Tag: 10 things

april 9/RUN

4.6 miles
ford overlook and back
45 degrees

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

10 Things

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

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

For Allen Ginsberg/ Dorothy Grossman

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

april 7/RUN

5.4 miles
franklin loop
30 degrees

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

10 Things

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

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

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

excerpt from Notes on Orange/ Jennifer Huang

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

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

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

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

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

april 6/RUN

4.15 miles
minnehaha falls steps and back
45 degrees

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

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

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

10 Things

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

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

Black lake, black boat, / Emily Skaja

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

april 4/WALK

55 minutes
ravine / longfellow flats / 7 oaks
34 degrees

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

Steps Taken

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

10 Things

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

orange

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

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

april 1/RUN

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

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

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

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

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

10 Rusty Things

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

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

Steps

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

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

Refreshing My Memory

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

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

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

march 31/RUN

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
36 degrees

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

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

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

10 Things

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

Found this poem the other day:

Color Keeps Time / Patrycja Humienik

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

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

Lover, let the morning slow
time through the branches.

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

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

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

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

march 28/RUNWALK

5.3 miles
ford loop
53 degrees

Spring! High in the 70s today. Tomorrow, in the 40s. When I started, I felt very sluggish and I wondered if I would be able to do the entire loop. I suppose it got a little easier, but I think it was more that I just kept putting one foot in the front of the other. I stopped to walk when I thought I needed to and kept running when I knew I could. There was one moment when I was just about to stop and walk but then I didn’t. I want to do that more often.

“10 Things

  1. the waves on the water from the ford bridge, looking like little scales — the wind pushing the water upstream
  2. reaching the top of the summit hill, hearing several dogs non-stop barking in a fenced-in backyard. I looked over and saw one of them up on something, their head higher than the fence
  3. a man exiting a port-a-potty at the Monument parking lot, ready to begin running again
  4. the cross on top of the monument — big and made out of stone — have I ever noticed it before?
  5. the feel of the sandy dirt on the edge of the paved path on the st. paul side: soft, fast, gentle, singing
  6. the bells from St. Thomas ringing quietly
  7. empty benches everywhere
  8. the faint knocking of a woodpecker high up in a tree
  9. no eagle perched on the dead limb of the tree near the lake/marshall bridge
  10. something floating in the water — I couldn’t tell if it was a buoy or an ugly 80s purse

Waters of March (Águas de Março) / Antonio Carlos Jobim

This song, which I’ve heard many times but never really listened to, came up on a mood playlist yesterday. I looked up the lyrics, and here’s the first part:

A stick, a stone
It’s the end of the road
It’s the rest of a stump
It’s a little alone

It’s a sliver of glass
It is life, it’s the sun
It is night, it is death
It’s a trap, it’s a gun

The oak when it blooms
A fox in the brush
A knot in the wood
The song of a thrush

The wood of the wind
A cliff, a fall
A scratch, a lump
It is nothing at all

It’s the wind blowing free
It’s the end of the slope
It’s a beam, it’s a void
It’s a hunch, it’s a hope

And the river bank talks
Of the waters of March
It’s the end of the strain
The joy in your heart

The song is originally in Portuguese and from 1972; Jobim created an English version later. I like the list of images — a list poem!

As the story goes, Jobim wrote the song in his country house, close to Rio de Janeiro. He was growing impatient with all the rain and mud that kept delaying some work he wanted done on the property and started the song as a way to distract himself from the constant downpour, creating a simple tune to go with the lyrics. His intention was to rewrite the melody later, though he soon realized that the downward spiral progression he had accidentally created fit the song—and the weather—perfectly.

The lyrics of “Águas de Março” tell of the constant rain that falls in Rio during the month of March, at the close of the summer (in the Southern Hemisphere, the seasons are opposite to those in the Northern). It is a common occurrence for excessive rain to cause floods and landslides. It washes away houses and streets, taking everything it clashes with in its current.

The Waters of March

And here’s a delightful poem I discovered on Instagram last night:

Lately,/ Laure-Anne Bosselaar

when a branch pulls at my sleeve
like a child’s tug, or the fog, reticent & thick,
lifts, & strands of it still hang like spun sugar
between branches & twigs, or when a phoebe
trills from the hackberry,
I believe such luck
is meant only for me. Does this happen to you?
Do you believe at times that a moment chooses
you to remember it entirely & tell about it —
so that it may live again?

ritual / ceremony / chant / movement

Reading through past entries for this month, I came across an idea from Cole Swensen:

as you move
through a

place, it moves
through you

OR

move through a
place and

it moves through
you too

I like the second one. I can imagine chanting it as I run and thinking about what I’m moving through and what’s moving through me. What is moving through me?

Here’s one answer, in a poem — Running Sentences — from a poet I just discovered on 26 march:

a The chorus is making sentences now: look,

b A cloud of gnats through which the body like a hailstorm blew,

c Here in the pockets of the path, there a heaven I avoid,

b Runners move through gnats, whole bodies move, disrupting,
(Running Sentences/ Endi Bogue Hartigan)

walk: 35 minutes
edmund
67 degrees

It almost feels like summer — wow. Trees and birds and a steady stream of cars on the river road enjoying the nice weather. Bikes, kids, the smell of dead leaves baking in the sun. My favorite thing: 2 people ahead of me on the sidewalk, one of them was wearing cool, baggy pants with a tank top and I thought that I’d like to have something like that to wear. Later a car drove by, the people inside scream-singing along to “Like a Prayer.” The person in the baggy pants called out and they stopped to let them get in. Then laughing and gleeful shouting and more scream-singing. I almost wrote, oh, to be that young again, but I don’t want to that young again. Instead, I’d like to be that delighted and joyful again.

march 26/RUNWALK

5.25 miles
bottom of franklin and back
46 degrees

More excellent running weather. Sunny and calm and warm(er). Birds singing and swooping and perching on tree branches right in front of me. I felt relaxed and strong and my back only hurt once, when I stood up after re-tying my shoe. I ran without stopping to walk to the bottom of the hill and right next to the river. It was swirling foam on the edges. Ran back up to under the franklin bridge then stopped to walk the rest of the hill. I noticed a sign — Trail closed starting March 31st — uh oh. Just looked it up; it’s only for 2 weeks:

Bike and walk trails along West River Parkway will close between the I-94 Bridge and Franklin Avenue for up to two weeks beginning Monday, March 31, 2025.

The closure is necessary for contractors hired by the Minnesota Department of Transportation to install a safe span system that will protect trail users during repairs to the bridge this year.

Trail users will be detoured to the upper West River Parkway roadway between the I-94 Bridge and Franklin Avenue. This same closure will be repeated in August so that workers can remove the safe span system after repairs are complete.

Listened to a mood playlist: energy for the rest of the run. The best (or worst?) song on the playlist was “Hocus Pocus” by Focus. I love the song, but it was too fast to try and run to!I had to increase my cadence to 200 bpm to match it! The song also does not have a steady rhythm; it just keeps getting faster and faster, probably because they were on cocaine while they recorded it.

10 Things

  1. the water was a brownish greenish blue
  2. in the flats I leaned over the ledge and watched the swirling foam slowly travel down stream
  3. workers on the road above the tunnel of trees, doing something to sewer which released a sour smell
  4. the workers were wearing bright yellow vests
  5. passed a walker who refused to move over — they were walking right next to the line. I suddenly wondered, are they neuro-divergent? then, maybe I should chill out about people needing to follow the accepted rules about where and how to walk on the trail
  6. stopped at the sliding bench, 1: heard a cardinal — it was somewhere nearby — looked up and saw that it was on a branch close to me. Was it red? I couldn’t tell, but I did noticed how its tail quivered slightly all the time — I’m assuming it was keeping its balance. Do birds have to constantly adjust while perched?
  7. stopped by the sliding bench, 2: looking down at the white sands beach, hoping for movement. Yes, there, deep in — a walker moving through the trees
  8. the small shadow of a bird crossing my path, flying fast!
  9. my sharp shadow in front of me, crossing over the softer shadows of tree branches
  10. the shadow of a tree with dead leaves on it — looking almost like a messed-up pom pom

At the end of the run, as I was walking home, I had a thought about CA Conrad’s and their idea of the “extreme present,” which I wrote about on here earlier this month on march 5th:

“extreme present” where the many facets of what is around me wherever I am can come together through a sharper lens.

intro to ecodeviance / CA Conrad

Conrad creates their soma(tic) rituals to make being anything but present is nearly impossible. Running by the gorge can put/force me into the extreme present. This sense of the extreme present doesn’t happen for the entire run, but I can achieve it in moments. In their lengthy, day-long rituals — wear a red wig, eat only red food — is Conrad able to achieve this extreme present for longer?

birdsong!

This morning Scott heard the cardinals outside his window and because he wanted to use some birdsong in his latest music project, he placed his phone on a chair on the deck and recorded some. I liked how he described it: I left the phone out on the deck then returned inside and went quietly about my business. When he told me about how similar each wave of sound looked, I asked if he could screen shot it and send me the sound file so I could post it here:

cardinal song, an image of sound waves
cardinal song / 26 march 2025

Wow! So uniform.

Happy 151st Birthday Robert Frost!

When the poem of the day on poetry foundation was a Robert Frost one, I figured it must be his birthday. Yep — 26 march 1874.

For Once, Then Something/ Robert Frost

Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

A beautiful sonnet — 14 lines, 11 beats per line, almost iambic pentameter. Is that right? I always struggle to hear meter properly.

Love the description of a reflection: Me myself in the summer heaven godlike/Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs

And that something white, uncertain, seen briefly then lost to a ripple. Yesterday I posted some lyrics from “The Windmills of Your Mind” about the ripples from a pebble. Ripple is a great word.

Seeing this sonnet is making me think I should try that form for my color poems. I could study a few different ways of doing the sonnet — Diane Seuss, Terence Hayes, William Shakespeare. Any others?

oh orchid o’clock

A good morning on the poetry sites. Not only did I find Robert Frost’s poem, but I found a cool collection that fits in with my study of time: Oh Orchid O’Clock by Endi Bogue Hartigan. (note: I just emailed Moon Palace Books about ordering it! update: I ordered it!)

/it is the president’s turned up o’clock it is America’s deadliness and dailiness

o’clock / it is glued to the headline o’clock

it is lunchhour-beeline o’clock / it is it’s only Tuesday o’clock another

curbside memorial o’clock another caterpillar miracle o’clock another

people emptying from their lives o’clock or into

their lives o’clock the Nile floods the Nile floods every hotspell in this week

I discovered this book through poems.com, which had one of its poems posted today:

hour entry: I fall asleep with a rain sound/ Endi Bogue Hartigan

I fall asleep with the rain sound app of my cellphone, the app includes distant thunderclap sounds and there are people who recorded or simulated these sounds, and it is time to disagree and thank the dawn. I disagree with this rain, I feel absurd for thesimulation of it and yet my brain waves have come to depend on it, depend onsimulated porous points between the raindrops. Always the porous dream, always theneural authority, the reaction meme, always the authority of always, the puncture ofalways, time spent saying always, the spider legs of always, the sleep command, thewake spindles, the spider leg threatening to break from the spider.

So cool! Encountering Hartigan’s work, I was inspired to think about time in relation to my blind spot and the practice of running beside the gorge that has happened beside (and because of?) my vision loss. I wrote the following in my Plague Notebook:

my blind spot
breaks open seconds
pries apart the hard edges of
a beat invites me
to dwell inside

I am suspended between
beats as time slows
but never stops
with moves so slight it takes
a practiced eye to see
their soft shimmering
embrace what is not seen but felt —
wind
the rotation of the earth
a bench sliding into the gorge
rock crumbling
cone cells collapsing
a blind spot expanding

walk: 40 minutes
neighborhood / winchell trail / oak savanna
54 degrees

What a great afternoon walk with Delia the dog! No coat. No mud. Walked to the Winchell Trail then down beside the chain link fence. Drip Drip Drip — the sewer pipe in the ravine. Everything washed out — light brown, tan, yellowed. Up on the mesa in the savanna, a great view of the river. Was able to walk on the dirt path between the savanna and the 38th street stairs. They’ve put down some mulch, so it’s not as muddy. As I neared the entrance to the Winchell Trail, I passed the spot where I fell in the mud, straight on my tailbone. No mud now, only memories and a still-sore back.

On the way to the river, I noticed something interesting hidden on the tree trunk while Delia sniffed around. I took a picture of it:

= > ÷

When I was looking at it in person, I thought someone had carved the message in the tree, but studying it now, it looks like it’s a rock wedged in a crack. I probably should have taken another picture that wasn’t quite as close-up for scale. That is one tiny rock.

I had to look up how to type the division sign on a mac. Hold down option and /

march 25/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
39 degrees

It felt much warmer than 39. Another great late morning for a run. My back seems to be getting better. Still sore, but not when I’m running. Felt compelled to walk a few more times than usual, but otherwise a good run.

10 Things

  1. a small bird’s shadow crossing the path
  2. a glimpse of silver, then the outline of a metal cart, a fold-up canvas chai with someone sitting in it, facing the river, the radio
  3. below the edge of the world: a steep trail tight against the bluff, going somewhere under the trail and over to the jagged ledges of a ravine
  4. drip drip drip the sewer pipe near the curved retaining wall dripping water
  5. empty benches
  6. hollowed out trunks on the Winchell Trail — empty circles
  7. a person climbing up the steep slope below the winchell trail on the other side of wrought iron fence
  8. the falls: white foam
  9. the edges of the river, slabs of ice/snow then sparkle
  10. the crooked shadows on the paved path, near the edge, cast by sections of a leaning wooden fence

Created another time playlist, this one all about loops and seasons and time as a circle called “The Wheeling Life.” Favorite song to listen to today: “Windmills of Your Mind”/ Mel Torm´e, which is inspired by hearing it in the season finale of Severance.

Like a tunnel that you follow
To a tunnel of it’s own
Down a hollow to a cavern
Where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving
In a half-forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble
Someone tosses in a stream

march 21/RUN

3.35 miles
trestle turn around
43 degrees

Wow, what a morning! Birds! Sun! Calm air! Everything quiet, relaxed. I felt fast and free. less tightness in my neck and hip. Greeted the Welcoming Oaks and Dave, the Daily Walker.

10 Things

  1. a runner with BRIGHT orange shoes
  2. a shining white form in the distance, through the trees: the river
  3. the strong smell of weed somewhere below me
  4. stopping at the sliding bench — movement below, in the trees just before white sands beach: a runner on the winchell trail — should I try that?
  5. the soft knocking of a woodpecker in a nearby tree
  6. stepping off onto the dirt trail for a brief stretch: soft and springy
  7. someone sitting on a bench near the trestle
  8. the river: open and blue
  9. a big branch sticking out of the trashcan — a discarded walking stick?
  10. 3? stones stacked on the ancient boulder

I decided to try an experiment with beats.

First mile: chanting in triples
Second mile: metronome at 170 bpm
Third mile: “Doin’ Time” playlist

mile 1: strawberry/blueberry/raspberry — (to the welcoming oaks) Hello friend! Hello friend! Hello friend!/ old oak tree / stacking stones / stack the stones / intellect / mystery / (noticing a crack in the asphalt) breaking up / cracking up / bright yellow / woodpecker

I found that bright yellow was especially good for locking into a rhythm — BRIGHT yellow

mile 2: 170 was hard. I think it was too slow. I probably should have tried 175 or 180. I think I’ve done 175 before. I only locked into this beat a few times. Was my inability to lock in also because I started with triples?

mile 3: I put in my playlist. The first song was “About Damn Time” by Lizzo. It was great for getting into a groove. Next up, “9 to 5.” As I started to listen to it, I realized the metronome was still on and the beats of the song and it didn’t match up. I decided to leave it going and see what happens when I’m dealing with competing rhythms. I can’t quite remember, but I feel like I didn’t lock into either rhythm; I just created my own, and it didn’t bother/unsettle me.

Later I thought about how the “9 to 5” rhythm represents the relentless drudgery of working within capitalism. Resisting that rhythm, and what it does to you, is important. The final song I heard was “Too Much Time on My Hands” by Styx. I listened to the lyrics and was reminded that it was about a guy who wants a job, a way to feel useful, something to do, but he can’t get one. While he doesn’t mention in the lyrics why he can’t get a job, I thought of the larger context and the conditions (economic, political, social/cultural) that make it difficult for people/communities to find work.

Reading the lyrics — without hearing the music or singing — I was struck by this line:

And I don’t know what to do with myself

So dark. Heard with the music it just seems like a light lyric from a pop song.

This was a fun experiment that yielded some surprising results. I liked the accident of the competing rhythms and the juxtaposition of 9 to 5 with Too Much Time on My Hands. For future attempts, I’ll increase the metronome speed and mix up the order. Maybe I should try to write something, too, at the end of each segment? Speak a poem into my phone?

march 19/RUN

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
38 degrees
wind: 18 mph / 37 mph gusts

Ran south and had the wind at my back for the first half, which was nice but it meant that I’d be running straight into it on the home. Not as difficult as I thought, but still draining. Wore the bright yellow shoes I bought last year and promised myself I’d never wear again because they make my feet hurt and calves cramp. They’ve been sitting in the rack all year, and looked so spring-y today that I couldn’t resist trying them again. Will I regret it? Probably. I should donate them instead of trying to make them happen.

10 Things

  1. little kid voices somewhere down in the savanna
  2. empty benches
  3. something glittering through the trees, up ahead — car headlights through the trees at the bend in the road
  4. a faster runner in a white shirt off to the side, heading down to the Winchell Trail — I followed above, watching as they slowly inched out of sight
  5. I don’t remember hearing the falls, just seeing them at a distance, from my favorite spot — white foam, moving rapidly at the corner of my central vision
  6. pale blue water, soft brown trees
  7. dead leaves on the ground — feeling orange to me
  8. the bluff on the other side was mostly brown with a few slashes of white — frozen seeps
  9. branches rubbing and creaking in the wind, sounding less like rusty door hinges and more like whimpering kids: soft, insistent, whiny
  10. running on the winchell trail, about to head up the 38th steps, I looked back and thought I saw someone approaching — nope, just the wrought iron fence

before the run: my blind spot

Yesterday, I read an interview with JJJJJerome Ellis and was inspired by their renaming of their Stutter as clearing:

Ellis’s glottal block stutter—which manifests as intervals of silence in his speech flow—is represented in this interview with the word clearing. Ellis offers this term as an alternative to words like stutter or stammer. Like a clearing in a forest, the stutter, for Ellis, can open a space of gathering between Ellis and the people he is communicating with.

Angel Bat Dawid and JJJJJerome Ellis

After a little digging, I found out more about the clearing and how it works for Ellis in their work:

Stuttering (especially in the form I present with, the glottal block) creates unpredictable, silent gaps in speech. I call these gaps ‘clearings’. Slaves sang in the fields, and whites heard them; but they also sang (and danced) in the woods at night, out of earshot. Undergirding the clearing created by my stutter is that other clearing, in the woods, where my enslaved ancestors stole away to keep healing, resisting and liberating through music – work that I continue today.

The Clearing/ JJJJJerome Ellis

Wow! What an amazing way to think about the stutter. In their follow-up book, the one that introduced me to Ellis, Aster of Ceremonies, they connect the Stutter explicitly with plants and place. I want to connect my blind spot — that growing lack of functioning cone cells in my macula — with water and stone and the gorge. As I try to explain this more, I have so many thoughts, too many words!

Just looked up blind spot and found these exciting definitions:

an area in which one fails to exercise judgment or discrimination

Merriam-Webster online

In this definition, a lack of judgment is a failure. And it is sometimes. But refusing to judge, keeping a space open for listening and beholding and bearing witness without judgment or the reduction of someone or something to a category (discrimination) is also essential.

Another helpful definition:

a portion of a field that cannot be seen or inspected with available equipment

Merriam-Webster online

during the run: my blind spot

I thought about my blind spot every so often as I ran, especially the idea of how it softens and fuzzes my vision. It’s difficult to see with precision, to scrutinize or make detailed observations that encourage me to identify and classify things. As a result, I devote less time to trying to name them, and more time to being with them. Here I’m thinking of Robin Wall Kimmerer and J. Drew Lanham.

I’m sure I had more thoughts, but I didn’t record them. If I had, would I even be able to hear them over the howling wind in any recording I would make today?

after the run: my blind spot

A space without judgment. Back when I was a scholar and teaching queer ethics, I was exploring what an ethics without judgement might look like, one that emphasized room to breathe and, as Judith Butler puts it, good air. I often invoked a quotation from Michel Foucault:

I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep.

The Masked Philosopher/ Michel Foucault

A few days ago, I read something else about not judging from Cole Swensen:

. . . an instance of witness, with witness defined as the act of being present to something, whether it’s an event, a situation, a person, a view. To be present to is to present yourself, to offer yourself, to attend without judgment, opinion, intervention, appropriation or even evaluation, and yet to be present to is not to be passive; it is an act, the act of anchoring the witnessed in history, confirming it, acting as the “second” that fixes it . . . . It is the ear that turns the falling tree to sound.

Walk/ Cole Swensen

Witnessing, being with, beholding. The gorge — a widening gap, a broad space where fires are lit, the grass grows, the wind howls, and river foam scatters. A generous place for holding all of the messy, entangled, conflicting, complicated stories of a place: of preserving and maintaining it, of stealing it, of losing it, of dead mothers who disowned it, of daughters who are attempting to reclaim it, of erosion and transformation and haunting, of a girl losing her central vision and searching for somewhere to be — to feel less alienation and more connection. There’s a lot here!

For the first half of the run, I listened to kids’ voices, for the second half, my “Doin’ Time” playlist. Speaking of time, here’s something great I read by Hanif Abdurraqib about nostalgia:

Another question I was asked about There’s Always This Year was about the use of nostalgia in my work, and the function of it, and I had this long answer I was going to give, but I look back on recent moments, and I realize that a major function of my relationship with nostalgia is actually tied to a committed and principled relationship with my present life. I am in pursuit, often, of a moment I will live and miss before it’s even gone. And the awareness of the longing to come offers me an opportunity to slow down time, to pay closer attention, to say I know something will end, but I would like a vivid catalog of its existence. My favorite Robert Hayden poem is “Double Feature,” which opens its final stanza with “Oh how we cheered to see the good we were / destroy the bad we’d never be.” I love that line. There’s a lot of bad to dismantle, and only some of it is housed within. The world houses the rest, and it is abundant. I require whatever good I can steal and then hoard. It fuels me to the fight(s,) which isn’t the same as a kind of whimsical nostalgia, but it is me saying that I remember there are things I love enough to fight for, even when it doesn’t feel like it. There are things I miss that I haven’t even experienced yet, and I want to get to them, eventually. And then get to what’s next.

instagram post

added later: I want to add these thoughts from an Alice Oswald interview about erosion here, too:

DN: I wanted to switch to another topic that infuses your work, and that is the process of erosion—erosion by water, erosion by wind, erosion by light—the topic of your first Oxford lecture but also, something that feels very present to Nobody. You said in one interview that the anonymity you were striving after for this book was inspired by eroded Cycladic sculptures, sculptures where the features had been nearly washed away. I was hoping you could talk about erosion in relationship to this and to the text.

AO: I suppose that comes back to your question about thinking. The poem conveys a kind of eroded thinking. It’s as if the thoughts have had reality washing away at them; a sentence sets out then gets blown in another direction. Erosion is important to me in that I think poetry has a particular duty and relationship towards time. Poems are miniature human clots I think, they’re full of time keeping in the way that a piece of music is full of timekeeping. In some way, they set their own time but they need to be awake to actual time moving around them. A poem has to offer itself up to the erosion that’s going on in the world. Nobody, more than any of my poems, I think gives in completely to that force of erosion where I would normally try to maintain some human presence in the face of it. I think Nobody allows itself to get weathered to a Cycladic blankness.

This idea of a poem offering itself up to erosion and to being within time, reminds me of something I heard from Jenny Odell the other day in “Another Kind of Time.” She’s talking about how being part of time, having a past, present, and future — and not just being timeless — makes something/someone a subject/actor instead of thing to be commodified/exploited. To be timeless/without time is to lack a context and a life. I’m also thinking about how preventing erosion often requires a sealing up and away from oxygen, water, wind. Erosion and decay are a necessary part of life.

DN: This talk of erosion and time makes me think of that famous Marguerite Yourcenar essay, That Mighty Sculptor, Time. I’m just going to read a couple of lines from it, “On the day when a statue is finished, its life, in a certain sense, begins. The first phase, in which it has been brought, by means of the sculptor’s efforts, out of the block of stone into human shape, is over; a second phase, stretching across the course of centuries, through alternations of adoration, admiration, love, hatred, and indifference, and successive degrees of erosion and attrition, will bit by bit return it to the state of unformed mineral mass out of which its sculptor had taken it.” I was thinking of this when I encountered your interview with Claire Armitstead where you said you think of your poems less as poems than as sound carvings which made me think that the sound these poems were making is eating away at something which then by extension suggests that both the blank page and silence are not really absences in this framing at all but presences.

AO: Yeah, I like that. I’ve always felt that in some way, a poem is really a framing of its silences, that the musical art poetry is all about leading you to those silences in a way that you hear them where normally one doesn’t necessarily hear a silence or an absence, both the sound is eating away that silence but then also, the sounds are, in their own way, erosions made so I let my voice get blown around by the information it’s taken in if you like. The feeling of not quite holding your own. . . .

DN: Let me ask you something about Homer’s syntax that you’ve said in light of sound carvings being a description of your poems. You said about Homer’s syntax, “The tendency of his grammar is therefore cumulative, like a cairn. Each clause is a separable unit. It might be placed loosely on another and held there with a quick connective, but it never loses its essential singleness; which is why you often find that one end of his sentence turns away from the other.” On the one hand, this feels like a process of accretion rather than erosion, an accumulation, but the singleness and the separateness of each component, and that each is surrounded by silence of the white page made me wonder if perhaps, this accumulation is the product of erosion like I imagine the scree that builds at the at the bottom of a cliffside of all the piles of rocks that are single but also part of this erosive process.

I love erosion: I like the way that the death of one thing is the beginning of something else (source).

march 18/WALK

45 minutes
longfellow flats
50 degrees / feels like 39
wind: 20 mph gusts

Sore hips this morning! Is it a running injury or just a terrible mattress? We flipped the mattress yesterday, and sleeping last night was worse than ever, so I’m thinking it’s the mattress. Ascending from the river, I powered up all 112 stone steps and my legs felt great. Would I be able to do that with an injured hip? I don’t think so. I’m definitely incorporating some step work this spring!

10 Things

  1. a woodpecker knocking a few blocks away
  2. the wind was coming from the north and the east
  3. two iron (or wire?) cranes in a backyard — I spied them through a fence — I want a giant iron bird in my backyard!
  4. low notes from a wind chime in the backyard of the house where a family from New Zealand lives — not only do they fly a New Zealand flag, but I heard one of them speaking with a New Zealand accent
  5. on the pedestrian part of the double bridge north of the stone steps — open and blue and brown below
  6. also on the double bridge: a temporary section of fence — looking over the edge of the (it’s high up here), I could see part of another temporary fence halfway down the steep slope — what happened?
  7. the floodplain forest between the steps and the river was littered with felled trees and tangled branches and dirt and dead leaves
  8. creeeaak — branches rubbing against each other in the wind
  9. from below, looking up at the bluff — a brown slope, a wooden fence, voices
  10. a roller skier slowly approaching the ancient boulder

Jenny Odell and Another Kind of Time

Yesterday I started listening to a podcast with Jenny Odell about her most recent book on time and I decided that when the book was ready (I requested it from the library), I would finally dedicate some time to clocks and time and other forms of time that don’t involve clocks.

15 jan 2024

It has taken me until today to return to this podcast. Why? I’m studying time and I got a notification that it was the featured podcast on Emergence. When I got the book, in February, I had already moved onto other projects — an ekphrastic project, then wind. So now, 15 months later, I’m taking up the task I assigned myself. Ha! That’s Sara/gorge time. I briefly returned to it this January, but dropped it again, which is another example of Sara/gorge time — scattered returns and departures, loops, taking it up again and again.

Today, I look several pages of notes in my Plague Notebook. Here are some highlights:

reframing language outside of the rigid belief that time is money and time as stuff that can be measured, counted, and should be hoarded

when did time become a commodity?

And then something happened, and it seems to have to do both with technology and sort of cultural needs: like on the one hand the escapement, which is like a part of a clock that can sort of keep the mechanism going as opposed to like a guy ringing a bell at a certain time, right?

Another Kind of Time

This reminds me of my poem and the idea of person inside that bell tower tugging on the rope to make the bell ring!

That happened. And then also towns that were becoming very commercial started needing to be able to count up and measure labor hours that they were buying from people. And so some confluence of those things led to this notion of an hour: like an hour that can just exist, you know, in the imagination. And that an hour is an hour, and a labor hour is a labor hour, and it sort of doesn’t matter what season it’s happening in, what time of day. And for me, that is a really crucial separating point. That is when this idea of time as stuff started to peel away from all the things that it had been embedded in previously.

As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days; inside the weather, where certain flowers and scents come back, at least for now, to visit a year-older self. Sometimes time is not money but these things instead.

Telling time through weather and seasons, and the leaving and returning of leaves, and the certain slant of light, and the sound of the water, and the feel of the path, and the amount of view, and the ease or difficulty in breathing.

chronos (ordinary, standardized time) and kairos (the interruption of things/ordinary time, extraordinary time)

horizontal (work + leisure used to restore energy for work = work + weekend)
vertical (awe, wonder, interruption, not work, “true” leisure)

migratory time, animal time

what is time to a flower? water, temperature, sun

the 72 micro-seasons in Japanese almanac

how do I tell time when I’m by the gorge?

weather – exposing myself to the elements, running in them, noticing and feeling the effects of wind, air quality, rain, snow, ice, the cold or heat — a relationship to/conversation with the world

witnessing the nearly invisible labor — tree trimming, repaving, managing and maintaining trails, erosion, nest-building

alienation and learning to listen to the world

. . . there’s a part of Braiding Sweetgrass, where Robin Wall Kimmerer is describing—I think she’s talking about like what it would feel like to not know the names of the things that are living around you. And then she says, I imagine it must feel like showing up in a city and you can’t read any of the signs, right? Like, that’s a deeply frightening and lonely experience to have. 

When I heard this bit, I raised my hand and said, “that’s me.” I can’t read signs on or inside building that often — even in Minneapolis, where I’ve lived for over 20 years. It is frightening and lonely and frustrating.

march 17/RUN

4.25 miles
locks and dam no.1 hill and back
50 degrees
wind: 13 mph/ 25 mph gusts

Warmer, windier. Ran straight into it heading south towards the falls. It didn’t howl or swirl the leaves but once it almost took off my hat. And it pushed against me, making it harder to run. I didn’t mind. At the start of the run, I felt a little stiff — especially my neck — but by the halfway point I had loosened up.

I noticed the river several times: Sometimes it was silver sparkle, other times tin or pewter, and it was ridged or scaled from the wind. I decided to run down the hill at the locks and dam no. 1 to get closer to the water. Inspired by AO’s Dart (see below), I wanted to hear the trails of scales and the bells just a level under listening. Did it sound like anything? If it did, the sounds were forgotten as I turned around and climbed the hill. A few steps in I stopped to take in the wide blue view of the river from this angle. It took up almost all of my sight: blue undulations

11 Things

  1. the long shadow of a slender tree cast across the part of the path that dips below the road
  2. an orange sweatshirt on a walker emerging from the winchell trail
  3. squaring my shoulders and running into a stiff wind
  4. 2 people under the ford bridge near the locks and dam no. 1, about to climb up somewhere
  5. the bright white base of the locks and dam no. 1 sign — they must use reflective paint
  6. the benches above the edge of the world and near folwell were empty
  7. the low hum of playing kids on the school playground
  8. the flat top of a recently made stump: orange
  9. a white patch in the river near the shore — was it a chunk of ice? a sandbar?
  10. a tailwind as I returned north — not feeling the wind but its absence and that everything was easier
  11. added a few hours later: a creaking above from one tree branch rubbing another in the wind

Listened to leaves shimmering in the trees as I ran south, my “Doin’ Time” playlist as I ran back north. Most memorable song, “Once in a Lifetime”:

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Water dissolving and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Under the water, carry the water
Remove the water from the bottom of the ocean
Water dissolving and water removing

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, into the silent water
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground

I never realized before how much water is used in this song. Very cool! The same as it ever was is an interesting contrast to what I was reading earlier this morning: Heraclitus and his idea of never stepping into the same river twice — see 17 march 2023

possible lines to recite/chant

Rereading my 17 march 2022 entry, I encountered these wonderful lines from Dart about how the river sounds:

will you swim down and attend to this foundry for
sounds

this jabber of pidgin-river
drilling these rhythmic cells and trails of scales,
will you translate for me blunt blink glint.

the way I talk in my many-headed turbulence
among these modulations, this nimbus of words kept in
motion
sing-calling something definitely human,

will somebody sing this riffle perfectly as the invisible
river
sings it

can you hear them at all,
muted and plucked,
muttering something that can only be expressed as
hitting a series of small bells just under the level of your
listening?

The bells!

High Above on the Ford Bridge Looking Down at the River

O, can you hear them
at all, these riffle-
perfect rhythmic cells
and trails of scales, plucked,
muted, muttering
below — a string of
small bells just under
the level of your
listening?

on moving — Alice Oswald and Cole Swensen

More words rediscovered while reading past entries in my “On This Day” practice:

I found this great quote from Oswald in her introduction to the poetry anthology, The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet:

Raking, like any outdoor work, is a more mobile, more many-sided way of knowing a place than looking. When you rake leaves for a couple of hours, you can hear right into the non-human world, it’s as if you and the trees had found a meeting point in the sound of the rake. (ix)

Mobile and many-sided, more than looking from a distance.

From Cole Swensen:

Then sitting still, we occupy a place; when moving through it, we displace place, putting it into motion and creating a symbiotic kinetic event in which place moves through us as well. 

Walk/ Cole Swensen

march 15/RUN

4.1 miles
river road north/south
38 degrees / humidity: 84%

Colder today. Back to winter layers: long-sleeved green shirt, orange sweatshirt, black vest, black tights, gray buff, black gloves, purple/pink baseball cap, bright pink headband

A gray sky and a slight drizzle. Bright headlights through the trees where the road curves. Grit. Wet leaves on the trail. Pairs of fast runners approaching.

Listened to other runners’ voices, the sandy grit under my feet, car wheels as I ran north, put in my “Doin’ Time” playlist heading south, including Good Times by Chic. My favorite lines:

I want to live the sporty life

and

Clams on the half shell, and roller skates, roller skates — here’s the full verse:

A rumor has it that it’s getting late
Time marches on, just can’t wait
The clock keeps turning, why hesitate?
You silly fool; you can’t change your fate
Let’s cut the rug, a little jive and jitterbug
We want the best, we won’t settle for less
Don’t be a drag; participate
Clams on the half shell, and roller skates, roller skates

Good Times was released in June of 1979. The clam shells and roller skates line seems ridiculous (and it is, in a delightful way), but it also captures the vibe of 1979.

After seeing several orange things, I decided that would be my 10 things list. I could only remember 8.

8 Orange Things

  1. a giant orange water jug set up on a table for runners
  2. orange lichen (or moss?) on the north side of the ancient boulder
  3. orange bubble letter graffiti on the underside of the bridge
  4. my orange sweatshirt
  5. the flesh of a tree where a branch used to be, newly trimmed and exposed to the elements (water, air): rusty orange
  6. leaves on the ground: burnt orange
  7. an orange effort: a higher heart rate (see 25 may 2023)
  8. hot pink spray paint on the iron fence that I initially saw as orange

ceremony/ritual/circumambulation

A few things related to my planning of a loop run as ceremony:

first, something to chant, from James Schuyler’s Hymn to Life:

Press your face into the
Wet April chill: a life mask. Attune yourself to what is happening
Now, the little wet things

The whole thing, or maybe just the last bit, starting with “Attune yourself”? See also: 14 march 2024, 15 march 2024

Second, the bells! The bells of St. Thomas signaling the start of the ceremony, or the start of some part of the ceremony? Accompanied by:

Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens are a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here –

or

I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

Pigrim at Tinker Creek/ Annie Dillard

converted into my 3/2 form:

My whole life
I’d been 
a bell but
never
knew until
I was
lifted and
struck. Now
I am still
ringing.

Third, form inspirations? A psalm, like Julia B. Levine’s Ordinary Psalms?

Megan Feifer: Both of your poems share the words “Ordinary Psalm.” Why did you choose to name these poems as such? Does a psalm lose its reverence when it becomes ordinary? Is that the point? 

Julia B. Levine: I am currently at work on a (hopefully) book-length collection of Ordinary Psalms. In these poems I am interested in the idea that the ordinary, if deeply lived and carefully attended to, are valid entryways into sacred or reverent experience. As a child I attended a Reform Jewish synagogue and always disliked the prayer books, though I loved the Torah. The difference, it seemed, had to do with the formal and vague language of prayer as contrasted with the heroic, vivid, and oftentimes earthy details of the weekly Torah readings. On reflection, this tonal difference in language may be the primary reason I don’t feel any sense of reverence toward an Old Testament God, but I do believe in the transcendent power of myth and stories. So, in contrast to psalms that rely on a formal address to an anthropomorphic God, I wanted to create a kind of personal prayer book that uses the living language of everyday details and experience to name and praise those aspects of this world that, for me, embody divinity.

Writer’s Insight: Julia B. Levine

JJJJJerome Ellis’ litany of names? Mary Oliver’s prayer as the attention before the words? lucille clifton’s praise of impossible things:

All Praises/ lucille clifton

Praise impossible things
Praise to hot ice
Praise flying fish
Whole numbers
Praise impossible things. 
Praise all creation
Praise the presence among us
of the unfenced is.

Oh, that unfenced is! That line gets me every time.

march 14/RUN

4.2 miles
minnehaha falls and back
63! degrees

Last night, I read this on Instagram from a local weather blog: Thursday feels like spring, Friday like summer, and snow on Saturday. What? Reading more, the snow should be north of us. Instead, we’ll get thunderstorms. That’s March (and April, and sometimes May) in Minnesota. This morning does feel like summer: warm. I wore shorts and a short-sleeved shirt and a light-weight sweatshirt. Halfway, the sweatshirt came off. The falls were gushing. I think I overheard some woman exclaim, How can there still be ice?! I didn’t look closely, but I imagine the one ice column beside the falling water is lingering.

Mostly I felt fine while I ran. My back didn’t hurt. Both of my hips are a little sore, but not like they’re injured sore. Almost like I’ve been doing too many core/hip exercises sore.

Listened to the birds and bikers and kids on the playground as I ran south. Put in my “Doin’ Time” playlist at the falls and as I ran north.

Playing for Time/ Peter Gabriel
What Time is It?/ Spin Doctors
Time of the Season/ Zombies

10 Things

  1. shadow 1: mine, beside me
  2. shadow 2: fence slats on the trail
  3. shadow 3: a flying bird
  4. a kid at the falls wearing a bright blue jacket with a logo on it that reminded me of a jacket I got from a race a few years ago. Did he run the race too?
  5. my favorite bench above the edge of the world was occupied by a person and a bike
  6. matching bright yellow shirts on 2 bikers biking up the hill between the double bridge and locks and dam no. 1
  7. running under the ford bridge, appreciating the cool, shaded air
  8. the river sparkling silver through the trees as I ran south, below the road
  9. the dirt trail on the boulevard, mostly mud
  10. stopped at the folwell bench to admire the river — all I remember is that it was open and blue

After I finished, I recited the Emily Dickinson poem I memorized yesterday: Crumbing is not an Instant’s Act. I remembered almost all of it, only struggling with this verse:

Ruin if formal — Devil’s work
????? and slow —
Failing in an instant, no man did
Falling Slipping — is Crashe’s law —

I couldn’t think if the right word for the second line. Sequenced? Ordered? Organized? No. It’s “Consecutive.” Of course!

I’ve liked this poem for a few years now, especially the second verse and “An Elemental Rust.” I decided to memorize it as I study time and think about its relationship to erosion (and to my vision).

lunar eclipse

Woke up around 1:30 and realized that there was a lunar eclipse. Got RJP (who was still up, natch) and we sat outside and watched it slowly happen. Well. at least 15 minutes of it. We didn’t have the patience to wait until it was completely covered. RJP and I always check out sunsets and the moon together. It’s one of our things. I am reminds me of a story I read years ago. Can I find it? Yes, but it took a long time. I had a title — October — but not the author or the journal. Lots of searching online and in my files and through my books. Nothing. More than an hour later sitting on the deck, the name Jill popped into my head. How? Why? I searched for “Jill essay October” and found it, except that wasn’t the right essay. This one was about her ex-husband and Texas and leaves; the one I remember was about her daughter and Texas and rain — but it had leaves (or leavings) in the title! Searched, “Jill essay daughter” and bingo! It’s funny how memory works.

Late last night, a surprise rain. My seventeen-year-old daughter and I rushed out to the deluge in bare feet, our T-shirts darkening with each drop. We raised our arms, spinning on the walkway and laughing until lightning seared the sky. I pointed to the tree’s thick arms, thinking about the way they stretch as if waving. We huddled under the light on the porch while rivers swelled against the curbs of the parking lot. When I told her we’ve been running into the rain since she was little, she grinned and nodded, her long blonde hair matted on her shoulders and against her neck.

*

It was there in Utah, when Indie was two and three and four, that I started the tradition: as soon as we hear rain, we throw open the door. During those first rains, I carried her. She was too young to know my sorrow, the way I waited for word from her father, the way I worried about my bank account every month. But when the rain came, all want and worry washed away. And then in the later rains, she beat me to the middle of the yard or the sidewalk or the walkway.

All Our Leavings/ Jill Talbot

march 13/WALK

35 minutes
neighborhood
55 degrees

Another spring-like day! Sun and so many birds. Cardinals and black capped chickadees and an irritating sparrow sounding almost like a squirrel just above us on a branch. Only the smallest lumps of snow from last week’s storm remain. Will I get more this month? Most likely. For now: bare grass and clear sidewalks!

Scott pointed out an orange cat across the street, strutting on the sidewalk, which led to a discussion of a difference between cats and dogs in terms of how they interact with you — dogs need you, cats don’t (or pretend they don’t). I’m a dog person, but I understand the appeal of the cat, especially when they strut down the sidewalk like they own it. I like that cats are fine leaving you alone and being left alone. Here was Scott’s summary of the difference: a dog is like your kid, a cat is like your roommate.

10 Non-Cat Things

  1. bright, blue sky
  2. a breeze only felt when walking in one direction — which? I think east
  3. the trash can at Minnehaha Academy which had been almost covered in snow was clear today
  4. nearing edmund and the river, I admired the soft golden tree line of the east bank
  5. that irritating squirrel-like sparrow: a light — white? or light gray — body with a dark head. Scott said he could see its throat swelling as it sang (I couldn’t)
  6. the saddest bark from a dog: a whine into a holler
  7. accidentally snapping a twig with my foot and having a sharp part of it scratch my ankle — ouch!
  8. a garland with lights wrapped around steps leading up to a fancy house on edmund
  9. other christmas decorations — 2 fake fir trees with lights — on another house — this is the house that also has a round head stuck on a lamp post. During Halloween it’s a pumpkin, then at Christmas a snowman, after that Mickey Mouse
  10. a colorful door — seeing it on other walks, I’m pretty sure it’s bright YELLOW!, but in the light and with my cone cells, it only looked, yellow?

notes from my Plague Notebook, Vol. 24

a blind spot = a gap/gash/silence in my vision = the Nothingness of the gorge

Crumbling is not an Instant’s Act/ ED

slow steady abrupt sudden
the strangeness of deterioration

shifting slipping spreading closing in narrowing

(thinking about Ellis and the Stutter as vessel) what does this openness/gorge hold?

a gap, gash, crack, weathering

rod cells on either side (rock) holding in the nothingness

void absent center

generous/big enough to hold all

unseen unstable shifting

circle cycle loop orbit around circumference (ED)
repeats, soft edges, curves, round

A song on my “Doin’ Time” playlist: Circle Game/ Joni Mitchell:

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

orbiting

Right now, I thinking/writing about a lot of different reoccurring themes: color, time, vision, erosion, the gorge, rituals and ceremonies. It can be overwhelming and feel like I’m doing nothing even as I do too much. Instead of worrying about this, I’ve decided to understand it as orbiting around something that I can’t quite reach. Somewhere in all of my wandering and reflecting and writing is the way into a poem-as-ceremony-as-poem that celebrates (or praises or embraces) my vision. Can I find it? I’ll try!

march 10/WALKRUN

walk: 60 minutes
winchell trail
57 degrees

A slow walk with Delia the dog. Stopping and sniffing and pooping and peeing and listening nervously to rumbling trucks and roofers. On the Winchell Trail, a black capped chickadee just overhead feebeed and chickadeedeedeed at us. Only a few remnants of the snow remain. A mix of dry path with puddles and mud.

Near the end of the walk I decided that what I really needed to do with my back was loosen it up by walking faster. Maybe I’m tensing up too much? Also decided that I’d try a short run.

run: 2 miles
just north of lake street
59 degrees

Ran past the ancient boulder and down through the tunnel of trees. The floodplain forest looks barren — no snow or leaves on the trees, only brittle and brown on the ground. Felt pretty relaxed and a little awkward — not quite a hitch in my step, but not smooth either. That got better as I warmed up. Listened to the breeze passing through the trees, and voices running north. I put in my “Doin’ Time” playlist for my run south. Heard: Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is; A Summer Wasting; Suspended in Time. All three offering visions of life outside the clock/capitalist time.

I almost forgot: I wore shorts today!

10 Things from my Walk and Run

  1. park workers in orange vests getting ready to do some work — trim trees? clear out brush? (walk)
  2. after weeks, they’re finally doing something about the gushing water on the corner of 46th! the barricades were gone, and so was the sound of water gone wild (run)
  3. chick a dee dee dee — a black capped chickadee in a tree just above my head — what I saw: a small dark flurry of movement on a branch (walk)
  4. the soft, energetic din of kids on the playground at Dowling Elementary (walk)
  5. a line of snow — a lump, not big enough to be a wall — stretched across the walking path (run)
  6. the river: open, shimmering, blue (walk)
  7. the tree line on the other side, a golden glow (run)
  8. a slight slip in mud on the boulevard between edmund and the river road (walk)
  9. the soft shadows of gnarled oak tree branches on the grass (run)
  10. 4 stones stacked on the ancient boulder (run)

circumambulation

Returning to circumambulation and the ceremony/ritual of looping around the gorge. A thought: when I swim at the lake I do multiple loops, but beside the gorge, I only do one loop. What’s the difference (mentally, spiritually, physically) between a loop vs. multiple loops. Also, where do my there and back runs — trestle turn around or the franklin hill and back or the falls and back — fit in? What sort of ritual are they?

Loosely, the structure of Gary Snyder’s “The Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais” is:

  • a brief description of place
  • a sacred chant/mantra
  • a further description — more details, directions, feelings/reflections/encounters

I’ll try this structure. I think I want to do the 8 loop that combines the ford and franklin loops. But, I’m taking it easy with the running right now, so maybe I should wait to do this until next month?

but now we really hear chanting
we can’t decode–Don’t
be so rational–a congregate speech
from the redtrembling sprigs, a
vascular language prior to our

breathed language, corporeal, chemical,
drawing our sound into its harmonic, tuning
us to what we’ve yet seen, the surround
calling us, theory-less, toward an inference
of horizontal connections there at

ground level
(Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais/Forrest Gander)

Some chants I might include:

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

All trees are just trees

In every part of every living thing/is stuff that once was rock

Listen, I don’t think we’re going to rise/in gauze and halos./Maybe as grass, and slowly. Maybe as the long-leaved, beautiful grass (added the next day: these lines don’t fit with the others, not enough rhythm?)

Life is but Life, and Death is but Death. Joy is but Joy, and Breath is but Breath.

In the name of the Bee-–
And of the Butterfly-–
And of the Breeze–Amen!


march 3/RUN

3.3 miles
2 trails+
51 degrees

51 degrees! Sun! Less layers — instead of 2 pairs of tights only 1 with shorts, no jacket or gloves or hat covering my ears. Before I started, as I walked towards the river, the birds were noisy. I imagined them calling out, spring spring spring. Since it was so nice, I decided to run on the winchell trail on the way back. The first part of the trail was all mud. Remembering how I fell last week, I carefully walked today. The rest of the path was dry.

I chanted in triple berries — strawberry/blueberry/raspberry

10 Things

  1. the soft knocking of at least 1 woodpecker
  2. 2 people on the edge of the trail, looking out at the river
  3. 2 big black forms coming out of the Winchell Trail — turkeys? No, 2 humans
  4. a brief glimpse of my shadow off to the side, looking strong, straight
  5. a view of the river — pale blue with silver, snowy edges
  6. thick, wet mud — brown, uneven
  7. a small black something on the side of the path — a hat? a bag? a bag.
  8. voices above me — one high, one low
  9. 2 people standing by the fence near the 38th street steps looking out at the river
  10. 2 walkers bundled up — winter coats zipped, stocking caps, gloves

This morning, I made an appointment to be evaluated for a vision study at the U of M. They’re developing virtual reading glasses that can move words out of a person’s blind spot. Will I qualify? Is my central vision too bad, my blind spot too big? Or, is it not big enough? Whatever happens, part of the evaluation is a vision assessment, which I’m hoping will give me more information about the status of my central vision. Talking with the scheduler, I recall her saying, there are no cures for many of the central vision diseases so we’re focusing on developing helpful tools instead. I like that approach.

My motivations for signing up for this study are (in order of importance):

free eye exam — free, as opposed to $500-$`1000 exam
connecting with people working on vision loss
curiosity about new technologies

It’s great that these selfish motivations could also lead to the development of a tool for enabling people to read with their eyes (as opposed to with their ears).

I’d like for reading to be easier, but I’m adjusting to and enjoying audio books, so I’m not devastated by this aspect of my vision loss.

I just came across this old Twilight Zone episode — I had saved it in my reading list. It seems fitting to add it to this conversation about reading and vision, as an example of how fully sighted people imagine vision loss as a nightmare.

march 2/RUN

5 miles
bottom of franklin hill
26 degrees

Hooray for being outside and on the walking trail! Hooray for not much wind! Hooray for running up the Franklin hill! My back was a little tight, but not too bad. My legs felt fine.

The river was open; the only ice was on the edges. The sky was a mix of clouds and bright sun. Before the run I heard some geese — did I hear any during? I don’t think so. Also heard before the run: some kids having fun inside a house — laughing and yelling through the closed windows.

At some point, I had an idea for my monthly challenge: the run as ceremony. Inspired by Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies, I want to return to Gary Snyder, Mount Tamalpais, and circumambulation. What sort of ceremonies can I make out of my run that brings together my blind spot and the gorge?

10 Things

  1. bright pink graffiti on a foot of the 1-94 bridge
  2. the top of one section of the wooden fence on the edge above Longfellow Flats is missing
  3. the chain across the old stone steps has been removed
  4. the path was almost completely clear — the only bit of snow I recall seeing was under the lake street bridge: a low and narrow ridge — just remembered one other bit of snow: just past the franklin bridge
  5. a full-length mirror left by the trashcan
  6. disembodied voices — coming from inside houses, below in the gorge, far behind me on the trail
  7. sh sh sh — my feet striking the grit on the asphalt
  8. my shadow briefly appeared – not sharp but soft, faint
  9. at least 2 trios of runners, some pairs, several runners on their own
  10. my friend, the limestone slabs propped up and looking like a person sitting against the underside of Franklin, is still there. I’d like to name them and add them to my list of regulars: Lenny the limestone?

lower back pain

My lower back has been sore lately. Sore enough that I took 5 days off of running. Not sure why I’ve waiting this long, but i decided today to look up lower back stretches for runners. I found this video and its 4 helpful stretches — the video claims to have 5 stretches, but they are only 4. I wonder what the missing one was?

correction, 2026: All five stretches are there, there just isn’t a marker for the third one, a 90-90 stretch. That one starts at about 4 minutes in.

The stretches: pretzel, thread the needle, plank to lunge, hip sweep

I’ll see how it feels in a few hours, but right now, having just stretched, it feels good!

a purple spill from march 1

I wrote this yesterday, but didn’t have a chance to post it.

It’s March and the purple hour is over, but in true purple fashion, the color can’t be contained to one month. Always it oversteps its boundaries. Reading the poem of the day, “Fog” by Emma Lazarus, purple appeared:

Swift, snowy-breasted sandbirds twittering glance 
Through crystal air. On the horizon’s marge, 
                Like a huge purple wraith, 
                The dusky fog retreats.

wraith

1
a: the exact likeness of a living person seen usually just before death as an apparition

b: GHOST, SPECTER

2

: an insubstantial form or semblance : SHADOW

3

: a barely visible gaseous or vaporous column

f you see your own double, you’re in trouble, at least if you believe old superstitions. The belief that a ghostly twin’s appearance portends death is one common to many cultures. In German folklore, such an apparition is called a Doppelgänger (literally, “double goer”); in Scottish lore, they are wraiths. The exact origin of the word wraith is misty, however, and etymologists can only trace it back to the early 16th century—in particular to a 1513 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid by Gavin Douglas (the Scotsman used wraith to name apparitions of both the dead and the living). In current English, wraith has taken on additional, less spooky, meanings; it now often suggests a shadowy—but not necessarily scary—lack of substance.

Merriam-Webster entry

marge = margin = edge

Wraith — I like that word and what it conjures. And to make it purple? Good job, Emma! I’m not sure about the middle section where she imagines the “orient town,” but I like “Fog,” especially this:

for on the rim of the globed world 
I seem to stand and stare at nothingness. 
                But songs of unseen birds 
                And tranquil roll of waves

Bring sweet assurance of continuous life 
Beyond this silvery cloud. Fantastic dreams, 
                Of tissue subtler still 
                Than the wreathed fog, arise,

And cheat my brain with airy vanishings 
And mystic glories of the world beyond. 

Returning to the purple — I like how she imagines the lifting fog as purple. Back in November of 2022 (how has it been that long?!) when I studied gray, I devoted a day to fog and mist: 23 nov 2022. Last month, purple — especially lavender and lilac or eggplant and dark purple — replaced gray. Where I used to see gray everywhere, now I see purple, or imagine purple.

feb 25/WALK (x2)

25 minutes
neighborhood
37 degrees
morning

Sun and no wind and barely any snow + chirping birds + barely iced puddles + mud and grit = the feeling of spring. I’m excited for warmer weather, although I’m also disappointed we didn’t get more snow. I suppose we still have March and April for that.

Walked with Scott and Delia. Scott and I talked a little about the U.S. and politics and how getting outside makes it a little (just enough) easier to endure all of this terribleness.

10 Things

  1. a black standard poodle stopped in the road, its human patiently waiting for it to move
  2. boulevards that are more mud than grass
  3. a thin, almost invisible sheen of ice on the shaded side of the sidewalk
  4. noticed for the first time, even though we’ve walked past them dozens of times: a kid’s footprints embedded in a stretch of old sidewalk
  5. chirp chirp
  6. the warm sun on my face
  7. near the end of the block: someone repairing or adding to a front porch
  8. heading south: a cool breeze
  9. blue sky
  10. the alley: mud, grit, puddles, ice

70 minutes
to the library and back
45 degrees
afternoon

Another chance to be outside! A wonderful afternoon for a walk. Sun, no wind, clear paths. Books to pick up at the library: Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color and Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. Noticed a dark bluish purple fence that clashed with a dark blue house and a house painted plum.

the purple hour

I did wake up a few times last night, but I didn’t take any notes about it. This morning, I’m finishing the violet chapter in On Color.

What color are the haystacks really? What color is the cathedral at Rouen? Monet’s answer is that the haystacks and cathedral are the color (or colors) they seem to be at the moment of looking (147).

“ocular realism” = a commitment to the illusionistic rendering, not of the world, but of visual experience (147).

1:30 pm / neighborhood walk

As I walked to the library and then back from it, I tried to think about violet and purple and images the evoke my feelings of restlessness and uncertainty and not-quite-formed. A hummingbird, mid-air — moving too fast to see the motion, or a spinning top, constantly whirring but looking solid and still. Carbonated water, something fizzy and bubbling — small little bouncing balls or shimmering bubbles. An insistent, soft whisper. Soft, unstable.

feb 22/RUN

3.1 miles
ford bridge and back
23 degrees

Feels like spring today! Birds! Warm sun! Melting and dripping snow! It is supposed to warm up all next week. The path wasn’t that crowded, which is surprising because it’s so nice and it’s Saturday. I don’t remember much from my run, other than wondering if my back was hurting (occasionally, a little) or if I should stop to tie my shoelace (I did). Can I remember 10 things?

10 Things

  1. 3 or 4 fat bikes on the dirt trail that is on the other side of the river road and runs alongside Minnehaha Academy, lower campus and Becketwood
  2. a biker and a bike stopped at the bench across from Folwell
  3. the rounded shadow of the light part of a lamp post
  4. a thick layer of snow on the walking path between folwell and 42nd
  5. three runners ahead of me evenly spaced across the whole path
  6. my dark shadow ahead of me as I ran north
  7. the clanging of an unseen dog collar
  8. a walker talking loudly on her phone as she walked, her voice echoing through the neighborhood and then above the oak savanna
  9. a runner in a bright blue jacket turning onto the trail from 42nd
  10. the river, all white, all covered in snow

I listened to voices as I ran south, the mood: energy playlist on the way back north.

the purple hour

1:35 am / dining room

Listened to Monica Ong’s “Lavender Insomnia.“

7:55 am / dining room

The poem of the day on Poetry Foundation is First Fig. Figs can be many different colors but are often associated with purple. Since I’ve posted this well-known poem about a candle burning at both ends before, I decided to find out if Millay had written any other fig poems.

Second Fig/ Edna St. Vincent Millay

SAFE upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
  Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

First Fig and Second Fig are from Millay’s 1922 collection, A Few Figs from Thistles. Is her use of figs and thistles a reference to Matthew in the Bible?

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

Matthew 7:16-20 King James Version (KJV)

Speaking of thistles, my mom often had globe thistles in her garden. After she died, I recall wanting to grow them in her memory, but I can’t remember why. Is it because butterflies like their round purple flowers, or because I do?

feb 14/RUN

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

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

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

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

10 Things

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

the purple hour — 2 days

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

Still life painting
Heavy shadows and light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

source

2:06 am / dining room / 14 feb

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

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

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

QA with Lucie Brock-Broido

7:53 am / dining room / 14 feb

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

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

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

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

source

Which led me back to the Q&A:

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

*

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

feb 12/RUN

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

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

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

10 Wintery Things

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

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

from #meteorology/ Lee Ann Roripaugh

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

*

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

~

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

*

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

icicle /

the purple hour

2:40 am — dining room

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

3:15 am — bedroom floor

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

*

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

feb 10/RUN

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

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

10 Things

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

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

the purple hour

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

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

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

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

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

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

a thin line of light near the closet door

*

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

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

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

1

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

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

2

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

Kafka on Prometheus

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

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

a screenshot from local weather forecast for this week

feb 9/RUN

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

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

10 Things

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

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

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

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

the purple hour

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

12:04 am dining room

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

2:01 bedroom

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

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

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

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

feb 7/RUN

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

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

10 Things

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

purple hour

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

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

Running / George Sheehan, 1978

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

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

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

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

1:49 am

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

3:08 am

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

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

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

unhitching

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

Lévi-Strauss quoted MRH page 52

Purple/ Margaret Steele Anderson

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

purple prose

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

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

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

feb 4/RUN

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

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

10 Things

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

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

cardinal
chickadee
woodpecker
woodpecker
cardinal
attention
ATTENtion
aTTENtion
attenTION

the purple hour

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

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

Interview with Water

from Paean to Place/Lorine Niedecker

How much less am I
in the dark than they?

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

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

from Nobody/ Alice Oswald

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

dark

purple

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

Mary Ruefle’s Purple Sadness

some guidelines on the experiment

[from Wagner, things to observe]

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

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

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

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

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

Sara, 8 jan 2026: Thank you! I really needed this today — a quick escape from the terrifying awfulness of ICE and their efforts to escalate (instead of de-escalate) one day after murdering a woman in South Minneapolis.

It’s the great space coaster, get on board

feb 1/RUN

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

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

10 Things

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

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

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

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

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

jan 31/RUN

3.2 miles
locks and dam no. 1 loop
34 degrees

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

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

10 Things

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

before the run

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Braille Encyclopedia/ Naomi Cohn

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

Then she mentions feeling very tired —

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

The Braille Encyclopedia/ Naomi Cohn

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

after the run

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

from In the Village/ James Longenbach

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

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

One hand having pulled

The doorknob
Toward him, the other

Held out, open,
Beckoning
You forward

jan 30/RUN

5.25 miles
ford loop
38 degrees

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

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

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

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

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

10 Things

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

memory

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

A Lecture on Corners/ Anne Carson

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

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

The Braille Encyclopedia/ Naomi Cohn

So many different types of memory to think about!

An alternative to vision.

The Braille Encyclopedia/ Naomi Cohn

I rely on memory a lot to help me see.

jan 29/RUN

5.3 miles
bottom franklin hill and back
33 degrees

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

a new experiment

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

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

10 Things

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

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

jan 26/RUN

5.25 miles
bottom of franklin hill
22 degrees / feels like 12
wind gusts: 29 mph

Sunny but windy. Shadows and shaking leaves. Like most of my runs lately, it felt hard. I briefly thought about stopping at the trestle, but then I kept going instead. As I ran down the franklin hill I remembered that I’d get to check out the frozen river. It did not disappoint! The coolest thing about the surface ice was the noises it made as cars drove by on the river road — that strange, echoey boom, almost like whales communicating, that happens when ice is disturbed — I have a link to this sound somewhere on the blog, but I couldn’t find it quickly. I’ll keep searching for it.

Listened to the wind, voices, and geese as I ran north. Put in mood: energy on the way back — “Baba O’Reily”; “My Sharona”; “Renegade”; “It’s Tricky”; “Cult of Personality”; “New Attitude”. Favorite line was from “Cult of Personality” — When a mirror speaks/the reflection lies. Also thought about “New Attitude” and the line, I’m feeling good from my head to my shoes — why not, good from my hat to my shoes?

10 Things

  1. bright blue, cloudless sky
  2. my shadow, sharp, running in front of me
  3. 2 geese honking high in the sky — I stopped running and craned my neck to watch them fly by
  4. empty benches
  5. ice on the path — a dirty brown, then almost amber when the light hit it just right
  6. voices from somewhere below, cheering somebody
  7. the river, covered in thick ice
  8. a person with a fancy camera stopped by the railing, taking pictures
  9. someone walking by in the flats, having an animated conversation with someone else over the phone
  10. a strong smell of weed — did it come from the car that just drove by or the walker with 2 dogs?

G.C. Waldrep

During my “on this day” practice, I came across a line from the poet G.C. Waldrep:

I write about “the eye” because you will not accept “faith” or “the soul.” 

The Earliest Witnesses

I had posted it on 26 jan 2021 because I had just encountered it on twitter and in the context of a discussion of the soul. Today I read it and wanted to know more about what Waldrep meant. I searched “G.C. Waldrep, The Earliest Witnesses” and found a post on the poet (and father of Jenny Slate) Ron Slate’s site, On the Seawall: On The Earliest Witnesses.

In the eighth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus performs one of his most perplexing miracles. The narrator tells us that, after a blind man is “brought” to him, Jesus “put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him.” But the miracle doesn’t seem to take. For after Jesus asks the man whether he can see, the man replies, “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.” In response, Jesus lays his hands on the blind man’s eyes once more—a kind of second go at it—after which, we are told, “his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.”

This story comes to mind, unbidden, in the reading of G.C. Waldrep’s The Earliest Witnesses — the poet’s seventh collection — not only because the book speaks candidly about the deterioration of sight (among other bodily maladies) but also because Waldrep’s poetry mirrors the slow and partial revelation of sight that we find in this miracle. These poems both obscure and disclose: in some lines they show us “everything clearly” — in others, “trees, walking.”

“I strode into the woods in a brute faith,” reads the first line of the first poem, “certain the forest / would give me what I needed.” Then, in a characteristic move of obfuscation, the speaker withdraws into occluded seclusion, as if from fear of speaking too plainly. “If there was a mathematics / I was all for it, math being hunger’s distaff cousin.” Here we find that tension between clear vision and partial sight that marks both our opening miracle story and so much of The Earliest Witnesses; however, in this instance, we begin with sight, only to have it dimmed immediately.

On The Earliest Witnesses

I want to read this collection!

I was immediately struck by the line in the post, I see people but they look like trees walking. That’s not quite how it works for me, but, with my vision, I can imagine seeing people that way, like trees walking. I want to read the bible verse the author is referencing and think about that some more.

Searching some more for Waldrep, I found an interview with him and this great discussion:

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.

An Inheritance Reassembled

Squinting! Mishearing or misreading or mis-seeing! The squinting makes me think of a poem by Linda Pastan or a line (I think, I’ll have to check later) from Arthur Sze. The mishearing reminds me of something I encountered during my annual review (22 july 2024) a few days ago:

the Ten Muses of Poetry — from the writer, Andrei Codescru, in his book, The Poetry Lesson. I’ve never heard of Codescru — he’s great. I found the chapter his Ten Muses are inand read it. Funny and strange and great. I wonder, would I enjoy taking a class from him? Probably.

The Ten Muses of Poetry

  1. Mishearing
  2. Misunderstanding
  3. Mistranslating
  4. Mismanaging
  5. Mislaying
  6. Misreading
  7. Misappropriating cliches
  8. Misplacing objects belonging to roommates or lovers
  9. Misguided thoughts at inappropriate times, funerals, etc.
  10. Mississippi (the river) 

jan 25/RUN

4.4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
26 degrees / feels like 6
wind: 32 mph gusts

Windy today. As I sit at my desk writing this, I can hear the wind howling through the gaps in our screen/glass door. Ran south again to the falls. Felt tired and sluggish. Stopped a few times to walk. Listened to the wind, rustling leaves, scattered voices, cars as I headed south, my “It’s Windy” playlist on the way back north.

10 Things

  1. a brittle brown leaf swirling and rushing ahead of me on the sidewalk
  2. the trail was stained a grayish white with salt
  3. a fat bike, its rider wearing a BRIGHT yellow jacket
  4. a non-fat bike, its rider bent low against the wind
  5. a section of the wooden fence is missing a slat and is leaning back toward the oak savanna
  6. the lone black glove that was on the path yesterday has been moved off to the side, on top of the piled snow
  7. 3 or 4 people by the green gate blocking the steps down to the falls, one of them already on the other side (the inside) of it, the others poised to do the same
  8. the sharp bark of a dog down near the falls
  9. a person standing in front of the railing by the creek, posing, another person behind a camera on a tripod
  10. a few thin splotches of ice on the concrete railing above the creek, mostly looking dull until the sun hit it, then shiny

I don’t remember thinking about much as I ran or noticing the river or hearing any birds. Not the easiest run, but I’m glad I got out there.

Yesterday afternoon, I discovered that Anne Carson gave a lecture titled, “On Hesitation.”

jan 24/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls
20 degrees / feels like 8

Above 0, but still felt cold. It was the wind, swirling softly in all directions, that did it. Ran south to the falls. Wasn’t sure if I’d make it all the way there — it felt difficult — but I did! The creek and the falls were almost all frozen, only a small stream buried under the ice. Looking at the falls from my favorite spot, across the way, it looked like a giant column of ice, which it was.

10 Things

  1. a strong smell of cigarette smoke near the parking lot
  2. thin patches of ice on the cobblestone at the park
  3. kids’ laughter coming from across the road, at the school playground
  4. my favorite bench, above the edge of the world, was not empty today
  5. near the bench, the snow where someone had written “DAVIDSON” had melted
  6. the mottled walking trail at the park — mostly white snow, with grayish asphalt splotching through
  7. a lone black glove, dropped on the trail
  8. a dark gray chunk of snow, upright, looking like a squirrel waiting to cross the road
  9. a few runners, a few walkers, no bikers
  10. glanced down at the big sledding hill at the park — not much snow and no one sledding down it

I had wanted to thinking about stillness (inspired by an entry from 21 aug 2024) or to chant triple berries but mostly I forgot. I put in a mood playlist: energy at the halfway point and focused on the music, including Britney Spears’ “Work Bitch.” Wow.

before the run

This month, I’ve been reviewing all my entries from 2024 and giving attention to remembering and forgetting and then getting in too deep with thinking and theorizing and organizing ideas around themes. Past Sara — Dr. Sara who is too enamored with theories and ideas and being clever — wants to return. Present Sara needs to figure out some ways to prevent that from happening! Yesterday I decided to take out my scrabble tiles and make anagrams out “remember forget” and “I remember to forget.”

remember forget
bee or germ fret [m]
more bereft germ
beet form merger
forge meter [brm]
frog meter berm
beef rot merger [m]

I Remember to Forget
Got more meter fiber
Orbit form tree gem
bee form griot meter

What anti-theorizing thing can I do today?

A line remembered during my “on this day” practice:

Tell me, how do I steady my gaze
when everything I want is motion?
(Saccadic Masking/ Paige Lewis)

Everything I see is motion or in motion or never not in motion.

Last night we watched a Voyager’s episode in which the crew was experiencing strange symptoms — Captain Janeway had terrible headaches and couldn’t sleep; Chakotay was aging way too fast; Nelix was transforming into another species; and another red shirt went into shock then died. After 7 of 9 shifts into a different phase, she is able to witness what is happening: there are tons of people (human looking) on the ship hovering around the crew members and injecting them with needles. They are experimenting on them in the name of “medical research.” Yikes. Janeway’s headaches are not due to working too hard and not getting enough sleep or exercise, but because they are injecting her with dopamine. They keep increasing the dose to see how much she can take. I said to Scott, can you imagine if our headaches were caused by imaginary creatures messing with us? Then I started to imagine that this was the case. I also started to think about all the things we can’t see that live with us, like mites and bacteria and more. Surprisingly this didn’t freak me out.

Here is a poem I discovered yesterday. I love that first line and what it does as it follows from the title! I found it before I watched the Star Trek Voyager episode, but it is interesting to put them together to think about who/what we live with that we don’t see, or refuse to see:

The Houseguest / Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

Forgiveness was sitting in your kitchen when you got home, and now rests elbows on the table to watch you reach for a knife. You scrape the papery skin from a ginger root and slice it into thin coins. You think too hard about which mugs to pull from your cupboard: you might reveal too much; should you offer the one with the uncomfortable handle? Water boils. You divide the ginger evenly into both cups and pour. Spoonful of honey. You stir slowly, eyes down as though you might be able to forget. You stir too long. Forgiveness coughs politely, so you turn, place both mugs on the table, sit. Forgiveness leans forward. You lean back. You have forgotten what it is like to live with someone who eats all your cut watermelon, picks clean the skeletal vine of red grapes, shakes water spots onto your bathroom mirror without wiping them away. What thresholds of welcome have you crossed and recrossed? Most mornings, you listen for the body to move through your house and out the door before leaving your bedroom. Most nights, you ghost around each other without speaking. But now, as the rain drizzles into gloaming, you settle into your chairs, inevitable, a cupful of hesitation finally beginning to loosen your tongues.

And here’s part of a poem I encountered this morning that seems to fit or could be interesting to put beside “The Houseguest” and the Voyager episode:

If/ Imtiaz Dharker

If we could pray. If
we could say we have come here
together, to grow into a tree,
if we could see our blue hands
holding up the moon, and hear
how small the sound is
when it slips through
our fingers into water,
when the meaning of words melts
away and sugarcane speaks
in fields more clearly
than our tongues

That small sound, those blue hands, when words melt away! To give attention, to pray!

Continuing to review past august entries, past Sara wrote this for me, January 2025 Sara:

In January and February, I’ll remember the first orange buoy looking like the moon in an afternoon sky or the glow of orange when the light hits the buoy just right or the gentle rocking of the waves or that satisfied feeling after 90 minutes in the water.

log entry 22 aug 2024

I remember the faintness of that buoy, like the moon in the afternoon visible mostly by my belief that it was there. I also remember swimming that stretch, trying to avoid other swimmers and the ghost vines growing up from the bottom of the lake, seeming extra tall this summer. I’ll remember finally reaching that buoy and rounding it for the start of another loop, unable to see the far shore of a lifeguard or the other 2 orange buoys.

I remember the way the water glowed orange from the reflection of the buoy, or the quick flash of the smallest whisper of an orange dot, or the orange appearing only as a feeling of some disruption in the shoreline scenery — not really seen with my eyes, but registered by my brain — the idea that something was looming ahead.

I don’t remember gentle rocking, but I remember the wild ride of rounding the far green buoy and being pushed around by the water, or how the water seemed so hard to stroke in sometimes.

jan 18/RUN

2.6 miles
river road, south/north
8 degrees / feels like -1
25% snow-covered

I didn’t feel exceptionally cold, but it felt hard, my legs thick. I stopped at the bench above the “edge of the world” and looked out at the covered river. Someone wrote the name “Davidson” in the snow earlier this week and it’s still there. As I ran, I started chanting in triples:

strawberry/raspberry/blueberry
winter cold/winter snow/winter ice
arctic air/sizzling leaves/crusty snow

10 Things

  1. BLUE! sky
  2. crunch crunch crunch
  3. the river was white and closed except for a few spots that were dark and open
  4. a (non-fat tire) bike
  5. a runner’s raspy, hello
  6. running into the wind, being exhausted by it, wondering how the runners at Boston 2017, when it was cold and windy and raining, managed to run the whole marathon
  7. bright, blinding sun heading south
  8. some of the ice on the path was smooth, more of it was jagged and rough
  9. empty benches
  10. a truck driving by, then the strong smell of weed

My Heart Has Known Its Winter/ Arna Bontemps

A little while spring will claim its own, 
In all the land around for mile on mile 
Tender grass will hide the rugged stone. 
My still heart will sing a little while. 

And men will never think this wilderness 
Was barren once when grass is over all, 
Hearing laughter they may never guess 
My heart has known its winter and carried gall.

gall? I looked this word up and dismissed the definition I knew — gall as bold, impudent, he had the gall (read: nerve) to — because it didn’t make sense to me. Instead, I decided the poet meant

abnormal growths that occur on leaves, twigs, roots, or flowers of many plants. Most galls are caused by irritation and/or stimulation of plant cells due to feeding or egg-laying by insects such as aphids, midges, wasps, or mites. Some galls are the result of infections by bacteria, fungi, or nematodes and are difficult to tell apart from insect-caused gall

Plant Galls

I wasn’t satisfied with Merriam-Webster’s online definitions, so I logged into my library and accessed the OED (very cool that I can do this!) for more definitions. This one sort of works:

Something galling or exasperating; a state of mental soreness or irritation.

this one, too:

A place rubbed bare; an unsound spot, fault or flaw; in early use also a breach. Now only technical.

and this:

A bare spot in a field or coppice (see gall v.1 3). In the southern U.S. a spot where the soil has been washed away or exhausted.

Erosion, exhaustion.

I love the way the word gall with its plant/ field meanings and its human meanings reinforces the association being made between human’s exposed than covered grief and the ground’s exposed winter stone covered in spring’s grass.

I wanted to remember this poem because of the grass and the stone and the forgetting of winter when spring arrives. I don’t totally agree with its use of winter as metaphor for misery.

I like winter. I like breathing in the cold, the sound of snow falling, smelling the air. The silence and the sharp sounds. The view of the river — vast and bare. The subdued colors — pale blues and grays and dark browns. The less crowded trails. The bare-branched silhouettes. Movement slowed, stilled, suspended. Layers. The bright, cold sun.

jan 17/RUN

5.4 miles
bottom franklin hill and back
37 degrees
20% snow-covered

37 degrees and a mostly clear path! A great run. I felt relaxed and strong and able to shift gears and keep going. I greeted almost every walker, runner, or biker I encountered by raising my right hand. At the bottom of the hill I stopped to check out the water — open, moving thickly, a few flat and wide sheets of ice floating by. Smelled weed. Heard birds — laughing and chirping. Slipped (only a little) on a few bits of ice. Stopped at the sliding bench to admire the view — so bare and quiet and alone. Put in my headphones at the top of the hill and listened to my “Remember to Forget” playlist. Some of today’s lyrics made me think about regret and longing for the past, some of them about the joy of forgetting, and some of them commanded, remember! or don’t you forget it!

added a few hours later: I almost forgot to post the picture I took. It’s of the pile of rocks under the franklin bridge that I keep thinking is a person sitting up against the wall. I know these are rocks, but I always first think: person

limestone mistaken for a man

Inspired by my triple berry chant exercise (see below), I chanted in triples. Can I remember 10 of them?

10 Triple Berry Chants

  1. empty bench
  2. grayish sky
  3. ritual
  4. down the hill
  5. ice and snow
  6. soaring bird
  7. sloppy trail
  8. lake street bridge
  9. noisy wheel
  10. 3 stacked stones

confession: I did chant a few of these, but the rest I created as I wrote this list. I just can’t remember what I chanted.

early morning coffee

1 — strange sleeping habits

A morning ritual: coffee, Facebook, poets.org, poetryfoundation.org, poems.com, “on this day.” While scrolling through Facebook I found an interesting article about sleep: The forgotten medieval habit of two sleeps. The concept isn’t new to me; I read the book that it’s based on, At Day’s Close, more than a decade ago. One new thing, or thing that I had read in the book but forgot, was about the author’s initial research and how he looked to court transcripts for information about daily life:

he had found court depositions particularly illuminating. “They’re a wonderful source for social historians,” says Ekirch, a professor at Virginia Tech, US. “They comment upon activity that’s oftentimes unrelated to the crime itself.”

I started thinking more about sleep. Last night was not very good: restless legs, sore hip, getting up 3 or 4 times, walking up earlier than I’d like because of my restlessness. At one point, the author, Roger Ekirch, mentioned how recognizing the long history of getting up in the middle of the night as normal and natural could relieve some anxiety for those of us who can’t sleep straight through the night. I suddenly thought, and not for the first time: I need to accept my crazy sleep instead of fighting or worrying about it, and I should turn it into something creative. Track it, or write into it, or . . . . I wonder if there are “insomnia writing experiments?

a list-writing experiment

The first thing that came up in my google search was a scientific study about writing and falling asleep faster. Perhaps if I had searched, “insomnia writing exercises” or “insomnia poetry prompts” I would have gotten different results.

Bedtime worry, including worrying about incomplete future tasks, is a significant contributor to difficulty falling asleep. Previous research showed that writing about one’s worries can help individuals fall asleep. We investigated whether the temporal focus of bedtime writing—writing a to-do list versus journaling about completed activities—affected sleep onset latency. Fifty-seven healthy young adults (18–30) completed a writing assignment for five minutes prior to overnight polysomnography recording in a controlled sleep laboratory. They were randomly assigned to write about tasks that they needed to remember to complete the next few days (to-do list) or about tasks they had completed the previous few days (completed list). Participants in the to-do list condition fell asleep significantly faster than those in the completed-list condition. The more specifically participants wrote their to-do list, the faster they subsequently fell asleep, whereas the opposite trend was observed when participants wrote about completed activities. Therefore, to facilitate falling asleep, individuals may derive benefit from writing a very specific to-do list for five minutes at bedtime rather than journaling about completed activities.

The Effects of Bedtime Writing on Difficulty Falling Asleep

Lists? I love lists! I think I’ll try this, or my own version of it. Maybe I’ll start with a to-do list, another night a completed list, then a things I love list, or a things that bother me list, my favorite poets list, things I notice in the dark, reasons I can’t sleep list, and on and on. Eventually, maybe I can turn this into a series of list poems?

2 — idea/poem starters, an inspiration

The visual poem on poems.com for today, Good Riddance, reminded me of something I started thinking about in march 2024. The poem is a grid with a fragment of thought in each box. There are arrows directing you across or down, or across then down then across again. However your eyes choose to read the boxes creates a slightly different poem. Anyway, I started thinking about the different boxes and mixing and matching the phrases and I remembered this idea from my “to do list for 2022, 23, and 24”:

a 3/2 idea: create fragments of 2-4 lines with a “complete” thought that can be the start of a new poem, or be put together in new ways to create new poems — almost like prompts:

a shadow

crosses

And now I’m remembering an even earlier experiment from 3 may 2019 with triple (3 beat) chants:

Speaking of chanting, I have a new exercise I want to try. First, I want to think up a bunch of 3 syllable phrases (down the hill, walk to work, eat down town, out the door, sunday best, monday worst, turnip greens, climate change, just say please, in and out…). Then I’ll write these on small slips of paper and put them in a hat or a bowl or a bag. I’ll randomly pick out 8-10 and turn them into a poem (either in the order I select them or in an order of my choosing). Maybe the phrases should be a mixture of things from the run and popular or whimsical expressions? So much fun!

added an hour later: While reviewing old entries from June of 2024, I came across a delightful typo. Instead of writing “the tunnel of trees” I wrote, “the tunnel of threes.” I love it! Maybe the title of a poem that uses triple berry chants?

jan 16/WALKRUN

walk: 30 minutes with Delia
neighborhood
35 degrees!
morning

Sun! Above freezing! Shadows!

10 Walking Things

  1. the sharp clang of something metal dropping on hard concrete
  2. low-note wind chimes, bing-bonging in the breeze
  3. standing tall, lifting out of my lower back and hips, feeling my legs ground themselves on the sidewalk
  4. soft snow
  5. the contrast between bare black pavement and white sidewalks
  6. drip drip drip
  7. bare branches 1: the welcoming oaks, the shape of their thick, sprawling branches making silhouettes
  8. bare branches 2: a maple’s small twigs at the bottom looking like hair
  9. a sizzling sound in the trees: wind on dead leaves
  10. a beautiful blue sky peeking through fluffy, fast moving clouds

run: 3.5 miles
godfrey and back
33 degrees
afternoon

Less layers this afternoon: running tights, shorts, tank top, long shirt, pull-over with hood, headband, gloves, sunglasses. My face was a little cool, especially the ears which weren’t quite covered by the headband. The sidewalks were sloppy and so was the trail. No ice, but some slushy snow. Encountered a few fat tires, walkers, at least one other runner. Stopped at the bench and remembered looking out at the river, but I can’t remember what I saw other than white. Oh — I saw a person climbing up and out of the winchell trail

Before the run I was listening to an interview with Jenny Odell that I first heard last May. I started thinking about different notions of time and then how memories rarely follow linear time. They don’t move forward in a row, confidently attached to years. They’re all over the place and in the wrong place and on top of each other. I tried to think about that as I was running. I imagined a mess of memories filling up the gorge, but not taking up any space. Then I imagined myself running through and beside them. These memories barely left a trace and I couldn’t feel them.

yesterday’s delights

Driving us on the river road, RJP pointed out two delightful things to me: one — a biker on a fat tire doing a wheelie for at least a minute and for dozens of feet. They were pedaling forward on one wheel, the other wheel was hanging in the air. That seems hard! added 17 jan: I looked it up and found this video. And two — turkeys! one flying!! and dozens more spread out all around turkey hollow.

jan 15/RUN

4.1 miles
trestle+ turn around
15 degrees / feels like 1
75% snow-covered

Hooray for getting back outside! I never felt cold. Hands and feet were fine, torso too. About halfway in, I overheated. Off with the mittens, down with the hood. The run didn’t feel easy; my legs were sore. But I bargained with myself — make it to the trestle, keep going until the sliding bench, don’t stop until after the hill! And I was able to shift gears, settling into something different with my legs (hard to explain). I lifted out of my hips, relaxed my shoulders and kept going for longer than I thought I would. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker. Stopped running to witness a wedge of geese flying overhead. Heard the rattling jawbone of some bird. Noticed that the river was open and dark under the trestle. Everywhere else it was white.

10 Things

  1. a honk cutting through the quiet then less than a dozen geese flying in a loose formation — I think I heard the swish of their wings as they passed directly above me
  2. the smell of tobacco beside me — did it come from the open window of a passing car?
  3. the smell of weed below me
  4. 3 stones stacked on the ancient boulder, half covered with snow
  5. a runner approaching from behind with a dog on a leash tethered to their waist, running faster than me through the snow
  6. the constant view beside me: slender bare brown slanted branches white river a white brown bluff on the other side of the river
  7. a flash of BRIGHT orange to my left — someone in an orange jacket walking below near the old stone steps
  8. a big dog — golden retriever? — squatting and pooping on the side of the path, their owner waiting with a bag
  9. a light brown cobblestone carriage walk in front of a fancy house on edmund
  10. the sharp crunch of one foot striking the crusty snow in my alley, the soft grind of the other foot leaving the snow

shades, shadows, memories

Before the run, I was reviewing May 2024 entries. This bit about the children’s book, The Shades, inspired some thoughts:

 . . .they live in the garden. All of their food comes from the shadow’s cast by real food, their house cast from the shadow of the old summer house that “broke Emily’s heart” when it was torn down. Most of the time they do what they want, but when a human enters the garden, whichever of them best fits that human’s form must shadow them around the garden. Sometimes this shadowing is fun, other times it’s tedious, and occasionally it’s dangerous: if a human climbs over the garden wall, the shadow must follow and be lost to the outside world forever.

log entry 20 may 2024

Thinking about the shadow’s independence from the object that cast them and their attaching forms that approximately fit, I started thinking about memories and the gorge. I imagined countless memories (as shadows?) living there, made and left behind by everyone that has spent time at the gorge. Then I imagined running through/with/beside them and some of them attaching to me (in some way). The memories weren’t mine exactly; they were independent of me with their own experiences and histories and feelings. But, beside the gorge, we become entangled. Maybe I can add this to the poem I started about shadows. I’d also like to add this idea: the silhouette as “a radical condensation of faith in shadows” from 17 may 2024.

jan 12/RUN

2.45 miles
2 trails
20 degrees
100% snow-covered

A short run because it snowed last night and they haven’t plowed the trail yet. I wore my yaktrax but the soft, uneven snow seemed too much for already sore muscles.

Interruption: as I sit at my desk writing this, after my run, a dog zipped by my window. Ace — the dog two doors down who likes to break out his backyard and roam the neighborhood. I used to worry about him, but I know he’ll return….just after finishing that last sentence, I saw a blur of movement — Ace again, across the street.)

It was a nice, relaxed run through a wonderfully wintery world! Snow covering everything — path, trees, river. Occasionally I heard a crunch when my foot hit some icy snow, but mostly the snow was soft and silent. I descended to the Winchell trail at 42nd and ran closer to the river. The path was a mix of snow and dead leaves. I continued past the 38th street steps and down into the oak savanna. Then beside the ravine and over the icy slats — that part was slippery! No running, barely even walking, at this part.

10 Things

  1. river hidden under snow
  2. a pack of runners approaching — the movement of their thin, muscular legs made them look like galloping horses
  3. a fat tire up ahead — at first, all I could see was a dark figure and I thought it might be a dog or a bear or the territorial turkey
  4. hi! — hello! greeting an approaching walker
  5. the heavy breathing of a fast runner passing by me
  6. a flash of orange — was it a snow fence?
  7. the wind heading north on the upper trail was cold and harsh
  8. the slow trickling of water below the ravine
  9. a tree bent over the trail so low I almost had to duck to get under it
  10. all the benches were empty

Happy 8th Anniversary to this log! On January 12th, 2017 I posted my first entry for this RUN! project. I had no idea where it would lead. What a life it has given me! It seems fitting for my love of the approximate that I started on the 12th instead of the 1st. It also seems fitting that the post began with no fanfare or introduction to some big project and that it was about restlessness. 9 years and 7660.2 miles of running (and around 500 miles of swimming) later, I’m just as or more restless. Wanting to move, to be outside, to connect with the world. To read, to write, to experiment with new ways to be. My restlessness drives my creativity and curiosity and also my unease and discomfort (and anxiety and suffering).

remember — inheritance

This Be the Verse/ Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

I first encountered this poem after . . .

Interruption. Sitting here at my desk in front of the window before my run, someone just walked by pushing a shovel. I think they decided to walk and shovel everyone’s sidewalk at the same time. That’s feeding two birds with one scone. Nice!)

. . . reading then memorizing Philip Larkin’s The Trees. I didn’t like it. That last verse — so harsh and unforgiving. But this morning my study of remembering and forgetting led me to the idea of passing down/inheriting trauma from past generations, and I came across this poem again. I continue to struggle with the conclusion, but I’m reading the rest of it differently — as a daughter who is beginning to understand the trauma she inherited from her mother and how she responded to abusive parents, and as a mother confronting the impact of her parenting choices on her kids. I had planned to write more about this now, but I don’t have time; FWA is returning to college today!

When I have time, I want to read/summarize this article: How Parents’ Trauma Leaves Biological Traces in Children. And I want to think about epigenetics and slavery and how inheritance works on a broader, more systemic level, within communities. Whew — that’s a lot!

jan 10/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
21 degrees
100% snow-covered

Today the winter I want: big flurries, everything covered in a thin layer of snow, not too much wind, warmer, not slick — especially with my with Yaktrax on. Nothing was quite easy, but everything wasn’t as hard as my last run on Wednesday.

10 Things

  1. a white sky
  2. the contrast between shoveled and un-shoveled sidewalks — both still white, but the shovelled ones had a tint of gray or brown peeking through
  3. the clacking jawbone of a bird’s beak — a blue jay?
  4. the river was all white — if you didn’t know better, you could believe it was a field or a meadow
  5. approaching from above, hearing the falls rushing over the limestone
  6. kids yelling and laughing at the playground, one loud, high-pitched sound — was it a kid screaming or a whistle?
  7. amongst the kid voices, a deeper, more knowing laugh — was that from a teacher?
  8. the contrast on the creek surface: white snow with blackish-gray water
  9. every so often, a flash of orange — not always sure what it was, just a voice whispering, orange — a snow fence? a construction cone? a sign?
  10. bright headlights cutting through the sky, which was both bright — everything white! — and heavy

Listened to my “Remember to Forget” playlist on the way back. The first song up, Do You Remember Walter? by The Kinks. Two different bits stuck with me:

one: Walter, you are just an echo of a world I knew so long ago.
two: Yes, people often change./ But memories of people can remain.

This second bit got me thinking about how I can’t always (can I ever?) see faces clearly. When the face is too dark and shadowed, I just ignore it altogether. But when there’s some light and I can sort of see them, I often re-construct the features I can’t see with memories of their face from before I lost most of my cone cells. I’m not remembering their face, but creating it. After thinking that the idea of remembering as re-memembering — putting a body back together — popped into my head. Yes! I take my image of face, only as fragments — the curve of a nose or a chin, a bit of eye — and turn it into something whole.

As I kept running, I thought more about remembering and memories and my vision and how I rely on past experience and habits to navigate. And now as I write this, I’m thinking about how everyone’s vision — not just mine — relies on a building up of past experiences (memories?) with things to be able to see them. Here I’m remembering something that I read in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss:

the sensation of sudden visual awareness is produced in part by the formation of a “search image” in the brain. In a complex visual landscape, the brain initially registers all the incoming data, without critical evaluation. Five orange arms in a starlike pattern, smooth black rock, light and shadow. All this is input, but the brain does not immediately interpret the data and convey their meaning to the conscious mind. Not until the pattern is repeated, with feedback from the conscious mind, do we know what we are seeing.

Learning to See in Gathering Moss/ Robin Wall Kimmerer

I’m continuing to read JJJJJerome Ellis’ Aster of Ceremonies. Wow!

Prayer to My Stutter #2/ JJJJJerome Ellis

You restore
a living
shoreline
between word
and silence

This beautiful prayer moves right into the next offering, Octagon of Water, Movement 3, which was titled by its first line when it was published in Poetry:

excerpts from The name of that Silence is These Grasses in the Wind/ JJJJJerome Ellis

1

The name of that silence is these grasses in this wind, and the name of these grasses in this wind is that other place on the other side of this instant. This instant is divided by curtains of water and the sound of shuddering time. A sunflower reeling with sun, six hands stretched in offering. This unsearchable, uncancellable instant wraps the shoulders of the grasses like a shawl stilled by the stoppage. 

How is/isn’t the instant similar to Marie Howe’s moment? If you listen to the recording on Poetry, you can hear the stretched silence as Ellis’ voice stops before pronouncing certain words.

2

This morning come shyly or boldly into the fertile field, however you are, come, come and stay in the rearrangement, the pressure of thumb on fescue blade, a year wheeling within a day, two round moments of warm mouth, finally at peace. The psalm is a key if only we can find the door. Do not swallow your dysfluent voice. Let it erupt in its volcanic flowering. Stoppage thence passage, aporia, poppy bursting with fragrant seed. 

What a beautiful description and reclaiming of a stuttering voice on the other side of the stoppage! The erupting bursting flowering dysfluent voice.

I’m inspired by how Ellis takes his stutter and turns it into this beautiful instant between silence and word. For them, the stoppage is a/the key aspect of the stuttering. What are the most important elements of my strange vision?

jan 8/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
12 degrees

Another sunny, sharp shadow day. Ran south to the falls and listened to cars, birds, kids on the playground, and some guy coughing too loudly. Stopped at my favorite spot to admire the falls, then put in my “Remember to Forget” playlist. Sometimes I felt strong, and sometimes I felt tired. My legs wanted us to stop. I did a few times, including at the bench above “the edge of the world.” I took two pictures. One had a clearer view of the ice on the river, but I picked the other one, with its branches and shadows and white sun:

Most of the image is of dark, bare branches and their shadows on a snow-less ground. Through the trees is an iced river and the sun.
above the edge of the world / 8 jan 2024

10 Things

  1. chirping birds
  2. my shadow, clear and strong
  3. shadows of trees in the park, soft and fuzzy
  4. a shadow of the lamp post, sharp and menacing
  5. someone who looked like Dave the Daily Walker from behind — a tucked shirt and not jacket, tucked into dark track pants — but wasn’t
  6. the creek — bright white snowy surface mixed with fast, flowing water
  7. the falls were gushing through the ice columns
  8. a man with a bad cough near the overlook
  9. a cold wind on my ears when I put my hood down
  10. the shadow of a tree sprawled across the trail that dips below the road, looking like an actual branch that might hit me as I ran by

For a moment, I thought I had completely forgot running the stretch down to, then over, the bridge that crosses above the falls, but then I remembered it: what the creek looked like, seeing some people (one of them, the man with the cough) as I crossed, but then not seeing them, and then seeing them again near the closed gate.

before the run

Last night, I started reading JJJJJerome’s Aster of Ceremonies, which I bought in october of 2023 and hadn’t read yet. Wow! Here’s a bit I’d like to take with me on my run:

What is the wound
reopening during the stutter?
How does it relate
to Morrison’s flooding? When
the Mississippi returns
to its former contours,
does the suture
we created by straightening
it open?
(Octagon of Water, Movement 2/JJJJJerome Ellis)

Last week, I was just writing about how the natural shape of the Mississippi River in the gorge is long gone, reshaped by the city and the Army Corps. After my run, I’ll read Toni Morrison’s essay to which Ellis refers.

added a few hours later: I tracked down the quotation that Ellis puts in a footnote for this poem from Toni Morrison in The Site of Memory (1995, 99):

You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory – what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding.” Along with personal recollection, the matrix of the work I do is the wish to extend, fill in and complement slave autobiographical narratives. But only the matrix. What comes of all that is dictated by other concerns, not least among them the novel’s own integrity. Still, like water, I remember where I was before I was “straightened out.”

The Site of Memory/ Toni Morrison

So good! I’m excited to think about these ideas some more and figure out my relationship to flooding and being straightened out and rivers before and after Minneapolis and the Army Corps of Engineers “fixed” them.

Thinking about Ellis’ stutter in relation to my vision problems. In some ways, I have a visual stutter — there’s a long pause between looking at something and actually seeing it. I need time for things to make sense. Also, images stutter, shake, fizz, are always moving, never still or sharp or clear.

remember/forget

1 — will

the differences between what we notice and try to remember and what we ignore or try to forget (16 april 2024)

2 — memory

When I heard the line, Seems like we’re livin’ in a memory, I thought about how I mostly can’t see people’s faces clearly and that I’ve either learned to tune it out and speak/look into the void, or I just fill in the smudge with the memory of their face. I’m used to it, and often forget I’m doing it until suddenly I wonder as I stare at the blob, am I looking in the right place, into their eyes, or am I staring at their chin? I don’t care, but I imagine the other person might, so I try to find their eyes again (9 may 2024).

In jan of 2024, I’m thinking about the daily, mundane bodily functions that we forget we’re doing, or don’t notice — what’s the difference between not noticing and forgetting here? I’m also thinking about this idea of memory and its relationship to the real. When is remembering “only a memory” and when can the act of remembering keep something real? Can we understand remembering as more than thinking about things from the past? What about remembering what is present, here still, real, connected to us?

3 — pay attention, be astonished, tell about it

Thinking more about the difference between noticing and remembering, I’m thinking about the different acts involved here. Yes, it is inspired by Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life! First, we notice, then we are open to feeling something about what we noticed, then we put that noticing and our feelings into words. For my practice, I don’t try to remember to notice or to be astonished, they just happen — at least, that’s the goal. Remembering comes in when I try to put my attention and astonishment into words. So, the connection between writing and remembering.

4 — writing to remember

I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.

Field Notes slogan

Many different directions I could go with this idea of remembering and writing, but I like this idea of the act of writing about something as the remembering. I rarely look back at my (Field Notes brand) Plague Notebooks when I’m finished with them; it’s the act of writing in them that helps me remember what I noticed or was thinking about. This method is approximate and doesn’t work all of the time. In my practice, I use the act of making a list on my log of 10 things I noticed as the moment of remembering what I didn’t even realize I noticed. But, unlike my plague notebooks, I do return to my log to read past entries and remember what I wrote before — in at least 3 ways: my monthly challenge pages in which I review and summarize what I did in relation to my theme each month; my “on this day” morning reviews, in which I reread past entries from that day in different years; and my annual summary, month-by-month of my log entries.

5 — forget the body

I like my body when I’m in the woods
and I forget my body. I forget that arms,
that legs, that nose. I forget that waist,

that nerve, that skin. And I aspen. I mountain.
I river. I stone. I leaf. I path. I flower.
(Yes, That’s When/Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer)

jan 7/YOGAWALK

yoga, 30 minutes
walk, 20 minutes
neighborhood
18 degrees

The same 30 minute yoga for flexibility routine I’ve been doing for 5 years. I like it, but I should try something else this month. Later, a short walk outside with Delia the dog. Brisk.

10 Things

  1. faint shadows, mine, tall, beside Delia’s, short
  2. the metallic buzz of a table saw
  3. a ridge of snow, refusing to melt on a neighbor’s narrow boulevard
  4. the fast flash of Delia’s tail when she’s excited or relieved or happy to be heading back
  5. cold air seeping through my hood and hat, into my ears
  6. bare grass
  7. the 6 inch gap under the gate of a yard a block away
  8. the smooth asphalt of a nearby driveway
  9. the sculpture of a turtle — bigger than an ancient tortoise — in a front yard — it looks heavy, is it made out of bronze?
  10. the buzz of workers all around the neighborhood — brrr!

forgetting/remembering

1 — the body

On jan 7, 2019, I wrote this about forgetting and remembering my body as I ran:

I found myself worrying constantly about my back or my IT band or my knee. At one point I wondered, what would it feel like to not notice my body? To simply run? Of course, this did happen many times during the run, but I remember more the times when I was too aware of my body. 

running log, 7 jan 2019

2 — never forget

Scrolling through facebook this morning, I encountered several “never forget” posts about the pro-Trump terrorist attack on congress on Jan 6, 2021. Then I read my On this Day post from jan 7, 2021 which begins with a brief description of the attack. I thought about how I use this log and my “on this day” practice to not forget things (typing this, I started wondering about the differences between not forgetting and remembering). Not forgetting is an important act of resistance.

I also read my jan 7, 2020 entry about the dogs in our neighborhood. Most of those dogs are gone now. Or, if they’re not gone, I don’t ever see them anymore. But, I remember them often as we walk past their houses. Delia does too. Not forgetting is an important ritual of staying connected to a place.

Simply looking. A car goes over a rise and there are birches snow
Twisted into cabalistic shapes: The Devil’s Notch; or Smuggler’s
Gap. At the time you could not have imagined the time when you
Would forget the name, as apparent and there as your own.
(from Hymn to Life/James Schuyler)

As I travel around my neighborhood, by foot or car, I speak about things that are no longer there — the tree with teeth, the big branch that sprawled above the road, the mustache on the mustache bridge, Bridgemans restaurant — and reflect on how easy it is to forget things that are no longer there. Without memories, it’s as if it was always like it is now, like the gone things never existed. Speaking of the mustache bridge, FWA mentioned it the other day. He referred to it (the bridge that crosses Hiawatha on the parkway) as the mustache bridge even though it only had a spray-painted mustache on it for a few months 10 years ago. I thought it was fascinating that this name has stuck. Will there be a time when we forget why we call it that?

3 — losing

I watch other bodies slip through the blue,
how fast the young are
& how old they become, floating, floating,
forgetting the weight of years
(Romance/Susan Browne)

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
(One Art/Elizabeth Bishop)

jan 6/RUN

5.5 miles
bottom of franklin hill
11 degrees / feels like 5

Another sunny, snowless day. A little wind, some cold air. Wasn’t planning to run 5 miles, but I wanted to get to the bottom of the hill so I could see the surface up close. Iced over — not smooth, but with seams and cracks.

The Mississippi river at the bottom of the franklin hill. White ice, cracks, and shadows on its surface. Beyond it, the east bank with barre branches and blue sky.
ice on mississippi river / 6 jan 2025

I’m glad I took a picture because I did not remember it looking like this! I was visually a surface that was more gray and uniform with cracks creating big and flat sheets of ice. I didn’t remember the shadows or the blue or how uneven it all looked.

As I ran, I listened to my “Remember to Forget” playlist. It started with “I Remember it Well,” from Gigi. I heard the opening lines:

We met at 9
We met at 8
I was on time
No, you were late
Ah yes
I remember it well

I thought — wait, if he thought they were meeting at 9, he wouldn’t have thought he was late if he got there after 8 — yes, these are they thoughts I have as I run. I thought about how subjective memory can be and wondered how certain we could be that she remembered correctly. Then I heard these lyrics:

Ah yes
I remember it well
You wore a gown of gold
I was all in blue

I remembered that meme 4 or 5 years ago with the dress — is it gold or blue? — and thought again about how we can remember things differently. When is it lack of memory, and when did we always just remember it wrong, or unusually, or with a focus on different details, or in a different light?

10 Things

  1. the hollow knocking of a woodpecker
  2. the thumping of wheels over something on the road on the bridge above
  3. 4 stones tightly stacked on the ancient boulder
  4. a section of the fence above a steep part of the bluff, missing, marked off with an orange barricade
  5. the icy river through the trees — blue and white and lonely
  6. daddy long legs at his favorite bench
  7. shadows, 1: mine, off to the side, in the brush next to the trail
  8. shadows, 2: a tree trunk, tall, stretched, looking like a dinosaur
  9. stopping at the edge to put in my headphones, seeing a flare of movement below: someone walking on the winchell trail
  10. the limestones still stacked under the bridge, still looking like a person sitting up and leaning against the bridge

A poem about forgetting:

Said a Blade of Grass/ Kahlil Gibran

Said a blade of grass to an autumn leaf, “You make such a noise falling!  You scatter all my winter dreams.”
 
Said the leaf indignant, “Low-born and low-dwelling!  Songless, peevish thing!  You live not in the upper air and you cannot tell the sound of singing.”
 
Then the autumn leaf lay down upon the earth and slept.  And when spring came she waked again—and she was a blade of grass.
 
And when it was autumn and her winter sleep was upon her, and above her through all the air the leaves were falling, she muttered to herself, “O these autumn leaves!  They make such noise!  They scatter all my winter dreams.”

more forget lines

1

like the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say, it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only all the time.
(Part of Eve’s Discussion/Marie Howe)

2

It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.

And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too
(Dead Stars/Ada Limón)

3

See whatever you want
to see. Even
at the moment of death
forget the door

opening on darkness.
See instead the familiar faces
you thought were lost.
(Squint/Linda Pastan)

4

According to Howe, most (all?) of the critical studies of ED as a poet (up to 1985, when this book was written), read ED’s decision to stay isolated in her bedroom for the rest of her life as tragedy and a failure to celebrate herself as a poet (Whitman) or declare herself confidently as the Poet, the Sayer, the Namer (Emerson). Howe argues that she made another choice and writes the following:

She said something subtler. ‘Nature is a Haunted House–but Art–a House that tries to be haunted.’ (L459a)

Yes, gender difference does affect our use of language, and we constantly confront issues of difference, distance, and absence when we write. That doesn’t mean I can relegate women to what we ‘should’ or ‘must’ be doing. Orders suggest hierarchy and category. Categories and hierarchies suggest property. My voice formed from my life belongs to no one else. What I put into words is no longer my possession. Possibility has opened. The future will forget, erase, or recollect and deconstruct every poem. There is a mystic separation between poetic vision and ordinary living. The conditions for poetry rest outside each life at a miraculous reach indifferent to worldly chronology.

My Emily Dickinson/ Susan Howe

jan 4/WALK

20 minutes with Delia
neighborhood
7 degrees / feels like 4

Winter! Heading north, an arctic wind, but otherwise, not bad. Warm sun, no snow. I love being outside and moving. A thought: I should commit to doing one or two long-ish walks each week to somewhere. The library? A coffee place?

10 Things

  1. dead, brown leaves on top of a pile of crusty snow
  2. a high-pitched, quiet whine from a truck on the next block
  3. the bare, gnarled, tall branches of the oak tree on the corner
  4. 2 green dumpsters on the sidewalk outside of Turtle Bread
  5. almost stumbling as I stepped on a small rock or hard chunk of snow
  6. a neighbor on the next block having an animated conversation with the mailman
  7. bark! — Delia the dog unexpectedly barking at them from across the street
  8. bark! bark! bark! — a dog in a backyard calling out to Delia
  9. the tree on the corner across from the Blue Door — dead, most of it trimmed away, more than a stump with a few dead branches still remaining
  10. the sun! heading south, warming my face and making it difficult to see if anyone was approaching

While tagging old entries with “remember/forget,” I came across Emily Dickinson’s poem about forget-me-nots on 2 march 2021, which helped me to remember that I was thinking about it — vaguely — as I ran yesterday!

There are spaces for living
and spaces for forgetting.
Sometimes they’re the same.
(Voiceover/ Rita Dove)

jan 1/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
15 degrees / feels like 3 / flurries

2025, I’m not sure how I feel about you. Not dread, but not exuberant hope either. I guess I’m trying not to think about you and what you might bring that much. Running beside the gorge helps. Very few, what ifs, many more now and now and nows. Today’s run was great. I was surprised to see that the feels like temp was 3. It didn’t feel that cold. I guess I picked the right layers: 2 pairs of black running tights, a black fleece-lined cap with ear flaps, a gray buff, a faded green long-sleeved shirt, a bright orange sweatshirt, a purple jacket, gray long socks, black short socks, black gloves, pink and white striped gloves. At the halfway point, one pair of gloves came off.

While I ran, I thought about remembering and forgetting and decided when I returned home, my 10 things list would be of things remembered and things forgotten.

10 Things Remembered or Forgotten

  1. I remembered to look down at the river
  2. I remembered what it looked like: steel blue, a few thin sheets of ice
  3. I remembered to stop at the bench above the edge of the world to take in the openness — soft, almost still except for a single leaf fluttering and several leaves sizzling, and was the water moving very slowly or was that just the staticky buzz of my glitching cone cells?
  4. I forgot about my headache
  5. I forgot about my IT band
  6. In mile 3, I remembered my IT band and thought about how it’s impossible to fully forget your body, which is good, because why would I want to do that?
  7. I forgot the election
  8. I remembered to look carefully, and more than once, before crossing from the trail to the grassy boulevard
  9. I remembered to stop at my favorite view of the falls — the water was gushing over the side
  10. I remembered what I overheard above the falls: a dad — no hiking today, a mom: we can take a walk instead!

I suppose it’s easier to remember what you remembered, than to remember what you forgot!

Reading through a past entry from 1 jan 2019, I was reminded of how I used to gather favorite lines at the end of the year and turn them into a new poem. I’d like to do that again this year!

The poems that I’ve been writing this fall about the gorge, are mostly about water and stone, but the open space of the gorge is important too. I’d like to devote some time to it as air, as openness, as possibility, as room to breathe, as Nothingness, as mystery, as inexplicable, as . . . . Here are two different fragments that may or may not turn into something:

When water cut through
rock, sandstone wore away,
limestone broke up, and
an abundance of
air arrived.

*

When water cut through
sandstone and limestone,
it made of the rock
still standing a frame
to loosely hold the
newly formed space. And
what a space! Such an
abundance of air!
Such room to breathe and
to be! Big enough
to hold more than is
seen or imagined
or witnessed with words.

dec 30/WALK

1.5 mile walk with Delia
the gorge, from 36th to 34th
32 degrees / fog

Good job, Sara. You resisted the urge to run. A walk with Delia was wonderful. So quiet and calm and relaxed! Moist, too. I loved breathing in the cool air and almost floating through the fog. All of it, a soft dream. Occasionally I encountered others — some walkers and runners — but mostly it was just us. At one point, descending through the tunnel of trees, which isn’t really a tunnel anymore because they cut it back at some point, the only thing I could hear was a hammer pounding across the road. No cars or voices or striking feet. Wow! Several times, I felt a warm buzz.

10 Things

  1. a white sky
  2. open water
  3. wet asphalt
  4. grass covered in brown leaves
  5. a dark form descending into the ravine — silent, featureless
  6. a brown view of the floodplain forest — all slender trunks and bare branches, no river or sky poking through
  7. a runner in the neighborhood emerging from an alley in a sprint, then returning to the alley, then appearing again, then disappearing around the corner
  8. thump thump thump the striking feet of a runner across the street — the same one? I’m not sure
  9. the silvery sparkle of the sign at the 35th street overlook — is this sign new?
  10. overheard: a woman running alongside a kid on a bike, talking to the kid — you had your pink backpack and your droopy dog stuffed animal — did she say droopy, or some other word?

I wanted to think about my Ars Poetica poem as I walked, and I did, but I’m still stuck. Something about letting things breathe and be exposed to the air to see what happens and erosion and ruins. I’ll give it until the end of the year, and if I’m still stuck, I’ll put it away for a bit.

forget what you are

While reading poet’s Cynthia Cruz’s explanation of how her poem, “Dark Register” is shaped by Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit, I encountered these lines about habit:

“Habit,” in the third stanza refers to Hegel’s concept of habit: the act of repeating an action that, through this repetition, becomes second nature. For Hegel, habit implies forgetting: we forget what we are doing once the action becomes habit.

Cynthia Cruz on “Dark Register”

we forget what we are . . . . I immediately thought of Marie Howe’s beautiful poem, “The Meadow” and her lines about her dying brother:

I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.

But in this world, where something is always listening, even
murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan

in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be
all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget

what you are.

This forgetting also reminds me of Mary Rueffle’s reference to Levi-Strauss’ “unhitching, which I wrote about on may 31, 2023. First, my rough paraphrasing:

unhitching happens in brief moments when we can step outside of or beside or just beyond — below the threshold of thought, over and above society — to contemplate/experience/behold the this, the what it is, the essence of everything, Mary Oliver’s eternity.

Second, a quote from Levi-Strauss in Mary Ruefle:

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

Lévi-Strauss quoted MRH page 52

Wow, all of this is making me think of something I wrote, referencing Mary Oliver, about the gorge. Initially I added it on the end of my geologic time poem, and maybe it should stay there and be extended, or maybe it should be another poem? Here are the lines:

Every day this place
erodes the belief
that rock will stand still,
is here forever,
unmoved, unmoving. 
And yet, with its slow 
slight shifts on a scale 
almost beyond her 
comprehension, these 
rocks might be as close 
as the girl can get
to eternity.

So many more connections I could make with forgiveness and forgetting and remembering and now and now and now!

dec 29/RUN

5 miles
minnehaha park and back
34 degrees / fog / humidity: 94%

Almost all of the snow, which wasn’t much to begin with, is gone. The ice, too. Hardly any wind, but plenty of moisture — the trail, the air, my face. Ran past the falls and John Stevens’ house to the VA bridge, then turned around and ran beside the falls. Stopped at my favorite spot to admire the falls, which were gushing. Put in “Billie Eilish” playlist and ran home.

10 Things

  1. mostly bare grass — the only snow were little mounds where the walking path split off from the biking path
  2. the creek water was fast and steel gray
  3. heard the train bells from across the road, then the horn tapping twice — beep beep
  4. car lights cutting through the mist/fog
  5. an older man pushing an empty wheelchair on the path
  6. glancing down at the Winchell trail north of 38th street, seeing two people walking on a part near the edge, high above the water
  7. I just wrote gray sky, no sun or shadows, but then I remembered there were a few patches of blue sky
  8. overheard: one woman walker to another — ptsd, trump, spend time with family
  9. smiling and waving to people I encountered — one good morning to another runner
  10. a man and a woman stopped at the edge of the walkway down to the bridge over the falls looking at something on a phone — I finally got it! Its back at my apartment

For the past 3 days, Scott, FWA, RJP, and I were up in Duluth. Very mild — no snow, no wind, no waves, some drizzle. Lake Superior was beautiful, especially the first night. While we were gone, I didn’t run. Today was my first day back since Thursday. My left hip is sore after the run. I should take more of a break.

I’m returning to my “Ars Poetica” poem and wanting to use this bit from Kafka for inspiration:

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

Not becoming one with the gorge, but striving to press deeper and deeper into it, to leave a trace/mark on it, and be marked by it.

dec 26/RUN

4 miles
trestle+ turn around
34 degrees

Yesterday I said I wasn’t planning to run again this week, but the paths were clear, the weather was above freezing, and I couldn’t resist. I nice morning for a run! Not sure how much of it was my vision and how much was moist, gray air , but everything looked extra blurry today. I didn’t even recognize Dave the Daily Walker until he greeted me by name.

10 Things

  1. happy, shouting kids somewhere on the hill between edmund and the parkway — were they sledding? I couldn’t see them, but that’s what it sounded like
  2. open water — dark gray
  3. fee bee fee bee
  4. a runner passing me from behind wearing a bright yellowish-green shirt that looked like the same one I had on under my vest and sweatshirt — was it for the 10 mile race from 5 years ago, like mine?
  5. stopped at my new favorite bench and looked down the slope at the white sands beach far below
  6. some voices down in the gorge — sounding far enough away to be on the other side
  7. the bells of St. Thomas chiming!
  8. one loud, deep bark up ahead — heard, not seen — I wonder how bit the dog was that made that sound?
  9. the walking trail is completely covered with snow — no bare walking trail until spring?
  10. more than once, the distant knocking of a woodpecker up in a tree

dec 21/RUN

3.3 miles
trestle turn around
11 degrees
75% snow-covered

Okay winter! Enough layers to keep me warm, a path that wasn’t crowded or icy, Yak trax to help me stay upright. The run wasn’t the easiest, but it might be the slowest. I’m stopped to walk more than I used to. Partly to admire the view, but also because I’m tired after a 1000+ miles of running this year. Time for a break, I think.

10 Things

  1. fee bee fee bee — a black-capped chickadee!
  2. the tight crunch of my feet striking and lifting off of the ground
  3. in several places, big mounds of snow off to the side, pushed their by a parks’ plow
  4. open water
  5. where the path is plowed, only on the bike trail, the snow is packed down or gone. Narrow strips of almost bare pavement have appeared on the edges
  6. where the path is not plowed, on the walking trail. the snow is loose and high enough to be difficult to run through
  7. 2 city plows on the street, rumbling down edmund
  8. I stopped slightly short of the trestle because someone was there fiddling with a bike, standing just where I wanted to stop to admire the view
  9. the sky was a bright white, not from sun, but from snow
  10. stopped at my new favorite bench — the view below was all white with thin brown lines and looked cold and alone

I made some progress on my latest section of Haunts this morning! Slowly, it’s turning into something. As I ran, I wanted to think about feral forms and forms that resist complete domestication and nets as forms. Did I? I’m not sure. Now that I’m back home, I plan to read a chapter in Lydia Davis’ collection, Essays One, about the unusual forms she uses in her writing. I happened upon this chapter by accident. Taking a brief break to think through what I was writing, I looked over at my bookshelf and noticed its awesomely green cover. So I picked it up and found “Forms and Influences.” Nice!

The poem of the day at Poetry Foundation was from Jenny Xie’s Eye Level. I’m pretty sure I checked this collection out several years ago, but I don’t remember this poem. One short section from it helped open a door for me into my poem:

If there is a partition between
the outer and inner worlds,
how is it that some water in me churns
between the mountain ranges?

How is it we are absorbed so easily
by the ground—
(from Long Nights/Jenny Xie)

dec 20/RUN

3.35 miles
locks and dam no. 1
12 degrees
99.9% snow-covered

It snowed yesterday. 5.5 inches of soft, powdery stuff. Today it’s colder and the snow has compacted. With my yak-trax it wasn’t too difficult to run on. No slipping. Tiring, though. And beautiful! For the first mile, the river was open and then it was covered — one half had ice and snow, the other sparkles.

10 Things

  1. sharp, dark shadows — mine, behind me for the first half, in front for the second
  2. the only bare stretch of pavement was on the biking side of the bridge, up against the wall, where it is sheltered and covered in dead leaves
  3. encountered at least 3 runners
  4. the loud voices of some construction workers, joking with each other
  5. a deep cough by one of the workers
  6. everywhere, small ledges and wedges of snow
  7. some dirt sprinkled on the path to make it less slippery
  8. the bones of fallen trees, covered with snow in the ravine
  9. a bench on the hill above the edge of the world, at just the right angle to face the sun
  10. a screeching bluejay high in a tree

I’m working on a section of my poem about form. At some point during the run, I thought about searching for forms that can hold my words — but not too tightly — and my messy, layered thoughts and feelings. Earlier this morning, I was thinking about partial forms and illusory forms and unreliable forms — the fuzzy forms my brain creates, the unnatural form of the river. I haven’t quite figured out how to tie them all together.

As part of my focus on forms that seem natural but aren’t, I’ve been thinking about and trying to find an article about the Apostle Islands and re-wilding. This morning I finally found it again! The Riddle of the Apostle Islands