lumpy Space Princess inspired me to find and order a Drama Bomb t-shirt.

According to wikipedia, purple prose originates with the Roman poet Horace in his “Ars Poetica”:

Weighty openings and grand declarations often
Have one or two purple patches tacked on, that gleam
Far and wide, when Diana’s grove and her altar,
The winding stream hastening through lovely fields,
Or the river Rhine, or the rainbow’s being described.
There’s no place for them here. Perhaps you know how
To draw a cypress tree: so what, if you’ve been given
Money to paint a sailor plunging from a shipwreck
In despair?

feb 4/RUN

4.1 miles
minnehaha falls and back
7 degrees / feels like 2

Lots of layers today. Too many. Under the jacket and pull-over and sweatshirt and shirt I was sweating. Like yesterday, the first mile was hard. I had several small victories as I pushed through moments of wanting to cut the run short.

10 Things

  1. happy, wild kids on the playground — I thought I heard one kid call out, thank you thank you thank you then Sara Sara Sara
  2. a bird singing — couldn’t quite hear the tune, just understood it was a bird
  3. the few times I ran on snow it crunched — crisp, compact
  4. the falls were dribbling over the ledge
  5. 2 vehicles in the parking lot, one of them was a pick-up truck
  6. a car honking far behind me in the parking lot — were they honking at me?
  7. a pink plastic bag in the small wood near the ford bridge — full of something
  8. a few walkers, one woman bundled up, wearing a white mask over her mouth and nose
  9. several fast runners, speeding by me
  10. the river was almost all white

Chanted some tripe berries, then triple birds, partly inspired by hearing Kacey Musgraves’ song, Cardinal, last night:

cardinal
chickadee
woodpecker
woodpecker
cardinal
attention
ATTENtion
aTTENtion
attenTION

the purple hour

I have eliminated Facebook from my morning routine and I’m not missing it at all. No gnus is good gnus with Gary Gnu*. Maybe I’ll check the news once a week? So, instead of Facebook, I went straight into poets.org then Poetry Foundation then poems.com. On Poetry Foundation, I found a wonderfully titled essay, The Joy of Attention by Jasmine Dreame Wagner. The whole essay is great and I’d like to return to it. When she mentioned Carolyn Forché’s Blue Hour (which I’ve requested from my local library), an idea slowly, or not so slowly, crept into my consciousness: doing a variation of Wagner’s experiment — going to the same place at the same time every day, giving attention, then listing what you notice (without metaphor) — that involves my restlessness/insomnia at night and calling it Purple Hour. At 1 A.M. last night, sitting at the dining room table, up because of restless legs, I wrote, What color is restlessness? Then I wrote: purple / grayish purple. My answer, I’m sure, was inspired by Alice Oswald, her lecture Interview with Water and her mention of purple in Nobody. In the exercise, Wagner suggests writing in a notebook. Should I do that, or type it up in a document?

To go back to that bucket of water — to wave a blue gown above it and ask, What is that color which Homer calls porfurium? It is not blue exactly; it gets translated as purple but purple is a settled color whereas Homer’s word is agitated. It derives from the sea verb porfurion which means to roll without breaking, so it is already a fluid word, a heaped up word, a word with underswell, not a pigment but an emanation from the nature of water. To get a true sense of porphyrion you need to see the sea in it and for Homer the sea is unhuman full of strange creatures missed colored unplowable and this is my favorite word it is a peritone meaning unfenced. If you want to imagine the colour of Odysseus’ gown you will have to swim out into the unfenced place, the place not of definitions but of affirmations. Yes I’m afraid you will have to find your way to the p volume of Johnson’s unwritten dictionary. There you will discover a dark light word an adjective for edgelessness — a sea word used also of death smoke cloth mist blood between bluish purple and cobalt mauve. It appears mid-ocean when the wind perhaps makes a network of backblowing glitters that the underswell moves sideways as when a big sea swells with noiseless waves. It is used of the heart meaning his heart was a heaving not quite broken wave. It indicates a surface but suggests a depth a mutation of flatness or noiseless sheen, a sea creature, a quality of caves, any inlet or iodine or shaded stone, a type of algae or rockfish, anything excessive or out of focus or subliminal — for example: a swimmer seen from underneath, a rotting smell, a list of low sounds, an evening shadow or sea god, a whole catalogue of simmering grudges storms waves and solitudes or deep water including everyone who has drowned in it. To be purpled is to lose one’s way or name, to be nothing, to grieve without surfacing, to suffer the effects of sea light. to be either sleepless or weightless and cut off by dreams — find yourself in the silence underneath an overhanging way that or thereabouts is the color of a bluish violet ultramarine gown so the great poet sang.

Interview with Water

from Paean to Place/Lorine Niedecker

How much less am I
in the dark than they?

Effort lay in us
before religons
at pond bottom
all things move toward
the light

Except those
that freely work down
to ocean’s black depths
in us an impulse tests
the unknown

from Nobody/ Alice Oswald

The sea she said and who could ever drain it dry
has so much purple in its caves the wind at dusk
incriminates the waves
and certain fish conceal it in their shells
at ear-pressure depth
where the shimmer of headache dwells
and the brain goes

dark

purple

purples to think about: heels echoing, doors creaking closed, deep pits. The gentle, queer curve of a branch towering over the trail — as I ran under it I thought, that’s very purple. Then the face of a child in the midst of bellowing frustration — I didn’t see their face, but I imagined it could be a deep purple. Purple whispers in the trees.

Mary Ruefle’s Purple Sadness

some guidelines on the experiment

[from Wagner, things to observe]

  • Record what you see, hear, smell, feel, and taste during each visit.
  • Aim to record at least six new observations each time.
  • On days when you’re pressed for time, allow yourself to simply record: “ailanthus, roof moss, fireplace wood smoke, fence squirrel, birdbath.” Phrases can be just as powerful as full sentences.
  • Note the small observations as much as the significant ones: “eclipse.”
  • When you notice that something in the visual field has changed, be sure to reflect on this change.
  • Observe movement in addition to stasis.
  • Pay attention to the appearance of new items and the absences of others.
  • Familiarize yourself with the specifics of your environment.
  • Resist the urge to create metaphor or simile; instead, log what you see. Recognize the world for what it is.

After recording your observations for a few days or weeks or years, Wagner suggests reflecting on the process of this experience by writing in reverse — starting at the back of the notebook and writing until you reach the first entry. Write in the margins and any empty spaces; “write until your reflections on your process become entangled with your observations; let the notebook become a gnarled and ecstatic poem.”

While Wagner writes everything by hand in a notebook, I might try typing up and/or dictating my observations, printing them out and then writing all over the printed paper. I’m thinking my approach will be be better for my weak eyes.

Will I stick to pure observation? I’m not sure; I might experiment with different ways of understanding my restlessness, and the purple of it all.

*After double-checking how to spell Gary Gnu, I decided to look up the theme song for The Great Space Coaster. Yes! You’re welcome future Sara!

It’s the great space coaster, get on board

feb 1/RUN

5.1 miles
bottom franklin hill and back
28 degrees / feels like 11
wind: 31 mph gusts

Windy and colder today. For mental strength required when I was running up the hill and into the wind. Did my reciting a poem per mile experiment: We grow accustomed; A Murmur; A lane of yellow led the eye; Tell all the truth; and It’s all I have to bring today. I struggled with the last one and the line, Be sure you count –should I forget/Some one the sum could tell. Not as easy today. I think it was the wind that made it hard.

10 Things

  1. Hi Dave!
  2. birds flying out of the trees, almost like leaves being scattered by the wind
  3. a leaf swirling near the ground, looking like a darting bird
  4. loud rustling on the edge of the trail — a squirrel? a bird? the wind?
  5. beep beep beep the alarm on the trestle going off — not a train but some other moving thing — people walking or biking?
  6. the stacked limestones under the franklin bridge are looking even more like a person — I bet someone has stacked them to look this way
  7. 2 e-bikes zooming past me, I watched the red lights on their saddles flashing as they disappeared
  8. a panel of the fence is missing on the double bridge near 33rd. I’ve seen it before but only today did I wonder what happened. Did a car hit it? On the other side of the fence there’s only air and river far below
  9. the river is just barely iced over and looking cold
  10. overheard: I don’t know Gene’s kid

Like a lot of people, I’m trying to avoid much of the news about executive orders and project 2025. It’s a delicate balance: stay informed enough but not too much. Today the balanced was tipped to too much when I read an article about stripping women of their rights in the name of “personhood” someone shared on Facebook. It might be time to eliminate Facebook from my morning practice.

It’s a new month and time for a new challenge. After revisiting an article this morning — In Search of Distraction — I’m thinking that might be it, distraction. Or wandering or dreaming or reverie.

Here’s a line from the essay, to get me started:

Distraction is a time between times, a time in which we become momentarily subject to the non-thought inside thought. And this is the time — or one of the times — of poetry. Attention can be helpful later on as part of the process of revision, but for vision itself poets stand in need of distraction.

jan 31/RUN

3.2 miles
locks and dam no. 1 loop
34 degrees

Breezy. Wind coming from the north. Sunny, too. Lots of shadows. Today’s run wasn’t effortless but it wasn’t hard either. Somewhere in-between. Listened to my “Remember to Forget” playlist for the last day of the month. Even with my headphones in, I could hear kids on the playground across the road, some hikers talking on the trail below.

Listening to the songs, I thought about the tenderness of remembering and the satisfaction of forgetting. Also thought about how we all remember things differently, and most of us inaccurately.

10 Things

  1. the river was a patchwork of white and gray
  2. only a few lumps of snow scattered on the grass and the trail
  3. slick puddles
  4. a sagging fence, casting a crooked and forlorn shadow
  5. BLUE! sky
  6. a few of the benches were occupied — at least 2
  7. my favorite bench, above the “edge of the world” was empty, so was the one near folwell
  8. ran on all of the walking paths — clear!
  9. the sparkle of broken glass in a pile of leaves on the street in front of a neighbor’s house
  10. a chain link fence below on the winchell trail, illuminated by the sun, on the edge, at the part of the trail that is slowly sliding into the gorge (the rubbled asphalt stretch just past 38th street)

before the run

These evenings of long light
Must be high festival to them. It’s the time
When the light seems tender in the needles
Of the pine, the shimmer of the aspen leaves
Seems kindly on the cliff face, gleams
On the patches and gullies of snow summer
Hasn’t touched yet. 
(from The Creek at Shirley Canyon/ Robert Haas)

Reading this description of light in this beautiful poem, I’m reminded of Wednesday’s afternoon light. Stepping out on the deck around 4, I gasped as I noticed the light on the bare trees, glowing a soft green. An olive green, Scott thought. It seemed to be offering a glimpse of the future when winter was over. How should I describe that light? Not tender — dazzling? a show-stopper? But maybe tender, too. The light was soft on the trees — bathing them in light? — coaxing out them of their dreamed of leaves in the forms of the green glow.

And the creek is flush
With life, streams of snow melt cascading down
The glacial spills of granite in a turbulence
The ouzel, picking off insects in the spray,
Seems thrilled by, water on water funneling,
Foam on foam, existence pouring out
Its one meaning, which is flow. 
(from The Creek at Shirley Canyon/ Robert Haas)

The glacial spills of granite? Water on water funneling? Existence’s one meaning: flow? Wow! I love this description of water.

Read, We Could Just Gaga Our Grammar, this morning and it got me thinking that I need to do some more strange, fun, playful experiments on here. Return to the erasures? Sentence scrambling? Pick something off of Meyer’s Please Add to this List list?

Encountered, Lullaby of Jazz Land: A Found Poem Composed of Titles from the American Songbook, and am thinking of doing something with the titles or lyrics from my Remember to Forget playlist.

Turned randomly to a page in The Braille Encyclopedia and read “Body”.

The rest of the body works to compensate for what the eye can no longer do.

The Braille Encyclopedia/ Naomi Cohn

Cohn discusses a sore neck and back, muscle spasms, headaches. Do I feel any of these things? The occasional headache. Starting these sentences, I had forgotten about the dizziness, then I remembered when I felt it — the world suddenly swimming for a moment as I tried to read and write in this entry.

Then she mentions feeling very tired —

A kind of tired that feels like most of my trillions of mitochondria have decided they’ve cooked their last energy-meal, turned off the stove, hung up their aprons, kicked off their pinching shoes, and gone to lie down somewhere. For a very long time.

The Braille Encyclopedia/ Naomi Cohn

I feel tired often — maybe not as tired as Cohn. I take naps, or fall asleep mid-sentence. I have the luxury of measuring my efforts, (and lowering my expectations), not doing things that are too draining too often. Shopping is draining, especially grocery shopping. A few weeks ago, I had to stop at the end of the aisle, hang onto the cart, and close my eyes for a minute. Too many things I couldn’t quite see, lights that were too bright. Deep breaths. This used to make me anxious, but now, with the help of lexapro and the understanding that this dizziness is caused by an uncertain and overworked brain, I don’t worry as much.

after the run

After discovering James Longenbach’s poem, “In the Village,” earlier this month, I requested his collection Seafarer from the library. Here’s part 4:

from In the Village/ James Longenbach

Of ghosts pursued, forgotten, sought new—
Everywhere I go
The trees are full of them.

From trees come books, that, when they open,
Lead you to expect a person
On the other side:

One hand having pulled

The doorknob
Toward him, the other

Held out, open,
Beckoning
You forward

jan 30/RUN

5.25 miles
ford loop
38 degrees

38 degrees! Sun and hardly any wind and less layers. The snow is almost all melted and all the paths were clear. I repeated yesterday’s experiment: run a mile; stop to walk, pull out my phone, and recite an ED poem into it; start running again (repeat, 5 times total). Today I recited: We Grow Accustomed to the Dark; A Murmur in the Trees — to note; I Felt a Funeral in my Brain; I heard a Fly buzz when I died; and A lane of yellow led the Eye. Like yesterday, it helped me to stay steady with my pace. The lines that stuck with me the most are at the end of A Murmur in the Trees — to note:

But then I promised n’ere to tell
How could I break my word
So go your way and I’ll go mine
No fear you’ll miss the road

I thought about this road in relation to the road in We Grow Accustomed:

A Moment — We uncertain step
For newness of the Night
Then fit our vision to the Dark
And meet the road erect

You adjust and get back on the road, where life steps almost straight (the ending line of “We Grow”), and I’ll stay here in the Dark with the little men in their little houses and the robins in their trundle bed and this whimsical, strange world (images from A Murmur).

10 Things

  1. my shadow, far below in the ravine near Shadow Falls
  2. the view from the top of the hill after climbing from under the lake/marshall bridge — wide, open, iced surface
  3. the bells of St. Thomas ringing
  4. running on the east side, across the river from one of the schools, I could hear the kids on the playground all the way over here
  5. my shadow, on the railing of the ford bridge — I kept looking down to the iced river, searching for more of my shadow on the shadow of the bridge’s railing
  6. the river, near the ford bridge was all white, but further north, it was gray with white splotches
  7. the port a potty at the Monument was covered in black graffiti and the door didn’t look like it could fully shut
  8. close to where I heard the kids across the gorge, I noticed how steep the slope was — don’t get too close to this edge!
  9. a man below on the Winchell trail talking to little kid (or a dog?) — momma’s coming — as a woman approached them
  10. a kid on the playground: it’s soooo warm!

memory

Memory can edit reality in some such way and then the edited version is too good to let go. Memory makes what it needs to make.

A Lecture on Corners/ Anne Carson

I picked up Naomi Cohn’s The Braille Encyclopedia at Moon Palace last night!

Now, in my sixties, the Velcro of memory has lost its grip, glutted with lint. This makes learning braille–all its letters, punctuation, symbols, contractions, and their rules for use–puzzling. The mind’s memory fail. What takes over? Muscle memory, body memory, skin memory. My fingertip remembers more braille than my hippocampus.

The Braille Encyclopedia/ Naomi Cohn

So many different types of memory to think about!

An alternative to vision.

The Braille Encyclopedia/ Naomi Cohn

I rely on memory a lot to help me see.

jan 29/RUN

5.3 miles
bottom franklin hill and back
33 degrees

Sun! Above freezing! Clear walking paths! Shadows! A nice, relaxed run.

a new experiment

I tried something new today. I picked 5 Emily Dickinson poems that I have memorized, then stopped after each mile to recite one of them into my phone. Mile 1, “Before I got my eye put out”; Mile 2, “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark”; Mile 3, “A Murmur in the Trees”; Mile 4, “A Felt a Funeral in my Brain”; and Mile 5, “A Heard a Fly Buzz when I died.” I didn’t have to stop right at the end of the mile, but just sometime before the next mile. It was fun and made the run go by faster. Sometimes I thought about what I had just recited as I ran, sometimes I didn’t. After “Murmur” I thought about ways to mash its lines up with “We Grow Accustomed” — maybe I’ll work on that more today?

assessment: This experiment was fun and helpfully distracting. I’ll definitely try it again!

10 Things

  1. Hi Dave!
  2. not much snow left on the walking path or the grass — in some places, a lumpy line of snow in the middle of the walking path from where the plow pushed the snow off of the biking trail
  3. a few slippery spots where water was barely ice
  4. the river was mostly frozen with a few spots of dark water
  5. a bird singing, cheeseburger or tea kettle — I guess that’s a chickadee?
  6. the thump of my zipper pull against by neck or chest
  7. a fat bike laboring by — slow and steady
  8. at least one bench was occupied — a person and two dogs
  9. my shadow beside me — sharp and erect
  10. another lone black glove — small

For part of the run, I focused on my rhythmic breathing: 1 2 3 in / 1 2 out. I began chanting: mystery is solved, then history is fact?, then history is wrong, then whose history is that? (which doesn’t quite fit the 3/2), whose story is told, and at whose expense?