Tag: 10 things

june 11/RUN

4.5 miles
veterans home and back
56 degrees

Still struggling with endurance, still showing up. How much of this is mental, how much physical? The sixty-four thousand dollar question, as my dad used to say. I think it’s both, but probably more mental. Maybe the lexapro is already kicking in, but my struggles aren’t bothering me. After the run I thought, these struggles will make showing up at the marathon start line, then finishing 4-5 hours later, much more meaningful.

It rained this morning, so everything was wet, even the air. Everything was also green. Green green green. Any other colors? Nope, not much to break up the green. Green green green green green.

10 Things

  1. lush green, dark, on the part of the path that goes below the road
  2. puddles
  3. a woman ahead of me, running, wearing only one compression sleeve on her right calf
  4. a group of kids walking to the playground at minnehaha
  5. a much bigger group of kids walking near 42nd — a long line, 3 across, took me 10 or 15 or more? seconds to pass them
  6. gushing water near the ravine by the oak savanna
  7. the bright yellow crosswalk sign — my bee — was muted in the gray sky
  8. crossing the bridge high above the creek, all green, no view of the water below
  9. lush green, dark, on the steep hill descending to the locks and dam no 1
  10. a pile of e-bikes parked near a bench — black with blue accents

paean to place/ lorine niedecker

Before my run, I started writing out, by hand, Niedecker’s poem. It’s so long! My hand started cramping up. I had to write slowly to account for my visual errors, like not seeing the words I’ve already written and writing words almost over them or above them instead of below them. The slow work is good, giving me time with each word and line.

Here’s one line I’d like to make note of:

Not hearing sora
rails’s sweet

spoon-tapped waterglass-
descending scale-
tear-drop-tittle

I wondered, what does a sora sound like, so I looked it up and listened. Yes, it sounds like LN described! Listen here to calls 1 and 2.

june 10/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls
60 degrees

Ah, summer mornings! Beautiful. Cooler. If I would have slept better, I would have tried to go out even earlier. The first half of the run felt good, then I got hot and it got harder. Today I didn’t worry about what that meant for my training. Instead, I enjoyed the brief minutes of walking, taking in the trees at the falls — so green! so full!

10 Things

  1. the falls, flowing, white, undulating — the water not falling straight, but almost falling over itself — was it hitting some limestone on the way down?
  2. a bundle of something on the ground next to the dirt trail — a hammock?
  3. 2 women with tall hiking packs on their backs walking on the paved path
  4. some animal — a turkey? — upset, calling out, a human voice saying something — hey?
  5. a flash below the double bridge — a sliver of creek almost covered by green
  6. 2 roller skiers near locks and dam no 1
  7. the dirt trail cutting through the small wood near ford bridge looking cool and inviting
  8. happy kids on the minnehaha park playground — happy: green voices, where green = young, outside, tender
  9. (walking back, about to cross 46th ave at 37th street) 2 older women chatting, then greeting me, oh! hello!
  10. (walking back almost to my alley) heard on a radio or from a phone or a computer in neighbor’s backyard, the next one is Scandia — was this talk radio or a zoom meeting or what?

Lorine Niedecker and “Paean to Place”

to dwell with a place:

What is required, however, is sensual, embodied experience—close encounters of awe, wonder, fright, disgust, or even tedium—which remind us both of the real earth with which we dwell, and that we share our home with innumerable cohabitants.

Dwelling with Place: Lorine Niedecker’s Ecopoetics

opening to “Paean to Place”:

Fish
fowl
flood
Water lily mud
My life

in the leaves and on water
My mother and I
born
in swale and swamp and sworn
to water

My father
thru marsh fog
sculled down
from high ground
saw her face

at the organ
bore the weight of lake water
and the cold—
he seined for carp to be sold
that their daughter

might go high
on land
to learn

Wow! Reading this opening, I’m thinking about the Objectivists and the Imagists and Ezra Pound’s 3 rules for writing poetry:

  1. Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective
  2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation
  3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome

What condensery and music in these lines! And what wonderfully effective descriptions of two people dwelling in and with a particular place, especially her mother, born in swale and swamp and bearing the weight of lake water and the cold.

definition of ecopoetics:

The word itself is an amalgam of two Greek words: oikos [household or family] and poïesis [making, creating, or producing], so that ecopoeticsquite literally means the creation of a dwelling place, or home-making. The term came into special prominence after the influential British literary critic Jonathan Bate published The Song of the Earth in 2000. There, Bate defined ecopoetics as a critical practice in which the central tasks are to ask “in what respects a poem may be a making … of the dwelling-place” and to “think about what it might mean to dwell upon the earth.”

Dwelling with Place: Lorine Niedecker’s Ecopoetics

LN’s opening lines and her descriptions of her parents, reminds me of Mary Oliver’s The Leaf and the Cloud and her brief mentions of her parents in the first section, “Flare.” LN and MO have different experiences but they rhyme, somehow, or echo?

My mother
was the blue wisteria,
my mother
was the mossy stream out behind the house,
my mother, alas, alas,
did not always love her life,
heavier than iron it was
as she carried it in her arms, from room to room,
oh, unforgettable!

Like LN, MO was also an amazing poet of place, but she doesn’t extend her ideas of place to her parents — a deliberate severing:

I mention them now,
I will not mention them again.

It is not lack of love
nor lack of sorrow.
But the iron thing they carried, I will not carry.

So much to say about that iron, but I have run out of time right now. Perhaps more later. . .

I’m back. First, the not carrying the iron makes me think of my mom and her desire for displacement from her abusive parents. More than once she said to me that she wanted to break that cycle of abuse — and she did. And I am grateful. But there’s something to explore here for me and my relationship to place, this place 4 miles from where my mom was born and raised, that I can’t quite get at yet.

The iron also reminds me of the wonderful lines from the opening of LN’s “Lake Superior”:

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

In blood the minerals
of the rock

*

Iron the common element of earth

Both MO and LN write about their fathers. First, MO:

My father
was a demon of frustrated dreams,
was a breaker of trusts,
was a poor, thin boy with bad luck.
He followed God, there being no one else
he could talk to;
he swaggered before God, there being no one else
who would listen.

and LN:

He could not
—like water bugs—
stride surface tension
He netted
loneliness. . .

. . . Anchored here
in the rise and sink
of life—
middle years’ nights
he sat

beside his shoes
rocking his chair
Roped not “looped
in the loop
of her hair”

The “looped” quote comes from William Butler Yeats and his poem, Brown Penny and it’s about love. I like how she throws in this line from poets or about poets, like this:

Grew riding the river
Books
at home-pier
Shelly would steer
as he read

I noticed another line of the poem in quotes, “We live by the urgent wave/of the verse.” Looked it up and found an article about “Paean to Place” and thanks to my college-attending son, I have access to it! Time to read it: Lorine Niedecker’s “Paean to Place” and its Fusion Poetics


june 9/RUN

3.7 miles
trestle turn around
65 degrees

Warm and windy. Lots of sweat. Another day of telling myself to keep showing up. A hard run with lots of walking. But, one faster, freer mile, and some scattered thoughts that might lead to something! I’ll take it.

11 Things

  1. under the lake street bridge, the side of the road was packed with parked cars — rowers?!
  2. yes, rowers: heard the coxswain calling out instructions
  3. briefly watched the rowers through a gap in the trestle: a head, an oar, a boat gliding by
  4. ran into a branch while avoiding another runner, just a few inches from my eye, imagined a scenario in my head where the branch had cut my eye
  5. in the tunnel of threes: a sea of swaying green
  6. a woman stretching in the 35th street parking lot, blasting music out of her phone
  7. wind pushing me from behind, making my ponytail swing to one side
  8. a cartoonish figure spray-painted on the sidewalk: bright orange outline
  9. loud rustling in the nearby brush then a hiker emerging from below
  10. whoooosssshhh — the wind rushing through the trees
  11. dragonflies? running near the trestle, an insect with a long, narrow body and wings almost flew into my mouth — no iridescent color, no color. Later, pausing at the top of the steps, I saw half a dozen of them. They opened and closed their wings in the sun

Yesterday, I decided that the theme of color or green wasn’t working for me this month. Instead, I’d like to return (again) to Lorine Niedecker. I’m particularly interested in her form of condensing and how I might apply it to my Haunts poems. Yes, the haunts poems are haunting me again. Before heading out for my run, I found a few lines from LN’s “Paean to Place,” that I especially like:

 grew in green
slide and slant
of shore and shade

            Child-time—wade
thru weeds

Maples to swing from
Pewee-glissando

      sublime
 slime-
song

A few times, I recited the first big: I grew in green/slide and slant/of shore and shade. As I thought about those lines I wondered what I grew up in. Green, for sure, but not by water. Then it came to me: I grew up on the edge of green in subdivisions that butted up against farms and woods, creeping, consuming those green spaces. I also grew up in carefully managed and cultivated green — bike paths through small stretches of trees offering the illusion of nature, privately owned by the subdivision. A very different green than the rural green of my dad’s farm in the UP or the urban green of my mom here by the Mississippi River. I thought about the managed green I run by and the difference between it, a public, national park, and the managed green of my suburban childhood, with its private green parks and private (No Trespassing!) acres of farm land, soon to be sold and converted into more “little boxes.”

Yes! The green I grew in was in-between col-de-sacs, and within small ravines and the slight stretches of trees or creeks developers left for aesthetic reasons. This green has deeply influenced my understanding of the wild and “green” spaces and is one reason why I’m fascinated by the management of nature.

june 1/RUN

4.15 miles
marshall loop (cleveland)
65 degrees
humidity: 85% / dew point: 60

Mostly overcast, a few moments of sun, no shadows. Sticky, everything damp, difficult. I felt better during the run — distracted by the dew point and the marshall hill — but when I finished, I felt a heaviness: hormones. The NP agrees: perimenopause. The good news: I’m healthy, the new NP I went to is awesome, I don’t feel anxious, I have an order in for an SSRI (lexapro). The bad news: I feel bummed out (depression doesn’t quite fit, I think), there’s some problem with insurance so they can’t fill the prescription so I have no idea when I can actually start taking the medication. But it’s June, I have several cool books to dig into, and I just got a hug from my daughter so I’ll be okay.

10 Things

  1. the red of a cardinal seen as a flash
  2. one small white boat on the river
  3. shadow falls falling, sounding like silver
  4. the smell of breakfast at Black — faint, sweet
  5. pink peonies about to pop
  6. click clack click clack — a roller skier’s poles: orange happiness
  7. the strong smell of fresh green paint on the base of a streetlamp
  8. the next streetlamp base: disemboweled, gray wire guts hanging out
  9. a purple greeting: morning! — good morning!
  10. a group of people in bright yellow vests laughing and walking on the road near the Danish American center — why?

added a few hours later: When writing this entry, I forgot about all the chanting I did. Started with triple berries:

raspberry strawberry blueberry
strawberry blueberry raspberry

Then added in some other 3 beat words:

intellect mystery history
remember remember remember

Then played with remember:

remember
try to re

member try
to remem

ber try to
remember

Then I decided to chant some of my favorite lines from Emily Dickinson:

Life is but Life
and Death but Death
Bliss is but bliss
and Breath but Breath

Life is but life is but life is but life
Death is but death is but death is but death
Bliss is but bliss is but bliss is but bliss
Breath is but breath is but breath is but breath

Life life life life
Death death death death
Bliss bliss bliss bliss
Breath breath breath breath

something important to remember: Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 counts of falsifying business records. He is now a felon and will be sentenced on July 11th. He can still run for office, but most likely won’t be able to vote (for) himself.

I’d like to focus on color this summer: June, July, and August. I’m not sure how I’ll do it, yet. Will I break it down my color? Possibly. Yesterday I picked up 2 color books that I had checked out 4 or 5 years ago. I’m anticipating that I’ll find them more useful now: The Secret Lives of Color and Chroma.

I also checked out Diane Seuss’ latest, Modern Poetry. Here’s one of her poems with some color in it:

Legacy/ Diane Seuss

I think of the old pipes,
how everything white
in my house is rust-stained,
and the gray-snouted
raccoon who insists on using
my attic as his pee pad,
and certain
sadnesses losing their edges,
their sheen, their fur
chalk-colored, look
at that mound of laundry,
that pile of pelts peeled away
from the animal, and poems,
skinned free of poets,
like the favorite shoes of that dead
girl now wandering the streets
with someone else’s feet in them.

At the beginning of the book, Diane Seuss offers a quote from Wallace Steven’s poem, Man with Blue Guitar, which I first learned of while reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. It is a long poem, so I won’t include all of it, just the part that Seuss quotes, with a few lines before that too:

from The Man with the Blue Guitar/ Wallace Stevens

Here, for the lark fixed in the mind,
in the museum of the sky. The cock

will claw sleep. Morning is not sun,
it is the posture of the nerves,

It is as if a blunted player clutched
The nuances of the blue guitar.

It must be this rhapsody or none,
The rhapsody of things as they are.

may 28/RUN

4.2 miles
minnehaha falls and back
59 degrees
drizzle, off and on

Didn’t realize it was raining the first time I left for my run. Returned home and waited a few minutes until the sun was shining. A mix of sunny and overcast for the whole run. On my walk back: drizzle again. At least I think it was drizzling; it could have just been dripping trees or ponytails. It’s been raining then not raining then raining again for the past few days.

The run was not great, but better than I thought it would be. Yesterday afternoon, without much warning, I started feeling light-headed, like I might faint. Then strange. I put my head down and breathed deeply for 10? 20? 30? minutes. My pulse wasn’t too low or too high, I could talk normally, and my breathing was fine. But I felt wrong. At one point I wondered, do I need to go to the hospital? I drank a glass of juice in case it was low blood sugar. I asked Scott to look up “symptoms low blood sugar” online. Nope, my symptoms didn’t match that. So then I had him look up panic attack. Yep. As he read the symptoms and I recognized them, I instantly felt something lift, at least a little. Ok, just a panic attack — don’t get me wrong, it was awful and I’m not pleased to be experiencing a panic attack, but it seemed better than the alternatives I had been imagining just a few minutes before. Sigh. The next phase of perimenopause for me, increased anxiety and panic attacks? Time to go to the doctor and figure out better solutions, I think.

For the rest of the day, I was tired and a little shaky. I wanted to run today, because I felt better and if it was a panic attack, it seemed important to get out there and keep doing this thing that I love despite any fear I might have over suffering from another panic attack. I read that one of the biggest dangers with panic attacks is that you will stop doing things because you’re afraid of another panic attack. Mostly the run was fine. My legs felt a little heavy — which was already happening last week — and I was a little anxious a few times — do I feel dizzy? am I pushing myself too much?, but I ran about 2 miles before stopping to walk for a minute, then ran another mile before a 10 second break, then ran the rest. And my heart rate was the same as it always is — 161 average. Panic attacks are no joke. Before it happened, I wasn’t upset or experiencing any anxiety. And when it happened, it was purely physical. I think it was a mild one, because I wasn’t terrified, but it did derail the rest of the day: 30 minutes of my head between my knees breathing, then the rest of the day on the couch.

10 Things

  1. everything wet and slick, the sidewalk slippery
  2. dripping trees
  3. gushing sewers
  4. spraying falls
  5. rushing creek
  6. robins hopping on the wet grass
  7. a walker in a BRIGHT red shirt
  8. puddle and mud on the dirt trail that winds through the small wood by the ford bridge — I saw them out of the corner of my eye as I ran by
  9. kids on the playground, laughing, yelling
  10. maybe there were some shadows, but what I remember was dark/wet pavement with the occasional patch of light

Running south to the falls, I listened to the water dripping. Running back north, I put in my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist.

Before I went out for my run, I was thinking about the silhouettes in the opening credits to the James Bond movie Scott and I watched last night: For Your Eyes Only. One of my favorites, partly because it was on HBO all the time when I was a kid. Click here to watch the opening on YouTube.

My echo, my shadow, and me

Wow, doing a little more research, I found this great article: James Bond: 50 Years of Main Title Design

may 26/RUN

7 miles
to the washington bridge and back
60 degrees
overcast – drizzle – soft steady rain

Overcast at the start, cool. Calm, quiet. The green felt deeper and darker in the gray. A block before I reached the river road, an ambulance sped by, siren blaring. A few minutes later, a police car, silent, but with frantic, flashing lights. I felt relaxed for the first mile. In the second mile my left ankle hurt a little. Started chanting triple berries to lock into a rhythm and to block out creeping doubt. Nothing fancy, just strawberry blueberry raspberry over and over. Once or twice: strawberry blueberry raspberry ice cream caramel strawberry chocolate ice cream

Just before I reached the bridge and the turn around point: drops drizzle rain — soft, steady, soaking. A few reprieves under the leaves, but mostly insistent water. I didn’t care; it cooled me down. The only thing I didn’t like was how my water-logged shorts stuck to my legs. Yuck!

assessment: I had some moments of struggle during the run — my legs were sore, feeling the need for a bathroom — but I also had some moments where I powered through. So much of it is mental. I’d like to come up with some fun distractions. I should return to my St. Paul sidewalk poetry project, find some more poems to run to. I could also do another poem-inspired scavenger hunt. I need a purpose for these runs that isn’t marathon training related.

10+ Things

  1. approaching from behind, rhythmic slapping –the slap slap slap of heavy, striking feet — then a fast runner in a blue shirt ran past me and up the hill near lake street
  2. passed him again when he stopped to study the map at the kiosk — was he lost?
  3. a rower on the river! single shell, their oars skimming the water — not sounding soft like a goose skimming the water, but choppy and hard like ___?
  4. the coxswain, instructing rowers through her bullhorn
  5. slap slap slap the blue-shirted runner passed me again between the trestle and franklin
  6. limestone leaks: even before it started raining, the limestone bluff in the flats was gushing water and leaving puddles on the pavement
  7. whoosh! a car’s wheels driving through the puddles
  8. a strange, intense floral smell — sweet, I think, and not entirely pleasant or unpleasant, just smell and flower and sweet
  9. a honking goose perched on the wall that holds back the river in the flats — were they honking at me? at a biker approaching from the other way?
  10. slap slap slap Mr. Blue Shirt is back! Nearing the end of my run, heading south, he zoomed past
  11. sometimes the rain sounded like footsteps from behind, but when I glanced back, there was no one there
  12. flash flash flash flash lights on the back of two bikes flashed red to let everyone know they were there, which was helpful in this gloom
  13. Good morning! a vigorous greeting from Mr. Morning!
  14. the return of Mr. Blue Umbrella, who walks in the middle of the path and never moves over. I’ve complained about him before — maybe last year? As I ran by him, the smell of stale cigarettes
  15. soft green fuzz on the edge of the trail, above the floodplain forest — was it from one of the cottonwood 3 — 3 giant trees in a yard. Last week, Scott and I walked past them; I have never seen that much cottonwood fuzz: the lawn was almost all not-quite-white!

Because of the rain and the cloud-covered sun, I didn’t see any shadows. I remember wondering if I might be able to see one if I was closer to the streetlamp or a car’s headlight.

may 24/RUN

3.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
64 degrees

Another hot and hard run with heavy legs. Not enough water or iron or rest? My body adjusting to warmer, heavier air?

Ran with Scott to the falls. Windy, green. We talked about the runner’s high and I mentioned my log post from may 24, 2017 that included an early poem about the runner’s high. I’d like to edit it, or at least revisit the ideas in it. This revisiting will include trying to experience more runner’s highs. I also mentioned Jaime Quatro’s article, Running as Prayer, and the deepest level of the runner’s high. Scott said he preferred the word meditation to prayer: less Christian baggage. That conversation lasted about 15 minutes, I think. I can’t remember what else we talked about — oh, the wind, the value of having designated spots for returning your ride share bikes, side stitches.

10 Things

  1. slick path or slippery shoes or both — mud, worn-down tread
  2. wind in our face, running south. Scott suggested that the wind was like a trainer holding a belt around your waist as you ran, which is something we noticed happening before the twins game last week with a player and his trainer and a belt
  3. flashes of pale blue, almost white, river through the thick trees
  4. plenty of puddles
  5. kids yelling on the playground
  6. spray coming off the rushing falls — water falling down and from the sides of the limestone
  7. a long queue for paying for parking in the minnehaha lot
  8. the surreys are back — bunched together near the falls overlook
  9. a cooling breeze heading north again
  10. minneapolis parks mowed a wide strip of grass near the trail by the ford bridge but left the meadow — good news for the bull frogs! Today I couldn’t hear them because of the wind and the traffic but I bet they’re there

Yesterday I posted part of a poem from Lucie Brock-Broido. Here’s part of another beautiful one:

from Periodic Table for Ethereal Elements/ Lucie Brock-Broido

A girl ago, a girlhood gone like a phial of ether
Thrown on fire-just

A little jump of flame, like grief, or,

Like a penicillin that has lost its will for killing
Off, it then is gone.

And, here’s a recording of her reading the whole poem.

may 23/RUN

5.35 miles
flats and back
61 degrees

10 Things

  1. globs of white foam on the river surface, moving slowly south, flat, brown, opaque water near the shore
  2. a hissing goose
  3. dazed, dreamy, almost disembodied, running fast up the franklin hill
  4. dandelion stalks on the grass, right before the ancient boulder, illuminated by sun, casting ragged shadows
  5. looking down at the green of the grass, seeing it as just a clump of green, wondering if people with better vision than me can see the individual blades
  6. walking along the cracked concrete wall that holds back the river, comparing the actual wall to its shadow, noticing what I see better in each. The shadow, the line/edge of the wall, especially when it is cracked — noticing how the shadow breaks there. The “actual” wall: texture, not in fine detail but roughly — all over, not smooth / specifically, gray depressions where shadows inhabit the spots the wall has broken off
  7. approaching a person standing in the middle of the path under the trestle, realizing at the last minute they were not alone, but hugging another person — were they comforting them (or vice versa)? or were they just expressing affection? They held the hug for a long time, much longer than one would in a greeting
  8. Hi Dave!
  9. (how could I almost forget!?) catkin fuzz! white fuzz from cottonwood trees, looking like a dusting of snow, lining the edges of the path. White fuzz, not looking like snow, floating through the air. I had fun trying to bat it around
  10. Taking a walk break, feeling a strange drop of water on the back of my knee, wondering what happened, realizing it was a drip of sweat from my ponytail

Not an easy run. Somewhat of a grind. The first 3 miles were fine. Then I stopped to walk for a few minutes until I returned to the bottom of the hill. Put in a playlist and picked up speed as I run up the hill. Walked for a minute near the crosswalk, then ran faster up the rest of the hill. Ran then walked then ran again for the rest of the run.

No rowers or shadows from birds or big groups of runners or frantic squirrels or unleashed dogs or menacing turkeys. At least one roller skier. Today my shadow only appeared at the end of the run, looking strong with broad shoulders.

the shadow of death

Yesterday as I was reading more of C.D. Wright’s Casting Deep Shade, I was thinking about how she unexpectedly died before it was published, wondering what “unexpectedly” meant. So I looked it up. Maybe a little out of morbid curiosity, but mostly because concrete details about death help me (us, I think) to engage with death in deeper ways that go beyond fear or discomfort or dismissal. Anyway, I looked it up and discovered that she died at 67 in her sleep from a blood clot she got on an overly long plane ride from Chile. Woah — that is unexpected. Thinking about this unexpected fact while I was running this morning, I thought that, for the person dying at least, this might not be a bad way to go — in your sleep. Then I wondered what experience of dying you might miss out on in your sleep. Would you dream about going into a light? Would your life still flash before your eyes as you slept? Or would all just be suddenly nothing?

A few days ago, someone somewhere (a poetry person on instagram?), posted a poem by Lucie Brock-Broido: After the Grand Perhaps. She died a few years ago. I remember that it was shocking and upsetting to many poetry people. She had been 61 and it was a brain tumor. Reading another poet’s account of her, I know she knew she was dying for at least a few months. I thought about her as I ran today, too.

2 shadow moments from After the Grand Perhaps/ Lucie Brock-Broido

After the pain has become an old known
friend, repeating itself, you can hold on to it.
The power of fright, I think, is as much
as magnetic heat or gravity.
After what is boundless: wind chimes,
fertile patches of the land,
the ochre symmetry of fields in fall,
the end of breath, the beginning
of shadow

*

After what is arbitrary: the hand grazing
something too sharp or fine, the word spoken
out of sleep, the buckling of the knees to cold,
the melting of the parts to want,
the design of the moon to cast
unfriendly light, the dazed shadow
of the self as it follows the self

may 22/RUN

4.2 miles
minnehaha falls and back
57 degrees
wind: 14 mph / gusts: 31 mph

New shoes! The Brooks Ghost, black. I’ve been wearing Saucony shoes for 13 years, but after 3 disappointing pairs, it’s time to move on. I like the Ghost — the name and the feel of them. Even so, this run was hard. I feel drained, like I hit a wall. By the end, it felt harder lifting my left leg.

Listened to the wind and the cars and rushing falls for the first half. Put in “Billie Eilish” Essentials for the second half. At the very end of the run, listening to “Chihiro” off of her album that dropped last Friday, I noticed her rhyming:

[verse] I was waitin’ in the garden
Contemplatin’, beg your pardon
But there’s a part of me that recognizes you
Do you feel it too?

[chorus] Open up the door, can you open up the door?
I know you said before you can’t cope with any more
You told me it was war, said you’d show me what’s in store
I hope it’s not for sure, can you open up the door?

Often, I don’t like a lot of rhyming. It can feel forced. But not here, especially with the interesting music underneath and Eilish’s voice. Still, I noticed the rhymes in a way that took me out of the song a little. But not as much as the overdone, forced rhymes in Taylor Swift’s “Peter,” also from her latest album:

Forgive me Peter
My lost fearless leader
In closets like cedar
Preserved from when we were just kids
Is it something I did
The goddess of timing
Once found us beguiling
She said she was trying
Peter was she lying
My ribs get the feeling she did
And I didn’t want to come down
I thought it was just goodbye for now

In closets like cedar? Ugh. I like Taylor Swift, and I like her new album, but I don’t like this song (which means I probably will after giving it more of a chance) and I think Billie Eilish’s music is more exciting and interesting and rich in complexity and complicated emotions.

10 Things

  1. burning silver sliver of river noticed through a gap in the green
  2. no puddles, but stretches of deep brown mud on the path
  3. repaired split rail fence — such a contrast between the weathered wood and the pale new boards — how long will it take for these boards to blend in?
  4. a glance to my left into the savanna: thick green
  5. lime green scooters everywhere — none on the path but parked on the side, down in the ditches
  6. little robins hopping on the grass
  7. 2 kids biking on the walking side of the double bridge
  8. at my favorite view of the falls: I used to be able to see the little bridge below and part of the trail, now it’s all green with only the white foam of the falls cuting through
  9. I was wrong in #2, there was one big puddle near the locks and dam no 1 parking lot
  10. no bugs . . . yet

currently reading in support of shadows: Casting Deep Shade/ C.D. Wright

shade: shelter from direct light; the cooling effect and darkness that that shelter causes; darkening (with a pencil); when black had been added to a hue to make it darker (as opposed to tint, when white was added to make the hue lighter), and:

@clipsforyourlife

Paris is burning. What is shade and reading?#parisiaburning #documentary #90s #80s #drag #dragqueen #ball #ballroom #pose #youtube #transgender #lgbt #lgbtq #queer #movie #pose #fyp #foryoupage #foryourpage #viral #shade #reading #theshade #foryou #fypシ #doriancorey

♬ original sound – Clipsforlife

Reading came first. Reading is the real art form of insult. You get in a smart crack and everyone laughs and kikis because you found a flaw and exaggerated it then you got a good read going. When you are all of the same thing then you have to go to the fine point. In other words if I’m a black queer and you’re a black queer we can’t call each other black queers because we’re both black queers. That’s not a read, that’s just a fact. So then we talk about your ridiculous shape your saggy face your tacky clothes. Then reading became a developed form where it became shade. Shade is, I don’t tell you you’re ugly. I don’t have to tell you because you know you’re ugly. And that’s shade.

Dorien Corey/ Paris is Burning

I remember teaching Paris is Burning in my Intro to Women’s Studies and Feminist Theory courses, when we talked about gender performativity and Judith Butler. That’s when I first learned about shade, I think: 2001. Anyway, this last version of shade seems to loosely (?) fit with C.D. Wright’s title, at least as one reviewer for the New York Times Book Review reads it:

C.D. Wright, renowned poet and essayist, completed ”Casting Deep Shade” just before her sudden death in January of 2016. This posthumous book might have been read strictly as elegy, yet Wright, as if presciently marking a trail through the woods for future readers, came up with a sly signpost of a title as ”pre-amble” to her work, briskly excluding melancholy even while taking stock of crimes against nature. The title is a trick or a kind of riddle. The gerund points to a ”Macbeth”-like conspiracy of tree and human, each ”throwing shade.” Here, for example, is Wright on privacy in an all-witnessing age: ”For the moment, I can locate you, whosoever you are, or re-imagine you in a keystroke. I can see the tree that cast your lawn in deep shade when you were wearing a linen dress, a string of seed pearls, and no underpants.” You get her drift?

Roots / Carole Muske-Dukes (referenced here)

Here’s another definition of “throwing shade” from Merriam-Webster:

to express contempt or disrespect for someone publicly especially by subtle or indirect insults or criticisms

“throwing shade” / Merriam- Webster

I can’t quite express it yet, but there’s something about throwing shade that involves connection and accountability and being implicated in something. It’s more than “expressing contempt or disrespect for someone publicly”. It’s rooted (rooted!) in communities, and the shade is being thrown by people who are deeply connected to each other.

Speaking of implication, can I fit this paragraph for another reviewer in here?

One of the gifts of her imagination is the insight of implication. In a passage where she acknowledges she had not been able yet to read Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, Wright notes “I sit here eating ‘carefully watched over’ cashews grown in India, from one of the 102 billion plastic bags used annually in the US, wearing a linen shirt (albeit secondhand) made in China, jeans fabrique en Haiti, Delta Blues Museum T-shirt made in Honduras . . . a walking, talking profligate.” If she was, as we all are, profligate, she was also prophet. She spoke to and for trees, and the creatures that owe their well being to arboreal health. She refers to “my standing brothers and sisters, the hardwoods.” Her work documents “the buds of tree consciousness.” Like so much of her language, that phrase operates in multiple planes, conjuring both human awareness of trees, and the fact that trees themselves are conscious, as well as the concrete responsibility of a poet: to cast an image, as a tree casts shade through its limbs and buds. Though any book written about trees in our modern era will necessarily be rife with dire predictions and realities, Casting Deep Shade is hardly dour. Subtitled “An Amble Inscribed to Beech Trees & Co.,” it has the charm and healing properties of a walk in the woods.

Some Trees

Fun with Acrostics: Bring Ya Ass

The Timberwolves have made it to the third round of the playoffs for the first time in 20 years. People here are excited. During an interview with Timberwolves star, Anthony Edwards, Charles Barkley said, “I have not been to Minneapois in 20 years.” To which Ant replied: Bring Ya Ass. Bring Ya Ass is now a meme and state officials and organizations are into it. Today, Governor Walz issued a proclamation that has fun with acrostics — the first letter of each Whereas paragraph spells out, Bring Ya Ass:

may 20/RUN

3.1 miles
trestle turn around
66 degrees
dew point: 61

Ugh! Sticky out there this morning. Lots of sweating. A hard run that didn’t feel great. Mostly sore legs. My shoes have worn out and the pair I bought to replace them hurt my feet. What did I notice in this distracted, uncomfortable state?

10 Things

  1. small purple flowers lining the trail
  2. the path near the ravine that winds through the welcoming oaks was wet from last night’s rain
  3. the path leading down through the tunnel of trees was almost all shade with only a few splotches of light
  4. the flash of squirrel on my right side so faint that I thought it be a shadow or a ghost — not really but I like the idea of Ghost Squirrel
  5. a gritty, slippery path
  6. Dave, the Daily Walker — Hi Sara! Hi Dave!
  7. a hiker wearing a loaded back pack — saw them last week too. Are they camping in the gorge?
  8. at least 2 sweaty, shirtless runners
  9. my shadow beside me
  10. a motorized scooter zooming by on the bike path

That was hard!

before the run

When returning to a favorite childhood book (this works with movies too) for the first time in decades, a question arises: Does it hold up? Is it a good book, or did I love it because I didn’t know any better? In my 20s and 30s, I applied a feminist lens to these books and usually they didn’t hold up. Now, a month from 50, I’m more generous; I like to think about the influence something has had with less judgment. I don’t remember the first time (or how many times) I read The Shades. But I remember liking it and finding the idea of shadow people fascinating.

brief synopsis: Young Hollis stays with a random college friend of his mother’s (beautiful, cool, kind painter Emily) in a creepy old house near a beach while his parents travel through Europe. One day, exploring the overrun, a-century-past-its-prime-garden, he discovers a dolphin fountain. After bathing in it, an older boy in strange clothing (those pants that buckle just under the knee — britches? breeches?) appears — Carl Shade. Turns out he’s a shadow that was cast by Emily’s grandfather. And Carl is not the only one. He’s part of a family — the Shades — and 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. There’s a benevolent dictator/God (the dolphin fountain whose magic makes the shadow world possible) and an evil, jealous enemy (the beautiful greek statue of a woman/siren who sings seductive songs designed to lure the shadows out of the garden). There’s the magic of the fountain — only those who bathe their eyes (the eyes, of course!) under the bubbling fountain can see the Shades. There are the poor, unfortunate souls of the shadows that listened to the Siren and left, and then tried to return only to be enslaved by the siren in the house (which, we learn near the end, is why the house always looks so gloomy). And there’s the biggest threat of all: the loss of the Self — and connection, memory, family, home — on the other side of the garden wall.

I could probably spend all day writing into and around this story. But that would take too much time. First — does this story hold up? Not if you think too hard about the structure — either of the world of shades and shadows within or the plot. But it was still fun to read again and to inhabit the haunting strangeness of the Shades in their weird garb and with their not-quite-tragic position between real and not real — dependent on humans, yet independent of them too, feasting on shadows yet able to “taste” and enjoy/detest the food.

It’s not the plot, but the images that hold up for me. The scene when Hollis gets a tour of the larder and all of the shadow food stored there, including Emily’s birthday cake from when she was a kid and had a party in the garden. Or the red, fluffy, wonderful rug in Hollis’ room that comforts him when he’s afraid. Or the creepy shadows of the children that encircle the evil Siren. Those little kid shadows remind me of a book that I started reading last year, but had to return before I finished. There are creepy shadowy unseen malevolent kids in it — A Good House for Children by Kate Collins.

Regardless of some plot holes and an underdeveloped Shade world (and the faint classism with its nostalgia for old money and grand houses and its disdain for encroaching “hooligans”), I still like this book and think it taps into some larger feelings I have about shades and shadows as things that are both traces of us and their own things too, and how that combination is haunting and strange and magical and delightful. Does that make any sense?

Just had another thought about the Shades and their shadow food. I’m reminded of the line from Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms”: We diet of water/on crumbs of Shadow.

during the run

I tried to think about shade and shadows and Hollis and Carl while I ran, but I was mostly too distracted by humidity and aching left calves and a constant voice whispering stop and walk and we’re tired in my head. Maybe that was my Shade?

after the run

Now that I have typed the word “shades” so many times, I’d like to study shades, as a variation of shadows, today. Different definitions, expressions, etc. Looking it up, I found a review for C.D. Wright’s Casting Deep Shade. I bought this book several years ago — I can’t remember why, maybe because I was really into thinking about the trees in the gorge? Anyway, I’ve been wanting to read it, but haven’t had a chance. Today’s the day, I think. Well, I’ll start it, at least.

added an hour later: I’m reading Casting Deep Shadow on my back deck under the shade of a bright green umbrella. Listening to the torpedoed call of a cardinal coming in slow waves of four (like Didi Jackson’s “Listen”), with additional notes at the end. I love this book and C.D. Wright’s wandering (and a little whimsical) approach to writing about beech trees. She describes different varieties, defines beech terms, recounts childhood stories sometimes only peripherally related to the beech, and places the trees geographically. On page 25, she even describes an anxiety dream she had about not practicing the piccolo which she believes must be “tangential to signing on to write about beeches.”

So far, she’s written about Beech Bark Disease (BBD), lingering beech leaves, trees from her childhood yard, roots. Here are a few examples of her writing:

Crowley’s Ridge is coated with a windblown sediment known as loess or rock flour. That’s where your kitty litter comes from. Grasses keep it from flying all over. Beeches don’t mind loess. Nor do peach trees, judging from the seet Elbertas that grew there–where Hemingway penned A Farewell to Arms when he was married to Pauline. It is the only rise in the Alluvial Plain of Old Man River. In the event the river floods, rather, when, head for the Ridge.

Casting Deep Shade/ C.D. Wright, page 14

The other distinctive aspect [of the beech] is that in the winter, most younger, lower branches always hold on to a few of their dead leaves all winter. They have a distinctive parchment color, and when backlit transmit light. I love that about them. However, these leaves are dropped promptly as the spring buds expand . . . .So noted by San Francisco-born Robert Frost:

We stood a moment so, in a strange world.
Myself as one his own pretense deceives;
And then I said the truth (and we moved on).
A young beech clinging to its last years’ leaves.

Casting Deep Shade/ C.D. Wright, page 19-20

As a by-product of the Ozark Mountains, I have long been at least semi-aware of my standing brothers and sisters, the hardwoods. Rocks, rivers, and trees we had in surplus. In our yard were four species of oak–white, post, blackjack, and Arkansas oak There are 29 species in the state); 7 or 9 pink and white dogwoods, a handsome blue spruce, an A1 southern magnolia, and two cedar sentinels beside the front steps. The red maple was lost early on.

Casting Deep Shade/ C.D. Wright, page 25

I love her writing style and the stories and accounts that accumulate, creating the feeling of wandering and wondering about beeches. I also like how she weaves in the I and her personal stories — including them, but not making them the center of this story. There is no center, only stories and information culled from a range of sources. I see this book as an inspiration as I continue to work towards polishing my log writing and turning some of my words here into something more condensed, crafted.