Tag: 10 things

dec 15/RUN

7.25 miles
lake nokomis and back
41 degrees

Ran to Lake Nokomis and back — a December goal achieved! A few weeks ago, I told Scott that I wanted to do that at least once before the end of 2023. Today was a great day to do it. Overcast, mild, hardly any wind. Everything brown and orange and calm. I felt relaxed and strong and only a little sore in my left hip.

Ran above the river, past the falls, over the mustache and duck bridges, by Minnehaha creek and Lake Hiawatha, then to the big beach at Lake Nokomis. I ran down the sidewalk that leads to the lifeguard stand and the water — the sidewalk I often take in the summer just before starting open swim. I thought about summer and swimming, then took this video:

Lake Nokomis / 15 dec 2023 / above the frame, a bird was flying

Ran on Minnehaha Parkway on the way back.

10 Things

  1. several spots in the split rail fence where the railing was bent or leaning or broken
  2. headlights cutting through the pale gray sky
  3. people walking below me on the Winchell Trail
  4. kids laughing on a playground*
  5. the parking lot at the falls had a few more cars in it then earlier in the week
  6. the creek was half frozen — thin sheets of ice everywhere
  7. a woman called out to a dog — liam or sam, I think? — or was she calling out to me, ma’am?
  8. a young girl testing out the thin ice on the edge of the lake — her name was Aubrey — I know this because a woman kept calling out Aubrey! Aubrey! No, don’t! and then, Let’s go Aubrey. I need to eat!
  9. the sidewalk was wet — in some spots, slick
  10. running north on the river road trail, in the groove, an older man on a bike called out, You’re a running machine! I was so surprised I snorted in response

*as I listened to the kids, I thought about how this sound doesn’t really change. Over the years, it comes from different kids, but the sound is the same. Season after season, year after year.

before the run

I’m trying to stop working on my poem about haunting the gorge, but I keep returning to it and just as I believe I have found the way in, another door opens, leading me in a different direction. When do you follow those doors and when do you stop? I worry that I’ll just keep wandering and never settle on/into anything. As I write this, I’m realizing that the question of when to keep moving and when to stop are a central theme of the poem. Here’s a bit of the poem that I wrote the other day that sums it up:

Stone is
satisfied
water
wants to be
somewhere
else. Sometimes
I am
water when
I want
to be stone
sometimes
I am stone
when I
need to be
water.

What to do with all of this? Maybe a run will help…

during the run

I kept returning to these questions of staying and leaving, moving and standing still. At one point, I started thinking about how nothing really stands still, the movement just happens at different speeds/paces/directions, in different scales of time. I’m interested in slow time, directionless time, time that seems to repeat, drip.

Then I thought about the value of solid (or stable or slow moving) forms in which to put my words. These forms aren’t forever fixed, but are solid enough to hold those words, to shape them into something meaningful.

after the run

Not sure what to do with all of this, but forms I’m thinking about: running form — the running body, breaths, feet; boulders; dripping, seeping, sloping water

Water! Now I thinking about Bruce Lee’s poem, be water my friend:

Empty your mind. Be
formless shapeless
like water 
now you put 
water into a cup
it becomes the cup you put
water into a bottle
it becomes the bottle you put 
it into a tea pot
it becomes the tea pot
now water can flow or it can
craaaaasshh
be water my friend

And all the different types of water I encountered on my run: river, dripping ravine, falls, creek, weir, lake, puddle, ice. Different forms with different properties — some flow, some stay

And also Marie Howe’s lines about learning from the lake in “From Nowhere”:

 think the sea is a useless teacher, pitching and falling
no matter the weather, when our lives are rather lakes

unlocking in a constant and bewildering spring.

And now I’m remembering some lines from a draft of my poem, “Afterglow”:

No longer
wanting to be water —
formless fluid — but 
the land that contains 
it. Solid defined
giving shape to the flow.

And finally, it’s time to post a poem I read from Gary Snyder in his collection, Riprap:

Thin Ice/ Gary Snyder

Walking in February
A warm day after a long freeze
On an old logging road
Below Sumas Mountain
Cut a walking stick of alder,
Looked down through clouds
On wet fields of the Nooksack—
And stepped on the ice
Of a frozen pool across the road.
It creaked
The white air under
Sprang away, long cracks
Shot out in the black,
My cleated mountain boots
Slipped on the hard slick
—like thin ice—the sudden
Feel of an old phrase made real—
Instant of frozen leaf,
Icewater, and staff in hand.
“Like walking on thin ice—”
I yelled back to a friend,
It broke and I dropped
Eight inches in

note: I just checked and I might have missed something, but I think the last time I ran over 7 miles was on September 21, 2021. I ran 7.2 miles to the bohemian flats. And here’s something interesting: I posted a draft, just finished, of “Afterglow,” with the lines mentioned above included for the first time. Strange how that works.

dec 13/RUN

4.5 miles
john stevens house and back
38 degrees

Sunny and warmer! Shadows! Clear, dry paths! A great afternoon run, even if my left IT band started hurting…again. I was able to run on all of the walking paths, even when they split off from the bike path.

Listened to kids, cars, chainsaws, and some guy with a DEEP voice as I ran to the Steven’s house and The Wiz on the way back.

10 Things

  1. the light was lower — it felt later than 2:30*
  2. a walker with a big white dog
  3. the falls seemed to be rushing more than on Monday
  4. a sour sewer smell near the John Steven’s house
  5. kids yelling and laughing on the playground
  6. a bird flying low in the sky, off to my side, almost looking like a fluttering leaf
  7. the soft whoosh of the light rail nearing the station
  8. the bells ringing as it left the station
  9. my feet feeling strange, awkward until I warmed up
  10. the buzz of a chainsaw echoing across the gorge

*the light reminded me of the line from ED:

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons – 

But this light wasn’t oppressive. It was warm and welcoming.

I’m continuing to plug away at my haunts poem, even though I was feeling burned out yesterday. I decided to read Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior” and the translator’s afterword for Perec’s How to Exhaust a Place. It helped and I think I had a break through this morning. Now I’m looking to Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness and 300 Arguments for inspiration. My focus: restlessness and stone and water. And, 2 mantras: 1. let it go and 2. condense! condense! condense!

dec 11/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
25 degrees
50% snow and ice covered

Cold air! So wonderful to breathe in, to make me feel a little dazed and disconnected. More gloomy white sky. Flurries on my face. Listened to a few birds, the kids on the playground, and the rushing water at the falls on the way there, then Olivia Rodrigo on the way back.

10 Things

  1. the strong smell of weed from behind me — no one in sight, then an old white van with a ladder on the back drove by
  2. much of the walking path was covered in a thin layer of snow/ice — so thin that the dark pavement was still visible, making the snow look light gray
  3. a leaning split rail fence, bent in the middle — not quite broken but almost
  4. a walker with two dogs walking down the steepish trail just past the double bridge — was it icy?
  5. someone in a bright yellow puffer jacket walking with a dog on the winchell trail — they had just crested the short, steep hill right before folwell
  6. the tinny recording of the train bell echoing from across Hiawatha to the falls
  7. the heavy thud of my feet on the cold cobblestones in the park
  8. a walker with a dog emerging from the steps that lead down to the bottom of the falls. As I watched they crossed the bridge
  9. running up the hill at the edge of the park near the sledding hill, remembering my run here a month ago when I imagined it being covered in snow
  10. missing: a view of the river, turkeys, fat tires, orange, red

Stopped at my favorite falls viewing spot and recorded the bridge and the water falling:

minnehaha falls, still falling / 11 dec 2023

At one point on my run back, I suddenly felt a beautiful ache of emotion and thought: tender. Yes, I need to include a few lines in my haunts poem about feeling tender as I run — maybe in contrast with tough and the callouses I mentioned last week (6 dec 2023)?

update, 11 dec 2024: Yesterday, I wrote a section about being tender for my Haunts poem. In the final (so far) draft, I didn’t mention callouses or tough skin, but it was in an earlier draft. I did not remember that I had had these same thoughts a year ago! It took me an entire year to take up this task, which often happens with my writing — it moves slow, or at least slower than I’m used to (or usually seems acceptable in this fast-paced world). Last night, during Scott’s jazz band rehearsal, I mentioned in my plague notebook, geological time. Yes! I want to write a section about how time passes!

dec 8/RUN

3.5 miles
trestle turn around
42 degrees

It didn’t feel as warm as it was because of the wind and the clouds. The sky, smudged white. Gloomy. Clear paths with a few chunks of ice still sticking around. How did they not melt yesterday when it was 49 degrees and sunny? A good run, even if my left IT band was sore.

IT doesn’t stand for iliotibial, it stands for:

  • Itchy Teeth
  • Irksome Toes
  • Incandescent Tonsils
  • Infatuated Trapezoids
  • Indigo Toenails (from Scott)
  • Inconceivable Tracheas (from RJP)

10 Things

  1. a noisy car speeding down the river road — don’t remember the color of the type of car or who was driving it, just remember that it was LOUD and FAST
  2. chick a dee dee dee dee
  3. the floodplain forest was roomy and deep brown and open to the river
  4. click click clack — roller skiers hitting their poles on the path
  5. bright headlights cutting through the tree trunks on the other side of the ravine
  6. can’t remember the color of the river — probably pale brown or gray or brown — just that it was soothing (looked at my video: blueish white)
  7. at the start of the run, the pavement was wet — why? melted snow?
  8. a regular — Santa Claus! we raised our hands in greeting
  9. overdressed — took off my orange sweatshirt at the turn around
  10. a mom on roller skis to her kids, also on roller skis — we’re almost there! I’m assuming she meant the big franklin hill

Listened to my breath, my striking feet, the cars driving by as I ran north. Put in a Billie Eilish playlist running back south.

Before turning around, I took some video at a favorite spot: the curved fence on the Winchell Trail before Franklin:

Not yet winter by the gorge. Listen to the sirens on the other side sing with the chickadees and the cars.

After I finished running, I recalled a line I had composed while running for a poem I’m working on about the bells of St. Thomas:

Have others
outside
forgotten
those bells? 
Or do they
hear them 
ringing still?

I like the double meaning of still here — both: continuing to ring and ringing until they become still/stop. I have to sit with it longer, but I think I’d like ring instead of ringing, but it doesn’t fit the 3/2 form.

As I write this I’m remembering another thought I had: getting rid of all of the longer poems that begin with I — I go to the gorge, I sync up my steps, I want connection, I orbit the gorge, etc. Those are the ghosts that haunt this Haunts poem — they are the traces/residue/palimpsest that is still there, but not fully. I think this makes sense to me, but I’m not sure if I can remove all of those words that I love and have spent so much time with…yet.

dec 6/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
37 degrees

Warmer today. Almost all of the snow has melted. Sunny, bright, shadows. Chirping birds, sparkling water, shimmering sidewalks — melted snow illuminated by sun. I went out feeling a bit overwhelmed, needing a run. It worked. By the end of the run I felt so much better.

I listened to the world around me as I ran to the falls: the birds, kids on the playground, cars whooshing by, the gushing falls. When I turned around, I put in a Billie Eilish playlist on the way back.

At the falls, I stopped at the overlook right beside the falls:

minnehaha falls / 6 dec 2023

10 Things

  1. wet path, shimmering — is it just water, or is it super slick ice?
  2. most of the snow gone, only little ridges on the edges of the trail
  3. empty, open, iceless river
  4. more darting squirrels
  5. encountering a woman in pink running shoes twice
  6. the bells from the light rail ringing and dinging from across the road
  7. my shadow — sharp — running beside me
  8. a runner in a bright blue jacket
  9. an empty parking lot at the falls
  10. the potholes on the path were easier to see because they were filled in with snow while the rest of the path was bare

Thinking about the gorge and WPA walls and riprap and Gary Snyder:

Riprap/ Gary Snyder

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles—
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

I mention the limestone walls made by the WPA in the 30s and 40s in my poem. I’d like to expand on them just a little more. Each rock a word — something there to build on, I think.

riprap: loose stones used to form a foundation

dec 5/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
32 degrees
10% snow-covered

It snowed last night. Less than an inch? Enough to cover everything, making it look like winter, but not enough to cause any problems running on the path. Wonderful! I love winter running. I started out a little cold, with my hood up against the wind, but ended over-heated: lots of sweat and a flushed face. My right IT band hurt a little, but not enough to end the run. I did stop at the halfway point — my favorite spot near “The Song of Hiatwatha,” admiring the falls from a distance. I took some video:

minnehaha falls / 5 dec 2023

video: Minnehaha Creek rushing over the limestone ledge, frozen water on either side of the rushing water, a bridge above, a bridge below.

10 Things

  1. the river: brownish-gray, flat, empty
  2. caw caw caw
  3. the snow is soft and not slick or clumpy, easy to run over
  4. a path winding through the savanna revealed by settled snow
  5. a leaning tree branch, dusted with snow. The snow making visible the trunks texture
  6. rustling in the brush — a squirrel
  7. the voices of kids laughing on the playground
  8. running near the overlook of the falls, not stopping to see the water, just hearing it rushing over the limestone
  9. beep beep beep beep beep beep then a few beats of silence on repeat — a service truck near the roundabout
  10. rabbit footprints all over my driveway — such big footprints!

before the run

This morning, while doing the dishes, I began listening to Chris Dombrowski’s The River You Touch. Here are a few passages I’d like to remember:

What does a mindful, sustainable inhabitance on this small planet look like in the Anthropocene? is no longer an academic question but rather a necessary qualifier to each step we take. For answers, we who have proven ourselves such untrustworthy stewards of our home might look to what Barry Lope called “myriad enduring relationships of the landscape,” to our predecessors, in other words, whose voices are the bells that must sound before any gritty ceremony of community can truly being.

The River We Touch/ Chris Dombrowski

bells — I like this idea of bells as signaling the start of a ceremony. Each loop around the gorge, or run beside the gorge is the start of a ritual, a ceremony, both sacred and mundane. What else do bells signal? I want to review my notes and weave other meanings into my poem.

“listening,” refers to direct contact, engagement, what the forager Jenna Rozelle calls the “primacy of immediate experience.” Callouses on palms formed by friction between human skin and oar handle. Shoulder muscles straining to pull oar blade through current, the oar stroke negotiating with the wave train’s brute liquid force.

The River We Touch/ Chris Dombrowski

The mention of callouses reminds me of Thoreau and his essay on walking:

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character—will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast enough—that the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.

physical dialogue (contact…encounter between feet and land)…sensorial empathy

The faculty of wonder—which, in this context, is simply the unsentimental ability to identify with astonishment the earth and its inhabitants as relational—is diminishing as quickly as any endangered species. If it vanishes as an inevitable byproduct of decreased direct encounters with the physical world, so, too, may go the instinct to protect the very places that sustain us.

Concluding a story about kayaking with his son, encountering a sea otter, attempting to capture the moment with his phone and then dropping the phone in the ocean, Dombrowski writes:

I scanned our ambit for further sign of the otter, weighing the value of what I’d beamed in on 4G versus the salt drying on the hand Luca had dragged through the water. I sensed the latter would form a more lasting kind of knowing.

The River We Touch/ Chris Dombrowski

Before heading out for my run, I wanted to think about some of these ideas, especially: touch, physical dialogue, and sensorial empathy.

during the run

I recall thinking about my feet and rough ground and how much I enjoy feeling the ground as I move. The snow today was fun to run over/through. It wasn’t hard or crusty or sharp or too soft or thick or soggy or slick. It felt almost like running over a carpet of grass. A nice break from the hard asphalt. I also thought about breath and air and how much they are a part of touching/experiencing the gorge.

Near the end of my run, a song came up on my playlist: Breathe (2 AM)/ Anna Nalick. I’ve had it on a running playlist for over a decade now. As she sang, breathe, just breathe, I breathed. Maybe more than feet, lungs and breathing and breath have been central to my writing on this log.

I also thought about the gorge as an emptiness, a void, mystery, the ineffable/inaccessible, that I return to when I run because I want to encounter this void. I want to face the mystery.

after the run

Sitting at my desk now, I’m hungry. After I eat, I’d like to think more about the Thoreau quote and feet and callouses and the physical impact of running around the gorge as part of this haunting experience.

dec 3/RUN

4 miles
marshall loop (to cleveland)
34 degrees

Humid, hazy. Smells like snow even though no snow is in the forecast. The light strange. Another good run. I felt strong and comfortable and relaxed. Ran through the neighborhood to lake street then over the bridge and up marshall to cleveland. I haven’t done a marshall loop since October?

After I finished, as I walked home, I pulled out my phone and recorded 10 things I noticed:

10 Things

  1. a person walking out to their car. I could see in my peripheral vision that their jacket was blue, but when I looked at them through my central vision, the jacket looked grayish-white. Looked again through my peripheral, blue. Then straight: white
  2. running up the marshall hill: a strange green thing in the grass — a sculpture? no a gardening tool
  3. across the street as I walk home: one dog is pooping and the other dog’s name is Rosie
  4. running across the lake street bridge, the water was perfectly still and flat and brown and empty
  5. sprinting on summit to make the light — I made it
  6. after sprinting, my legs felt great and relaxed
  7. hearing the bells of St. Thomas near the beginning of my run
  8. running by a house I walk by often, seeing the door looking different — a new color? orange? have they painted their house or is the light just weird for me today?
  9. no bells heard when I was running by St. Thomas
  10. running down a hill to below the marshall/lake street bridge, looking at how the bridge was reflected in the still water, the arch smiling

Here’s a wonderful poem I discovered the other day. I love Larkin’s reading of it — such gentle, beautiful rhymes.

An Arundel Tomb/ Philip Larkin

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd—
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

dec 1/RUN

3.6 miles
trestle turn around
27 degrees

What a wonderful way to start December! Love this cold air and the bright sun. And the shadows — mine was able to run below in the floodplain forest. Later, it went down on the Winchell Trail. I greeted Dave, the Daily Walker — Good morning Dave! What a beautiful morning! For the first mile I chanted in threes: girl girl girl/ ghost ghost ghost/ gorge gorge gorge.

I listened to the birds — I think I heard the clicking beak of a jay — and scattered voices on the way to the trestle. Tried out a few different playlists on the way back.

10 Things

  1. running above the floodplain forest: brown and open and bottomless, brown leaves blending in with brown trunks
  2. most of the steps down to the Winchell Trail are closed off with a chain, but not the old stone steps — why not?
  3. the stretch of river just north of longfellow flats was half frozen
  4. 2 people walking below on the winchell trail with a dog — a LOUD conversation. One of them was wearing a bright orange — or was it red? — jacket
  5. steady streams of cars at different spots on the river road
  6. a fast runner passed me with their arms down at their sides, swinging them low. Were they running like this the whole time, or did they just do it when they passed me?
  7. more darting squirrels
  8. there are certain stretches I don’t remember running through — like the part of the walking trail that separates from the bike path right before the trestle. Why can’t I picture it?
  9. after I finished the run, walking back on the grass between Edmund and the river road, heard the knocking of a woodpecker high up in a tree. I craned my neck and arched my back to see it, but no luck
  10. In number 1 I said the floodplain forest was empty, but I just remembered that there was a thin line of orange leafed trees on the southern edge of it

Just ordered A. R. Ammons’ Tape for the Turn of the Year. Reading it might be my December project — will see, when it arrives on Monday. I think it might be a good inspiration for my Haunts poem as I continue to work on it.

One more note: At the halfway point, before heading back, I hiked down on the Winchell Trail to the curved railing. I took a picture. I decided to only take one, but I wondered if I should have taken more. Yes, I should have. When I looked at the picture after the run, there was the shadow of my thumb in the corner. Oops.

nov 30/RUN

5 miles
veterans’ home loop
32 degrees

Warmer today. Sunny, bright, clear. The river sparkled and burned. Shadows everywhere. Big columns of ice next to the falls, a thin sheen of ice on the steps and the bridge over the creek. Saw my shadow far below me while I was above on the bridge over to the veterans’ home. Encountered at least half a dozen darting squirrels, one was heading straight towards me but did a sharp turn away at the last minute. Near the end of my run, I saw and heard a vee of geese flying low in the sky — maybe 12 of them? Something about the blue sky and the brilliant light made their wingtips look silver. I didn’t stop running, but I craned my neck as I moved to keep watching them.

10 Sounds

  1. kids at recess, playing on the playground at minnehaha academy: scattered voices laughing, yelling
  2. some sort of chirping bird — not a cardinal, a robin? finch?
  3. the caw caw of a crow, down in the gorge
  4. the gushing falls — steadily falling creek water
  5. rustling in the leaves, 1: a squirrel
  6. rustling in the leaves, 2: a chipmunk or a bird
  7. rustling in the leaves, 3: a person walking below me on the Winchell Trail
  8. honking geese
  9. a chain link fence rattling — someone playing disc golf near Waban
  10. missing sounds: didn’t hear any roller skiers or music from a bike or a car, no bikes whizzing by or horns honking, and no fake train bell at the 50th street station as I ran near the John Stevens house

Stopped at the Folwell bench to admire the view and to check on my watch which had turned off. Bummer — out of charge, so no data from today’s run. Took a picture of the gorge:

A view from above of the Mississippi gorge and river. Just to the right of center in the image a thick brown tree trunk stands -- well, not that thick, but much thicker than the other trunks surrounding it. To me, this trunk looks like a tall person, with a long neck and a head that's just off the edge of the top of the frame. They have one arm (which is actually a bare branch) that extends up and across and then off the top of the frame. This arm is bent which creates the illusion of an elbow, an armpit, and a torso. Below the tree are dead leaves, light brown, and beyond the tree is a blue river and then a brown bank.
a tree with river gorge / 30 nov 2023

nov 25/RUN

4.85 miles
top of franklin to stone arch and back
27 degrees

Another Saturday run with Scott. We drove to the top of the franklin hill and started our run: down the hill, through the flats, up the 35W hill, past the Guthrie, to the Stone Arch bridge, then back. We ran up the whole hill and it felt great to me. So great that I, annoyingly I’m sure, sang “Eye of the Tiger” as we neared the top.

11 Things

  1. ice on the seeps, 1: big columns of ice streaking the limestone
  2. ice on the seeps, 2: so many streaks of ice; some of them stretched to the street and had melted and refroze on the road. A strange sight. It looked like someone had used “fake snow” spray paint to make it look like winter
  3. a few scattered chunks of ice on the river
  4. more bright green leaves still on some trees
  5. a new apartment building that looked like it was made out of limestone, but was probably mostly concrete with a thin veneer of limestone
  6. ducks! in the river, bobbing up, showing their butts
  7. geese! in the river, too far away for me to see, loud honks
  8. roller skiers, pt 1 — a whole crew of a dozen of more, heading south on the trail
  9. roller skiers, pt 2 — bright pink jackets on 2, yellow on another, one in black and white
  10. roller skiers, pt 3 — click clack scrape echoing off of the bridge
  11. a runner sprinting up the hill — when I saw her I sang the Kate Bush song to Scott, Running up that hill

Here is a vision poem that I’d like to remember and return to:

punctum/ Teja Sudhakar

A punctum is the little, unexpected extra in a photo. It is the face or the hand or the expression or the animal that you did not notice as you took the picture. It is simultaneously never the subject and entirely the subject. – Diana Weir

my earliest memory is of learning disappearance / on my father’s lap smudging an eraser across the page / even then i knew what i could lose if not careful / how whiteness operated to disappear you / have you ever been the first to leave a room / have you ever made your place behind the camera / my children might know me only out the corners of their eyes / when birds slam against rainbacked windows they leave their outlines / the water continues as if there was not dying all around it /
are you seeing this / i ask someone here are you seeing this / how many buildings have i passed through without a sound / how many years only remember me by my imprint / when we speak

a word we are naming each of its previous utterances / i fear i am only the language i have kept alive / i fear i am only my name being poured down a hallway / are you seeing this / the light we look through took years to get here / to see the disaster you must first see its veil / our pupils not made to hold all this bright / our eyes call their blood to the photograph / to take an image you must first take all the light out of the room / please hold as i steady / please keep your eyes soft / as i click /

nov 22/RUN

5.4 miles
ford loop
31 degrees

Brrr, at least for the first mile. Had to put up my hood and breathe deeply. Ran through the neighborhood on my way to the lake street bridge instead of by the Welcoming Oaks. Such beautiful light this morning, bright warm sun. Saw my shadow several times. She kept wandering down in the ravine or right by the edge. I took a picture of her when I stopped at the Monument, which is a Civil War monument and not a WWI one (which is what Scott thought):

update, 22 nov 2025: I’m not sure why I thought it was a civil war monument; Scott was right, it is a monument to WW1 soldiers. Doing a bit more googlin’, I think I thought it was a civil war monument because I was mistaking it for the “soldiers and sailors monument” in Summit Park.

My view from the overlook at the civil war monument. From back to front: sky, lake street bridge, west river bluff, river, bare tree branches, cliff, a shadow of me taking this picture, dirt
view of my shadow/river/bridge / 22 nov 2023

10 Things

  1. water dripping at shadow falls — not quite rushing or gushing, but close
  2. little white caps on the water from the wind
  3. a bird calling out repeatedly, sounding like a car alarm — must have been a cardinal, right?
  4. even less leaves on the trees than last week, although there are still stretches of bright green
  5. one runner passing me slowly, gradually
  6. another running zooming past me up the hill
  7. the satisfying feeling of sandy grit crunching under my feet as I ran on the dirt rail next to the paved path
  8. on the St. Paul side most of the benches have plaques embedded in the concrete, none of them do on the Minneapolis side
  9. spotting a parked car, glowing in the sun on the west side of the river as I ran on the east side
  10. noisy, darting squirrels everywhere

before the run

Today I’m revising and expanding my part of the Haunts poem about the Regulars, the people (both alive and dead) that are regularly at the gorge. I’d like to add something about the “in memory of” plaques along the trail, mostly embedded in the concrete near benches. So I’m giving myself a task: take pictures of more of these plaques to write about in my 3/2 form. Will I do it? Will I be willing to stop and take these pictures? How many of them can I get?

Speaking of plaques, I was curious about how to get one and how much they cost. Here’s the link for Minneapolis: Tributes and Memorials

To get a bench plaque, fill out the interest form on the site. It’s $5000 for a new bench for 10 years, $2500 for a refurbished bench for 10 years. Only 10 years.

Here’s St Paul’s information. Same 10 year deal, although you can add 10 year increments for an additional $1500 at any time. Also: It’s $5000 for a new bench/10 years at St. Paul Parks, except along the Mississippi River Parkway. Those are $10000. That seems like a lot — is it?

during the run

I did it! Starting by the monument, I stopped at every bench and took a picture of the plaque next to it. Lots of stopping, but it was fun! 12 images in total. I didn’t read any of the inscriptions, just stopped, took out my phone, clicked, put my phone back in my pocket, then started running again. I would imagine that some of the people I encountered were wondering what I was doing. I kind of wish one of them would have asked so I could say something like, “I’m working on a poem about the gorge and I’m gathering memorials to include in it.”

after the run

Now, back at my desk, I’m looking through the images. Almost all of them are legible! So far, there’s only one I can’t read and that’s because I made it a 4 second video instead of a photo. Oops. Oh–and it’s always because it’s in a cursive font that’s very hard to read.

It’s moving to read these memorials, many of them about people who died too young. I’m particularly struck by one that says, “Just a kid growing up!” — Tony Basta, 12/1/99

A plaque embedded in concrete. It reads: "Just a kid growing up!" Tony Basta, 12/1/99
Memorial plaque along the Mississippi River Bluff in St. Paul

I had no idea what this meant, so I looked it up. On April 26, 2000, while riding his bike along the Mississippi River (near Randolph) around 10 pm, 17 year old Tony Basta was shot and killed by 3 teenagers who wanted to shoot a random person “just to scare them.” Basta’s parents had the plaque made; the quote is from Tony in his yearbook. Wow. So heartbreaking and haunting — the details in this article (Tony Basta’s Murder 10 Years Ago) about the bystander who heard the shot and thought it was fireworks, his father who owns The Italian Pie Shoppe, the girl who overheard the killers telling the story at a party and reported them, earning a reward that paid for her college, the killer who expresses daily regret.

Will any of this make it into my poem? Possibly? Probably? Who knows? I’m not sure what will come of these accounts, but it feels meaningful to bear witness to the lives of the people on these plaques today.

As I was finishing up my run, my thoughts wandered. I thought about having one of these plaques for when I’m dead and how I’d want poetry on it. Then I thought, why wait until then and why put it on a plaque? What about leaving some poetry around the gorge now? Then I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to leave some lines from my haunts poem — some parts of my repeating refrain that includes, a girl runs and ghost and gorge? And now I’m thinking that I want to do some sort of unofficial public installation of this poem around the gorge. It could be lines left on the path or tied to a tree, or it could be QR codes with links to the text and a recording of me reading it. YES! I should research how others do public installations for inspiration.

nov 20/RUN

6.2 miles
franklin loop + extra*
40 degrees

*ran the regular franklin loop but when I reached the lake/marshall bridge I kept running up the hill on the east side, all the way to the bench at the bend on the bluff. I took a picture of a plaque, then turned around and ran back to the bridge and then over it.

A plaque near a bench. It reads: In Loving Memory of Jeffrey Peter Hanson. "Oh what I would say to you again" from Losing a Year
a plaque in the ground by a bench

I looked up the sentence/title and it’s a lyric from a song by the person remembered on the plaque, Jeff Hanson. It was on his second of three albums. He was found dead in his St. Paul apartment by his parents in 2009. According to Wikipedia the cause of death was “drug toxicity” — a mixture of anti-depressant and anti-anxiety pills with alcohol — and they couldn’t determine if it was accidental or self-inflicted. So sad.

One of the reasons I stopped to take a picture of the plaque was because I’m revising my Haunts poem and I gave myself the task of finding more of the plaques and then putting them into a section of the poem that follows “The Regulars.”

Overcast today, a pale gray. Another nice, relaxed run. Another beautiful morning by the gorge. Greeted Dave, the daily walker just a few minutes in. Admired the Welcoming Oaks and the tuning fork tree. No stones stacked on the ancient boulder. Chanted triple berries for a few miles. Felt good and strong and happy to be running a 10k.

10+ Things

  1. the river is higher — the water has spilled over into the floodplain on the spot below 31st
  2. jingle jingle jingle a dog collar making noise below me on the Winchell Trail
  3. clear open views everywhere to the other side — almost all the leaves are gone!
  4. one tree still full of leaves — the leaves were browned but so light they almost looked silver
  5. a few other trees on the east side still holding onto bright green leaves
  6. encountered several U of M students with backpacks walking over to campus
  7. a sign on the bridge — End the Occupation
  8. every street lamp I passed on the bridge had had their copper wire cut — some of them were also missing the door at the bottom that covers the wires, and one lamp had lost its entire top — it was just a stump
  9. the white sands beach was glowing white from across the river
  10. many of the benches I passed had recently been repaired — the three slats for the back had been replaced — I wondered: did the old boards have “in memory of” plaques, and do those not get replaced?
  11. on the bridge, looked up in the sky and stopped: 3 soaring birds, high in the sky — eagles? hawks? geese? I couldn’t tell

nov 18/RUN

4 miles
hidden falls to crosby farms and back
37 degrees

Just like yesterday, another beautiful morning! Sunny, calm, not too cold. Sharp shadows, cloudless blue sky. Today’s route started and ended at the Hidden Falls parking lot, right next to the sunlit river. So wonderful! Ran with Scott and talked about Amy Winehouse, NCAA cross country races, lurking shadows, and why there was a car driving on the no vehicle path — lost golden retriever. As we neared Crosby Falls, we ran over a root that was embedded in the path and looked like a snake. Very cool! Scott took a picture of it:

a cracked sidewalk with a tree root winding through it, looking like a snake
Scott’s picture of a root in the paved path / near Crosby Farms

10 Things

  1. chirping birds, shrieking squirrels
  2. shadows, 1: ours, sharp, beside us then in front of us
  3. shadows, 2: the trees, casting long lines across the paved path
  4. shadows, 3: the trees on the water, making the bright blue water look dark brown
  5. question pondered: what’s the difference between a shadow and a reflection — Scott’s answer: the position of the light
  6. a walker in a bright pink jacket
  7. the sandstone/limestone bluff — high and looming — on one side of us
  8. graffiti spray painted on a barricade in the parking lot, uh oh stinky
  9. smoke from a campfire on other side of a little lake near Crosby Farms
  10. running up a short, step hill on the tips of my toes and remembering when I tried (and failed) to bike up it a few years ago without shifting gears

nov 17/RUN

3.2 miles
trestle turn around
36 degrees

Yes! A near perfect morning for a run. Sunny, still, cool but not cold. Deep blue sky, sharp shadows. Relaxed hips, knees, shoulders. A moment to remember and return to when needed. So calm, happy, not anxious. Walking back after I was done, I heard a knock so I stopped and looked up to the top of a tree — a woodpecker! And I could see it! I watched for a few seconds then listened deeper: another chirping bird, leaves rustling underfoot, a leaf blower.

10 Things

  1. good morning Dave!
  2. the floodplain forest is bare and a beautiful, soothing brown
  3. with everything so bare and exposed because of the lack of leaves, I thought about how it all looks bigger (wider, more open) and smaller (no mystery, all out in the open) at the same time
  4. glancing down at white Minneapolis rowing club building, it looked like it was a shimmering mirage in the sun
  5. almost to the trestle — I could see it through the bare trees, stretching across the water. It looked so far away, even though I was almost there
  6. took the recently redone steps just north of the trestle down for a better view of the water — the river was such a deep, dark blue — but a dark blue that was still clearly blue and not black (which is what navy looks like to me)
  7. on those same steps: my shadow ahead of me — hi friend!
  8. another shadow: a runner approaching me from behind. I could hear her slowly gaining on me, then suddenly her shadow appeared, almost lurking behind me for a moment
  9. running on the sandy, gritty dirt just off the edge of the trail
  10. smelling breakfast — can’t remember what type of breakfast, just breakfast — wafting down from longfellow grill

As I was running on the dirt trail just next to the paved path, I had a thought about my haunts poem and the recent ones I’ve added about the trails. So far I have three — the dirt trail on the grassy boulevard, the official paved trail, and Winchell. I think I should add this one, and maybe more. I could sprinkle them throughout the poem, or just add that one in with the others, near the beginning?

I was planning to run a little longer and listen to a playlist for the second half, but a mile into my run I realized that I had forgotten my phone. That has happened maybe once or twice ever, in all of the years I’ve been running. Today, I didn’t care, but still didn’t want to run too long without it, especially since I hadn’t told Scott which way I was running.

nov 16/RUN

5.4 miles
ford loop
63 degrees
wind: 19mph

Another windy day. I had to hold onto my cap several times so it wouldn’t fly off. Running east on the lake street bridge, I put my hood so my cap wouldn’t fall off. Running west over the ford bridge, I took the cap off and held it in my hands. The wind made it difficult, more draining. Is that why my legs feel so sore?

10 Things

  1. ridges and white caps in the blue water, from the wind
  2. kids at the church daycare, at the far end of the fenced-in playground. Running by I could hear their tiny, sweet voices plotting something
  3. more filled benches than usual along the route, including one with a person sitting and a stroller behind it
  4. in the neighborhood: knocks on the roof — not a woodpecker, but roofers … or was it a woodpecker?
  5. running straight into the wind, wondering if would push me up against the railing (not quite)
  6. my shadow down in the ravine near shadow falls — lucky shadow, sheltered from the wind
  7. everywhere hazy — it might have been my vision, but I think it was dust stirred up by the wind. Yuck!
  8. running north, at the end, feeling the wind pushing me, but not in a helpful way
  9. the wind didn’t rush or roar, it just pushed and pulled
  10. a walker, walking in the middle of the path, blasting talk radio

I stopped on the double bridge to take a picture of the ravine and to put in my headphones:

My view from the bridge of some bare-branched trees. Everything mostly brown, with a few streaks of white (or gray?) peeking through. The white is the water, or is it the sky? Difficult to tell. Below the frame of this imagine (just out of the picture), is a branch with green leaves, swaying in the wind. Also out of the frame is a walker with a dog, walking by. I didn't notice them until they passed by and crossed my periphery.
a warm, windy November day / 16 nov 2023

today’s view out my window

It’s snowing leaves. Mostly they are drifting down slowly, one after the other. Sometimes at a distance, occasionally almost on my window screen. My neighbor’s yard is covered with them, a dead leaf carpet. Yesterday, as Scott and I cleared out our leaves we could see that the neighbor’s tree was still full of leaves. I wondered what would happen when the wind came back. Today I found out.

Also, encountered this interesting (and unsettling) article about the effects of climate crisis on Japanese poets who write haikus: Japan’s haiku poets lost for words as climate crisis disrupts seasons

nov 14/RUN

3 miles
under ford bridge and back
55 degrees
wind: 20mph

Almost too warm and definitely too windy. The wind doesn’t bother me like it used to, but this wind was tough. I ran straight into it heading south. One nice thing: it pushed me along in the second half. I wore shorts and by the end of my run I had taken off my sweatshirt and pushed up my short sleeves. Bare legs and bare arms in the middle of November. Strange and disorienting.

10 Wind Things

  1. leaf shards in my eyes
  2. holding onto my hat so it wouldn’t blow away
  3. being pushed to the edge of the trail
  4. a roar in my ears
  5. swirling leaves above me, below me, to the side of me
  6. squaring my shoulders, leaning in as the wind pushed me back
  7. a sudden gust from the side
  8. knocking my ankles together
  9. shaking, swaying trees
  10. more sizzle than howl

I didn’t hear any geese or notice what the wind was doing to the river. I might have seen my shadow; I almost remember. Encountered some other runners, bikers, and a roller skier.

I listened to the wind until I reached the ford bridge, then I stopped and put in an old playlist: “Landslide,” “Cheap Thrills,” “Sorry,” and “Love is a Battlefield.”

I came across Wendy Xu’s “Absolute Variations” today and I wanted to make note of the first few lines. What a way to start a poem!

The first time I read a line by John Ashbery
was in a little café in Massachusetts, from left to right
There it was written across my friend’s collarbone
It felt right to be there with someone
who would show me something like that
when we had never met before

I appreciate how she never explicitly names the Ashbery lines. I suppose if you know a lot of Ashbery’s poems, it’s obvious, but I don’t, so it isn’t to me. But that’s okay; it could be fun trying to find them, and it’s not necessary to know them to enjoy the poem. I think her refusal to be explicit here is an example of trusting the reader to figure it out. I like that.

nov 13/RUN

5 miles
veterans’ home loop
42 degrees

What a day! Sunny and calm and beautiful. I overdressed — didn’t need the gloves or the headband, maybe should’ve worn a lighter sweatshirt? Ran south to the falls, over the creek, behind John Steven’s house, over the creek again, to the grounds of the Veterans’ home, down the hill to the locks and dam no. 1, north on the river road, past the welcoming oaks, down through the tunnel of trees, across to Edmund, then done. Ran 5 miles without stopping. I didn’t even stop while taking off my sweatshirt and wrapping it around my waist. It would have been smart to stop for that, but I wanted to keep moving, so I did, and probably looked ridiculous.

10 Things

  1. chirp chirp chirp
  2. my ponytail swishing and hitting my shoulder
  3. my shadow — sharp and straight and solid
  4. a group of people — was it kids and a teacher, or all adults? I’m not sure — standng silently on the grass between Minnehaha Academy and Becketwood
  5. shimmering scattering glowing river water
  6. rushing gushing falls
  7. the fake bells from the light rail sounding like the beginning of an ABBA song (at least to me) — I thought about listening to an ABBA playlist on my run back, but I forgot
  8. running over the bridge that leads to the Veterans’ home, hearing the creek rushing way below me
  9. encountering a few walkers — a short woman, later a tall man — as I ran down the steep hill to locks and dam no. 1
  10. 4 stones stacked on the ancient boulder

As I ran down a hill into Minnehaha Park, I tried to remember the sun and the warmth and the bare ground, and thought about how this same path will be cold and snow-covered within a month.

Before my run, I thought about how before works in my Haunts poem and revisited a wonderful poem, “Transubstantiation,” that plays with befores and afters. I wanted to explore the idea of after while I ran — what comes before, what after? But I realized as I moved that I am most interested in playing around with the before, creating layers of befores that don’t follow a linear progression, but circle around unresolved. I held onto as many of my thought as I can, then recorded them into my phone once my run was done.

notes / 13 nov 2023

transcript: November 13, 2023. Just finished a 5 mile run and while I was running I was thinking about girl ghost and gorge and befores and how I’m not interested in doing afters, I’m interested in circling around these befores. Not in a linear way, but a circular way. I’ll do another one that is before there was gorge, there was girl. That one will be about me before I started paying attention, before I started running by the gorge, before this practice. Then there will be one that’s before there was girl, there was ghost. This one will involve more of my mom as a ghost. I’m interested in playing around with the befores and making it disorienting; there’s no real origin point. It’s circular and repeats itself, phrases repeat themselves.

repetition: chiasmus and chanting

Thinking more about the circularity of my befores and the chant-like repetition of girl ghost gorge / ghost girl gorge / gorge ghost girl. Before my run, during my morning ritual of coffee and poetry, I encountered Jane Huffman’s poem, “The Rest” and her discussion/explanation of it in, “Backwashes and Eddies: Jane Huffman on “The Rest”“. She mentions the chiasmus, which I had to look up to remember what it meant:

Repetition of any group of verse elements (including rhyme and grammatical structure) in reverse order, such as the rhyme scheme ABBA. Examples can be found in Biblical scripture (“But many that are first / Shall be last, / And many that are last / Shall be first”; Matthew 19:30). See also John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”).

glossary term, Poetry Foundation

Here’s how Huffman describes her use of it in “The Rest”:

Cut red / flowers hung in pink water.
                Cut pink flowers hung in red water.
                Cut red water hung in pink flowers.
                Cut pink water hung in red flowers.

The poem operates in reversals, in mirror images, in symmetries: “Cut [pink or red] [flowers or water] hung in [pink or red] [flowers or water].”

About the water and flowers, Huffman also says this:

Indeed, “The Rest” refuses to move on. It cannot. It is obsessive, recalibrating the relationship between “flowers” and “water” until its options are exhausted. Exhaustion is a teleology of sickness. One cough anticipates the next.

“The Rest” is about her frequent bouts with bronchitis and Huffman uses repetion, especially the chiasmus, for several reasons:

  1. the bilateral symmetry of her lungs — inhale/exhale left lung/right lung
  2. stagnation / the stasis of the bedridden body / back and forth / refusing to move on (the backwashes and eddies)
  3. seeks to capture the banality of the body — daily routine
  4. imperfect — not exactly the same, repetition with variation

poetic forms that use repetition in this way: villanelle, ghazal, duplex, pantoum

Huffman argues that her repetition of the flowers and the water give the poem its emotional thrust. I’m not sure what I want to do with these ideas, but I can feel them informing my choices about how to use repetition in this poem. One idea: maybe my 3/2 form could involve inverted repetition at some points?

Now moving on to chants, after a quick search, I found this essay: Learning the Chant Poem.

repetition: for meaning, memory, magic, music
to only repeat is boring
the best chant poems are expansive
repetition is important, but so is chaos/wildness

One key: it’s okay to use some nonsense words

an hour, or so, later: I’m returning to this entry because I want to make note of how Huffman’s poem has influenced/inspired me. In particular, I was thinking about her formula and the variations she created to play with the repetition, unsettling it and giving it movement and an emotional punch:

Cut [pink or red] [flowers or water] hung in [pink or red] [flowers or water].

After a few minutes of playing around with the ideas, my own formula emerged:

Before [girl, ghost, or gorge], [girl, ghost, or gorge]: or .
[2 beat word — concise and expansive].

Here’s one that I came up with the I’ll put right before the section of the poem about wanting to run with my mom:

Before girl, ghost.
Cancer.
Terminal.
Before ghost, girl:
intact.

Ooo, I like this! I hope it’s an idea that sticks.

nov 11/RUN

5.25 miles
fort snelling loop*
36 degrees
snow flurries

*a new loop! Started at the Hidden Falls parking lot in St. Paul and ran south to some steps just before the confluence. Over a bridge to Fort Snelling. Through Fort Snelling, Coldwater Springs, the Minnehaha dog park, the Veterans’ Home. Over the ford bridge and back to the river trail.

A wonderful run with Scott! A new loop to add into the mix. From our house, this loop is about 7.5-8 miles. Not too bad. So many wonderful views of the rivers — Mississippi and Minnesota. Such variety in surfaces and landscapes! Asphalt, concrete, crushed limestone, grass, dirt — soft and hard, dead leaves. Over bridges, above ravines, beside old military barracks and frequently travelled highways, through beloved parks, around disc golf courses. Under trees, next to freaky looking bushes with no leaves but dark pinecones, through tall grass, up steep steps with special tracks for rolling bikes down.

Not too long after this run, we drove down to St. Peter to hear FWA’s fall concert. I didn’t have time to finish and post this entry. I’m finishing it on Sunday morning. Can I remember 10 things from yesterday’s run?

10 Things

  1. the river (mississippi) stretching north — a clear, unobstructed view from above — this stretch near hidden falls in st. paul has the best views of the river
  2. so many glowing green leaves on the trees
  3. Scott ranting about Elon Musk and his latest attempts to destroy electric cars
  4. the strange (and a little irritating) visual effect of running next to a tall railing as the light pulsed through the slats — a constant flash flash flash flash
  5. running right by the barracks at Fort Snelling and feeling the misery of it — the cold quarters, especially in the winter, and this site as concentration camp, killing so many Dakota people in the winter of 1862
  6. the pleasing slide and crunch of the crushed limestone on this stretch of the trail
  7. a mix of surfaces: a few steps of limestone, then a flat, hard surface with a map printed on it
  8. running through the Ft. Snelling parking lot, then over to a trail next to Highway 55 — a tall wall then the highway on one side, strange bushes with ugly and ominous-looking pinecones on the other
  9. cutting through a narrow dirt trail near coldwater springs — running up and down as the path gently rose and fell over small hills
  10. a row of American flags lining the road right by the Veterans’ home — it’s Veterans’ Day

I did it! I probably could have listed another 10 things. This route was memorable.

nov 10/RUN

5.1 miles
franklin loop
37 degrees

More excellent November weather! A solid, relaxed, non-stop (except for walking up the bridge steps) run. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker and, later, another friendly runner — Hi! Admired the blue river and the occasional flash of red in the trees. Took deep breaths of fresh, cold air. Listened, without headphones, to the traffic and a chirping bird, rustling leaves and an alarm beeping somewhere.

10 Things

  1. a clear view of the forest floor from above
  2. so many green leaves still on the trees on the east side — light, glowing green
  3. somber (or reverent?) wind chimes
  4. smell 1: stinky, sour sewer gas, faint
  5. smell 2: either skunk or weed, probably weed
  6. smell 3: hot chocolate
  7. bright yellow headlights from cars, cutting through the trees
  8. some part of a machine scraping on a sidewalk somewhere in the distance
  9. a tree that I thought might be a person until I saw it in my periphery: a tree with one branch holding a hat at head-height
  10. a woman walker in bright orange pants

At the end of my run, I took a picture from the top of the hill, above the tunnel of trees, across from the ancient boulder:

Overlooking a forest that winds down to the river, which is a faint white -- or no color, just the absence of brown branches and yellowed leaves. Mostly bare branches and a brown ground covered in fallen leaves. In the lower right-hand corner a chain link fence stretches. This fence marks where the Winchell Trail used to go after coming up from the ravine. Now it's barely a trail, mostly hidden by leaves, no longer maintained. Just outside of the frame on the left, a green leaf flutters in the wind.
a view to the river near the 35th street parking lot / 10 november 2023

I love this poem by Donika Kelly, and I love what magic she can do with words!

I love you. I miss you. Please get out of my house. / Donika Kelly

Nothing today hasn’t happened before:
I woke alone, bundled the old dog
into his early winter coat, watered him,
fed him, left him to his cage for the day
closing just now. My eye drifts
to the buff belly of a hawk wheeling,
as they do, in a late fall light that melts
against the turning oak and smelts
its leaves bronze.
Before you left,
I bent to my task, fixed in my mind
the slopes and planes of your face;
fitted, in some essential geography,
your belly’s stretch and collapse
against my own, your scent familiar
as a thousand evenings.
Another time,
I might have dismissed as hunger
this cataloguing, this fitting, this fixing,
but today I crest the hill, secure in the company
of my longing. What binds us, stretches:
a tautness I’ve missed as a sapling,
supple, misses the wind.

I love all the work the title does to set up the poem, how she describes it as watering the dog (and not giving the dog water), and these verbs: cataloging/fitting/fixing. My favorite sentence, and the reason I wanted to post this poem today, is this:

My eye drifts
to the buff belly of a hawk wheeling,
as they do, in a late fall light that melts
against the turning oak and smelts
its leaves bronze.

A late fall light that melts against the tree and smelts it leaves bronze? Wow. I want tp remember that line. I’d also like to find an example of it out by the gorge on my run today (I’m writing this bit before my run), but there’s no autumn sunlight today, just gray gray gray. I wonder, what does gray to those leaves?

during the run: I hoped to think about this question of what gray does to the leaves, but I got distracted, or maybe, it didn’t do much, at least not today. Most of the leaves were gold or orangish-brown, no shimmering or sizzling, just soft and flat.

Instead of thinking about what gray does to the leaves, I was thinking about some lines I’d like to add to my Haunts poem:

A girl runs
four blocks
to the gorge.
She’s all
muscle bone
and breath,
foot strikes and
arm swings.
The river
and ghosts
wait.

transcript: During the run I was thinking about ghosts and girls and the gorge. And I was thinking that what I’m really trying to convey is that there’s a heaviness and a solidness and a there-ness that is both good and too heavy. So there’s a desire to lighten up. What I want to do is convey the heaviness, so maybe using the word, “heavy,” heavy foot strikes. Then I was thinking of Lizzy McAlpine and her song, “all my ghosts.” And then I was thinking about how all these ghosts aren’t primarily a bad thing, but there are a few ghosts I struggle with more than others. I think the ghost of cancer is haunting me the most right now.

the chorus from McAlpine’s “all my ghosts”:

And all my ghosts were with me
I know you felt them too
Watchin’ as I started to get dizzy
‘Cause I hate all of my habits
But I happen to love you
I hope that’s true

another version of my lines:

A girl runs.
She’s all
muscle bone
and breath,
heavy foot
falls and
swinging arms.
At the
river her
ghosts wait.

nov 8/RUN

5.5 miles
ford loop
43 degrees

Ah, November! Ran through the neighborhood, past the kids playing outside at the church daycare, past the house that has a giant Packer’s flag hanging from their fence, past the window of the business where I watch myself run and wonder if the people inside are watching me watch myself, over the lake street bridge to the east side of the river. On the bridge, I passed a couple holding hands. A mile later, I passed another hand-holding couple. An unusual sighting, and twice. Ran up the long hill to the Monument, then beside the river until I reached the ford bridge. Stopped to take a picture on the bridge, then ran the rest of the way back with Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo.

A view from the ford bridge, poorly framed. Not sure what color other people might see here, but to me it's all gray: light gray sky and river, broken up by chunks of dark gray trees. I like how the sky and the river look almost the same color to me.
taken from the ford bridge / 8 november 2023
My view of the river from the ford bridge. I stuck my phone above the railing, pointed and clicked quickly, afraid I might drop my phone into the river. For me, this image is fuzzy, almost furry, with soft greens and golds and grays. Most of the shot is of the past-their-prime trees on the shore of the Mississippi. All along the left edge curved around the trees is the light gray river which, at some point, turns into the sky. This image looks more like a painting than a photograph.
taken, with some trepidation, over the railing of the ford bridge / 8 november 2023

10 Things

  1. kids playing at the church daycare, several of them huddled at the fence, one of them (accidentally?) threw a ball over the side
  2. blue water, some waves, a few streaks or trails from something
  3. running above shadow falls, not sure if I was hearing it dripping or the wind through the trees
  4. running up the summit hill, a stretch of lit street lamps lining the path, the amber lights glowing softly
  5. noticing the gloom and the absence of my shadow as I ran around the ravine
  6. wondering if I would get to hear the St. Thomas bells as I ran close to campus (nope)
  7. chickadee dee dee
  8. turkeys! I’m not quite sure, but I think they were hanging out in the grass, just past the ford bridge, before you head down the hill to the locks and dam
  9. an unnaturally vibrant green on some of the leaves on the east side of the river — is this spring or late fall?
  10. an intense smell of cinnamon shortly before reaching the ford bridge — where was it coming from? someone’s gum? a bush?

before the run

Last night during Scott’s South High Community Jazz Band rehearsal, when I sit and listen and work on poetry, I returned to Susan Tichy’s North | Rock | Edge. Wow! This morning, before my run, I’m thinking about the lines I read and an interview Tichy did for Terrain.

There’s also a sensory excitement in a sea-rock-light-wind-bird-flower-seal-seep-peat-rain-salt—oh look, there’s a whale!—environment that subsumes attention to any one thing into the press of the whole.

I love how she describes the environment and her idea of attention to the whole, not just to any one thing.

Rock blurs the categories of time and space by making time visible and place temporal. A poem uses both rest and motion to create a form, which can be seen and must be heard—as the Susan Howe epigraph says, fleeting and fixed. These poems, like many in Avalanche Path, have a surface texture of fragmentation, abrupt change, and brokenness metamorphized into a new whole, voiced in present time, human time. Nothing is still; nothing is uniform.

And here’s a wonderful bit from the first part of Tichy’s poem, 60 North|Arriving, Stand Still:

& here wind

elevates to a theory

of time : to not miss a single

wave’s decay, a verse

of coast becoming dearth

of certainty, to undefine

the edge as noun, dissolving

in the not unyielding mouth

of cliff : verse/reverse

from the root of turn :

wind-wave & swell

compounded to a single

force, broken

by the thing it breaks—

In the next section she offers this line, what place is not. The gorge as what place is not, or where place one was?

during the run

I think Tichy’s poem influenced my thoughts indirectly as I ran. I was thinking about a part of my Haunts poem I’m working on, particularly about how I am sometimes a girl, sometimes a ghost, and sometimes a gorge. Am I the gorge, I wondered as I started running. And as I ran over the lake street bridge I came up with an answer: yes. Later, when I reached to ford bridge, I stopped running to record some thoughts:

I am the gorge because the gorge is the remains, what is left behind, what continues to exist even as ground erodes, self erodes, vision erodes. The gorge, constantly shifting, but always there. The gorge is the eroded. Is the ghost the verb, the eroding? … I am also the gorge because I’m constantly leaving part of myself here and becoming this place and not just moving through the place, becoming the place.

nov 6/RUN

5 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
50 degrees / wind: 14 mph

Warmer this morning, so I wore shorts without tights, a short-sleeved gray t-shirt, and my orange sweatshirt. At the bottom of the hill when I turned around, I took off the sweatshirt and ran the second half with bare arms and legs. The only part of me that was cold was my ears, from the wind. A good run. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker:

me: Hi Dave!
Dave: Hi Sara! How are you doing today?
me: I’m good. How are you?
Dave: I’m very good. Thanks for asking.

Today I thought about how both of us almost always say the same thing, but they aren’t empty words. We both are always good when we’re outside, moving; we are our best selves: happy, free, able to forget and to admire everything around us.

10 Things

  1. honking geese, heard not seen, hidden in some brambles
  2. wind chimes, softly ringing at the start of my run
  3. mostly gray and overcast, once sun and my shadow — hello friend!
  4. approaching the Welcoming Oaks, all bare now, a deep red tree — have I ever noticed before that they are a few maples mixed in with the oaks
  5. several of the Welcoming Oaks had broken branches — the branch that remained looked jagged and gnarled
  6. an open view down to the floodplain forest! only a few patches of green
  7. no stones stacked on the ancient boulder
  8. more chickadee dee dees
  9. Daddy Long Legs crossing the street
  10. a slight haze everywhere, covering everything

what the wind can do

A block into my run, the wind picked up and gathered the leaves, pushing them forward. They looked almost like kids running — frantic and fast — towards something fun or away from something boring. This image reminded me of the other day when Scott and I were waiting in the drive-up line at the pharmacy. The wind was pushing an open wrapper. Instead of swirling around, the silver wrapper looked like it was dancing or marching. It didn’t look like a wrapper, but like a bug or some creature that was alive. One more wind/leaves image: Running south, the wind was at my back. A few times it pushed the leaves and we (me and the leaves) raced. I won, of course.

loops, repetitions, projects, time, and echoes

I’m still orbiting around ideas, trying to figure out what to do next. I’m getting closer. I know that it involves my not-yet-finished haunts poems and repetitions and restlessness and the untethering of project from progress, looping and leaving and returning, and time. Time keeps coming up. I’ve thought/written/theorized about time for decades. I even wrote about it in a doctoral exam. On this log, I frequently discuss it — how it drips or disappears when I’m running, my need to slow down the time it takes me to run (pace), rethinking time outside of clocks and the tight boxes of seconds, minutes, hours, trying to imagine time in much larger and longer scales across generations and centuries, Mary Oliver’s eternal vs. ordinary time, Marie Howe’s moments, past present and future Saras, cycles and seasons.

The other day I came across an amazing new endeavor (note: I’m resisting using project here), by Graywolf Press: a series of labs in which several artists come together to discuss, share, collaborate, imagine new possibilities for a theme. The first lab’s theme is time and, as I read through it (I read the transcript first, I’ll listen to their podcast next), I was inspired. Too many ideas to try and write down in this entry. I was particularly struck by Lisa Chen (LC) and her novel (I’m starting it after I finish this entry!), Activities of Daily Living. Here’s how she describes the book:

it’s about this durational artist Tehching Hsieh who was active in downtown New York in the seventies, eighties, nineties. And the, the novel is about a woman named Alice, who’s, has a day job but is trying to make something artistic. And she decides she’s gonna do a project about this artist just because he’s on her mind at the same time that her father is declining from dementia.

And the book is partly organized by going through these six seminal projects that the artist is known for before he stopped making work. And right, so, so the “Time Clock Piece,” he punched a time clock on the hour, every hour for like a year. And he missed, he missed a few. So again, Alice is trying to make a project out of this work so part of it is she’s digging into each of these durational projects and trying to think about what it stimulates or what she can make of it.

In the conversation, LC distinguishes between artist-time and life-time and projects we work on outside of capitalist/work-time. This makes me think of the many discussions I’ve had about being useless and un-productive and engaging in work outside of/in resistance to “the clock.” For me, this sort of time conversation is about what it means to work as an artist — I should return to Mary Oliver and the ways she struggles with this in The Leaf and the Cloud! Haunting questions: what’s the point? but, what does it do?

In the midst of all my thinking about time and progress and projects, I’ve been reflecting on repetitions and echoes in my own work. After rereading an entry from nov 5, 2019, I wrote this in my notes:

Reading through entries from past years on this day and feeling like I could have written/experienced the same thing on a run today — the same river, the same gray sky, the same dying vision, the same words feelings thoughts. This sameness points to a larger time scale and a resistance to progress! and improvement! but I also wonder if it suggests that I’m stuck in the same loop — be outside, move, notice, write. Where is it all going? Does it have to go anywhere? I feel these doubts in these moments when I’m in-between projects, when I have too many doors to enter and I don’t know which one to choose. This tension of restlessness and looping and resisting and in-between and the life of a writer should all be part of this collection. It should be haunted by these themes. 

my notes

I also wrote about this theme in an “On This Day” entry this morning:

I’m thinking about my echo discussion for nov 4, 2020 and how an echo repeats but slightly differently each time — fainter or softer or distorted. So much of what I write (and experience) as I move is almost the same from year to year. The view, or lack of view, of the river. The wonderful cold air. How much I love running in the cold. Often I start with, A wonderful run or a beautiful run or another great run. What distinguishes these entries are the small and brief moments and the images they create, like the snow and the bridge. That moment only lasted a few seconds, but it creates the echo here. (if that makes sense.) 

Sara, age 49, on November 4, 2023, is thinking a lot of repetition and looping and wondering about the differences between being stuck in a rut of repetition and using the grooves to sing a beautiful song. (not sure if that metaphor works). Put another way: I’ve been doing this practice of moving outside, noticing, writing about it for almost 7 years. So many of the entries contain the same descriptions, or almost the same descriptions. Am I just repeating myself, stuck on the same path, or is each entry an echo, a variation, with (sometimes) slight differences, difficult to discern?

On This Day: November 4

Wow, this is a lot. Right before my run, as I was thinking about all of these things in a kind of jumbled mess, this idea flashed in my head: find the echoes. Start with the moments, over the 7 years of writing in this log, in which I repeat myself (sometimes word for word) and put them together into some sort of chant or small poem or something. Sprinkle them throughout “Haunts.” Mix them in with other examples of echoes — in the geography, the history, the setting? How many echoes can I find?

nov 4/RUN

4.1 miles
hidden falls / confluence
28 degrees

Loved the weather this morning! Hardly any wind, not too bright, not too cold. Scott and I drove over to a parking lot near Highland Bridge and ran beside the Mississippi River past Hidden Falls to the confluence where the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers meet. Wow! Such soft, sweeping views! Heard lots of chickadees (chick a dee dee dee) and ran up and down lots of little hills.

10+ Things

  1. a cracked rutted cratered trail
  2. steps leading down to a bridge across the river — something to try next time!
  3. empty benches on the edge
  4. a recently re-painted parking lot below the confluence with jaunty arrows on the pavements — I said they looked like they were italicized
  5. the tops of the bare branches looked fuzzy and soft and gray
  6. 2 rivers curving around an island
  7. more white sand than usual — the river is low
  8. running through Highland bridge, I could hear a dog relentlessly barking at the dog park
  9. hidden falls was steadily flowing down limestone and concrete ledges
  10. a few slick, icy spots on the bridge
  11. geese! A gaggle of geese on the edge of the trail, only the final one acknowledged our presence with a sharp honk — no hiss, thankfully

nov 3/RUN

3.1 miles
2 trails
41 degrees

A little warmer today. Another beautiful run. What a view! Clear and through the trees to the river and the other side. I love November and its blues, grays, browns, and golds from a few trees still holding onto their leaves. I felt relaxed and strong — lungs and legs.

Listened to rustling leaves, striking feet, dripping ravines for the first 2 miles of the run. Put in Taylor Swift’s new version of 1989 for the last mile.

10 Things

  1. a single leaf floating through the air, then down to the ground — was it brown or gold or green?
  2. the steady dripping of water out of the sewer pipe
  3. the smell of something burnt — toast? coffee? — but from a house or the gorge and not longfellow grill
  4. a runner in a bright yellow shirt, running across the road, then through the grass below edmund, then onto the dirt trail in front of me
  5. the steps down to the winchell trail are closed, with a chain across the railings, but I went around on the dirt path
  6. the winchell trails was covered in yellow leaves
  7. the roar of a chainsaw from across the gorge
  8. kids’ voices from the playground at Minnehaha Academy
  9. a biker on the walking trail where it dips below the road and hangs above the floodplain forest
  10. a bright headlight from a bike, glowing in the grayish gloom

Found this wonderful little poem the other day:

Injury Room / Katie Ford

Through my
little window, I
see one day
the entire bird,
the next just
a leeward wing,
the next
only a painful
call, which, without
the body, makes
beautiful attachments
by even
attaching at
all.

This poem reminds me of my own experiments in trying to determine how little information (especially visual data) I need in order to recognize or identify or be aware of the presence of some thing.

Poetry is not a Project

Two days ago, at the end of my entry, I posted about a pamphlet I was reading, Poetry is not a Project. I offered some notes from the first section, Habitus, and promised to do the rest in later entries. Here’s the rest. Instead of a lot of notes, I decided to condense it into a key passage from each section.

Poetry is Not a Project / Dorothy Lasky

Habitus

Poems are living things that grow from the earth into the brain, rather than things that are planted within the earth by the brain.

This discussion of dirt/the ground reminds me of Mary Ruefle’s Observations on the Ground and April, 2022, when I spent the month studying dirt.

An Example

To write a poem is to be a maker. And to be a maker is to be down in the muck of making and not always to fly so high above the muck.

This passage reminded me of an essay I posted about in September and finally read yesterday: En Plein Air Poetics: Notes Towards Writing in the Anthropocene / Brian Teare

What is Really Not Intentions, but Life

The road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exists.

On the same site, Ugly Duckling Press, where I found Lasky’s pamphlet, I also found this chapbook, Almost Perfect Forms, in which the author creates the constellations out of ands and ors found in Dreams and Stones by Magdalena Tulli.

How We Write and What We Write For

Because poets make language and make language beautiful. Because beautiful language makes a new and beautiful world. Because poets live and make a new world, which beautiful language itself creates.

nov 1/RUN

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
30 degrees / feels like 22

Yes, another wonderful run! I love breathing in this cold air. Everything that has been almost closed opens up. A lot of the snow has melted, but there were a few patches on the grass. The path was almost completely bare and dry, only one or two short stretches of ice. The falls were roaring. I passed a guy talking on his phone (he was in shorts, of course), showing whoever he was talking to the falls — these falls are so beautiful (at least I think that’s what he said).

I tried chanting in threes:

I am girl /I am ghost/ I am gorge
Girl Ghost Gorge/ Girl Ghost Gorge
Girl / Ghost / Gorge
Girl Girl Girl / Ghost Ghost Ghost / Gorge Gorge Gorge
Girl Ghost Gorge / Ghost Gorge Girl / Gorge Girl Ghost

I was hoping I find some way into words about my haunts poems. It started with one: obsession (which I thought about before my run too. See below). I was thinking about how I return to the gorge again and again, day after day, wanting to be there, wanting to find better words, wanting to establish (once and for all?) that this place is my home. I haunt this place, as ghost and girl.

10 Things

  1. honking geese (just before going out for my run)
  2. snow mixed with ice mixed with yellow leaves
  3. a strange noise — a big pipe clanging mournfully (not exactly sure what was happening, but the noise was caused by a city worker patching the path)
  4. the sharp smell of tar
  5. a woman and her dog walking on the double bridge
  6. a few patches of ice under the ford bridge
  7. running past the cold, silent meadow, almost hearing the buzz of bugs from earlier in the fall
  8. rushing, gushing, roaring falls
  9. crossing over the grassy trail (to avoid the work being done on the path), running over little piles of snow and leaves, my foot sinking into a hidden hole
  10. listening to a playlist for the second half of my run, running on the far edge of the road, being passed by a car hauling a trailer

I was just about to write that I forgot to look at the river, but I just remembered that I did and that I saw one spot that looked like it could almost be ice.

Stopped at my favorite falls spot and took a few seconds of video before turning on a playlist and starting to run again. Watching this video, it seems less white and wintery than it felt when I was there.

minnehaha falls / 1 nov 2023

before the run

I wrote this before my run. It made me feel hopeful that I’m getting closer to a way into a months long obsession.

It’s November and I’m feeling the itch to start (or return to) a big project. Me and my projects. I feel unsettled, lost, irritated, overwhelmed without them.

Not everyone likes the word project as the way to describe what a poet is doing when working on some thing (or, working on nothing, when nothing is not no thing but that empty, unknown space, the void). I guess the idea of a project bothers me a little too — too organized, structured, disciplined. Maybe I’ll start calling it my latest obsession? But an obsession with some direction; the goal = (temporarily) exhausting my feelings/thoughts/understandings/experiences with a certain thing. To write and write and write about a thing until I’m exhausted, emptied or satisfied, at least temporarily.

The difficulty right now is that I have too many obsessions: the periphery, the other side/lifting the veil, living in a land of almosts, girl/ghost/gorge, RUN! as an archive. Where should I land? Which one should I choose? Perhaps I should avoid settling on something so BIG and important, and search for a small, off to the side way in?

Ever since I encountered a chapbook by Dorothy Lasky, Poetry is Not a Project, I’ve been critical/uncertain about my own use of project as a way to describe what I’m doing. I think I first encountered it in year 2 (2018) and I don’t think I actually read it. I just remember feeling uneasy with its title. And that unease has stuck. I think I’ll read it now.

note: I did read it and loved it and then went out for my wonderful run. Now, 3 hours later, I’m back and ready to read it again and then write about it a little.

There’s a lot I could write about in this wonderful pamphlet and its 4 sections: Habitus; An Example; What is Really Not Intention, But Life; and How We Write, and What We Write For. So, I want to break it down over 4 log entries. Today: Habitus

Habitus

I think poems come from the earth and work through the mind from the ground up. I think poems are living things that grow from the earth into the brain, rather than things that are planted within the earth by the brain. I think a poet intuits a poem and a scientist conducts a “project.”

Poetry is Not a Project

She is not satisfied with this distinction, feeling it’s not quite correct, then ends this page with the following hope:

But I do think there is a distinction. And the distinction, I think, is very important to how we come to think of poetry in the 21st century. Because I want this new century to be full of people who write poems, not full of poets who conduct projects and do nothing more.

Poetry is Not a Project

On the next page, she discusses why projects are useful for poets: they bring in money and respect.

A poet with a project has everything set out before he even gets started. A poet with a nameable project seems wise, and better than other poets with unnameable ones.

Poetry is Not a Project

She calls this out as BS. Then she discusses intuition and its importance for poetry, how the outside world of an artist blends and blurs with our internal drives. This blending and blurring can be difficult to name.

Love this bit:

Naming your intentions is great for some things, but not for poetry. Projects are bad for poetry. I might argue that a poet with a “project” that he can lucidly discuss is a pretty boring poet, at best.

Poetry is Not a Project

and this:

when a poet interacts with the field or domain of poetry, she is aware of the immense history she represents in her words enough to let herself be crushed by it.

Poetry is Not a Project

She then argues that poetic “projects” can be toxic to established and new poets, creating pressure by demanding the poets know exactly what they are doing and be able to articulate it to others. She closes this section with,

a poem, as a thing, resists being talked about linearly in its very nonlinearity. In its very nonlinear life. In the poem’s actual life, goddamn them.

Poetry is Not a Project

Here, I was planning to write some of my thoughts, but I’m struggling to describe why/how Lasky’s ideas resonate for me. I think I’ll write about the other 3 sections and then respond.

But, just one more thing: Lasky’s discussion of our inability to know or express what a poem is in the form of a project, reminds me of a definition of wild that I revisited this morning:

wild = capacity of all things to elude the mind’s appropriations

oct 31/RUN

3 miles
treadmill, basement
35 degrees / feels like 28
windy / earlier, snow

It snowed last night. Maybe 2 inches. I decided to run in the basement instead of going outside in the cold and the wind. While I ran I listened to a You Are Good episode about the horror movie, The Changeling. I’m not familiar with the movie but it’s on the horror movie puzzle we’re working on right now, so I was curious. Now I think I want to see it.

Not much to remember about my run. Can I think of 10 things?

Almost 10 Things

  1. I forgot my headband and even though my hair was pulled back in a ponytail, stray hairs kept flying out and into my face. I think running on the treadmill must cause static
  2. the hairs feel like little spider webs and are annoying
  3. I thought sweat would help tame these hairs, but it didn’t. They kept harassing all through the run
  4. I briefly stepped off the treadmill mid-run to set up the podcast. The belt made a loud whirr that sounded like it might fly off at any minute
  5. sometimes, but not all the time, I forgot my feet were touching the ground and I felt like I was floating
  6. on the podcast they talked about how the main character, George C. Scott, was an old dad — he was in his 50s, but was an old 50s — Sarah Marshall called it a 70s 50s. She also compared him to her dad and said that they were both born smoking cigarettes, which aged them more rapidly
  7. why is that what I remember?
  8. my left hip was a little stiff
  9. treadmills are boring and I kept looking at my watch, hoping the time was going faster

I don’t like running on treadmills that often. We just rejoined the Y for the winter so maybe I won’t have to? If I do, I’d like to do some interesting experiments. Maybe more reciting poetry or listening to more podcasts or audio books?

It’s Halloween, and here’s a wonderful poem in celebration of it:

Ode to Halloween/ Joanne Durham

The Crayola crayon box on skinny legs
squeezes close to the patch-eyed pirate
on my doorstep, goodie bags outstretched

like ours were long ago—We knew
we were the lucky ones, living
in the apartments, where we scored more

M&Ms and Snickers bars in twenty minutes
than the kids in fancy houses did in an hour.
But it wasn’t the candy that enticed us,

most of mine forgotten on the kitchen shelf
for months after the initial gorging.
It was the whole town complicit

with superheroes and monsters, my sister
morphed into a frog in Mom’s t-shirt and
green socks, Mr. Carson dressed in fluorescent

skeleton bones we dashed past to reach
the fairy godmother at the front door,
our faces upturned and open—

We forgot if we were a kid who couldn’t spell,
a boy sprouting acne at nine. We just fastened
a lion’s fuzzy face over our own and roared.

Speaking of Halloween, we have had the same decorations for 6 or 7 years. Cheap Target skeleton lights, a styrofoam tombstone, and hands and a skull that light up and look they’re coming out of the earth. It’s not amazing, but I like decorating a little and it looks cool from down the street. For the past week, the lights haven’t been working and I couldn’t figure out why. Scott finally checked: someone cut the cord. Why? Such a bummer.

oct 30/RUN

5.4 miles
franklin loop
25 degrees / feels like 20

Yes! A great temperature for running. I love the cold air and not getting overheated. Wore black running tights, black running shorts, my 10 year-old base layer green shirt, an orange sweatshirt, black gloves, a hat and a buff. Such a great run. I feel satisfied and happy and energized. A great start to the winter running season!

10 Things

  1. chatty, chirping birds — sparrows? wrens? finches? chickadees?
  2. the Welcoming Oaks are almost bare. Where was I when the leaves fell? hello friends!
  3. a bright white circle of sunlit river burning through the growing gap between the trees
  4. everywhere more of a view to the other side
  5. empty blueish gray water — so calm and pleasing to my eyes
  6. passed Daddy Long Legs, dressed in black. His hi was so quiet it didn’t register until it was too late to call back a greeting
  7. Hi Dave! — greeting Dave, the Daily Walker in the final mile
  8. crossing the bridge, approaching 2 talkative runners from behind: excuse me. / Oh! [a runner jumps to the side looking freaked out] / Sorry I scared you!
  9. the smell of smoke down below on the east side of the river
  10. a roller skier! I couldn’t hear the clicking and clacking of his ski poles until I was right next to me

bats, bells, noisy road work, and late fall leaves

Found this poem from DH Lawrence the other day while looking for poems about bats. Wow, he didn’t like bats!

 Bat/ D.H. Lawrence

At evening, sitting on this terrace,
When the sun from the west, beyond Pisa, beyond the mountains of Carrara
Departs, and the world is taken by surprise …

When the tired flower of Florence is in gloom beneath the glowing
Brown hills surrounding …

When under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio
A green light enters against stream, flush from the west,
Against the current of obscure Arno …

Look up, and you see things flying
Between the day and the night;
Swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together.

A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches
Where light pushes through;
A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air.
A dip to the water.

And you think:
“The swallows are flying so late!”

Swallows?

Dark air-life looping
Yet missing the pure loop …
A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight
And serrated wings against the sky,
Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,
And falling back.

Never swallows!
Bats!
The swallows are gone.

At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats
By the Ponte Vecchio …
Changing guard.

Bats, and an uneasy creeping in one’s scalp
As the bats swoop overhead!
Flying madly.

Pipistrello!
Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe.
Little lumps that fly in air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive;

Wings like bits of umbrella.

Bats!

Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;
And disgustingly upside down.

Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.
Bats!

In China the bat is symbol for happiness.

Not for me!

Today, writing this bit before my run, I’m thinking about bats and echos and echolocation. Vibrations, reverberations, sounds that haunt by continuing to ring out. Bells. But, back to the echoes. In addition to bats, I’m thinking about a stanza from a favorite Halloween poem that I posted on this day in 2020:

A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:
from Black Cat/ Rainer Maria Rilke

Speaking of haunting, relentless sounds: I am sitting at my desk in the front room and city workers are paving the hole they made in the street in July or August. So loud! Beep beep beep. Rrrruuummmbbbllleee. Scrape scrape, tamp tamp. Even the visual noise echoes — a flash flash flash of the lights on the truck as it dumps the gravel or tar or whatever they’re putting in the hole. Everything is vibrating — the street, my jaw, my chair, the windows. Difficult to think or to write while this is happening!

At the end of my run, having crossed the river road to walk in the grassy, leaf covered boulevard, I was distracted by the delightful noise of fallen leaves. Then I noticed a bare tree, its still green leaves scattered around it.

An image of the ground covered in leaves, most of them green. A strange sight in late fall when most of the fallen leaves are usually brown or orange or gold. When I took this picture, the ground seemed to glow from the green, but now, looking at the image, everything is muted and dull and boring. Is it my lack of functioning cone cells, my inability to take a decent picture, or something else?
green leaves on the ground / 30 oct 2023

oct 28/RACE

Halloween 10k
stone arch bridge
27 degrees

We did it! Scott and I ran together in our first race in 4 years. Much slower than I’ve ever run a 10k, but it doesn’t matter because we did it without stopping, especially on the final hill. And I felt good at the end and even smiled. Hooray! The only part I didn’t like was before the race. It was freezing. I was dressed in my usual winter attire — tights, a green shirt, orange sweatshirt, black vest, gloves, and a buff — but it wasn’t enough. I was so cold that I felt like I might throw up. I’m fine running outside when it’s very cold, but I have to be moving, which we weren’t for almost an hour.

10 Things

  1. the cobblestones at the beginning were a challenge — so uneven and broken
  2. David S. Pumpkins and his 2 ghosts were running the race
  3. also a guy portaging a canoe — an actual canoe! I wonder if he was running the 10k or the marathon
  4. other costumes: 2 m-n-ms — red, 2 oompa loompas, curious george and the man with the yellow hat
  5. a guy dressed up like the granny from Little Red Riding Hood
  6. running down a hill, I passed one of the leaders of the race running back up it. I thought I heard hime call out, only 5?! as he passed the 5 mile marker
  7. one runner approaching another one and calling out, I love your earrings! They make your outfit look extra special
  8. a guy in a banana costume struggling up the first hill, wheezing loudly and breathing heavily
  9. bump/bump bump bump/ bump bump buuuuummp (overheard: the opening to “eye of the tiger” at the top of the hill)
  10. speeding up on the stone arch bridge and (almost) sprinting across the line with Scott with a huge smile on my face — a great race!

adding this several hours later: I found this poem on HAD (havehashad.com) and I didn’t want to wait until the next time I run to post it, so here it is:

Friendly?/ Luke Strathmann

The fact they call Casper friendly
Means he probably isn’t
Probably a real piece of shit
The type of ghost
Who keeps business unfinished
Just to stick around
Longer than anyone wants
One time grandpa fell on a knife
And grandma said a ghost did it
And I bet it was fucking Casper
I don’t trust him for one fuck
And don’t care if he hears it, either
Haunt me, baby
HAUNT ME!!!
One day I’ll be a ghost, too
And then we’ll see who’s friendly
We’ll beef until the sun explodes
Eats the earth and everything else
And that will be the end of all business
Unfinished or not

oct 27/RUN

2.7 miles
2 trails
37 / feels like 29
wind: 15 mph

Okay winter. Wore tights under my shorts, a long-sleeved shirt under my sweatshirt, gloves and a buff. The only part of me that was cold: my ears. Now, sitting at my desk, they burn. Blustery out there. Swirling wind. A few times I mistook a falling leaf for a flying bird, which was very cool to see. A brown bird, floating by.

My legs were sore. I’m eager to get my blood checked at my physical in a few weeks. My iron might still be low. Until then, more burgers and a new multi vitamin that’s not quite a choking hazard.

10 Things

  1. more of a view today: cold blue water through the remaining red and yellow leaves
  2. slippery leaves covering the trail — don’t fall!
  3. near the sidewalk at 36th and 46th: a deep hole, dug up by the city workers, not as neat or wide as the holes carved out on our street, more like a gash or a missing chunk ripped out
  4. walkers bundled up in winter coats with hats and gloves
  5. the entrance to the Winchell trail, which was shrouded in yellow the other day, was open and bare today
  6. dripping water at the ravine — drip drip drip
  7. looking down at the gorge from the edge, a pleasing palette: steel blue, dark green, gray, brown
  8. a brown leaf fluttering by my face, looking like a floating bird
  9. at least 3 or 4 lonely, empty benches
  10. a kid’s voice below — would I encounter them later? Yes

Revisiting a poem I posted on this day in 2020, My Doubt/ Jane Hirshfield, these lines reminded me of something:

the lines:

I would like
to grow content in you, doubt,
as a double-hung window
settles obedient into its hidden pulleys and ropes.

the something:

Dance with the pain 

That last one is something I describe a lot. What does that even mean?
It means to greet the pain or discomfort like an old friend. Know that it’s always there waiting for you. If you accept it, and envision yourself enjoying its company, it’s much more manageable.

from a race recap at the Chicago Marathon — @emmajanelbates

Being content with the doubt and greeting pain as an old friend. Accepting doubt and being content with it I think I can do, but befriending pain? I’ve been trying to work on that as part of this larger writing/living/moving project. The pain I’m thinking of is the pain in my knees or my back or my hips, but it’s also other, deeper pains: the pain of aging, loved ones dying, living within a body that doesn’t work as well. Not sure if I’d call it a friend yet, more like acquaintances. I think it’s possible, but what does enjoying the company of pain look like, outside of the model of sadomasochism?

oct 25/RUN

3.3 miles
2 trails
51 degrees
humidity: 91%

Yesterday it rained all day. Today it was wet and gray and leaf-littered. For the first mile, I heard a squeak squeak each time I stepped on the wet leaves. Saw and good morninged a regular: Mr. Walker Sitter. Heard kids yelling at the school playground. Smelled the sewer gas. Avoided city workers and roofers and bikers almost over the white line. Admired the “edge of the world,” now open and looking even more edge-y. Worried about slipping on the wet leaves and falling down the steep slope. Dripped sweat in the humid air. Counted drops falling from the sewer pipe in the ravine. Wondered if the distance/pace was not working properly on my watch. Forgot about everything else.

The color of the day is YELLOW.

  1. tunnels of yellow leaves above me
  2. piles of yellowed leaves under me
  3. yellow cross walk signs glowing in the gloom
  4. a runner’s bright yellow running shirt
  5. (writing this entry): a neighbor’s yellow tree outside my window,
  6. yellow leaves on the hydrangea bush
  7. a stretch of yellow trees, just past their peak, beside me near Folwell
  8. a yellow entrance to the Winchell Trail

The yellow I see is mostly bright. Not gold, but with hints of orange and green.

Before I ran I memorized A Rhyme for Halloween. Then I recited lines from it as I moved. Never all at once, but every so often.

As I was searching for another poem to post I thought about how many poems I’ve already posted and why I keep posting more when I hardly have time to read the ones I’ve already posted. So today, I decided to revisit a poem that I posted on October 25th, 2020: Beginning/ JAMES WRIGHT. Beautiful. Reading it right now, I love the opening:

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.   
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.

I love the idea of the moon dropping feathers and the dark wheat listening. And now, as I read the third line, Be still. I’m thinking of it less as a command to not move (to be still), and more as an invitation or a plea to continue to exist (be, still). And then I’m connecting that idea to the last 2 lines of the poem:

The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.

Perhaps my darkness involves an impossible wish, that my mom and Scott’s parents were still alive.

oct 21/RUN

6.2 miles
minnehaha dog park and back
53 degrees
wind: 15 mph

Back on track with the weekly “long” run with Scott. Today we ran past the falls to the dog park, then turned around. Beautiful but windy. Not sure if this has ever happened before, but a gust of wind blew my cap off my head. I joked with Scott that the wind was mad at me for the bad poetry I was composing. Something about how the bright sunlight strobed through the trees while the leaves disrobed and the wind probed the empty space where red and gold and green had been. Pretty bad — I guess I deserved to get my hat knocked off. Thankfully I was able to catch the cap before it blew into the street.

After we passed the falls, which were in full flow, I recited Mary Oliver’s “Can You Imagine” to Scott as we followed the paved trail on the edge of the bluff, above Minnehaha creek as it travels to the Mississippi. When I was finished he admitted he had become distracted when I recited the line, Surely you can’t imagine they just stand there loving every minute of it” because he started thinking about the song with the lyrics, “loving every minute of it.” At the time I couldn’t remember who sang it or how it went, but I just looked it up. Loverboy. Excellent.

10 Things

  1. a bright yellow tree
  2. next to a fiery red one, both glowing from the sun
  3. my favorite orange tree near the double bridge, now bare and looking brittle
  4. 3 roller skiers! Before I saw them, I heard their poles click click clacking
  5. a pileated woodpecker laughing, somewhere in the trees
  6. another woodpecker tap tap tapping away at the roof of the kiosk
  7. May Swenson’s scarcely gliding stream from her poem “October”: Minnehaha Creek as seen from the tall bridge that crosses over the Veteran’s Home
  8. from the top of the bluff at Wabun Park, you have a clear view of the new development on the old Ford plant grounds
  9. the glitter effect: the sparkling water burning through a gap in the trees
  10. dodging walkers, a few with coffee cups, as we sprinted down the hill and through the tunnel of trees

oct 18/RUN

3.1 miles
2 trails
54 degrees / drizzle

Wow, so much yellow. Full fall color, I think. I was sore this morning from my run yesterday, but glad I went out to be with all of this beautiful color!

I listened to a playlist, then took out my headphones while I was on the Winchell Trail, then put the playlist back in for the last mile. Ended the run with the theme to Rocky — not on purpose; it happened to come up on shuffle.

Smelled the sewer, heard the limestone dripping, called out right behind you several times. Thought (again) about stopping at the overlook to take a picture of the wonderful view of the river, but didn’t. Instead, I stopped at the entrance to the Winchell Trail and took this shot:

At the top of some limestone steps, about to enter the Winchell Trail from the south end. In the lower right, a limestone wall. In the center, a black railing. More than half of the image is yellow leaves, mostly on trees, some on the dirt trail which used to be asphalt. On the right side, a stand of straight brown trunks.
entering the Winchell Trail from the south

10 Things

  1. 4 or 5 stones still stacked on the ancient boulder
  2. the floodplain forest is almost all yellow
  3. the sewer gas from below smelled sour and unpleasant
  4. a Minneapolis Park truck was parked in the grass above the gravel trail that descends through the ravine — are they planning to clear out more dead limbs below?
  5. encounter 1: 2 people with 2 big black dogs on the Winchell trail — right behind you / sorry / no worries. It’s a beautiful morning!
  6. encounter 2: a man with his dog — right behind you / no words, but he moved over slightly / thanks!
  7. the “edge of the world” was mostly bare, with only a few streaks of yellow left
  8. avoiding roots on the dirt trail next to edmund, imagining that I was doing agility drills
  9. taking off my pink jacket at the bottom of the 38th street steps
  10. encounter 3: 2 different people with dogs, or a dog?, bypassing the steps and continuing on the dirt trail to the oak savanna

oct 17/RUN

6.2 miles
ford loop
49 degrees

Overdressed. Didn’t need the tights under the shorts or the long-sleeved shirt under the sweat shirt. Made the run a little more difficult. Still, a good run on a beautiful fall morning. Lots of yellow today. Very fall-y.

10 Things

  1. St. Thomas bells chiming
  2. I could see my breath at the beginning of the run
  3. the light making the yellow leaves glow
  4. at least 4, maybe 5, stones stacked on the ancient boulder
  5. a biker calling out to me as I ran on the St. Paul side, good job! —Thanks!
  6. looking down at the river from up on the lake street bridge: a sandbar! I’ve read about the sandbars, and thought I saw one just below the surface, but today, there it was, fully exposed
  7. an inviting bench, perched above the gorge with an open view
  8. almost perfect moment: looking down at the water falling over the limestone ledge, sparkling in the sun, murmuring softly, framed by yellow leaves
  9. a west bound lane on the ford bridge closed off for construction, orange cones everywhere
  10. running up to the “edge of the world,” and stopping to admire the open view

I stopped on the bridge to take a picture of the sandbar:

A view from above the river, which is a blue-ish gray, with a white sandbar, strangely shaped, and a shiny circle of sun reflecting on the water. More on the strange shape of the sandbar: in its middle, where it is at its narrowest, the sandbar is covered over with water, making it look like 2 sandbars. Both above and below this spot the sandbar expands.
a sandbar in the Mississippi River below the lake street bridge

oct 12/RUN

3.6 miles
locks and dam no. 1 hill
51 degrees
wind: 13 mph

My knees were sore last night and this morning and I wondered if I should go out for a run, but it’s supposed to rain later today and all of tomorrow, and I read an article that said sometimes running on sore legs is better than not running, so I ran. And I’m glad I did. My legs/knees feel better after than they did before.

Felt windier than 13 mph. It almost knocked my cap off.

I listened to beeping trucks and chainsaws and rushing wind as I ran south. When I got to the top of the hill at the locks and dam no 1 I stopped and put in a Bruno Mars playlist.

10 Things

  1. the dirt on the boulevard was sometimes dark brown, sometimes light brown
  2. more trees without leaves — have we passed peak leaf season?
  3. a parks’ truck blocking the entrance to the overlook and the winchell trail — no winchell trail for me today
  4. running up the hill, the sun came out briefly from behind the clouds, just enough for me to see the faint outline of my shadow. Hello friend!
  5. more crunching leaves in the grass — brittle, brown, formed into little mounds by the wind
  6. a rough trunk with lichen growing on it — on the north side — a faint, yellowish green
  7. several different versions of green on the tree trunk and the grass
  8. walking past a giant rectangular hole in the street — the spot where they busted open the street to work on the water pipes. Minutes before, workers had filled it with warm, bitter smelling tar (or asphalt?) Heat was coming off the filled hole, warming my legs
  9. a falling red leaf hit me on the shoulder
  10. color of the day: bright yellowish green. Not only was I wearing a shirt in that color, but I saw at least 3 other yellowish green shirts on a runner, a walker, and a biker

After staring at the yellowish greenish lichen, I took a picture of it:

A close-up image of tree bark that is rough and brownish gray (or grayish brown). There are streaks of greenish-yellow lichen on the bark. While taking this picture, with my face close to the trunk, I could see the lichen. And, if I put my face close to the screen while studying the picture, I can still see it. I can also see the lichen in the picture if I turn my head slightly and look at it through my peripheral vision. But at a normal (1 foot) distance, I can't see the lichen. It blends in, not looking yellow or green but light brown.
a close-up of a tree with lichen on its north side

oct 10/RUN

5.1 miles
franklin loop
44 degrees

Ah, this fall weather! What a morning to be outside by the gorge. A little windier than I’d like, but wonderful. My legs felt a little stiff and sore, but I kept going and they got better. In the third mile, I started chanting triple berries. Just the same three again and again: strawberry blueberry raspberry strawberry blueberry raspberry. They helped me stay in a good rhythm.

10 Things

  1. rowers on the river! 6 or 8 in one shell
  2. the river was blue heading east, brown on the return trip west
  3. either wind or water through the trees, making a shimmering sound
  4. still so much green everywhere
  5. 2 different bikes blasting music that I couldn’t quite identify
  6. click clack click clack — a roller skier passing me as we neared the lake street bridge
  7. a minute later, a rollerblader approaching from the north, heading south
  8. flowers in the pipe sticking out of the trestle railing that’s been turned into a vase — a memorial for someone
  9. a man using a DIY walker/runner — bike wheels, yellow frame (I think I’m remembering that right?)
  10. the glitter effect: wind + sun + water = wow
My view facing south from the overlook on the Lake Street bridge. The Mississippi River with trees in the background and an apartment building in the upper right corner. This photo is in color -- blue water, green trees with hints of yellow and orange --but to me it looks black and white, or gray and brown.
My view facing south on the Lake Street bridge

No geese or fat tires or Daddy Long Legs. Also, no headphones. Listened to the wind, radios, conversations, my feet thudding on the ground.

I stopped at my favorite part of the tunnel of trees. Walking up the small hill, I noticed leaves gently falling from the trees, birds chirping, the light coming through the canopy. I decided to stop and take a short video:

at the end of my run, above the floodplain forest

Here’s how I see/hear this video: The view of a canopy of trees. Occasionally, a leaf stirs in the wind. All around this view, leaves were drifting down one at a time. If I put my face right up to the screen — nose touching — I can see that these trees are GREEN!, but with my face a foot away, the scene looks grayish brownish, with only the whisper of green. When recording this video, I mostly heard the birds and not the cars above me on the road. But watching the video I hear mostly the loud rushing of cars and some wind. The birds are very quiet.

The birds, both remembered from when I stood at the spot recording this video and heard in this clip, made me think of a wonderful bird poem I discovered yesterday:

For the Birds/ Zilka Joseph

Sudden dash of light in the corner
of my eye, a soundless flash in hazy swathe
of trees leaps stealthily from the small maple
to the crabapple that has taken this year’s
drought hard. My eyes bore into foliage. Is it
a mynah? Dad, you taught me well how to look
and listen. This is Michigan, and it’s probably
a grackle, but I think of the crow pheasant
(the coucal) I often watched in India, a wily
master of camouflage. I remember the first

time I ever saw one close up. I was seven
or maybe eight, sickly and bookish. While
sitting in the shade of a sprawling gulmohar
that dropped scarlet whorls of flowers
on me, it darted from under the hibiscus. So
graceful its arched tail, so fiery its beady eyes.
I was reading some Enid Blyton novel about
young girls in a boarding school in rainy
England who ate scones and crumpets, and had

fabulous adventures. It was a hot afternoon
as this avian beauty that normally threaded light
woodland and field slipped into my grandaunt
Lily’s garden. She was a famous doctor
at Tata Hospital when few women
stayed single and had careers. She drove
a grey Standard Herald, and her frantic beeping
of the horn sent her gardener’s sons rushing
to throw open the low iron gates when
she came home. Once, she gave me a nest
a weaver bird had abandoned. It adorned
my bedroom for years. She would tell me

about the trips she had taken when she was
young. All over Europe, and yes, to the Isle
of Capri—her favorite. All eyes, I would listen.
Then she would sing “‘Twas on the Isle of Capri …”
or play a Vera Lynn record. Did she have many
lovers? I wanted to wear expensive Dhaka
saris, high heels, smoke cigarettes (as I had seen
her do at dinner parties sometimes), travel—
be like her. Would I ever go anywhere? I who
failed in math and science, hated bullies, hated
school. My head sailed in the clouds. My brain,
they told me, was for the birds. My handwriting
a bird’s nest. My weak fingers would never grasp
a pen properly, my legs never walk normally again.
When would my flesh grow light, my bones
breathe only air so I could fly? When the bird

appeared from nothing, shapes shifted, my book
levitated. The bird floated, not walked. Did it
even have feet? I felt my weight lift. Floating
was as good as flying. It seemed not to see
me, as if it were a peaceful spirit passing
through. Strange girl, they said. A dreamer.
Did I imagine it then? Hearing a creak of leaf
and branch near my deck, the blur I saw earlier
turns to flesh and blood—a gawky crow
who arrows to the roof from the forsythia
and caws shrilly. Curious juvenile, her
glance is full of questions. Friend or
foe? Food or death? I throw my head
back, look up at her. She peers at me
over the edge. I slip indoors for bread, then
leave ripped bits on the railings. Where
is she? She’s hiding somewhere, watching me

watch her. They emerge and melt, these wily beings—
show a wingtip, glitter of eye, flick of tail. Leave me
a feather to dream on, a map to follow. My mother
and I fed them scraps everyday.They jostled each
other on the ledge, fought for crumbs, always
hung around our windows. Then disappeared
into neem, peepul, or the banyan tree as big
as a city. Did they wonder where we’d gone?
Had they heard us weep? Had they pecked at the
shuttered windows and silence? Wild fig seedlings
now grow from cracked brick. A sudden woosh

of wing beats. Listen! The air throbs. Three
trumpeters pass over me to land on the pond.
I wave. This is where I live. And there and
here and there. Crow, sparrow, finch, blue
jay, nuthatch, chickadee, cardinal, mallard,
cormorant, heron, geese, swan. They visit,
feed and fade. Return. They know their own.
I’m for the birds. I’m never alone.

I love how place — both India and Michigan — are so present in this poem. And I love the story she tells, about seeing a bird in India, being a misfit only for the birds, looking up to her grandaunt, and how she tells it. Also, I want to think some more about this line: All eyes, I would listen.

oct 7/RUN

5.5 miles
ford loop
43 degrees

Ran the ford loop with Scott. Finally, it’s cooler. Much easier to run. We talked about a problematic NYTimes article that Scott had read earlier that was so sloppily edited that they spelled Gov Walz’s name wrong (as Waltz, I think). We also talked about the rowers on the river and the Brooks’ mile on the marathon course.

Mostly the run was easy. My IT band was acting up by the end and I rolled my ankle on something in the grass in the last mile.

Running over the lake street bridge I noticed a single shell on the water. Then more shells, some with only one rower, one with eight. Then buoys. A race! A few minutes later a woman overheard us wondering about it and told us it was a tournament. It was so quiet on the bridge that we were able to hear the oars slapping the water. They made such a delightfully awkward sound. Without sound, the rowers float effortlessly over the water. But when you can hear the oars you can feel the effort of their rowing. I like being able to hear them; they feel more real that way, more body, less machine.

10 Things

  1. dark blue water. near the edges it looked almost black
  2. the lamps lining the path on the st. paul side were on, the ones on the minneapolis side were not — the minneapolis have been stripped of wires and never repaired/replaced
  3. rowers’ voices drifting up from the river near Shadow Falls
  4. it started overcast, almost gray. by the time we were done, the sky was bright blue
  5. a chipmunk darted in front of me, narrowly missing my foot
  6. plenty of color on both sides of the river — yellow, red, orange
  7. the ford bridge stretched in front of us, looking longer than it usually does
  8. on both the lake street and ford bridges, a tiring wind blowing into us
  9. a motor boat near the shore. I wondered if its wake would cause problems for the rowers
  10. turkeys! 3 of them in someone’s yard on the st. paul side

Typed “oars” in the search box on Poetry Foundation and found this poem. I like the form and want to read the larger work — Emptied of all Ships — that it comes from:

…shift at oars/ Stacy Szymaszek

water
relives
reservoir

boat
bottom
draft
displaced

°

lineal
thought
backward
body

no one
knows
the brains
I am now

tree
an oar
origin

joints ruptured
soak in
deep ink

Very cool. I might have to buy Emptied of All Ships.


oct 5/RUN

3.1
trestle turn around
60 degrees

Hooray for (slightly) cooler weather! And hooray for legs that let me go out to the gorge this morning! I love fall running, almost as much as winter running, but not quite. Today I was able to greet Dave, the Daily Walker and run a 5k without wanting to stop. It was windy. Not a helpful wind that pushes me along, but a frustrating wind that is always in my face.

No playlist today. Instead, I listened to the wind and a buzzing sound coming from somewhere below the lake street bridge.

10 Things

  1. the slap of a runner’s feet as she ran past me
  2. a bright circle of white light through the trees — the river
  3. overheard: some of those hills are ____? Didn’t get to hear the ending
  4. running north, it is still mostly green
  5. encountered: a few runners, some bikers, walkers with and without dogs, a big stroller
  6. one runner’s gait: smooth, strong, steady feet up and down up and down
  7. another runner’s gait: jerky with flailing arms
  8. and one more runner’s gait: fast with quick thuds as their feet pounded the pavement
  9. a buzz below — was it a weed whacker? leaf blower? a much bigger machine?
  10. the ravine between the 34th and 35th street parking lots is thick with green. Still no view of the black iron fence or the limestone ledge below it
Above the ravine, at a split rail fence, only seeing a few dark trunks, some green and yellow leaves. No way to see what's below.
the view above the ravine, between the 34th and 35th street parking lots

I don’t remember hearing any birds or dripping water or roller skier’s poles. No fat tires or radios or rowers. Only a quick view of the river. A few yellow leaves, some red. No orange.

oct 4/RUN

4.4 miles
longfellow gardens and back
64 degrees / 78% humidity

A little cooler, but still humid. More shorts and tank top. Decided to run past the falls to Longfellow Garden to check out the flowers. Oranges, reds, pinks, purples, yellows. Did the gray sky make the colors seem even more vibrant to me?

The falls were gushing, so was the creek. The sound of dripping water from the sewer mixed with the wind. Chainsaws echoed below me in the gorge as Minneapolis Parks workers removed dead branches and leaning trees.

Running on the part of the trail that dips below the road, between locks and dam no. 1 and the 44th street parking lot, I could smell the rotting leaves — the too sweet, stale smell of last night’s beer. Yuck! Did I smell anything else? Yes! The strong scent of burnt toast or burnt coffee beans or burnt something somewhere in the neighborhood. The soft, pleasing scent of the tall, fuzzy grass that Scott says smells like cilantro.

I listened to kids being dropped off for school as I ran south. At my favorite spot at the falls, I put in an old playlist. I took my headphones out again when I reached the Winchell Trail. Then I put them back in after I was done and walking home. I listened to a chapter about the benefits of being small in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss.

Since I’m prepping for a week about fall color for my class, I tried to notice color on my run.

10 Things I Noticed: Color

  1. there is still so much green. Everywhere, green. Not dark winter green, but light summer green
  2. a few slashes of red on the edge of the trail, the bright red hair of a walker
  3. orange cones, orange vests, orange signs, a past-its-prime orange tree, orange school bus, orange flowers sticking out above the other flowers
  4. hot pink petals, still intact
  5. flowers glowing such a light, almost white, purple that I imagined them to be ghost flowers
  6. yellow safety vests on a long line of bikers crossing at the roundabout, backing up traffic
  7. dry and dead brown leaves on the edge of the trail, covering the path
  8. the dark blueish gray of crumbling asphalt
  9. dark brown mud
  10. white foam from the raging falls

While walking around the garden, I took a few pictures:

Fall flowers at Longfellow Gardens. In person, these flowers seemed more vibrant and in reds, purples, pinks, oranges. Now looking at the photo, it is mostly various shades of green or gray or brown. If I put the screen right up to my nose or stare at the photo out of the corner of my eye, I can see some color, almost like the idea of color or a flash of color. Nothing steady or solid.
Longfellow Gardens, fall flowers in bright colors that I mostly cannot see

Pale purple flowers at Longfellow Gardens. In person, these flowers were so pale and so bright, almost white, that I imagined them to be ghost flowers.
ghost flowers at Longfellow Gardens

I love this description of what poetry is/could or should be:

Ars Poetica/ José Oliverez

Migration is derived from the word “migrate,” which is a verb defined by Merriam-Webster as “to move from one country, place, or locality to another.” Plot twist: migration never ends. My parents moved from Jalisco, México to Chicago in 1987. They were dislocated from México by capitalism, and they arrived in Chicago just in time to be dislocated by capitalism. Question: is migration possible if there is no “other” land to arrive in. My work: to imagine. My family started migrating in 1987 and they never stopped. I was born mid-migration. I’ve made my home in that motion. Let me try again: I tried to become American, but America is toxic. I tried to become Mexican, but México is toxic. My work: to do more than reproduce the toxic stories I inherited and learned. In other words: just because it is art doesn’t mean it is inherently nonviolent. My work: to write poems that make my people feel safe, seen, or otherwise loved. My work: to make my enemies feel afraid, angry, or otherwise ignored. My people: my people. My enemies: capitalism. Susan Sontag: “victims are interested in the representation of their own sufferings.” Remix: survivors are interested in the representation of their own survival. My work: survival. Question: Why poems? Answer:

the work of a poet: to imagine; to do more than reproduce toxic stories; to make your people feel safe, seen, loved; survival

oct 3/RUN

2.5 miles
lake nokomis
70 degrees / dew point: 59

Warm, again. More summer attire: shorts, orange tank top. Tomorrow it is supposed to be cooler.

Scott and I ran around Lake Nokomis together. Strange to be sweating so much while running over so many fallen leaves. Summer air, fall ground.

As we ran, we talked about the wet bulb temperature and the flag system for determining when a race should be cancelled.

10 Things

  1. the little beach covered in honking geese
  2. the low rumble of a plane flying overhead
  3. cracked, uneven pavement
  4. a fishy, lake-y smell near the dock
  5. a wonderful view of the water from the small hill between the bridge and 50th
  6. an empty, buoy-less swimming area
  7. a memorial hanging from a fence with bouquets of flowers — was this for the girl who drowned in August?
  8. watch out for the pumpkin guts on the path, they might be slippery!
  9. a woman sitting on a bench, listening to the news on her phone, then a song with a driving beat that I suggested (to Scott) would be good to run to
  10. blue water with small ripples, sparkling in spots from the sun

In September, I did my own variation on wordle, which I called birdle. The first word had to be a bird. This month it’s boo-dle or spooky wordle or something like that. The first word must be a spooky word. So far I’ve done: ghost, witch, ghoul

This poem was the poem-of-the-day on poems.com on Sunday:

Dorothy,/ Garth Graeper

Trees, light, weather, people

Millions of warm vibrating chords

Chance threads woven together in coordinated movement

I close my eyes and try to feel my blood pumping

Instead I feel you, walking miles, melting into hills and flowers

The simple power of circling a lake

You knew how to lose yourself, how to leave space

Walking to find a way to be whole

Bird song, leaves rustling

I fall into this moment, my atoms spun just so

This heartbeat is not mine alone

Two bodies walking

Two layers of sound in motion together, hundreds of years apart

Words stored deep in muscle-memory

Carried in hunger, in bruises

Reflected back by grass, branches, rocks

How do I get this voice out of me?

Love this poem. It makes me think of Thomas Gardner and his discussions in Poverty Creek Journal about running with the ghost of his dead brother. It also make me think of my early poem about running with my mom. And, the first lines — trees, light, weather, people — makes me think of Georges Perec and his attempt at exhausting a place by focusing on what happens when nothing happens — weather, people, cars, and clouds.

Reading Graeper’s bio, I found this very interesting bit:

 Explorations of place—real, remembered, escaped, imagined—are at the core of his poems. Graeper created a site-specific, handmade Park Book series based on places like New York’s Central Park and Battery Park, which he distributed surreptitiously. 

I did this too; I just didn’t distribute it to anyone. Maybe I should? First I need to record myself reading the poems and set up the audio tour.

oct 2/RUN

3.5 miles
2 trails and a hill
69 degrees / dew point: 60

Another hot, sticky morning. Yesterday it was so warm that they cancelled the Twin Cities Marathon. Wow. It wasn’t just the temp — it got up to 91 — but the dew point and the humidity.

I’m calling this route, “2 trails and a hill,” because I did my 2 trails route (running above heading south, running below on the Winchell Trail heading north), but also kept running south to the locks and dam no. 1, then down the hill and back up it before heading north and entering the Winchell Trail.

I’m on day 10 of being sick. I’m almost over it, but still have congestion — stuffy nose, crud on my chest. Our (me, Scott, RJP who is sick now) latest theory is that this sickness is the flu. Scott’s not getting it because he got his flu shot. Makes sense to me. This sickness shares some similarities with my usual cold, but is also different. It has knocked me out more, making it harder to run. My heart rate was unusually elevated for a day. I have a swollen lymph node in my armpit. I’m ready for it to be over.

bird tryptych

one: Sitting on the deck early this morning with my coffee, I heard one goose honking, then the sound of something sharply cutting through the air. Almost like scissors — swish swish swish swish. I looked up and saw a vee of geese! Maybe a dozen, speeding by in formation, not a single honk, only the swish of their wings.

two: Running south, just past the double bridge near the 44th st parking lot, I saw movement in the trees. 2 birds — were they geese or turkeys? I couldn’t tell — they were hiding in the bushes and I was moving too fast — but I decided they must be turkeys.

three: Running back north, close to the double bridge again, I saw the birds again. Definitely turkeys. They flapped their wings a little as they moved to the side for me. Thanks friends! A few seconds later, a bike passed me. I heard the biker ringing his bell over and over to alert the turkeys. ding ding ding ding ding ding

added the next morning, a bonus bird!: Last night Scott and I walked over to Sea Salt. On our way home, on the winchell trail, we saw a turkey on the fence — or, Scott saw a turkey and kept pointing it out to me until I finally saw it too. As we neared it, it flew away and into a tree. Crash! That might be the first time I’ve ever seen a turkey fly!

10 Things

  1. nearing the entrance to the Winchell trail: the water was almost white and very bright from the sun
  2. at the bottom of the hill, looking ahead at the ford bridge: the curve of the bridge was reflected in the water, almost, but not quite, looking like a smile
  3. more glimpses of the river, white and glittery, through the trees
  4. a biker on the hill, climbing it, then looping around to descend and climb again
  5. the sound of water steadily dropping from the sewer pipe at 42nd
  6. the buzz of crickets
  7. the croak of a few frogs
  8. car after car after car heading north on the river road — difficult to cross
  9. all around, rustling sounds — dry, brittle leaves being disturbed by critters moving through the brush
  10. beep beep beep beep beep — a truck backing up on edmund, trying not to hit the dumpster parked on the street

When I approached the “edge of the world,” I decided to stop and take a picture of it:

At the bottom of a paved section of the Winchell Trail, covered in red and yellow and brown leaves. On the edge of the path, an old chain link fence attempts to hold back leaves, the trunks of a few trees, and the open air of the gorge.
at the edge of the world / 2 oct 2023

When I finished my run, a mile and half later, I stopped at the 35th overlook to admire the view. When I saw my shadow, I decided to take her picture:

The shadow of a runner and the railing from an overlook above the Mississippi River. One hand of the shadow is holding a phone to her face, the other is perched on her hip.
Sara and her shadow / 2 oct 2023

sept 24/RUN

5.5 miles
marshall loop to Fry
62 degrees
humidity: 90% / dew point: 61


Cool, sticky, thick air. Lots of sweating. For our weekly Marshall loop. Scott and I ran several more blocks (past Cretin, Cleveland, Prior, and Fairview) to Fry, then over to Summit and back down to the river. We heard the bells at St. Thomas chiming 2 or 3 different times — or more? Scott talked about the Peter Gabriel tour video he watched last night. What did I talk about? I can’t remember. Oh — at one point, I pointed out the light passing through a tree above Shadow Falls, making it glow. The beauty of September light! I also talked about Glück’s line about the light being over-rehearsed and how the bushes and flowers and trees looked worn, past their prime, over-rehearsed.

10 Things

  1. a line of dead leaves floating on the surface of the river, almost under the lake street bridge
  2. slippery, squeaky leaves covering the sidewalks
  3. between fairview and fry the sidewalk narrowed — Scott guessed that it might be as narrow as 4 ft (it’s supposed to be 6, but is often 5)
  4. drops of water falling off some leaves, illuminated by the sun
  5. ORANGE! several bright orange and burnt orange trees
  6. lions, pineapples, bare-chested women with wings — lawn ornament on Summit
  7. waffles, falafel, “mixed” popcorn, Thai, ice cream — restaurants/stores passed on the run
  8. overheard: it’s hard to tell how well the Vikings will do — a biker to 2 other bikers
  9. looking across from the east side to the west bank of the river, thinking I was seeing some sort of color — not BRIGHT color, but the idea of it: red instead of RED! Asked Scott and he said, Wow, that’s some RED! [how color works for me]
  10. 3 roller skiers on the bridge — no clicking and clacking because there wasn’t room for them to swing their poles

One of my favorite local poetry people (and one of my former teachers) posted this mushroom poem by Emily Dickinson. A nice contrast to another one of my favorite mushroom poems by Sylvia Plath:

The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants — (1350)/ Emily Dickinson

The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants –
At Evening, it is not
At Morning, in a Truffled Hut
It stop opon a Spot

As if it tarried always
And yet it’s whole Career
Is shorter than a Snake’s Delay –
And fleeter than a Tare –

’Tis Vegetation’s Juggler –
The Germ of Alibi –
Doth like a Bubble antedate
And like a Bubble, hie –

I feel as if the Grass was pleased
To have it intermit –
This surreptitious Scion
Of Summer’s circumspect.

Had Nature any supple Face
Or could she one contemn –
Had Nature an Apostate –
That Mushroom – it is Him!

Tarry is to delay or be tardy.
The tare is the weight of a container when it’s empty.
A scion is a young shoot or twig of a plant, especially one cut for grafting or rooting OR a descendent of a notable family.

Favorite lines today:

The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants –
At Evening, it is not
At Morning, in a Truffled Hut
It stop opon a Spot

As if it tarried always
And yet it’s whole Career
Is shorter than a Snake’s Delay –
And fleeter than a Tare –

So good!

sept 23/RUN

2.05 miles
edmund, south/north
67 degrees
humidity: 87% / dew point: 63

a quick note before describing my run: For some reason, I felt compelled to rhyme things today. Most of it was unintentional, but a few times it was deliberate. Was I somehow inspired by a line from the song, “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)”? I watched a video of Gwen Verdon singing this song — and dancing too — last night. Here’s the line:

Hello, lamppost, what’cha knowin’?
I’ve come to watch your flowers growin’
Ain’t’cha got no rhymes for me?

Sticky. Uncomfortable. Thick. Lots of sweating. Flushed face. Heavy legs. Dark with hazy, humid air. I had intended to cross over to the Winchell Trail, but it looked crowded near the river. So I just turned around and went back north on Edmund. A chance to check the house that posts poems in their front window. Was there a new one? Unfortunately, in this bad light and with my bad vision, I couldn’t tell. Oh well.

before the run

A few more stanzas from Forrest Gander’s “Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpas”:

Cardiac Hill’s granite boulders appear
freshly sheared Look, you say,
I can see the Farallon Islands there
to the south over those long-backed hills
one behind another a crow honks

Running above the river on the paved trail it’s difficult, even in the winter, to see the terrain below — the limestone ledges, the steep slopes. Often, it’s all leaves (on the trees or the ground) and brambles and bushes.

Do crows honk?

the moon still up over Douglas
firs on the climb to Rock Spring yellow
jackets and Painted Lady butterflies
settle on the path where some under-
ground trickle moistens the soil

It doesn’t happen that often — because of my vision, pollution, the bright light during the day — but I like being able to see the faint outline of the moon in the morning or the middle of the day.

Throughout the gorge and on the Winchell Trail, there are springs and seeps. They are especially visible in the winter when they freeze over and turn into strangely shaped columns of ice.

A plan for the run? Not much of one: to take the Winchell Trail instead of the paved path.

during the run

Nope. I didn’t take the trail so no chance to get a view of the river or the bluff or any limestone ledges. Instead I listened to Taylor Swift and tried to keep my cadence steady and quick(er). Between 170 and 180.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. kids laughter drifting over the fence of my neighbor’s yard — a birthday party for her 3 year-old
  2. a big backhoe parked on the street — no digging today, hooray!
  3. a plastic orange slide, spied through the slats of another neighbor’s fence
  4. a dusty dirt trail, so dry it was slippery and uneven
  5. yellow leaves all around
  6. lots of red on the ground
  7. a biker’s bright headlight over on the river road
  8. a mountain bike — don’t think it had fat tires — on the dirt trail, approaching me
  9. 2 people in bright yellow construction vests, walking on Edmund
  10. a biker stalking me — approaching from behind. Not really stalking, just unable to pass me before we crossed an intersection

Don’t remember any birds or swirling leaves or bugs or roller skiers or music being blasted from car radios or leaf blowers or falling acorns.

after the run

I’ll have to think about Forrest Gander’s words some other day. For now, I’ll post something else I’d like to remember because I’m always looking for poems about erosion:

Erosion/ David Hanlon

You’re eight hours of sleep & careful folding;
I’m a mouthful of ulcers & grasping at hours
lost to obligation,
lost to obsession.

You’re made of granite & marble,
made for building;
you make

sheet music of my skin,
exhume a melody in me.

I’m chalk & sandstone,
used in paint;

I’m weak
because life runs through me.

I’ll move, I’ll go
wherever it takes me—

I’ll still
hold your hand,

sing my song,
brushstroke

our existence.

sept 22/RUN

3.8 miles
river road, north/south
70 degrees

Gloomy, everything looking dark and mysterious. I like these overcast mornings, especially when running beside the gorge. All the colors feel more intense — dark greens, yellows, reds, oranges. Today I saw at least 3 different versions of orange: orange leaves pale and almost pink; then orange leaves like a neon crayola; finally the classic orange — what I call orange orange — of construction cones and a sidewalk closed sign.

Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker. Smiled at a dozen walkers and runners. Forgot to try and see the river. Heard some birds (more about that below), the clicking and clacking of ski poles from a roller skier, the irritating squish of a walker’s slides. Smelled tar. Noticed that the path was covered in green leaves.

I felt relaxed and dreamy at the beginning, sweaty and a little sore at the end.

before the run

More with Forrest Gander and his circumambulation. Today, the next few stanzas of Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpas:

 as we hike upward mist holds
the butterscotch taste of Jeffrey pine 
to the air until we reach a serpentine
barren, redbud lilac and open sky, a crust
of frost on low-lying clumps of manzanita

mist holds/the butterscotch taste of Jeffrey pine I rarely think about (or remember if it happened) tasting the air. What might the air taste like on my run today?

Serpentine — another word for winding or twisting? Are there any parts of my running route that are serpentine? I’ll try to pay attention.

at Redwood Creek, two
tandem runners cross
a wooden bridge over
the stream ahead of us the raspy
check check check of a scrub jay

Looked up scrub jays. Also called California scrub jays. Like the blue jays here, which are just called blue jays (at least, that’s what I found in my minimal research), they are LOUD. Here’s what the Cornell Lab writes about their sounds:

CALLS

California Scrub-Jays, like other jays, are extremely vocal. Behaviorists have described more than 20 separate types of calls for this and the closely related Woodhouse’s Scrub-Jay. Examples include a weep uttered during flight, while carrying nesting material, or while taking cover from a flying predator; a bell-like shlenk used antagonistically, a quiet kuk exchanged between mates, and loud, rasping scolds for mobbing predators.

OTHER SOUNDS

Scrub-jays often clack their bill mandibles together to make a sharp rapping. Their wings make a whooshing sound on takeoff, and they exaggerated this during altercations.

California Scrub-Jay: Sounds

Gander’s rasping check check check must be the Cornell Lab’s rasping scolds. You can also hear the delightfully irritating clicking of the bill mandibles and the exaggerated flapping of their wings.

hewing to the Dipsea path while
a plane’s slow groan diminishes bayward,
my sweat-wet shirt going cool
around my torso as another runner
goes by, his cocked arms held too high

hew = adhere, conform…a plane’s slow groan — I’ve never heard a plane as groaning. Usually I write roar or buzz — a boom? I’ll have to listen for groaning planes today.

Yesterday when I was running, and it has too hot and sticky, I checked to see if my shirt was sticking to me. Nope. Not or long enough to have that happen. Does it ever happen? I sweat a lot, but rarely to the point where my shirt is soaked and stuck. With this brief description, I know that Gander’s circumambulation has been going on for a long time and that it is really HOT.

I like Gander’s last line about the cocked arms held too high. I often give attention to walkers’ and runners’ gaits and how they hold their arms. Some small part of it might be out of judgment, but primarily it’s about: admiring moving bodies, especially graceful ones; studying them to see what doesn’t feel right — this is a way to work through my vision limitations and to determine what I am actually seeing; and as a way to identify different movers out by the gorge. I can’t see faces clearly enough to recognize people (not even my husband or my kids), so I rely on other methods, like wide arm swings (that’s how I identify the Daily Walker) or gangly legs (the long- legged walker I call Daddy Long Legs).

Okay, so during my run today if I can, I’d like to think about/notice the following:

  1. tasting the gorge
  2. looking for serpentines
  3. listening for blue jays and groaning planes
  4. noticing how and where (and if) my sweat collects
  5. making note of the different gaits of walkers and runners

during the run

I wasn’t sure how I would try to notice all of the things I wanted to — a taste, a twist, an irritating sound, where my sweat collects, and a distinctive gait — but as I ran, I just started collecting images. It became a game or a scavenger hunt. Here’s how I did it: First, I tried to be open to things on my list. Not searching too hard for them, but being ready if they appeared. Then I briefly stopped at the end of each mile (roughly), and recorded the images I collected — I described them on a voice memo app. I was able to collect all 5, with taste being the last to be found.

mile 1

serpentine twist: looking up, noticing the trees winding through the air, almost like a river reversed.

irritating bird: Heard the clicking of a bird and I’ve been wondering (for some time) what bird makes those clicking sounds and I think it might be the clicking of the bill mandibles of a blue jay!

mile 2

My sweat is collecting on the side of my nose. I can sometimes see it through my peripheral vision. Now it’s dripping down my cheeks.

a gait: Passed a runner with very fast cadence — short, little steps. This inspired me to pick up my cadence.

right after recording these two images, I took a picture of my view, down on the Winchell Trail at a small overlook, perched above a sewer pipe:

a black railing, a leaf-covered trail, some red leaves on a tree. On the left side, above the railing, a sliver of river
a view from the Winchell Trail between Lake Street and Franklin Avenue

mile 3

taste: Bitter burnt toast coming from the tar they were using to cover the cracks near the trestle.

Bonus: a blue umbrella

A bright blue umbrella on a bench, looking strange and out of place. I noticed someone sitting next to the umbrella. I found this umbrella wonderful for the pop of color it brought to the gloomy gorge, for how unexpected it was, and for how it made me wonder about its companion: a person who likes to be prepared? who loves walking by the gorge so much that they’ll go even if it’s about to rain? who loves the rain? And, why did they leave the umbrella open — to give us all a gift of bright blue? they despise closing umbrellas? the umbrella is broken? Maybe if I was standing still, some of these questions would have been answered, but I like the mystery that moving made!

after the run

This “game” was a lot of fun, and I’d like to try doing it again. Would it work as well the next time? I’ll have to see. It made the run go by faster and helped me notice and remember things I might not have otherwise.

Also: I don’t taste a lot of things while I’m running. I should try and work on that by practicing and maybe reading more of other peoples’ words about tasting the world.

sept 21/RUN

3.1 miles
2 trails
70 degrees / dew point: 59

Another warm morning. Sunny, too. Not much wind. Almost a mile into the run my back on the right side, just under the shoulder blade, started to hurt. Enough that I needed to stop and walk for a few steps. When I started again, and ran more upright, it felt better, and didn’t hurt for the rest of the run. I wondered what it was, then suddenly realized: yesterday Scott and I cleaned out a lot of crap in the garage, some of it heavy; I must have pulled something.

Running south, I listened to cars, construction, kids arriving for school at Dowling Elementary, screeching blue jays, trickling water out of the sewer pipe. For the last mile, I put in my headphones and listened to more Olivia Rodrigo.

before the run

Thinking about Gary Snyder and circumambulation and Forrest Gander’s poem, “Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpas.” I listened to him reading the first stanza:

from Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais/ Forrest Gander

 
maculas of light fallen weightless from
pores in the canopy our senses
part of the wheeling life around us and through
an undergrowth stoked with the unseen
go the reverberations of our steps

my notes: I was immediately drawn in with his use of maculas. I think a lot about maculas because the macula (in the center of the retina in the back of our eyes) is where all the cones reside in your central vision and my cones are almost all dead. I looked up macula and it can also mean, more generally, spot or blotch. Here I like how his use of macula and pores reminds me that the canopy is a living thing, and living in ways that are similar to humans. “the undergrowth stoked with the unseen” — I’m thinking of how thick the trees are beside the path, how much goes unseen — but always felt — above the gorge.

During my run, I want to think about and notice the maculas of light falling weightless, the pores in the canopy, wheeling life (cars? bikes?), the undergrowth, the unseen, and the reverberations of our steps. That’s a lot!

during the run

I did it! I thought about most of these things and it made the run more interesting and meaningful. At the 38th street steps, before I ascend to the river road trail, I stopped to record what I thought about and noticed:

running notes, 21 sept 2023

transcript: September 21st, 2 miles into my run, at 38th street steps. Thinking about the Forest Gander poem and first, the idea of the maculas weightless. Then I was thinking of dappling light but the light today is not weightless, but thick. It must be humid, feels warm, and it’s pouring through, which makes me think of pores and difficult breathing. My nose, hard to breathe through my nose, and my back behind the rib cage, it hurt. And then I was thinking of the wheeling life and taking that literally: the wheeling of cars, whooshing off to work. And then I saw 2 different sets of bicycles: an adult on one bicycle, a young kid on the other, biking to school at Dowling. And then I was thinking of the wheeling life and the changing of seasons and transformations and the idea of life continuing to move, not necessarily forward (although it does that too), but also just a constant motion, even when you might want it to stand still for a while. Then I was thinking of the wheeling life as the hamster wheel [I thought about the hamster because I heard the rustling of a squirrel or chipmunk in the dry brush] and repetitions and routines and continuing to do the same thing over and over again — the loops, the way it’s warm every year at this time in September: too hot, too humid, too sunny.

Wow, when I’m talking into the phone about my ideas mid-run, I have a lot of run-on sentences!

after the run

 I love Forrest Gander’s poetry. And I love how packed with meaning his words are, like “wheeling life.”

the wheeling life: 10 things

  1. car wheels, near the road — relentless, too fast, noisy
  2. car wheels, below, on the winchell trail — a gentle hum, quiet, distant
  3. bike wheels, approaching from behind very slowly — a little kid biking to school with his mom who had a carrier with another kid behind her seat
  4. bike wheels, nearby, another kid and adult on the way to school
  5. the wheel of life as a loop: a favorite route, running south, looping back north, first on edmund, then on the winchell trail
  6. the wheel of life as transformation: red leaves decorate a tree halfway to the river
  7. the wheel of life as cycles: not the end of the year, but the beginning — school time: kids at the elementary school
  8. the wheel of life as constant motion: on the trail, below the road and above the river, everything is active: birds calling, squirrels rustling, wheels traveling, river flowing, feet moving, leaves and lungs breathing
  9. the wheels of life as cycle: always in late september, hot and humid and too sunny
  10. the wheels of life as transformation: thinning leaves, falling acorns, a small view of the river
Thinning leaves, some yellow, some green. Straight and slender brown trunks. A view of the river -- blue? gray? a few ripples
a picture of my view wile recording my notes, near the 38th street steps

sept 19/RUN

3.6 miles
trestle turn around (+ extra)
65 degrees / 72% humidity

Out near the gorge, everything is busy today — wheels whooshing, hammers pounding, bobcats speeding by. All the sounds felt electric. I’ve wondered this before (and looked it up, but forgot the answer): is the moisture in the air causing everything to sound different — louder, more intense?

Having just written something about triple berry chants for my class, I decided to do them today. Strawberry / raspberry / blueberry. I think I chanted them for at least a mile. They helped keep my cadence up. Did they do anything else?

10 Things I Noticed While Chanting Triple Berries

  1. Dave the Daily Walker had on bright blue running shoes — nice!
  2. a rollerblader passed me from behind — no clicking and clacking ski poles to alert me to their approach
  3. minneapolis parks has trimmed back the bushes and wildflowers that were blocking part of the already narrow path that splits from the biking path and dips below the road
  4. a runner, only a little faster than me, entered the path in front of me at 32nd. Very gradually, he inched away, then turned off the trail again
  5. more yellow leaves, a few slashes of red, no orange
  6. human voices and the clanging of a dog collar down below on the Winchell Trail
  7. several openings in the otherwise thick trees — dirt trails descending to the Winchell Trail
  8. a noisy runner with an awkward gait — did he swing his arms awkwardly too?
  9. another runner, speeding fast. Almost a blur with feet thumping the ground
  10. at least one loud thud as an acorn fell

Running north, I listened to feet striking the ground, an acorn falling, runners joking. I stopped at the turn around put it Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS then ran south.

At the halfway point, I took this picture. The river and the gorge are behind those leaves. In a month, I’ll get to see them again!

fall leaves, mostly yellow, several straight brown trunks, no view of the river
no view of the river, near franklin

sept 18/RUN

2.5 miles
2 trails
75 degrees

Recorded the lecture for my class this morning, so I had to run in the afternoon, when it’s warmer. Hot! Sunny! Everything dry and dusty, thirsty — the dirt trail, the dead leaves, me.

Listened to a playlist until I reached the south entrance to the Winchell Trail, then to the gorge. Dripping pipes, striking feet, my breathing, falling acorns.

10 Peripheral Things — above, below, and beside

  1. dirt flying up on my ankles as I ran on the dusty trail
  2. brittle red leaves, crunching underfoot
  3. the shadow of a bird flying overhead
  4. frantic rustling in the bushes — I flinched in anticipation of a darting squirrel that never arrived
  5. a walker moving over to the edge of the path for me to pass — thank you! / you’re welcome
  6. a slash of red just below — a changing leaf
  7. flashes of orange all around — construction signs
  8. to my right and below: dribble dribble dribble — water falling down a limestone ledge in the ravine
  9. shrill squeaking under the metal grate in the ravine as I crossed over it — a chipmunk?
  10. is this peripheral? breaking through several spider webs on the winchell trail, about chest height

For the second week of my class, which starts this Wednesday!, I’m offering alliteration as one way into the words for describing/conjuring/communicating wonder (along with abecedarians and triple berry chants). This poem-of-the-day on poems.com (Poetry Daily), is a great example of what’s possible when you write only words starting with one letter — in this case, a:

Autobiography/ Michael Dumanis

Attempted avoiding abysses, assorted
abrasions and apertures, abscesses.

At adolescence, acted absurd: acid,
amphetamines. Amorously aching

after an arguably arbitrary Abigail,
authored an awful aubade.

Am always arabesquing after Abigails.
Am always afraid: an affliction?

Animals augur an avalanche. Animals
apprehend abattoirs. Am, as an animal,

anxious. Appendages always aflutter,
am an amazing accident: alive.

Attired as an apprentice aerialist,
addressed acrophobic audiences.

Aspiring, as an adult, after applause,
attracted an angelic acolyte.

After an affirming affair, an abortion.
After an asinine affair, Avowed Agnostic
approached, alone, an abbey’s altarpiece,

asking Alleged Almighty about afterlife.
Ambled, adagio, around an arena.
Admired an ancient aqueduct. Ate aspic.
Adored and ate assorted animals.
Ascended an alp. Affected an accent.
Acquired an accountant, an abacus, assets.
Attempted atonal arpeggios

There’s also an essay about how Dumanis wrote this poem, which I haven’t had time to read yet. Very excited to check it out! Okay, I just skimmed it. Here are some resources from the end that I might want to explore:

A few terrific examples of letter-constraint-based contemporary poems include Phillip B. Williams’s tour de force “Mush-mouf’s Maybe Crown,” where all the words begin with M (or, occasionally, “em” or “im”); Izzy Casey’s univocalic “I’m Piss Witch”; several terrific single-vowel lyrics in Cathy Park Hong’s collection Engine Empire including “Ballad in A”; Harryette Mullen’s linguistic experiments, such as “Any Lit,” in her collection Sleeping with the Dictionary, and, of course, Christian Bök’s virtuosic book-length project Eunoia, in which, among other idiosyncratic constraints, every chapter can only use a single vowel. All such projects derive at least some of their inspiration from the mid-20th century French avant-garde collective Oulipo, or Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, a “workshop of potential literature,” which encouraged systematic, sometimes arbitrary, language-based constraint in the composition of texts. For my Oulipian autobiography, it was especially important to me that every individual narrative moment made clear semantic sense despite the constraint, that the alliteration did not overly affect the speaker’s syntax or natural cadence, that taken together they told the story of a life.

sept 17/RUN

5 miles
marshall loop (to fairview)
54 degrees


Ran all the way up Marshall to Fairview this morning. Slowly, Scott and I are building up distance for our 10k race next month. What a wonderful morning to be outside! Running up the hill, Scott talked about REM and their first performance on Letterman — how shy Michael Stipe sat at the edge of the stage and wasn’t part of the interview. Then we discussed the big houses on Marshall, wondering how many of them were duplexes. We ended the run wondering why people were stealing the wires out of the street lamps on the bridge — was it out of desperation? If so, how much money could they actually get for selling these wires?

10 Things

  1. people gathered outside the church, talking — was a service about the begin?
  2. crossing the lake street bridge, part 1: admiring the fog hanging low on the water
  3. crossing the lake street bridge, part 2: saying to Scott — this view looks like a fogged up window that needs to be wiped! Everything smudged, fuzzy
  4. a pileated woodpecker, laughing
  5. a whiff — the smell of up north, at my family’s farm in UP Michigan. What plant triggers that memory?
  6. running past a grand old building. Scott guessed that it used to be a school and that the big windows on the top floor were for an old gym
  7. Woodpecker castanets! A double clicking sound as a woodpecker drummed into a tree above our heads
  8. the house on the Summit that almost always has the sprinklers going during our Saturday run. This time they were shooting out from under the low bushes near the edge of the path. I felt a soft, cold spray as I ran by
  9. a runner ahead of us, running with 2 big golden retrievers. Their steps were so in sync that initially I thought there was only one dog — this could have also been because of my bad vision
  10. crossing the lake street bridge, part 3: returning to Minneapolis 40 minutes later, the fog had lifted. The river was empty and blue

Yesterday we buried Scott’s dad in Austin. No big service, just family at the cemetery. 11 months ago we were here to bury his mom. Then it was colder and overcast, today sunny and 70. As the pastor led some prayers, I noticed 2 squirrels leaping across the lawn behind her. My first thought: Scott’s mom loved squirrels and would have enjoyed watching these two. My second thought: life continues to happen around us, indifferent to us and our pain. For me, this indifference is not upsetting, but brings comfort.

sept 15/RUN

3.5 miles
past the trestle turn around
63 degrees / dripping

Unexpected rain this morning. Waited until 11 to go out for a run. Everything wet. Added 1/2 of distance to one of my classic routes: the trestle turn around. Felt pretty good. A few minutes in, after I reached the river, I started chanting in triple berries: raspberry / strawberry / blueberry. Then I tried to move beyond berries to other triples — mystery, history — but I got stuck.

Running through the tunnel of trees I listened to my shoes squeaking on the wet leaves. squeak squeak I heard the squeak behind me and looked back: no one, just my own echo.

A few minutes later, thunk! — an acorn falling from a tree, landing hard and intact on the pavement.

10 Things

  1. no stones stacked on the ancient boulder
  2. lots of dirt and mud kicked up on the edge of the path — maybe from park vehicles’ wheels or from the rain
  3. a smell — something pleasant — green, almost like cilantro, fresh
  4. pale yellow leaves
  5. a coxswain’s voice (female) from below
  6. the only view of the river I had was when I ran under the lake street bridge between the posts
  7. a walker holding a blue umbrella, from a distance I couldn’t tell that they were holding an umbrella. It looked like they were missing a head
  8. the ravine by 35th street overlook: the water was glittering, you could hear it falling out of the sewer pipe, moving down the limestone ledge
  9. more earthy smells — fresh, not sweet
  10. the Welcoming Oaks are turning from green to gold

Gary Snyder and Circumambulation

A few months ago, I came across a reference to Snyder and circumambulation. Now, since I’m studying Snyder and his work for the second half of September, I get the chance to think about it some more. Very cool.

Snyder explained, “The main thing is to pay your regards, to play, to engage, to stop and pay attention. It’s just a way of stopping and looking — at yourself too.” In graduate school at UC Davis in the late 1990s, I studied poetry with Snyder. I learned from him the importance of noticing and naming where I am and what is around me, the concept of bioregionalism.

bioregionalism: noticing and naming where I am and what is around me

I recall encountering the term “bioregionalism” for the first time in Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. I searched my files and yes!, I found some notes I took:

2 parts:
disengage from attention economy
engage in/from specific place: rootedness, bioregionalism

rooted in a place + in time (as in past, present, future…not always linear)
time/historical and space/ecological (who and what live/d here)

bioregionalism = an awareness of inhabitants AND how they/we are all connected (entangled?), identify as citizens of a bioregion as much as or more than the State

my notes, june 2021

circumambulation: the act of walking in a circle around a object of veneration.

On the morning of October 22, 1965, the Beat Generation poets Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg and Philip Whalen stood near this spot [in Muir Woods National Monument, on the Marin Peninsula north of San Francisco] and chanted the Heart Sutra before setting out to consecrate the mountain through ritual circumambulation. That historic walk would be enshrined in Snyder’s poem “The Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais” 

*

He would later explain his motivation for pioneering the ritual walk: “I felt it was time to take not just another hike on Mt. Tam, the guardian peak for the Bay and for the City — as I had done so many times — but to do it with the intent of circling it, going over it, and doing it with the formality and respect I had seen mountain walks given in Asia.” Starting at Redwood Creek in Muir Woods, the three Beat poets walked clockwise around the mountain, stopping to chant at 10 “stations” — notable spots along the route that were selected spontaneously for what the poets considered their special power — before closing the loop back at the creek.

Circling the Mountain

on ritual and repetition

Without exception, everyone commented on the value of ritual. Lisa Kadyk, a geneticist, said, “I’m not religious, but I do like rituals and recognition of spirituality in a big sense.” Visual artist and environmental field educator Kerri Rosenstein put it this way: “I like the nature of practice. To do something over and over. To train. It requires patience and discipline. I trust that each time offers something new. That we evolve by repeating the same walk as we awaken both to what becomes familiar and to what becomes revealed.” Gifford Hartman had throughout the day played the important role of “sweep,” following us to make certain no one took a wrong turn or needed help. “A ritual is returning to a place,” said Hartman, an English as a second language instructor. “Rituals also reinforce the seasonal cycles of life.”

Circling the Mountain

So many ideas about doing something with my earliest tanka collection, River Running, or my latest Haunts that includes a circumambulation! I just wrote in my Plague Notebook, Vol. 16:

The sacred object I’m circling around: emptiness, open air, the gorge

I really like the idea of doing a circumambulation around the gorge while (or, and then?) writing about it. A brief google search has given me lots of sources to explore, including this one — The Circumambulation of Mount Tamalpais: Limited Series. Wow!

I’ve decided to print out Snyder’s poem about the circumambulation and put it on my desk, under the glass, to study. I did this with Schuyler’s poem, “Hymn to Life” last year and it was very useful and fun.

sept 14/SWIM!

1.5 loops
lake nokomis main beach
79 degrees
windy choppy

So glad I wore my wetsuit! Also glad that I’m an excellent swimmer who doesn’t panic easily. That was a tough swim. And that was some rough water. Normally in an open swim, even one where I’ve picked up the pace or am swimming for more than an hour, my heart rate stays between 120 and 130. In today’s swim, my heart rate was 158. Wow.

10 Things

  1. seagulls, part 1: more than a dozen, floating in the water
  2. seagulls, part 2: flying furiously, stirred up by a little kid chasing them from shore
  3. before my swim: an almost empty beach, the sand had been tamped down by a park vehicle’s wheels
  4. after my swim: 3 sunbathers and one guy in jammers (men’s swim shorts that look like bike shorts) about to swim
  5. whitecaps
  6. swam over a few ghost vines reaching up from the bottom
  7. the giant swans are still in the water, tethered together by a dock
  8. only one sailboat with a white sail out in the water
  9. cloudy, murky water, impossible to even see my hand in front of me below the surface
  10. before the swim: a motorcycle pulling into the parking lot, blasting “Love Shack” — you’re what? tin roof … rusted

an unexpected ramble about libraries and unfamiliar places and my vision struggles

Picked up my first physical (non ebook) at the library yesterday. Last time I’ve been inside the library was sometime in early 2020, before the pandemic, and before the library suffered heavy fire damage during the George Floyd uprising, when white supremacists tried to burn it down.

There are lots of reasons I haven’t made it back to the library since then — I mostly read ebooks which you check out online because the light from the screen is always bright enough for me, while I often have to read physical books outside in direct sun to see the words. During and after the pandemic, I’ve been less willing to go into public spaces. I can’t drive anymore and the library is too close for a bus, but too far for an easy/quick walk.

Maybe the biggest reason: I’ve been scared. Walking into a building, I can’t read the signs that tell me where to go or notify me of something, like a new policy. What if I can’t find where to go? What if they’ve changed how to pick up holds, where to check them out? Of course, I could ask and I have been willing to do so, but it’s hard. Even if I ask, first I have to endure that moment of unknowing and confusion, when I enter a building and can’t see people’s faces, read signs, orient myself quickly.* This is Emily Dickinson’s moment in “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark” — A Moment — We uncertain step/For newness of the night –. Also, even though I’ve been working on it, it’s still hard to ask for help — to take the time, to bother someone, to not know how to do something. I’m hoping asking will get easier and I’ll care less and less about having to do it. For now, I have a different solution: Scott (or my kids or a friend) can come with me to a new place the first time, to help with any confusion I might have. Once I know how it works, I can come back on my own.

* To add to this: it’s not just that I’m uncertain, confused. Sometimes, my brain makes very bad guesses — often the exact opposite of what is actually there — and I overconfidently act on them. The more wrong I am, the more likely I am to boldly act. This is embarrassing — I look stupid or sound crazy/ridiculous, but it is also dangerous. Scott has witnessed this enough times to verify my assessment. I believe this is related to my failing vision, but I don’t know how. So strange and frustrating because I don’t seem to have any control over it, and I like to have control.

Gary Snyder’s Riprap

The book I had requested and picked up is one I’ve wanted to read for several years now: Gary Snyder’s Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. I read/skimmed through it yesterday afternoon, and there are several poems that I’d like to read closely and study. I think they might help me with my series of Haunts poems. I like his sparse, matter-of-fact approach. I also like his love for walking/hiking. I think that I’ll devote the second half of September to his work! I just requested a few more books from the library.

Here’s a poem I’d like to start with:

Above Pate Valley/ Gary Snyder

We finished clearing the last
Section of trail by noon,
High on the ridge-side
Two thousand feet above the creek
Reached the pass, went on
Beyond the white pine groves,
Granite shoulders, to a small
Green meadow watered by the snow,
Edged with Aspen—sun
Straight high and blazing
But the air was cool.
Ate a cold fried trout in the
Trembling shadows. I spied
A glitter, and found a flake
black volcanic glass—obsidian—
By a flower. Hands and knees
Pushing the Bear grass, thousands
Of arrowhead leavings over a
Hundred yards. Not one good
Head, just razor flakes
On a hill snowed all but summer deer,
They came to camp. On their
Own trails. I followed my own
Trail here. Picked up the cold-drill,
Pick, singlejack, and sack
Of dynamite
Ten thousand years.

I want to spend more time with this. After the 3rd or 4th reading: love the line breaks and how they keep it moving. Also how some of the lines have new meaning when read alone:

Edged with Aspen–sun
Hundred yards. Not one good

sept 13/RUN

5 miles
bottom of franklin hill
55 degrees

What a wonderful morning for a run! 55 degrees! Low wind, bright sun. Wore my pink jacket until I warmed up, faded black shorts, gray t-shirt, raspberry red shoes, my mostly purple with pink splotches lightweight baseball cap that I found in my mother-in-law’s closet after she died, with the tag still on, and white socks (also found with tags on in her closet).

Running south, then back up to under the Franklin bridge, I listened to chainsaws, workers yelling about trees falling, bluejays screeching, Dave the Daily Walker saying good morning, and Daddy Long Legs calling out hello. For the last 2 miles of the run I listened to Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS.

10 Things

  1. the deep voice of the coxswain calling out instructions
  2. the blue, empty river
  3. graffiti on a post under the lake street bridge — block letters outlined in black — was there blue too? I can’t remember
  4. an old convertible sports car parked under the bridge, white or cream
  5. a photographer with a telephoto lens on their camera, standing under the trestle, probably taking pictures of the river
  6. Daddy long legs stretched out on a bench
  7. some guy talking (to the gorge? on the phone? to some other person I couldn’t see?) halfway up a column under the bridge — was I seeing this right?
  8. a line of bikers in bright yellow and orange vests heading south when I was heading north
  9. someone running in a bright pink shirt, another in orange, and one without a shirt
  10. my shadow — sharp and dark in the sun, running alongside me

Found June Jordan’s Guidelines for Critiquing a Poem in one of my files. Right now, I’m especially interested in these bits:

2. Is it a poem? 

a. Poetry: A medium for telling the truth. 
b. Poetry: The achievement of maximum impact with minimal number of words. 
c. Poetry: Utmost precision in use of language, hence, density and intensity of expression. 

Technical Checklist: 

a. Strong, descriptive verbs. Eliminate all forms of the verb “to be.” 
b. Singularity and vividness of diction (choice of words) 
c. Specificity / resonant and representative details 
d. Avoidance of abstractions and generalities 
e. Defensible line breaks 
f. Compelling / appropriate horizontal and / or vertical rhythm and / or vertical line breaks. 
g. Alliteration / Assonance / Dissonance 
h. Rhyme 
i. Consistency of voice / distance from the reader / diction 
j. Dramatic inconsistencies 
k. Punctuation (Punctuation is not word choice. Poems fly or falter according to the words composing them. Therefore, omit punctuation and concentrate on every single word. E.g., if you think you need a question mark then you need to rewrite so that your syntax makes clear the interrogative nature of your thoughts. And as for commas and dashes and dots? Leave them out!)

sept 12/RUN

2.25 miles
dogwood run
61 degrees / 71% humidity

Cool. Wore my pink jacket this morning. Thick air. Fall is here. The Welcoming Oaks are starting to turn golden. Everywhere, the feeling of soft yellow. We ran north on the river road trail. I was on the outside and was nearly hit a few times by bikers speeding by without warning. Oh well. I’ll try to remember the kind bikers I encountered on Saturday and forget today’s jerks.

Saw one of my running regulars, Santa Claus! Also, as we ran through the tunnel of trees, I recounted to Scott the time I noticed some guy silently sitting in a tree. What was he doing? added an hour later: I just realized that this strange tree sitting happened on september 11, 2019. I can’t remember what we talked about, and I forgot to look down at the river.

10 Things

  1. several stacked stones on the ancient boulder
  2. the port-a-potty is back near the overlook
  3. slippery trail, a few squeaking leaves
  4. burnt toast or burnt coffee bean smell near the Lake Street bridge
  5. passing a fast walker on the inside near the trestle
  6. encountering a runner almost sprinting on the greenway
  7. a duet of chainsaws in the gorge below, probably cutting up the giant tree that we noticed on the ground last Sunday on our hike
  8. yellow vests at Brackett Park — park workers mowing the lawn?
  9. clashing colors: a pale green bench next to a pale blue church
  10. after finishing, walking to Dogwood, passing a welcome mat with thick stripes of black and white