Tag: 10 things

april 23/WALKBIKE

60 minutes
winchell trail / dowling community garden / neighborhood
61 degrees

Even better than yesterday! What a wonderful late morning. Delia and I walked to the Winchell trail, then up to the mesa in the oak savanna. More winchell until the folwell bench, then across the road through the 1960s neighborhood and into the community garden. So many birds! Lots of green and white flowers too, blooming all over the hillside in the oak savanna. I found out what these white blossoms were called a few years ago, but I can’t remember — maybe it’s one of these?

10 Things

  1. a steady dripping down in the ravine
  2. 2 dark holes — caves in the rock
  3. more of the chainlink fence is ripped away from the posts
  4. yesterday I noticed ugly red graffiti on the 38th street steps. Was it still there today? I forgot to check, but surely I would have noticed, right?
  5. less mud, more dirt
  6. sometimes sunny, sometimes overcast / sometimes blue, sometimes light brown
  7. in a wood near the community garden: 2 (or more?) birds making a racket up in a tree, sounding like the drum at the beginning of Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” — nice!
  8. the river: patches of smooth water, patches of rougher water — not from wind, but from sandbars?
  9. calm, still, the water was barely moving — only after staring at it for a moment could I see a slight shimmer out of the corner of my eye
  10. a woman in bright pink, sitting near the 38th street steps, silent except for the repeated clearing of her throat

before the run

Reading through my entires from april of 2022, I’m returning to thoughts of entanglement and mushrooms and precarity and ruins. Here is today’s inspiration from 23 april 2022:

  • a different sort of We, not a me or an I, but a we, an us
  • a different way of looking/sensing/becoming aware: not seeing straight on, but feeling, looking across and to the side, down, beneath and below
  • stop looking up to the heavens, start feeling/sensing what’s below
  • a hope that is not predicated on evidence, when evidence = seeing and Knowing and fully understanding (seeing things as parts or discrete categories or individual things)
  • entangled is not separate or pure but messy and enmeshed

this is why we are all here — from my haibun and what I heard coming out of the little old lady’s phone

this 
why 
we 
all
here

why = curiosity, wonder

The why is not an explanation — this is why/this is THE reason — but an invitation to imagine differently, expansively, wildly.

we all = ecosystems, organisms, networks, asemblages

Organisms are ecosystems. 
I find myself surrounded by patchiness, that is, a mosaic of open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, with each further opening into a mosaic of temporal rhythms and spatial arcs (Tsing, 4) .

here = a place, located in history, a specific place, not transferable or easily translatable, can’t be scaled up or turned into assets

I picked up Mushrooms at the End of the World, and found this in the preface:

The time has come for new ways of telling stories beyond . . . Man and Nature . . , such stories might be simultaneously true and fabulous. How else can we account for the fact that anything is alive in the mess we have made?

The Mushrooms at the End of the World/ Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (viii)

fabulous = resembling or suggesting a fable : of an incredible, astonishing, or exaggerated nature

invented and true

[about this book] what follows a riot of short chapters. I wanted them to be like the flashes of mushrooms that come up after a rain: an over-the-top bounty; a temptation to explore; an always too many.

explosion / too much, too many / after the rain eruptions of excess

This explosion bit reminded me of Arthur Sze in an interview with David Naiman:

I began to think I love this idea that the mycelium is below the surface. It’s like the subconscious, then when the mushroom fruits pops up above ground, maybe that’s like this spontaneous outpouring of a poem or whatever.

during the run

I thought about something else I read in the entry with this Sze passage. It’s a fragment of a poem I wrote in response to Sze and a few Mary Oliver lines:

Maybe like mushrooms, we rise
or not rise, flare
brief burst from below
then return 
to swim in the dirt…

I was thinking about not wanting to swim in the dirt, but be out in the air, exposed, vulnerable to erosion and rust/ing.

after the run

In The Mushrooms at the End of the World, Tsing discusses how matsutake mushrooms develop their fungi networks in locations of ruin — edges of volcanos, forest destroyed by logging and lumber companies. So, there’s a relationship between the flare/the fruit (the mushroom) and decay/ruin/erosion. Now I’m thinking about my version of what the moment of ruin can produce, where the moment of ruin = ruined eyes. What poetry might burst forth as I reckon with my dying/dead cone cells?

Mushrooms came up in the fiction book I’m reading, too: The Bog Wife.

But when he returned to the bog, he found a row of trespassers sprouting where the swale met the hinged door to the Cranberry River. These trespassers retained their heads, and Percy knew as soon as he saw them that his suspicions were correct; they were mushrooms. His heart sank. He sometimes saw mushrooms in the sparse forest on the west end of the property, modest white-headed clumps strewn across the soil or fringed gray dishes sticking out like frills from the trunks of trees. But he had never seen any of their ilk here, where the soil was not mushroom soil because it was bog soil, a dense wet batter that supported only the shallow-rooted and perpetually thirsty.

They would never tolerate any of the mushrooms, Percy thought. The mushrooms had all been trespassers. He tore out the orange mushrooms and gathered up the torn stems for burning, but he knew it wouldn’t make a difference. Mushrooms could not be dug up. They could not be evicted.

The Bog Wife/ Kay Chronister

I’m reading Emily Dickinson’s “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants” and refreshing my memorizing of Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms.” Nobody sees us, stops us — SP envisions mushrooms as trespassers.

And here are a few more passages from Mushrooms at the End of the World, that I want to archive:

a network of (mostly) invisible influences

Below the forest floor, fungal bodies extend themselves in nets and skein, binding roots and mineral soils, long before producing mushrooms. All books emerge from similarly hidden collaborations.

The Mushrooms at the End of the World/ ALT

a gift and a guide

The uncontrolled lives of mushrooms are a gift — and a guide — when the uncontrolled world we thought we had fails.

promise and ruin, promise and ruin

This is a story we need to know. Industrial transformation turned out to be a bubble of promise followed by lost livelihoods and damaged landscapes. And yet: such documents are not enough. If we end the story with decay, we abandon all hope—or turn our attention to other sites of promise and ruin, promise and ruin.

bike: 20 minutes
basement

It was definitely nice enough to bike outside today, but I wanted to test out how riding a bike would feel on my back/hips/glutes for taking my bike off the stand and carrying upstairs. Plus I wanted to watch more of The Residence. Great show!

Almost 2 hours later, my back feels okay. We’ll see how it is when I want to go to sleep. If it’s okay, I might try biking outside tomorrow!

april 22/WALK

45 minutes
winchell trail south / folwell bench
58 degrees

Wow wow wow! Spring. Little explosions of bright green everywhere — out of sidewalk cracks, under fences, on slender branches. I think explosion is the right word — not pops or flashes, well maybe flares. Almost overnight, green! Not yet annoying or oppressive; I still have my view of the gorge and the other side. I could see fuzzy details, branches, rippling water, houses, but what I felt was the horizons of gray (river), brown (shore/trees), and blue (sky). 3 distinct lines dividing my view into 3 colors.

Delia and I walked to the river then down the uneven wooden steps to the trail. We walked even slower than usual to let two walkers move past. One of them was talking about a friend (or a partner?): we’re both from the same town, and we went to the same school! I smiled and greeted a friendly runner, called out Hi Dave! to Dave. Delia jumped up and walked all of the walls on the trail. We ended at the folwell/the WWDD bench (see below) and sat for a moment, taking in the view.

10 Things

  1. the air was hazed with humidity, making everything look even fuzzier, more distant
  2. minneapolis park workers have cleared out old trees in the savanna, turned them into mulch that they put on the trail
  3. the small rise up to the paved trail is more visible now — all dirt and dead leaves and stubs of tree trunks
  4. the cave below the limestone ledge in the ravine seems to be expanding — how long is this process? how long before the ledge collapses?
  5. mud on the part of winchell on the hill between the savanna and the 38th street steps
  6. the repeated honk from a lone goose, below us. It always seemed the same distance from us. Was it following us, or taking a walk with us?
  7. a loud, rhythmic clanging above us that I couldn’t quite place. A thought: was it someone banging on a fire hydrant to open it up? Near the end of my walk, I saw one open and gushing water
  8. sitting at the folwell bench, overheard — an older walker to a younger one: we haven’t even gone 20 minutes yet
  9. someone pushing a walker through the grass on the boulevard between edmund and the river road, stopping to check out each tree
  10. the husk of some big trees leaning at awkward angles in the oak savanna

A wonderful walk! I felt relaxed and calm and grateful to be outside and moving (without pain) this morning.

before the run

Reading through my “on this day” entries from past april 22nd entries, I was inspired by Mary Oliver and a little old lady walking and listening to a radio and a bench dedicated to a woman who fell through the ice one winter and a fragment overheard on the little old lady’s radio — this is why we are all here — especially the this, which is echoed in Marie Howe’s poem, The Gate. Instead of trying to explain these connections–entanglements?– I’ll gather them here:

1 — the little old lady

For the third time, encountered the little old lady walking with her hiking poles listening to a radio show or an audio book or something. Today I heard, “which reminds us of why we are all here.” Decided that I should create a poem or some piece of writing around this phrase. This phrase could be the title or the ending line of the whole poem or a sentence or a refrain (5 aug 2019).

…the little old lady slowly shuffling by, swinging her hiking poles, a voice TED-talking out of her phone’s speaker reminding you that this is why we are all here. Do not bother the bench resting on the rim of the gorge to ask what this is (22 april 2022 — a draft of my poem).

note: reviewing these entries, I’m noticing how I changed what I heard from “reminds us why” to “this”. I’m almost prefer the original — the reminder, that doesn’t have to be the answer, just a pointing to it — a finger pointing! a definition of poetry!

2 — The Gate

from The Gate/ Marie Howe

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.

And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.

3 — This is why we are all here

which reminds us why we are all here…

We are here. Me and joints and muscles and bones and ligaments and lungs. Us. me
and blood and cells and electrolytes and sweat and saliva. we. me
and hands and feet, a heart, two diseased eyes, a knee that displaces. we. me
worn out running shoes, threadbare worries. we. me
and those oak trees, that wrought iron fence, this rutted, dirt path, that short, steep hill. we. me river. that we are here with the old woman who slowly shuffles in her straw hat with her hiking poles and a voice that calls out from her radio speakers, “which reminds us why we are all here.”
here. above the river and the gorge and the floodplain forest, below the bike path and the road, the cars and the boulevard.
here. in this heat and humidity and haze. here. on a monday morning. here.

We are all here.

(from 22 april 2022)

4 — Mary Oliver

Reading MO, I’ve noticed, and have been trying to articulate, a tension in her poems between the I, the World, Nature, God, Eternity, Work. This tension seems to take many forms and MO imagines it to be endlessly intriguing and part of the process of living. Never to be resolved but to be puzzled over. One element of this tension involves the plight of the human—born to doubt and argue and question what it all means, to be both brought closer to and further away from the world by language and the power and beauty of words, which are never as powerful or beautiful as the world itself. To want a name and a useful place, to claim a life, but also to belong to the world, to be “less yourself than part of everything.”

(from 22 april 2021)

From The Book of Time in The Leaf and the Cloud

5.
What is my name, 
o what is my name
that I may offer it back
to the beautiful world?

from “Gravel” in The Leaf and the Cloud

6.
…
It is our nature not only to see
that the world is beautiful

but to stand in the dark, under the stars,
or at noon, in the rainfall of light, 

frenzied, 
wringing our hands, 

half-mad, saying over and over:

what does it mean, that the world is beautiful—
what does it mean?

5 — the words/reminder

from “Work” in The Leaf and the Cloud

3.
Would it be better to sit in silence?
To think everything, to feel everything, to say nothing?

This is the way of the orange gourd.
This is the habit of the rock in the river, over which
the water pours all night and all day.
But the nature of man is not the nature of silence.
Words are the thunders of the mind.
Words are the refinement of the flesh.
Words are the responses to the thousand curvaceous moments—
we just manage it—
sweet and electric, words flow from the brain
and out the gate of the mouth. 

We make books of them, out of hesitations and grammar.
We are slow, and choosy. 
This is the world.

Words can help us to remember a beloved but long dead dog:

And now she’s nothing
except for mornings when I take a handful of words
and throw them into the air
so that she dashes up again out of the darkness,

5 — the bench

I have run by this bench hundreds of times, stopped and sat once or twice, even wrote about it, but I’ve never noticed this small plaque on it. How did I see it today? I love these little surprises, just waiting to be found! I had no idea what this plaque meant — WWDD? I looked it up and found a facebook page for the Rachel Dow Memorial. Wow. She was loved by so many. I read a little about her life — a passionate, social justice minded, free-spirit — and her death — she fell through the ice at the river and died of hypothermia. Maybe I’ll write a poem about her and the others I’ve found through their plaques. All of them share with me a deep love for this river. And maybe one day, I’ll have a plaque there too (from 8 sept 2022).

6 — Jane Hirshfield

Termites: An Assay/ Jane Hirshfield

So far the house still is standing.
So far the hairline cracks wandering the plaster
still debate, in Socratic unhurry, what constitutes a good life.
An almost readable language.
Like the radio heard while traveling in a foreign country—
You know that something important has happened, but not what.

What to do with all of this? I’m not quite sure yet.

during the run

Occasionally, I thought about these ideas as I walked, and when I sat on the folwell bench. What did I think? I hardly remember. Once, I thought about how words were not the most important part, that being out there by the gorge, feeling everything was.

april 21/WALK

45 minutes
minnehaha academy loop*
50 degrees

*43rd ave, north / 32nd street, east, past Minnehaha Academy / edmund, south / 34th street, west, past 7 oaks / home

Before taking a walk with Delia and Scott, I “watched” the Boston Marathon, where watching = tracking runners on the app, listening to the Citius Mag watching party, and watching the last 5 minutes of the women’s race on an unofficial YouTube feed. Wow, they were fast!

It looked warm and sunny, but it felt colder than 50. It was the wind, I think. For the first half we talked about kids and wanting to be empty-nesters and how to have hard conversations about the future and the series finale of The Americans — we finished it last night. In the second half, Scott pointed out a strange mash-up of a garage and I pointed out the Siberian Squill. I wondered if we were seeing it more now because we’ve named it, but we agreed that it has become more abundant in the past few years. There was a particularly impressive patch of it in the yard of the house on the south corner of edmund and 34th. Taking in the entire patch, it looked blue. Focusing on a flower, it looked purple.

10 Things

  1. siberian squill, everywhere, including at the edge of our yard
  2. a loud dog in a fenced-in backyard
  3. an empty parking lot at minnehaha, no school for Easter
  4. a metal sign at Cooper School, bent and leaning to the side
  5. a security guard car parked in front of the gate to the field at minnehaha academy
  6. the boulevard on the edge of the academy that used to have a small line of aspensmwith aspen eyes, now only has one aspen
  7. a woman stapling a poster to a pole
  8. mud on a boulevard — Delia, stay out of the mud! — a deep brown
  9. the wind chimes chiming at the house with an Easter Island head on the front stoop
  10. looking over at the river road and seeing/feeling the open space between the west and east banks

Back/hip/leg update: today it is a little uncomfortable to sit in the chair at my desk. Is that because I went down and up the old stone steps to the river?

april 10/RUN

4.5 miles
river road, north/south
51 degrees

Today I wore shorts! I did a variation on the beat workout. Mile 1 = chanting triples / Mile 2 = metronome at 175 / Mile 3 = Playlist (Color). The variation was that I took a little longer between miles and I tried to get faster with each one. I felt faster and more locked into the beat, which was fun.

Right after I started the run, the tornado sirens went off. Hmm — it’s not Wednesday and it’s not the first week of the month, so what was happened? I asked a walker I encountered and she told me it was tornado prevention month. Of course!

10 Things

  1. the river road was crowded with a steady stream of cars as I entered the path
  2. a small tree beside the path, some of its tops were spray painted orange
  3. a bike was hidden behind the feet of the lake street bridge
  4. a man and a woman standing next to 2 overturned lime scooters — the man had his phone out, was he about to rent them?
  5. a tree leaning heavily against the wooden fence above the ravine — how long until the tree falls or the fence breaks or the park workers fix it?
  6. a runner ahead of me wearing white mid-calf socks, looking smooth and relaxed
  7. the part of the road between the franklin and I-94 bridges is open again
  8. I mistook the tree trunk with a burl at the height of a head for a person again
  9. a heavy gray sky
  10. road closed April 12th — what for? a race?

color

Today’s ROYGBIV:

Red — Taylor Swift’s song, “Red”
Orange — my sweatshirt
Yellow — another runner’s bright yellow shirt
Green — the grass, a pale green
Blue — a recycling trashcan along the route
Indigo — ?, maybe the color of a car?
Violet — the sky, the palest, slightest hint of violet

I’m reading more of the book, On Color. Here are some passages/ideas I’d like to archive from the introduction:

1

Color is an unavoidable part of our experience of the world, not least as it differentiates and organizes the physical space in which we live, allowing us to navigate it.

Often, this navigation is assumed, taken for granted, unspoken. It is not that I can’t see color; it is that I see it in unreliable ways. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes green is brown, yellow pink. Red is gray. Orange makes an object invisible.

2

But for all color’s inescapability, we don’t know much about it. There is no comparably salient aspect of daily life that is so complicated and so poorly understood. We are not quite sure what it is. Or maybe it is better to say we are not quite sure where it is. It seems to be “there,” unmistakably a property of the things of the world that are colored. But no scientists believe this, even though they don’t always agree with one another about where (they think) it is.

Chemists tend to locate it in the microphysical properties of colored objects; physicists in the specific frequencies of electromagnetic energy that those objects reflect; physiologists in the photoreceptors of the eye that detect this energy; and neurobiologists in the neural processing of this information by the brain.

*

For artists, the precise scientific nature of color is more or less irrelevant. What matters is what color looks like (and also, and not to be underestimated, how much the paint costs). 

3

Color vision must be universal. The human eye and brain work the same way for nearly all people as a property of their being human—determining that we all see blue. But the color lexicon, meaning not merely the particular words but also the specific chromatic spacethey are said to mark, clearly has been shaped by the particularities of culture. Since the spectrum of visible colors is a seamless continuum, where one color is thought to stop and another begin is arbitrary. The lexical discrimination of particular segments is conventional rather than natural. Physiology determines what we see; culture determines how we name, describe, and understand it. The sensation of color is physical; the perception of color is cultural.

4

Always with color, what we see is what we think is there.

A Crown of Sonnets?

A few days ago while working on my color sonnets I suddenly remembered that sonnet crowns existed. I wasn’t quite sure what one was, I just knew of them. Could this work for my color poems? I like the thought of it, but I’m not sure I can make it work — but I’ll try, at least!

7 sonnets linked through a structure: the last line of one poem is the first line of the next, and the last line of the final sonnet is the first line of the firsts sonnet. Tricky to not make it sound contrived. (see Learning the Sonnet)

Some variations — link with lines throughout but don’t make the last line of the last sonnet the first line of the first OR do the first/last line with 1 and 7, but not throughout.

april 9/RUN

4.6 miles
ford overlook and back
45 degrees

Overcast, warm. I was overdressed in a short-sleeved shirt with a hooded pull-over. I tried a slightly new route today: south on the river road trail, up to Wabun park, over the ford bridge, along the river in st. paul, stopping at the ford overlook, then turning around. A harder run today. I felt tired and had to convince myself to keep running a few times. Recited the poem I re-memorized this morning as I ran — Still Life with Window and Fish/ Jorie Graham. Such an amazing poem!

10 Things

  1. a brown leaf whirling in the wind then startling me as it landed in front of me
  2. kids yelling on the playground, one voice sounded frantic at first, like the kid was hurt. As I listened longer, their voice sounded less pained and more playful
  3. a tall runner with long legs loping (with a long, bounding stride) — not graceful but awkward, gawky
  4. 2 (or was it 3?) big birds with wide wingspans riding the thermals near the overlook — almost floating, smooth, slow, silent
  5. reading the plaque describing the giant rusted paddle wheel on display at the overlook — from 1924, part of the hydroelectric power plant — the rust was deep red-brown and speckled with orange
  6. a skateboarder heading to the empty skate park
  7. crossing the ford bridge from west to east, noticing how steep and crumbling the slope at the edge of the bridge was — I wondered how soon this would need to be reinforced
  8. the river was a deep and dark blue with small waves and no shadows
  9. someone playing frisbee golf in wabun park — not seen, but heard: the clanging of the chain netting as it caught the frisbee
  10. running above on the paved trail, noticing a man walking a dog below, feeling tall and fast as I passed them

Here’s a poem I found the other day. I love the idea of writing a thank you poem to a poet. Maybe I’ll do one?

For Allen Ginsberg/ Dorothy Grossman

Among other things,
thanks for explaining
how the generous death
of old trees
forms
the red powdered floor
of the forest.

april 7/RUN

5.4 miles
franklin loop
30 degrees

Wore my new Brooks for the first time today. I need to adjust the laces at the top, but otherwise, they’re great. Hooray for past Sara for buying these shoes, and hooray for new shoes! Sunny and cooler today. Wind. I felt strong and relaxed, occasionally my back was tight.

10 Things

  1. a flash of silver in the sky — a plane
  2. a blue sky — cerulean — no clouds or birds
  3. the river, 1: from the trestle on the west side: blue
  4. the river, 2: from the franklin bridge: small waves, textured
  5. the river, 3: from the lake street bridge: sparks of light moving fast, making my head buzz in disorientation and delight
  6. the deep bellow of a train horn on the east side
  7. the soft knocking of a woodpecker
  8. a turkey on the trail — as I neared them, they flared their feathers then moved over
  9. another turkey in the brush on the edge of the trail
  10. the bridge railing casting a thick grid of shadows on the path

Listened to voices in the gorge below — high-pitched, a laughing kid or a startled animal? — and wind and water in the trees for most of the run. Put in my color playlist on the bridge. Went deep inside the beat as I listened to “Mr. Blue Sky.”

Tried to think about my orange poem — I’m a little stuck — but got distracted by my effort and the wind and the turkeys. Now, after the run, here’s some inspiration:

excerpt from Notes on Orange/ Jennifer Huang

In case you’re wondering, the fruit came first, the color
name second. They called it red-yellow for some time, and
for some time it was just that. Red brought nearer to
humanity by yellow, as Kandinsky described it. I am just
that: a human who wants to be closer to god. What is the
true opposite of human? Maybe orange. A piece of sun, its
properties have been known to help us recall the feeling of
cool-blue grass under toes, the chime of a baby robin, the
holy scent of ripe mud. What is it that makes us want to get
close? To the gods, to summer, to sweetness, before we
retreat again . . .

One section — right now, it’s the beginning — of my orange poem is this:

Before word fruit and before fruit color
not as concept but movement, a certain
length of light finding its way to the back
of an eye, to a brain, through a body.
More than sight, sensation, the feeling
of heat* bursting out of the blue**

*or flame?
**blue as orange’s contrast color and blue as the lake water surface an orange buoy sits upon

hmm . . . I’ll play around with this some more. I need to connect this section with my experiences with seeing and not seeing orange buoys.

april 6/RUN

4.15 miles
minnehaha falls steps and back
45 degrees

Yes, spring! Bright sun and clear paths. Warmer air. Lots of runners and walkers and one roller skier in a bright yellow shirt. My lower back/glutes did not hurt when I was running — even though they had ached slightly (or softly?) yesterday and last night.

Did a slightly different route today: river road trail, south / godfrey / hiked down the steep trail then ran across the flat, grassy part below the falls where the creek pools and begins to bend / walked up the 100+ steps / climbed over the green gate / ran through the park / north river road, trail / boulevard grass

Running south I listened to the roller skiers poles striking the ground and happy voices, returning north, my color playlist. An orange song happened at the end, Shake it Well/ Koo Koo. Like most orange words, its about the fruit.

10 Things

  1. a loud rustling in the dry leaves below the double bridge
  2. a big turkey on the winchell trail, they moved off to the side to let me pass — no hissing or gobbling
  3. white foaming water falling beside slabs of ice
  4. the creek, moving past over the rocks, glittering in the sun
  5. a woodpecker somewhere in the trees, laughing
  6. the bench above the edge of the world, empty
  7. something big and bright and shining across the river
  8. something else big and white — at first I thought it might be the sky through a gap in the trees but later I decided it was a building
  9. my shadow in front of me — sharp, looming, distracting
  10. a lumpy shadow cast on the paved trail by a gnarled tree branch leaning over a crooked fence

This month, I’m slowly incorporating steps into my training, and my thinking about color, especially but not exclusively, orange. Here’s a color poem I discovered yesterday:

Black lake, black boat, / Emily Skaja

black fog I can’t find my way
through. Black trees, black
moon. I once knew the sky
from the water. This course
I remember, its narrowing.
How I crept my way down
the ladder like clutching
the gluey rungs of a throat.
I know you know how I’ve been.
Like you, like blood sucked
from a cut. A hot metal gash,
a beat of alarm, too late.
The water is listening.
That’s my name in its mouth.

april 4/WALK

55 minutes
ravine / longfellow flats / 7 oaks
34 degrees

Took Delia for a walk this morning. With the sun and the birds and the dry ground, it felt warmer than 34. Spring! What a wonderful morning! Walked down the wood steps to the winchell trail just above the ravine. Heard the steady, soothing drip of water falling out of the sewer pipe and onto the scattered rocks — riprap — then over the limestone ledge to the exposed pipe on the forest floor. No more ice or slick spots. The soft light made all the brown and rusted orange glow. I studied the husk of a tree on the edge of the gravel trail — still upright, but not much of a trunk left, and no leaves, one or two rotted branches. Climbed out and over to the Drs. Dorothy and Irving Bernstein Scenic Rest Area Overlook to check out the view. Then went down the steps to the abandoned dirt and leaf-littered trail that hugs the edge. Part of this trail only has the posts for a chainlink fence, part of it has the whole fence half-buried. Walked through the tunnel of trees, then down the old stone steps to Longfellow Flats. Walked past a huge tree on the ground, moved off to the side of the trail by park workers. The trunk was stripped clean and bare at the top, and thick with bark at the bottom — a very noticeable contrast in girth and texture. The river was beautiful and blue up close, all silvery sparkle from a distance. Powered back up the steps, which felt good on my glutes and calves, crossed the river road and made our way past 7 oaks to home.

Steps Taken

  1. worn wooden steps at the edge of the 36th street parking lot
  2. the makeshift steps closer to the ravine made from slabs of rock sticking out of the dirt
  3. limestone steps at the Drs. Bernstein Overlook
  4. the old stone steps to longfellow flats — 112 steps

10 Things

  1. silvery river burning through a break in the trees
  2. drip drip drip — water falling into the ravine
  3. bright blue graffiti on a wall only seen when you’re deep in the ravine
  4. the abandoned posts of a chainlink fence above the gorge
  5. the way the thinned-out trees, the soft sand, and the small curve of the path frames the water and the air — wide open, vast, yet contained enough to take in all at once
  6. at least 2 woodpeckers softly knocking on rotting wood, later one of the woodpeckers laughing
  7. the st. thomas bells
  8. voices behind, then two walkers passing past us
  9. on the forest floor, looking up at the top of the bluff, watching as runners glided by, looking so high and small
  10. in the floodplain forest, not too far from where the trees open to the river, a tree covered with bright green moss
tree with moss and shadow

orange

During the walk, I thought about orange, especially in terms of the history of the color that I had just read yesterday. The fruit came before the name of the color. It wasn’t that the color didn’t exist until it was given a name, it’s just that people didn’t recognize it as orange. It was yellow-red or brown. I also thought about what I had read about Van Gogh and his still life painting with oranges, how his focus was not the fruit, but the color. The color as its own thing. I pulled out my phone, and spoke this idea into it:

Orange existed before it was attached to a word, before it was attached to an object.

april 1/RUN

3.5 miles
2 trails
39 degrees / wind: 27 mph gusts

Windy and cold. Cold enough to bust out my black vest, but not cold enough for the purple jacket. Lots of swirling and floating leaves. Did I hear any birds? Not that I remember, but I did hear voices — kids on the playground and a squeal near longfellow flats that I think was an excited little kid but could have also been a hurt animal. Saw one roller skier twice, or 2 different roller skiers once.

My back was stiff this morning, but didn’t hurt at all while I was running. The run was relaxed — I stopped several times to look for rusty things – and felt good. The wind didn’t bother me while I was running, but now, sitting at my desk, my ears are burning.

Also, sitting at my desk, looking out my window, a runner that often see is running by. This is the first time I’ve seen her at home, the other times have been near the ravine at 36th. I suppose I should include her as one of the regulars. The distinctive thing about her, the thing that makes it possible for me notice and remember her even with my bad vision, is her strange gait. She runs with a hitch in her step. I marvel at it: how can she keep running with that hitch? how does she not get injured? does she feel the hitch, or is she unaware of it? Tentatively, I’ll call her, Miss Hirple Hip because I learned last month, while looking for a word that rhymes with purple, that hirple means limp and because her limp starts in her hip.

Before the run I wrote about my chosen challenge for the month: steps (see below). I made a list of things I want to explore. After that, I briefly wrote about 2 poems that I re-memorized this morning, which brought me to color and rust. I thought about the process (the steps) of rusting — oxidation — and decided to search for rusty things while I ran. Has my plan for the month already derailed? Instead of steps, will I fixate on rust? Future Sara will find out!

10 Rusty Things

  1. the bolts on a bench at 42nd street
  2. the metal plates at the entrance to the sidewalk on the next block
  3. almost every chain link fence
  4. the sound of the st. thomas bells ringing from across the river
  5. wind chimes in a yard
  6. the bottom of a lamp post on the edge of the trail
  7. just above the wheel well of a car
  8. a metal pole that used to hold a sign but no longer does
  9. a cover for the wires stretching up from the ground to a power line pole
  10. the sound of the dead leaves as they rustle in the wind

Some general thoughts I had about rust as I ran: rust is an edge dweller / while there are lots of edges around here, there isn’t that much rust, at least where I was looking

Steps

Last month, I came up with my challenge for this month. Steps. Will I stick with it? I can’t ever be sure, but it is a very promising theme. So many things I can do with it. Here are just a few:

  1. identify and list all of the steps on the franklin/ford loop
  2. take them, describe them, count them
  3. explore the history of these steps
  4. explore the public staircases of St. Paul
  5. incorporate stair climbing into marathon/strength training
  6. explore the history of step as a concept — a measurement
  7. how are steps designed — what regulations exist around steps, best practices, etc.
  8. steps and low vision, steps and accessibility
  9. step-by-step instructions + how to manuals
  10. activities that require a certain sequence, activities that do not
  11. ladders
  12. memorable steps in literature and poetry
  13. step counters and 10,000 steps
  14. feet — it begin here: feet first, following

Refreshing My Memory

It’s been almost a year (I think?) since I checked that I can still recite the poems in my 100 list, so during April — for National Poetry Month! — I’m revisiting my poems and refreshing my memory. I’m working in reverse order:

Crumbling is not an instant’s Act — / Emily Dickinson — I decided to memorize this poem because of its description of erosion — all of it, but specifically the line, An Elemental Rust. Erosion — as evidenced by the gorge and in my dying cone cells, is a key theme for me right now. Also: rust as a process, a color. I want to add to my collection of color poems with one about rust.

Tattoo/ Wallace Stevens — I first read this poem in a dissertation about Lorine Niedecker and her nystagmus. Immediately I thought of Alice Oswald and Dante and insects that travel from your eye to the world and back again to deliver data so you can see. I love this idea and have been playing around with it in terms of color vision while I’m swimming — I imagine light as the fish in me escaping to determine the color of the water/waves, and then reporting back to me. Another mention of color — I think I should return to my color poems!

march 31/RUN

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
36 degrees

Yesterday afternoon we got 2 or 3 inches of snow. By the time I went out for my run in the late morning, much of it had melted, even on the grass. Excellent. It’s the warmer ground and the bright sun that did it. I was over-dressed in my purple jacket with a stocking cap. Halfway through the run, I took off the cap and held it in my hands.

As I ran south to the falls I chanted in triples. Lots of berries and sweet things (hot fudge sauce, fresh whipped cream), histories and mysteries and possibles, both muddy trail and mud on trail, and metronomes. On the way back, I put in my “doin’ time” playlist for the last day of my time month. I was planning to not stop to walk for the second half, but when a runner who was running the same speed or just a little slower than me joined the path in front of me, I decided to stop a few times to get some distance from them. One of the places I stopped was the bench above the edge of the world. I don’t remember what the river looked liked, all I remember was that looking at it made me feel calm and content and vast.

overheard while running by the falls: one person to a group of others, he should do it, his arms are the longest. Were they taking a group selfie?

10 Things

  1. water falling, 1: a steady gush out of a gutter
  2. water falling, 2: trickling from the sewer pipe at the ravine
  3. water falling, 3: gushing at the falls — mostly white foam
  4. shadow, 1: the small shadow of a bird crossing my path
  5. shadow, 2: the sprawled, gnarled, twisted, softened shadows of oak trees on the road
  6. shadow, 3: the sharp circle of the lamp part of the lamp post
  7. missing: the top railing of a wood fence on the edge of the trail
  8. several people in the falls parking lot, waiting to pay for parking
  9. empty benches
  10. a thin layer of snow on a leaning branch in the ravine

Found this poem the other day:

Color Keeps Time / Patrycja Humienik

or it rides us
like a torrent. Blurs
and fastens, flesh

to seconds. Just look
at your veins.
In vespertine woods,
I tried to read moss
by hand. There’s
something laconic
about green that I need.

Lover, let the morning slow
time through the branches.

vespertine: relating to, occurring, or active in the evening
laconic: using few words, concise to the point of seeming rude or mysterious

What kind of time are different colors? What sort of time is orange, for example? If purple is twilight, orange is late afternoon or early summer evenings.

I tried to read moss/by hand. This line reminds me of Robin Wall Kimmerer and her suggestion that “Mosses, I think, are like time made visible. They create a kind of botanical forgetting. Shoot by tiny shoot, the past is obscured in green. That’s why we have stories, so we can remember” (Ancient Green/RWK).

“Color Keeps Time” is from the collection, We Contain Landscapes.