4 miles over ford bridge and back 57 degrees wind: 9 mph / gusts: 19 mph
This might be my last run before the marathon on Sunday, although I might run a mile or two on Saturday. My feet and form felt very strange for the first mile. It might be all the foam in my shoes; I wish stacked shoes and more foam weren’t the trend in running shoes. I prefer feeling the ground. Since I’m complaining, another problem with my shoes for the past few years: the laces always loosen and my feet slide around. I had to stop less than 2 minutes into the run to tighten the laces. Something positive: I have done enough running for 3 minutes, walking for 1, that it feels like a habit now, something I’ll be able to do during the race, almost automatically, when things get harder.
Today’s beautiful color: more bright red leaves on several of the trees closes to the edge of the trail. Also: the feeling of changing leaves as I ran across the ford bridge. I write feeling, because I’m not sure I was actually seeing anything more than the slightest hint of reds and oranges and golds in the trees, but it felt like change was about the happen or, already happening but very slowly.
10 Things
after the double bridge: brown and red leaves covering the paved path
the sound of a frisbee hitting the chain as a man threw it in at the frisbee golf course in Wabun
some sort of wake on the water: a thin trail, not too far from shore
overheard, one biker to another: everyone has their subjective experience
passing by a walker in a BRIGHT yellow jacket — I was heading up the hill to wabun, they were heading down
the buzz of chainsaws in the oak savanna
passing by a parks maintenance vehicle, parked on the path with their BRIGHT lights and very LOUD engine
my shadow, faint, ghostly, off to the side of me
empty benches
the orange spray paint marking off the part of the path with a big crack looked even more orange-y today — I wonder when they’re planning to fix it?
Recited the poem I re-memorized this morning, “Rhyme for Halloween,” as I walked back to my house. I thought about its dark whimsy and wondered if I’ve managed to achieve any of that in my Haunt poems. I’d like to.
On my walk, I also noticed tons of wild mushrooms in yards and decided the next poem to re-memorize is Sylvia Plath’s “The Mushrooms.” Decided, too, that I should memorize Emily Dickinson’s mushroom poem: The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants — (1350)/ Emily Dickinson
10 miles east on Summit / west on Summit 60 degrees / 91% humidity dew point: 59
A week from today, right now, at almost noon, I’ll be deep into the marathon. For my last long (ish) run before the race, I decided to run miles 20.5 – 25.75 of the course. The first half was almost all uphill — not steep, but steady. I didn’t mind it today, but I bet I’ll be feeling it next Sunday. It’s a beautiful and painful way to run the last 10k of a marathon.
I had two memorable animal encounters. The first one occurred about 2 miles in. Standing at a stoplight, waiting for the light to change, something fell on the bill of my hat. Was it drips from a big tree? I looked up to see. No tree, but a utility pole and on the wire, a single bird. Gross! I started running for about a minute and then thought, I better check to see if there’s bird poop all over my hat. Yep. Luckily the grass was wet and I could use it to “clean” off the poop.
The second encounter happened a few miles later. With no warning, a squirrel ran out from the trees on the edge of the sidewalk and ran straight into my ankle bone, then kept running. My feet banged into each other, but I didn’t need to do any stutter steps. The ankle bone burned for a few minutes, but I think I’m okay.
After this second encounter I thought about how bad things happen in threes and I wondered what my third thing would be. Thankfully, it never happened.
10 Things
thick, foggy air
wet leaves, in oranges and reds and yellows, squeaking under my feet
the smell of cigarette smoke — passing a woman, watching her lift a cigarette to her mouth, then a puff of smoke
bright pink and yellow flowers at the front gate of a fancy house
crossing Ayd Mill Road, noticing a new bike path below
passing the governor’s mansion, running beside the fence, orange cones in front, on the edge of the road
the bells of St. Thomas ringing
more splotches of yellow and red and orange in the trees — fall is here!
having to wait through 2 cycles of lights at Lexington before I got a walk sign, hearing the recorded voice calling out, wait wait wait wait wait
shadow falls creek was flowing steadily, the falls were falling
Crossing back over the bridge, a favorite image of the run: rowers! 6 or 7 single shells spread across the river, the strange, whiteish gray light, making the front end of each shell glow in silvery white. Wow!
Here’s an excerpt of poem that is the poem-of-the-day at Poetry Daily. I like the easy way the story unfolds:
Here on a rock I see the loon does not perceive me as a threat. She ate her lunch looning around in circles, going under & coming back, always within 12 feet of me but in water if I approach she goes under & disappears disliking boat’s vibration in her element
But on the ground a mother grouse and 2 young freely walk around the cabin—they’re not afraid of people, said Gillian that’s why they get hunted but we don’t hunt them she said, & I brought you some eggs pullet eggs and these purple flowers clustered on spindly stems—fresh thyme or is it oregano
3 miles trestle turn around 60 degrees / humidity: 89%
Back to sticky running this morning. Overcast, but humid and wet from an early morning rain. I wore my BRIGHT orange YWCA Tri shirt from 2013 and my BRIGHT yellow running shoes. I wonder, did I brighten the otherwise gloomy gorge for anyone? I’m continuing to do my 3/1 method. The first 3 felt good, the second 3 did not, then after that, they all felt about the same: not hard, but not effortless either. Lots of sweating. After climbing up from under the lake street bridge I saw my first “road closed for an event on oct 4” sign. That’s for the marathon! For the next mile, I had a big grin on my face. It’s coming!
Two days ago, I came across WS Merwin’s “The Light of September” in an log post and I decided I wanted to re-memorize it (I memorized it a few years ago). Then yesterday, I decided to re-memorize Diane Seuss’ “I Look Up From My Book at the World Through Reading Glasses.” Today, it was Jorie Graham’s “Still Life with Window and Fish.” As I ran, I recited the lines in my head: Down here this morning in my white kitchen along the slim body of the light . . . Such a wonderful poem that has so much to say about vision and light. As I was memorizing DS’s poem yesterday, I thought about how brilliant it is in describing my experience of seeing the world sometimes — the world, italicized/Douglas fir blurs into archetype. . .Then I thought about a new project: picking some of the favorite vision poems I’ve gathered by others and writing about how and why they resonate for me. Seuss and Graham would definitely be on that list, along with several Emily Dickinson poems.
10 Things
a small pack of shirtless runners — I heard the loud slapping of their feet first, then saw them as they flew past me
scuff scuff scuff — a runner in a BRIGHT yellow shirt, scuffing his feet on the path with every step — he was slow but had a fast cadence, so there were a lot of scuff noises
a few more slashes of yellow, red — I think a few orange too
the squeaky whirr of wheels on an orange motorized something — not a bike, not a scooter — it was orange and had 3 wheels and the old guy in an orange jacket riding it was moving fast
the sliding bench was empty
any view of the river, forgotten — was I able to see it, or was it blocked by leaves?
a white sky
no geese, no blue jays, no chickadees, one cheeseburger from a carolina wren
cars driving on the river road in bursts — a line-up, then no cars, then a line-up again
waving to Daddy Long Legs who was over on the bike path while I was on the walking path
haunt / overlook
Today, since I’m writing about the overlook — the ones by the gorge, the act of ignoring or passing by without noticing or forgetting — I decided to search for “overlook” on Poetry Daily (poems.com). Jackpot! A great poem by the wonderful Maggie Smith:
Our honeymoon was a strand of scenic overlooks. I first wrote strange—a strange of scenic
overlooks—my mistake, and strange enough was the desert penned in red ink. The scene
was either Sedona or Mars. They say the iron in the rocks calls to the iron in our blood,
so it tugs on us. It tugged. We stayed on Airport Mesa, where we called the crowds drawn to sanguine
sunsets “tourists,” as if we weren’t, and where, each night, the Milky Way made a mess of the sky.
Was I the only one who wanted
to wipe its white smudge away, to polish the night
black again? Our honeymoon was a stranded scene I overlooked. We posed for photographs \
we never took. I remember the moon framed above the landscape, looking silvery as a tintype
taken in a modern-day ghost town. The last day, we reached the canyon and saw where the river
had over millions of years chewed it down to bone, clear to the canyon’s strange marrow, riven
into red, copper, and purple—bands like sunsets compressed and recorded in rock. That view
remains. Our honeymoon was a strand, a strangeness, a look ahead. I wrote only what I could see.
1 — look / scene (seen) / tourists (gawkers) / a blocked view (Milky Way) / photographs (staged looks) / a view (of the moon) framed / landscape (visible feature of an area of land) / looking like / saw / view remains / look ahead / could see
What a variety of uses of view/see/look here, related to vision! I’d like to try this out in my overlook poem — or, maybe the same approach (gathering and using a wide range of descriptions related to a concept) on my dirt path poem, which has two sections: desire and abandon
2 — overlook as view / overlook as not seeing
3 — geologic time / iron in rock connected to iron in body — references to Lorine Niedecker and “Lake Superior”?
4 — a beautiful description of the carving out of a canyon, both literal and figurative as what happened to a marriage years after the honeymoon
5.6 miles above locks and dam / ford bridge / under lake street 54 degrees
The first mile was rough. My feet were sore. Mile 2 wasn’t that great either. But, by mile 3, I started to feel better. And by mile 4, I decided that instead of stopping at a certain distance, I’d stop at a certain time: an hour. This run gives me confidence for the marathon. I can remind myself that even if it feels hard in the first few miles, it starts to feel better around mile 4. Better = a little easier, more relaxed, my legs and lungs and arms in sync.
One of the goals for my run today was to visit a few overlooks that I might use in a poem tentatively titled, overlook. On my way back from the ford bridge, I stopped at Horace Cleveland Overlook and took some video. As I ran from there above the river, I started thinking about unofficial overlooks — like above the ravine or above the floodplain forest in the tunnel of trees. Suddenly it hit me: these unofficial overlooks are often overlooked because people aren’t giving them enough attention as they move through the gorge, or because they are hidden from our “normal” ways of looking — the river, the floodplain forest, the steps that wind down to the flats. I decided this poem should have both meanings of overlook — or, maybe even other meanings too, similar to one of Jane Hirshfield’s assays. I need to revisit some of her assay poems to figure out if they fit with what I’m trying to do.
10 Things
a squirrel who had no fucks to give — didn’t even bother to be startled as i ran by
white heat on the river’s surface — the sun bouncing off the scaled surface
a group of bikers meeting up at the locks and dam no. 1 parking lot
a red bag, under a tree, just below the ford bridge
the river near the eastern edge, just off of the ford bridge, was a pale greenish blue
the view of the east bank from the ford bridge: hints of reds and oranges in the trees
a tall guy, running fast in bursts — doing strides? the first time I saw him stop, I heard him wheezing from his hard effort
almost all of the floodplain forest is still green
some little purple flowers on the edge of the trail — Siberian Squill? — so upright and softly colored, looking like little bouquets spread out along the trail
while most of the benches were empty, more than usual were filled — mostly by a single person, but at one, two women were sitting and talking
Horace Cleveland Overlook / 23 sept 2026
Looked through past entries and found a definition for assay from 11 jan 2024:
definition of an assay
Assays began with a poem written after I’d reread Edgar Allan Poe’s stories while writing an essay on how hiddenness works in poems. Some of the qualities of essay exploration and prose step lingered in its music and mode of thinking. At the time, I was regularly seeing the journal Science. On the back would often be advertisements for half-million-dollar machines for performing assays. That word—close to essay and sharing its root in the idea of an attempt, a try—refers to discovering a thing’s nature by breaking it into its elemental parts. The poem became ‘Poe: An Assay.’ That approach to writing, of testing a subject for its discoverable parts, imaginative and factual, caught. I began writing others. ‘Judgment: An Assay.’ ‘Tears: An Assay.’ ‘And: An Assay.’” Jane Hirshfield
assay (def): the testing of a metal or ore to determine its ingredients and quality
Does this fit with what I’m trying to do? Not quite.
20 miles lake harriet and back 55 degrees humidity: 91%
20 miles. For the first 10 miles, I listened to creek water and foot strikes and the rush of traffic — so many cars out there on a Sunday morning! For the second 10 miles, I put in a new playlist that I made yesterday, called 20 miler. I created it by looking through Apple Music playlists for the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s. I put it on shuffle. I recall that Tribe Called Quest and Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” helped me get through my tough moments.
I’m proud of myself for what I just accomplished. Not because it was particularly fast, although it was 16+ minutes faster than my 20 miles from 2024, but because I did it at all. When I woke up this morning, my left hip/IT band was sore. I decided I’d run to lake nokomis and around it, then do the franklin and ford loops for the rest of the distance. If, at some point, my hip felt too sore, I would be closer to home so if I cut some of the distance, I could get home easily. Maybe this plan would have worked, but I imagine it would have been too easy to decide my hip hurt too much and to stop.
This was the plan, but when I got to the creek, which had been almost completely dried up in my past runs, and saw (and heard!) that it was full because of recent rains, I decided I wanted to keep following the creek to see what it looked and sounded like on the way to lake harriet.
A little bit later, I might have turned around before reaching lake harriet, but when I got to the part of the trail that had been closed, it was open. So I decided to keep going. From there, I just kept going until I reached 10 miles, which was deep into the lake harriet trail. Then I took a short break and turned around and headed back.
On the way back, my knees were stiff and sore and my feet hurt. I wondered if I was pushing it too much and should stop — a brief thought: I could call FWA and have him pick me up. Then I wondered if I should just walk the rest of it, or at least the next mile. Instead, I switched to running for 90 seconds, walking for 30. And I just kept going.
When I got to mile 18, I thought I would have to run beyond the turn off to my house to get the full 20 miles. A flash — it’s okay if you only run 19; that’s good enough. But, I didn’t stop at 19. I kept moving, 90/30, until I reached 20.
Lots of fortitude practiced today, which makes me happy because building up my fortitude — not giving up when it’s hard, pushing past what I think I can do, just putting one foot in front of the other even when I think it’s impossible — is one of my top reasons I wanted to train for and run another marathon.
20 Things
leaves: mostly green, but a scattering of yellow and red, some orange too
crossing over the duck bridge and seeing all the water in the creek — no dirt bars or aquatic plants, just water
the part of nokomis avenue that was closed off for road work is open again
the giant images of monarch butterflies are still on the fence of the pickleball court
a full house of pickleballers — a mixture of loud thwacks with cheering
a spot on the trail, just past lake nokomis, that I’ve made note of before: wind rushing through leaves almost sounding like falling water
stretch of the trail that follows the other side of the creek and goes under chicago was open again — hooray!
part of the path and certain slats on the small wooden bridges were slick from friday’s and yesterday’s rain
running under the freeway bridge, wondering if there were any bats up there today — a sudden flurry of movement, something too big to be a bat and gray swooping down and landing — a pigeon?
the bronze bunny did not have a scarf or a garland or any decoration on it
another section of the path is closed — the detour requires you to climb a steep hill then descend it a few minutes later — I walked up it, then ran down it
crossing a bridge, looking down at the creek water as it rushed over a row of small boulders
reaching lake harriet: crowded paths, mostly pedestrians several people wide
a beautiful beach — the buoys are still in! — calm, blue water, an unbroken surface
shshshshsh the feel and sound of feet running on loose dirt on the side of the trail
running into wind on the way back
as part of the detour, had to run on a section of the bike path where bikers can’t see well and often bike very fast — on the way back, noticed a dirt trail cutting through some grass on the hill — took it to avoid fast bikers
darkish sky with wind, then bright sun, then dark sky again
groups of people hiking on dirt trails beside the creek, between chicago and bloomington
2 dogs encountering each other near the mustache bridge — one of them big and excited, the dog’s owner, a guy who was big and looked strong, struggled to hold the dog back
It is now a few hours after I finished my run. I’m wiped out and sore, and relieved to be done. Time to taper! As they (pro runners) like to say: the hay is in the barn.
7 miles ford loop+ 61 degrees / dew point: 59 drizzle, off and on
Moist. Humid air mixed with sweat mixed with rain-soaked bushes mixed with occasional drizzle. Overcast. Encountered several walkers with umbrellas or rain jackets. Ran past some geese, a few wild turkeys. Heard the bells of St. Thomas.
10 Wet Things
my upper arm after brushing against wet leaves
the sidewalk — a little slick
puddles on the path, making visible cracks I might not have seen otherwise
the surface of the river, crossing the ford bridge: scaled, gray
shadow falls was falling vigorously
the big fountain in front of a fancy house on the river road, bubbling
my shirt, soaked at the top
stopped at the water fountain near the skate park
my pony-tail, dripping
they’re doing work at the old steam plant/ Ford Area C — an orange something looking like a thick lane line in the water near shore, a big crane, yellow-vested workers all around
While working on a poem about Ford Area C and the abandoned power plant yesterday, I read about how Ford, which still owns this building/land, had to submit a plan for cleaning up the toxic dump that has been there for more than 80 years — is that what they’re doing down there, cleaning up? Something else they’ve already done is remove a small building up on the bluff, just off of the trail. Today I made that my turn around point (note to future Sara, if you’re planning to run 7 miles, this is about 1/2 mile short). I walked out near the edge and took a few pictures of the open view to the plant below, including this one:
above the power plant / 17 sept
Friends of the Mississippi River (FMR) put together a helpful timeline of Ford Area C. Here are a few key dates:
1945-1966 — Ford dumps waste solvents over the bluff and deposits barrels of paint waste onto the Mississippi River floodplain, creating what is eventually named “Area C.” (The primary manufacturing campus includes parcels “A” and “B.”)
1965-66 — Ford deposits large amounts of construction debris on top of the hazardous waste at Area C.
1979 — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with Ford’s permission, adds construction debris to the top of the Area C dump during nearby lock and dam reconstruction, making removal of the hazardous waste underneath more difficult. Ford is paid by the yard for the disposed-of waste.
Fall 2025 — Ford has submitted a draft cleanup plan (feasibility study) to the MPCA. The MPCA will hold a community meeting and seek public comments in January 2026 before selecting a cleanup alternative with Ford.
In January of 2026, the MPCA held public meetings to discuss Area C clean-up plans. I haven’t found much more information. Looking at the MPCA site for Ford Area C, I found a timeline that claims 2027 is when the clean-up will happen.
Returning to the MPCA site and their description of Ford Area C:
From approximately 1945 through the mid-1960s, Ford disposed of paint sludge and solvents used in automobile painting operations at the base of the bluff. Although the specific disposal practices are not known, it appears that liquid solvents may have been dumped over the edge of the bluff, while barrels of paint sludge were buried. Disposal of industrial waste stopped in about 1966. Ford also disposed of construction rubble, contaminated soil, scrap metal, and other types of debris at Area C.
During the reconstruction of Lock & Dam No. 1 in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers disposed of a large volume of construction rubble and sand on top of and surrounding the industrial waste. In the mid-1980s, Ford covered the top of the construction rubble pile with a paved parking lot. The city of Saint Paul placed additional rubble at Area C during reconstruction of Mississippi River Boulevard in the late 1980s.
Dumped over the edge of the bluff, buried in the ground, covered with rubble, sand, a parking lot.
5 miles bottom of franklin hill and back 61 degrees / humidity: 73%
Warmer today, which meant more sweating and a little more effort. This week is the big one: 5, 10, and 20 milers. Mostly, I felt good. No kneecap slips today. At the beginning of the run, I noticed the wind rushing through the trees. In my head I recited, I am the wind and the wind is invisible. All the leaves tremble but I am invisible. Later I chanted, life is but life is but life is but life is but death is but death is but death is but death is but bliss is but bliss is but bliss is but bliss is but breath is but breath is but breath is but breath / life life life death death death bliss bliss bliss breath breath breath.
10 Things
fall is here, 1: streaks of red in the trees on the edge of the trail
fall is here, 2: a stretch of grass carpeted with red and yellow and brown leaves
a woman near the road down to minneapolis rowing club in a bright yellow vest
cheeseburger cheeseburger — carolina wren
wet and slightly slippery trails, caused by yesterday’s rain
just north of the big crack by the trestle, more cracks returning, widening, spreading
a startled squirrel — it was about to dart out, then decided so abruptly to reverse course that it jumped up to the side and did a frantic spin
empty benches, including the sliding bench
no more stacked slabs of stone looking like a sitting person under the franklin bridge
I think I heard some rowers on the river, but didn’t see them
Listened to the cars and the birds as I ran north. Put in my “Hello, Goodbye” playlist for the last mile.
September is the month when 3 out of our 4 parents died: Scott’s dad on 1 sept 2023; Scott’s mom on 29 sept 2022; and my mom on 30 sept 2009. So, it’s fitting to post this beautiful poem halfway through September:
Not the Bread Machine, but the Space It Takes / Sara Rosenberg
For years it rested beneath the pantry’s floating shelves, sap-sticky with spills:
hot honey and rice slipped from the bag. Then, behind the giant soup pot I used only once,
to brine a turkey the way my mother used to on my first Thanksgiving without her—Prussian blue
and dented, speckled like a bird egg. Later, I wedged it beside the pasta maker and its many attachments,
another thing I never knew I wanted until she gave it to me, as if to say I was worthy
of time-saving, of a homemade dough I didn’t have to knead. For weeks, it sat in the box of waiting donations,
where each time I bent down to haul it away, a stone fell down the back of my throat.
Crusted with the bread I cultivated, crumb of wheat, of banana, of oatmeal, from when I lived
alone in the rat house behind the landlord’s five-bedroom, pretending his black creek was my black creek,
that his chimney’s columns of smoke were my columns of smoke. She showed up
at my door with a box of new cutlery, knives so clean I saw my face in them, with new dish cloths I had never
thought to need. She set the appliance on the green tile countertop like a bouquet of roses.
I heard it whir, warm with promise, loud as rain. A memory so delicate it flakes in my hand.
13.75 miles franklin / ford / the confluence 53 degrees cloudy, some drizzle
The weather was wonderfully cool, which made a big difference. Everything felt easier, and I felt stronger. My 3/1 plan was working well. It was great until my kneecap skipped (or slipped? or stuttered?) around mile 8. It didn’t slide out so far that I had to pop it back into my place (with my hand, or by walking up stairs), but it was enough to make my tendons angry and to shake my confidence. I stopped to walk briefly, then started again. Another stutter. For 2 or 3 seconds I panicked, then I started running, this time more deliberately, lifting my knees. No more stutters — at least, I think there were no more stutters. For the rest of the run, I was weary and distracted. But, I still did it, and I’m choosing to believe that the kneecap skips were an aberration, and I’m choosing to remember how good (relaxed, strong, steady, fast enough) I felt for the first half of the run.
I have two ideas about how to prevent the skips from happening again:
more stretching and warm-up before I begin, especially exercises to get my glutes firing
wear my compression socks
My route involved a figure 8 with the lake street, franklin, and ford bridges, then a (mostly) straight shot to the confluence and back. In the first hour, I saw (and heard the oars of) rowers on the river. Also encountered some sort of bike event — not a race, but a fun ride around the city. I wanted to ask someone what it was, but I didn’t want to stop. Just looked it up: St. Paul Classic Bike Tour. My route was part of the bike tour route — well, not exactly — I was on the path, they were on the road.
a few things overheard by bikers:
one biker: look at the Halloween decorations! another: Halloween? Too soon!
I forgot you went to River Falls (University of Wisconsin, River Falls)
and she was completely naked, except for the towel!
one biker: did you finish all of your projects at the cabin? another biker: nope
I think I just tasted some rain drops! / the weatherman was wrong!
oh, it’s so beautiful here (one biker to another, on the trail between hidden falls and the confluence)
13+ Things
about a dozen wild turkeys spread out over the lawns of some big houses
a dark sky, bright white bike lights cutting through
cheers from people leaning over the franklin bridge for the rowers below — a race? not that I could find online
cheeseburger cheeseburger — a carolina wren
the sound of water falling fast out of a crack in the limestone
stopping to fill my water at the monument — waiting in a short, fast line behind 2 other runners
more fall color on the trees — red and yellow on the trees just above the railing near marshall
at least one roller skier — click clack click clack of their poles
the bike tour had a pit stop at the parking lot and overlook closest to the ford bridge — port a potties, dozens of bikers, music — as I passed by, one biker called out: have a great run! / thank you! have a great bike ride!
a small building on the edge of the trail, part of the ford power plant, is gone — where and when did it go? a gap and a view that hadn’t been there before
the voices of kids playing at a house across the road, hidden by big fir trees
a short drizzle, both refreshing and chilly
studying the river’s surface from the ford bridge: flat, smooth, a thin sliver of bright blue cutting through grayish-blue reflecting the clouds and the small bit of blue sky trying to peek through
a woman emerging from the woods with a dog, her dog running hard into her knee, the woman staggering and calling out in pain — me: are you okay? her: yes, my dog ran into me
For most of the run (the first 12 miles), I listened to the bikers and the birds. For the last 2 miles, I put in my “Hello, Goodbye” playlist.
3.1 miles bottom of lock and dam no. 1 61 degrees / humidity: 65%
Ah, only 65% humidity! My legs and lungs could feel the difference. A beautiful, almost fall morning. Crowded trails — runners doing their final long runs for the marathon? Scott runs his 20 miler tomorrow; I’m a week behind, so I’ll run my next week. My goal is 11:30 – 12:00 minute per mile pace. So I’ll be out on the trails for 4 hours.
10 Things
rowers! a coxswain calmly and clearly explaining to the rowers what they should do
running below on the winchell trail, hearing 2 runners above me — a man and a woman, talking about how they were enjoying the run — good vibes, good conversation
sparkling, burning water in front of me as I turned down to enter the winchell trail at the south end
at the bottom of the lock and dam, stopping to admire the water — scaled, corrugated
encountering a kind man on the hill — good morning! what a beautiful day! congratulations to you for getting out here and getting after it! / thank you!
a voice, above, descending the hill from the ford bridge, talking to someone
that voice, a few minutes later, a solitary runner’s, talking non-stop on a blue-tooth to someone as she ran
a darting squirrel, almost running right in front of me
on the part of the path at the edge of the world, hearing water trickling out of the pipe in the ravine
all green leaves, no yellow or orange or red yet on this stretch
As I ran, I thought about a poem I was working on before my run, Haunt: the Benches. I want to write about 3 of my favorite benches, but which ones? Before the run, I knew 2 of them: the sliding bench and the bench above the edge of the world. As I ran past the Rachel Dow Memorial Bench, I realized I should write about it. Of course! Thinking more about the bench, some words: bench, not as place to sit, but frame — framing of place, of view — the invitation (or suggestion or expectation): look here, at this spot, we (the placers of the bench) have decided this is what is worth noticing — And now, as I write this, I’m thinking about how some of the benches have been maintained, their views kept unobstructed, and some have not.
marathon mantras
Last night, or early this morning, in one of several wake-ups, I thought about how I should have a mantra or mantras or a chanting practice (triple berries?) for the marathon. Something to work on — something I should have worked on earlier, but this marathon build has been strange. Wildfire smoke, allergies, extreme heat, sickness, and shoe and foot problems have caused me to always feel like I’m behind. The other day I said to Scott, I already know I want to run another marathon so I can have a better, more enoyable/consistent, build.
Some lines of poetry that have been helpful in the past: ED’s lines from “‘Tis So Much Joy”:
Life is but Life! And Death, but Death! Bliss is, but Bliss, and Breath but Breath!
On March 10, 2022, on my run and in the log, I experimented with fitting these lines to my breathing/running:
1
Life is but Life is but Life is but Life is but Death is but Death is but Death is but Death is but Bliss is but Bliss is but Bliss is but Bliss is but Breath is but Breath is but Breath is but Breath is but
2
Life xxx Life xxx Life xxx Life xxx
3
(Or, like “The Safety Dance”)
Life life life life Death death death death Bliss bliss bliss bliss Breath breath breath breath
Reading the entire poem again, I’m thinking I should try memorizing all of it to recite in my head:
Tis so much joy! ‘Tis so much joy!If I should fail, what poverty! And yet, as poor as I, Have ventured all upon a throw! Have gained! Yes! Hesitated so – This side the Victory!
Life is but Life! And Death, but Death! Bliss is, but Bliss, and Breath but Breath! And if indeed I fail, At least, to know the worst, is sweet! Defeat means nothing but Defeat, No drearier, can befall!
And if I gain! Oh Gun at Sea! Oh Bells, that in the steeples be! At first, repeat it slow! For Heaven is a different thing, Conjectured, and waked sudden in – And might extinguish me!
8.75 miles the confluence and back 59 degrees / humidity: 86% 100% sun
Cooler, but still warm because of humidity and sun. Only a few minutes in, my face was dripping with sweat and the top of my shirt was soaked. I need some new running shirts that aren’t light green or any other light color that so easily shows sweat. The first mile wasn’t easy — my feet/stride felt awkward and my legs were sore — but I reminded myself that it would get easier once I warmed up and that I could run almost 9 miles. It worked! I just kept going — 3 minutes of running, 1 minute of walking — and, at some point, it wasn’t as hard.
I tried something new: miles 1-4 — 3/1, miles 5-7 — 2 m/45 s, mile 7 — 90s/30s, mile 8+ — 3/1. I was curious which of these ratios might work best (best = easiest or fastest or lowest heart rate). The verdict: 3/1 was the best. 2/45 was too hard to keep track of and 90/30 elevated my heart rate the most.
For the first half of the run, I listened to the cars and the falls and the birds. For the second half, my “Hello, Goodbye” playlist.
10 Things
middle schoolers walking to school, 1: scuff scuff scuff — a boy in shorts, socks, and slides scuffing his feet as he walked towards me
middle schoolers walking to school, 2: 3 girls, dressed almost identically in white t-shirts and sweatpants — very polite, moving over to give me space — after they passed, a cloud of a scent — sweet, artificial, a perfume that reminded me of pink bubble-gum
car after car after car passing beside me on the river road
empty parking lots at the overlooks
the sound of a frisbee hitting a chainlink net — someone playing frisbee golf in wabun
ford bridge view, south: calm, flat water in several versions of blue
hidden falls falling softly, steadily
a new water fountain at the confluence that fills water bottles fast!
empty benches — no one sitting at my new favorite bench just above the dog park
ford bridge view, north: a small motor boat heading south to the lock and dam — a few seconds later I think I heard the bell at the lock that signaled it was being filled up with water so the boat could enter
A good run. I ran marathon race pace. My left knee was sore afterwards, but otherwise, I felt like I could keep running.
Sometime during the run, I started thinking about my Girl Ghost Gorge manuscript. First, I thought about one of the poems I’m working on, Here, We Speak Void, and how the form for it should be small stanzas surrounded by lots of space — maybe the different stanzas, which are different understandings/examples of Void, would be on different pages. This thought led to more thoughts about the whole collection. In addition to being about a girl, a ghost, a gorge, it’s about rock and river and air. Air = lots of empty or open space on the page, Water = words flowing freely, steadily.
we speak in Void
I found these thoughts yesterday and want to condense them into part of my poem. Today’s task, I think.
Gabbert suggests that the frustration of incoherence, mystery, not being able to make sense of something is alluring, erotic. It’s why many are drawn to poetry — to slow down, notice, get the chance to dwell in the unknown. 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.
log entry from 29 march 2023
Something similar to, not familiar language made strange, but strange language made familiar. I like the word, familiar — a meaning for knowing to put beside, or replace, mastering or (fully) understanding. And now I’m thinking about becoming accustomed — We grow accustomed to the Dark (ED).
18 miles lake harriet bandshell and back 67 degrees / humidity: 92%
That was hard. Like most of the runs in this marathon build, hot and humid. Lots of sweating. Near the end of hour 2, I looked down and noticed that my shirt was drenched. The first half felt mostly good: 3 minutes of running, 1 minute of walking, over and over. The second half was more difficult. I switched to 90 seconds of running and 30 seconds of walking and did 10 sets before I took a slightly longer walk break.
18 Things
past lake nokomis, on the creek path, the wind passing through the trees, sounding like water — no specific memory, but a reminder of the farm and how I would often hear that sound there
cracked asphalt on the creek path — marked with orange paint, some of the paint was zigzagged and some of it was loops, looking almost like flower petals
signs on the pickle ball fence: 2 giant monarch butterflies for the monarch butterfly festival — is that today? no, I checked, it’s 12 sept
a real monarch butterfly, fluttering through the trees next to the path
just after mile 1: a shirtless runner, pushing a strollers and holding onto a dog’s leash — talking to the kid he was pushing and/or someone on the phone — at one point he called out, GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE! did he see a turkey, or were he and his kid just remembering another time when they saw/heard a turkey
the dog was a beautiful golden retriever — not light golden fur, but dark, like copper — and was also very graceful and relaxed as they ran
an e-bike blasting “Let it Be” from their radio — the voices were clear until the bike passed, then distorted from the doppler effect
the creek continues to be very low, a lot more mud and dirt showing than normal
a mom on one bike, her very young daughter on another, carefully crossing the road and passing by an older man in a recumbent bike — he greeted them and called out to the girl with an encouraging, hey!
reaching the bandshell at lake harriet, looking for a water fountain, encountering about 50 people doing yoga on yoga mats, facing the lake — what an image! I think I heard to woman leading them say something about gratitude — wow, I looked it up and they had free yoga EVERY DAY this summer at lake harriet! today was the last day — I wish I would have known; I would have gone at least once
windy at lake harriet, I watched/listened to the water lapping the shore — I briefly thought about taking a 5 or 10 minute break to sit on the beach and be with the water, but decided it might be too hard to start up again
what a crowded path at harriet! too many people taking up too much space, making it hard for me to run easily
a group of adults gathered around a little girl, laughing (not at, but with the girl) and calling out, oh, her face, look at that face! not sure what was happening
2 bikers, one of them explaining to the other that they were redoing a bridge — it’s going to be really cool!
slowing down to let a faster runner pass me — good morning! / good morning!
a few honks, up in the air, geese far off somewhere
stopping at the back of the nokomis rec center to refill my water bottle with the jet-powered bottler filler, noticing a group of 6 or so older people standing around — from what I heard, I think they were about to rehearse a song they were planning to sing — I left before they started
two school gardens, one at Hiawatha, one at Howe, spread over several big planters, looking abundant and desperate for water
That run was not easy. My quads and hips and, occasionally my knees, hurt, so did my left ankle. And everything was sore by the end. I was slow and walked way too much for the last 4 miles. But, I did it. I was out there moving for 18 miles, and I was able to be on a trail that I’m rarely on these days. And I got to run all the way to lake harriet. I didn’t have to go to the bathroom. I didn’t have any terrible cramps. And, any negative thoughts I had (this is too hard or how will I be able to run a marathon in 4 weeks) didn’t last long. Victory!
For the first 14 miles, I listened to water and wind through trees and cars moving and dogs barking and some dad yelling out, gobble gobble gobble. For the last 4 miles, I put in headphones and listened to my “Remember to Forget” playlist.
5.7 miles ford loop 74 degrees humidity: 92% / dew point: 72
No sun until mile 4, humidity’s haze instead. The air, so thick! From the beginning, it felt like a steam bath and, when I reached the lake street bridge, it looked like one too. Running over it, my face was damp — was it sweat or the liquid air? I’m not sure.
Other than one longer walk break on ford bridge, I stayed steady with 3 minutes of running/1 minute of walking. Sometime during the run, it seemed to click. Even though it was uncomfortably humid, the run wasn’t that hard. A nice confidence boost.
10 Things
river surface: corrugated — blue-gray, small ridges, a streak in the middle — the wake of boat?
bright pink graffiti on the sidewalk on the bridge
a new water fountain at the monument, with a fast-filling bottle station — excellent!
shadow falls, falling, soft but insistent
the jangling of a dog collar somewhere nearby
feeling like fall, 1: piles of leaves on the edges of the paved trail
feeling like fall, 2: even more red leaves sprinkled throughout the tree line
several benches, occupied, each one with only one person
sun and blue sky as I ran over ford bridge
laughing kids on a school playground
On the Ford bridge, I stopped for a few minutes to admire the view upstream and to take a few pictures:
mississippi river looking north / blue sky / haze / blue waterford bridge railing / 4 sept 2026
4.25 miles minnehaha falls and back 78 degrees / dew point: 71
A recent refrain: hot, hot, so hot! I thought about running 10 miles, but when I couldn’t start my run until after 9, I decided 4+ miles would be enough. Tomorrow I’ll run to my new favorite bench which is about 7 miles there and back, so my total for this week of marathon prep will be fine. (5 on tues, 4.25 on thurs, 7+ on fri, 18 on sun). Yesterday, Scott and I spent about 8 hours at the fair — lots of time on feet. Can I count that as marathon training?
10 Things
Morning Sara! / Oh, hi! good morning Dave!
running beside a monarch for a few seconds — a splotch of beautiful orange at eye level — I thought about mom and how much she loved monarchs
sun, then clouds, then sun again
brittle, brown grass
a few more red leaves, a yellowed tree — were the leaves on it changing for fall or dead?
minnehaha creek above the falls looked still
the creek water falling over the ledge, subdued and diminished
the water at the water fountain on the edge of the park was unpleasantly warm
one roller skier — click clack click clack
the water at the fountain at the 36th parking lot was cool
Before I got too hot, I thought about looping around the falls an extra time or two to add distance. I made note of the distance: .7 miles. I can imagine a run where I do 1/2 mile run/.2 mile walk loops.
For the first half of my run, I didn’t listen to music, for the second half, I put in my headphones and listened to an old playlist, augustrun — “9 to 5”; “Misery Business”: “I’m Still Standing”; and “Can’t Touch This”.
Back to the fair: As we do every year, Scott and I waled around the fine arts building. And, as always, it was inspiring. There are some amazing artists in Minnesota. Scott took pictures of 2 textile/fiber art pieces that I particularly liked. One is inspiring for my HOLE project, the other for my gathering of plastic:
fireweed and sky / a weaving of thin strips of paper with words printed on them
I love this idea of weaving words! It looks like something fun to try. I looked up the artist, Theresa Zemlin, and jackpot! She has a wonderful site and many more inspiring pieces in her gallery! The piece at the fair is part of a larger collection she has titled, Woven Works:
My work has evolved from weaving fabric on floor looms, to Eva Hesse-inspired mixed-media, to welding life-size steel and paper pulp sculptures, to the physical manipulation of photo-based inkjet prints on paper. Inspiration for my work has always been rooted in the tactile, the language of materials and process, and finding my way to something compelling through trial, error, and investigation. Combining photo-based inkjet prints, text from naturalists and philosophers, and traditional weaving drafts has resulted in modes of thinking, responding, and assembling that are new and familiar in terms of chance juxtapositions and relationships between pattern, structure, text, and image.
Oh, I’m excited to give more time to her work and play around with some of the ideas!
further exploration: Listen to this podcast with Theresa Zemlin
2 — Once There Were Green Fields / Erik Jon Olson / quilted plastic waste
Once There Were Green Fieldsonce there were green fields, close-up
Erik Jon Olson has a wonderful website, too. Here’s what he writes on his artist statement:
My art practice exists at the intersection of material experimentation, environmental critique, and contemporary craft. Working primarily with single-use plastic waste that I layer, quilt, reconstruct and then stitch into large-scale compositions, I transform one of the main pollutants of our time into an expressive visual language. My work extends beyond the simple repurposing of found materials; it functions as an investigation into the cultural, ecological, and psychological consequences of contemporary consumption. … The visual seduction of my compositions—their vibrant color, intricate patterning, and tactile surfaces—creates an intentional tension between attraction and repulsion. From a distance, the works evoke traditions of abstraction, quilting, and graphic design; upon closer examination, viewers encounter the unsettling reality of consumer waste embedded within the aesthetic experience. This dynamic compels viewers to confront uncomfortable truths through the language of visual pleasure.
I looked at his list of exhibits and he has a solo show going on right now at a church a few miles from my house. Nice!
David Bowie!
While writing this entry, I’ve been listening to David Bowie’s album, The Man Who Sold the World. I was struck by these lyrics from “All the Madmen”:
Day after day They send my friends away To mansions cold and grey To the far side of town Where the thin men stalk the streets While the saints stay underground.
Wow, this song! Mansions cold and gray, the saints underground. Listening to another song on the album, “After All,” I looked it up and saw a reference to Nietzsche’s influence on Bowie, which led me to a review of a new book about Bowie and 6 key philosophers, including Nietszche: We’re Nobody’s Children. So far, I haven’t had any luck finding this book at a local library, or any samples of it online, but I’ll keep looking.
16 miles lake harriet and back 68 degrees humidity: 90%
16 miles! It was warm. That humidity! As I’ve heard several pro runners (on youtube or podcasts) say, humidity is the poor man’s altitude, which means I could expect to go slower — in fact, I should go slower — to account for the extra effort that hot and humid air demands. Before I started, I reminded myself that this run would be harder because of the humidity so I should take it easy. A mantra: if you’re not going slower, you’re going too fast. I also told myself that I only needed to worry about the first 8 miles to lake harriet because once I did that I was halfway and would have to run and/or walk another 8 miles back. Keeping my expectations low and being kind to myself helped.
I drank a lot of water, chewed on 6 or 7 Cliff blocks and sweat a lot. Somewhere between miles 10 and 12 I realized that my shirt was completely soaked and sticking to me. It was so wet that I was almost able to wring it out. Other than the humidity, the thing that made the run the hardest was my sore legs, especially my knees. I think that was partly due to all of the walking at the state fair we did 2 days ago. My knees felt stiff and sore even before I started!
3 things I did well: 1. even though I know I had unfinished business, it wasn’t a problem at all — no cramps, no need to stop at a port-a-potty!; 2. a steady pace for the first half + never totally going off the rails for the second half; and 3. believed I could do it the whole time and never gave into negative thoughts.
3 things to work on: 1. eat a bigger breakfast + drink more water before; 2. keep a steady pace with consistent run/walk sets when it gets tough — instead of taking a walk break, do easier run/walk sets, like 1 min run/ 1 min walk; and 3. try drinking electrolytes, and not just water, during the run.
16 Things
rowers on the river! I could hear the coxswain barking out instructions at the start of my run
minnehaha creek was so low, pt 1: near the duck bridge, there has hardly any water, but lots of green aquatic plants
minnehaha creek was so low, pt 2: under the echo bridge, a huge sandbar (or, dirtbar?) in the middle of the creek
a biker, biking slowly, and singing to herself, I am so tired
minnehaha creek was so low, pt 3: mostly, the creek was quiet and still, with only the occasional whisper/babble
running under the freeway, where the walking path is on the other side of the creek, I could hear something hissing and squeaking above me — bats?!
thud thud –– the steady feet of a fast runner behind me, then beside me, then in front of me, then gone
thwack thwack thwack pickle balls being hit hard on the pickle ball court near lake nokomis
the strong gust of water coming out of the water bottle refill fountain — nice!
reaching lake harriet to an empty beach with inviting water — I briefly thought about cooling off for a few minutes, but decided against it — too much sand in my shoes on the run back!
lake harriet trails were crowded — lots of runners and bikers and walkers (and talkers!)
a BIG peloton (30 or more riders) on the road
mostly cloudy, every so often, sun
orang spray paint, painted in zigzags over cracks and craters and bumps on the path that need to be fixed — there was a lot of it near the Rosie and Fletcher bridges
people packing up after a church service at the falls
one roller blader spotted near the beginning — I can’t remember if I heard their poles clicking, I just remember that they passed me on the trail
For the first 12 miles of the run, I listened to the world around me: hissing bats, rushing cars, a crying baby, laughter from kids somewhere beyond what I could see; moving water. For the last 4 miles, I put in my “Hello, Goodbye” playlist.
During the first few miles, I thought about part of a poem I’m working on. It begins with a quote from a PBS video about echolocation:
There’s sound and there’s a lack of sound, and a lack of sound still makes noise. We call it a sound shadow.
As I ran, I thought about this pair sound/lack of sound and other pairs I encounter at the gorge, like space/lack of space, or ground/lack of ground (gap/gorge). Sound shadows are also called acoustic shadows. I looked them up and found an article about bats, accoustic shadows, and echolocation: Acoustic shadows help gleaning bats find prey
“We propose that bats perceive a change in depth profile and an ‘acoustic shadow’ cast by prey. The shadow is more salient than prey echoes and particularly strong on smooth surfaces.” Wow, I’m just thinking about how there are echoes, and there are acoustic shadows, but I’m still not sure I understand acoustic shadows.
Here’s the wikipedia definition:
“An acoustic shadow or sound shadow is an area through which sound waves fail to propagate, due to topographical obstructions or disruption of the waves via phenomena such as wind currents, buildings, or sound barriers” (source).
The deeper I dig into this, the more I think it is for a future project that explores echolocation more broadly.
Found this poem in the July/August issue of Poetry:
A friend tells me he was holding his mother’s hand as she lay dying. At the end, her final words were, “I’ll find Dad and tell him you said hello.” “Find,” she said. Not “I’ll see him” or “we’ll be together again” but “I’ll find Dad.” How astonishing that language almost means then frightens us when it doesn’t— love, we say, God, we write, and the words fall short. We dream of lost vocabularies, and from nowhere, a word is worth a thousand pictures. What you say doesn’t have to be true. It only has to be imaginable. Where is my friend’s father? In the kitchen of that big house making coffee, say, or sorting nails in the workshop. Or in the yard, unlearning the constellations so he can see the stars.
Notes: This poem includes lines from Jack Gilbert’s “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart” and “Tear It Down.”
—
I like this idea of putting in two lines from these Gilbert poems for a few reasons: he doesn’t italicize which lines and it’s an invitation to find and read 2 more poems and put them into conversation with his poem. I want to try this out for my poems — the ones I’ve already written using others’ lines + the ones I’d like to write using those lines.
the bells: another meaning: the bell announcing the final lap of a track race
One of my favorite runners said the following in an interview after winning UTMB’s OCC (50k) race this past week:
The most played out race strategy of all time in the 1500. It’s like the bell rings and everybody goes with 400 to go.
I’m like this is such a predictable strategy. Everyone knows this is going to happen. But it’s kind of like what happened yesterday where it’s like something about crossing over that bridge and hitting the town and that’s like the bell ringing and something changes and your adrenaline spikes and you can actually like will the last bit of yourself.
9 miles! Still not easy, but I felt strong and relaxed and steady. For most of it, I ran 3 min, then walked 1. For 2 of the miles, I ran 90 sec, walked 30. Those miles were about 40 seconds faster, which might have been too fast; I think they made me more tired and increased my heart rate. When I hit mile 8, I thought, on Sunday, this will only be the halfway point of my run, but before I could dwell on it and wonder how I could run that much more on Sunday, I thought about something else, or I stopped thinking altogether.
When I was in the shade, which was about half the time, I felt cool-ish, but when I was in the sun, I was hot. So much sweat! I hope it cools down in September.
I wasn’t sure which route I would take this morning — to Lake Nokomis and back or the Confluence. I told Scott, I’m going to run south on the river road and let my body decide which one — either I’ll turn at Locks and Dam no. 1, or I’ll keep going past the falls. I’m not sure when I decided but, by the time I got to the locks and dam, there was no doubt I was turning.
11 Things
looking down from the ford bridge, the water was smooth and still — I think I saw some sandbars just beneath the surface
the river water was also low — I could see a long stretch of green (grass, I think) where there has been water in past years
the gate that K and I had to squeeze through because it was locked a few weeks ago was open today
hidden falls was quietly falling
a tall man sitting on a bench, his long legs sprawled out in front of him, talking on the phone — I remember that I hear what he said, but I don’t remember what it was
the click of a bikers shoes clicking into their pedals
uneven brick — not broken but raised by (un) settling ground
stopping at my favorite bench, which was in the shade, reading the plaque beside it as sweat dripped off of my face
a lone skateboarder at the skateboard park — saw them in flash, heard the scuffing of the wheels
more filled benches than empty ones
almost forgot this one: everything was dry — the grass, the dirt that trickled down the bluff almost like water, the leaves, which sounded very loud in the quiet morning
Diana’s kindness warms us, her humor makes us smile, and her zest for life keeps us going.
I’ve decided to leave my shoes in the picture because I like the color of them. I just received an email that my new pair or Saucony Rides are arriving today — they are navy with aquamarine.
Looking up her name online, I found this short video that offers more images of where I was when I took this picture:
Diana Jean Jezewski was 20 when she died of cancer in 1999. So young! She was born 5 years after me. She graduated from Highland Park High School and had been captain of the volleyball team. What type of cancer did she have?
Looking at the poems-of-the-day, I found this fitting one on poets.org:
once again i’ve brought my dead dog to the party. not the box of ashes, but the pen-drawn sketch my friend lenny made six days after she died.
or five. i saw it coming, the way mimsy went. the hard part was saying it, so i wrote it down: something small i love is leaving me.
now it’s late morning in abiquiu & i’m alone in the courtyard, rolling around on the flagstone breathing, a drawing of mimsy in the shade,
a mug cooling at her side. i said i don’t drink coffee or need a week to myself but look at me now, trying not to lie. so i listen: a shrill of pinyon jays
in a juniper trills me from ghost to cobalt sky. all winter i didn’t see them, not a single thrill of murmuration & though it’s a hideous sound—a jay’s call, like a
small computer dying slow—to live, to move like that: seven siblings at my side, six at each of theirs, my god! not thinking where’s the threat but being
more than one, not less than any . . . the nearly-noon shadows recede & soon mimsy’s in full sun, where i leave her, the light
too bright to stay, the shrill too clear. i say yes, i’ve seen a rock wren & no, that is a fishless osprey circling the steppe & tomorrow i might make a cairn of quartz
just to knock it down, slip a stone into my pocket, put nine postcards in the mail, or begin another poem for lenny i’ll try to finish when i’m home—
you had a friend once. now she’s different. we remember what we need.
Much to think about and love in this poem. A question: does a bluejay really sound like a computer dying slowly? I guess I don’t know what a computer dying slowly sounds like. What I know is that a bluejay screech is grating and terrible — I recall thinking it sounded like (or, maybe felt like?) a dull knife hacking the silence until it ripped open.
Decided to bike to the lake for a swim while I still have the chance. An easy bike ride, with no scary moments, both there and back. I was able to successfully pass several groups of people. The road that you need to cross — Nokomis Avenue — to keep going on the creek path was open again. The pickleballers were still pickleballing — thwack! thwack!
Coming out from under 28th street, I heard the whirr of their wheels before I saw them: a mini-peloton of 8 or so riders. The first one yelled, BIKE!, when he saw me to alert the riders behind him. His voice was very sharp; it didn’t startle me, but it did make me mutter, yikes!, under my breath.
Nearing the lake, I thought about how it didn’t matter what kind of swimming I did in the water; I just wanted to be in it. Mostly just because I wanted to be in it, but partly because I’m trying to get as close to swimming 24 hours total in August. Then, I had an idea: why not interview the milfoil today (I mentioned interviewing them very early in the season)? This idea was inspired by my June entry, but also by the amazing podcast I listened to yesterday, Into a Darker Wilderness1. It’s local and I love it! At the end of each episode, the poet they’re interviewing offers a writing prompt. Here’s the one from Sean Hill (he mentioned that the prompt was originally written for Poetry Daily):
I invite you to get to know a bit more about one of your nonhuman neighbors—feathered, furred, scaled, exoskeleton-held; grown from a seed, hatched from an egg, birthed from a womb; or others; or water in its various beds, the stones around our homes. Visit a nonhuman neighbor. Introduce yourself and pay attention to your neighbor’s response. Use your body and your mind, and be attentive to them with your several senses. Appreciate their story. Try to grasp how your lives align, what narratives you share. Find other resources to broaden your knowledge and appreciation of your neighbor’s narrative. Write a poem twining those narratives.
What questions could I ask the milfoil, I wondered, then thought, no questions or words, more like listening and noticing what the milfoil was communicating (or, what Robin Wall Kimmerer might say, what stories it was telling) in ways beyond words — its colors, thickness, position relative to the sun, the surface, the lake bottom. This idea of non-human living things using language without words reminds me of A.R. Ammon’s and section of his collection, garbage. I’ve written about it on here; when I have more time, I’ll try to link to it.
Leaving the lake, I felt tender and grieved the end of another swim season. Because of my congestion or allergies or bacterial infection or whatever I got that is making it hard to breathe and to swim, my season seems shorter. Was it? Yes, I checked my total swimming minutes from 2024, 2025, and 2026 summers, and this year is the lowest. But, it’s not just that getting sick in August shortened the season; it was also getting sick in July (plus wildfire smoke). Usually, July is my favorite month of the year and the one where I run and swim and bike the most. I burn about 18000 active calories in July. Not this year — my swimming and running were down and I burned less than 14000 calories. So, I guess I’m grieving for July. And, I’m grieving for future Julys that I anticipate will be negatively affected by more wildfires, more bacteria in the lake, and more random sicknesses.
swim: 1/2 loop lake nokomis main beach 30 minutes 80 degrees
The water on the edge of the lake was laced with bright green, and the water just under the surface seemed to glow green. Not quite enough to think there were blue green algae blooms present, but enough to worry while I swam. Not much deepening and quieting of the spirit in lake today. I wasn’t worried about fish or milfoil, instead I kept asking myself, will this make it hard to breathe later today?
11 Things
several girls far out in the water, near the faded red buoys, laughing and yelling and singing Happy Birthday to one of them
geese overhead, flying so low I could hear their wings swishing and instinctively ducked to avoid being hit by one
a flock of seagulls swooping down over the water
a swimmer in a bright orange hat, the only part of him out of the water was his head, almost looking like a buoy himself — luckily his cap (swim cap? baseball cap?) was brighter than the buoys
marco polo / marco polo / marco polo
said to a young boy: want a sandwich? a cookie? a clementine? the boy: no / no / nothanks grandma, as he gathered something, brought it to the sand, thn gathered more, and brought that to the sand. grandma: I see you’re busy
2 women standing in waist-deep water, far out near the buoys, discussing different lakes around the city and whether they were safe to swim in or not
a pale blue sky with streaks of bright blue, sometimes sun, sometimes clouds
the milfoil below was pale yellow or faded orange and dark green
floating in the water, using my yellow buoy as a pillow, sometimes closing my eyes and seeing red from the sun, sometimes opening them and trying to look at the sky
a loud snapping noise — a woman shaking the sand out of her towel
from the podcast site: “Into a Darker Wilderness podcast sits at the intersection of nature and Black history, expanding our definitions and seeking new understandings of our relationships with and through time, nature, and history.” ↩︎
14 miles franklin / ford / almost confluence 56 degrees
14 miles! For my route, I ran north on the river road, over the lake street bridge to north on the east river road. Took the franklin bridge back over to the west side and then south on west river road. When I reached the lake street bridge, I crossed it again and headed south on east river road until I almost but not quite reached the confluence. On the way back, I crossed over the ford bridge, ran through Wabun park, down Godrey, back under the ford bridge, down and back up the road to locks and dam no. 1, then north on the river road. The route was a variation on the franklin-ford loop — instead of a loop, a figure eight — combined with the confluence loop. Mostly, I ran 3 min, then walked 1. When it got harder, in the last few miles, I switched to 90 seconds of running, 30 seconds of walking.
For the first hour, I listened to the quiet — hardly any cars, early on a Sunday morning! — and the rowers and water seeping out of the limestone. For the rest of the run, I listened to my “Hello, Goodbye” playlist. The thing I remember most, was 867-5309 and this lyric with a double meaning:
Jenny, Jenny, you’re the girl for me Oh, you don’t know me, but you make me so happy I tried to call you before, but I lost my nerve I tried my imagination, but I was disturbed.
I heard disturbed meaning 2 things at once: the more popular, interrupted, but also, unhinged. Was this double-meaning intended? Not sure, but that’s how I heard it, and I liked the multiplicity of it.
the rowers!As I crossed over the lake street bridge for the first time, I saw them. A speck, a streak, then 3 shells approaching from the south. The first coxswain had a deep voice and was explaining the order to the rowers: male single shells and female single shells together. A few minutes later a coxswain with a higher voice tried to pump up the rowers. A few times, the words became distorted as the voice got louder and more excited. I did hear something about starting at the trestle. I could see the rowers for most of my run north towards the franklin bridge. Oh — I almost forgot — when I first noticed the rowers, it was quiet enough that I could hear their oars slapping the water awkwardly. I could also hear the oars creaking as the rowers lifted them out of the water.
14 Other Things
a carolina wren — cheeseburger cheese burger
the gate at the entrance to the no longer used for power plant was locked again
a shimmering sound — water leaking out of the limestone below me
the crack in the sidewalk just north of the trestle is getting worse — tall plants are growing out of it at one end, while it grows deeper on the other*
click clack click clack — a roller skier hitting, then scraping their poles
the sliding bench — shaded, surrounded by green
on 2 different occasions — a tall man, walking alone, talking very loudly on a phone — their voice echoing
no tent near ford bridge today, but someone sitting on a tall chair, facing the road, an umbrella giving them shade
click click click click a walker approaching me, striking the asphalt rhythmically with her hiking poles
the sky was blue and a little hazy — was it humidity burning off or my bad vision?
I stopped at a bench above hidden falls to tighten my shoe laces: it was in the sun and empty
a single red leaf on an otherwise green tree — fall is coming
the flat, smooth surface of the river as seen from above on the ford bridge
the reflection of the bridge on the surface of the river as seen from below the ford bridge
Just remembered something else about the surface of the river below the ford bridge: it was an unnatural green on the closest edge, It reminded me of the color of algae blooms. It looked oily and smelled strange. What spilled/was spilled into the river here?
That run wasn’t easy and I am tired. My calf and knees started to hurt around mile 11. But, I did it and, an hour later, I’m already feeling better. I will be able to run 16 miles next week.
I’m not putting this in my 10 things, but I could. The grass is not really green, but brown. In some spots in the strips along the river, it is so dry, it’s yellow. I remembered these images of grass, when I read poets.org’s poem of the day by Carl Sandburg. I like his poetry — whimsical and weird.
Summer grass aches and whispers. It wants something; it calls and sings; it pours out wishes to the overhead stars.
The rain hears; the rain answers; the rain is slow coming; the rain wets the face of the grass.
*Running beside the crack in the path, I decided to stop and take a few pictures of it. I wonder, are they planning to fix it, or accept defeat and reroute the walking path here?
crack north of the trestle / 23 aug 2026split open / 23 aug 2026
9 miles, and it’s not even my long run for the week. I’m deep in the marathon training. For the first half, I ran 3 minutes, then walked 1. When I reached the Confluence, I took a 3 or 4 minutes walk break, then I did 4 sets of 90sec r/30 sec w, then a mix of 2 or 3 mins of running with 1 min of walking. Finally, I ended strong, with the help of a few upbeat songs, to run/walk my fastest mile of the run. Nice!
Early on in the run, I started thinking about my poetry manuscript. In particular, I thought about the series of poems, sprinkled throughout, that feature a specific location (a few possible titles: You Are Here, Echo Locations). The current form for each of them is: a brief description of location in 3 beat lines or 3 / 2 beat lines, then ending with a rhyming verse, roughly formal, but not in any specific form. I like the rhymes, but I’m not satisfied with them. Are they too rhyme-y? As I ran, I thought about taking the feeling that the rhyme creates, but getting rid of the rhyme — could we call this an echo? — Condensing the idea, eliminating excess words. I thought about my Tunnel of Trees poem. Here’s the verse:
Oh, where is the sky? And where is the ground? Neither can be seen. Moving feet strike only air, and eyes see only green.
What about this instead:
sky ground gone only green green green green
Well, this is what I thought as I ran, but I don’t think it quite works. The idea that feet feel air, eyes see green is missing. I’ll work on it some more. Other related thoughts: should I make this haibun-esque, with a prose poem description poem and the condensed haiku at the end? I’ll try it. I like the condensed version of the rhyme part, because it feels more accurate to how I chant when I run — not in rhyming verses, but in single words repeated and ringing out.
I also thought about a poem I’m writing about the spot, on the edge of Wabun park and above the Locks and Dam no. 1. From it, you can see across to the abandoned ford power plant. My thought: perhaps I should add in some more details about that plant now that I’ve hiked among its ruins?
11 Things
passed a regular: shorts with sandals
view of river, ford bridge: a flat, smooth surface reflecting pale clouds and abruptly ending at the edge of the dam, looking like an infinity pool
a tent set up on the grassy hill next to the ford bridge — a wheelchair in front of the tent’s entrance — the tent wasn’t hidden, but it was mostly sheltered and obscured by its position on the hill
a VW van, almost looking like the Mystery Machine: green! A guy sitting in it, taking out some stuff — parked near the tent — is he sleeping in the tent?
one skate boarder at the skate park — he was skilled — as I ran by, I admired his grace as he went up a ramp
the gate that was closed and that trapped me and my friend 2 weeks ago, was wide open today — I wondered if it’s usually open on weekdays and closed only on weekends? I’ll try to remember to check next time I run by it
just before I reached my bench, I heard a dog bark at the off-leash park on the other side of the river
there were no stones stacked on the top of the ancient boulder, but little pebbles piled in several indentations on the boulder’s side
walking through the alley, almost home, I could hear acorns hitting garage roofs and see little leaves falling — fall is coming
see footnote below: I thought I had written about the history of Shadow Falls before on this log, but I can’t find anything. So, I googled it. First, I found this, about a nearby and now gone falls:
Kavanagh Falls were a cascade over several steps of rough limestone ledges named after the former owner of the land these falls were once on, the land today is now in the grounds of the Town and Country Club. In an 1891 article, a columnist wrote of Kavanagh Falls, “The plateau falls abruptly away to a picturesque glen or gorge, through which a brook purls to the level of the lawn, and then leaps laughingly to the river below. To make travel in the area easier, a bridge once spanned the Kavanagh Gorge. The spring that once fed Kavanagh falls remains on the grounds of the Town and Country Club. However, the bridge and gorge that these falls once tumbled into has since been filled to provide additional parking spaces for the Town and Country Club members.
Then I found another source, Equatorial Minnesota, which I’m pretty sure I read before. Among other interesting things, including a reference to “goat trails on the bluff”!?, they refer to Shadow Falls Creek. They also write this, “Today if you stop by, though, there is a panel of information detailing its history and geology (source).” I’ve never seen this info! I wonder if it’s at the entrance at the top of Summit Hill? I’ll have to look next time I run there! I’ll have to return to this blog; it’s a great resource.
swim: 2 loops lake nokomis open swim 48 minutes 79 degrees
The final open swim, and I was able to do it! Sara-from-a-week-ago would have liked to swim for the full 2 hours, but after my congestions or bacterial infection or whatever it was, I am very excited that I was able to swim 2 loops. The water was some of the choppiest I’ve ever swum in, which was fun. Only a few waves crashing directly into me, mostly water pushing me around and rocking me back and forth. I liked it!
Only 3 buoys today, so had to swim straight across and back. I think that swimming to the little beach and back is actually longer than the typical 5 buoy triangle. How is that possible? I’m not quite sure. But, this isn’t the first time I’ve noticed it.
Oh, how can open swim be over already? In a better world, I’d be able to swim every day of the year, or at least more than just 10 weeks in the lake. Will I join the Y this winter? Wouldn’t that be wonderful.
lifeguards on kayaks / 2 buoys
Sitting at Painted Turtle and drinking a beer after I was done, Scott took a picture of the lake. He had to zoom in a lot. It’s funny how the water doesn’t look nearly as choppy as it felt.
As I listened to Hidden Falls Creek fall over the ledge, I wondered if the water at Shadow Falls, which is the subject of one of the poems I was thinking about, was called Shadow Falls creek. I’ve looked it up before, but I can’t remember; I’ll have to find the entry in which I wrote about it….I looked, but couldn’t find anything. Did I write about the history? ↩︎
1 loop (2 mini loops) cedar lake open swim 30 minutes 80 degrees
The final cedar lake open swim of the season. A beautiful night! Calm water, not too crowded. Since I’m still dealing with congestion, I decided to be cautious and only swim 2 loops. When I was done, I stayed in the water for a few minutes, first squatting, then floating, using my buoy as a pillow.
As I walked to the beach, I recited MO’s poem in my head. I thought again about her wording — it is TIME NOW and it will be TIME AGAIN. Among other things, this wording makes it easier for me to remember the poem. I tried to go deeper and quieter in the water, but I was worried about whether or not the water would make me more congested, so it was hard.
10 Things
overheard — 2 swimmers talking, one had already finished, the other about to start — the one starting: I’m a teacher and tonight is my last chance to chill out before the craziness of the year
a blue sky with streaks of clouds
pale, yellow vines reaching up from way below
bubbles, 1 — the ones my hand made as they pierced the water
bubbles, 2 — in front of me — a warning that I was about the run into another swimmer — much smaller and lower in the water than the ones my hands make
the buoy at hidden beach was almost on the beach — so close to shore!
last year, some of the trees on the edge of the lake looked like they were changing colors, but not this year — everything is still green
nearing the beach before the swim, a little girl to her dad: Daddy, can you see the moon? The moon the moon the moon is here! Can you see it, Daddy — the moon?
floating in the water, hearing another swimmer coming in from a loop, breathing heavily
an almost empty beach
Another great season. I feel strong and satisfied — although, like always, I wish I could swim every day of the year. I also feel deep gratitude for open swim — that it exists, that I can participate in it, that the water is still (mostly) clean enough for open swim to happen at all.
4.1 miles wabun / edge of falls / river road, north 67 degrees / humidity: 90%
Something different today: a little more speed. 2 miles steady at a moderate pace / 5 min walk / 1-2 minutes fast run, 1 min walk (5xs). It felt good to move faster — more like flying and with better form.
For the first 2 miles, I (almost) finished my Hello, Goodbye playlist. The most memorable songs: the beginning of “Never Can Say Goodbye” when it sounds like Michael Jackson says, Never can STAY goodbye — at least to me; and the slow and long wind-up of Barbara Streisand’s “Hello Dolly.” After the 5 minute walk, I switched to my “Wheelin’ Life” playlist. My favorite fast song on that playlist was: “Proud Mary”/ Ike and Tina Turner. It’s really fun to sprint to.
10 Things
buzzzzzzz of cicadas
a faint voie down below — the coxswain instructing the rowers
waving to Santa Claus and to Mr. Morning!
2 different birds — one was a bluejay, I think — squawking at each other: what? / WHAT!
puddles on the trail from last night’s rain
empty benches
park workers mowing a stretch of grass near the road
some faint moaning sounds coming from a house near 7 oaks — was it a dog, or a person?
my shirt, soaked with sweat — not sticking to me1, but saturated, making the color of it a deeper blue
the pulp of all the acorns that have fallen in the alley and been crushed by car wheels — turned into paste from last night’s rain — in a thick layer on the asphalt
lake water congestion update: My sinus are no longer inflamed, my throat doesn’t hurt, and I can breathe easily through my nose. Hooray! But, I am full of snot, I have crud in my chest, and my cough sounds scary. Boo. Open Swim ends on Thursday. Will I feel good enough to go for a swim before it ends? I hope so, but I’m not sure.
echo locations
Fall has started early, I guess. At least for me and Scott. Last night he said, let’s make today the official start of Halloween season? Yes! To mark the occasion, we watched, “Thriller” and I attempted (badly, I’m sure) the zombie dance near the end. Another marker of fall: working on my river running manuscript. Its first name — Haunts, then, Girl Ghost Gorge, then, Echolocate || Echolocated, now, Echo Locations. I decided to look up “echo” on Poetry Daily. I found this wonderful poem from A.E. Stallings:
Echo/ A.E. Stallings
What tales we tell what tales About the girls gone quiet The story-telling ones Who entertained the heart Till suddenly they ceased. What makes the tongue inert? What turns the voice to swords Cutting the throat? What takes, The name from the alibi Of the body? We were stern: Stories, we said, are lies, We told her, don’t repeat them.
What ails? Yet once art eased hurt. Words, aches, I turn ice eat them.
I love the different echoes in this poem! Some rhyme, some almost rhyme, some almost sound the same, and some are almost, but not quite, the same. Fun!
Looking through my tags, I noticed several for “echolocation” and one for “echoes.” When I clicked on the echo entry (from 1 sept 2025), I discovered these wonderful ideas about echoing a favorite poet:
The Poetry Daily’s poem-of-the-day is I, Lorine Niedecker. Very cool and difficult for my cone-compromised eyes to read, I’m glad they included an essay by the author about the process of writing the poem.
Surely, the finest way to appreciate Niedecker would be to read her well. And then repeated reading, reading aloud, transcribing the vibrant phrases on to paper, oh and even framing then. But how to linger in the presence of this voice, and let it echo within oneself, make her a part of oneself? Perhaps by applying Niedecker to Niedecker, I would arrive at a new condensary. De- and re- constructing her poems, deleting words, conflating words, writing through her writing.
After their explanation, Rao offers a writing prompt:
Pick a poet who moves you, isolate their characteristics, and apply this to their work. Using words from within their own work, write the narrative of their poetics or/and biography. Example: Get romantic and didactic with Wordsworth, apply surrealism on André Breton …
Imitation is the best form of flattery, but also of ridicule—so this kind of repetition can function as a spotlight or a spoof. I suggest choosing a poet you absolutely adore, as it’s better to have such a voice under your skin.
I’m not sure if I want to follow this prompt, but her suggestions about echoing a favorite poet have me thinking, and wanting to experiment more with how I can create echoes out of my favorite poems, poets, words. Last fall, I tried “quarrying” 2 favorite Emily Dickinson poems, “Before I Got My Eye Put Out” (13 dec) and “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark” (14 dec) —
An experiment with quarrying words. Find all of the one, two, and three syllable words in a favorite poem. Turn them into a new poem that offers echoes of the original (13 dec 2025).
Maybe I should try one with “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain”?
swim: 1 loop lake nokomis open swim 23 minutes 80 degrees
Open swim! After all of my congestion and having trouble breathing and coughing, I wasn’t sure if I would feel okay enough to swim across the lake another time. But, I’m feeling better today and when I saw the forecast for the last open swim on Thursday — 40% chance of thunderstorms — I decided I better go tonight and say goodbye to the lake. Maybe I’ll be able to swim again on Thursday, but if not, I did it tonight, and that’s enough. I was a little scared, worried that I might trigger my congestion, but I decided it was important to risk it. As I swam across the lake, I tried hard not to swallow any water and wore my nose plug (which I’ve been doing for at least 10 years). The course was short because many of the college aged lifeguards were already back at school, so there were only 3 buoys. No triangle, just a straight line with the buoys always on your left. There was wind, so the water was choppy. I tried to think about MO and “Swimming, One Day in August,” but I was distracted by my effort to not swallow water. When I returned to the big beach, I floated on my back, using my yellow buoy as a pillow, and recited the poem in my head.
After exiting the water, I met up with Scott and had a beer. We talked about marathon training and how much we love running. Then we walked over to a bench and looked out at the sailboats on the lake — very Sailboat (as in, the Platonic form of a sailboat). I told Scott about how happy I am to live in the midst of water — a mighty river, a creek, this wonderful lake.
It was a wonderful night — a reminder of how great it is to live where we do.
Yesterday, while reviewing “circumambulation entries”, I reread my discussion of a Forrest Gander poem in which the narrator is running with a sweaty shirt that clings to his torso. I mentioned that, even as I sweat a lot, my shirt rarely clings to me. ↩︎
12 miles confluence + falls 66 degrees / humidity: 86%
12 miles! I’m running today instead of swimming because I am sick or have a sinus infection or my allergies are acting up because of the lake water (the e coli is very high at lake nokomis — over 1000). Since Friday, I’ve felt out of it. It started with a sore throat in the morning. I hoped it was just because I slept with the window open, but it wasn’t going away and I started feeling sinus pressure and stuffiness. Saturday was unpleasant (not quite miserable, but close, and I was whiny about it). I really dislike when my sinuses close up and I can’t breathe through my nose. Not being able to breathe is one of my big fears. If the stuffiness is due to the lake water, I might have to end my season early. If it’s because I’m sick, I might be able to swim again next week. As much as I love swimming, I hate being stuffed up and having a lot of trouble breathing. I’ll be bummed if I have to stop swimming already, but not too bummed: I’ve swum a lot this summer, and I need to prioritize marathon training.
But, back to today. 12 miles! I knew I would do 12 miles but, because I’m still stuffed up, I wondered how much of it would be walking. I surprised myself by feeling pretty good for a lot of it. I took one 5 minute walk break in the middle, but otherwise I mostly stuck to a plan: 3 mins run / 1 min walk. I wonder if I would go slower or faster if I switched up the ration to 90 sec run/ 30 sec walk. I’ll have to try that in this upcoming week.
Even though I made a playlist — Hello, Goodbye — for the entire run, I didn’t begin listening to it until my 5 minute walk break after the confluence. Before that, I listened to my key jingling in my pocket, a souped-up car going too fast on the east river road, blue jays screeching, hidden water falling, the clicking and clacking of roller skier’s poles. When I finally put in the playlist, I remember feeling nostalgic while listening to Lionel Richie’s “Hello” — oh, 10 year old Sara watching the video with the blind girl and the creepy, stalker professor! 1984 and 85 were some wonderful years for watching movies and music videos. I also remember feeling tender when Adele sang, “Hello from the other side.” I thought about my mom. She’s been dead for almost 17 years. How is that possible? Running by the falls, the telephone section of the playlist started. I got a boost with Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” and ran too fast for a few minutes. Down by the locks and dam no. 1, I heard Lady Gaga sing, “Out in the club and I’m sipping that bubb” in her song “Telephone” — I’m assuming she means bubbly/champagne?
10 Things
running over the lake street bridge, looking down at the river — blue, scaled, the wake of some small boat streaked across the surface
the steps on the lake street bridge that lead down to the trail: clothes were strewn all over the steps — what happened? I decided to take the road over to the trail instead
running parallel to another runner — first on opposite sides of the trail then, when she crossed the road, opposite sides of the road — I think I was slightly faster than her, so I was creeping up. If I wasn’t running 12 miles, I might have sped up to pass her faster, but I think that would have burned too many matches (or spent too many pennies) and I would have suffered later in the run because of it
noticing all of the dirt trails leading up from the river on the way to hidden falls, remembering my hike with my college friend last week, wondering if we could have taken any of them
a new regular? a short (4.5 feet tall, maybe) older woman who I also saw here last time. She was walking, I was running. Both times she was wearing shorts. should I call her short shorts?
the view from the confluence overlook: a parking lot below — will the view be better once the leaves are off of the trees?
stopping at a “good” water fountain near the skate park, where good = designed for water bottles, so it’s easy to fill them up — most of the water fountains are old school and curves, making it almost impossible to fill up a water bottle
hearing the roar of the water rushing over the concrete dam at locks and dam no. 1
waving a thanks to a guy who moved out of the way as I ran by the parking kiosk
my new favorite bench — somewhere between the 2 entrances to Hidden Falls park, perched on a stretch of the bluff that’s wide open, with a beautiful view of the river below — was empty1
It was supposed to be partly or mostly cloudy today, but I don’t recall see any clouds. So much bright sun! I didn’t hear any rowers or chiming bells, no fragments of conversation. No geese or turkeys.
Memorable haunts I encountered: lake street bridge; above shadow falls; the monument; the ford overlook; hidden falls; my new favorite bench; the confluence; ford bridge; wabun disc golf course; the falls; the bottom of locks and dam no. 1, then the top; the double bridge; the oak savanna; the ancient boulder; the welcoming oaks; the tunnel of trees.
I’d like to do a run that turns around at this bench. I’m thinking it would be between 7 and 8 miles long ↩︎
before the swim: Tired this morning. My throat is sore, not from sickness (I hope) but from keeping the window just above my head open all night. Reviewed yesterday’s entry and thought more about a place-based MO swimming poem: Swimming in One Place in August or Swimming in Place in August. Swimming in place is about repetition and loops and returning again and again to here. Not accumulating time but becoming more and more aware of the world around me — the flashes and flickers, the color of the water, the sounds underwater, the bubbles just below the surface.
About time in the water: While I’m swimming, I have very little idea of what time it is. I know that a loop is about 20 minutes, so I can figure it out, but I can’t read my watch when I’m constantly stroking 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left.
4 loops lake nokomis open swim 81.5 minutes 72 degrees
Before the swim I reminded myself of how much I love swimming across the lake and how much I’ll miss it when it’s over in a week. Another season almost over. As always, it has gone by too fast!
The first loop was very relaxed — my stroke, my breathing, the water. A steady rhythm and hardly any waves. Between buoys 3 and 4, a V of geese flew low over the water. They felt so close, but probably weren’t that close; swimming in the water distorts your perceptions of distance and size. Buoy 5 was almost as far as it’s been to the left. So far, that I thought the course/the triangles the buoys make was bigger than usual. Nope. I’m not sure how this is possible, but the course was actually a little shorter this morning.
As I swam, I thought about place — swimming in place, returning to a place, becoming familiar with a place. I know I had more interesting thoughts, but now I can’t remember them. Oh well, if they were important, I’ll remember them.
10 Things
a vee of geese, flying low
a seagull flying/floating in the wind
a place, parallel to the water, also flying low
my sparkle friends — most of them swimming straight at me
glitter paths! the rough surface of the water, glittering in the sun
a big splash off to my left — another swimmer who is not that efficient with their stroke/kick
the green buoy, way off in the distance, becoming lost among the white sailboats
clouds then sun then clouds then sun then all sun
a haze in the air — not smoke but humidity
swimming from buoys 1 to 2 on loop 3 when the water was choppier — even harder to sight the buoys, imagining lifeguards on kayaks were right in front of me when it was just the strange effect of waves and trees on the shore
When I finished, Scott was still running, so I took my towel and sat on the beach. What a morning! two moms and 2 kids.
overheard/witnessed after the swim
Mom 1, carrying a small kid out of the water: let’s get you into your robe, it’s cold! Mom 2, also carrying a small kid: I really wish I would have thought to bring a cover-up for her! I bet a cover-up would feed nice and warm. Mom 1: atowel should work.
(a few minutes later, after Mom and kid 1 left): Mom 2 to her kid, okay, let’s get you in this warm towel! LOUD SHRIEKS Fine, no towel it is. Let’s walk to the bathroom. Kid 2 makes noises like they’re very cold. I bet a towel would really warm you up right now, but you made it very clear that you didn’t want one.
At some point during the swim, I had an idea for my long (12+ mile) run tomorrow: a Hello Goodbye playlist. I brainstormed songs as I stroked: Hello/Lionel Richie; Hello/Adele; Hello it’s Me/Todd Rundgren.
Hello Goodbye Playlist
Hello, goodbye/ Beatles
Hello/ Lionel Richie
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road/ Elton John
Hello/ Adele
Goodbye Stranger / Supertramp
Hello it’s Me/ Todd Rundgren
Goodbye to You/ Scandal
Operator/ Jim Croce
Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares/ Travis Tritt
Call Me Maybe/ Carly Rae Jepsen
Call Me/ Blondie
Telephone ft. Beyonce/ Lady Gaga
Where the hell is my phone?/ Lizzo
Telephone Line/ ELO
Mr. Telephone Man/ New Edition
867-5309/ Tommy Tutone
Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You/ Sugarloaf
Hello / The Book of Morman
Bye Bye Bye/ N’Sync
Hello I Love You/ the Doors
So long, Farewell/ The Sound of Music
Hello 12, Hello 13, Hello Love/ a Chorus Line
Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee (Goodbye to Sandra Dee)/ Olivia Newton John
Scenes from an Italian Restaurant/ Billy Joel
I’ll Be Seeing You/ Billie Holiday
Hi Hi Hi/ Paul McCartney and Wings
Because I Got High / Afroman
Why’d You Only Call Me when You’re High?/ Arctic Monkeys
Rocky Mountain High/ John Denver
Hey Good Lookin’/ Hank Williams
Never Can Say Goodbye/ Jackson 5
Welcome to the Jungle/ Guns n’ Roses
You’re Outta Here/ Lorraine Feather
The First Goodbye / 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
The Second Goodbye / 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
The Final Goodbye / 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye / Roberta Flack
Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye / Steam
The Goodbye Look/ Donald Fagan
Goodbye Blue Sky/ Pink Floyd
I had wanted to make this playlist 2.5 hours, but I couldn’t quite get there. It’s 2 hrs and 23 minutes.
4 loops lake nokomis open swim 81 minutes 79 degrees
Wow, 79 degrees felt cool — at least, the air, when we got there. The water was fine — not too warm or too cold. The lifeguards claimed the triangle was shorter because of staffing issues, but it seemed about the same size to me. I counted strokes from buoys 4 to 5: 250. My goggles kept fogging up and the milfoil was thick, but the rest of the swim was great. Steady strokes, buoys sighted, collisions with other swimmers narrowly avoided. The water was the same pale green it has been all summer. I don’t remember any of my sparkle friends — probably because there was no sun, which was covered by a thick blanket of white. Today the sky is heavy. Me to Scott: This sky is unsettling, like something is about to happen but isn’t, or like it’s later in the day than it is.
10 Things
Arriving at the lake, I heard a few ducks furiously quacking
After the swim, I noticed two ducks rooting around in different clusters of towels that had been temporarily abandoned by their swimming owners
even without the sun, the orange buoy left an orange reflection on the flat and mostly still water
lots of stray vines, floating through the water, 1: making my skin itch briefly
lots of stray vines, floating through the water, 2: one long strand got stuck on my head — as I stroked, I flung it off
a sailboat, moving on the edge of the course
overheard one swimmer to another: I know the milfoil is there and it still makes me panic every time I swim into it
swimming over the top of a thick thatch of miloil, swinging my arms wide, trying to keep them as close to the surface as possible so they wouldn’t get wrapped around a vine
finishing the swim, hearing some kids playing Marco / Polo / Marco / Polo
stopping in the middle of the lake, overhearing 2 swimmers chatting — were they treading water? using kickboards? I couldn’t see, partly because I didn’t look
before the swim
At the end of yesterday’s entry, I wondered what “Swimming, One Day in August” would be if Mary Oliver had centered place instead of time. That question was inspired by listening to the New Yorker Poetry podcast with Richard Siken as he discusses Jorie Graham’s poem, “I Catch Sight of the Now” with the host, Kevin Young. Here’s what Siken says:
Some poets build out of space, and some poets build out of time. And this (I Catch Sight of the Now/ Jorie Graham) is definitely built out of time. It moves through considerations of always and never and now and then. And these choices are able to point to the inevitable and the timeless while still pulling in to be absolutely timed locked….She’s playing with temporality rather than geography.
unforgettable though then hardly noticed green tiled ledge just up to my right in the glistening shower stall, slightly above my open eyes, square window in it, & slender citrine lip onto which I place, gently, this first handful of hair—always I see it—the window- pane up there letting anything in and out that wishes to pass thru—so freely—drops from the steam of the shower on it, the slipping of forever & for- ever all down the pane, where, beyond the still-wet clump, all seems to shine and murmur it’s just day, just this day, another day, filled with the only of this minute, this split minute, in which if I reach now I can feel the years, the fissure in them, these fractions here inside the instant—
Her mention of the window reminds me of a favorite poems of hers that I’ve memorized, Still Life with Window and Fish. In her introduction to that poem, she mentions being stuck inside with an extended illness.
it’s just day, just this day, another day, filled with the only of this minute, this split minute, in which if I reach now I can feel
Back to my earlier question, how does MO’s poem — both the written one and my echoing/embodying/re-writing of it with my August swimming practice — change when I center place instead of time? Swimming, One Lake in Minneapolis? Or, two lakes — Nokomis and Cedar? What words/images are used in a poem about geography and not temporality? For someone else, perhaps this is an easy question, but for me, it requires more pondering. Is that because I am so much more rooted in time words/imagery than in place ones? hmm. . .
during the swim
As I looped the buoys, I thought about place and swimming in one place1 in August — this lake, here. Then: here and here and here. This is the place here where we sink and settle . . . . No — I don’t want to sink to or settle at the bottom of the lake; I want to be just above and under its surface — that between, threshold space. I didn’t come up with any other words to describe what a quieting of the spirit might look like in terms of locating/grounding yourself in a place? Submerging? On land, it’s rooting; what is it in water? Fixing your position? The coordinates. I thought about how locating/orienting myself in a place seems much more important than fixing myself in time. Then I thought about the geometry of water and angles and points/coordinates.
Rereading this entry the next morning to make sure I don’t have too many typos, I thought, swimming in place, looping again and again, going nowhere or to the same heres again and again. ↩︎
8.5 miles franklin + ford loop 70 degrees / humidity: 70%
That was hard! I had barely started and I already felt too hot, my legs too sore. By the time I reached 3 miles, I abandoned my system of run 3 mins, walk 1 min and the doubt started creeping in — how can I possibly run a marathon in less than 2 months? The pressure and worry too — I have to run more this week or I’ll get too off track!
a brief flash: this run is a failure / you can’t do the marathon
The flash passed and I simply kept going. I walked when I needed to — which seemed often — and ran when I could. I drank water and ate an energy chew. And I kept going. One foot in front of the other. A step then another step then another. Sometimes running, often walking.
heart broken: I noticed the gentle and labored whirr of a bike wheel — deep, quiet, singular — and thought about how, in my state of struggle, I was tender and open to the world and its different sounds. Every sensation — a man’s disembodied voice high on a hill, a bird calling from the gorge, a cool-ish breeze on my sweat-soaked face, the strong smell of weed near the overlook — was clear, acute. Not irritating or overwhelming, like sensations can be when I’m anxious, but calling to me, like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –over and over announcing my place in the family of things.
10 Things
a carolina wren calling out cheeseburger cheeseburger cheeseburger
a loud sound — is that a radio on a bike? no, a kid shrieking in a bike trailer, then the adult biking calling out sternly, what’s going on back there?
a single canoe on the river with at least 3 people in it, hugging the west side of the shore
a coxswain’s voice, giving instructions, his voice distorted by a bullhorn
Mr. Morning! — morning! / good morning!
a spring gushing through the rock on the east side of the river — not seen, only heard
footsteps behind me, never gaining, just hovering in the air
playing chicken with a woman walking with ski poles on the bridge — I won because I wasn’t going to move and I was on the proper side
a man in the grass, near the locks and dam no. 1 parking lot lifting one heavy barbell — squatting and thrusting with it — his movement reminded me of a shot putter preparing to hurl the shotput
more than half a dozen roller skiers, going fast up the hill, their poles clicking on the asphalt, several of them continuing past me, 4 of them turning around in front of me — sharply, quickly — the last one misjudging the turn and stumbling, then apologizing to me for almost getting in my way
I reflected on the run, which was both a failure and a success — a failure because I had to walk much more than I planned, a success because I didn’t give up and wasn’t nearly as slow as I thought I would be.
I heard Des Linden’s words in my head, you can do hard things. Yes. Most of the point of running another marathon is to give me the opportunity to prove that to myself — I can do hard things. There is something satisfying about facing a difficult/overwhelming task that you can’t imagine being able to do, and just starting to do it and never stopping until it’s done. To a lesser degree that happened at my swim last night. On loop 1 of 4, I felt tired and awkward, my body heavy in the water. A brief thought — can I really do this for an hour and a half? Then I stroke and kicked and breathed until I finished loop 4. Never quite believing or not believing; just doing and not thinking.
A deepening and quieting of the spirit = a deepening of the resolve, a quieting of the voices that encourage you to quit / a muting of an ego/I that believes going slow or walking or straying from an exact plan = failing, a digging into the depths for new forms of belief
breaking news: an audiobook I requested from the library just became available! I Contain Multitudes / Ed Yong.
Every animal, whether human, squid, or wasp, is home to millions of bacteria and other microbes. Ed Yong prompts us to look at ourselves and our animal companions in a new light — less as individuals and more as the interconnected, interdependent multitudes we assuredly are.
from the “about this title” blurb in Libby
I’ve tried reading or listening to a more recent book by Yong. I can’t remember what about it made me stop. It would be wonderful if I liked this book and could listen to it on my long run (at least 12 miles) on Saturday.
Back to hearts breaking apart. I looked up, “breaking apart” and Poetry Daily (poems.com) and found this excellent poem. I’m thinking of it less in terms of my 1 day in august project and more in terms of my Holes/How I Read project.
Language is breaking apart in our hands. In the darkness, we can only make out the shapes of letters on the pages. We’ve been reading like this for hours, or forever, it seems, but now the sun fades out our windows and particles of darkness block the white bays the letters gather in their limbs— the blank spaces that make them legible, where the illuminate of the pale page makes shape.
Each word, suddenly the shape of a small animal. Lines of small animals creating a blurred grid on the page.
A moment longer and the darkening brings out the beady eyes, glowing, reflecting the light from the headlight of our eyes.
(An inherent light inside the eye— who had that idea, that I feel now in my sockets?)
In the neighboring darkyards not cherryglow but a single candle left flickering out
I want to return to this poem, later, when I’m working on Holes again. There is some great ways of describing reading in low light and with limited vision!
swim: 3 loops (6 mini) cedar lake open swim 71 minutes 86 degrees
The past two cedar lake swims were cancelled because of blue-green algae. Today it was open and almost empty and wonderful. There were lifeguards and more than a dozen open swimmers, but hardly anyone else. Was it because they just opened the beach at 3pm today?
Hardly any wind and only a few waves. Lots of floating strands of milfoil. I was subject to at least one full body scan as I passed over a vine. A few kayaks and canoes. I saw bubbles but now sparkle friends. No flashes of fish either.
The air was hazy. I kept thinking my goggles were fogged, but it looked as fuzzy with or without the goggles. Difficult to see, but just enough for me to navigate. Other swimmers weren’t able to navigate in the haze and sinking light. Or, they didn’t care whether they were swimming on course or not. I noticed several swimmers swimming way over on the wrong side. Cedar vibes.
Before leaving home for the swim, I thought about how MO’s poem would change if you focused on space instead of time — There is space here for the sinking and settling of the spirit? Every so often, I thought about space and here in relation to my swimming, but I don’t remember what I thought. A task for tomorrow?
4 loops lake nokomis open swim 120.5 minutes 86 degrees
A beautiful night. The water had a few more pockets of cool water and was choppier, but was still wonderful. Before I started, I heard the lifeguard say something about the course being shorter due to limited lifeguards. And it was shortened, but not by that much. All I noticed was that the lifeguards were too close to the buoys and that green buoys 4 and 5 were a lot shorter.
10 Things
more menacing swans
the sun, sinking, its soft reflection on the water
one plane, low in the sky, parallel to the water
water color: pale blueish green
every so often, a burst of birds — 6 or so of them flying together above the water
almost running into a swimmer in front of me — I could see her orange buoy ahead of me and them, boom, it was right there — I didn’t run into her, which seems like a miracle
at the start — a thick, overcast sky — no smoke or rain, just heavy and covering the sun
no buoy in sight no buoy no buoy then BUOY
the slimy bottom of the lake floor near shore — vines or leaves or some aquatic plant matter
little swirls, almost like Ss with a flourish, just below me — little bubbles were my hands had been, pulling through the water
swimming one day in august
I’ve been working on filling up the different squares of my cork board with thoughts about key words or phrases from MO’s poem. I noticed that the most sparsely filled space is: my heart would break. Time to think more about the heart and how it breaks. What does it mean to break a heart/have a heart broken? And, in terms of those meanings, what is breaking my heart these days?
Heart break/broken: Something had pestered me so much/I thought my heart would break = being bothered, worried, upset, saddened, agitated overwhelm with grief, undone by a deep pain, beside yourself, out of your mind with worry? Not an actual break, but a feeling of, an almost
heart break = running too fast, swimming too hard, causing your heart to beat too fast and to stop working properly
heart break = a line break in a poem that shifts the meaning; the volta/turn of the poem?
a heart broken . . . open: MO discusses this at the end of her poem, “Lead,” and Maggie Smith does, too, in “Heart”:
And the dead inside you, don’t you hear them breathing? You must have a hole they can press their gray lips to. If you open– when you open–will we find them folded inside? In what shape? I mean what cut shape is made whole by opening? I mean beside the heart.
Your heart could break in two, or scattered into a thousand pieces. Could it be that every time I swim my heart breaks open (here, a broken heart is an opened, and not closed (off) heart), then bursts into the little clear bubbles that trail me all over the lake . . . or, the heart is the surface of the water that I’m breaking open with my strokes.
You won’t be needing this …. This clip from The Simpsons isn’t exactly a heart being broken, but a heart being ripped out. Close enough for me:
“You won’t be needing This!”
Thinking about MO’s use of the word pester — something had pestered me so much — and bugs pop into my head — pestered by the mosquito, the gadfly. Searching through love poems I’d gathered, I found this:
When I see you, watching the violinist, his eyes shut, the Russian composer’s concerto in his head, white horsehair fraying on the bow, and your face is bright with tears, and there it is again, the word love, not a fly or a mosquito, not a cricket or a bee, but the Luna moth we saw one night, luminous green wings knocking at the screen on the window as if to say I have a week to live, let me in, and I do. (from Love is a Luminous Insect at the Window/ Martin Espada)
And this response to the poem by Ada Limón:
During my cynical years, I wrote drafts of poems about how love was rather dumb really. I distrusted anyone who asked me out and tried to spew some romantic crap my way. I was good at it, that being alone and being walled like a protected ancient city. I felt better being skeptical and side-eyed than I did when I was open and willing to believe any and all flirtatious banter tossed my way. I knew who I was. I was a house with a locked door. It was safe in there. My ribs made a nice cage for the beating heart that needed protection.
Then of course, love did happen. And it wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t what I had known before. And on top of everything it wasn’t painful. It was easy and kind. I didn’t know that kind of love, the one that wasn’t mercurial and sometimes hurtful. And when that did happen it felt like realizing that the word “love” can’t do all the different kinds of love justice. It can’t cover all that ground and the muddy waters in between.
An open heart = an easy heart, a heart at ease, a heart eased
Next, I read “Love Letter” from Diane Seuss, which is on my list of additional love poems, and found these great lines:
Now when I think of love it’s like focusing too hard on the mechanisms of blinking or breathing. You can be blinded or suffocated by that degree of self-consciousness.
Mechanisms, mechanics, mechanical — thinking (too much) about how something works or doesn’t work. To break the mechanical part of a heart is to break apart your thinking about how that heart works. To break thinking altogether.
And then the (she searches for the right word) instruction of balancing along in the water, the ten thousand adjustments of vivid action, the staining together of mind and time so that she is no longer miles and miles apart from her life, watching it differently unfold, but in it, as it, it.
(1=1/ Anne Carson)
So, what is breaking my heart? I could write about the terrible things closing my heart, but I’d rather give attention to what is opening it. Maybe I’ll try, while looping, to list them with each breath?!
update, after the swim: I thought about making a list a few times, but each time a bird would be in the sky or a swimmer would be right in front of me or a menacing swan would be lurking in the background and I became distracted. Oh well, I can always try again tomorrow.
update, the next day: I found a few more notes about my swim that I want to add in here. As I swam, I thought about bits of my heart being released from my body, like little bubbles which made me think, leaking and unraveling. A sudden image: Olivia Rodrigo in the music video for “The Cure,” her veins emerging through her skin like red threads unraveling. In the video, this image is intended to be terrible (and maybe terrifying), but as I swam, I thought about those red threads emerging as a body opening up and connecting with the world outside the rigid, closed-off self. In my version, unraveling = loosening the knots that tie us too closely to our Self/the I.
Another note: still lake water causes blue-green algae blooms. These toxic blooms thrive in still, warm lake water. As I thought about MO’s quieting, I thought about how still water, while often easier to swim through than moving and wavy water, is not good for the quality of the lake. Here stillness is not a good thing, and still water is not a quieting but a making stagnant and stuck — an excess of nutrients become trapped and turn into toxins.
One of my roommates and dear friends from college was in town and we went for a hike near Hidden Falls. We started above, walking on the trail that I had run on earlier in the week. We stopped at the bench that I had wanted to sit on, but was occupied on Wednesday. We noticed the new yellow signs cautioning bikers to notice and alert walkers as they passed. Then we descended the steep hill at the far end of the park and walked on a road beside some meadows, clusters of trees, and the Mississippi River. When we reached the big parking lots in the heart of the park, I suggested we take the trail that leads directly to the falls and some stone steps up to the parking lot instead of hiking up the steep road. I warned that the trail was hard to find. We tried to find it, and failed. We took one path but I quickly realized it was going the wrong way. Then we took another: a wide dirt path lined with some noxious plants that I didn’t recognize but KJW did because she had recently had a terrible encounter with them. About 20 minutes later, I suddenly realized that we had gone too far. KJR checked the map on her phone and we were way past the falls; we were almost to the ford power plant.
We encountered a choice: one path stayed closer to the river, and farther from any way up to the road and the car. The other passed through a big hole in a chainlink fence where an entire panel had been cut out and seemed to lead closer to the bluff. I was skeptical that there would be an opening up above, but we went for it. The trail led to the abandoned plant, which was covered in graffiti. After wandering around for a few minutes, wondering where to go, we hiked up a very steep road. I’ve passed by this road up above while running my hidden falls / confluence routes. Halfway up, we passed by an abandoned parking lot, which had no cars, but lots of weeds. We also passed by a small structure sticking out of the steep bluff. I know that building too! I said to KJW — I think it’s too steep to get up there. / Definitely, KJW replied.
At the top of the road, a closed gate. There was barbed wire on the top of the fence. We could see the trail just on the other side of the gate. Luckily there was a narrow gap between the post of the gate and the post of the fence, and luckily we were both small enough to fit through it. Whew.
I wonder if I’ll think about the abandoned plant when I run past this gate in the future? I looked it up on Reddit and read about how unstable the structure is. Someone mentioned pits of asbestos. Yikes.
10 Things
grasshoppers leaping out of the meadow grass — dozens of them, making it look like the grass was moving
a roller blader skating up a hill on the river road
on the steep road down to hidden falls at the far end, passing under the highway five bridge, hearing the traffic rushing by above
a lime scooter, on its side in the grass-hoppered meadow
a motorized white boat on the river far below us, later another white boat beside us
a wide dirt trail, lined with green leaves
a rock face — st. peter sandstone with faces etched in it
the trail suddenly turned soft — sand right by the river — we stopped so KJW could fling some of it out of her shoe
a stand of towering cottonwoods — so wide! so tall! so much welcomed shade
on the ford power plant structure: brightly colored graffiti everywhere
4.15 miles minnehaha falls and back 77 degrees / dew point: 72
I was supposed to swim this morning, but it was raining and windy with a chance of thunderstorms, I was tired from last night’s swim, and it was the queen stage of the Tour de France Femme avec Zwift, so I decided to skip open swim today. Scott and I watched the stage instead and it was awesome. The women’s tour has been way more exciting than the men’s. Kassia Niewiadomma Phinney destroyed the field on an HC climb.
After the stage finished, the rain had stopped, so I went out for a run. Right after I returned, a clap of thunder. Nice timing! It was hot and humid and I sweat a lot. I ran 90/30 for almost all of the run. Because of the humidity, my heart rate was still high, but my pace was steady. I’d like to try this 90/30 again on a longer run, and when it’s a little cooler.
For the first mile, I ran without headphones. Do I remember anything I heard? I think I heard some construction noises and at least one car? Oh — just remembered: I heard the bells of St. Thomas! After that, I put on the latest “Off the Rails” podcast. They were talking about the new women’s pro baseball league and the terrible version of the National Anthem that opened the season at a stadium in Illinois.
10 Things
there were a lot of people near the falls and waiting to pay for parking in the parking lot
the bells of st thomas! I heard at least one chime (this is when I remembered that I had heard the bells, or a bell, then I added it in the previous paragraph)
the sky was dark — thick, heavy, holding a storm waiting to happen
small puddles all over the trail
sometimes windy, sometimes still
the trail that dips below the road south of the double bridge was especially dark and mysterious-looking
a tiny kid — maybe 2? — running away from an adult and another kid near the parking lot
as the run went on, the sky got darker and heavier
someone has painted the tops of two wooden railings on the path bright colors: one is orange, one yellow
another runner emerged near 42ndas the winchell trail climbed out of the gorge, then they immediately turned and followed the trail back below
4 loops lake nokomis open swim 120 minutes 81 degrees
Another choppy night of swimming. I don’t recall seeing a corrugated surface, but I could tell the minute I started swimming that the water was going to be rough. It didn’t unsettle me; just made it harder and more draining to swim. Saw my sparkle friends and lots of bubbles. Noticed a silver flash below — a fish?! During one loop, heading back to the big beach, I noticed some birds flying over the water. Geese? Seagulls? Not sure. Also saw a few planes.
I’m not sure if there were any whitecaps but the waves were a couple feet tall and they rocked me from side to side. Swimming from buoy 2 to buoy 3, they kept wanting to drag me under. Swimming from buoy 5 to buoy 1, they were behind me and pushed me along. When I got the angle just right, I could swim fast.
10 Things
one non-open swim club member with an orange buoy, swimming beside the white buoys
so many sailbots, moving along the edge of the course — mostly white sails
some menacing swan boats on the edges
1 or 2 canoes paddling across the course
the milfoil is thickening again, just off the white buoy closest to the beginning of the course — as I stroked into shore, vines grabbed my wrist and my watch
fogged-up goggles
water color: deep green
the first buoy was far out into the middle of the lake
during one loop, a hissing sound beneath me, almost like air was leaking out of a tire
a clear sky with no clouds
Swimming One Day in August
before the swim: Reviewing old entries tagged, 1 day of swimming, I found some great stuff from 2 sept 2025:
“The song I remember the most was Peter Gabriel’s “Playing for Time.”*
Oh, there’s a hill that we must climb Climb through all the mist of time It’s all in here what we’ve been through
Not a fan of the phrase, mist of time, but these lyrics reminded me of a few lines from Mary Oliver that I read right before heading out for my run:
Slowly up the hill, like a thicket of white flowers, forever. (The Leaf and the Cloud/ Mary Oliver)
The lines just preceding these were a series of good-byes to the world: the swaying trees, the black triangles of the winter sea, oranges, the fox sparrow, blue-winged teal, lettuce, turnip, rice fields, the morning light, and the goldfinches.
Down, I’m getting it down Sorting it out So everything I care about Is held in here All of those I love, inside
Listening to these lines, I thought about Oliver’s deepening of the spirit. I thought about the interior and moving inside of yourself and of burying memories and ideas not as a way to avoid them, but to protect them. I also thought about someone growing older and having memory-loss and trying to hold onto faces and names and experiences. I weighed the possibilities and limitations of going deep inside as compared to opening up to the outside. All of these thoughts came at once — not in a linear progression — in a burst which lasted until I heard these lines less than a minute later:
There goes the sun Back from where it came The young move to the center The mom and dad, the frame
I just remembered: at the start of my run, I was thinking about the difference between ordinary and extraordinary time, which was a continuation of thoughts that began earlier this morning. Habits, routines, activities/events experienced again and again — the mundane — versus the scattered, sporadic occasions that break up the routine. While meaning and memories are often found in the singular moments** I’m drawn to the rituals and repetitions and daily events as where important meaning dwells.”
*I told Scott about the song as we drove over to the lake and then we listened to it.
**are memories created from singular moments, or from the repetition of moments? conversely, do we remember something that happened only once as happening frequently, like a part of our character instead of just one instance or aberration?
during and after the swim: Mary Oliver’s one day = 24 hours / morning, afternoon, evening, night / dawn to dusk / a longing for a future time (in winter, thinking about swimming in the summer — one day I’ll swim again!) / a snapshot, one instant or instance / the start of an adventure in a fairy tale (one day the little girl wandered into the woods)
10.1 miles confluence and back 62 degrees AQI: 36!
10 miles. That was not easy. Much cooler today, better air quality, but still warm. I sweat a lot. By mile 5, my pony tail was dripping. I could feel it on my shoulder, hear the wet strands of my hair swishing as I moved. I decided not to bring my handheld water bottle, which was a big mistake. Two thirds of the way through, I ran out of gas.
3 things that worked well:
managed my unfinished business — even before I finished mile 1, I felt like I needed a port-a-potty, but taking walk breaks and not thinking about it, helped the need to poop go away
just kept moving (mostly running, some walking) — I wasn’t sure how much I could run today and when I realized that the route to the confluence and back was almost 2 miles short, I could have stopped sooner, but I decided I need to keep going, so I did
nice route — even though this route was too short, I liked it — the stretch of the east river road between hidden falls and the confluence is beautiful — such amazing views!
3 things to work on:
don’t forget the water bottle
don’t forget snacks
work on being more consistent with the run/walk method — on the next run, try 90/30 again
As I ran under the road at Hidden Falls, I thought about the small stretch of hidden falls that was daylighted when they redid this area a few years ago. I listened as it rushed to the edge then fell over it and smelled its fishy smell.
10 Things
running over the ford bridge, admiring the river, 1: the brownish water was calm, still, flat, not even a ripple
running over the ford bridge, admiring the river, 2: because the surface was still, I could see below it — the faint outline of several sandbars
a short (under 5 ft) older woman i, stretching next to the hidden falls park sign, at the top of the hill, later I encountered her again; she was walking, I was running
a strange pair of sounds on either side of the road, call and response. Bird song I had never heard before, sounding almost like machines or alarms — was it 2 birds, or 2 people with some kind of device making the noise?
what a view! — 1/2 mile from the confluence overlook, the trail and a bench are high above a bend in the river where you can see the mississippi and the minnesota rivers — I would have stopped but someone had brought a chair and was sitting in front of the bench
near the far entrance to hidden falls — a roller skier perched at the top — were they about to bomb down the steep hill?
at the confluence — a lime green bike, wedged in the corner of the overlook — too many leaves below to see anything — a warm water water fountain
a bird crying out, sounding like they were in distress — a woman came to the edge where I was standing and said the sound came from an eagle on the other shore
2 men running on the ford bridge, one of them was turned around and running backwards
2 older men, carrying signs to place along the bike path that said something like, bikers, use caution! alert walkers with an “on your left” or a bell — Yes!
Just before I heard the eagle (mentioned in #8), I took a picture of a view of the river:
east river road, heading to downtown St. Paul
Running near where this picture was taken, I suddenly remembered a conversation I had with FWA at the dog park earlier this year. We were deep in the gorge, looking up at this bluff I was running on this morning. I said, this summer, when I’m training for the marathon, I want to run up there. And I am!
1 Day in August
Bummer! As I write this, I received an email from Open Swim. It’s cancelled tonight because there are blue-green algae blooms at one of the Cedar Lake beaches. Must be serious if they’re cancelling the swim; usually they just post an advisory and caution club memebers to “swim at your own risk.”
Reading the first verse of Mary Oliver’s poem again, my eyes stopped on among the flux of happenings” and I thought about the floating particles I encounter while swimming in Lake Nokomis. Often I call them my sparkle friends. They are the little bits of sediment or muck or aquatic plant that float in the water in front of me. They sparkle because of shafts of light in the water, and they seem to be in a constant motion of floating at me. I imagine some people might think my friends are gross, but I don’t, and I love the strange, trippy effect they create as I swim through them. I wrote one of my inklings about them:
Particles before buoy 1
Lit by thin shafts of light, they put on a show. Their frenzied disco of shimmer sparkle shake stirs us up.
I like MO’s use of among here — among the flux of happenings. The deepening and quieting of my spirit comes among this flux, these little happenings.
I know I’ve written about “among” before; found it! On 16 may 2025, past Sara wrote a lot of things that are very helpful to present Sara as I think about MO’s use of among!
side note: the more I follow my muse here — and, maybe, my muse is a fish or floating milfoil or a sparkle friend? — the more clear it becomes: this year’s Swimming One Day in August is about engaging in a deeper reading of MO’s words — expanding on meanings, connecting them to her other work, reading thembeside my experiences in the lake.
But, back to among. Here’s what I wrote in my 16 may 2025 entry:
among / between
When I read and posted Lorine Niedecker’s poem about standing among the birch last week —
For best work you ought to put forth some effort to stand in north woods among birch.
I was struck by the word among and wondered how it was different from between. I looked it up this afternoon and, after wading through discussions about how between is used with 2 items, among with more than 2, I came across a helpful distinction in Merriam Webster:
We use between when we want to express a relation to things and have them considered as individual and usually equal entities.
Among, on the other hand is the best word to use when referring to things collectively and imprecisely.
5 aug 2026 Sara, interjecting here: using among to refer to things collectively reminds me of a favorite (and very popular line) from MO in “Wild Geese”:
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
among: your place in the family of things — so, the deepening and quieting of the spirit could be finding one’s place in the world? Where you belong? when you’re in your element? Of course this reading is different from the predominant one in which quieting your spirit among the flux of happenings means being present and calm, not worrying about all the noise around you.
I like among in LN’s poem, although I wonder about the effect of using between (or beside or with) instead. to stand/in north woods/between birch. Among indicates a kinship — among all of us trees, but between suggests an actual place — stand between this birch and that birch and an exchange — between us. I like both meanings. I like imaging my best work as trying to become a tree. But I also like the idea of my best work happening when I stand between birch — giving and receiving air.
I was reminded of among and between while reading this passage from Marie Howe:
That was really a big deal. I was given this place to be without any expectations really. And everything changed so that the particulars of life—this white dish, the shadow of the bottle on it—everything mattered so much more to me. And I saw what happened in these spaces. You can never even say what happened, because what happened is rarely said, but it occurs AMONG the glasses with water and lemon in them. And so you can’t say what happened but you can talk about the glasses or the lemon. And that something is in BETWEEN all that.
You can name/describe the collection of things (among), but you can’t find words to describe how their meaning has changed in that moment. Often when I think about the slight shifts in meaning between small words, like among or between, I’m reminded of an essay I read about Mary Oliver and her mousier words. I love mousy words! Meanwhiles and in-betweens and yous and wes and usses (is that the plural of us?).
…it’s tempting to be blinded by the more immediately visible parts of speech: the monolithic nouns, the dynamic verbs, the charismatic adjectives. Mousier ones—pronouns, prepositions, particles—go ignored.
Reading through this past entry, and thinking about MO’s next verse —
Something had pestered me so much I thought my heart would break. I mean, the mechanical part —
I remembered MO’s words in another of her poems:
I Go Down To The Shore/ Mary Oliver
I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out, and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shall– what should I do? And the seas says in its lovely voice: Excuse me, I have work to do.
Here the sea doesn’t hold her until she grows easy or tell her what she should do, but they (the sea is they, because the sea is not an it) offer a suggestion, find your place in the family of things, do the work you were meant to do.
And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe–that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.
Upstream/ Mary Oliver
I use this passage in the introduction to my “How to Be” project on my Undisciplined site.
an idea: Perhaps I should revisit Upstream and Long Life. I own both of them. Also, how about another read through of The Leaf and the Cloud?
Warm again this morning. Humid, too. Not easy to run, but still nice to be outside and breathing air that wasn’t that smoky. I was planning to run through the grounds of the veterans home and over the tall bridge then to the falls, but the bridge was closed, so I had to adjust my route. No bridge, no John Stevens’ house, no Big Feet statue or falls. Instead, I ran through Wabun, over to the edge of Minnehaha park, then back north on the river road.
Mostly I ran for 2 minutes then walked for 45 seconds. I listened to the audio book, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. I saw a regular, Skirt with Sandals. Like I mentioned the last time I wrote about her, she no longer wears sandals, but running shoes. Should I rename here? Anything else? I don’t recall seeing the river or hearing any rowers. No turkey sightings. I did see one roller skier and heard their poles clicking the paved path. And I ran, carefully, over some acorns scattered across the sidewalk.
a word I’ve learned before but forgot: mondegreen
Returning to my poem-of-the-day practice, which I haven’t done for some time, I encountered a word that looked familiar but that I couldn’t remember the meaning of: mondegreen. It’s the title of Poetry Daily’s poem for today.
Mondegreen: “a word or phrase that results from a mishearing especially of something recited or sung” (Merriam Webster).
origins: from the mishearing in a Scottish ballad of “laid him on the green” as “Lady Mondegreen”
example: Up until a few years ago, I always the heard the line, what are we doing here?, from “Grease” as what do we do in PE?
I mentioned mondegreens to Scott and he offered up his favorite:
From “The Heart of Rock and Roll” from Huey Lewis and the News: Scott heard the old boy may be barely breathing as the oboe may be barely breathing.
Mondegreen/Bobby Elliott
I mistake the sound of a recycling cart hitting the curb for the latch of our gate and picture him instantly: my father stumbling into the light of the backyard to shoot himself. I’d been looking at the fruit trees and the fire pit, the loose board of the old fence in the wind. I’d been thinking of how lost you’d have to be to believe you knew everything there was to know about yourself. And now this sound I mistake for my father going through with it: one awful letter in his coat pocket to me, another to my unborn son.
Reading an interview with the poet, I discovered that this book is autobiographical and about his father, but that father is “very much alive.” This fact offers an interesting shift in meaning for me, like something new clicking into place. But, more than the father, I’m interested in the idea of mishearing, mis-imagining, mis-seeing, mis-interpreting. It reminds me of something I’ve posted on here a few times (26 jan 2025 / 22 feb 2026):
The Ten Muses of Poetry
Mishearing
Misunderstanding
Mistranslating
Mismanaging
Mislaying
Misreading
Misappropriating cliches
Misplacing objects belonging to roommates or lovers
Misguided thoughts at inappropriate times, funerals, etc.
Mississippi (the river)
And, here’s a line from a scientific study using mondegreens: “Expectations and prior knowledge can strongly influence our perception.” How does that impact what I see and what I hear?
Also, this passage from the same study:
An elegant method to examine top-down modulation of perception is to employ stimuli which can induce two concurring percepts which has been extensively employed in vision research using reversible figures, such as Rubin’s vase-face illusion [8]. So far, much less is known about how expectations can alter perception in the auditory modality. For speech content, such ambiguous stimuli that can be perceived in two different ways are called ‘slips of the ear’ which have been described as phenomena during which ‘a listener reports hearing, as clearly and distinctly as any correctly perceived stretch of speech, something that does not correspond to the speaker’s actual utterance’.
Slips of the ear reminds me of something else I read in the 22 feb 2026 entry about squinting with your ears:
A second key might be “eavesdropping.” As it happens I have deficient eyesight and hearing, not enough to impair my regular function but enough that I can, as my colleague Karla Kelsey puts it, “squint,” either with the eye or the ear, without difficulty. Some of my best lines—especially the generative lines, the bits of poetic grist from which poems develop—come from phrases I’ve misheard in conversation or (at least initially) misread as text. I guess you could say I “own” such material—I make a lyric and creative claim to it—by mishearing or misreading it.
swim: 2 loops (6 mini mini loops) cedar lake open swim 86 degrees / wind: 16 mph
Windy, which made the water choppy. So choppy that the lifeguards couldn’t use the buoys and needed to shorten the course. Instead of swimming from beach to beach, we swam out into the middle of the lake and turn around near a lifeguard at a kayak. That might be some of the choppiest water I’ve ever swum in. I wonder how it compares to mild chop on Lake Superior or an ocean?
10 Things
bobbing green caps
bright yellow orange pink buoys
the water’s surface was corrugated (a word Anne Carson used to describe a lake she swam in)
a swimmer returning from the middle, doing a powerful backstroke — not looking or able to see where he was going — just swinging his arms, chopping the water — did he run into anyone?
a strong spray from behind — waves crashing into me?
so many scratchy vines floating in the water — one got stuck on my back and I had to stop to fling it off
a pale blue sky, a few patches of bright blue
a group of women in the shallow water in the swimming area — chanting and taking pictures — a party? a cult meeting? a religous ceremony?
leaking goggles
breathing mostly on my right side
A vigorous rocking as I swam. Between that delightful distraction and the constant need to look out for other swimmers and to find the turn around point, I didn’t think about Mary Oliver’s poem at all. Only after, did I realize I was living one of her verses:
I went down in the afternoon to the sea, which held me until I grew easy.
Yes, that lake water this late afternoon/early evening held me and rocked me, helping me to forget any worries or irritations I had. The water was rough, but not overwhelming. No waves rushing into my mouth when I breathed at the wrong time, just swells nudging me from side to side. Fun!
6 loops! In the 13 years I’ve been doing open swim, I think I’ve swum 6 loops once before. It took a little less than 2 hours. What a great way to start my swimming one day in August month! The conditions were great: calm water that wasn’t too cold or too warm, sun, a clear sky. As they announced the opening of the course, a lifeguard mentioned that it was slightly shorter because of a staffing shortage. In the past, a shorter course meant eliminating the green buoys and just swimming from beach to beach, but today’s “shortened” course had all 5 buoys and didn’t look that much shorter. Having swum it and checked my number of strokes and the distance, I don’t think it was short.
10 Things
a dozen geese flying not too far above the water — not in a tight formation, but an approximate V
the color of the water near the surface: a pale green
the color of the water, deep below: dark green
the color of the water on the surface: purple
the sky: a pale blueish purple
several planes in the air: most were parallel to the water, one nearly perpendicular, climbing straight up
nearing the buoy #3 (green, closest to the little beach) the water surface was mostly flat, and calm, with flecks of golden light
a tri clinic on the edge of the beach: women preparing for next Sunday’s sprint distance triathlon
stopping in the middle of the lake: quiet, still
the surface of the water glowing green or orange as I rounded a buoy
Today was the first day of my “swimming one day in August” project. A cumulative total of 24 hours spent in the water during August, partly inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem of the same name. As I stroked through the water, I recited the lines and thought about what Oliver means by, It is time now, I said, for the deepening and quieting of the spirit among the flux of happenings. I thought about the deepening and the bottom, about 18 feet below me that I couldn’t see. Then I remembered a line from the poet, Maxine Kumin: the thinker’s the sinker. Too much thinking, too much trying to go deeper into the murky depths, makes you lose your buoyancy. I thought about the quieting of the spirit and ways to understand it in the midst of moving. A strong, steady core? I recalled more lines from the poem, I went down in the afternoon to the sea, which held me until I grew easy. Even when the sea is calm — and how often does that happen? — the waves are not quiet or still, but relentless. A deepening and quieting is about settling into a rhythm. Then I started thinking that that deepening is not about sinking deeper into your own interior, but opening up to the world outside of yourself. The quieting, then, is about quieting the “I” and those things that make us believe we are separate from others and the world.
I think these thoughts, which came and went, probably comprised 10 or 15 percent of my swim. The rest of it was counting strokes between breaths (12345) or between buoys (buoys 3 to 4 = 200 strokes / buoys 5 to 1 = 100 strokes) or trying to sight the course or not running into some swimmers, racing others or noticing colors or listening to my nose squeak and water slosh over my ear or stopping myself from worrying about whether or not my feet were cramping.
When I finished, I was tired and a little sore, but my left shoulder didn’t ache and my calves or feet weren’t cramping. Hooray!
Here are today’s colors. Orange, green, yellow buoys. Water: purple surface, pale green just under, dark green deep below. Pale blueish purple sky with streaks of bright blue and a white cloud or two. Green trees lining the shore, light brown sand on the beach, too white swan boats.
8 miles ford + hidden falls loop 68 degrees / humidity: 87%
That was hard! I had wanted to run 10 miles, but the route I took was a lot shorter, my legs were tired, and the sun was hot, so I only did 8. Good enough for me today. I ran the first mile without stopping, then 2 min run / 45 seconds walk for most of the rest. After listening for Shadow Falls, 15 minutes in, I put in my headphones and listened to an audiobook I recently checked out, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. It’s a great book to listen to while running: a good distraction.
10 Things
running up the hill above the ravine, hearing the water falling at shadow falls
another running passing me, then the sour smell of someone working hard
a peloton on the road — a dozen riders
a big group of shirtless runners: 20 or so? a college cross country team?
encountering many runners (most) approaching me, running the other direction
a sour, sharp smell near the overlook at hidden falls — from the creek water?
so much sweat — my shoulders were soaked
baby turkeys! near the 44th street parking lot, grazing in the grass
a boisterous group of runners — 5 or 6 women laughing
Patches of mud and some felled trees — because of yesterday’s rain and occasional strong wind?
No roller skiers, no geese, no bugs, no acorns underfoot — usually the acorns begin falling at the end of July. When will they fall this year? (update, a few hours later: Scott and I took Delia the dog on a short walk and, at the end of the block, acorns on the sidewalk!)
Before starting my run, the line from Mary Oliver’s “Swimming One Day in August” popped into my head — it is time now, I said, for the deepening and quieting of the spirit. I imagined this deepening and quieting as an inner stillness. I hoped to think about that as I ran, but I was too distracted my the heat, my legs, and the effort.
So far, I’ve heard 2 hours (out of almost 12) of the audio book, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. It’s about two friends, Sadie and Max, who love playing and making video games. I’ve haven’t read the summary and don’t know that much about the book, but I’m assuming they make some big video game together. Do they fall in love, too? The first video game Sadie makes in her seminar at MIT is called EmilyBlaster and it involves pen-as-gun that shoots out the words of Emily Dickinson poems. Nice. I looked it up, and the game actually exists online, EmilyBlaster. I tried playing it. Admittedly, with my bad vision and limited gaming skills, I sucked, but it was pretty cool. The first poem was “I felt a Funeral in my Brain,” which I memorized a few years back. It felt strange to try and shoot these words as I recited them in my head. I can’t believe I’ve never heard about this video game before.
EmilyBlaster is one of Sadie Green’s earliest games, and one of the first games I invented for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow as well. It’s the simplest game in the book, and I needed it to be convincingly something a clever college student might be able to make on limited resources and time in the 1990s. The game was inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson and by edutainment games of the 1980s, like Math Blaster! I liked the slight subversiveness of making a game where the object was to shoot poetry, and I thought that Emily Dickinson’s compact verse style and memorable phrasings would make for perfect targets.
More on echolocation and bells and bioregionalism. I recalled something I’d heard about earlier in the year. Here’s what I wrote at the end of my entry for 9 jan 2026:
Working on a tiny (24 word) poem tentatively titled bio-regionalism, and I was thinking about something I recalled hearing from Stanley Tucci in his series on regions in Italy and their food: he said that a region/neighborhood was/is defined by anyone who was in earshot of that neighborhood’s church bells. I looked it up and found this helpful definition and video from Rick Steves. The term is campanilismo:
During Tuscany’s medieval and Renaissance prime, this region was a collection of feuding city-states dominated by rich families. To this day, Tuscans remain fiercely loyal to their home community, and are keenly aware of subtle differences between people from different cities, towns, and villages. (Italians have a wonderful word for this: campanilismo, meaning that a community consists of the people within earshot of its bell tower — campanile.)
I love this idea of defining a community, your home-place, by its bells. My bells are the bells of St. Thomas, just across the river.
And here’s the poem:
Defining a Neighborhood
It begins from the ground up with feet following, and ends when ears listening can no longer hear the bells.
It needs some work! I’d like to include it in Echolocation — should it be a separate poem, or should I add in some lines in my opening poem, Listen, where I first introduce the bells?
bike: 4.5 miles the falls and back 82 degrees AQI: 66
Two slow, short bike rides to the falls and back. Only 12 minutes, even with a delayed start after turning my workout on, from the falls to my garage. So close! I didn’t have any problems biking. I thought about the echolocation video I watched a few days ago and Molly’s (the blind YouTuber) words about wishing she could bike,
I had to stop riding bikes when I was eight, because I rode into a pole. And ever since then I’ve had to use a tandem bike.And that was frustrating for me, and that’s always one of the things, when people ask me what I miss about being sighted, I always say the things that I miss the most are the things give you freedom.
Freedom. Yes! I like walking places, but biking is so much faster, and you can go farther.
hike: 40 minutes from the falls to the river 85 degrees
Took the steps down to the dirt trail that winds beside the creek until it reaches the river. Stopped at a shaded bench for a few minutes to listen and be lulled by the water as it rushed over small rocks. A gentle, constant sound, occasionally interrupted by people passing by. I thought about sound and echoes and how the senses are entangled — particularly, how sound is textured and how it works (or seems to work, I don’t know that much about it yet) with touch when tapping a white cane.
When I met with my vision occupational therapist last month, she encouraged me to get white cane training sooner rather than later: it’s easier when you still have some sight left to learn it. Makes sense to me, so maybe at my next appointment, I’ll ask her how to sign up for it. I’m not scared of the white cane, but curious about how it works and how I’ll feel becoming so visibly disabled when I use it.
My cane tip tells me whether a dark line is thin shadow or a garden hose. I can test whether the ground’s dry, wet, or icy. Dry sounds like a scrape of plastic against pavement. Ice is a slippy hiss. Puddles gurgle.
*
My cane and I build a map of sounds and feelings. With each step, each tap or slide, I gain another data point. A sound, a vibration, a resistance or its absence. I think of Seurat building a picture of the world with repeated movement, the painter adding tiny dabs of paint to a canvas.
After 15 minutes, I got up and took the metal slat walkway until it turned into dirt again. Dirt that was packed, then wet, then loose. I stopped beside the limestone wall where decades of passersby have scratched into the soft stone, including RJP and FWA over 10 years ago.
10 Things
the bridge linking the 2 sides of the creek at the mouth of the river has several warper slats — I walked over it carefully
across the river, on the east bank, a lone figure, walking on the beach
the sound of a collar clanging — a dog and their human approaching on the trail
someone from behind — footsteps getting louder, a cough — morning! a guy passed me then turned and climbed up and under the bridge
constant noise of the creek going over the rocks
a disembodied voice: a kid, whining
such deep, dark, lush green, looking even more magical when the sun went the clouds covered the sun
2 women talking — one to the other, he didn’t even make it to the 3rd inning!
rustling in the leaves — a bird? a mouse? a squirrel?
taking the 100+ steps 2 at a time, hearing a guy say to his friend, will you drag me back up?
Oh that green! Usually this deep into summer, so much green is accompanied by lots of bugs. Yes, I heard the buzz of cicadas, but there weren’t any mosquitoes or gnats. Where are all the bugs? Returning to the green, these different plastics roughly represent the green, either as I saw it, or as I remember feeling it:
seltzer bottle / olive oil bottle / bread bag
swim: 2 loops (4 minis) cedar lake open swim air: 90 / water: 87 AQI: 75
The water was warm and opaque — low visibility. Yellowish green. A few bubbles, some scratchy vines, but no sparkle friends. The water was heavy and smooth on the way to hidden beach and choppy on the way back. Lots of swimmers were having difficulty navigating and ended up swimming on the wrong side. I almost ran into a pair of swimmers going the wrong way. I didn’t care.
On the back half of the final loop, I started racing another swimmer. We were going the same speed for much of the time, until I turbo-charged it by breathing every 6 strokes and pulled away. When I reached shore, they approached me — I think I was racing you; it was fun! thanks! It was fun.
Today’s water color:
yellowish green cedar lake
Is this too yellow? Possibly, but at the beginning of the swim, before I settled in, I remember the lake looking this yellow to me.
A little cooler this morning. The AQI wasn’t that high, but there must have been some smoke in the air because the spots of light on the path looked pinkish-orange. A steady run. Felt strong, sweat a lot.
10 Things
rowers’ voices, down below
click clack click clack — a roller skier’s poles hitting the sidewalk
running parallel with another runner — I was on the paved path, they were on the dirt trail near folwell
2 women sitting on the curb at the top of the locks and dam hill — taking a break after doing a hill workout? waiting for someone? just sitting and talking?
running under the east river road at hidden falls, listening to the creek water rushing down then over hidden falls — what creek is this again? looked it up: Hidden Falls Creek — but, actually, it’s not a creek but a stream of storm water*
minneapolis park workers, mowing the grass beside the trail, stopping and waiting for me to pass
the smell of freshly cut grass
the river, below me on the ford bridge: flat and still and empty
spots of sunlight on the trail, stained orangish-pink
dust or smoke, stirred up by work they were doing at the old power plant near the locks and dam
*When I looked up the name of the creek at Hidden Falls, I found a Hidden Falls Resource Management Plan from 2004 and this description:
Today, Hidden Falls Regional Park encompasses 130 acres andn1.6 miles of shoreline and is an important natural area within the Mississippi River Corridor Critical Area and the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area. It is an oasis of floodplain forest along the Mississippi River visited by local residents and visitors using the park’s trails throughout the year. Visitors utilizethe park for hiking, fishing, running, bicycling, dog walking, birdwatching, wildflower watching, picnics, and boating. The park is a significant stopover place for migrating songbirds and waterfowl traversing the Mississippi Flyway. The park also serves as an outflow for storm water from adjacent neighborhoods north and west of the park via storm sewers that end in the bluffs along the park’s eastern edge.
And here’s a description of where I ran as I followed the creek to an overlook of the falls:
For decades, Hidden Falls has been a nearly inaccessible trickle dripping out of a culvert behind the Ford Plant in St. Paul’s Highland Park neighborhood. Bounded by a tight curve in the Mississippi River Boulevard (MRB), the falls offered visitors two options: a steep climb down crumbling limestone stairs or a rocky hike up from the Hidden Falls Park picnic pavilion.
This month, with the opening of a new tunnel and walkway under MRB, a new viewing platform and the partial daylighting of Hidden Falls Creek, the falls are ready to be discovered by many more visitors.
Originally, Hidden Falls Creek was fed by a natural spring located near Cleveland Avenue and Ford Parkway. The creek above the falls was buried into a culvert sometime in the past century during the development of Highland Park. Now, the falls are connected to a whole new source of water via the Highland Bridge development’s massive stormwater management system, creating a consistent flow of water over the falls.
A creek, daylighted! Reading a little further in the article, I found a video from Dr. Greg Brick (I’ve read and enjoyed his great book, Subterranean Twin Cities) at the site as they were working on it a few years ago:
the video ends with a useful note: the only parts of the site that originated with the WPA are the fire pits. The steps came later.
It was cool to watch this video and think about it the history of where I ran this morning. It’s easy to not notice or reflect on the spaces you’re moving through. Now, five years later, the evidence of the planning and the labor done to create the path under the road, the overlook on the edge, and the daylighted creek are hidden to those not giving attention.
echoes
Thinking about the daylighted creek and the work done to restore/open up the area around Hidden Falls, I’m wondering about echoes beyond the definition of sound bouncing off an object and returning to a listener. Echo as trace, vestige, evidence of what came before. My collection of poems is filled with traces/evidence of what was/is there before me: countless other living things, human and non-human. I am not alone.
Echolocation is a practical tool for navigation; using echoes/changes in sound to gain a sense of the terrain — hearing where a tree or a car or a drop-off is. I use sound in this way to supplement (enhance?) my weak central vision. But echolocation, as in, locating the echoes-as-traces-as-evidence-as-proof that others are there or have been there, is also important to me.
swim: 3 loops lake nokomis open swim 87 degrees AQI: 70
3 loops! No pain in my shoulder! No panicking in the middle of the lake! Only a near foot cramp at the end of loop 3 and misjudging where buoy 4 was on the first loop. A good swim. I felt strong and steady and mostly breathed every 5. There were a few patches of cold water but also patches of very warm, almost hot, water. It was 100 degrees yesterday, so that must have hotted up the lake. It was crowded — on the course, all around the beach, at Painted Turtle. I saw my sparkle friends, noticed that the water was a pale green, felt something touch my toe (a fish, I think). Heard sloshing water and other swimmers chatting near the final buoy; I was treading water to assess my cramped foot.
Overheard: one swimmer to another near the 5th buoy — I feel like I was all over that course!
Overhear: one swimmer to another, on the beach — what do you do if you can’t quite do another loop? I wish there was a half loop option!
The sky was a pale blue with a few clouds. There were kayaks and paddle boarders and a few menacing swans on the edge. No sail boat — probably because there was hardly any wind.
Swimming one day in August is coming and I think I’m ready for it!
bike: 8.7 miles lake nokomis and back 84/88 degrees
As the European grand tour cycling announcers say, it’s hotting up out there. Scott said that the dew point was 81 at the airport this morning. The record (for all recorded weather here) is 82. Yikes. Instead of running, I decided to bike to the lake and swim. I haven’t biked over to the lake when it wasn’t an open swim this summer for several reasons: 1. the milfoil around the buoys made it too annoying (and dangerous) to swim; 2. I was swimming a lot already at open swims; 3. and because I was already swimming too much, I injured my shoulder. But, the milfoil has been removed, or at least thinned out (hooray!): I can’t do open swim at cedar tonight; and my shoulder is feeling better. Another reason to come over here on my bike besides the facts that it’s too hot to run and I haven’t driven a car in 5 years: my Apple watch activity challenge for July is 5 bike rides of 5 minutes or more. Even though that’s not a challenging challenge, I haven’t achieved it yet this month because it’s been too hot, too smoky, and I’ve been too sick.
The bike ride was easy. I didn’t have to try and pass anyone and I could see well enough to navigate. The paths were not crowded. No big groups of kids or silver riders. No packs of runners. Part of the trail was closed, but I could see and follow the detour signs.
10 Bike Things
the parking lot at the falls was almost empty, one 1 or 2 cars
a bird near the lake — cheer up cheer up — a robin
thwack thwack — the pickleballers are at it again, playing on the court at the rec center, no shade anywhere
a handful of single runners sprinkled throughout my ride
the creek under the echo bridge was low and bright and still
an adult with a kid in a seat sped past on an e-bike
orange paint around the cracks on the trail near my favorite part of the path
just past that: trail closed for road (or sewer?) work on nokomis
biking over some bumps on the part of the path sandwiched between the light rail and the creek, my chain was jammed — I slowed down, preparing to stop and fix it, but it unjammed itself
minneapolis park workers out doing some work — mowing? cutting down limbs? I’m no sure
swim: 1.5 loops lake nokomis, main beach 86 degrees AQI: 57
A wonderful swim! The water was calm and not too warm. Only one other person was swimming loops, and they were doing it much closer in. No boats or paddle boards to watch out for. Hardly any milfoil, or the usual (from past years) and manageable amount of ghost vines reaching up from the bottom. A few more vines floating free near the surface. I swam at a relaxed pace, stopping to notice the quiet lake at the end of every loop. I listened to a dad talking his little kid — kid: am I going to grow taller? Dad: yes, you just need to keep eating your growing up food. I exchanged something (not words, but a feeling, mutual acknowledgment/recognition?) with a seagull that was perched on the far white buoy for the entire time I swam. Hello friend — are you waiting to catch a fish? A brief thought: how many fish are beneath me right now?
As I stroked beside the white buoys, I thought about how swimming in this deep-ish water off the big beach is a different experience than swimming across the lake. Here, with the shorter loop and the buoys beside me, I hardly have to sight. I can just swim until I reach a far buoy, then loop around it, and swim until I reach the other far buoy. Here, I barely need vision. For that reason, and because I’m not swimming far out into the middle of the lake, you might think that swimming here would be less scary. But, I’m always a little more on edge during these swims than the ones from shore to shore. Will I get too tangled in the vines? Are there fish lurking under the buoys?
At the end of my loops, I swam in between the faded red buoys and floated, my head resting on my yellow buoy. Then I sunk under the water and swam with my face just above the lake floor, studying the brown, sandy bottom. Ah! What a way to start the day!
Today’s color palette: white cylindrical buoys, faded pinkish-reddish spherical buoys, pale green water, bright blue sky, the clear bubbles and underside of water’s surface, a light brown sandy bottom.
(l to r) blue sky, brown sand, white buoys, faded pink buoys, clear bubbles, green water
a return to echolocation
Even as I’m trying to think about water and swimming, I’ve also returned to my manuscript from last year, which has gone through a number of names: Haunts, then Girl Ghost Gorge then Echolocate || Echolocated and now Echolocation. I was compelled to return to this project 2 months early (usually I work on it in the fall) because I noticed a call for manuscripts at one of my favorite presses. And I’m writing about it here because I realized, as I searched for past thoughts and words about this project, that even as I remember thinking about some poem or essay or fact that I’ve come across, I can’t find it on this log1. Did I write about it in a pages document or in Plague Notebook entry? If I don’t post it here, it’s more likely to get lost. So, more posting here.
As I fine-tune my manuscript, I want to weave in more direct references to echolocation and what I mean by making it the title of my collection. It’s literal and figurative. I’m writing about the location of echoes (the gorge and the trail above it), where echoes = the bouncing back of sound in wide open spaces and traces of the past/ghosts. I’m also writing about the act of echolocation, which is used by blind and low vision people to navigate the world. I’ve read about passive echolocation (hearing sounds/echoes that already exist to navigate) and active (creating sound with tongue or cane clicks or footsteps to bounce off of objects. I’m also interested in a third version of this, which is both (or neither?) active and passive: being the object or the solid thing in the world that can be located by others’ sounds. Does that make sense? Here’s a video that I just found that I’d like to archive and use to think more about echolocation:
passive and active echolocation
Not being able to find past essays/histories that I know I was reading and thought I was writing about has also come up with my “this isn’t the sea” project. I was almost positive I wrote about Dr. Christian Lambertsen and his SCUBA testing at Lake Nokomis but, after a long search, I couldn’t find anything. ↩︎
3 loops! lake nokomis open swim 81 degrees AQI: 69
3 loops! Finally, I’m feeling better — less anxiety and crud on my chest and no shoulder pain. I was planning to only do 2 loops today, but when I felt good at the end of loop 2, I decided to do one more. Who knows when the smoke might come back and make it impossible to swim?
The water was wonderful. A little cooler, more buoyant. Talking with a woman after swimming, we agreed that the water was much nicer than on Friday, when it was choppy.
I felt very relaxed and powerful. Strong shoulders and back. Sometimes I breathed every 5 strokes, more often every 3 or 4 or 3 then 4. I had no problem staying on course, a combination of seeing the buoys more frequently, and straight, even strokes.
note: I’m trying to write this as I watch the final stage of the tour, which is not easy because Pogachar is going for it. As one of the announcers remarked, “He’s racing like it’s the end of days out there!”
11 Things
as I started, near shore, the water was a dark green, almost the color of my olive oil bottle shards
clear bubbles bursting from my hands as I pierced the water
my sparkle friends! sediment being illuminated by the light, coming towards me
bright pink buoys bobbing in the water, tethered to torsos
200 strokes from buoy 4 to buoy 5
a few planes high in the air above me
a glitter path and sparkles on the water’s surface
some floating vine fragments getting tangled in my fingers as I stroked through the water
the view below me: a deep green nothingness
the view above me, from underwater: the surface, green then clear then bubbles
a church service was happening near Painted Turtle; as I paused in the middle of the lake to enjoy
Wow! What a finish to the Tour. The most exciting one I think I’ve ever seen — a showdown between Matthew van der Poel and Pogachar. Then van der Poel hung on to win, as the sprinters were closing in.
5 miles bottom of franklin hill and back 77 degrees / dew point: 72 AQI: 52
Went out for my run at 10 so I could watch the queen stage of the Tour de France. It was hot, but worth it to watch all the drama of the final climb. Sepp Kuss crashing twice and barely saving himself from falling over the edge of the mountain. Yikes. Carapaz won the stage. Pogachar acted as a domestique for del Toro.
It was warm, but there was a cool breeze and no sun, which helped. I was able to greet Dave the Daily Walker at the beginning – Good morning Sara! / Hi Dave! I heard the rowers down below, encountered lots of runners, most of them running by themselves, like me. Was passed by many bikers and roller skiers. I ran down the franklin hill then stopped at the river to study its surface — a thin film of something was on it in streaks. Down in the flats, by the low retaining wall, I noticed a single shell and the white coxswain’s boat taking a break in the middle of the river.
Even though my chest has some crud, I feel much better today. My resting heart rate is lower and I’m less anxious. The effects on inhaling wildfire smoky air = 4 days of feeling like I had a bad cold.
10 Things
white sky
thick, moist air
deep greens
no bugs — where are the bugs?
overheard: one guy walking down the franklin hill, meeting up with someone halfway down and turning around to walk with him, I‘m glad I don’t have to walk up the entire hill!
the big crack north of the trestle is growing deeper and is still barricade off — is too deep and dangerous to patch?
stopped at the sliding bench — a deep, dark green view below
a woman crossing over the road ot the trail, carrying a coffee, not wearing any shoes
no stones stacked on the ancient boulder
a horn blasting from somewhere — a train horn? deep and loud
today’s colors in plastic
At different times, depending on the how bright the light behind the clouds was, the sky looked either 1, 2, or 3:
the “white” sky
Standing behind the sliding bench, looking down at the green gorge, I saw these 2 greens:
Still not feeling the greatest from too much wildfire smoke last weekend, but I am feeling better than I was on Tuesday night, so I decided to swim a loop before going to Scott’s concert (the big band he’s in) at the falls. RJP drove me. It was great to spend time with her. I think we both made each other feel better.
The water was warm and choppy, which I didn’t mind. The buoys were set up in such way that made the course .25 miles shorter, which I also didn’t mind. My shoulder ached a little, but it was mostly okay. My back and legs and torso felt strong, my lungs a little weaker. It was difficult to breathe every 5 strokes; I switched between every 3 and every 4. For the last stretch of the loop, I think I heard myself wheezing. It was all the crud stuck in my throat. I’m glad I only swam one loop. Two loops would have been too much.
10 Things
one swimmer talking to another before starting, 1: the water’s a little cooler; I like that
one swimmer talking to another before starting, 2: the lifeguard is right in the way — I hate when they do that (me too)
bubbles — clear, underwater
the slimy, milfoil-y bottom of the lake near shore — felt by my foot as I adjusted my nose plug before starting
4 kids playing soccer in the sand, near the sidewalk
blue sky with streaks of clouds
the water was choppy but no waves were crashing into me as I breathed
swimming wide on the course until suddenly I saw a quick flash of a buoy –I’ve had to train myself to believe in these flashes and follow them — it’s taken years to believe because they are so fleeting
123 breathe right 123 breathe left
4 sailboats out on the water — one of the sails was red
3.35 miles wabun hill and back 68 degrees wind: 15 mph / gusts: 26mph AQI: 50
Woke up feeling bad. Sore throat, a little stuffed up, sore/achy, out of it. Both FWA and Scott have felt this way too. We could be sick — covid? — but most likely, it’s the smoke and bad air quality from the weekend. Mine could also be caused by HRT, at least the achiness. Hopefully I will fell better soon. Yes, I am whining a little because I dislike sore throats and feeling out of it, but mostly I’m writing about feeling sick for future Sara to read in a few months or years.
note: Future Sara here — one day later, that is — after a covid test, we’re pretty sure it’s just the wildfire smoke that is causing this. A rough night and a difficult morning. I write more about it in my 22 july 2026 entry.
It’s hard to feel too bad when it’s so nice outside. Cooler and fresher. A breeze, a lower AQI. I decided I couldn’t waste this weather, so I went out for a run. I also thought it might make me feel better, which it both did and didn’t. Ran south on the trail to the locks and dam, then up the wabun hill. Stopped at the top to look out at the river. All I can remember is thinking that it was higher than it had been. Ran down the hill, then back north on the trail. Listened to my “Plastic Fantastic” playlist but don’t remember much of what I heard, other than this line from Lady Gaga in “Plastic Doll,” I’m no toy for a real boy, and these from AQUA’s “Barbie Girl,” You’re my doll, rock’n’roll, feel the glamour in pink/ Kiss me here, touch me there, hanky panky. “Barbie Girl” is such a terrible song.
10 Things
the bright purplish lights of a bike approaching
a group of 5 or 6 bikers, chatting loudly, biking on the road and backing up cars
Regular, 1: waving to Santa Claus!
Regular, 2: passing Skirt with Sandals — she wasn’t wearing hiking sandals, but running shoes!
a group of women, walking together down the locks and dam hill
a man with a fancy camera on the walking side of the pedestrian bridge, taking pictures of the ravine
a woman, looking down at her phone, standing in the middle of the path
3 people standing on the sidewalk, talking, completely blocking the entrance
adjusting my cap so it wouldn’t blow off in the wind
peering through the green on the way up the Wabun hill: before you pass under ford bridge, some rock face, deep in the shadows, then dirt, then grass
swim: 1 loop lake nokomis open swim 78 degrees (air) / 82 (water) AQI: 77
Was feeling crappy all day, but Scott really wanted to go over to the lake and I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to swim (who knows what the AQI will be tomorrow), so we went. I’m glad we did. A good swim, much better than the run. I felt strong and confident and happy to be in the water. It was choppy with little swells rolling in behind me as I neared the third buoy. And more waves in the back stretch.
overheard, swimmer 1: it’s not too bad out here. the wind has calmed down. swimmer 1: don’t say that, you’ll jinx it! *the wind picks up* swimmer 2: see what you did — you ruined it for all the swimmers! (laughter from both of them)
I was committed to only swimming one loop. Between the choppy water, me being a little out of it, and my still sore shoulder, I didn’t want to overdo it. Hopefully I can swim more at the end of the week and next week.
The water was more blue green tonight. I think I saw bubbles, but no silver flashes. now menacing swans or clueless kayaks or drifting sailboats. I don’t remember seeing any birds or planes or dragonflies. No squeaks or leaks from my new nose plug.
4.6 miles locks and dam / wabun hill / veterans home / falls 76 degrees / dew point 72 AQI: 70
Hot! So much sweat! Sun. The air was thick but not smoky. I’ll take it. Yesterday, while I was swimming, Scott ran around the lake once, which is not quite 3 miles. The AQI was almost double at 137. Last night his throat started burning, like swallowing acid, he said, and his throat closed up a little. He thinks it’s because of the high AQIand that he breathes only through his mouth when he runs. I thought about what happened while I was running and noticed how I was breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. It’s all of my rhythmic breathing, I think: In 2 3 / Out 2.
I listened to my Plastic Fantastic playlist. I was particularly struck by The Sugercube’s “Dear Plastic,” so I looked up the lyrics:
p-p-p-plastic n-n-n-nylon te-te-te-terylene
made of atoms by tender fingers and determined heads of inventors tickling perfection
p-p-p-plastic r-r-r-rayon
I was born aeons ago before anything human was known my friends the alchemists told me everything was natural and always will be that way and possible to make gold from dirt
p-p-p-plastic n-n-n-nylon
dear plastic be proud don’t imitate anything you’re pure, pure, pure
p-p-p-plastic n-n-n-nylon
I believed I was their dustbin for knowledge took everything and digested of course I became big, big and really really strong
today I’m old and withering away my friends the alchemists long disappeared into dust I no longer get anything fruity no longer gold made from dirt the only thing I get is spacefood on a tray
p-p-p-plastic p-p-p-plastic p-p-p-plastic…
As I was walking the last few blocks after I finished running, I thought about Elastigirl from Pixar’s The Incredibles and how her superpower is the ability to stretch and transform into (almost) any shape she wants or needs and then return to her original shape. Plastic can make new shapes without returning to the original shape. I looked up, “elasticity vs. plasticity” and found this:
Objects deform when pushed, pulled, and twisted. Elasticity is the measure of the amount that the object can return to its original shape after these external forces and pressures stop.
The opposite of elasticity is plasticity; when something is stretched, and it stays stretched, the material is said to be plastic (source).
AQI (1:00pm): 45 AQI (4:40pm):61
swim: 1 loop (2 cedar loops)
cedar lake open swim 88 degrees AQI (5:30pm): 61
I would have loved to swim more loops, but it was warm and windy and my shoulder started hurting near the end of the first loop. A bummer, but at least I was able to swim for almost 30 minutes in the lake. No terrible air quality. I am grateful for any chance to swim.
The vibe was very cedar lake, with the disgusting, almost totally filled porta potty with no toilet paper, randos swimming out the buoy and getting in the way of swimmers — watch out! — and open swim club members swimming as close to or as far from the buoy as they wanted, occasionally crossing the path of swimmers going the other way.
The water was green with notes of yellow and opaque. I was able to see a few of my bubble friends, but nothing else. No fish or milfoil or sparkle friends. I don’t think I ever see sparkle friend here — not the sediment sparkles under water or the glittery sparkles on the surface.
added the next day: I wanted to replicate the color of the water with my plastics, but didn’t have time last night. I’m not sure either of these quite capture the mix of (mostly) green with some yellow:
123
1: back of cukes plastic bag held close to the window 2: back of cukes plastic bag held far from the window 3: a square of a yogurt container covered with seltzer water shards
I think 2 is too yellow. I think there’s a section of 3, on the right side, that might best capture my memory of the water. I also like the overall color of 1.
Will we have open swim in an hour and a half? They haven’t cancelled it yet. I went outside to water the tomatoes and peppers and I could feel the smoke, but it wasn’t too bad. 113 is “unhealthy for sensitive groups.”
In other health news for future Sara when she talks to her doctor at the end of the month: another night with restless legs and (almost) a calf cramp. I felt the same sort of wave of something strange pass through my lower calf as I did a few years ago. Back then, it made me very anxious, last night, not as much. Is it the wrong level of estrogen or progesterone, or my body getting used to the HRT, or something else? Whatever it was, I slept poorly: only 5 hours even though I went to bed at 10:30.
AQI (8:15am): 123
swim: 2 loops lake nokomis open swim 76 degrees AQI: 137
Open swim happened! Hooray! I was disappointed that the air quality was bad, but it wasn’t that bad and it made for a cool effect on the water. So much smoke and haze, all of it white and dreamy. Harder to see for everyone, at least I imagine it was harder for normally sighted people too. It didn’t bother me because I already can’t see that well, and don’t really need sight to navigate.
Before the swim, my entire body was bubbling with anxiety — a combination of adjusting to the hormone flux, and strong physical reactions to any strange sensations in my calves. I think I was worried that I might have a calf cramp in the middle of the lake. As I started swimming everything felt strange, surreal. Smoke, warm water, a gentle rocking. I tried to distract myself by focusing on colors, but the anxiety kept bubbling up near the edge, like boiling pasta water on the stove. Just before it boiled over, I abruptly stopped swimming and listened to the silence in the middle of the lake. I saw a lifeguard silhouetted in the smoked-out sun and the bright pink buoy of another swimmer and I was able to calm down. I started stroking again — 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left — as I passed the second, then third buoy.
I was able to swim about 40 minutes without stopping and with only a few more anxiety flare-ups. The water was a pale blue-ish green below me. Looking up and just beneath the surface, it started as pale green, then turned into a clear band at the edge. Above, it was the hint of a purply blue.
10 Things
a lot of the Eurasian milfoil is gone!
some non-open swimmers were blasting a speaker at the lifeguard stand where open swimmers leave their stuff, the LOUD throbbing of the beat increased my anxiety
overheard, 1 swimmer to another: I’m just going to swim to the second buoy and back
overheard, 1 swimmer to another: I have no illusions about my swimming ability!
overheard, 1 swimmer to another: Let’s put our ages on our (Women’s Tri race) caps! You don’t have to, but it’s fun to see everyone’s age when you’re running!
arriving at the lake, the smoke on the water looked so thick — everything was white
the occasional bent elbow of another swimmer, some foam, a bright pink or orange buoy tethered to a torso
a few shredded clouds hanging in the sky
a slight ache in my left shoulder by the start of loop 2
rounding the fifth buoy and sighting the first one in the distance: a small, bright orange dot
AQI (12:30pm): 156
The water offered a gentle rocking for the first half of the first loop, then turned choppier. I could see my bubble friends and hear the sloshing of water over my head.
color in layers: underwater / underside of surface / surface from above / sky
water / under surface / above surface / sky | seltzer bottle / danish container / ziploc / milk jug
Playlist: Plastic Fantastic
Created this plastic playlist yesterday. I’m looking forward to listening to it on my next run.
Plastic Hearts/ Miley Cyrus
Midnight Sky/ Miley Cyrus
PLASTIC/ sakehands (feat. Marty Valentine & Lo)
Plastic/ Moses Sumney
Fake Plastic Trees/ Radiohead
Plastic/ New Order
Plastic/ Portishead
Plastic Doll/ Lady Gaga
Barbie Girl/ Aqua
Plastic Romance/ A Toys Orchestra
Dear Plastic/ The Sugarcubes
Plastic Jesus/ Jello Biagra & MoJo Nixon
Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach/ Gorillaz (feat. Snoop Dogg and Hypnotic Brass Ensemble)
Plastic Beach/ Gorillaz (feat. Mick Jones and Paul Simonon
Synthetic World/ Swamp Dogg
Plastico/ Ruben Blades
Plastic Girl/ CAPSULE (feat. EeL)
The Bomb/ L7
Plastic Factory (Mono)/ Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
4 miles minnehaha falls and back 82 degrees / dew point: 72 AQI: 62
Hooray, the smoke moved out! Boo: not in time to have open swim this morning. Oh well, went for a run instead. It was hot and humid, but the air wasn’t hazardous and I had (finally) tied my shoes properly so that my feet weren’t sliding around, so I was happy to get outside and move. Mostly running, with some walking. In my approximate fashion, I followed a plan of intentional run/walk segments — 4/1 | 4/1 | 2/1 | 90/30 | 2/1 | 2/2.
10 Things
2 porta potties at the park with a temporary hand sanitation kiosk beside them — what even is happening here today? update: an art fair
a food truck — orange, yellow, and red — Cafe Cairo
the white foam of the falls
a shopping cart with a few things in it — some sort of electronics — in the middle of the narrow trail below the road
big spots of light in the midst of the shadowed trail, near the cart
a city truck blocking the path that leads down to the locks and dam — a crane in the air
the water in the water fountain was hot — yuck!
a person briskly crossing the parking lot, stopping in time to let me run by
a biker weaving over to the walking trail to avoid the bright sun on the bike path
the tangy — sweet and sour and rotting — smell left behind by the garbage truck
While I moved, I listened to the podcast about microplastics that I mentioned yesterday: Science Vs. Microplastics. I enjoyed it, even as I was a bit skeptical (thanks to another podcast, Maintenance Phase) when they started discussing a rise in/crisis of obesity without interrogating the term at all, like: how have designations for who is considered obese changed? Why is the term so morally and politically charged? But, I decided to let go of my criticisms and just listen. Here are two things I’d like to remember:
1 — we’re not consuming a credit cards worth of microplastics every week, but our endocrine system is being disrupted by chemicals in/on the plastic
The idea that we are consuming a large amount of microplastics (some people have suggested a credit cards worth a week!) doesn’t hold up, but concerns about the chemicals in/on the plastic getting into our bodies are warranted:
WZ … this idea that these chemicals on, in plastics are messing with our hormones. Take me through the science! Firstly what would these – how would they mess with our hormones? RR They’re tricksters! So they like bust in and they take over this important role from our actual hormones. So – hormones are all about binding to receptors on cells in order to send messages throughout the body. And they’re involved in SO MUCH, they do a lot day to day but also they help these key developmental things happen over the course of our whole lives. So if these chemicals are messing with it – that could be pretty bad. Here’s what Pat Hunt told me – she’s our scientist from the top of the show … PH I think of it kind of as radio static. You know, your hormones control everything. Your growth, your metabolism, your sleep, your reproduction. And it’s all by these finely tuned signals. And here’s this static in the system. RR So these endocrine disruptors are the static. They interfere with the hormones by binding to the receptors that hormones are supposed to bind to, and that could mess up those signals. WZ And we know these chemicals are in our environment, like, we know for sure? They’re in my body right now? RR Yeahhhh probably, we know that just about everybody is exposed to them
2— cut back on plastic consumption, including hair and skin products, but consider the benefits vs risks of using products that have plastic (like canned beans, which have plastic in the lining)
I don’t know, the thing is, like, the thing is with this topic that’s so frustrating, I still, even though I’ve been working on this for a couple months, and I’ve had these conversations with scientists who are like, Oh, I don’t I don’t buy canned food if I can help it. Every time I go to the grocery store, I stock up on my canned beans. I can’t quit it. And it’s like I think the problem is like without more specific information about how bad is it. What is my risk? I’m not able to weigh the risks of the plastics getting into my canned beans against the benefits of canned beans. I know the benefits: They’re cheap, healthy, easy. I like em. So for right now I’m kind of assuming the b
This episode has 84 footnotes — a great resource for more words and understandings about plastic. Here’s a disturbing passage:
The growth of plastics production in the past 65 years has substantially outpaced any other manufactured material. The same properties that make plastics so versatile in innumerable applications—durability and resistance to degradation—make these materials difficult or impossible for nature to assimilate. Thus, without a well-designed and tailor-made management strategy for end-of-life plastics, humans are conducting a singular uncontrolled experiment on a global scale, in which billions of metric tons of material will accumulate across all major terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems on the planet.
plastics’ largest market is packaging, an application whose growth was accelerated by a global shift from reusable to single-use containers. As a result, the share of plastics in municipal solid waste (by mass) increased from less than 1% in 1960 to more than 10% by 2005 in middle- and high-income countries
A lot to take in and think about — or try not to think about. Not as a way to be absolved or to deny accountability and responsibility, but as a way to endure. Sometimes thinking about the amount of waste that accumulates every year month week day second is too much. I imagine a door to a room where that information exists and I shut it. Don’t want to dwell in there, I might say to someone — the wind, a tree, Scott. update: I usually shut the door when I’m in a big store with too much plastic stuff, like IKEA.
do you ever feel like a plastic bag?
1 — American Beauty
1999
I don’t think I really liked this movie — Kevin Spacey was a terrible creep, but I often think of this scene where I see a plastic bag dancing in the wind.
2 — Firework/ Katy Perry
Do you ever feel/like a plastic bag/drifting through the wind/wanting to start again?
I can’t remember why I did it, but I put this song on one of my first playlists when I started running in 2011. Anytime I hear it, I think of that wonderful time when my life opened up and I became a runner.
There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack that should have been bagged in double layers
—so that before you are even out the door you feel the weight of the jug dragging the bag down, stretching the thin
plastic handles longer and longer and you know it’s only a matter of time until bottom suddenly splits.
There is no single, unimpeachable word for that vague sensation of something moving away from you
as it exceeds its elastic capacity —which is too bad, because that is the word I would like to use to describe standing on the street
chatting with an old friend as the awareness grows in me that he is no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance,
a person with whom I never made the effort— until this moment, when as we say goodbye I think we share a feeling of relief,
a recognition that we have reached the end of a pretense, though to tell the truth
what I already am thinking about is my gratitude for language— how it will stretch just so much and no farther;
how there are some holes it will not cover up; how it will move, if not inside, then around the circumference of almost anything—
how, over the years, it has given me back all the hours and days, all the plodding love and faith, all the
misunderstandings and secrets I have willingly poured into it.
Ah, I love Tony Hoagland’s poetry. He often writes about swimming — I’ve memorized 2 of his water poems and recite themwhile I’m swimming around the lake, How sad it was that he died of cancer a few years ago!
4 — a plastic bag exhibit in Germany
A German exhibition documents the history of plastic bags, showcasing their evolution from a culture of convenience and design, opposed to the environmental nuisance they have become today.
The German Museum for Everyday Culture has dedicated a special exhibition to the history and design of plastic bags. ‘Adieu Plastiktüte!’ (Goodbye, Plastic Bag!) featuring a collection of more than 50,000 plastic bags from the last 50 years, looks back at the history and evolution of this innovation of convenience. Showcasing various designs, the exhibition illustrates how they were considered attractive advertising spaces, communicating the individuality of both brands and consumers. Though out of style these days, plastic bags were once a rocking cultural trend.
Another hot morning. Another successful run. Not fast, but steady. Mostly running with some walking. 2 Regulars sightings: Santa Claus and the walker that always wears a skirt and sandals — I feel like I named her, but I can’t remember what. I checked the log and I have mentioned the woman wearing sandals and a skirt 3 times, but have never named her. I think I’ll call her Skirt with Sandals, which is a reference to a phrase we’ve (Scott, RJP, FWA, and me) used many times over the years: socks with sandals. It’s from the show within a Disney show: So Random in “Sonny with a Chance.” I used to unironically wear socks with sandals frequently.
I heard the far off echo of workers hammering something, trickling water, the click and clacking of roller skiers’ poles above me. As the skiers passed me, I heard 2 of them discussion “Love Island.” At least one of them didn’t like the show. I’ve never watched it, but RJP was very invested in this most recent season which ended earlier this week.
In Hawaiʻi, you often hear the term “island time,” referring to the slow pace that pervades the culture here. But for me, standing on land just a few hundred years old, island time is a reminder that this is a place in the process of being both made and unmade. Here in ʻĀhihi, there are barely any trees—the soil still thin atop the hardened rivers of basalt and scoria. Not enough time has passed to erode these sharp and porous remnants into dirt. Yet in that short stretch of centuries, between that time and this one, the island has changed irrevocably. When I began snorkeling, I was warned there was little left to see on Maui, most reefs dead and dying—a result of rampant tourism, overfishing, commercial runoff, and warming waters.
island time — land just a few hundred years old — I’m thinking about lake time and how lake nokomis only celebrated its 100th birthday in 2014 (see: 12 july 2025). Before that it was marshy land — wider and shallower. 100 years is the approximate time it takes for a human-made lake (nokomis was a marsh, dredged, made into a lake) to act like a natural like
“I settle into my liminal position, turning my back to the earth as I know it: the solid ground under my feet replaced by weightlessness. I trespass into this unknown world—below me, I feel how time itself has turned the stone to sand. At last, I cross the threshold with my entire body.“
“I am held in the veil between these worlds that are each, astonishingly, part of this place that we call Earth. Within minutes, my cells acclimate to the cool buoyancy. I am carried away from everything I know. As I kick out, the mechanisms of my movement grow more and more effortless. Anything heavy or painful drains from me. In the water, I am held—a child rocked in a mother’s arms. My body moves differently here, swaddled and swept in the cadence of waves, alongside all the creatures who share this space. . . .”
“I am flying now—a wingless bird gazing down, seeing the universe anew. Like Icarus, I feel the warmth of the sun against my back. Between realms, I face an ecosystem nothing like my own.”
seeing the universe anew — in the ocean, everything might be clear and vivid below, but in lake nokomis, and with my bad eyes, everything is murky, muddled, felt in the briefest of flashes.
“Beneath the inscrutable blue-black mirror of the water’s surface lies this universe in technicolor. “
What is the color of the lake water? As part of my plastics project, I’m gathering the colors of the water that I see when I swim. The plastics project = keeping as much of the plastic that my family uses for visual poetry projects — produce bags, seltzer water bottles, ziploc baggies, miscellaneous. packaging, T Joes’ pasta/rice bags. Here are the colors I’ve collected so far in greens and blues. (The lake is usually much moregreen than blue.)
plastic origins, from top left to bottom right: granola bag, little cukes bag, russet potato bag, Trader joe’s pasta bag, bottle of olive oil, bottle of seltzer water, squash bag
Are these all “green”? I see them that way. The bright green of the upper center is what the water looks like when a blue-green algae bloom is present. Last night’s warm and stirred up water at cedar lake resembles the brownish yellowy green in the lower left. Number 2 and 3 in the bottom row are shards from bottles, while the rest are bags, only colored on one side.
lake nokomis blue
plastic origins, from top left, top right, bottom: Trader Joes’ rice bag, shards of the locks from ziploc baggies, Trader Joes’ pasta bag. I don’t think I ever seen the lake water look like this below the surface, but above, when it’s sunny and I’m looking at it from the right angle: blue, often with purple vibes.
Scott asked me what I plan to do with these colors. I’m not sure yet, but I know it will be part of something that expresses how I see color and how color works in a city lake that resides in a lake city that prioritizes access for everyone and that is working hard to keep the lake and its people safe and healthy in the midst of a climate crisis (almost apocalypse?).
Once I gather more colors that fit, I could create some visual poem to place beside this poem, which is in by chapbook, Inklings:
Fish 3 between buoys 3 and 4
The fish in us escape. They flash and streak and leap, then return to bubble whisper the names of water’s colors.
swim: 2 loops lake nokomis open swim air: 96 degrees water: 84 degrees
Hooray! 2 (almost) pain-free loops at lake nokomis open swim! Before it started, I was able to talk with 2 other swimmers about how much we love open swim. They were a little older than me — 5 or 10? years — and just as enthusiastic about the water.
10 Things
2 girls — older high schoolers or in college? — flirting with 2 guys at Painted Turtle: loud, awkward giggles
a guy playing guitar, accompanied by a recording — I know I enjoyed 2 of his songs, even danced to one, but I can only remember the other — an instrumental “Careless Whispers”
very choppy water — not the type of waves that put up a fair fight, that you can punch, but the ones that unsettle, disorient, jostle
swallowing a wave of water, which made me more careful about when and where I breathed and stroked
1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 breathe right 1 2 3 breathe left
a very LOUD metallic buzz beneath the surface — somewhere someone was doing something that was causing this noise — was it a boat? a machine drilling somewhere?
slosh slap
bubble friends!
being routed by lifeguards when I swam too wide of an angle
the first orange buoy was almost in the middle of the lake — maybe the farthest I’ve ever seen it
The water was opaque and the color was somewhere between these 2 colors:
4 miles river road, north/south 85 degrees / dew point: 72
Last night, I planned to do my run early in the morning, but when I woke up it was already hot so Scott and I decided to walk and get coffee instead. As we walked back on the river road trail, we realized that it didn’t feel too terrible. There was shade and a breeze and the humidity was lower. When we got home, we both changed, then went out for runs — I went at 10:15, Scott at 10:40. I was surprised at how fine I felt. I was hot, but I didn’t feel like I would faint or get heat stroke; I just felt like I was working hard. No anxiety about it — a mental victory! Was it because of my HRT patch? Possibly.
Almost all of my route was in the shade, which was by design; I wouldn’t have been able to run in this heat with direct sun. I encountered many walkers, a few bikers, 1 or 2 other runners, 2 big groups of kids — one on bikes, one on foot.
I listened to my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist. I told Scott later that I was trying to manifest shade. It worked.
10 Things
dappled light, jagged patterns of light on the trail
kids on bikes in bright yellow vests
2 bikers stopped near the trail, recovering or fixing something on their bikes after climbing the franklin hill
no bugs — no swarms of gnats encircling my face or single gnats trying to swim in my eye juice
the crack north of the trestle is still blocked off — this stretch had the most sun
passing a walker on the path in flip flops, near the rowing club — did they just finish rowing? probably
a scooter on the edge of the trail, but not far enough on the edge — if I hadn’t been paying attention, I could have tripped over it
air quality is good — no smoke from colorado fires this year!
bright blue sky
a flushed face, sweat-soaked shirt
swim: 1.5 loops (3 cedar loops) cedar lake open swim 95 degrees
Wow, the water was warm! As another swimmer said to me, it’s like bath water. I tried to remember that and not swim too hard. Hot air temp + hot water temp = hot Sara, with no chance to cool down. No worries. I swam slow and steady. 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left. By the 3rd loop, I had increased my strokes: 1 2 3 4 5 6 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 breathe left
Great news: My shoulder didn’t hurt at all on the first loop, and it hardly hurt on loops 2 and 3, and now, an hour later, it doesn’t hurt at all. Hooray!
Not so great news: I sacrificed my other new nose plug to the lake. Treading water at the end of loop one, trying to adjust my nose plug and unfog my googles, the nose plug fell down into the murky depths. Oh well. These nose plugs were slightly too big: I had to adjust them almost every loop. Time to go back to the slightly more expensive ($7 instead of $2) nose plugs. I wish I could find the exact one that I’ve been wearing for more than 5 years, but they’re always changing things, making them “better,” and I don’t think they make the exact one I have now.
The water was calm on the way to Hidden beach, rough on the way back. It was also yellow and murky. I saw some of my bubble friends but no silver flashes. I got tangled up in a few floating vines, had to stop swimming as clueless paddle boarders crossed the swimming course.
images of the day: the wide arc of some swimmers on the other side of the loop, swimming back. What I saw: some splashes, a few caps, buoys, the idea of a curved line. Also, the occasional swimmer, swimming down the middle, or crossing over to swim in the wrong direction. All these swimmers — their elbows and white foam and buoys — looked so far away. Distance is distorted in and on the water.
1 loop lake nokomis open swim 85 degrees water temp: 81 degrees*
*measured on 6 july, so probably warmer today, almost a week later
Today the goal was to take it easy on my shoulder. It had been feeling better by the end of this week, but I’m thinking about my bigger goal for the summer: swimming one day (24 collective hours) in august, so I didn’t want to overdo it. Just past the first orange buoy, my shoulder began to ache a little and then ached, dully, for the rest of the loop. I think I can still swim; I just need to do less as I rehab it — strengthening exercises + RICEing it — well, mostly IIcing it: icing and Ibuprofen. It’s a bummer that my shoulder still hurts, especially since I was looking forward to July being a big month of swimming, but I’m not too upset. It could be a chance to approach my open swims differently, maybe spend more time going slow or stopping in the middle of the lake!
When Scott and I arrived at the lake, I noticed all the glittering on the surface. My first thought: wow, that looks so cool. My second thought: all that glitter means the surface is not smooth and that means the water is choppy. And it was. Also, warm — so warm! I liked the choppiness. It wasn’t rough — no big waves were crashing into me. Instead it was constant — wave after wave after wave, making me rock from side to side.
It was fitting that there were waves, because I’m working on revising/condensing a poem about waves (literal waves at open swim and waves of grief after my mom died). Hopefully today’s swim can serve as inspiration.
10 Wave Things
stirred-up water below the surface with lots of sediment floating in front of me, 1: difficult to see anything, like my hands or bubbles or fish
stirred-up water below the surface with lots of sediment floating in front of me, 2: water color was a mix between pea soup green and lentil dahl yellow
stirred-up water above the surface, making it difficult to see buoys
the surface: all glittered up
no white-caps, but lots of spray flying high in the air
an increased amount of breaststroke by other swimmers
more breathing on one side, 1: in the first half of the loop, I breathed mostly to my right
more breathing on one side, 1: in the first half of the loop, I breathed mostly to my left
the yellow safety buoy tethered to my torso was bobbing vigorously
I did not feel like I was fighting the water, but that it was holding me and reminding me it was there
Do I remember the sound of waves? No, I don’t recall the sloshing sound of the water as it rushed over my ears. I bet it was loud.
Found this poem when I searched, “waves” on poets.org. It’s a golden shovel poem, where the last word in each line comes from a different poem. The original golden shovel was Terrence Hayes creating a poem that ended each line with words from Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool.”
If I don’t taste the complicated waves— if I only see the rolling, only hear the roiling up or smell those waves —then I will tumble head over stance. Then I spring up, drenched in partisan sand.
I’d like to try something like this with my waves poem to suggest another meaning. I could either use words from a poem about grief or moving water. For grief, maybe Emily Dickinson, for water, Niedecker or Oswald? Maybe one of my favorites?
several hours later: 6:04 / 90 degrees, feels like 94
a reminder when experimenting with my wave poem: don’t try to force it — find some poems I like about waves or grief and see what happens
Sitting under my crab apple tree, where it is much cooler than on the deck, I reread an interview with Alice Oswald in the winter 2026 Paris Review. I’ve posted bits from it already. Today, since I’ve been thinking about spiriti visivi and insects, I wanted to post these lines:
1
. . . the contracts you make with the natural world that allow you to be in a place, the feeling of living somewhere you don’t own.
(But don’t you own the house?)
Yes, but it’s very clear that it’s really the insects who own it, and the river that comes right up to the garden. The rain comes through the ceiling. It’s interesting, the way the dead and the natural world are sort of exchangeable. That might sound theoretical, but ancient Greek lament, and lament from everywhere, has always used birds and plants as intermediaries for communicating with the dead. And I feel, when I’m here, a deference toward my uncle and my father, who once looked after the house, that’s kind of interchangeable with the deference I might feel toward a bird or an insent.
2
[after discussing the sound that flies and grasshoppers make, the interviewer asks: Is it the choral sound that you love?]
And the fact that they don’t speak with their mouths. I love the way insects speak with their wings or legs. For a
Interview with Alice Oswald
After the interview were 4 new poems from AO, including this one about the fly. 3 fly poets I immediately think of: Emily Dickinson, Aracelis Girmay, and Alice Oswald.
Fly-play/ Alice Oswald
Enter a fly no sooner nowhere than here wiping her rear-view eye and tapping the world with one foreleg
What is it you wish for Fly?
She merely glitters to me of silence tapping . . . tapping the world walks backward . . . refers me to her myth and exits . . .
The scene is summer
Enter a yellow curtain:
One servant dressed simply as the sun going in and out with a beam of dust one fly . . .
WHAT IS YOU WISH FOR FLY?
She merely rotates for me her mask as if to bring something born in one world back in another
Then round and round with her weak voice pleading that her one belonging is her life which lasts but a day . . .
But you know full well, Fly, it takes 400 insect years for me to lift my ahnd and by the time it lands I too will be mute, I too will be you
glitter / silence / tapping refers me to her myth? what is the myth of the fly?
12 miles franklin + ford + hidden falls + veterans home + falls 67 degrees humidity: 86% / dew point: 65
Ugh! That was hard. It was too hot, too sunny, too humid. My feet hurt from warts and a big blister. I almost altered the route to cut off 2 miles. And I did it. And I felt okay for the last mile, like I could have kept going. Success! I’m proud of myself for persisting today.
3 things I did right
I didn’t have any unfinished business problems! I brought my water and made sure to keep drinking from it. I didn’t give up.
3 things to work on
Bring more snacks/fuel. A bandaid around my toe doesn’t work — it created a juicy blister — find other solutions. Be more intentional with music or mantras or experiments to try for distraction/focus.
10 Things
Mr. Morning! upped his game today with his greeting. Instead of just, morning! He added: Have a Great Day!
rowers!, 1: a coxswain’s voice, giving instructions through a megaphone
rowers!, 2: the gentle slap of the oars hitting the water
the crack just north of the trestle is bigger (again) — they’ve barricaded it off with metal gates
the part of the trail near the trestle on the east side was blocked off — some sort of work with a tall crane
the bells of st. thomas chiming
a skate boarder at the skate park: doing a wide arc at the edge of the course
filling up my water bottle: at the monument, near the skate park
a group of three bikers — 2 adults, one kid — biking slowly in front of me
stopping in the grass to adjust my laces (at least 5xs), stopping at a bench to take off my shoe to inspect my toe (1)
I have to do this again next week, but for the rest of today, I’ll celebrate the accomplishment of running (with some walking) 12 miles and moving for more than 2 hours.
For the first hour, I listened to birds, fragments of conversations, cars, trickling water, and bells. For the next 45 minutes, I listened to a Ruth Ware audiobook. And for the rest of the time: my Color playlist.
I’ve just barely started reading Kohn’s How Forests Think, which I was able to get through RJP’s college library. This is one of the opening lines in chapter 2, “The Living Thought”:
This chapter develops the claim that all living beings, and not just humans, think, and explores another closely related claim, that all thoughts are alive. It is about “the living thought.” What does it mean to think? What does it mean to be alive? Why are these two questions related, and how does our approach to them, especially when seen in terms of the challenges of relating to other kinds of beings, change our understanding of relationality and “the human”?
If thoughts are alive and if that which lives thinks, then perhaps the living world is enchanted. What I mean is that the world beyond the human is not a meaningless one made meaningful by humans. Rather, mean-ings—means-ends relations, strivings, purposes, telos, intentions, functions and significance—emerge in a world of living thoughts beyond the human in ways that are not fully exhausted by our all-too-human attempts to define and control these. More precisely, the forests around Ávila are animate. That is, these forests house other emergent loci of mean-ings, ones that do not necessarily revolve around, or originate from, humans. This is what I’m getting at when I say that forests think. It is to an examination of such thoughts that this anthropology beyond the human now turns.
How Forests Think / Eduardo Kohn
I’d like to put this chapter and the questions, What does it mean to think? and What does it mean to be alive?, beside Alice Oswald’s Homeric mind, with thoughts that don’t reside in the brain but travel outside of it, over the sea, Emily Dickinson’s bees, and the possibility that thoughts might be creatures themselves — and not just metaphorically. I’ve written about this before, and I’ll find where, either later today or tomorrow.
the next day:
1 — Alice Oswald on the Homeric mind:
Well, as you know, I’m quite fascinated, even obsessed, you might say with Homer. And one of the things that really tantalizes me in Homer is what is the Homeric mind? Because I think it’s very different from a literary mind. And it seems not to be inside the skull, but to be out in the world. So, there is a particular simile in the Iliad, which actually that first bit of the poem is based on, where it talks about two goddesses coming from heaven to the earth. And they’re very physically described. They kind of fall down from heaven to the earth. And then when they land, they take little pigeon steps, steps like doves or pigeons. So you can really picture them. But the way their flight moves from heaven to earth is as a man, you know, as the mind flutters in a man who has traveled widely, so you can turn it the other way around and say the way a man thinks is like this incredibly physical flight of two goddesses coming down to earth a bit like pigeons. And that’s always really interested me, that for Homer, the mind has the limitations of a pigeon, if you like. It is this kind of … this physical thing that moves. So, if you imagine a place over the sea, your mind actually has to get there. So, even though it may be as fast as the light, it is physical movement.
Here’s an article about the origins of the phrase. According to the article, the phrase is still being used in popular culture. I use it, usually when I notice Scott hell-bent on some task — and usually it seems like a task, or idea, that is fool-hardy but that he needs to work through and figure out for himself.
Sometimes instead of saying, bee in your bonnet, I say that someone (or me) is hellbent. Of course, writing that immediately makes me think of Jackie from the 1979 Death on the Nile:
Jacqueline De Bellefort : One must follow one’s star wherever it leads. Hercule Poirot : Even to disaster? Jacqueline De Bellefort : Even to Hell itself.
When I envision a bee in my bonnet, I see something that is relentless, impossible to ignore, urgently needing to be dealt with. That’s not quite how I imagine my preoccupation with haunts and ghosts and writing about the gorge. Still, I like the idea of bees in bonnets, and bees in general, so maybe I’ll spend more time with them this morning?
Reading through several ED “bee” poems, I suddenly had a thought: could the bee in your bonnet be your soul, trying to escape the confines of the body?
This thought was inspired by a poem I wrote about in an On This Day post: Body and Soul/ Sharon Bryan. I didn’t mention it in the post, but the description of the soul in the poem, as leaving the body at night to roam around, reminded me of an ED poem I read a few weeks ago, when I was thinking about the difference between the brain and the mind:
If ever the lid gets off my head And lets the brain away The fellow will go where he belonged — Without a hint from me,
And the world — if the world be looking on — Will see how far from home It is possible for sense to live The soul there — all the time.
3 — thoughts as a swarm of bees, uncontrollable and unwanted
As I started thinking more about my discussion of thoughts as bees, I also thought about how those bees, especially if they are swarming in your head without the lid being removed, could be overwhelming, incapacitating. Then I found this in my log entry from 30 june 2024:
“During the first loop somewhere between the first and second orange buoys an alarming thought appeared: what if I fainted in the middle of the lake? In the past this thought might have caused panic which I would feel in my body — a flushed face, harder to breathe, hot tingling on the top of my head. Not today. No physical effect. Within a few minutes the thought was gone. Is this because of the lexapro? FWA says that sometimes he feels the lexapro working — he’ll start having overwhelming thoughts but instead of spiraling, he feels himself become separated from those thoughts — they become abstract and distant. I wondered about this as I stroked then connected it to Alice Oswald’s Homeric mind and the idea of thoughts not just living in our head but traveling outside of our bodies from there to there.”
Don’t you wish they would stop, all the thoughts swirling around in your head, bees in a hive, dancers tapping their way across the stage?
Who with their whispered psalm can outvoice their huckster cackle, the trees blustered to howls while the tesla bees
whine loudly to the shocked air?
other links: I have a page about bees in my “How to Be” project on Un || Disciplined (I had forgotten that I did this — thanks, past Sara!)
one more thing: Finding my archive of bee-related things, is putting a bee in my bonnet. I need to archive all of my resources — or, as many as I can — before my central vision is completely gone. I imagine it will be much harder to do this once that happens!
3.9 miles wabun hill and back 67 degrees / humidity: 87%
An early-ish run. Started at 7:45. If I had run earlier, the temperature would have been a few degrees cooler, but the humidity and dew point would have been higher. Which is worse, higher temp or higher dew point? Dew point, I think. I’ll have to test it out — if I can get up earlier!
For the past month or so, I’ve been struggling with my feet and ankles. I’ve tried a few different pairs of shoes to see if any of them were better. This week — on Tuesday and today — I went back to my Brooks Ghosts. They seem to be working better. Today I realized (or remembered?) to put my laces through the extra holes at the top of the shoe. I think I had tried this early on with these shoes, but it felt too tight, then. It worked!
10 Things
gobble gobble gobble a turkey calling out from a tree in turkey hollow
a bike rushing past me on the wabun hill
an older man and woman stopped at the bottom of the locks and dam hill
thwack thwack the chain from the flag hitting the flag pole
a few bits of glitter on the surface of the river under the ford bridge
the older man and woman halfway up the hill, each of them dragging a tire
almost all benches were empty
stopping at the Rachel Dow Memorial bench for a quick view of the river and to retie my shoe
the wabun hill was covered in wet dirt — a little slippery when descending it
a woman standing on the edge of the trail, looking out somewhere, taking a picture of something
strong shoulders
Open swim tonight, but no Sara swimming. It’s a bummer, but I know that it’s a very bad idea to try and swim with my sore shoulder, My favorite, self-proclaimed “best PTs in the world,” Bob and Brad have some exercises for me to try in the next couple of days:
run: 4.1 miles monument and back 70 degrees humidity: 87% / dew point: 68
More uncomfortably warm conditions. Difficult, but doable. I did my run/walk plan: 5/1 (mile 1) — 1.5/.5 (miles 2-4). My feet didn’t hurt that much, and I had a lot of energy, especially in my legs, at the end of the run. I’ll take that as a victory. I listened to my striking feet and dripping water (shadow falls) and the st. thomas bells for the first half, Olivia Rodrigo for the second.
10 Things
St. Thomas bells — faint and short, 8:45, I think
rowers!, 1: on the way to st. paul, crossing the lake street bridge, 2 double rowing shells in the blueish gray water
rowers!, 2: on the way back to minneapolis, crossing the lake street bridge, 4 6-man rowing shells + the white boat with the coxswain
coxswain to rowers: okay and stop. good job!
overcast — a gray sky — is it going to rain? no: soon, sun
the dreamy reflection of clouds on the pale blue gray river
the path near shadow falls: cracked, cratered, ridged — dangerous!
at the top of the shadow falls hill, passing an adult and a kid wearing a backpack — summer school?
honk honk
near the beginning: a woman walking with a dog, holding the leash too loose, the dog licking my leg — sunday, I didn’t mind; today I did
swim: 1 loop lake nokomis open swim 81 degrees
Written the next morning. Almost perfect conditions. Smooth, warm water, not too crowded, overcast. For the first half of the loop, I felt strong and relaxed, but sometime not long after I rounded the third buoy, my right shoulder started to hurt. It was difficult to lift my arm. Ouch. When I reached the final green buoy, I stopped and rested for a few minutes in the beach area. I tried to swim again. Nope. I had to stop. A big bummer. I think I could have swum 5 loops tonight in this water.
Looked it up in the middle of the night (which might seem like a bad idea, but didn’t make me any less able to sleep) and it’s probably swimmer’s shoulder, caused by overuse. Swimmer’s shoulder is a common injury. I’m hoping that taking the rest of the week off will be enough to make it better. The silver lining: I still have more than half of the season left, so I should be able to swim again.
2 loops (4 cedar mini loops) cedar lake open swim 88 degrees
Very warm. Choppy. Crowded. As always, a great swim. Before the swim started, the orange buoy was way off to the far side, which caused a delay. The lifeguards wrangled it back and we started with it in its usual place. When I returned after the first loop, the buoy was drifting far out again. Most people were not even trying to round it. I tried, then gave it up too. After the second loop, the buoy had been moved back but very close to shore. After the third it was back in its usual place. The shifting buoy and the too bright sinking sun made it difficult to sight.
10 Things
small fish, about 1/2 foot long, bumping into my hand and my foot as I waited for open swim to begin
a lifeguard kayak escorting a swimmer back to shore
bright blue sky + fluffy clouds
racing another swimmer who kept pushing me out and away from the buoy
swimmers almost run into: 3
swimmers run into: 1
out in the middle of the deep lake, a few ghostly forms below: milfoil, I think
a paddleboarder looming beside me before passing me at a safe distance
on the back half of the loop, I mostly breathed every 4 strokes
on the front half of the loop: watching the curved line of swimmers returning to shore
the next morning: Yesterday was Scott and my 30th wedding anniversary. 30 years?! Wow. Wonderful. We went out for lunch in our old uptown neighborhood then walked around Bde Maka Ska and Lake of the Isles before heading over to Cedar for open swim.
run: 11 miles ford loop + veterans home + lake nokomis (x2) 66 degrees humidity: 92% dew point: 60+
I did it! It was humid and hot in the sun and my feet started hurting by mile 4, but I did it! I ran through the neighborhood, then over the lake street bridge, up shadow falls’ hill, past the monument and (mostly) up the east side of the river. I crossed the ford bridge, went through wabun park to the veterans’ home, crossed over another bridge, ran on the edge of the park, then beside minnehaha creek. When I reached Lake Nokomis, I had to run around it twice.
10 Things
teakettle teakettle — a carolina wren
a single rowing shell on the river
from the bridge, the water looked fuzzy, the air above it hazy
just past the monument, I heard the St. Thomas bells — I think it was 7:30
mostly dry dirt, or slightly damp earth on the desire path beside the paved trail — one spot was squishy mud and I almost twisted my ankle on it
cloudy then sunny then shade then sun and sun and sun then shade
someone on the other side of the mustache bridge, running and pushing a stroller, blasting some upbeat music that I didn’t recognize
the creek water is high! I especially noticed that as I ran over my favorite part of the trail
a woman with a dog — she wasn’t holding the leash tight enough and the dog leaned over and licked my knee as I ran by (surprisingly, I didn’t care)
running and walking over the cedar bridge, looking down at the water’s surface: a soft gray blue with reflections of clouds
For more than half of the run, I listened to the birds and my feet and the sloshing water in my handheld water bottle. Near the falls, I put in “Olivia Rodrigo Essentials.” Even though I’ve turned it off many times before, apple music was still set to fading songs, which means it took the last few measures of one song and made its beat match the beat of the next song. When this first happened, the last bit of the first song suddenly slowed, sounding so strange that I was worried I might be having heat stroke. Why does Apple do this? Boo.
3 things to celebrate / 3 things to work on
I kept the negative thoughts away (hooray)
I was able to eat a fig bar during the run and didn’t feel an urgent need to go to teh bathroom (yay)
My legs felt good in the last mile and I had some energy (woo hoo)
My feet hurt for almost half of the run (boo)
My ankles hurt some too — I need to tie my shoes tighter and/or get shoes in a smaller size (bummer)
As is often the case after a hard effort, I was cranky at the end when I met up with Scott (grr)
swim: 2 loops lake nokomis open swim 71 degrees
The plan: run to the lake for open swim. Scott would bring my bag with my stuff. I wanted to do at least one loop of swimming. I imagined it would be refreshing and restorative for my sore legs. And it was. Wow, that water! Almost perfect. Calm and warm enough. There was milfoil but no blue green algae. As I neared the beach, I could see clumps of the milfoil washed up on shore. Yuck!
The swimming felt easy and relaxing. Steadily, I stroked, breathing every 5 strokes. Occasionally I stopped stroking and listened to the quiet as I tread water. All I could hear was the soft slap of the water from another swimmer’s hand.
Today, I started counting strokes as I passed by the 4th buoy. 275 to get to 5th and final buoy.
A strange feeling: as I swam from buoy 3 to 4, I could see the green buoy up ahead. It seemed like I kept drifting out, almost too far to the left. Trying to correct my path felt strange and awkward. I briefly wondered if there was a current I wasn’t consciously feeling or if my run had made me less able to swim straight.
overheard: one swimmer to another: not many people here this morning! and you don’t have to rush off after we’re done, do you? and the water is wonderful! Except for the weeds!
Today I decided to start at the normal spot, instead of entering at the far end of the swimming area. The weeks were there, and I had to shorten my stroke when I reached them, but they weren’t too bad and didn’t last that long.
Speaking of weeds, I noticed a bad patch just below the cedar bridge when I was running. So thick, just below the surface. Looking brown and orange, then dark dark green.
Today would have been a perfect day to swim 5 loops. And if I hadn’t run for 2 hours before swimming, I would have done it. I wish I could have, but I’m glad I didn’t try. That would have been too much!
added at the end of the day: Even though I ran 11 miles and swam 1.5 miles today (and achieved 300% of my move goal), I don’t feel wiped out or that sore. Only my feet hurt, and that’s because of the warts (yuck!).
earlier today, I was looking through my 5 july entries from past years. I would like to remember some things from them, including:
1 — 2025
Yesterday, in a ramble about rumors and whispers, I stumbled upon a tentative theme for the month: the language of water. First step: read/skim How to Read Water.
Here’s an interesting bit I’d like to remember:
. . . ponds and lakes are far from permanent; rivers will tend to grow naturally with time as they do their own excavating, but the opposite is true for still water. Unless ponds and lakes are given some help, they will all eventually return to land, It starts with algae, then the rushes and other shallow water plants getting a foothold, and this allows sediments to gather, water turns to wet mud, and a reinforcing cycle begins that culminates in the water losing the battle against the encroaching land.
How to Read Water/ Tristan Gooley
Shallow water plants getting a foothold. No!
2 — 2024
Because the buoys are positioned by lifeguards every swim — they paddle out on kayaks where they are advised by someone on shore where to drop their anchor — and because there’s no exact spot for each of buoys, the loop distance varies. Today it was long, which I like — the more distance, the better! Here’s a comparison on 3 different 4 loop swims by number of strokes I took / distance (which I’m pretty sure my watch doesn’t measures accurately):
25 june 2024: 2094 strokes / 3100 yards 30 june 2024: 2124 strokes / 3600 yards 5 july 2024: 2374 strokes / 4000 yards
I like how approximate the course is. Some things about it are set, some aren’t.
3 — 2021
Why I do and don’t like Cedar Lake + differences between Nokomis and Cedar Lake (see 23 June 2021). The first time I ever swam at Cedar Lake was 14 August 2019.
