Tag: 10 things

june 4/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
67 degrees

Another successful 9/1 run, where success = picking something and committing to it and keeping steady and relaxed. Yesterday it rained most of the day, so no running. Evn if it hadn’t been raining, I wouldn’t/couldn’t have fun; smoke from the Canadian wild fires made the air quality terrible. Not just hazy; I could smell/feel the smoke. Today it’s much better.

9 Things

  1. mowing
  2. sweating
  3. bugs
  4. shadows
  5. voices
  6. laughter
  7. crowds
  8. cars
  9. potholes

I tried something new today with the 10 things. At the end of my run, I pulled out my phone and recorded a list of things. I ended up with nine because I forgot to count as I was doing it. By the end, I wasn’t sure of how many things I had listed.

On Monday, we moved RJP into her new apartment. She handled the stress of moving very well. What a difference a year makes!

Here’s another bit from Brian Teare’s Companion Grasses I’d like to remember:

from Tall Flatsedge Notebook/ Brian Teare

A guidebook calls it “tall Flatsedge” but at my desk
it doesn’t stick : each sketched notebook detail floats
slowly from what once had make it live. At its smallest
:matter has no ideals” : taking off my socks, I find
several flatsedge seeds hooked : no split of self
from self—it can’t lack—carbon, oxygen, nitrogen—
it’s being & being singly is. All day at Chimney Rock
I’d returned to three thoughts :

you; the “world

we wanted to go out into,
to come to ourselves into”;

& the right form
to bridge two subjects apart

“organizations in the sound of them
verg[e] upon meaning,
upon ‘Heaven;”

As part of this section, Teare includes sources for these ideas in the left margins. I fiddled around with columns to add them in, but I wasn’t able to. Maggie Nelson did a similar thing with sources in The Argonauts. And Alice Oswald does it in Dart to identify the “voice” that is speaking in the poem. I’d like to experiment with this in a piece involving my notes for a gorge run.

I also like his discussion of bridging the gap between two subjects — you and the world. Here I’m thinking of the you and the I, too.

june 2/RUN

2.25 miles
2 trails
70 degrees

14 years ago today, I started running. I wanted to mark the occasion with a longer run, but it’s warm and I don’t have time. This morning we move RJP into her first apartment. It’s difficult to put into words how I’m feeling. I will miss her being here, but I’m not sad. I’m excited for her and for me. She’s ready, and I am too.

10 Things

  1. bugs
  2. breeze
  3. drip drip drip
  4. mulching leaves
  5. bird chorus
  6. hazed surface
  7. distanced
  8. shrill
  9. dark green
  10. wood chipped

Something new to try: if I look at this list in a few days, are these words enough to remind me of what I noticed and experienced on this run? Future Sara, let us know!

Discovered this book today, Hardly Creatures. It looks amazing! I found out about through Poetry Daily, which is where I’m finding out about most of my new favorite poets. I think this should be an early birthday present to me! (update: bought it!)

I found out about this book from this interview, which was linked to on Poetry Daily.

I want to remember this part:

The question I asked at the very beginning, before writing many poems from this, was: what would accessible poetry mean, maybe not in the ways that mean “easy to read” or “intelligible,” but as in “meeting the needs of the reader”? How could a poem do everything a poem wants to do, while also meeting the needs of the reader? That questioning drove the whole book, the individual poems themselves, and especially the access symbols. 

JGJ: “Meeting the needs of the reader” is exactly it. I felt like needs I didn’t even know I had were accounted for while reading this collection. Sometimes there’d be a poem that was just the title, and the rest of the page would be blank. Those moments helped me realize that I actually needed to just sit and take the previous poem in, because maybe it had a lot of heavy material, or had a lot happening in it. Those moments give the reader their own authority over the reading experience. One could choose to just sit there in the blank space, or choose to reread the poem, or move on. 

There’s one poem, “History of Display,” that really stuck out to me. While reading, the poem was at once being really guiding and gentle, but didn’t let that tenderness stop it from criticizing the absurdity of our ableist world. How did you learn to strike such a balance in your writing, of making sure to meet the needs of your reader, while also remaining critical?

RMC: I paid a lot of attention to my own experiences reading. I’m not always the best reader… I’m a very tired and sleepy person, and I would sort of pay attention to things like, Okay, how many poems can I get through before I feel like I need to stop? Or, What order of poems is helpful to keep me reading? If while reading I encounter a super dense, lyrical poem on one page, enough to make me think, I hope the next one’s shorter, and then the next one would be just as dense, it would pull me out of the work. I would feel bad about that because it’d be wonderful work, but because my needs weren’t being met, I wasn’t able to give my fullest attention to the work. 

My inclination towards form was very helpful, because it helped to break apart the book into smaller units, poem by poem, and then wing by wing. It was a lot of reading, paying attention to how reading felt, and thinking about what made me feel better when I was reading.

I can’t read a lot of words; it hurts my eyes/brain and I often fall asleep. I’m drawn to shorter forms that I can easily hold in my head. One approach to accessible could be making all the words available in a recording, but I’d rather reduce the number of words altogether!

may 31/RUN

3.5 miles
top of wabun hill and back
67 degrees

Hot! Sunny! It’s summer. Another successful 9 min run/1 min walk session. Building up discipline. I wasn’t sure what my route would be; I just went where my feet lead me, which was halfway down the hill at Locks and Dam no. 1, then all the way up the hill to Wabun park. At the top, I turned around and descended to the parking lot, then to the river road trail heading north.

10 Things

  1. goose
  2. beard
  3. sliver
  4. hiking poles
  5. twang
  6. braid
  7. bench
  8. LOUD!
  9. trail
  10. chartreuse

A honk, then a big shadow on the path in front of me. A goose flying overhead!

At the top of the Wabun hill, a guy in a wheelchair, at an angle, looking down at the river. His white beard glowed in the sunlight.

Remembered to look for the river. Only saw a sliver of it through the tree.

Running up the hill at the locks and dam, passing by 2 people powering up the hill, using hiking poles.

A car — or was it a bike? — blasting country music. Not sure who or what it was. All I could hear was twang.

Approaching then passing another runner from behind, noticing her long, white braid. I couldn’t quite hear, but I think she called out, good job!

A bench facing a wall of green. Someone was sitting on it, taking in the green view.

A mini peloton of 30 or so riders on the road. Their whirring wheels were so LOUD!

Running down the short stretch of the path that dips below the road, I noticed a steep trail descending to the river. I’d like to take it some day.

Seen on the wabun hill: a walker wearing chartreuse shorts.

I did it. I struggled to come up with 10 things. Maybe because it was a shorter run or because I was hot or because not much was happening on the trail this morning. No — not that last one. There’s always something happening on or near the trail!

may 26/RUN

4.6 miles
veterans home
63 degrees

Ran to the falls. Every day, my legs are feeling stronger. Will I be ready to run almost 8 miles next week? Yes! I listened to all the walkers and bikers and roller skiers and runners out by the gorge as I ran south, my “color” playlist as I ran north. I stopped a few times to record some ideas about my blue poem. Yesterday was indigo, today it’s blue.

10 Things

  1. roots
  2. sky
  3. roar
  4. flags
  5. voices
  6. bikers
  7. Sawyer
  8. horns
  9. picnic
  10. honks

Near the end of my run, I ran on the grassy boulevard between the river road and edmund. There were a lot of them, but I managed to not trip over any of the roots popping out of the dry dirt.

The sky was a cloudless blue, sometimes bright, sometimes pale.

At the park, I didn’t run near the falls, but I could still hear its roar as it rushed over the edge.

Memorial Day. At the Veterans home, the road was lined with flags.

Crossing over the creek on the high bridge, I could hear kids’ voices below, laughing and calling out to each other. I couldn’t hear any splashing, but I could tell by their tone that they were in the water.

The path was thick with fast moving bikers.

No — Sawyer — no! Two adults called out to their toddler when he tried to follow me as I ran by.

Running down the steep hill near locks and dam no. 1, I heard horns on the ford bridge. Was it in support of memorial day? Against a war or a dictator? (update, minutes later: Scott ran too. He saw someone walking through the park with a sign that read, Democracy dies in silence.)

At Wabun, a dozen or more people were having a picnic under one of the pavilions.

About a mile into my run, a cacophony above the trees. Geese! I followed their honks up into the sky and witnessed a wedge heading north.

blue

Today, I’m thinking about blue and trying to write a sonnet about it. As I ran, some ideas flashed in my head, so I stopped to record them:

after mile 1: inspired by the cacophony of honking geese, I thought about blue as an action, a verb, a phenomenon, not a noun or a pigment. Also: unfenced water, scattered sky.

after mile 2: Thinking about me as blue — as sparkling and shimmering and scattering and flinging waves of light all around. Blue as a happening that is not solid or tangible but imagined, a trick of the light, a “real” that we create for ourselves out of desire. Blue cannot capture the color, the feeling, the happening that blue is.

after finishing the run: The blue sky is not smooth or seamless. I see the scattering, the static, the pixels — the veil that hides the illusion of sight and seeing color, has been lifted.

Searching through my archive for thoughts about blue, I came across this fact, which inspired my thinking about scattering:

Like all other blue birds, Indigo Buntings lack blue pigment. Their jewel-like color comes instead from microscopic structures in the feathers that refract and reflect blue light, much like the airborne particles that cause the sky to look blue.

All About Birds

may 25/RUN

3.5 miles
trestle turn around
63 degrees

Felt good today. Ran a little faster, felt a little freer. Even though the weather is great, it’s Sunday, and it’s almost noon, the paths weren’t that crowded. Was it because it’s memorial day weekend? Whatever the reason, I appreciate not having to dodge bikers or groups of walkers.

10 Things

  1. sea
  2. stacked
  3. stink
  4. staring
  5. shadows
  6. craters
  7. purple
  8. soft
  9. sitting
  10. saw

Running through the tunnel of trees above the floodplain forest, a sea of green. No sky or river or solid ground.

4 stones stacked on the ancient boulder.

Above the rowing club, a slight stink from the sewers — sweet and sour.

Running up the hill, past the old stone steps, 2 walkers and a dog about to descend the old stone steps. I couldn’t see their faces, but I felt like they were staring at me.

At the start of my run, bird shadows: a big one swooping, several smaller ones shooting across the street like bullets.

The craters in the patched crack near the trestle seem to be growing deeper.

Running past a tree, a flash of purple in the otherwise green leaves. Was that a trick of the light?

The soft sound of water falling or wind gently rustling the leaves near the ravine.

I was planning to stop at the sliding bench, but 2 people were already sitting there.

Before I began running, I heard a woman’s voice — you did it! Then the sound of a saw buzzing, then good job! Her tone sounded like she was praising a little kid. I wondered if that were true and how old the kid was that she was teaching to use a power saw — not in judgment, in wonder.

indigo

I have returned to my color poems. Before I ran, I was thinking about indigo again. During the run, an idea popped in my head, so just past the trestle I stopped to record it:

Thinking about indigo and idea of wanting this time, at night, that is dark without stars. Which is referencing how, when I lose all of my cone cells, there may never be true dark. And then thinking also about how true dark is not possible (in the city) because of light pollution. The idea that indigo is something both wished for and feared.

another grass line

It will soon be cold here,
and dark here;
the grass will lie flat
to search for its spring head.
(Love in the Weather’s Bells/ Jay Wright)

may 23/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
56 degrees

Didn’t feel the greatest — unfinished business — but managed to keep running and feeling strong, especially in my legs. Today is another beautiful day. When I walked outside, I whispered, wow! Sun, blue sky, warm air, birds, dry paths.

10 Things

  1. scary
  2. runner!
  3. cooler
  4. busker
  5. bikes
  6. busy
  7. left
  8. cobblestones
  9. unstacked
  10. hitch

In the bathroom at the falls, a little boy in the next stall was scared by the loud sounds — toilets flushing, hand dryers buzzing. His mom said, try putting your hands over your ears and I imagined him trying — wide-eyed with tiny sticky hands up to his ears.

Running south on the trail, a long train of young bikers — a school field trip? — slowly passed me. As each biker approached me, they would call out to the others behind them, runner! I was impressed until one of them yelled it right in my ear. Ouch!

Taking the part of the trail that dips lower than the road and into the shade, everything was darker, dimmer, cooler.

Running through the park, I passed a busker playing an instrument that I couldn’t see because I was running too fast or hear because I had headphones on.

The kids that had biked past me on the trail had stopped at the falls. Their bikes had taken over a grassy hill near the playground. So many bikes!

The park was busy — people walking, biking, taking pictures, eating outside at Sea Salt or near the pavilion.

A woman on a bike with a kid on a seat behind her extended her right arm to signal a left turn. There was something about how straight and stiff her arm was that made me remember the gesture.

Ran over the cobblestones near the falls overlook. Later, leaving the park, listened to Simon & Garfunkel sing about cobblestones and feelin’ groovy. Thought about how my ophthalmologist told me I had signs of cobblestones in my peripheral vision a few years ago.

The white plastic chairs I wrote about a few days ago that were stacked, are now unstacked and set up side by side in the shade of the building.

A runner passed me. I couldn’t see it, but I heard a slight hitch in his step as one foot strike was always slightly louder and longer than the other. I wondered, what do people hear in my foot strikes?

before the run

Reading the poem-of-the-day on Poetry Foundation — We/ Joshua Bennett, I was struck by a word near the end, apprehension.

he is a father now, with a boy he is trying to teach
the benefits of apprehension.

I wanted to dig into apprehension, so I looked it up and found this, on Merriam-Webster:

There’s quite a bit to comprehend about apprehension, so let’s take a closer look at its history. The Latin ancestor of apprehension (and of comprehend, prehensile, and even prison, among others) is the verb prehendere, meaning “to grasp” or “to seize.” When it was first used in the 14th century, apprehension could refer to the act of learning, a sense that is now obsolete, or the ability or power to understand things—learning and understanding both being ways to “grasp” knowledge or information. It wasn’t until the late 16th century that apprehension was used, as it still is today, for the physical seizure of something or someone (as an arrest). The most commonly used sense of apprehension today refers to a feeling that something bad is about to happen, when you seize up, perhaps, with anxiety or dread, having grasped all the unpleasant possibilities.

entry for apprehension

I started to think about prehension too. It feels vaguely religious/spiritual to me. I looked it up: “apprehension by the senses.”

I like how apprehension and its grasp, can mean to understand or “get” something — to grasp it, but also to be seized or held by it — is this seizing always negative/oppressive?

All of this musing over the different meanings of apprehension, returns me to the beginning of the poem and the narrator’s wrestling with different meanings of attention — as the money of the mind or care or access to the Divine. Of course, to care can also lead to caring too much, being preoccupied with, worried, anxious, apprehensive. Now I’m thinking about the color of the therapist’s dress and the disagreement over whether it is a yellow-based red or a blue-based red. And I’m thinking about this line —

still studying the difference between
what a man proclaims in speech and what he says with his
body.

The difference between comprehension (knowing in language) and apprehension (knowing through senses). All of these tensions with opposing meanings. I mentioned this Scott at breakfast and added, wow, the word apprehension comes near the end of the poem. It’s the volta — the moment in which the poem turns, shifts, a door opens to unlock understanding or to upend understanding!

The Italian word for “turn,” a volta is a rhetorical shift that marks the change of a thought or argument in a poem. 

Other common names for volta include turn, fulcrum, or hinge. The volta marks a shift from the main narrative or idea of the poem and awakens readers to a different meaning or to a reveal in the conclusion of the poem. They often use words like “but,” “yet,” or “however” to distinguish a reversal or shift in thought. 

Voltas are part of the sonnet form. In the Petrarchan sonnet, the volta occurs between the eighth and ninth lines. In the Shakespearean sonnet, the volta occurs before the final couplet. Voltas are also characteristics of other poetic forms, and can even occur in free verse poems. 

Volta

And now, writing this last sentence, I’m realizing that the volta is a MOMENT, to put beside my other definitions of moment.

I go to the gorge

I go to the gorge/to find the soft space/between beats. Woke up this morning to the news that a favorite poem of mine, written in the late fall of 2022, will be published this August. Hooray! Yesterday, watching a book trailer for Litany for the Long Moment — a book that I’d like to read, but might have to ILL or buy it to do so, I had an idea for a video project. Something about the mix of music, text on the screen, and the flash of images, made me think about my ritual/circumambulation project and the idea of chanting,

I go to
the gorge

over and over and finishing the phrase differently each time with cuts between text/voice and images from the gorge. I imagine an acceleration of this text and images until something breaks open and ? — maybe silence, the image of the air above the gorge, and then voice-over of the entire poem. After that, a return to more images, softer and slower this time, and more chanting.

I go to/the gorge || to open/a door
I go to/the gorge || to be with/ my mom
I go to the gorge ||to become/ shadow

names

a connection between the two other poems-of-the-day:

1

from Poetry Daily and Visitation/ Kelly Hoffer

my nameis the last name my mother refused
to change. so as not to lose you, the hospital
lists your name with your mother’s on your
baby wristlet. thislife is a repetition that knows
no bounds, tracing a tablet into a waxing
oval that spirals outward. seed of a
seed sowing itself into the ground. this name
just happens to be the size of the concept growing.

2

from Poets.org and Naming/ Julia Kolchinsky

For the first month of life, I was 
unnamed. To my Mama, my body belonged 
to one name, and to my Babushka, another, so 

they called me Lyalya, Lyalichka, little 
doll, baby, because neither would bend 
their letters and though I was already known 

to scream, to refuse sleep and strangers, 
they couldn’t have known then how, 
silently, I’d keep screaming, keep refusing 

any name they’d give me, how in my mouth, 
it wouldn’t feel like mine, and on the tongues 
of others, even less like I belonged. 

may 22/WALK

60 minutes
winchell trail, south/grassy boulevard, north
55 degrees

The rain is over. Now, warm sun and green green green! A beautiful morning for a walk with Delia the dog. Calm and quiet and wonderful.

10 Things

  1. lilac bushes
  2. BLUE!
  3. BEEP! BEEP!
  4. velvet
  5. squish
  6. tin-whistle
  7. friends
  8. dappled
  9. dandelions
  10. unruly

Walking by a row of lilac bushes up against a fence, breathing in the sweet, flowery smell. No memories conjured, just a smile spreading across my face and a feeling of satisfaction.

With my polarized sunglasses on, the sky looked almost too blue to be true. The kind of blue that is so intensely BLUE! that it seems ominous.

Walking in the grass with Delia, our reverie was interrupted by a BEEP! BEEP! as a car attempted to pass 3 cars on the river road before quickly slotting in behind a fourth right as a car was approaching from the other way.

On the winchell trail, I reached out to a basswood (also known as linden) tree and its lined leaf. A soft shock — the leaf felt like velvet!

After the rain, I wondered how wet the dirt would be. Wet! I stepped cautiously on it and squish, mud!

That sound! Sharp. Metallic. I think it was a robin with its tin-whistle call, echoing throughout the savanna.

Up on the mesa, we encountered another dog and their human. Delia and the other dog, about her size and temperament, chased each other while we — the humans — wished good morning to each other. A brief encounter with new friends.

The trees cast their shadows on the grass. All around, dappled light.

The slender, rubbery stalks of dandelions with their fluffy white heads dotted the grass. I wondered what this stage is called so I looked it up: AI says, seed head or blowball. I prefer blowball!

Everywhere I looked, green. Green grass, green trees, green view. Unruly green leaves reaching through the slats of the fence. Oh, to be that green! To claim space with such wild abandon!

note: This is the second day I’ve tried a new experiment with my 10 Things. Instead of describing the things in the list, I’m picking 10 words and then writing about each in sentences and/or paragraphs.

air / breath

Was reminded of this beautiful poem from my entry on this day in 2017:

as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space around the hands and the space of the room and the space of the building that surrounds the room and the space of the neighborhoods nearby and the space of the cities and the space of the regions and the space of the nations and the space of the continents and islands and the space of the oceans and the space of the troposphere and the space of the stratosphere and the space of the mesosphere in and out.
(This Connection of Everyone with Lungs/ Juliana Spahr)

I want to connect this idea of lungs and breath to a favorite fragment of mine about feet first, following. Feet syncing up with breath.

Spahr’s lines make me think of the moment as a space, a Nothing space. Not empty, but no words or memories or history or self. A shared space possessed by no one, Chloe Garcia Roberts’ the median intervals of floating passivity that resist recollection.

In the time that it took me to find the Roberts line, I lost my train of thought. Maybe it is dwelling in that space between? Can I return to it?

Not sure if this is the thought I lost, but I’m also thinking of this space/time — moment — as when/where I encounter a walker on the winchell trail and I thank them for moving over to let me pass. The moment after I say, thank you, and before they say, you’re welcome, when the you is floating between us, in the process of being exhanged from them to me.

No, I think this might have been it: Not the floating passivity of Roberts — a nothing in-between — but more like dirt in Sharon Olds’ “Ode to Dirt“:

Dear dirt, I am sorry I slighted you, I thought that you were only the background for the leading characters—the plants and animals and human animals. It’s as if I had loved only the stars and not the sky which gave them space in which to shine.

That space, that air — and here I’m thinking especially of the air above and within the gorge — that is a character in my story, not just the background —

When I understood I had never honored you as a living equal, I was ashamed of myself, as if I had not recognized a character who looked so different from me

I’ve devoted a lot of attention to water and stone beside the gorge, but the air has always been there, too. Air as the space between things, which isn’t really empty, but filled with stuff too small to see.

sinkhole

Last night at dinner, FWA mentioned that a sinkhole had opened up somewhere in St. Paul. I hadn’t heard about it. Just now I looked it up. A 35 foot — 35! — hole happened in the middle of busy 7th street. Watching a news clip about it, the director of public works said, we’re not sure how it happened yet. We need to dig down 35 feet to the sanitary sewer and fix that. Wow — so the sewer line is 35 feet below the surface? 35 feet is more than 6 Saras stacked! The sinkhole opened up on 8 may. I couldn’t find any update about it. I wonder when and if we’ll find out what caused it.

may 21/RUN

5.5 miles
ford loop
44 degrees
drizzle

Wasn’t planning to run the ford loop, but I started it and then just kept going. It felt good, relaxed, not hard to keep my heart rate a little lower. My pace was slow, but it didn’t feel slow, or fast, or any speed really.

10 Things

  1. mist
  2. dripping
  3. spray
  4. mirrors
  5. puddles
  6. graffiti
  7. traffic
  8. bridge
  9. debris
  10. slick

It rained all day yesterday, and some early in the morning. Started again during my run. Everything dripping wet, including me, although I didn’t really feel it, or couldn’t distinguish it from my sweat. Before I started running, as I walked through the neighborhood, I looked into the puddles on the sidewalk and admired how they had become mirrors, reflecting the sky and the trees. Running over the river, I looked down at the east bank and saw colorful graffiti all over the rocks at the base of the lake street bridge. In spots, the trail was slick with mud or covered in debris — fallen leaves, broken branches, grit. Crossing the ford bridge, I looked north and was delighted by the mist, making everything seem fuzzy and unformed. The traffic on the bridge was thick — I couldn’t see or feel any spray coming off of their wheels, but I could hear it.

overheard: one runner to another — you can bank the time.
Another use of time as a commodity.

Listened to the water, in its various forms, for the first half of my run. Put in my “moment” playlist for the second half. The most memorable song today: One Moment in Time/ Whitney Houston

A line that stood out to me:

And in that one moment of time
I will feel
I will feel eternity

I thought about Mary Oliver’s definition of eternity and how Whitney Houston’s doesn’t fit with it. MO understands eternity as creative time that’s outside of the ordinary and beyond the self. Houston’s eternity seems more like eternal glory.

As I listened to all of the lyrics, I thought about Whitney Houston’s tragic life and terrible death — an overdose. I also thought about the idea of one moment and what happens after that moment is over. And this made me think about post-Olympic blues, or post-marathon blues, or post-publishing a poem blues.

To keep myself distracted and steady, I chanted in triple berries —– strawberry blueberry raspberry. Then I chanted my poem — I go to the gorge/to find the soft space/between beats.

more on the moment as between

Read a very brief interview with Marie Howe the other day. She mentioned a poem that inspired her and that she wished everyone would read: The Season of Phantasmal Peace/ Derek Walcott. Beautiful! Here’s a line to remember that describes the moment:

and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace

Before my run, I began listening to a talk by Jennifer Chang, “Other Pastorals: Writing Race and Place“. She mentions one between in the presentation of her thesis statement: how poets of color use pastoral to grapple with the complex composition of place as a tension between lived and learned experience. She recites another between from Rick Barot’s “On Gardens”: somewhere between/what the eye sees and what the mind thinks/is the world, landscapes mangled/into sentences, one color read into rage.

Chang also mentions context: If you look at the word “garden” deep enough you see it blossoming in an enclosure meant to keep out history and disorder.

Chang’s lecture is part of the Bread Loaf conference in 2019. This page has many great links for future Sara to explore.

And here is a helpful essay with some ideas for thinking about the pastoral, and links to poems, like Rita Dove’s Reverie in Open Air, which I’ve already posted on this log. The second half of Dove’s poems fits with early May’s theme of grass:

But this lawn has been leveled for looking,   
So I kick off my sandals and walk its cool green.   
Who claims we’re mere muscle and fluids?   
My feet are the primitives here.   
As for the rest—ah, the air now   
Is a tonic of absence, bearing nothing   
But news of a breeze.

And a few more grass lines from Jennifer Chang:

Stalk of wither. Grass-
noise fighting weed-noise. Dirt
and chant. Something in the
field.
(Pastoral/ Jennifer Chang)

What sound does grass make? Wind through the grass, crunching over dry, brittle grass, feet on grass — bunny’s feet:

 I think my favorite sound was the soft footsteps of the bunny hurrying across the lawn. A silvery whisper only possible to hear on a calm summer morning like today. I love the sound of animal feet moving — running or hopping through the grass

log entry on 16 july 2024

may 19/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
54 degrees
wind: 15 mph

Even though I’ve run the past 3 days, I decided to run again today for 2 reasons: 1. it’s supposed to rain all day tomorrow and Wednesday and I don’t want to run in the rain and 2. we have leftover butternut squash mac and cheese, and I always like to run before eating it for lunch. A good run. Managed to keep my heart rate lower until I reached the falls. Had to stop at the bathroom in the park building for some unfinished business. Will that be a problem again this summer? After, I put in my “Moment” playlist and ran again until I reached the bench above the edge of the world. I was planning to stop, but I noticed someone was sitting there. Bummer

Because I wanted to eat right when I got back, I gave myself about 3 minutes to jot down 10 things I remembered from the run (the jotted list was brief; below was written after I ate):

10 Things

  1. didn’t see the falls, but heard it — not a roar, but a rush of water
  2. looking ahead, seeing someone on the dirt trail next to the path — is that a kid? It looked like they were moving towards me. As I got closer — 15 or 20 feet, I realized it was not a person, but a bike — and a bike that had been parked there yesterday too
  3. a strong wind — for one stretch I was worried it would rip my cap off of my head
  4. 2 plastic white chairs stacked on the side of the park building — later in the summer they will be unstacked and people will usually be sitting in them
  5. a long row of port-a-potties (20 or more?) still standing after Saturday’s race. I wondered if they were planning to pick them up or if there was another race this weekend
  6. a walker, passed twice, bundled up in a winter coat, a winter cap (with a ball on top), and a mask
  7. the faint laughter and yelling of kids on a playground
  8. the dim roar and rush and rustle of the wind moving through the trees
  9. a fully parking lot at the falls
  10. noticed beneath the dirt next the trail just north of the 44th street parking lot: netting left behind from a failed attempt at re-grassing this stretch

more on the moment

Looking at my Plague Notebook, vol. 26, I saw that I had written CONTEXT for yesterday’s entry — as in, moments have a context, a history, a location in space. I remember being reminded of context as I walked back home after my run while listening to Rut by Wimps:

Each day is
the same as the last
There is no future
There is no past

I like routine
It’s my favorite thing
No new memories
Don’t change my scenery

Note: I listened to some other songs on the City Lights, the album “Rut” comes from. Wow — it’s all about losing your Self when you become a Mom.

Responding to the word context in yesterday’s entry, for today I wrote: Yes, context is important! A moment is not out of time, but deeper in it — geologic time.

For future Sara, who will want to bring context into any writing we do with the moment, past Sara discussed it in these entries: 6 may, 7 may, 8 may 2025

Poetry Daily’s poem-of-the-day is a great one for thinking about moments: Temporal Saturation by Chloe Garcia Roberts in their book, Fire Eater. I might want to buy this book for my birthday?

temporal saturation—the explanation for why certain moments of your life seem to spill or shrink, to transcend or subvert their physical duration, and color differently their surrounding time.

This is a wonderful description of a Moment!

Temporal saturation is an elusive measurement disproving any correlation between quantity and influence that is used to explain both the canyons that can appear inside moments of great rending, joyous or horrific, entombing an incarnation of the self which will never again exist; as well as the median intervals of floating passivity that resist recollection and whose ending is marked by a feeling of awakening: a drowsy startle or a gradual reconsciousness.

Difficult to measure / length of time does not determine significance / the canyons inside moments — canyons = the Mississippi River Gorge?! / not entombing a past or gone self but holding it / floating passivity = the space between beats?

saturation = the state or process that occurs when no more of something can be absorbed || Can I make a connection with the dew point and its impact on a moving body? dew point = “the temperature at which the air becomes saturated with water vapor”

High levels of temporal saturation are evidenced by a languorous stretching of the experienced present, which then refracts and amplifies the emotion of the moment. The joy making this spreading pleasurable, the fear terrible, though both poles can be described in terms of the sensation of falling. The difference being that the first is a falling into and the latter a falling through

refracts = deflects / distorts / bends / disrupts

falling through = And then a plank in reason broke / And I dropped down and down / And hit a World at every plunge / And finished knowing then (I wrote these lines from “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain,” from memory so the punctuation and capitalization aren’t quite right).

Low levels of temporal saturation are evidenced by malaise, an involuntary refusal on the part of the individual to knit themselves to the place they occupy. Home-sickness—the corporeal and spiritual longing for a physical and temporal point of greatest belonging—is the best diagnosis to describe these ebbs of existence.

No moments = a lack of connection, an untethering, no home

The measurement of temporal saturation then can be used to quantify both the abscesses and the vividities, these gestures floating in great swathes of meaningless automation. Just as the atoms composing a human body can condense smaller than the head of a pin, the self can, like a black hole collapse, like a poem reduce. And the proof of the emptiness that oceans those bright livings is how they sparkle and call to each other despite the expanse of the interims, be they seconds, decades, lifetimes. Inlaid in space, they form the constellation of the soul.

water images: floating, condensation, oceans, sparkle — like waves hit by light
the sparkle reminds me of swimming across the lake and seeing the sparkling water, realizing that each cluster of sparkles was another swimmers’ hand piercing the water

seconds, decades, lifetimes: Aren’t we all just masses of energy and light in a jumbled future or past, stopping to embrace one another for a moment or decades before passing too far for sight? (Halos/ Ed Bok Lee)

The dew point is the temperature when air condenses on the skin and turns into sweat.

Lorine Niedecker and the poet’s work: condensing. “A condensary is where condensed milk is made. In order to make condensed milk, you evaporate a significant amount of water from milk and what you’re left with is
something delicious and much more concentrated and powerful” (Close Reading).

may 18/RUN

3.3 miles
locks and dam no. 1
48 degrees

Still not as warm as last week, but great weather! Sunny, calm, a slight chill so I didn’t overheat. There were stretches on the trail, at least during the first mile, when there were no cars or people, only quiet. Just before reaching under the ford bridge, I decided to turn off on the dirt trail that goes through a small woods beside the bridge. I’ve never taken it, but always wondered how it went — I already knew where it went: up to the trail beside ford that descends to locks and dam parking lot. I didn’t get lost, but was a bit uncertain as to where to go as the trail wound through trees and tall grass and huge chunks of abandoned asphalt or concrete.

another moment: not when you’re lost, but just after you realize you don’t know where you are and just before you locate yourself, or accept and embrace being lost.

Emerging from the woods, I took off my sweatshirt and put in my “Moment” playlist before descending the hill and heading back north.

Listened to:

“Learning to Fly”/ Pink Floyd — I remember liking it, and thinking it was fitting for the theme, but I can’t remember why. I’ll have to listen to it again.

“Between the Devil and Deep Blue Sea”/ Ella Fitzgerald — thought about the moment when you’re faced with a difficult, impossible decision — “Sophie’s Choice” came into my head and I thought about this fall and how I almost had to make one of those impossible decisions over which of my kids to save.

“Threshold” / Steve Miller — This is the opening to another Steve Miller song, or they’ve been mashed together like, We Will Rock You and We are the Champions. The song, Jet Airliner. It was strange to be listening to Threshold and anticipating the opening of Jet Airliner.

“The Moment”/ Tame Impala. Favorite line, I fell in love with the sound of my heels on the wooden floor

“Iris”/ Goo Goo Dolls — RJP’s suggested this one. Very 90s. RJP mentioned that it transports her back to a rough place. I thought about her as I listened to the lyrics and I recalled a 90s song that did that to me: “I Can’t Make You Love Me” / Bonnie Raite.

After I finished my run, I heard, “Vienna”/ Billy Joel, “Rut”/ Wimps, and “Before He Cheats”/ Carrie Underwood. So glad I added “Rut” — never heard of it, but it fits nicely with my theme.

10 Things

  1. a huge trunk of a tree in the woods — hollowed out, having fallen some time ago, empty of any roots or dirt or even bugs
  2. a slab of concrete or asphalt that used to be part of the road or a trail, half buried in dirt in the woods
  3. voices in the gorge — the coxswain and a rower or two
  4. a white pick-up truck turning into the locks and dam no. 1 parking lot then backing up, turning around, and leaving
  5. the sound of water falling softly, or wind through the leaves, or both
  6. persistent (or insistent?) movement out of the corner of my eye — a runner across the road, running in the grass
  7. approaching 2 runners taking up too much of the path as a biker sped towards us — me having to run through the middle of them, squeezing my shoulders tight to fit — the woman seemed to huff, as if annoyed that I was crowding her — did I imagine that last bit?
  8. filled bench, 1: a person sitting
  9. filled bench, 2: a person standing next to a bike — I got the feeling they seemed uncertain but I’m not sure why I thought that — how could I see that, I was moving so fast?
  10. 2 people standing in the middle of the walking trail, looking at their phone — were they confused? lost?

also noticed: a roller skier, a song coming out of someone’s radio, 2 people walking with a dog in the grass that’s across the river road from the double bridge, many runners, port-a-potties and orange cones from yesterday’s race

another moment: Distracted from passing another runner and listening to my playlist, I lost some moments — the moments between the 44th street parking lot and the folwell bench. I can’t recall running them. I remember thinking that I didn’t remember right as it was happening.

moment — some wanderings

“You can never even say what happened, because what happened is rarely said, but it occurs among the glasses with water and lemon in them. And so you can’t say what happened but you can talk about the glasses or the lemon. And that something is in between all that” (Marie Howe).

The other day, I asked FWA why he didn’t talk to his therapist about not wanting to go on a trip before it was too late, and he said I didn’t know I didn’t want to go. I couldn’t put into words what I was feeling. I responded: instead of trying to find the words, why not describe what you are actually doing, or not doing, in your every day life, and he’ll figure out that something is wrong.

The idea of describing the things — habits or lemons or glasses — when you can’t describe what’s happening, seems similar, but not the same, to via negativa. Maybe the other side of it?

Instead of finding meaning by describing what is not there, or what you don’t know (via negativa), you’re determining the meaning of the unknown/absent by what frames it, or surrounds it, or shows evidence of its absence, or its hidden presence.

For more on via negativa, see 7 sept 2023.

I’m thinking of a moment as something out of the ordinary, or something so ordinary it’s exceptional, happening, and instead of being framed by beats (or ticks of the clock) like a minute is, it’s framed by objects or actions of everyday life.

note for post-run Sara: think about the idea of the moment in relation to Mary Oliver’s eternal time.