Cooler this morning, earlier too. My goal was to run at 7. My watch says I started the run at 7:07, which means I left the house around 7. Nice. Wore my old (2021, I think) Sauconys that I stopped wearing because they made by big left toe hurt. At mile 4, my toe started hurting again. Bummer. Back to Brooks again or buying a new pair of cheaper Sauconys.
Ran to the falls without headphones, listening to the cars and the geese returning north. Ran back listening to my “Bunnies and Rabbits” playlist. Bad Bunny’s “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” and The Jazz Crusader’s “Young Rabbits” helped me to pick up the pace. I need to create a playlist for pace — maybe mix it in with my beat/metronome experiment: 1 mile with no music or beat / 1 mile with metronome at 172-180 / 1 mile with music.
10 Things
honk honk honk honk geese returning
sparkling water
soft shadows
a runner behind, breathing heavily, closing in, then disappearing — where did they go?
white foam (the falls)
a roller skier — or was it a roller blader?
tufts of symmetrically place ornamental grass mixed with purple blooms near “The Song of Hiawatha”
a woman in a bright yellow windbreaker passing me on a bike, calling out morning!
Mr. Morning! — morning! / good morning!
ending at the big rock that looks like a chair, stepping on it to look down at the oak savanna: green green green
a return
This winter, I replaced many of my regular habits with new ones: (almost) no alcohol; waiting an hour to drink coffee in the morning; more protein, fiber, and iron; instead of sitting at the dining room table for 1+ hours when I woke up reading poems-of-the-day, I watched a brief video then started work on my Holes project; a consistent bedtime routine — ready at 10, asleep by 10:30. I also transformed my workspace. I added a huge cork board to one wall. It’s been fun to mix it up and try new things. I’d like to continue with many of these new things, and I also want to return to a few I’ve shifted away from, especially reading / studying / memorizing other people’s poetry.
In writing this log entry, I decided to visit my favorite poetry sites — poets.org; poetryfoundation, poets.com. On Poetry Foundation I discovered a wonderful podcast series, Wake, Butterfly:
Matsuo Bashō wrote:
Wake, butterfly— it’s late, we’ve miles to go together.
Poetry magazine presents Wake, Butterfly, a series of intimate portraits that invite listeners to keep creating.
The final installment, which is the first I’ve encountered and will listen to, is with Marie Howe, one of my favorite poets! I think I’ll listen to it on the deck.
an hour or so later: I listened to it as I mowed the back yard. Usually I listen to the Bob’s Burgers Soundtrack (and I did today, too, after the 15 minute podcast ended). I’ve also listened to podcasts with Joy Harjo and Vs. with Danez Smith and Franny Choi, and several Agatha Christie books.
I love Marie Howe’s voice. Two times I recall hearing it before: when she was interviewed for On Being 6 or 7 years ago (at least) and in her brief discussion and recitation of her poem-in-progress, “Singularity.” In this podcast, she describes living with a big Irish Catholic family and the stories they would tell. She talks about war (WWII and Vietnam) and how she found poetry. Then she offers this:
I think the poem uses our stuff, you know, like it uses the details of my life, but the details are not important. The details are the cup … That hold something you can’t quite see, but you can feel, I hope. Because when it works, I feel something I can’t see. When I was writing a book called What the Living Do, it wasn’t done yet and I didn’t know how it wasn’t done. It had enough pages, it had an arc, I guess. But I was thinking about when I was in high school and. I was living up in the attic of our house with my brother. My brother lived in one room and I lived in another, and my dad would come up there when he was drunk and, um, pester me for hours—the way a drunk person does, wanting attention, wanting something, and it was very difficult. That’s one of the stories in my heart about my younger life, and I thought, “OK, what else is also true about that story?” And I remember actually standing up from my desk in New York here, and turning around, turning my body around 180 degrees and saying, “What else is true?” And I saw my brother Tom, who would come into the room and try to get my dad out, or would come into the room after my dad had left, and I wanted to praise him. So I want to offer you this invitation. Consider one of the stories of your life that feels fixed, and allow yourself to gaze around that story—quite physically—around the room of it or the time of it and to find something else in that story, even if the story is a painful one, to find something else in that story that’s praisable.
Consider one of the stories of your life that feels fixed, and allow yourself to gaze around that story—quite physically—around the room of it or the time of it and to find something else in that story, even if the story is a painful one, to find something else in that story that’s praisable.
I love this idea of taking a fixed story and finding something else in that story to praise. I think I need to sit with this one for a few hours.
Before then, this:
The Maples/ Marie Howe
I ask the stand of maples behind the house,
How should I live my life?
They said, shh shh shh . . .
How should I live, I asked, and the leaves seemed to ripple and gleam.
A bird called from a branch in its own tongue,
And from a branch, across the yard, another bird answered.
A squirrel scrambled up a trunk
then along the length of a branch.
Stand still, I thought,
See how long you can bear that.
Try to stand still, if only for a few moments,
drinking light breathing.
—
This standing still — seeing how long I can bear it — seems like a great thing to do everyday. As part of this: explore different ways to be still. What is it to be still?
The beginning of this poem reminds me of a Mary Oliver poem that I’ve posted on this log several years ago (2 july 2020):
I Go Down To The Shore/ Mary Oliver
I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out, and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shall– what should I do? And the seas says in its lovely voice: Excuse me, I have work to do.
Sitting at my desk in the morning, I heard some noise — rustling, I think? — just outside the window. Freezing rain or snow — graupels. Then it started snowing, not too hard, but enough to cover everything. No! I wanted to run today. Luckily, it warmed up and by the time I was ready to run, everything had melted.
10 Things
a police car parked parallel to the road in the first falls parking lot
aside from the police car, the lots were empty
a lime scooter leaning against a bench
one guy standing at the bridge overlooking the falls, with an orange hat or an orange something else (I couldn’t see)
voices below on the other side of the wall, down in the falls
no one else in the park
big puddles everywhere — my one foot was soaked only 5 minutes into the run
kids yelling and laughing on the playground
the river was covered with ice and snow with one sliver of open water
a walker approaching me, walking 3 tiny dogs — this made me smile
The run was mostly great. At times, my legs felt heavy (or, at least, heavier than they usually do) and I stopped to talk a few extra times. Were they sore or my lack of ferritin or some other ailment? The second half felt easier.
bunnies — nudge? muse? pest? ghost?
note: I started writing this section yesterday and have spent over four hours this morning wandering through the spaces it created . There’s a lot of movement in it — traveling from thought to thought to thought, here to here to here. Future Sara, and anyone else reading this, you might get lost.
So far I’ve written two bunny poems without really trying to. I’m starting to believe they want me to write about them. This very idea suddenly appeared in my third poem. I started writing about the moment when I first noticed the bunnies in the backyard at night and realized they had probably always been there. Then I wrote in my Plague Notebook 27: I didn’t choose to notice them as much as they decided to be noticed. And I thought: muse! Could this poem be about bunnies in the backyard and about bunnies as the thing that has decided it’s time for me to write, and write about them? For years now, I’ve disliked bunnies, and never imagined writing about them. But now here I am, writing about them, and I fear that I might learn to like bunnies.
All of this has me wondering, what is a/my muse? I’m familiar with the term, but have never seriously studied it, either as a concept or through examples of it in the popular imagination. Do I want to now? Is it necessary for my poem? Maybe instead of devoting a month to it — although that could be fun! — I’ll give it a day or two?
No angel speaks to me. And though the wind plucks the dry leaves as if they were so many notes of music, I can hear no words.
Still, I listen. I search the feathery shapes of clouds hoping to find the curve of a wing, and sometimes, when the static of the world clears just for a moment
a small voice commes through, chastening. Music is its own language, it says. Along the indifferent corridors of space, angels could be hiding.
If the bunnies are my muse, I didn’t seek them out. I looked out the window one winter night and saw them on the lawn, not knowing what they were. Did they seek me out, or are they indifferent to me? Did they reveal themselves, or did I just happen to notice them one day? I think I do less trying to find a muse, more trying to create the conditions where it could be possible. I noticed the bunnies because I was doing a month-long practice I called the purple hour. It involved using the time when I woke up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, to notice purple and write about it. One night, I was studying the different purples in the backyard and there they were, the bunnies. And maybe it’s more than creating the conditions where it’s possible; it’s also about being open to what could be a muse, letting it in.
Muse — to be occupied by, possessed, taken over, haunted, held captive, in the thrall of?
This idea of captivity reminded me of the poem, Captivity/ Siddhartha Menon which I posted on this log on 15 may of this year. In an essay, Menon wrote this about the final line of the poem:
“You are paralyzed.” It suggests the fatal indecision of a rabbit caught in a hunter’s flashlight, and snaps the poem shut” (Siddhartha Menon on Epigraphs).
My rabbit/bunny is back! This sentence is the only mention of a rabbit in a 872 word essay about a poem that features a bird. Where will my bunnies appear next?
Returning to definitions of muse, I googled it, and just past the dictionary entry — the nine daughters of Zeus, a person/personified force who is the inspiration for an artist — in the “People also ask” section was this question: What makes a woman a muse? Here’s the AI generated answer:
A woman becomes a muse through qualities like enigmatic allure, deep connection, and embodying creative energy, acting as a profound source of inspiration for an artist, often sharing a unique bond that fuels artistic expression, though not always romantically. Muses can be captivating personalities, friends, lovers, or even strangers who embody traits like wisdom, charisma, or mystery, prompting the artist to create, often embodying a living, breathing work of art themselves, inspiring everything from specific works to an artist’s entire focus.
Eww. The uneven power dynamics here, between the subject (isn’t it most often a male artist?) and the object (a woman who is not an artist, or is not considered an artist) that inspires them bother me. After images of male artists and their models flashed in my mind, a phrase appeared: Manic Pixie Dream Girl. I recalled encountering a critical feminist essay about this trope back in the day (around 2007 or 2008, when I was teaching pop culture and queer theory at the University of Minnesota). I searched for it. Not an essay, a video from Feminist Frequency. Yes! I remember them. This video holds up. Around 4 and a half minutes in, they link the trope directly with the Muse:
manic pixie dream girl
And now I’m thinking about birds in poetry and how they’re used to do a lot of the heavy lifting of a poem. She’s not the only poet to write about it, but here’s a good example of this idea from Ada Limón:
does this bird want to be in this poem today? Maybe it doesn’t. You know, we always want to turn the animal into something else, right. And sometimes I want to let the animal be. Of course animals are symbols, of course they turn into our metaphors. I mean, that happens. But I also think there are moments when you just think, okay, the birds aren’t going to save me.1
All of this makes me wonder: what am I doing as I keep putting the two bunnies in my backyard into my poems? And why do I insistent on calling these wild and mature eastern cottonwood rabbits bunnies? I’m not sure these rabbits are indifferent to me, but I think they notice me in terms of whether or not I am a threat to their main activity: grazing in the grass.
Now I’m remembering an interesting fact I encountered the other day: much of the eastern cottonwood rabbit’s time is spent eating, 6-8 of the day, both during the day and at night!) Okay, I looked it up again and I was right about the 6-8 hours a day, but here’s a delightful detail: primarily during dawn and dusk. Rabbits are crepuscular grazers. Crepuscular (cre PUS cular)?! What a word, and a good title for a poem?!
But, back to if rabbits (I still want to call them bunnies) notice me or not. Is my assumption correct about noticing me in terms of my threat level? Another google:
Wild rabbits are acutely aware of humans, perceiving them primarily as potential predators due to their innate, high-alert survival instincts. They utilize exceptional hearing and a keen sense of smell to detect people, often fleeing immediately to safety. While they may learn to tolerate consistent, non-threatening human presence over time, they generally maintain a healthy fear of people.
Yes! So, here’s something interesting: in the poem I’m working on right now, tentatively titled, Bold as Brass, my backyard bunnies do not care that I’m passing by; they keep grazing. They’re seemingly so indifferent that I’ve started calling out a pre-boomer phrase (and unironically!) to anyone around me: those bunnies are bold as brass! Where’s their healthy fear of humans? Is it that they can tell I am no threat, or are they being impudent? Or, has something screwed up their “normal” behaviors, and could that something be human-caused (like the over-developing of land, the loss of “natural” habitats, the increased need to live in the midst of humans?) Could that be the true heart of this poem?
Possibly, but first, another plunge2 down that rabbit hole! What do “experts” say about my theory of encroaching landscapes? Looked up “rabbits encroaching landscape” and What to do about wild bunnies? appeared. Here’s the subtitle: “Timid wild rabbits may occasionally eat plants in the garden, but usually live unnoticed on the fringes of our yards.” Usually unnoticed and on the fringes? Two favorite themes in my poems! Also included in one of the first paragraphs: edges, in-betweens.3 Back to “usually unnoticed,” here’s another useful bit from the article:
Here today, gone tomorrow is one way to describe rabbits in suburbia. Given the many predators who make meals of rabbits, their populations can rise and fall dramatically over the course of a year.
Come on, now, the pun was set up for you: hare today, gone tomorrow! Anyway, does my recent (for the last year) notice of backyard rabbits, almost every day, count as part of this normal rise and fall of rabbit populations? Or does it indicate something else?
The line about the gardens make me think of two things. First, a memory. My mom loved gardening and was especially proud of her West Des Moines garden (I created a digital story about it a few years ago). I recall the rabbits liked her flowers, especially her roses. On the advice of a neighbor, she sprinkled bone meal around the bush, which didn’t work. Not wanting to kill the rabbit, she managed to catch it — I can’t remember how, maybe with the help of that same neighbor — and drove 10 or 15 miles out of town and into the prairie to release the rabbit.
Second, a few feelings I recall having decades ago when reading the section in Peter Rabbit when Peter Rabbit’s coat gets caught on Mr. McGregor’s fence and he’s trapped and then when he manages (barely, at least how I remember it) to make it home and has to recuperate in bed. The feelings: not fear or relief but an understanding that life was dangerous and serious and an ambiguity as to who was in the wrong — the bold, misbehaving Peter who disobeyed his mother’s orders and stole vegetables, or the hard-working farmer who was planning to kill Peter as punishment. I recall thinking I was supposed to think Peter was in the wrong, but I wasn’t buying it.
What to do with these rabbit wanderings? And where has my plunge down the rabbit hole led me? It seems fitting to conclude this ramble with the rabbit hole, which is a reference to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and her following of the white rabbit down into Wonderland. Of course, “down the rabbit hole” is also a term used for getting lost on the internet:
“Down the rabbit hole” is an English-language idiom or trope which refers to getting deep into something, or ending up somewhere strange. Lewis Carroll introduced the phrase as the title for chapter one of his 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, after which the term slowly entered the English vernacular. The term is usually used as a metaphor for distraction.[1] In the 21st century, the term has come to describe a person who gets lost in research or loses track of time while using the internet.
Out-of-control curiosity. Distraction. Losing track of time. Getting lost in strange worlds. These are presented as bad things. Are they? Many of them are embraced within poetry. And they are great tools of refusal and resistance against late-capitalism and wannabe fascist governments — you’re not working for/perpetuating the system while you’re following the rabbit hole.
Does that work when the getting lost is online, where the rabbit hole is designed to be the way curiosity is monetized: the more levels of the rabbit hole you enter, the longer you stay lost in all of the information offered, the more attention you give to a site and its advertisers.
I started this ramble yesterday after realizing my third bunny poem might be about the muse. That realization was partly inspired by a recent rereading of an excerpt from Tommy Pico’s poem, “IRL.” Somehow I’ve made it back to that beginning.Here’s the last section of that excerpt:
All I need is my phone. Subway, elevator, drifting off in a convo—no one really seems to notice, occupied by their own gleaming pod of longing. I am the captain of my shit, possessed by the spirit of Instagram I am omnipotent on Twitter on Blurb on Vine Soap boxes on the street corner of my mind Clear, boosted, boundless something come stop the shaking A sun to fly towards iMean something to do: mimicry of purpose. The injury of hunger is: death. The word of the day is: Gloze. To explain away. Glowing gauze glozes the etc. Weather.com says Stay inside forever, or drop dead. We’ve ads for you to click. You n me? It’s going to take soooo long for us to know each other ten years.
I don’t understand all that is happening in this excerpt, but the more I read it, the more doors it opens for me and my thinking about the internet, IRL, and the Muse.4
“the birds aren’t going to save me” — I suppose my initial turn to the bunnies was with that expectation, where saving = giving me something else to think about other than ICE and Occupation Minneapolis and fascism and my high blood pressure and insomnia ↩︎
My choice of plunge is deliberate; it’s a reference to Emily Dickinson’s “I felt a funeral in my Brain” — And then a Plank in Reason, broke,/And I dropped down, and down,/ And hit a World, with every plunge,/And Finished knowing – then – ↩︎
Something else included: “rabbits will excrete, eat and re-digest their own droppings to obtain the maximum amount of nutrients.” I wonder if that’s part of what the rabbits in my yard are doing when they spend so much time stock-still in the snow. ↩︎
One last thing about the Muse that I want to mention for a future discussion. What if the bunnies/rabbits are not a muse, or a catalyst for action (which was said of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland), but a gate? As in, Marie Howe opening in “The Gate”: I had no idea that the gate I would step through / to finally enter this world / would be the space my brother’s body made↩︎
Brr. Colder today. Walked with Delia around the neighborhood. Purple, white, red, yellow flowers all around, even on the sidewalk. The ephemerals don’t last long! Even with the cold wind it felt like spring. My legs are a little sore from the run yesterday, but my back and glutes are fine. I think I’ve turned a corner with my injury.
before the walk
What’s the difference between a meadow and a field? Looked it up and found this:
A field is used more often to describe an area managed by people. The field before you was once an orchard and pasture belonging to a farmer. A meadow is used to describe a wild area.
Fields and meadows start when trees have been removed from an area. This can occur naturally with a forest fire or flood, or humans may cut down a forest. Seeds from grasses and weeds take root shortly after and a meadow is born.
Meadows can be large or small and can occur anywhere, including in the middle of a forest, alongside a pond or stream, or in the middle of a highway.
Both fields and meadows are open areas with few or no trees. Grasses, and wildflowers are usually the dominant species. Only a limited number of shrubs and trees are present. When allowed to grow larger shrubs will take over a meadow and after years become a thicket. Thickets become forests as tree species take root. This natural process is known as succession.
My family’s farm in the UP had a big field — the front 40. They once grew potatoes, and rocks. When no one mowed it, trees grew quickly. Not fast enough for me to see a forest, just thickets of scrubby trees that housed black snakes and foxes and mice. The back 40 field was a pasture for grazing cattle.
Abandoned orchards reminds me of a favorite essay by Wendell Berry, “A Native Hill.”
I’m inspired by these lines: “When allowed to grow larger shrubs will take over a meadow and after years become a thicket. Thickets become forests as tree species take root. This natural process is known as succession.
succession
A meadow becomes a thicket. A thicket becomes a forest. A forest returns to meadow. A meadow grows into a thicket. A thicket remembers its forest.
And what about an oak savanna?
An oak savanna is a community of scattered oak trees (Quercus spp.) above a layer of prairie grasses and forbs. The trees are spaced enough so that there is little to no closed canopy and the grasses and forbs receive plentiful amounts of sunlight. The savanna is often thought of as a transition system between the tallgrass prairie and woodland environments, but may contain species that are found only in it and not in either forest or prairie. As a result, it is an important and diverse system containing species from both woodland and prairie, but containing some species that is unique to only savanna.
Once common in Minnesota, the oak savanna is now a rare ecosystem. Before European settlement, oak savanna covered roughly 10% of the state, and now there is only a fraction of that left. What happened? Savannas rely on periodic disturbances such as fire, grazing, and drought to flourish. Such disturbances prevent most tree species from establishing themselves and turning the habitat into a forest community. Fire-adapted trees, such as bur oak trees with their thick, corky bark, and prairie grasses are resilient to fire and do well in environments where fire is a common occurence.
Without fire, tree saplings begin to grow in the savanna and are able to take over, shading out and eliminating the grass and forb species. Soon, where there used to be an oak savanna, there is now a woodland habitat. Oak savannas have become rare because settlers suppressed fires. Farming and development has also helped obliterate the oak savanna ecosystem.
Reading about oak savannas, and pastures too, I came across the word, “forbs.” What are forbs? “A forb or phorb is a herbaceous flowering plant that is not a graminoid (grass, sedge, or rush). The term is used in botany and in vegetation ecology especially in relation to grasslands and understory. Typically, these are eudicots without woody stems” (wikipedia).
after the walk
And now I’m thinking about prairies. According to this site, the difference between a savanna and a prairie is the number of trees — less in a prairie.
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee. And revery. A prairie alone will do If bees are few. (To make a prairies/Emily Dickinson)
Meanwhile, the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees (Wild Geese/Mary Oliver)
And the difference between a prairie and a meadow? For many, they’re interchangeable. For some, prairies have more warm season grasses and meadows have more cool season grasses.
As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together
and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers. (The Meadow/Marie Howe)
Reading up about different grasslands on an Illinois site, I found this curious fact:
Virtually all of Illinois’ native prairies are gone today. Most of the remaining lots of undisturbed prairie are in railroad rights of way, pioneer cemeteries and other spots that were not conducive to farming
45 minutes winchell trail south / folwell bench 58 degrees
Wow wow wow! Spring. Little explosions of bright green everywhere — out of sidewalk cracks, under fences, on slender branches. I think explosion is the right word — not pops or flashes, well maybe flares. Almost overnight, green! Not yet annoying or oppressive; I still have my view of the gorge and the other side. I could see fuzzy details, branches, rippling water, houses, but what I felt was the horizons of gray (river), brown (shore/trees), and blue (sky). 3 distinct lines dividing my view into 3 colors.
Delia and I walked to the river then down the uneven wooden steps to the trail. We walked even slower than usual to let two walkers move past. One of them was talking about a friend (or a partner?): we’re both from the same town, and we went to the same school! I smiled and greeted a friendly runner, called out Hi Dave! to Dave. Delia jumped up and walked all of the walls on the trail. We ended at the folwell/the WWDD bench (see below) and sat for a moment, taking in the view.
10 Things
the air was hazed with humidity, making everything look even fuzzier, more distant
minneapolis park workers have cleared out old trees in the savanna, turned them into mulch that they put on the trail
the small rise up to the paved trail is more visible now — all dirt and dead leaves and stubs of tree trunks
the cave below the limestone ledge in the ravine seems to be expanding — how long is this process? how long before the ledge collapses?
mud on the part of winchell on the hill between the savanna and the 38th street steps
the repeated honk from a lone goose, below us. It always seemed the same distance from us. Was it following us, or taking a walk with us?
a loud, rhythmic clanging above us that I couldn’t quite place. A thought: was it someone banging on a fire hydrant to open it up? Near the end of my walk, I saw one open and gushing water
sitting at the folwell bench, overheard — an older walker to a younger one: we haven’t even gone 20 minutes yet
someone pushing a walker through the grass on the boulevard between edmund and the river road, stopping to check out each tree
the husk of some big trees leaning at awkward angles in the oak savanna
A wonderful walk! I felt relaxed and calm and grateful to be outside and moving (without pain) this morning.
before the run
Reading through my “on this day” entries from past april 22nd entries, I was inspired by Mary Oliver and a little old lady walking and listening to a radio and a bench dedicated to a woman who fell through the ice one winter and a fragment overheard on the little old lady’s radio — this is why we are all here — especially the this, which is echoed in Marie Howe’s poem, The Gate. Instead of trying to explain these connections–entanglements?– I’ll gather them here:
1 — the little old lady
For the third time, encountered the little old lady walking with her hiking poles listening to a radio show or an audio book or something. Today I heard, “which reminds us of why we are all here.” Decided that I should create a poem or some piece of writing around this phrase. This phrase could be the title or the ending line of the whole poem or a sentence or a refrain (5 aug 2019).
…the little old lady slowly shuffling by, swinging her hiking poles, a voice TED-talking out of her phone’s speaker reminding you that this is why we are all here. Do not bother the bench resting on the rim of the gorge to ask what this is (22 april 2022 — a draft of my poem).
note: reviewing these entries, I’m noticing how I changed what I heard from “reminds us why” to “this”. I’m almost prefer the original — the reminder, that doesn’t have to be the answer, just a pointing to it — a finger pointing! a definition of poetry!
2 — The Gate
from The Gate/ Marie Howe
This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me. And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What? And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.
3 — This is why we are all here
which reminds us why we are all here…
We are here. Me and joints and muscles and bones and ligaments and lungs. Us. me and blood and cells and electrolytes and sweat and saliva. we. me and hands and feet, a heart, two diseased eyes, a knee that displaces. we. me worn out running shoes, threadbare worries. we. me and those oak trees, that wrought iron fence, this rutted, dirt path, that short, steep hill. we. me river. that we are here with the old woman who slowly shuffles in her straw hat with her hiking poles and a voice that calls out from her radio speakers, “which reminds us why we are all here.” here. above the river and the gorge and the floodplain forest, below the bike path and the road, the cars and the boulevard. here. in this heat and humidity and haze. here. on a monday morning. here.
We are all here.
(from 22 april 2022)
4 — Mary Oliver
Reading MO, I’ve noticed, and have been trying to articulate, a tension in her poems between the I, the World, Nature, God, Eternity, Work. This tension seems to take many forms and MO imagines it to be endlessly intriguing and part of the process of living. Never to be resolved but to be puzzled over. One element of this tension involves the plight of the human—born to doubt and argue and question what it all means, to be both brought closer to and further away from the world by language and the power and beauty of words, which are never as powerful or beautiful as the world itself. To want a name and a useful place, to claim a life, but also to belong to the world, to be “less yourself than part of everything.”
(from 22 april 2021)
From The Book of Time in The Leaf and the Cloud
5. What is my name, o what is my name that I may offer it back to the beautiful world?
from “Gravel” in The Leaf and the Cloud
6. … It is our nature not only to see that the world is beautiful
but to stand in the dark, under the stars, or at noon, in the rainfall of light,
frenzied, wringing our hands,
half-mad, saying over and over:
what does it mean, that the world is beautiful— what does it mean?
5 — the words/reminder
from “Work” in The Leaf and the Cloud
3. Would it be better to sit in silence? To think everything, to feel everything, to say nothing?
This is the way of the orange gourd. This is the habit of the rock in the river, over which the water pours all night and all day. But the nature of man is not the nature of silence. Words are the thunders of the mind. Words are the refinement of the flesh. Words are the responses to the thousand curvaceous moments— we just manage it— sweet and electric, words flow from the brain and out the gate of the mouth.
We make books of them, out of hesitations and grammar. We are slow, and choosy. This is the world.
Words can help us to remember a beloved but long dead dog:
And now she’s nothing except for mornings when I take a handful of words and throw them into the air so that she dashes up again out of the darkness,
5 — the bench
I have run by this bench hundreds of times, stopped and sat once or twice, even wrote about it, but I’ve never noticed this small plaque on it. How did I see it today? I love these little surprises, just waiting to be found! I had no idea what this plaque meant — WWDD? I looked it up and found a facebook page for the Rachel Dow Memorial. Wow. She was loved by so many. I read a little about her life — a passionate, social justice minded, free-spirit — and her death — she fell through the ice at the river and died of hypothermia. Maybe I’ll write a poem about her and the others I’ve found through their plaques. All of them share with me a deep love for this river. And maybe one day, I’ll have a plaque there too (from 8 sept 2022).
So far the house still is standing. So far the hairline cracks wandering the plaster still debate, in Socratic unhurry, what constitutes a good life. An almost readable language. Like the radio heard while traveling in a foreign country— You know that something important has happened, but not what.
What to do with all of this? I’m not quite sure yet.
during the run
Occasionally, I thought about these ideas as I walked, and when I sat on the folwell bench. What did I think? I hardly remember. Once, I thought about how words were not the most important part, that being out there by the gorge, feeling everything was.
4.5 miles minnehaha falls and back 21 degrees 100% snow-covered
Today the winter I want: big flurries, everything covered in a thin layer of snow, not too much wind, warmer, not slick — especially with my with Yaktrax on. Nothing was quite easy, but everything wasn’t as hard as my last run on Wednesday.
10 Things
a white sky
the contrast between shoveled and un-shoveled sidewalks — both still white, but the shovelled ones had a tint of gray or brown peeking through
the clacking jawbone of a bird’s beak — a blue jay?
the river was all white — if you didn’t know better, you could believe it was a field or a meadow
approaching from above, hearing the falls rushing over the limestone
kids yelling and laughing at the playground, one loud, high-pitched sound — was it a kid screaming or a whistle?
amongst the kid voices, a deeper, more knowing laugh — was that from a teacher?
the contrast on the creek surface: white snow with blackish-gray water
every so often, a flash of orange — not always sure what it was, just a voice whispering, orange — a snow fence? a construction cone? a sign?
bright headlights cutting through the sky, which was both bright — everything white! — and heavy
Listened to my “Remember to Forget” playlist on the way back. The first song up, Do You Remember Walter? by The Kinks. Two different bits stuck with me:
one: Walter, you are just an echo of a world I knew so long ago. two: Yes, people often change./ But memories of people can remain.
This second bit got me thinking about how I can’t always (can I ever?) see faces clearly. When the face is too dark and shadowed, I just ignore it altogether. But when there’s some light and I can sort of see them, I often re-construct the features I can’t see with memories of their face from before I lost most of my cone cells. I’m not remembering their face, but creating it. After thinking that the idea of remembering as re-memembering — putting a body back together — popped into my head. Yes! I take my image of face, only as fragments — the curve of a nose or a chin, a bit of eye — and turn it into something whole.
As I kept running, I thought more about remembering and memories and my vision and how I rely on past experience and habits to navigate. And now as I write this, I’m thinking about how everyone’s vision — not just mine — relies on a building up of past experiences (memories?) with things to be able to see them. Here I’m remembering something that I read in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss:
the sensation of sudden visual awareness is produced in part by the formation of a “search image” in the brain. In a complex visual landscape, the brain initially registers all the incoming data, without critical evaluation. Five orange arms in a starlike pattern, smooth black rock, light and shadow. All this is input, but the brain does not immediately interpret the data and convey their meaning to the conscious mind. Not until the pattern is repeated, with feedback from the conscious mind, do we know what we are seeing.
Learning to See in Gathering Moss/ Robin Wall Kimmerer
I’m continuing to read JJJJJerome Ellis’ Aster of Ceremonies. Wow!
Prayer to My Stutter #2/ JJJJJerome Ellis
You restore a living shoreline between word and silence
This beautiful prayer moves right into the next offering, Octagon of Water, Movement 3, which was titled by its first line when it was published in Poetry:
The name of that silence is these grasses in this wind, and the name of these grasses in this wind is that other place on the other side of this instant. This instant is divided by curtains of water and the sound of shuddering time. A sunflower reeling with sun, six hands stretched in offering. This unsearchable, uncancellable instant wraps the shoulders of the grasses like a shawl stilled by the stoppage.
How is/isn’t the instant similar to Marie Howe’s moment? If you listen to the recording on Poetry, you can hear the stretched silence as Ellis’ voice stops before pronouncing certain words.
2
This morning come shyly or boldly into the fertile field, however you are, come, come and stay in the rearrangement, the pressure of thumb on fescue blade, a year wheeling within a day, two round moments of warm mouth, finally at peace. The psalm is a key if only we can find the door. Do not swallow your dysfluent voice. Let it erupt in its volcanic flowering. Stoppage thence passage, aporia, poppy bursting with fragrant seed.
What a beautiful description and reclaiming of a stuttering voice on the other side of the stoppage! The erupting bursting flowering dysfluent voice.
I’m inspired by how Ellis takes his stutter and turns it into this beautiful instant between silence and word. For them, the stoppage is a/the key aspect of the stuttering. What are the most important elements of my strange vision?
5.5 miles bottom of franklin hill 11 degrees / feels like 5
Another sunny, snowless day. A little wind, some cold air. Wasn’t planning to run 5 miles, but I wanted to get to the bottom of the hill so I could see the surface up close. Iced over — not smooth, but with seams and cracks.
ice on mississippi river / 6 jan 2025
I’m glad I took a picture because I did not remember it looking like this! I was visually a surface that was more gray and uniform with cracks creating big and flat sheets of ice. I didn’t remember the shadows or the blue or how uneven it all looked.
As I ran, I listened to my “Remember to Forget” playlist. It started with “I Remember it Well,” from Gigi. I heard the opening lines:
We met at 9 We met at 8 I was on time No, you were late Ah yes I remember it well
I thought — wait, if he thought they were meeting at 9, he wouldn’t have thought he was late if he got there after 8 — yes, these are they thoughts I have as I run. I thought about how subjective memory can be and wondered how certain we could be that she remembered correctly. Then I heard these lyrics:
Ah yes I remember it well You wore a gown of gold I was all in blue
I remembered that meme 4 or 5 years ago with the dress — is it gold or blue? — and thought again about how we can remember things differently. When is it lack of memory, and when did we always just remember it wrong, or unusually, or with a focus on different details, or in a different light?
10 Things
the hollow knocking of a woodpecker
the thumping of wheels over something on the road on the bridge above
4 stones tightly stacked on the ancient boulder
a section of the fence above a steep part of the bluff, missing, marked off with an orange barricade
the icy river through the trees — blue and white and lonely
daddy long legs at his favorite bench
shadows, 1: mine, off to the side, in the brush next to the trail
shadows, 2: a tree trunk, tall, stretched, looking like a dinosaur
stopping at the edge to put in my headphones, seeing a flare of movement below: someone walking on the winchell trail
the limestones still stacked under the bridge, still looking like a person sitting up and leaning against the bridge
Said a blade of grass to an autumn leaf, “You make such a noise falling! You scatter all my winter dreams.”
Said the leaf indignant, “Low-born and low-dwelling! Songless, peevish thing! You live not in the upper air and you cannot tell the sound of singing.”
Then the autumn leaf lay down upon the earth and slept. And when spring came she waked again—and she was a blade of grass.
And when it was autumn and her winter sleep was upon her, and above her through all the air the leaves were falling, she muttered to herself, “O these autumn leaves! They make such noise! They scatter all my winter dreams.”
more forget lines
1
like the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say, it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only all the time. (Part of Eve’s Discussion/Marie Howe)
2
It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn some new constellations.
And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus, Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.
But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too (Dead Stars/Ada Limón)
3
See whatever you want to see. Even at the moment of death forget the door
opening on darkness. See instead the familiar faces you thought were lost. (Squint/Linda Pastan)
4
According to Howe, most (all?) of the critical studies of ED as a poet (up to 1985, when this book was written), read ED’s decision to stay isolated in her bedroom for the rest of her life as tragedy and a failure to celebrate herself as a poet (Whitman) or declare herself confidently as the Poet, the Sayer, the Namer (Emerson). Howe argues that she made another choice and writes the following:
She said something subtler. ‘Nature is a Haunted House–but Art–a House that tries to be haunted.’ (L459a)
Yes, gender difference does affect our use of language, and we constantly confront issues of difference, distance, and absence when we write. That doesn’t mean I can relegate women to what we ‘should’ or ‘must’ be doing. Orders suggest hierarchy and category. Categories and hierarchies suggest property. My voice formed from my life belongs to no one else. What I put into words is no longer my possession. Possibility has opened. The future will forget, erase, or recollect and deconstruct every poem. There is a mystic separation between poetic vision and ordinary living. The conditions for poetry rest outside each life at a miraculous reach indifferent to worldly chronology.
3.5 miles trestle turn around 12 degrees / feels like -3
With the sun, it didn’t feel like -3 to me. No brain freeze from the wind, or numb fingers, or frozen snot in my nose. Well, as I’m write this I’m remembering that my legs felt slightly disconnected from my body, like logs or stumps, which is because of the cold.
My shadow ran in front of me as I headed north. She never wandered from the trail. I was just about to write that I forgot to look at the river, or forgot what I saw when I looked at the river, but then I remembered: sheets of white spread across, from east to west, between lake street bridge and the trestle. The ice looked like white waves and very cold. I stopped at the sliding bench for a moment and admired the river, then stopped a few minutes later to admire it again. Quiet, calm, a soft blueish-gray.
I listened to my new playlist (see below), so I don’t remember noticing much else. I was re-energized when Taylor Swift’s “I Forgot that You Existed” came on, and had some interesting ideas during “Veronica” about memories and the mind and thoughts and when and where they do and don’t travel and how and when we can’t access them anymore. Then I thought of an image for thoughts scattering and one’s mind being blown that I read on twitter several years ago: a mind being blown as not being blown up, but as being scattered like someone blowing on a dandelion — each thought or idea or memory is one of the dandelion seeds being spread. Now I’m thinking about each memory or thought as a bee swarming from a hive . . .
remember and forget
It’s looking more and more like remembering and forgetting might be my theme for january. It seems fitting for the first month of the year, when I’m trying to remember some things and forget others from 2024. I’m excited about this topic, and have thought about it before. There are so many ways I could approach it: the moment of remembering, the softness of forgetting, memorizing poems, memory loss . . .
Here’s my tentative remember to forget playlist:
Remember the Time/ Michael Jackson
I Don’t Remember/ Peter Gabriel
I Keep Forgettin’/ Michael McDonald
Try to Remember/ The Fantasticks
Don’t You (Forget About Me)/ Simple Minds
I Remember/Molly Drake I
Forget to Remember to Forget/ Johnny Cash
September/ Earth, Wind, and Fire
I Forgot that you Existed/ Taylor Swift
Veronica/ Elvis Costello
I Love You and Don’t You Forget It/ Sarah Vaughn
Do You Remember Rock n Roll Radio/Ramones
Do You Remember Walter?/ The Kinks
Remember/ A Little Night Music
I Remember it Well/ Gigi
Forget You/ Cee Lo Green
(Love Will) Turn Back the Hand of Time/ Grease 2
Memory/ Barbara Streisand
and here are a pair of lines from two different poems, one about forgetting, one about remembering:
the snow has forgotten how to stop (Blizzard/ Linda Pastan)
As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together
and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers. (The Meadow/Marie Howe)
1.5 mile walk with Delia the gorge, from 36th to 34th 32 degrees / fog
Good job, Sara. You resisted the urge to run. A walk with Delia was wonderful. So quiet and calm and relaxed! Moist, too. I loved breathing in the cool air and almost floating through the fog. All of it, a soft dream. Occasionally I encountered others — some walkers and runners — but mostly it was just us. At one point, descending through the tunnel of trees, which isn’t really a tunnel anymore because they cut it back at some point, the only thing I could hear was a hammer pounding across the road. No cars or voices or striking feet. Wow! Several times, I felt a warm buzz.
10 Things
a white sky
open water
wet asphalt
grass covered in brown leaves
a dark form descending into the ravine — silent, featureless
a brown view of the floodplain forest — all slender trunks and bare branches, no river or sky poking through
a runner in the neighborhood emerging from an alley in a sprint, then returning to the alley, then appearing again, then disappearing around the corner
thump thump thump the striking feet of a runner across the street — the same one? I’m not sure
the silvery sparkle of the sign at the 35th street overlook — is this sign new?
overheard: a woman running alongside a kid on a bike, talking to the kid — you had your pink backpack and your droopy dog stuffed animal — did she say droopy, or some other word?
I wanted to think about my Ars Poetica poem as I walked, and I did, but I’m still stuck. Something about letting things breathe and be exposed to the air to see what happens and erosion and ruins. I’ll give it until the end of the year, and if I’m still stuck, I’ll put it away for a bit.
forget what you are
While reading poet’s Cynthia Cruz’s explanation of how her poem, “Dark Register” is shaped by Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit, I encountered these lines about habit:
“Habit,” in the third stanza refers to Hegel’s concept of habit: the act of repeating an action that, through this repetition, becomes second nature. For Hegel, habit implies forgetting: we forget what we are doing once the action becomes habit.
we forget what we are . . . . I immediately thought of Marie Howe’s beautiful poem, “The Meadow” and her lines about her dying brother:
I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.
But in this world, where something is always listening, even murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan
in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget
what you are.
This forgetting also reminds me of Mary Rueffle’s reference to Levi-Strauss’ “unhitching, which I wrote about on may 31, 2023. First, my rough paraphrasing:
unhitching happens in brief moments when we can step outside of or beside or just beyond — below the threshold of thought, over and above society — to contemplate/experience/behold the this, the what it is, the essence of everything, Mary Oliver’s eternity.
Second, a quote from Levi-Strauss in Mary Ruefle:
The possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists … in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society; in the contemplating of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.
Lévi-Strauss quoted MRH page 52
Wow, all of this is making me think of something I wrote, referencing Mary Oliver, about the gorge. Initially I added it on the end of my geologic time poem, and maybe it should stay there and be extended, or maybe it should be another poem? Here are the lines:
Every day this place erodes the belief that rock will stand still, is here forever, unmoved, unmoving. And yet, with its slow slight shifts on a scale almost beyond her comprehension, these rocks might be as close as the girl can get to eternity.
So many more connections I could make with forgiveness and forgetting and remembering and now and now and now!
Ran with Scott on a beautiful spring morning. Sun, shadows, a welcome breeze. We ran over to St. Catherine’s University, across the river. RJP has almost decided to go there (hopefully she makes up her mind tonight) and we wanted to check it out. I’m impressed and excited to visit her next year. We talked a lot more in the first half of our run; we were both tired the last 2 miles. Scott talked about some Threads exchange involving Drake, Kanye West, and a diss track. We heard a creaking tree and I said it sounded like the squeaking gate we heard yesterday afternoon while we were walking. The mention of the gate reminded me of Marie Howe’s poem, “The Gate,” which I recited for Scott (of course I did). We talked about many other things but I just remember discussing what a wonderful campus St. Cates is and how great it will be for RJP.
On the sidewalk just outside of campus, we encountered several sidewalk poems that are part of the Public Art Sidewalk Poetry project. Scott took a picture of one:
November/ Marianne McNamara and Scott’s feet
November/ Marianne McNamara (2009)
Autumn winds drag leaves from the trees, clog the streets in dreary finale. Bare branches crisscross the heavy sky. Icy rain spatters, ink-blots the pavement. I settle at the window, stare into the black flannel, search the woolly lining of the night for winter.
I was unable to read this on the sidewalk, so I’m glad I could find it online. How hard is it for someone with good vision to read? I like the idea of this project, but in practice, it doesn’t quite work. Scott suggested they should use black paint on the letters, to make them stand out.
10 Things
smell: lilac, intense
tree shadows, more filled in than last week
a loud leaf blower
a safety patrol on the corner near Dowling saying I hate you, I hate you — who was he talking to?
the soft trickle of water falling from the sewer pipe near the 44th street parking lot
mud and ruts filled with water at a construction site on the edge of campus
feeling a fine film of dust on my face near the end of the run
more than a dozen signs in the grass outside a liquor store, each one said the same thing: wine sale. Scott: I guess they’re having a wine sale
running down Randolph encountering 3 or 4 sidewalk poems, none of them marked on the map
noticing a faint white thing flying through the air, high above us: a bird? a plane? a trick of the light or corrupted data from my eye to my brain?
the allegory of the cave, part 1
I want to read the cave parable and think about its shadows, but I want to read it in the context of The Republic so I’ve been searching my shelves for my copy. Which class in college did we read this for? Probably The Individual and Morality. Maybe a philosophy class? Anyway, it is very hard for me to find one book among almost a thousand. When we moved in I organized them, but over time, books have moved. Also, it’s dim in our living room and I have a lot of trouble reading book titles with my bad eyes. Yesterday I asked RJP to help, and she found it! Maybe I’ll try reading some of it out on the deck this afternoon. Reading physical books, as opposed to e-books, can be hard; there’s never enough light unless I’m reading it under my special lamp (designed for sewers and cross-stitchers and 80 year-olds with bad eyes and me). Reading outside in natural light helps.
an hour spent outside reading and dozing off and reading again . . .
First, two links that connect Plato and his cave with poetry:
From the Republic/ Plato — tldr; In these sections, Plato discusses why he doesn’t like poets. I’ll have to return to these sections.
Reading through the allegory, I came accross these lines:
. . . the eyes may be confused in two ways and from two causes, namely when they’ve come from the light into the darkness and when they’ve come from the darkness into the light. . . whether it has come from a brighter life and is dimmed through not having yet become accustomed to the dark or whether it has come from greater ignorance into greater light and is dazzled by the increased brilliance.
518a, The Republic / Plato, trans. G.M.A. Grube
Of course, I immediately thought of two of my favorite vision poems (what I’m calling them) by Emily Dickinson. And of course I have both of them memorized — but not her punctuation.
We grow accustomed to the Dark When light is put away As when a neighbor holds the lamp To witness her goodbye.
A Moment — We uncertain step — For newness of the Night (We Grow Accustomed to the Dark/ ED)
Too bright for our infirm Delight The truth’s superb surprise
. . .
The truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind. (Tell all the truth but tell it Slant/ ED)
I remember Plato’s cave and the shadows and the inability to access Truth, but I didn’t remember him discussing how both too little light and too much light blind us. The emphasis, as I recall, was always on darkness = bad, ignorance, the problem. Was I just not paying attention in philosophy class?
Searching for “plato cave,” I came across a video about it and decided to watch it:
The School of Life
I’d like to write more about what I find to be missing (also what’s helpful) in this account, but I’ve run out of time. Here’s one more video for comparison that I just started watching. When I have time, I’ll reflect on both:
Late morning felt hot today. Bright sun, not much shade. The river road was closed off for the annual Walk MS charity event so I ran on the dirt/mud trail between it and edmund. Listened to my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist for the whole run:
(skipped Shadow Song/Screaming Trees, Shadows and Light/ Joni Mitchell) Silver Shadow/ Atlantic Starr Total Eclipse of the Heart/ Bonnie Tyler Help Me Make It Through the Night/ Kris Kristofferson Sunshine in the Shade/ The Fixx The Shadow of Your Smile/ Astrud Gilberto Evening/ The Moody Blues White Room/ Cream
I wondered what a silver shadow might look like, then I wanted to see one. The silver outline of the sun behind the clouds? My shadow on the blue-white snow? I know — it’s Eamon Grennan’s birdsong in his poem, Lark-Luster:
. . . when summer happens, you’d almost see the long silver ribbons of song the bird braids as if binding lit air to earth that is all shadows, to keep us (as we walk our grounded passages down here) alive to what is over our heads—song and silence—and the lot of us leaning up: mind-defeated again, just harking to it.
Then I got distracted by mud and people and the sun and didn’t give close attention to the lyrics for the next three songs, only briefly registering that Bonnie Tyler was singing to someone whose love is like a shadow on her, keeping her in the dark; Kris Kristofferson was comparing someone’s hair “laying soft upon his skin” to the shadows on the wall; and The Fixx were declaring that they were the sunshine in the shade of life.
Off the grass, back on the road, I thought about Astrud Gilberto’s affection for the shadow of a smile — was the shadow cast by a very bright smile? Looking at the lyrics now, I understand the shadow to be the wonderful (but haunted?) memory of a love that didn’t last.
I am really digging The Moody Blues, “Evening.” That flute! Shadows on the ground/never make a sound/fading away in the sunset/Night has now become/Day for everyone
I thought about the white curtains in Marie Howe’s dark room instead of Cream’s black curtains in a white room. where the shadows run from themselves.
This is fun! I like thinking about silver shadows as birdsong, and shadows softly caressing the wall, and what it would be like to see shadows running from themselves.
Near the end of “Shadow of Your Smile,” I saw something ahead of me, in the middle of the road. A big black dog? No — it’s that menacing turkey again! The one I wrote about on april 30th and april 11th. Just standing there in the middle of the road, his feather fanned out. This time I didn’t turn around, but walked by him, at a safe distance. I also took a picture:
RJP has named this big turkey Jon.
Zooming in, I see a brave person on the sidewalk, nearing Jon.
Recounting the story to Scott when I returned home, I decided that I wanted to imagine this turkey as a friend, not an enemy — or a frenemy? I also began to believe that he’s trying to tell me something: write about ME! And I will. Well, I already wrote one poem:
Unsettled
by noise
I stop to witness
a dark shape draw near
too big for
a squirrel
too small for a bear.
The moment suspends
unresolved until
the shape turns — pale beak
red wattle framed by
tail feathers. This Tom
wants trouble.
What if this turkey is my shadow-self? Will he be around for my next run? I guess it’s the spring of the turkey — maybe the summer, too? I will add Jon — I might name him myself if he appear again — to my list of Regulars!
Inspired by another turkey sighting, and deciding that I will embrace these visits, here’s another amazing poem from Diane Seuss’s Sill Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl:
The turkey’s strung up by one pronged foot, the cord binding it just below the stiff trinity of toes, each with its cold bent claw. My eyes
are in love with it as they are in love with all dead things that cannot escape being looked at. It is there to be seen if I want to see it, as my
father was there in his black casket and could not elude your gaze. I was a child so they asked if I wanted to see him. “Do you want to see him?”
someone asked. Was it my mother? Grandmother? Some poor woman was stuck with the job. “He doesn’t look like himself,” whoever-it-was
added. “They did something strange with his mouth.” As I write this, a large moth flutters against the window. It presses its fat thorax to the glass.
“No,” I said, “I don’t want to see him.” I don’t recall if I secretly wanted them to open the box for me but thought that “no” was the correct response,
or if I believed I should want to see him but was too afraid of what they’d done with his mouth. I think I assumed that my seeing him would
make things worse for my mother, and she was all I had. Now I can’t get enough of seeing, as if I’m paying a sort of penance for not seeing then, and so
this turkey, hanged, its small, raw-looking head, which reminds me of the first fully naked man I ever saw, when I was a candy striper
at a sort of nursing home, he was a war veteran, young, burbling crazily, his face and body red as something scalded. I didn’t want to see,
and yet I saw. But the turkey, I am in love with it, its saggy neck folds, the rippling, variegated feathers, the crook of its unbound foot,
and the glorious wings, archangelic, spread as if it could take flight, but down, down ward, into the earth.
4.2 miles minnehaha falls and back 49 degrees / drizzle wind: 7 mph / gusts: 14 mph
When I left for my run, I thought the rain had stopped. I was wrong, which was fine, because I don’t mind running in a drizzle, especially when it’s not too cold. Was it a drizzle? Maybe I’d call it a mist — a steady, soft spray that soaked my orange sweatshirt and mixed with the sweat on my face. Mostly I couldn’t see it; I just felt wet or damp or . . . I’ve got it: Moist! That’s how I felt as I ran today, moist. Scott hates this word, but I don’t mind it. What words do I detest? The only one I can think of immediately is nummy. Is that even a word?
So, everything, including me, was moist. Moist sidewalks, moist trails, moist air, moist shorts, running tights, socks. Other words for moist: soaked, damp, dank, saturated, humid
10 Moist Things
the paved path — big puddles everywhere — the biggest puddle was right after the locks and dam no. 1 parking lot heading south
the strip of dirt next to the paved path — muddy ruts
the oak savanna — covered in leaves, light green and dripping
the thick, gray air
the laughing, water-logged voices of kids on the playground
the slick road
my running shoes
my pony tail
my orange sweatshirt
the grass — a sponge . . . squish squish squish
A good run. I felt strong and springy — both because of the weather and my bouncy feet. I listened to the water gushing out of the sewer pipes and over the ledge as I ran to the falls. I put in my “It’s Windy” playlist on the way back. Most memorable song: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (11 on the Beaufort Scale for violent storm).
before the run
It’s almost the end of April (wow) and this morning, before my run, I finished my Beaufort Scale in Verse:
Beaufort Scale in Verse
0— The Moment/Marie Howe
The whir of I should be, I should be, I should be
slows to silence,
the white cotton curtains hanging still.
1 — Long Life/Mary Oliver
We may be touched by the most powerful of suppositions—even to a certainty—as we stand in the rose petals of the sun and hear a murmur from the wind no louder than the sound it makes as it dozes under the bee’s winds. This, too, I suggest, is weather, and worthy of report.
2 — Nature Aria/Yi Lei
Autumn wind chases in From all directions And a thousand chaste leaves Give way.
3 — And All Visible Signs Swept Away/Carl Phillips
I am stirred, I’m stir-able, I’m a wind-stirred thing
3 — When the Fact of Your Gaze Means Nothing, They You Are truly Alongside/Donika Kelly
the dry sound of applause: leaves chapped/falling, an ending
4 — Enough/Jeffrey Harrison
The rising wind pulls you out of it,/and you look up to see a cloud of leaves wheeling in sunlight, flickering against the blue and lifting above the treetops, as if the whole day were sighing, Let it go, let it go, for this moment at least, let it all go
5 — Love Song for the Square Root of Negative One/Richard Siken
I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble and I am invisible
6 — Wind/Emily Dickinson
When winds go round and round in bands, And thrum upon the door, And birds take places overhead, To bear them orchestra
7 — Who Has the Wind?/Christina Rossetti
Who has seen the wind? Neither You nor I: But when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by
8 — Fall/Edward Hirsch
Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air: It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies
9 — Plea to the Wind/Alice Oswald
Unglue the fog from the woods from the waist up And speak disparagingly of leaves
10 —Plea to the Wind/Alice Oswald
Whip the green cloth off the hills
11 — Postscript/Seamus Heaney
So that the ocean on one side is wild With foam and glitter. . . As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
12 — Wave After Wave/M. Bartley Seigel
In a heartbeat, rollers mass two stories trough to insatiate tempest, unquelled by prayer nor cigarette, careless, mean,
a cold-blooded indifference so pure, a strong swimmer won’t last ten wet minutes. At the Keweenaw, surf pummels the stamp sands with ochre fists, ore boats stack up lee
of the stone, and entire beaches stand up to walk away.
3.8 miles river road, north/south 62 degrees wind: 16 mph / gusts: 30 mph
62 in bright sun with very little shade feels warm, too warm. Time to start running much earlier in the day. Other weather-related gripes? Had to hold onto my cap several times so it wouldn’t blow off.
Everything is slowly turning green, especially the floodplain forest. The trees are coming into leaf/like something almost being said.
Noticed some cool bird shadows, one on the road from a bird high up in the sky, another on the side of a house.
Heard something beeping as I ran under the trestle — was a train coming soon? Not that I could tell.
Listened to the wind running north, my “It’s Windy” playlist running south. Heard “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Wind of Change” and thought about how an answer blowing in the wind could mean two contradictory things at once: 1. the answer is coming, change is coming, a better, freer world is coming and 2. the answer is just blowing in the wind, out of reach, as futile/pointless as talking to the wind.
back to the Beaufort Scale
Last week I came up with a great plan to create a Beaufort scale out of poetry lines, but it stalled when I couldn’t figure one out for 1. Today I’ll try again.
But before I do that — I think it stalled also because I got side tracked by metaphor and figurative language. The Beaufort scale mostly uses literal language, describing the effects of wind on various things, like umbrellas or people trying to walk. Occasionally metaphor creeps in with the use of white horses to describe white caps on waves. Is this the only use of metaphor in the scale? No.
Use of metaphor in Beaufort Scale:
0 — “sea like a mirror” 1 — ripples like scales 2 — crests like glass 3 — foam like glass 4 — white horses
If I’m reading correctly, the for use on land section is all literal descriptions of wind’s effects: leaves rustling, trees being uprooted, roof tiles ripping off, inconvenient then difficult to walk. I like how 7 is inconvenient to walk, while 8 is difficult.
Okay, now back to a poem scale. Instead of literal descriptions, I think I’d like figurative ones. It’s more fun!
when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by — “Who Has Seen the Wind?”/ Christina Rossetti
Would this be 5, “small trees in leaf start to sway”? or 6, “large branches in motion”? or 7, “whole trees in motion”?
I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble and I am invisible — “Love Song for the Square Root of Negative One” / Richard Siken
2? “leaves rustle”? or 8, “”twigs break from trees”?
I am stirred, I’m stir-able, I’m a wind-stirred thing — “And All Visible Signs Swept Away” / Carl Phillips
Okay, think I know this one: “Leaves and small twigs in constant motion” (3).
Autumn wind chases in/From all directions/And a thousand chaste leaves/Give way. — “Nature Aria” / Yi Lei
I think this should be 2, “leaves rustle”
Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless/ Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:/It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies — “Fall” / Edward Hirsch
7, “inconvenient to walk against the wind”
the dry/sound of applause: leaves chapped/falling, an ending. — “When the Fact of Your Gaze Means Nothing, Then You Are Truly Alongside” / Donika Kelly
3: “leaves in constant motion”
Unglue the fog from the woods from the waist up/ And speak disparagingly of leaves — “Plea to the Wind” / Alice Oswald
This is a tough one for me. Is ungluing the fog violent or gentle? To speak disparagingly of the leaves seems less forceful than yelling at them — I think I’ll go with 4 “wind raises dust and loose paper, small branches move” but I could also go with 9, chimney pots and slates removed
Whip the green cloth off the hills — “Plea to the Wind” / Alice Oswald
When winds go round and round in bands,/And thrum upon the door,/And birds take places overhead,/To bear them orchestra, — “Wind” / Emily Dickinson
6 — whistling in telegraph wires, umbrellas used with difficulty
So that the ocean on one side is wild/With foam and glitter. . ./As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways/ And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. — “Postscript” / Seamus Heaney
11: the sea is covered in foam, widespread damage
So, I already found a line last week for 0. With these lines above, I’m only missing 12. Although some of the lines above are used for multiple levels. I’ll fine tune that in a future entry. This was fun!
Here they are in order, so far:
0 —- the white cotton curtains hanging still
1 —
2 — Autumn wind chases in/From all directions/And a thousand chaste leaves/Give way. — “Nature Aria” / Yi Lei
3 — I am stirred, I’m stir-able, I’m a wind-stirred thing — “And All Visible Signs Swept Away” / Carl Phillips AND the dry/sound of applause: leaves chapped/falling, an ending. — “When the Fact of Your Gaze Means Nothing, Then You Are Truly Alongside” / Donika Kelly
4 —
5 — I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble and I am invisible — “Love Song for the Square Root of Negative One” / Richard Siken
6 — When winds go round and round in bands,/And thrum upon the door,/And birds take places overhead,/To bear them orchestra, — “Wind” / Emily Dickinson
7 — when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by — “Who Has Seen the Wind?”/ Christina Rossetti
8 — Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless/ Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:/It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies — “Fall” / Edward Hirsch
9 — Unglue the fog from the woods from the waist up/ And speak disparagingly of leaves — “Plea to the Wind” / Alice Oswald
10 — Whip the green cloth off the hills — “Plea to the Wind” / Alice Oswald
11 — So that the ocean on one side is wild/With foam and glitter. . ./As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways/ And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. — “Postscript” / Seamus Heaney
5.15 miles franklin loop 44 degrees wind: 15 mph / gusts: 30 mph
So windy! A crosswind heading north towards Franklin, then straight into it heading west over the Lake Street bridge. Cooler too. Wore my running tights and my orange sweatshirt. My left knee felt tight for the first few minutes, then fine for the rest of the run.
Wet and green. Noticed that the floodplain forest is filling in. Last week, bare and brown. Today, an outline of green. The river was gray with ripples. When I looked down at it from the bridge I could tell by the ripples that it was blowing south.
All of the pedestrians I encountered were bundled up in hats and winter coats. One runner was in shorts and white shoes. After he passed me I was mesmerized by his heels floating up and down, up and down, up and down. So smooth and rhythmic.
No eagle on the dead tree branch. Spotted 2 lone black gloves discarded at different parts of the path. Heard one woman talking to another. She said something strange, but I can’t remember what. Heard lots of black capped chickadees but no geese or woodpeckers.
more on wind: According to the Beaufort Scale, today was a 5 — fresh breeze. Brisk? Bracing. Stiff. Not breath-taking but ponytail whipping and energy sapping and eye watering. A few times, it howled in the trees. No dust in eyes or big branches falling from trees, but leaves whirling on the ground. At one point, running across the bridge, I felt like I was being held up by the wind — both slowed down and suspended in mid-air. Running south, with the wind at my back, it felt easier, like the wind was pushing me along.
beaufort scale
Thinking about wind some more and wondering if I shouldn’t narrow my focus to the Beaufort Scale? Maybe try to play around with my own Beaufort Scales. Today, while reviewing Marie Howe’s “The Moment” I thought about gathering lines from poems that fit with the scale. The line in Howe’s poem that Inspired this was the last one:
the white cotton curtains hanging still
The poem is about that moment when everything stands still and is silent. No to-do lists. No traffic. No I-should-bes. With these curtains, I think Howe is referencing sitting silently in her brother’s room, as he was dying. I imagine this moment of stillness as 0 on the Beaufort Scale.
Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, ’Twas sad as sad could be; And we did speak only to break The silence of the sea
All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon.
Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.
a bird moment, possibly for my bird project: After I finished my run, walking back on Edmund, I heard 2 black capped chickadees calling back and forth. Their notes were slightly different than I usually hear. By the time I got out my phone to record them, only one chickadee was calling. No response. They kept trying their fee bee call, maybe 5 or 6 times, but no reply.
Hooray for feeling strong and happy and unbothered by the wind! A good run, even though it feels strange with no snow. Scott told me it’s 5 degrees warmer here in Minneapolis than it is where we used to live in Upland, California. Wow.
Starting last night and lingering through the morning: rain. Not snow, but rain. Everything was wet and muddy and slippery. At the end of my run I noticed that I had specks of mud on my shirt — how did that happen?
Around mile 3, as I ran straight into the wind, a biker approached from behind. I heard her call out Fast! I wasn’t sure what to say, so I said, there’s a lot of wind! She agreed. Later I encountered the biker on the ford bridge — she was walking her bike while I was still running — There’s goes that fast runner! I waved and smiled. I did a lot of smiling at every person I encountered.
a strange winter sight: roller skiers, one of them wearing shorts!
Talked with Dave, the Daily Walker about how I’m missing the snow. He agreed, but only when it’s windy and there’s lots of snow and no one else out on the trail. Then it’s fun, he said. His version of fun is one reason why I like Dave so much.
Took 2 pictures of my view. Both are just south of the double bridge and the Horace W.S. Cleveland Overlook. Here’s one of them:
My view from above the gorge: bare limbed trees, all trunk and thin branches. A few trunks are thick — like the one near the center of the image or the one leaning on the left side — but most are thin, creating a transparent screen between runner (me) and river. The ground, in the bottom third of the picture, is mostly dead, curled-up brown leaves. Sometimes, this is what I see even when there aren’t thin, bare branches everywhere — my view slightly obscured by something in the way — dead cone cells, I think — creating fuzz or static or a slight pulsing or wavering of lines. Also, if this picture were in black and white I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Often I have to ask Scott: is this in color or black and white?
peripheral: how I see
before the run
Before my run, while I was reviewing my Oct 2023 log entries and encountering several of my “how I see” photos, it came to me: this should be the new version of my vision poems. I want to study the ekphrasis form (An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning — def). Then I want to write a series of “how I see” poem/descriptions. These will be about experimenting with the form and exploring ways to describe how I see. I wrote in my notes: not about what I can’t see, but what I can. I’m also interested in experimenting with the idea of alt-text as form — I have a few sources for this. I’ll read some Georgina Kleege and her latest book, More Than Meets the Eye. These poems will be practical — describing the literal way I see — but also poetic — strange, unsettling, more than a report.
I’m thinking that these poems would involve describing what I see in the photo and what I saw when I was taking the photo. Also, they’re as much about HOW I see (the mechanics/process) as WHAT I see. I love this idea; I hope it sticks!
While I ran lots of different thoughts flashed. First I thought about Marie Howe and the idea of observing and not looking away. Describing what you see with details not metaphors. Then I thought about how “looking” works for me, how it’s harder because of what I can and can’t see. How much can any of us (no matter where we are on the spectrum of seeing/blind) actually see? Then I started thinking about Huidobro’s poem, “Natural Forces” and all of the different glances he describes — One glance to shoot down the albatross. What do my different glances see?
right after the run
During my walk back home, I thought more about how I see (and spoke those thoughts into my phone). I was reminded of Robin Wall Kimmerer and her chapter, “Learning to See” in Becoming Moss. It’s about how we can learn to see the small things — like moss — that were invisible to us before.
I also thought about how I’m interested in the process we use to see and how that shapes what we see and how it enhances or detracts from our ability to behold/witness. Yes! This connects back to Ross Gay and beholding, which I discussed on here a few years ago.
I’m interested in how we sense without seeing, or how we see with our other senses (like sound). And I’m interested in thinking about how vision isn’t the primary mode in which we understand and make sense of things. It is only one of many ways, not THE way.
Ekphrasis
The verbal representation of visual representation.
Basically, an ekphrasis is a literary description of art. Like other kinds of imagery, ekphrasis paints a picture with words. What makes it different from something like pictorialism is that the picture it paints is itself a picture: ekphrasis stages an encounter between representations in two mediums, one visual and one verbal.
key feature of an exphrasis poem: it engages with an artistic representation — does this fit for my project? I think so, especially if I make the taking of the photo as part of the description.
Another helpful definition of Ekphrasis from Poets.org:
Ekphrasis is the use of vivid language to describe or respond to a work of visual art.
Feels like spring today. Sun, warm air, less layers. Today: black tights, black shorts, long-sleeved green shirt, orange sweatshirt, hat, buff, headband.
No gloves. No winter jacket. No snow on the path. Lots of birds and darting squirrels and shimmering water.
I felt sore from the 30 minute workout I did yesterday, but not too sore. Maybe I’ll try it a few more times.
Thought about how strange it was to be running in January with no snow and such warm air. It’s not just that it’s warm today — we’ve had warm days in past Januarys, but that it’s been warm like this for 4 or 5 days and will continue to be this warm for the next week. And, there’s no snow. Bad for the trees; they’re starting to bud. RJP came home the other day from school and told me how one of her friends was very scared about the warm weather — we’re all going to be dead by the time we’re 30, he said. How terrible to be coming of age in this time, when statements like this are felt so intensely by so many people.
Yesterday, while rereading my July entries from 2023, I was reminded of Christina Sharpe’s amazing book, Ordinary Notes. I read it while quarantining for COVID. I posted a note from it on July 4th:
I was particularly struck by her discussion of the shift from guilt to grief because Scott and I just watched (on Monday night) a beautiful story on PBS about Rita Davern and her efforts to reckon with her family’s buying of Pike Island, a sacred space for the Dakota people known as Bdote which was illegally “purchased” by Zebulon Pike in 1805. I’m not sure if Rita utters that exact phrase, but the idea of moving from guilt to grief was a big focus. After reading Sharpe’s note again, I decided to find and watch the documentary she mentions, Traces of the Trade. Found it online from my local library — public libraries for the win! — and watched it yesterday afternoon. It was amazing. One thing I kept thinking as I watched it was Marie Howe’s entreaty: don’t look away. Guilt gives us distance and prevents us from witnessing/beholding. Grief enables us to feel — not just the pain of others, but our own pain — the pain of silence, complicity, denial of connection, fear, helplessness.
I’m not a big fan of guilt; it’s not helpful as a foundation for ethics or politics. As I thought this, I suddenly remembered a feminist ethicist I read/liked, back in the day: Elizabeth Spelman. She wrote a chapter titled “Good Grief” and it was about ways of grappling with racism. She was critical of guilt as a response — what did she like instead? I’m sure I have the article somewhere. Oh well.
Speaking of rereading old entries, I’ve been encountering the idea of the peripheral a lot lately. It’s giving me the itch to work seriously on some peripheral poems. Maybe this could be the February challenge? Maybe this poem could get me started?
Light as a soul released from a painting by Bosch, its greens and vermilions stripped off it.
He climbs a tree that is equally ahistoric.
His heart works harder.
This last line about his heart working harder reminds me of something else I’m reading: The Plenitude of Distraction. In it, Marina Can Zuylen argues for the value of distraction. In a bit I read last night she praises how the slowness that distraction demands — wandering through the peripheral and away from one’s central task. Maybe I should read this too — I’ll try; it has a lot of words for my weak eyes.
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
several spots in the split rail fence where the railing was bent or leaning or broken
headlights cutting through the pale gray sky
people walking below me on the Winchell Trail
kids laughing on a playground*
the parking lot at the falls had a few more cars in it then earlier in the week
the creek was half frozen — thin sheets of ice everywhere
a woman called out to a dog — liam or sam, I think? — or was she calling out to me, ma’am?
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!
the sidewalk was wet — in some spots, slick
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.
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
honking geese, heard not seen, hidden in some brambles
wind chimes, softly ringing at the start of my run
mostly gray and overcast, once sun and my shadow — hello friend!
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
several of the Welcoming Oaks had broken branches — the branch that remained looked jagged and gnarled
an open view down to the floodplain forest! only a few patches of green
no stones stacked on the ancient boulder
more chickadee dee dees
Daddy Long Legs crossing the street
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?
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?
Warm, but low humidity. Ran later, at 11:30. Some shade, mostly sun. Ran south on the dirt trail between edmund and the river road. Yesterday it was mostly wet and muddy, today dry and dusty. Crossed over to the river road trail, then down to Winchell just before 44th. I don’t remember much about the river except that it was white and very bright. The trees were green and thick. No leaning trunks today. Also no sleeping bodies passed out on the path.
Listened to more acorns dropping — clink clunk thump — and kids yelling as they biked or played at the playground for most of the run. After ascending the 38th street steps, I put in Taylor Swift’s 1989 and she welcomed me to New York.
10 Things
right before starting to run: a dark brown, almost black, squirrel sitting up on its hind legs — did it have an acorn? I couldn’t tell
pale, dusty dirt on the boulevard path
the squeaky groan of the bed of a big truck tilting down to drop off some type of giant machine on the road
passing by a walker on the narrow winchell trail — right behind you! — as water dripped dripped dripped out of the sewer pipe below
running on the tips of my toes as I traveled up the short, very steep grade near folwell
3 or 4 small stones stacked on the ancient boulder by the sprawling oak tree
passing by the old stone steps that lead to the river, the flash of an idea: why not take these steps down to the river? another flash: bugs, heat, no time to stop. So I didn’t
another groups of kids in yellow vests biking on the trail, the leader/adult calling out, stay on your side of the lane!
doing quick steps to avoid the tree roots just barely sticking out of the dirt on the trail at the top of edmund
listening to the line in Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood”: Did you have to do this? I was thinking that you could be trusted Did you have to ruin what was shiny? Now it’s all rusted and thinking about shiny vs. rusted, and rust in the fall, then I noticed some rust on one of the big metal tubes all around the neighborhood that the city is using for their sewer work — Scott says these tubes get placed vertically in the ground and the workers stand in them as they do their work
I couldn’t tell one song from another, which bird said what or to whom or for what reason. The oak tree seemed to be writing something using very few words.
I couldn’t decide which door to open—they looked the same, or what would happen when I did reach out and turn a knob. I thought I was safe, standing there, but my death remembered
its date: only so many summer nights still stood before me, full moon, waning moon, October mornings: what to make of them? which door?
I couldn’t tell which stars were which or how far away any one of them was, or which were still burning or not—their light moving through space like a long late train,
and I’ve lived on this earth so long, 50 winters, 50 springs and summers, and all this time stars have stood in the sky—in daylight when I couldn’t see them, and
at night, when most nights I didn’t look.
This idea that stars are there all the time, even in the day when we can’t see them, seems to be (at least in my limited experience) a favorite of poets. Also: the moon!, the fact that stars are dead by the time we see them, so we’re looking at ghosts, and the realization that ponies are not baby horses (I encountered this revelation, sometimes with the annoying phrase, I was today years old when I realized that ponies aren’t baby horses, from poetry people). All of these, sources of wonder and delight. I suppose they are for me, well maybe not the horses/ponies thing.
Currently I’m reading Andrew Leland’s The Country of the Blind and it’s amazing. His descriptions of becoming blind, or being in this state of living while losing sight, not living with lost sight, resonate a lot for me, especially the idea of doubting your own vision loss and his experiences with eye doctors:
(note: I didn’t have time to transcribe this page, but I will come back to do it and put in alt text for others who already can’t see the image, and for me who will soon not be able to.
swim: 3 swell loops lake nokomis open swim 82 degrees
So many swells in the water today. For most of it, I felt like I was being pulled down into the water. Not very buoyant. I wondered if I would able to do 3 loops. But as I got deeper into the swim, I felt stronger and more able to keep going.
10 Things
little minnows near the shore — hello friends!
being rocked — not roughly or gently but in a way that made it difficult to push through the water
getting stuck behind a woman swimming backstroke and getting way off course — is she swimming backstroke? is that the green buoy, way over there?
racing a wetsuit on the back end of the first loop. Did he realize we were racing, or was it just me? I won
the far orange buoy was much closer to the little beach than it has been all season
spotted one swan, no sail boat or wandering canoes
sighting other swimmers by the bubbles their feet made under the water
the orange buoys looked like they had white patches as I got closer to them — the sun was shining extra bright on them, I guess
no birds or planes that I remember but one zooming dragonfly
felt like I was on a people mover for the last stretch between the last green buoy and first orange one — swimming so fast, pushed along by the swells behind me
Recited Mary Oliver’s “Swimming, One Day in August” in my head as I swam the last loop and realized something. She writes:
Something had pestered me so much that I felt like my heart would break. I mean, the mechanical part.
The mechanical part? I realized that her heart breaking is a good thing here and that her mechanical heart is the one that follows the beat of organized, tightly contained time, broken down into hours and minutes and seconds so we can be as efficient and productive as possible. Yes! Swimming in the lake can break me open and out of time’s rigid boxes.
Warm this morning, but it didn’t feel miserably hot, probably because I was able to be in the shade for most of the run. So much wonderful shade, so many friendly shadows! Ran south above, north below, on the Winchell Trail. Didn’t look at the river much, even when I was closer to it. One glance: between the thickening trees near the southern entrance of the Winchell Trail, I saw a small patch of sparkling water.
today’s color: the blue of the blue jay (I think it was a blue joy) that flashed past me as I rounded the curve at 42nd. Normally I can’t see the color of birds, and I’m not sure if you’d call what I saw seeing, more like the idea of blue or a voice calling out, blue! What kind of blue was it? Not deep or dark but light and intense, almost glowing. But not pale blue — somewhere in-between dark and light.
10 Things I Noticed
the shadow of tree sprawled across the path
the steady flow of water coming out of the sewer pipe near 42
the clicking and clacking of roller skier’s poles up above me near folwell
passing 2 walkers and hearing one of them say walk or should be walking or something like that
the steady stream of cars driving by
a few kids’ voices at the playground
the flash of a white t-shirt up ahead on the trail, then disappearing around the bend
leaning trees creating archways to pass through in several spots on the winchell trail
cottonwood fuzz on the edges of the trail
the metal slats in the ravine were slick and slippery
Mary Ruefle on Eavesdropping, You, and Unhitching in “On Sentimentality”
before the run
Today’s the last day of May and my last day with Mary Ruefle. I just finished reading/skimming her lecture, “On Sentimentality.”
Eavesdropping: In response to a poet who criticizes and laments the too frequent use of a generic You in poetry as too passive, turning us into observers, mere eavesdroppers, Ruefle asks: What’s wrong with eavesdropping? I agree. Today during my run, eavesdrop. Listen in on conversations between birds, the river and the sky, walkers.
YOU: What kind of subject are you (or is You)? And, if you are You, then who is the I? The path, a shadow, that tree? Think about this as you run beside the river.
unhitching: to crudely paraphrase Lévi-Strauss, unhitching happens in brief moments when we can step outside of or beside or just beyond — below the threshold of thought, over and above society — to contemplate/experience/behold the this, the what it is, the essence of everything, Mary Oliver’s eternity. In your run above the gorge, near the river, below the trees, can you unhitch?
during the run
In spite of the warm conditions, I managed to wonder about/wander through or with all 3 of these! A little bit of eavesdropping, some unhitching or at least thinking about how/where unhitching is possible, and becoming a You.
All of these ideas were simmering in my mind the entire time I ran, but I had a breakthrough in the second mile as I passed a walker and a dog on the Winchell Trail. They noticed me before I reached them and moved to the side. I said thank you and the woman replied you’re welcome. As I continued running on the steep-ish trail with no railing I thought about how when I said thank you, I was the I, she was the you. But when she answered you’re welcome, I become the you and she the I. Each of us both. Then I started thinking about the space and time between when we each embodied the pronoun, before my I turned into a you or her you into and I. This is the space of possibility where unhitching can happen, when we can be both a you and an I or something else that doesn’t divide and separate or assign us a fixed role — as active I or passive you. A moment when we can experience or behold the is below the threshold of thought, over and above society and its constructs. Not long after thinking these things, I encountered the blue flash of the bird and it felt magical.
I wanted to hold onto these ideas so I eventually stopped in the ravine, just past the oak savanna, to record my thoughts.
we exchanged the You. First they were the you, then I was, but there was some time in-between before we switched from I to you or you to I that was undetermined or both or nothing and that it’s those moments where we have the opportunity to unhitch.
the immeasurable or barely measurable lag between what we do, what we feel, what we hear, what we see, and our brain and as it travels to the brain then travels back out in whatever form. That is where those moments occur. (I’m thinking about a Radiolab episode I listened to last year)
thoughts recording during my run
And, a few minutes later, after my run was done, I recorded a few more thoughts:
Instead of lamenting the loss of what we once were like in Marie Howe’s “Singularity,” what if we gave more attention to the possibilities that exist in those spaces between the You and the I? Those moments of unhitching …And I was thinking about Robin Wall Kimmerer and the moss again and this idea of enough-ness, being satisfied with the small moments. Not trying to get more, to be more, but to just be, or to not be, or to be passive.
Not an observer or eavesdropper as someone who is spying on, staring at, invading the space of others. Not a lurker, as in lurking troll. Is there another way to understand how to notice the world passively? An absorber? Not a lurker, but a dweller?
thoughts recorded after my run
After my run, I also recorded myself reciting a poem that memorized a few years ago and was trying to keep fresh as one of my 100 poems memorized: Natural Forces/Vincente Huidobro. I almost got every word correct.
after the run
Such a great run, with so many interesting ideas! Arriving home and then trying to put the feeling of the run and the feeling of my thoughts into words, dulled some of the shine. It’s hard to find the right best proper most profound complete words to translate the experience. I didn’t want to lose so many great ideas and the moments of clarity. Then, another thought: what if the goal was not to accurately or exhaustively remember and then record my thoughts and feelings, but to hold onto those feelings and allow them to shift my perspective. I’m not sure that makes sense, but it did to me when I first thought it.
I have enjoyed reading Ruefle all this month. I’ve gotten to know her a little bit better and been able to wander in many different directions. I’ve also experimented with a new way of engaging with ideas/authors/writings. As an academic, I used to spend hours trying to effectively (and comprehensively) summarize the argument of a piece of writing. This summary, what one of my profs called appreciation, was always the first step. With Ruefle, attempting to lay out her entire argument in a neat and logical way doesn’t work. Why try to pin down her wild and wandering thoughts in such a way? Why waste all of my energy trying to summarize something that shouldn’t be summarized? So instead, I’ve been trying to engage with the little bits and bobs (thanks British TV for reminding me of this wonderful phrase!) that resonate for me. For me the point is not to KNOW these poems and lectures and essays by Ruefle but to FEEL them in small and big ways.
Some other ideas in “On Sentimentality” that I want to store away for future Sara:
I You They are invented devices
The words I, and you, and they, are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement and totally devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attributed to them.
“On Life”/ Percy Shelley, quoted in Ruefle’s MRH, page 32
on vague Yous and John Keats’ “This Living Hand”
The poem is nothing but a gigantic, disembodied hand pointing a finger at someone. That finger is a magnet and a conductor: it reaches out to the vague, ill-defined you like God reaching within an inch of Adam, and it charges the reader with all the responsibility in the world: go figure these things out for yourself, while you still have blood in your veins.
page 35
another definition of poetry
a good poem is seldom comfortable; either it vanquishes us with anguish or electrifies us with ecstasy or makes us pause and consider a new sense of the world or unravels us altogether, but never does it make us feel comfortable in the fashing of these ads [part of a discussion about an ad that used the phrase, the poetry of knits].
pages 46-47
unhitching
The possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists … in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society; in the conntemplating of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.
Lévi-Strauss quoted MRH page 52
Returning again to the ideas of You and I and We and Us, I wonder if some of my thoughts were influenced by a poem I read while drinking my coffee:
For today’s run, I decided to go past the falls to Longfellow Gardens. Since I was reading Mary Ruefle’s prose poem about purple sadness, my plan was to visit my favorite purple flowers. When I reached the gardens I discovered that they haven’t been planted yet. Thanks strange spring with your late snow storms and unending cold weather in April!
Another one of those wonderful spring days with sunshine and birdsong. A week ago I would have added “no bugs,” but they’ve arrived. All this week, mosquitoes have been feasting on my elbows, under my knees, my wrist. Today a gnat died on the side of my nose. I could see it through my peripheral vision. Another flew into my eye. Yuck!
My right big toe hurt again for a few minutes, then it was fine.
Heard the wind, water gushing out of the sewer pipes, the falls roaring, kids laughing at the playground, one little kid in a stroller that was over everything, a giant mower or weed whacker or some other noisy machine near the Longfellow House.
Smelled cigarette smoke as I passed a guy on the trail. Was he smoking or was it just his clothes?
surfaces: tightly packed dirt, half buried tree roots, grass, hay, asphalt, concrete, road, street, sidewalk, brick, dead leaves, crumbling asphalt — some mostly asphalt, some with big chunks of asphalt mixed with leaves and dirt, some rubble, limestone steps
Mary Ruefle, Immortal Cupboards, Windows, Offerings, and a Purple Wood
Today I’m reading Ruefle’s lecture, “My Emily Dickinson” and her purple sadness poem.
immortal cupboards
J. D. Salinger once remarked, “A writer, when he’s asked to discuss his craft, ought to get up and call out in a loud voice just the names of the writers he loves…”
“My Emily Dickinson” / Mary Ruefle, page 150
That lovely little book. I’ve had nothing affect me quite so much since I discovered haiku. But then you come from Japan! You now inhabit a corner of my immortal cupboard with LZ (especially the short poems), Emily Dickinson, Thoreau, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, John Muir, bits from Santayana, D.H. Lawrence, Dahlberg, William Carlos Williams, and haiku. These knew “when / to listen / what falls / glistens now / in the ear.”
Emily Dickinson is also in my immortal cupboard, along with Mary Oliver, Lorine Niedecker, Marie Howe, possibly Alice Oswald, definitely Rita Dove.
windows
Emily Dickinson often looked out of her bedroom window, and many of her poems, if not her worldview, seem framed by this fact; so much has been made of this there is little I can add; to argue whether a window is the emblem of complete objectivity (removal and distance) or complete subjectivity (framing and viewpoint) is an argument without end, for every window has two sides, and they are subsumed in the window, the way yearning, a subsidiary of the window, is subsumed in both the object yearned for, and the subject of its own activity.
“My Emily Dickinson”/ Mary Ruefle, page 151
offerings
But she has a common grave, and I like to go there and leave things, and when I did, I see that many other people have done the same.
“My Emily Dickinson” / Mary Ruefle, page 182
list of offerings left (real or imagined) throughout Ruefle’s lecture:
a stone, a penny, a small bronze alien
two plastic champagne glasses, pink and purple larkspur, an ear
a lemon, a dime, a diamond ring, a parachute
a white rose, a fortune-telling passionate fish, ice cream for astronauts
a sheaf of flowers from the florist with a thank-you note attached, a plastic fly, a nickel, an egg
A stick of gum wrapped in foil. A shard of glass.
a plastic watch, a feather, some Kleenex
Nothing.
lilacs, a spool of thread, a book of matches, a mood ring
an envelope, addressed but otherwise empty, a piece of gum in silver paper, a packet of nasturtium seeds, and a button
a thimble, an acorn, a quarter, and many, many daffodils
yellow snapdragons. A robin made of tin. A child’s block with the letter E. A pen. A pinecone. A tiny hat. An Austrailian coin.
a paratrooper, a cork
s piece of coal, a candle stub, a chrysanthemum
a small gargoyle, a rubber heart, an old key, a guitar pick a sequin, a sprig of heather, and a piece of hair
A doorknob.
a purple wood
A lane of yellow led the eye Unto a Purple Wood Whose soft inhabitants to be Surpasses solitude (Emily Dickinson)
from My Private Property/ Mary Ruefle
Purple sadness is the sadness of classical music and eggplant, the stroke of midnight, human organs, ports cut off for a part of every year, words with too many meanings, incense, insomnia, and the crescent moon. It is the sadness of play money, and icebergs seen from a canoe. It is possible to dance to purple sadness, though slowly, as slowly as it takes to dig a pit to hold a sleeping giant. Purple sadness is pervasive, and goes deeper into the interior than the world’s greatest nickel deposits, or any other sadness on earth. It is the sadness of depositories, and heels echoing down a long corridor, it it the sound of your mother closing the door at night, leaving you alone.
Just discovered how the ends of her lines create another poem:
Stroke words it is possible to dig a pit deeper into sadness a long leaving
The last words, leaving you alone, reminds me of Ruefle’s discussion of Emily Bronté, and Emily Dickinson in My Emily Dickinson:
Emily Dickinson never lived alone for a single day in her life. Emily Bronté never lived alone for a single day in her life.
before the run
Today on my run, I want to think about purple, and I plan to run the 2+ miles it takes to get to longfellow gardens where some of my favorite purple flowers dwell (or have dwelled in past springs). What are these flowers called? I have no idea.
other purples to think about: heels echoing, doors creaking closed, deep pits.
during the run
No flowers. well, I did find some flowers that were white, but looked like they could be or would be or should be turning purple. Also, a reddish-purple plant. I took some pictures:
tiny purple flowers (if you really believe)a reddish, purplish plant
I can’t really see any purple in these, or much of anything, but maybe you can?
Other purple things I remember encountering: the gentle, queer curve of a branch towering over the trail — as I ran under it I thought, that’s very purple. Then the face of a child in the midst of bellowing frustration — I didn’t see their face, but I imagined it could be a deep purple. Purple whispers in the trees.
No purple cars or shirts or shoes or bikes or signs or birds or left behind objects in the grass. Mostly just green and blue.
after the run
Apparently the leaving of strange offerings at Emily Dickinson’s grave is a thing. In her play on Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson and Ruefle’s My Emily Dickinson, Meg Shevenock writes, in My My Emily Dickinson:
Then, there’s this: after visiting Emily’s house, my friends and I made a small parade to visit her grave, and the objects I knew would be there, were there. Best of all, a white plastic pen with white cap from a hotel. Or best of all, a blue pencil cracked and dried, that had weathered so much snow. We all want her to say more, write more, about who she was; or, we want to say, I get it, I’m a writer too, and we also know it’s impossible, so we leave an object from the world, from a day long beyond her breathing, to get as close to touching as stone.
The first outdoor bike of the year! I’m always anxious, not knowing how much I’ll be able to see on my earliest bike rides of the season, but today was fine. Hooray! Not scared at all, nothing popping up unexpectedly. okay, maybe once when I was focusing on a bike that was approaching from far off, I didn’t notice another bike that was much closer to me. I was more concerned with my tires, which NEED to be replaced; they’ve been leaking air for a few years now. They were fine too. Several times during the bike ride I had a big smile on my face as I thought, I can still bike! then, I get to bike to the lake and swim across it all summer!
10 Things I Noticed
the wind was rushing in and past my ears as I biked south
several bikers on fat tires — I wondered why. Do they know something about the road conditions that I don’t?
the port-a-potties at the falls for the race this past weekend were still there, so were the detour signs
the duck bridge is temporarily gone — it’s being repaired until ? As I biked by, I noticed a chainlink fence and an asphalt trail abruptly ending where the bridge should be — now that’s an image for one of my nightmares!
squeak squeak squeak On your left — some squeaking bikes approaching from behind, then passing me just past the duck bridge
the lake — open water, but not empty water — some people already swimming
the safety boat — a silvery white beacon across the lake
the surreys (Scott’s nemesis) were lining the trail, ready to torment him
an older guy, sitting in a lawn chair at the beach, telling someone a story about how his baseball card collection isn’t worth anything — he said, you might as well throw it all away. — even this card? it should be worth something?! Nope
an even older guy stopping a woman in a bikini walking by and talking at (not to) her about how there aren’t any lifeguards. Couldn’t quite tell what he was saying, but I assume he meant, but there should be! If he had asked me, I would have said — the season doesn’t start until next weekend and who will you be able to hire this early in the year?
Mowed the front yard, raked some fallen branches, pulled the irritating garlic mustard that erupts every spring. Least favorite thing about it: it always comes back. Most favorite thing about it: it’s satisfyingly easy to pull; it just pops right out! Listened to an audiobook — the 2nd in a murder mystery series where Agatha Christie’s bff and head housekeeper solves murders. This one’s called, A Trace Poison.
I like mowing the lawn with our reel mower. (I didn’t know that it was called a reel mower. Last summer, when I asked the guy working at the store for help I thought he said real mower, and then I thought, as my daughter would say, he gets it. Yes, the only kind of mower to get is a hand-powered one and not a loud, huge monster mower. But no, he just meant a mower with a reel, a reel mower.) Anyway, it’s fun to be outside, and it’s a chance to move while I listen to my book. Unfortunately, as my vision gets worse (and our yard does too), it’s harder to see where I’ve mowed and where I’ve missed. My aesthetic has always been “almost-chic” or that’s good enough, so I don’t mind, but I think Scott might. So this summer, FWA will have to mow, and I’ll stick to pulling weeds.
Mary Ruefle and not knowing or knowing nothing
Today I finally arrived at the part in Madness, Rack, and Honey in which Mary Ruefle uses one of my favorite quotes of hers, a quote that was an inspiration for my “Bewildered” poem:
The difference between myself and a student is that I am better at not knowing what I am doing.
“Short Lecture on Socrates,” page 250
I am almost positive I did read this exact passage when I checked out this book from the library, but maybe I didn’t? Anyway, reading Ruefle’s book was much later after I had already encountered the quote and fallen in love with the idea of being better at not knowing. I first read it in an article about bewilderment, Less Than Certain. I had no idea (or no memory of it, at least) that the quote is in a lecture about Socrates and the unknowingness/not knowing/knowing nothing as the foundation of Western civilization. Wow. I forgot to take my own advice to always think about the larger context of a quote that I want to use!
Reading this small lecture, recognizing that we know nothing seems to be about humility. Recognizing the limits of what you do or can know. Not believing you can know everything. In another article on this topic that mentions Ruefle’s quote, Jack Underwood echoes this:
What interests me about poetry is that rather than looking up for answers, it tends to lead us back indoors, to the mirror, as if seeing ourselves reflected within its frame, confused, gawping, empty-eyed, and scalded by circumstance, might re-teach us the lesson: that meaning presents itself precisely as a question — therefore, you can’t entertain it by seeking to answer it. Imagine! The old, old universe, arranging itself legibly into a puzzle that our small brains might be qualified to solve with the knowledge we can accrue from our small corner of its tablecloth. Solving the mysteries of the universe: isn’t that just the most arrogant, preposterous thing you ever heard? The idea of there being some sort of Answer to Everything is an admirable feat of imagination but also displays a woeful lack of it.
Even as I appreciate the importance of humility, I like thinking about this not knowing or knowing nothing in other ways.
Not knowing as an action. To actively not know something. This could mean unlearning it, to be engaged in the act of not knowing it or divesting (disinvesting?) from it. Or it could mean willful ignorance — a refusal to know some fact, someone. I choose to not know! It could be Mary Ruefle’s wonder from “On Secrets” — I would rather wonder than know. Or it could my moment or many moments of refusing to conceal my not knowing to others, to admit/embrace/accept that I can’t see that bird, right over there, that you are pointing out to me.
Knowing nothing as knowing the thing, or things, that is/are nothing, where nothing is a space where time is stopped or where productivity doesn’t happen (Ross Gay). Or where nothing is the Void, the absence, the blank space around which we orbit, trying to find meaning or possibility or connection. Or where nothing is Marie Howe’s singularity:
No I, no We, no one. No was No verb no noun only a tiny tiny dot brimming with
The perfect temperature for a spring run. The light looked strange. Filtered through trees, clouds, haze? it looked almost pink or light orangish-pink. I liked it. Everything, everywhere thick with green.
note, 19 may, 2023: talked with Scott and RJP about the strange light, which has continued: forest fires
I greeted the Welcoming Oaks and good morninged Mr. Morning! and another regular — did I ever name him? Maybe it was Mr. Holiday?
I chanted in triple berries to keep a steady rhythm — strawberry blueberry raspberry — and tried to stop thinking or noticing anything, to just be on the path, moving and breathing. What did I notice anyway?
10 Things I Noticed When I Wasn’t Noticing
2 stones stacked on the ancient boulder
down in the flats, the river was moving fast. I tried to race it
white foam on the river, under the I-94 bridge I thought (or hoped?) it was a rowing shell
a fat tire bike sped down the franklin hill, abruptly turned at annie young meadow and almost ran into a parked car, then called out to the guy in the car — his friend — Hey!
the bucket of a big crane curled under the franklin bridge with a worker in it, studying the underside of the bridge
a guy walking on edmund in a bright yellow vest, no other vest wearers or official vehicles in sight
a runner coming down the other franklin hill — the one near the dog park — then entering the river road trail 25 yards? ahead of me
smell: pot, down in the flats
a woman stopped at the edge of the trail, looking through a camera lens at a tree on the other side of the road. I thought about calling out, what’s in the tree?, but didn’t
the weeds on the edge of the trail, poking out of cracks in the asphalt looked monstrous — now I can’t remember what I thought they were at first, just not weeds
bonus: a turkey! chilling in the grassy boulevard between edmund and the river road
I don’t really remember what I heard as I ran without headphones toward franklin. After stopping 3/4 of the way up the hill to walk, I put in music. I thought I put in Lizzo’s Special but I must have forgot to tap something because when I hit the play button it was Dear Evan Hansen again. Oh well.
Mary Ruefle, “Madness, Rack, and Honey”
Last night during Scott’s community jazz band rehearsal, after our regular community band rehearsal, when I sit for an hour and try to read or write or think about my poetry, I started Ruefle’s titular lecture (is that the correct way to use titular?). Now, after my run, I’m back at it again. This lecture is a chewy bagel and I’m determined to not spend too much time on it.
The title is strange — what does she mean by madness, rack, and honey? — and I was pleased to discover that she devotes the lecture to explaining the title. She begins with a Persian poem:
I shall not finish my poem. What I have written is so sweet The flies are beginning to torment me.
honey:
It is so simple and clear: the “figurative” sweetness of the author’s verse has become honey, causing “literal” flies to swarm on the page or in around the autor’s ead. This is truly the Word made flesh, the fictive made real, water into wine. That is the honey of poetry: the miracle of its transformation, which is that of creation: once there was a blank page–scary!–now there is something in its place that is attracting flies. Anyone who has not experienced the joy, pleasure, transport, and who has not experienced the joy, pleasure, transport, and sweetness of writing poems has not written poems.
pages 130-131
rack:
Enter the flies who feast. For the poem clearly reminds us that honey has complications–those flies are beginning to torment the poet. Torment, pain, torture, is what I mean by the rack.
page 134
It is what poetry does to the world, what poets do with words, and what words will do to a poet. And that’s the rack of it. And if you have never experienced the rack while working on a poem then you have have never worked on a poem. Have you never put language in an extenuating circumstance with dangerous limits until an acute physical sensation results?
page 135
And, if I have time, I’ll return for madness later today.
One more thing to post before I go eat lunch. Instead of posting the poem, which I also like, I’m only posting the poet’s explanation of it.
“Sometimes you hear a word as if for the first time, a word you’ve been saying your whole life. I don’t know what in the brain allows the word, in that moment, to reveal itself, but it always makes me feel very smart and very foolish at once. This poem was written during the period when I had just gotten into gardening and was gaining a new appreciation for everything—food, nature, and time. I wonder what else is waiting to reveal itself to me in such a way, and whether I’ll be distracted enough to receive it.” —Jeremy Radin
Now I’m thinking of the opening lines from Marie Howe’s “The Meadow”: As we walk into words that have waitedfor us to enter them…is this idea of walking into words similar to words (and new meanings) revealing themselves to us? As I write this question, I’m reminded of a Mary Ruefle piece in My Private Property: “In the Forest”
When I wander in the forest I am drawn towards language, I see meaning is quaintly hidden, shooting up in dark wet woods, by roots of trees, old walls, among dead leaves…
page 74
And these lines helped me to remember a thought I had as I ran this morning on the part of the pedestrian path that dips below the bike path, the two separated by a slight rise and some bushes. When I first started to run this trail, almost 10 years ago, I was a little afraid of taking this lower trail. It was hidden from the road and other people and I wondered if someone might be lurking, waiting for me. Today I thought, how could I have been afraid of this short part of the path, only hidden from view for a few seconds? It does seem ridiculous.
4.35 miles marshall loop to cleveland 52 degrees humidity: 80%
Wet air, wet ground. Everything bright green or muddy brown. Overcast. Ran up the marshall hill and past Cretin to Cleveland. As I approached St. Thomas, I wondered if I’d hear the bells. Yes! Dum dum dum dum at 11:15. Encountered a few other runners, some walkers, bikers, a dog. Scanned the river for rowers, saw a paddleboat! A Mother’s Day brunch? Heard a black-capped chickadee calling out fee bee fee bee, then some blue jays screeching ha ha ha ha. Running right past a bush, a red bird suddenly flew out if it, a whirr of red in my face. Later, heading down the Summit hill, heard the shimmering (or tinkling or fluttering or ?) of water falling over the limestone ledge at Shadow Falls. Noticed near the end of my run that the forest below the tunnel of trees is hidden by a veil of green. I thought about how nice it was that the gnats and mosquitoes hadn’t arrived yet — or the catkin fluff from the cottonwood trees.
A very relaxed run. A nice way to spend a Mother’s Day morning. I don’t feel too sad today, but I don’t like Mother’s Day — especially since I lost my second mother last fall. My current take on the day: it irritates me. Anyway, here’s a beautiful mother poem that I was happy to find this morning:
I discover a piece of stationery, bordered with red-gold
leaves. In the center, her cramped hand reads simply
The snow is so so white today.
How odd to read these words in June, air hung with
humidity, sweat jeweling my lip. Just that one line,
stuck in an old calendar underneath a stack of books.
I upend each one, fanning the pages to search for more
and out they flutter like doves, each one scribbled like
urgent messages from some simpler beyond–
That red bird is back, crashing into the window.
Railroad tracks are the saddest things.
The wood is pretty where it is rotting.
If I could revise our lives, make her survive the cancer
that burned fast and bright through her insides,
I would tell her how wrong she was to say she couldn’t
write, how much I am like her with my mundane
notes, my daydreaming observations, post-its
congregating in each bag, notebooks on each surface,
and I would sit with her and notice every moment,
rebuke her for thinking she was not good enough,
a mistake I still make, one that I am making right now
as I question and regret each line I add to this poem.
I want to talk to her. I want to tell her that cardinal
is back, flying straight at the window again and again.
These lines:
If I could revise our lives, make her survive the cancer/that burned fast and bright through her insides,
After stopping my run at the ancient boulder and crossing the river road, I pulled out my phone and recited a poem that I memorized a few years ago and am memorizing again as part of my 100 poems memorized goal: The Meadow/ Marie Howe. I listened to my recording while looking at the poem just now. Not too bad, only a few missed words, one mixed up line.
After almost 2 months of preparing for, then waiting, then watching it happen, the house is finally painted. Now I can mow and garden and bring out the umbrella for the deck. Hooray! Since I knew I should have a day off from running — having run 4 days in a row, I decided to do yardwork today.
Yardwork. And now the yardwork is over (it is never over), today’s Stint anyway. Odd jobs, that stretch ahead, wide and mindless –“Hymn to Life”/ James Schuyler
Today it feels like summer but the backyard looks like early spring. Tulips in full bloom, peonies popping up with their green shoots that look like asparagus — at least to me. Big bare patches from where robins had dropped crabapple seeds in late winter. Dandelions, garlic mustard, creeping charlie, the half-mulched leaves left over from late fall.
I listened to a Maintenance Phase episode — Oprah v. the beef industry — while I mowed and raked and swept up scattered mulch.
10 Things I Noticed
everywhere, in the back and front yards, the ground seemed soft — too soft. is it the ants?
right next to the front step, a giant mound — an ant hill
the soft metallic whirr of the reel mower blades
the distinctive thunk of the blade getting jammed from a small twig
strange — bare vines by the yucca bushes — is this ground cover dead/dying, or have the leaves not appeared yet. is it the ants?
the sloped front lawn, soft and bare, a few patches of weeds, some suspicious looking soft dirt. is it the ants?
weeds infiltrating the red and yellow tulips on the south side of the house
a few bright green leaves growing on the hydrangea twigs
some small maple leaves poking out from the spirea
small asparagus-like stalks emerging from the earth — time to put the cages around the peonies before they get too big to tame!
Mary Ruefle and Washing Dishes
In the opening lines of “Towards a Carefree World,” Ruefle writes:
Many of the most astonishing writers in the world had ser- vants. It is doubtful they ever really washed the dishes. Which is too bad; I think they would have enjoyed wash- ing the dishes, especially after dinner. Repetitive motion can take your mind off things. By things I mean the cares of this world.
With these lines, I decided to think about washing dishes.
She rarely made us do it— we’d clear the table instead—so my sister and I teased that some day we’d train our children right and not end up like her, after every meal stuck with red knuckles, a bleached rag to wipe and wring. The one chore she spared us: gummy plates in water greasy and swirling with sloughed peas, globs of egg and gravy.
Or did she guard her place at the window? Not wanting to give up the gloss of the magnolia, the school traffic humming. Sunset, finches at the feeder. First sightings of the mail truck at the curb, just after noon, delivering a note, a card, the least bit of news.
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there. And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of. It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off. For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless: I am living. I remember you.
3
Mostly I like washing dishes. It’s a chance to move after a meal, or as a break from writing. I listen to a podcast — Maintenance Phase, Ali on the Run, Vs., Between the Covers — or an audio book while I soak then scrub then rinse. Sometimes I look out the window at the trees swaying in the wind or the sky glowing orange or a squirrel taunting my dog. Occasionally, but not often, I shatter a dish on the granite countertop.
Usually I can see well enough to properly clean the dirty dishes. Sometimes I rely on feel — if it’s smooth, it’s clean; if it’s rough, it’s dirty. My biggest struggle is with the metal cheese grater. I hold it under the light, tilt it in different directions, trying to see if I missed any streaks of cheese. Almost impossible for me to tell.
We have a dishwasher but it hasn’t been working properly for 2 or 3 years now so I hand wash the dishes. Sometimes I wish our dishwasher worked, sometimes I don’t care. Often I wonder if washing dishes will be one more thing lost to me once all of my central vision is gone.
I don’t remember washing too many dishes with my mom, but I do remember drying them for Scott’s mom and dad after dinner. They always had to do the dishes right after eating. It took me years (15? 20?) to finally feel comfortable enough to help them. They were very particular about how you should wash dishes — don’t waste water, make sure they are absolutely dry before putting any dishes away, use a drying cloth that doesn’t leave lint but also doesn’t dry anything. When they both stopped caring about the dishes and how they were done, I knew we were entering the final stage.
Our kitchen faucet had been dying for three or four years. First, it dripped when you turned it off. Sometimes, if I jiggled it just right, it would almost stop. For at least 3 years this happened. Then, the retractable hose started getting stuck. You could pull it out, but not put it back in. Then you couldn’t move it from one sink to the other. Finally, the whole faucet — base and all — wouldn’t stop moving and leaking water into the cabinet below. When this happened Scott abruptly declared it was time, right this minute, to go out a buy a new faucet. So we did. And when we returned home Scott removed the old faucent, which was hard to get out, and put in the new one, which slid in without a problem. Why, I wondered, had we waited so long to get a new faucet?
4.5 miles minnehaha falls and back 27 degrees / feels like 21 75% snow and ice covered
Icier than I expected so I went slower. A gray day. Fuzzy, unformed or unfixed or out of focus. The sky filled with static. I ran south, planning to check out my favorite winter spot — just past the oak savanna where the hills part and open to a view of the river — but I forgot, or I was distracted as I tried to avoid slippery spots and pedestrians.
About a mile in, was passed by another runner. I could hear their soft footsteps approaching. After they passed I watched them fly away. Their gait seemed a little erratic, like they were almost about to slip on the snow with each step. Speaking of slips, running up the hill between Locks and Dam #1 and the double-bridge, I witnessed a biker almost wipe out on some chunks of ice the plow had kicked up from the street. Yikes. I stopped to let him go by safely.
The falls were frozen. The river was too, but not completely.
10 (groups of) People I Encountered
a group of walkers, paused by the sign for the bike surreys at the falls
another group of walkers near locks and dam #1. Heard one of them say, “The farmer had to fish her out of the river.”
a guy and an exuberant dog by the Longfellow poem at the park
the speedy runner I mentioned above
the biker who almost fell
someone on a fat tire
kids at the school playground across the street, more subdued than usual, but still laughing and yelling
a guy blasting his phone or radio as he walked. I think he was listening to music, but I can’t remember what kind
a runner in a bright blue jacket, over on the trail, when I was on edmund. we ran parallel for a few minutes then he inched ahead
a runner carefully crossing over some ice as she talked on a bluetooth phone to someone
Running back from the falls, I crossed over to edmund to avoid the crowd, and the ice on the trail. Stopped at my favorite poetry house that puts a poem on their front window. Was there a new one? Yes! Here it is:
Maybe Alone On My Bike/ William Stafford
I listen, and the mountain lakes hear snowflakes come on those winter wings only the owls are awake to see, their radar gaze and furred ears alert. In that stillness a meaning shakes;
And I have thought (maybe alone on my bike, quaintly on a cold evening pedaling home), Think!– the splendor of our life, its current unknown as those mountains, the scene no one sees.
O citizens of our great amnesty: we might have died. We live. Marvels coast by, great veers and swoops of air so bright the lamps waver in tears, and I hear in the chain a chuckle I like to hear.
I’m glad to have found this poem. Think! and we might have died. We live. Marvels/coast by, great veers and swoops of air I love the title of the poem and where it sits at the start of the second stanza. Weather and light like today — the gray, overcast, wintery light, not dim, but not bright either — is conducive for thinking and reflecting and being grateful to be alive and to notice the veers and swoops of air, the chuckle of a bike chain.
Yes, gray is for thinking and wondering and for opening up to the world.
Inciting Joy: Through My Tears I Saw [Death: the Second Incitement]
Before heading out for a run, I read Gay’s second incitement about the death of his father. I don’t want to summarize it because it’s not meant to be summarized, but experienced, endured, read closely without looking away. Wow — Gay is an amazing writer. His descriptions of his dad’s diagnosis of cancer, his illness and decline, his death, are so powerful and vivid. I could feel the pain of my own grief — over my two moms, one dead for 13 years, the other for 2 months — in my body, especially in my sinuses and throat. My body tightening, tingling, wanting to close up.
At one point, as I read the 17 page chapter, I thought of Marie Howe and her entreaty to not look away, even when it’s painful. To face the sadness and grief, to let it in. In the poem I posted yesterday, Levine writes about how this letting in — dragging our grief out of the river and putting our mouth on it — can lead to a loosening, an opening up, a joy. Gay writes about this too, in the conclusion to the chapter, as he says goodbye to his dying father:
Can you hear me Dad, Can you hear me, and by now I was crying hard, and I was kissing my father’s face again and again, telling him I loved him again and again, it was the softest face in the world, my father’s face, so quiet like that, I never knew it, I had never touched it before, I was crying onto his eyelids and cheeks and kissing him and telling him again and again I loved him, I love you Dad, his brown face was lit with my tears. and with my forehead pressed into his, and my hands on his cheeks, I noticed that my father had freckles sprinkled around the bridge of his nose and his upper cheeks. It was like a gentle broadcast of carrot seeds blending into his skin, flickering visible from this distance. It was through my tears I saw my father was a garden. Or the two of us, or the all-of-us, not here long maybe it is. And from that what might grow.
I’d like to run this morning, but I won’t. I’m trying to give my right knee a break. So instead, I did a short bike ride in the basement. Hopefully, later this week, I’ll swim at the Y. No deep thoughts while biking, just the chance to move and get my heart rate above 120 bpms. Thought about starting the second season of Cheer! — I watched the first during the winter of 2020 — but ended up watching another track race. Maybe next time I’ll start re-watching Dickinson? I’ve started listening to the awesome poetry podcast about the show, The Slave is Gone, and I’ve been wanting to return to ED’s poems, and read the book I bought earlier this year, My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe. Too many projects, not enough time or energy. Oh well.
Marie Howe and the Moment
Yesterday, I posted 2 poems from Marie Howe, Part of Eve’s Discussion and The Meadow, and I mentioned a third that I had posted earlier in this year on July 19, “The Moment.” Here it is:
This last line about the white curtains hanging still reminds me of an interview with Howe that I posted an excerpt from 3 days later. When asked about caring for her dying brother, she mentions a green, flapping shade:
being with John when he was alive in those hours and days in his room with the green, flapping shade. Sitting by Johnny and just talking in those ways for those hours and all the particulars: the glass, the sandwich, the shade, the bedclothes, the cat, the summer heat outside pressing against the windows, the coolness in the air, the dim room. The peacefulness. The sounds of kids on bikes outside. For once there was nothing else going on but that. That’s the freedom of it, right? What’s more important? Nothing. So you’re actually living in time again.
and also this:
That was really a big deal. I was given this place to be without any expectations really. And everything changed so that the particulars of life—this white dish, the shadow of the bottle on it—everything mattered so much more to me. And I saw what happened in these spaces. You can never even say what happened, because what happened is rarely said, but it occurs among the glasses with water and lemon in them. And so you can’t say what happened but you can talk about the glasses or the lemon. And that something is in between all that.
Reading her words here, and thinking about the death of her brother, has helped me to enhance/shift my understanding of a few lines from “The Meadow”:
But in this world, where something is always listening, even murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan
in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget
what you are.
I first wrote about these lines on july 13 and 14, 2020.In those entries, I talked a lot about the value of forgetting. To forget what you are and just be, without judgment, giving attention to the light and the breeze and a flapping, green shade.
a few more thoughts about moments:
In “Logic” Richard Siken writes the moment before something happening and sleeping and possibility. I don’t completely understand his words, but they reminded me of Howe’s words:
A hammer is a hammer when it hits the nail. A hammer is not a hammer when it is sleeping. I woke up tired of being the hammer. There’s a dream in the space between the hammer and the nail: the dream of about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream, but the nail will take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever.
Also, I keep thinking about a moment as not being a unit of time, but a location, that in-between space. And I’m also thinking of time outside the clock, which is a theme I’ve return to a lot, and that comes up in the bit of the poem I re-memorized yesterday:
Our clock is blind, our clock is dumb. Its hands are broken, its fingers numb. No time for the martyr of our fair town Who wasn’t a witch because she could drown.
It’s also in the a few lines I wrote in my long poem, which I was calling “Haunts,” but am now thinking of it as “Girl Ghost Gorge”:
I slip through time’s tight ticks to moments so brief they’re like shudders, but so generous they might fit every- thing left behind by progress.
Overcast, a heavy white sky. No snow coming, just thick clouds. A nice contrast for the bright yellows and reds and oranges lining the gorge and neighborhood sidewalks. The best view: running back across the lake street bridge, from Minneapolis to St. Paul. Such vivid colors!
About 1/2 mile in, my kneecap seemed a little shifty. Do I need to turn back? I decided to walk for a minute and regroup. Started running again, still uncertain whether I would keep going or not. For the rest of the run, it sometimes felt strange. Or was it just that I was worried about it? I can’t decide if it — my knee, my leg, my calf — feels strange because I’m worried, or because it’s warning me? Should I take several days off to be safe? Probably.
image of the day
Running over the bridge, I noticed these foamy streaks on the east side of the river — not continuous lines, but dashes or slashes in the water. I wondered what caused them. Later, walking for a short stretch back across the bridge I decided it was the strong wind pushing the water, making little ripples. Now I’m wondering again: was it just wind, or wind and small sandbars below the surface?
Last night, I recall reading something about how low the Mississippi River is this year and about some rock formation near St. Louis (I think?) that you normally can only access by boat, but now you can walk to. Okay, I looked it up. It’s Tower Rock and it is near St. Louis and here’s an article about it.
Before I went out for my run, I re-memorized my favorite part of one of my favorite Halloween poems. It’s from “A Rhyme for Halloween” by Maurice Kilwein Guevara:
Our clock is blind, our clock is dumb. Its hands are broken, its fingers numb. No time for the martyr of our fair town Who wasn’t a witch because she could drown.
Now the dogs of the cemetery are starting to bark At the vision of her bobbing up in the dark. When she opens her mouth to gasp for air, A moth flies out and lands in her hair.
The apples are thumping, winter is coming. The lips of the pumpkin soon will be humming. By the caw of the crow on the first of the year, Something will die, something appear.
Oh, the mood this poem creates! I love it. I intended to recite this in my head as I ran, but I forgot. I think I was too distracted by worries about my knee.
Found this poem on twitter yesterday. It’s from Marie Howe, one of my favorite poets:
It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand, and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop, very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say, it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only all the time.
I want to return to this poem and think about this moment some more, and the last line. And I want to compare it to some of her ideas about moments, like in The Moment or The Meadow:
The Meadow/ Marie Howe
As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together
and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers. Imperceptibly heaving with the old impatience, it knows
for certain that two horses walk upon it, weary of hay. The horses, sway-backed and self important, cannot design
how the small white pony mysteriously escapes the fence every day. This is the miracle just beyond their heavy-headed grasp,
and they turn from his nuzzling with irritation. Everything is crying out. Two crows, rising from the hill, fight
and caw-cry in mid-flight, then fall and light on the meadow grass bewildered by their weight. A dozen wasps drone, tiny prop planes,
sputtering into a field the farmer has not yet plowed, and what I thought was a phone, turned down and ringing,
is the knock of a woodpecker for food or warning, I can’t say. I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.
But in this world, where something is always listening, even murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan
in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget
what you are. There will come a day when the meadow will think suddenly, water, root, blossom, through no fault of its own,
and the horses will lie down in daisies and clover. Bedeviled, human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words
that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.
swim: 1 loop lake nokomis open swim 75 degrees 9:30 am
FWA did it! Today, he swam across the lake and back again. 1200 yards. It was fun to stop at the little beach and talk with other swimmers, while we took a break. We met an older woman, who loves to swim around the lake, even when it’s not open swim. She said her kids told her she better stop because the fine is big if you are caught. (I think it might be $2500!) One of her responses, Technically I’m not swimming across the lake, but around it. I like her.
The water was great for the swim: smooth, and not choppy at all. Much easier than when it’s windy. It has been fun training with FWA. I’m hoping he’ll swim some in August. What a gift to spend this time with my wonderful son!
run: 3 miles marshall loop, shortened 80 degrees 11 am
A little while later, I ran with Scott. It was hot. We walked a lot, which was fine with me. A memorable sighting: an eagle circling around, high above us, riding a thermal. It took a while for me to be able to see it in my central vision, but finally I could. What a wing span!
The other day, searching for something else, I found this beautiful interview with Marie Howe from 2013 for Tricycle. She’s talking about losing her beloved brother Johnny and the space she had for grieving. These words fit with other words of her that I’ve read and loved and just used in my class. Putting them in the context of her grief makes them glow even brighter for me:
MH: That was really a big deal. I was given this place to be without any expectations really. And everything changed so that the particulars of life—this white dish, the shadow of the bottle on it—everything mattered so much more to me. And I saw what happened in these spaces. You can never even say what happened, because what happened is rarely said, but it occurs among the glasses with water and lemon in them. And so you can’t say what happened but you can talk about the glasses or the lemon. And that something is in between all that.
KPE: It’s like the Japanese esthetic word of ma. It’s so wonderful. The space between….
MH: This is the space I love more than anything. And this became very important, but there’s no way to describe that, except to describe “you and me.” And there’s the space. I make my students write 10 observations a week—really simple. Like, this morning I saw. . . , this morning I saw. . . , this morning I saw. . . —and they hate it. They always say, “This morning I saw ten lucky people.” And I say, “No. You didn’t see ten lucky people. What did you see?” And then they try to find something spectacular to see. And I say, “No.” It’s just, “What did you see?” “I saw the white towel crumpled on the blue tiles of the bathroom.” That’s all. No big deal. And then, finally, they begin to do it. It takes weeks. And then the white towels pour in and the blue tiles on the bathroom, and it’s so thrilling. It’s like, “Ding-a-ling, da-ding!” And some people never really take to it. But I insist on it. What you saw. What you heard. Just the facts, ma’am. The world begins to clank in the room, drop and fall, and clutter it up, and it’s so thrilling.
KPE: Because it clanks and falls?
MH: Yes! It does. It’s like, “Did you see it? Did you see it?” Everybody goes “Whoa!”
It is thrilling to notice the world! To hear it clank and drop, watch it create clutter. This reminds me of 2 other things I have recently encountered, one for the first time, one again, after a few years.
First, this poem was posted on twitter the other day:
Do Not Ask Your Children To Strive for Extraordinary Things/ William Martin
Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.
The space between us, reminds me of Juliana Spahr’s amazing post 9-11 poem: This Connection of Everyone With Lungs
as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space around the hands and the space of the room and the space of the building that surrounds the room and the space of the neighborhoods nearby and the space of the cities and the space of the regions and the space of the nations and the space of the continents and islands and the space of the oceans and the space of the troposphere and the space of the stratosphere and the space of the mesosphere in and out.
Another windy, choppy open swim night. It wasn’t too bad swimming from the big beach to the little beach, just some swells from behind. Occasionally, the swells made it difficult to do full strokes. Rounding the far orange buoy was difficult. Big (at least, big for Lake Nokomis) waves straight into my face. The next loop I remembered to breathe to my left to avoid them.
10 Things I Remember
a few military planes flying above the lake
on the way back to the big beach on the first loop: voices somewhere nearby. I kept trying to figure out what they were. Finally: 2 people in a canoe, way too close to open water swimmers. When I told them they were in the swimming area, one of them said, “we’re trying to get out of here, but this wind is kicking our butt!”
lots of bits of vegetation floating in the water — I had to spit some of it out, other bits of it made it under my suit. I noticed them later, when I took a shower. A few vines wrapped around my arms
with all the waves, lots of swimmers were doing breaststroke or treading water, a few seemed to be almost clinging to the big buoys
I had no problem staying on course. My biggest problem: a nose plug that kept shifting and goggles that kept leaking. I had to stop a few times to adjust them
when the water wasn’t too choppy, I breathed every 5. When it was choppy, every 3 or 4
didn’t see or hear any birds — no seagulls or ducks, in particular
the waves made it difficult to see anything but water in front of you. Sometimes the slight swells looked like someone was right ahead of me — a phantom swimmer?
exiting the water and looking back from the shore, the water looked almost calm to me. You’d never know how choppy it was in there!
I had something else to write, but somehow I got distracted and lost it again. Maybe I’ll remember and come back and add it in here?
Even though it was choppy, another great swim. As always, I felt strong and happy and confident.
Found this beautiful poem the other day by the wonderful Marie Howe:
swim: 2 miles / 2 loops lake nokomis open swim 75 degrees
More wind, more chop, more rolling waves and swells. Today was a morning swim so the orange buoys were backlit. For me, and my lack of cone cells, this meant they weren’t orange but invisible and then, at fairly close range, dark hulking shapes. Do most people see their orange-ness? As always, I am amazed at how comfortable I’ve become swimming towards something that I can’t see but I trust to be there, based on past experience + deep knowledge of the lake’s layout + my strong, straight shoulders. But this year, there’s another layer to this swimming into nothingness that amazes me: I trust that I’m going the right way, but I also don’t worry if I’m not. So what if I get off course? Who cares if the lifeguards need to nudge me back a little closer to the buoys? I am much less bothered by not knowing, or–and this is a theme for the summer and will feature heavily in a writing project I can tell I’ll be starting in the fall–not quite knowing or roughly/approximately knowing. Not exactly but mostly, almost but never completely. Part of the picture, but never the whole thing. I’ve been writing a lot about bewilderment and unknowingness. This not quite knowing is not bewilderment but something else. Not wild, not lost, but not found either. Hmm….
For the past four times at lake nokomis (sunday, tuesday, thursday, friday), the water has been choppy/rolling in the same way: Smoothest (but not really smooth) from the big beach to the first orange buoy. Swells picking up between buoy 1 and 2, difficult to breath on right side with waves rolling quickly over my head from right to left. Not too bad between the 3rd orange buoy and the white buoy at the little beach. From the little beach back to the big beach, increasingly rough and choppy–waves crashing into me, water spraying up, sometimes difficult to breath on both sides. A wild ride rounding the final green buoy just off the big beach. Swells lifting me up and pushing me along swimming parallel to the shore and heading towards the orange buoy. I like the challenge of choppy water and the energy that it produces but I’m ready for some smoother water. With so many waves, I have to lift my head higher to sight (and breathe?) and my neck is getting sore.
run: 2.7 miles 2 trails 83 degrees
Decided when I got home from swimming that I’d go out for a run. Hot, but a cooler wind. Listened to a playlist for the first half, then the wind mixed with my breathing for the second half. I was able to run in shade most of the time. Very warm in the sun. Don’t remember much of anything. No irritating or memorable people–as I write this now I remember some bikers stopping and blocking the entire path on the way down to the Winchell Trail. Lots of acorns and walnuts on the ground. Don’t remember hearing any birds or seeing any spazzy squirrels. No roaming dogs. Oh–ran past a garbage truck and the smell was terrible. It (the smell) followed me for a few blocks. And I thought again about how I’d like to work with older students (55+) and teach classes that somehow combine critical thinking, creative writing and experiments, deep awareness of place, and physical activity. Still now sure what that would look like or how to start…
loving like the lake
Yesterday I went through poems I gathered about water and made a list, based on these poems and some of my own ideas, about what water does and how it loves. I’m thinking I might use these various things as titles or first lines for poem. Here’s a line I’d like to turn into a poem:
I think the sea is a useless teacher, pitching and falling no matter the weather, when our lives are rather like lakes
3.25 miles 43rd ave, north/tunnel of trees/welcoming oaks/oak savanna/edmund, north/7 Oaks 49 degrees
Hooray for wonderful runs! Sunny, warm enough for shorts, clear trails, welcoming oaks, robins who sound like they’re singing “hurry up hurry up hurry up.” Ran on the trail but don’t remember looking at the river; too busy looking out for other people. After reading an article about “The Warbler Wave” at 7 Oaks, decided to end my run there and listen. According to local bird expert Dave Zumeta (I have his Birds of the Mississippi Guide pdf), mid-May is a great time to see/hear warblers as they migrate south, and 7 Oaks is the best place to do it:
Warblers are Zumeta’s favorite birds, bar none. He not only knows the subtleties of their markings, but can also recognize their songs. His favorite place to watch for warblers isn’t Costa Rica or the Greater Antilles Islands. It’s a sinkhole on 34th St. and 47th Ave. just a stone’s throw from his house. He said, “Seven Oaks Park is the reason we moved where we did. I think it’s one of the best places to bird watch anywhere – and it’s a warbler magnet.”
Wow, I love where I live! Here’s the recording I took as I stood on the edge of the sinkhole:
May 7th, birds at 7 Oaks
I have loved Marie Howe ever since I read one of her amazing poem from What the Living Do and listened to her On Being interview. Such beautiful words! Here’s one that features a bird:
From Nowhere/ Marie Howe
I 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. Listen, a day comes, when you say what all winter
I’ve been meaning to ask, and a crack booms and echoes where ice had seemed solid, scattering ducks
and scaring us half to death. In Vermont, you dreamed from the crown of a hill and across a ravine
you saw lights so familiar they might have been ours shining back from the future.
And waking, you walked there, to the real place, and when you saw only trees, come back bleak
with a foreknowledge we have both come to believe in. But this morning, a kind day has descended, from nowhere,
and making coffee in the usual way, measuring grounds with the wooden spoon, I remembered,
this is how things happen, cup by cup, familiar gesture after gesture, what else can we know of safety
or of fruitfulness? We walk with mincing steps within a thaw as slow as February, wading through currents
that surprise us with their sudden warmth. Remember, last week you woke still whistling for a bird
that had miraculously escaped its cage, and look, today, a swallow has come to settle behind this rented rain gutter,
gripping a twig twice his size in his beak, staggering under its weight, so delicately, so precariously it seems
from here, holding all he knows of hope in his mouth.
I love the idea of our lives as thawing lakes in a bewildering spring, and the kind day descending and things happening cup by cup, gesture by gesture, and the surprise of sudden warmth, and the delicate, staggering bird. The line about the bird reminds me of Ada Limón’s interview on VS:
Ada Limón: Yeah. I think, for me, there are a couple of new poems I’ve been working on. One of them, just recently, where I saw a beautiful kestrel that was on a really small branch. And I kept sort of loving this image of a heavier bird being held up by a small branch, right. And I kept thinking, I’ve got to do something with this, I’ve got to do something with this. And then, really, towards the end of the poem, I realized, like, I want this image to somehow tell me that as the branch, I can bear more, and I can bear a lot. And as the bird, I can balance on barely, you know, on something that’s barely there. And yet, in the poem, I recognize that it’s not telling me that, right. That that’s actually—all it is is a bird doing its thing, landing where it needs to land. And, you know, I want to look at those lessons. But I also need to pull back and think, okay, maybe it’s just a noticing, and that’s what my job was. And not always turning it into a … fable, you know. (LAUGHS) Or an idea that will somehow rescue the speaker. And in this case, you know, the speaker being me.
Franny Choi: Yeah, that helps me totally see what you mean when you say, allow the animal to be an animal alongside us as animals. Like To just like, be with them in an environment together, rather than being a colonizer like, be like, th, like, how is this tree useful for me? How is this bird useful? What can I -what can I make it for?
It’s interesting how these images of birds are opposites: Limón’s is too big for the branch, Howe’s is too small for the twig, but both are about the too-muchness of life—the world’s weight, too much for our small branched bodies, and hope’s sudden and unexpected appearance, almost too much to bear.
May 6/WALK
A break from running today. Took Delia on 2 walks instead, one just me, the other with STA and RJP. One down by the ravine, the other in the grass between the river road and Edmund.
Starlings/ Maggie Smith from Goldenrod
The starlings choose one piece of sky above the river and pour themselves in. Like a thousand arrows pointing in unison one way, then another. That bit of blue doesn’t belong to them, and they don’t belong to the sky, or to the earth. Isn’t that what you’ve been taught–nothing is ours? Haven’t you learned to keep the loosest possible hold? The small portion of sky boils with birds. Near the river’s edge, one birch has a knot so much like an eye, you think it sees you. But of course it doesn’t.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen starlings in person. I checked my bird list and they do live in the Mississippi Gorge. Maybe someday I’ll see them? Anyway, I picked this poem because it uses two interesting bits of information that I’ve wanted to use in a poem ever since I found out about them: 1. a boil of birds and 2. the tree with eyes.
a boil of birds
On March 9th, 2020, one day before I got my first of many sinus infections and just days before the pandemic became real in Minnesota, I went for a walk and noticed a big bird circling in the sky. Wondering why it circled, I looked it up and found out about thermals and boils of birds. Here’s what I wrote:
Thermals are updrafts of warm air that rise from the ground into the sky. By flying a spiraling circular path within these columns of rising air, birds are able to “ride” the air currents and climb to higher altitudes while expending very little energy in the process. Solitary birds like eagles and hawks often take advantage of thermals to extend their flight time as they search for food. Social birds that fly in large flocks also use thermals to gain altitude and extend their range during migration. The sight of dozens or hundreds of birds riding a thermal has been said to resemble the water boiling in a kettle, so the terms kettle or boil are sometimes used as a nickname for a flock of birds circling in a thermal updraft. The benefits of thermals are not limited to the animal world either as glider pilots often take advantage of them to gain altitude as well.
I want to see hundreds of birds riding a thermal and looking like water boiling in a kettle! Mostly so I can see them doing it but also so I can write about the boil of birds I just saw.
a tree with eyes
On June 18th, 2020, walking with STA and Delia the dog, we noticed a tree that looked like it had eyes. Here’s what I wrote:
Every day, in the late afternoon around 5, Scott and I take Delia the dog on a long walk between Edmund Boulevard and the River Road. This week, while stopped near the upper campus of Minnehaha Academy–the one that was recently rebuilt after the old building exploded a few years ago, Scott noticed all the eyes on an aspen tree and took a picture of it. I remember remarking, “oh, I bet there’s a name for that. I’ll have to look it up.” I finally did just now. The most popular answer? Aspen eyes. According to several sites I found, these eyes are formed through self-grooming, when aspens shed their smallest branches.
walking and listening this morning
On my walk this morning with Delia the dog, I heard black-capped chickadees, pileated woodpeckers, cardinals, and the red-breasted nuthatch I just identified yesterday. Also might have heard the plink plink of a bobolink–is that possible?Standing at the rim of the giant sinkhole that’s been turned into a city park at 7 Oaks, I heard so many other birds, including one that I hear all the time but I can’t yet identify. I manage to record it (along with other birds). \
May 6th, a one-syllable bird call at 7 Oaks
Birding by ear is difficult and overwhelming at first. Too many different sounds that I can’t distinguish. So, I’m looking for tips, like these: Six tips for birding by ear. In it, they suggest some things to listen for.
I ran to the falls for the first time in a long time. I looked it up, and unless I missed something, the last time I ran to the falls was July 10th. Wow. I read somewhere that the falls were beautiful this winter; I avoided them because of all the people. Was I too cautious? Probably, but it’s hard to run to the falls in the winter in any year. Even though the Minneapolis Parks plows the trail it’s narrow and they can never clear the double bridge.
Today, it’s cold and windy. I didn’t care. It was a great run. The river was pale blue. I heard lots of birds–especially crows. Speaking of crows, here’s a great poem I read the other day by the ornithologist, J. Drew Lanham from his collection, Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts:
No Murder Of Crows/ J. Drew Lanham
I watched a flock of crows fly by, counted forty-two black souls, then up to sixty-five, maybe more. Not sure whether fish or ‘merican They were silent as coal, headed to roost I assumed, a congregation I refused to a call a murder because profiling aint’ what I do: besides, they was just flyin’ by. No cause to criminalize the corvid kind.
What else do I remember from my run? The annual Get in Gear race, which STA and I have done a few times, was happening today. Mostly virtual, I think. Low key. I haven’t run in a race since October of 2019–is that right? The falls were gushing! As I approached them I thought I was hearing a noisy truck. Nope, just the rushing water. Encountered lots of packs of runners, a small group of fast moving bikes that completely ignored the stop sign. No roller skiers or eliptagogos. No rowers or roller bladers. Enjoyed listening to my feet shuffling on the sandy grit at the edge of the road.
Here’s a MO poem I found last night. It’s very much like all the others, which used to bother me–why say the same thing over and over again?–but I see it (and her work) differently now. The repetition of the words–the habit of repeating this process of noticing, then being astonished, then telling about it–are needed. Practice is necessary because we always need to remember to remember. Maybe it’s like what they say with running: it never gets easier, you just get better at handling the hurt/pain/difficulty of the effort. And, of course, occasionally, your diligence (what the runner Des Linden describes with her mantra, “keep showing up”) can result in a moment, which is what MO describes in this poem:
Such Singing in the Wild Branches/ Mary Oliver from Owls and Other Fantasies
It was spring and finally I heard him among the first leaves— then I saw him clutching the limb in an island of shade with his red-brown feathers all trim and neat for the new year. first, I stood still and thought of nothing. Then I began to listen. Then I was filled with gladness— and that’s when it happened, when I seemed to float, to be myself, a wing or a tree— and I began to understand what the bird was saying, and the sands in the glass stopped for a pure white moment while gravity sprinkled upward like rain, rising, and in fact became difficult to tell just what it was that was singing— not a single thrush, but himself, and all his brothers, and also the trees around them, as well as the gliding, long-tailed clouds in the perfectly blue sky—all, all of them were singing. And, of course, so it seemed, so was I. Such soft and solemn and perfect music doesn’t last for more than a few moments. It’s one of those magical places wise people like to talk about. One of the things they say about it, that is true, is that, once you’ve been there, you’re there forever. Listen, everyone has a chance. Is it spring, is it morning? Are there trees near you, and does your own soul need comforting? Quick, then—open the door and fly on your heavy feet; the song may already be drifting away.
april 23/WALK
Drizzling. Took a walk with Delia the dog down the worn wooden steps past the chain-link fence to the slick slats above the ravine. Listened to the water trickle out of the sewer pipe then drip down the ledge. Such calming colors: the rich browns of freshly watered tree trunks mixed with pale green leaves and light gray gravel. Today I marveled at the tree trunks. Three different trunks, coming up from the bottom of the ravine, leaning into the fence. I can’t remember much about them but how beautifully brown they were and that they were of varying degrees of thickness and that one of them curved gracefully away from the others. Thinking about these trees reminds me of an MO poem I read this morning from her collection, Evidence:
The Trees/ Mary Oliver
Do you think of them as decoration? Think again, Here are maples, flashing. And here are the oaks, holding on all winter to their dry leaves. And here are the pines, that will never fail, until death, the instruction to be green. And here are the willows, the first to pronounce a new year. May I invite you to revise your thoughts about them? Oh, Lord, how we are for invention and advancement! But I think it would do us good if we would think about these brothers and sisters, quietly and deeply. The trees, the trees, just holding on to the old, holy ways.
And here’s another poem that features trees. This one puzzles me; it seems to speak to MO’s conflicted feelings about words and the answers they offer: even as she loves words, she laments how they get in the way of just being. There’s something about her description of her grandmother’s “uneducated feet” and “faulty grammar” that bothers me and I’m not sure what to do with this poem.
Answers/ Mary Oliver
If I envy anyone it must be My grandmother in a long ago Green summer, who hurried Between kitchen and orchard on small Uneducated feet, and took easily All shining fruits into her eager hands. That summer I hurried too, wakened To books and music and cicling philosophies. I sat in the kitchen sorting through volumes of answers That could not solve the mystery of the trees. My grandmother stood among her kettles and ladles. Smiling, in faulty grammar, She praised my fortune and urged by lofty career. So to please her I studied—but I will remember always How she poured confusing out, how she cooled and labled All the wild sauces of the brimming year.
Having just read through both of these poems again, I’m struck by the parallels between the “old, holy ways” of the trees and the easy, eager, uneducated habits of her grandmother. Still not quite sure how I feel about this connection, especially the description of her grandmother.
Here’s another poem that speaks to the holding on to the old, holy ways:
From The Book of Time in The Leaf and the Cloud
7. Even now I remember something
the way a flower in a jar of water
remembers its life in the perfect garden
the way a flower in a jar of water
remembers its life as a closed seed
the way a flower in a jar of water
steadies itself remembering itself
long ago the plunging roots
the gravel the rain the glossy stem
the wings of the leaves the swords of the leaves
rising and clashing for the rose of the sun
the salt of of the stars the crown of the wind
the beds of the clouds the blue dream
the unbreakable circle.
Reading this poem, I immediately thought of these lines from Marie Howe in “The Meadow”:
As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together
and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.
I also thought of this:
I will not tell you anything today that you don’t already know, but we forget, we human people, and our elders have told us that our job is to remember to remember. And that’s where the stories come in.
Wow, what a beautiful morning! A bright blue sky, not much wind, warm air, few people. Ran above the river and made sure to notice it today. Pale blue, almost white or light gray in parts. Flat, no sparkle. Calm. No rowers. Heard a kid below me as I ran above the oak savanna. Heard some more kids at the Dowling school playground. Managed to take my bright orange sweatshirt off and tie it around my waist while I was running. Didn’t see any turkeys but heard a pileated woodpecker and a few black-capped chickadees.
Tried to breathe mostly through my nose while I was running but it was hard. Sometimes I could do it, other times I could breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth, but often I had to resort to all mouth breathing. Is this because of my left nostril plugging up a lot? I’m reading Breath by James Nestor right now and he’s a very big proponent of nose over mouth breathing. Is it good for running? I decided to google it and discovered that it’s not that simple; sometimes runners need to breathe through their mouths, especially during faster runs, to ensure they get enough oxygen. I’m glad I checked; now I won’t worry as much if/when I mouth breathe while running. This is a helpful resource: How To Breathe While Running
While I was running, I tried to think some more about Mary Oliver and her messy and irresolvable tensions around poetry, words, language, being human, the Self, the World, and nature. One question I kept asking myself is: why am I spending so much time on these tensions?
Before I went out for my run, I took the following notes:
Mary Oliver and the Bedeviled Human
from The Meadow/Marie Howe
Bedeviled, human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words
that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.
Reading MO, I’ve noticed, and have been trying to articulate, a tension in her poems between the I, the World, Nature, God, Eternity, Work. This tension seems to take many forms and MO imagines it to be endlessly intriguing and part of the process of living. Never to be resolved but to be puzzled over. One element of this tension involves the plight of the human—born to doubt and argue and question what it all means, to be both brought closer to and further away from the world by language and the power and beauty of words, which are never as powerful or beautiful as the world itself. To want a name and a useful place, to claim a life, but also to belong to the world, to be “less yourself than part of everything.”
from “Work” in The Leaf and the Cloud
3. Would it be better to sit in silence? To think everything, to feel everything, to say nothing?
This is the way of the orange gourd. This is the habit of the rock in the river, over which the water pours all night and all day. But the nature of man is not the nature of silence. Words are the thunders of the mind. Words are the refinement of the flesh. Words are the responses to the thousand curvaceous moments— we just manage it— sweet and electric, words flow from the brain and out the gate of the mouth.
We make books of them, out of hesitations and grammar. We are slow, and choosy. This is the world.
Words can help us to remember a beloved but long dead dog:
And now she’s nothing except for mornings when I take a handful of words and throw them into the air so that she dashes up again out of the darkness,
and console us in our anger and grief:
and what could be more comforting than to fold grief like a blanket— to fold anger like a blanket, with neat corners— to put them into a box of words?
Words can keep us company, offer exits out of difficult spaces, open thousands of doors, give us a place in the world. But, they can also separate us from the world, feeding our hubris:
Understand from the first this certainty. Butterflies don’t write books, entierh do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive—that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.
Upstream/Mary Oliver
or our constant doubts:
from “Riprap” in The Leaf and the Cloud
2. In my mind, the arguers never stop— the skeptic and the amazed— the general and the particular, in their uneasy relationship.
…
O what is beauty that I should be up at four A.M. trying to arrange this thick song?
5. And, anyway, what is thought but elaborating, and organizing? What is thought but doubting and crying out?
From The Book of Time in The Leaf and the Cloud
5. What is my name, o what is my name that I may offer it back to the beautiful world?
from “Gravel” in The Leaf and the Cloud
6. … It is our nature not only to see that the world is beautiful
but to stand in the dark, under the stars, or at noon, in the rainfall of light,
frenzied, wringing our hands,
half-mad, saying over and over:
what does it mean, that the world is beautiful— what does it mean?
Watched a race while I biked. Ran with a playlist, then remembered a runner mentioning listening to “thunderstruck” while they ran and liking it, so I switched to that for my final minutes. Nice. AC/DC is fun to run to. Didn’t think about anything except that I breathe better when I’m working out. I also breathe better outside and in the winter, which I noticed (again) earlier today when Scott and I were walking Delia the dog. So bright with the white snow.
A nice relaxing day. Managed to stop myself from obsessively checking the news every few minutes. Sat on the couch and read Agatha Christie’s “The Secret Adversary” with the sleuthing duo, Tommy and Tuppence. Scott and I discovered their 1982 (or 83?) BBC show a week or so ago and we’ve been watching it almost every night. I like their dynamic and saying “Tuppence” as much as I can–maybe Tuppence and Bunty from Father Brown should team up for a show. Such strange names.
Went out on the deck for my moment of sound this afternoon. Managed to convince my 14 year old daughter to join me. Today’s sound is mostly the scampering of Delia the dog–her collar clanging as she shakes, her claws scratching the deck, her scampering paws. Delia loves leaping through the snow like a bunny.
jan 9, 2021
I’m already liking these moments of sound. The quality isn’t that great and maybe what I’m capturing isn’t that interesting, but the act of capturing a moment of sound outside and then listening back to it and writing about it is helping me develop (or reinforce) great habits–making sure I get outside and that I stop and stand still and listen are important/helpful things to do right now. Plus, it helped me to get my daughter outside to play in the snow for a few minutes–something she hardly ever does.
Discovered this afternoon that there’s an animation for an awesome poem by Marie Howe:
And here’s a poem I found the other day that I like:
During roll call a black beetle wanders to the sink, near my toothbrush, and I say, “Poor thing, I better let you go.”
My father says, “You better smash that thing before it multiplies.” I think he says the same about me.
I lie awake at night and think about crunchy leaves crushed in the autumn.
My mother sees six red ants running around the loaf of bread anticipating their breakfast. She says to me, “Get those things off the table.”
My sister panics at the sight of a spider. She runs to the kitchen and screams bloody murder. I remind her, “We don’t find scary things scary anymore.”
My mother flicks the grasshopper off her book. She asks how I am doing. I lie to her and say, “I’m doing quite all right, I smashed a bug with my shoe. We all do what we don’t want to do.”
I see a cockroach on the ground. “Gregor,” I whisper, “you better run fast.” He says to me, “I only need to run faster than you.”
bike: 20 minutes bike stand, basement run: 1.25 miles
It wasn’t too cold outside, but I decided to stay inside so I could do some biking too. Watched a few races and, when I heard Lorde’s “Royals” playing during one of the races, I decided to watch that video. Wow, just looked it up and it’s hard to believe that “Royals” is from 2013. It’s 7 years old?! With some more (albeit cursory) digging, I found that it was on popular radio in the US in August of 2013. I probably heard it around then, or later. In the fall of 2013, I was just shifting away from my TROUBLE blog and writing about researching and creating an interactive documentary about my family’s farm on a new blog, STORY.
Because I always feel compelled to document my life, I have a summary of the creative/intellectual work I did at that time:
SUMMER 2013
Edited my Grandma Ines’ memoirs, which she wrote in the late 1980s a few years before she died, by breaking it up into manageable chapters and combining it with supplementary videos, photos, a scan of her scrapbook and a forward and concluding essay written by me. Excitedly published it in iBooks, eagerly shared the link with family members and unrealistically and perhaps unfairly hoped that they would read it and recognize it for what I imagined it to be: a gesture of love and an invitation to reconnect with each other through a shared investment in the Puotinen heritage
Created and began posting content on a new site for archiving farm-related materials and documenting the process of reflecting and remembering the farm and its inhabitants
FALL 2013
Analyzed interactive documentaries, did research on how people tell stories online and created a resources page with links about online storytelling, interactive tools and examples of projects that were inspiring and influencing me
Crafted a storytelling manifesto
To make the most out of an annoying time gap between when I dropped off my son for school and when I dropped off my daughter, began another digital storytelling experiment with digital moments documenting brief moments of life with a second-grader who was curious about the difference between a pie and a tart, who liked playing hopscotch and swinging on the monkey bars, who was transfixed by freaky trees that looked like they had teeth and who hated swimming the butterfly stroke
Researched and wrote an Interactive Media Project Grant Proposal for a $50,000, two-year project that I correctly predicted would never be accepted but that I (mostly) enjoyed doing anyway because it enabled me to learn a lot of new things and forced me to get off my ass and actually start working with all of the farm materials that I had collected and had promised to use in farm stories for years
I still lived in my old house but my son was starting 5th grade at one elementary school a block and a half from our future house while my daughter was in 2nd grade at another school. (This was the start of them being at separate schools. Scott and I always talked about how they wouldn’t be back together again until FWA was a senior and RJP a freshman in 2020. Of course, now it’s 2020 and they aren’t in school at all, but at home doing online school during the pandemic). That summer, I swam across Lake Nokomis for the first time and fell in love with open water swimming. That swim changed my life. Now, I cannot imagine not being an open water swimmer–which made my decision to not swim in the lake this summer even more difficult.
The idea of changing your life reminds me of the poem I reviewed today and then recited a few times during my bike ride: Marie Howe’s “The Meadow.” Such a beautiful last sentence!:
Bedeviled, human, your plight in waking, is to choose from the words that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change our life.
After biking, I changed into my new berry red shoes and ran for 12 minutes while listening to Taylor Swift and Lizzo and Justin Bieber. I almost, but didn’t, fell of the back of the treadmill when I got distracted, checking my pulse. Oops.
note: This post, and my ability to find so much of what I did in 2013 online, reminds me again of how grateful I am for past Sara. She did such a great job giving accounts of our life.
bike: 25 minutes bike stand, basement run: 2.4 miles
It wasn’t too cold, but it’s Saturday, which is more crowded, and it’s icy, which is more difficult when it’s crowded, so I decided to work out in the basement. Couldn’t find anything to watch while I biked so I started listening to a “You’re Wrong About” podcast episode. I need to find something like “Cheer” or “Selling Sunset” to watch. As I ran I listened to music. Tried to start with Schoolhouse Rock but I determined that multiplication rock is not that motivating when you’re running on a treadmill in the basement. Switched to my playlist and ran faster to “Eye of the Tiger” and “Black Wizard Wave.” Don’t remember thinking about much or noticing anything. I got lost in the steady striking of my feet. That’s cool.
This afternoon we (all five of us) took a drive. Near the end we drove on east river road, beside the path that I take for the ford loop. So beautiful with an amazing view! It makes me want to run this loop soon. I’m thinking I might stop at several of the overlooks. Maybe Monday?
Saw this poem on twitter. Oh, Marie Howe, I love you!
The Copper Beech/ MARIE HOWE
Immense, entirely itself, it wore that yard like a dress,
with limbs low enough for me to enter it and climb the crooked ladder to where
I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.
One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell darkening the sidewalk.
Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches, I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy,
BIDEN DEFEATS TRUMP! Such a wonderful, needed headline. Sitting upstairs at my desk, working on my poem in the late morning yesterday, Scott called out, “He did it” or “It’s over” or “He won,” I can’t remember which. I started walking down the stairs, stopped, then began to cry. So much relief and joy. It will take weeks for all the fear and despair to leak out, I think. I recognize this is not the end of all that, just the beginning of a renewed hope in the world and the belief that we can avoid the darkest timeline.
Very windy and warm this morning. Noticed my shadow a few times. She’s very excited about Biden and Harris (Harris!) winning too–I could see it in how she held her frame as she ran. Listened to a playlist and felt happy to be outside moving. I wore shorts. I might be able to do that again tomorrow, but after that it’s running tights. We might get snow on Tuesday.
Admired the sparkling river as I ran above on Edmund. I can’t wait until I can run by the river again without worrying about getting too close to people. Next spring?
Scrolling through twitter, one of my favorite poetry people just tweeted: An open gate. Love it! Possibility…not guaranteed, but a chance to enter a new world, a new era, somewhere other than where we’ve been for the past 4 years. Reminds me of a poem I memorized this summer (and have already almost forgotten, sadly…I’ll have to review it a few times):
*44th ave, north/32nd st, east/river road, south/42nd st, west/edmund, south
Another good run. Cooler and very calm, still, quiet. Don’t remember hearing (m)any birds, no conversations, no rowers. At least 3 separate times, I thought I was hearing the clickity-clack of roller skiers, but was actually hearing a bike with noisy wheels or messed up gears or something. Strange that it happened 3 times when I don’t remember ever making that mistake before. Was it the quality of air? Hardly any wind this morning. Sunny, but not bright. Did I see my shadow? Can’t remember.
Recited “The Gate” one more day and thought about gates and openings and doorways and thresholds and windows and spaces where movement and breathing and new stories/ways of being are possible. I think this is my new theme for the month and/or for a series of poems/essays.
Recorded myself reciting it just after finishing my run–my heart rate was probably around 140 or so as I spoke. I got it mostly right but messed up the second to last “this.” The order she writes the three thises–“This is what you’ve been waiting for, ” “And he’d say, This,” and “This, he’d say” is important. It doesn’t have as much impact the way I recited it.
The Gate, July 20
Yesterday, reading Ted Kooser’s Delights and Shadows, I found these two poems that I really liked:
Grasshopper/ Ted Kooser
This year they are exactly the size of the the pencil stub my grandfather kept to mark off the days since rain,
and precisely the color of dust, of the roads leading back accross the dying fields into the ’30s. Walking the cracked lane
past the empty barn, the empty silo, you hear them tinkering with irony, slapping the grass like drops of rain.
Ahhh!! A beautiful morning. Even though it was 71, it didn’t feel too hot. Just after reaching the river road — about .3 miles in — I encountered a woman listening to music without headphones as she ran. I’m pretty sure the song playing was “I Wanna Sex You Up” by the 90s boy band, Color Me Badd — the part at the beginning where they sing “ooo ooo ooo ooo” and just before “tick tock you don’t stop.” Wow. I will choose to believe that that was the song she was listening to and remain impressed that she was willing to listen to such a cringe-worthy song without headphones in a public place. Nice.
For the rest of my run, I recited “The Gate” by Marie Howe in my head. There were a few lines that I couldn’t remember exactly–was it “the gate I would step through” or “walk through”, “the world” or “this world”, “holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich” or just “holding my cheese and mustard sandwich”? I thought about the differences in meaning and rhythm that these word choices might make. Then I started thinking about the line, “having folded every sheet, rinsed every glass he would ever rinse.” At first, I couldn’t remember what he had folded–was it a towel, a shirt, a sheet? Then, when I remembered sheet and I thought about the subtle differences in meaning between folding a sheet — evoking the intimate space of a bedroom — versus a shirt or a towel. Did Howe immediately think of sheet, or did she deliberate over different choices before settling on it? It was fun to spend some time reflecting on word choice as I ran. I love how packed and precise poetry is, and often in ways that aren’t readily visible but that you can feel as you read it–even when you don’t realize you’re feeling it.
After 30 seconds after I stopped running, I recorded myself reciting the poem: several errors with word choice. I better practice it some more! The most egregious error (at least to me), instead of saying, “This, he’d say, sort of looking around” for the last line, I said, “And he’d say, This.” Starting with “this” is so much stronger.
2.5 miles 43rd ave, south/42nd st, west/edmund, north 74 degrees humidity: 87%/ dew point: 71
Hot this morning! Very crowded too. Started out running with Scott but after avoiding too many people together, we decided to split up. Some clueless walkers, but mostly just lots of people. Encountered several cars on Edmund too. Don’t remember any roller skiers or runners. No rowers or river views. Any birds? Not that I heard. Finished by running around the block. Discovered it was .5 miles. Good to know.
joy and suffering beside each other (Ross Gay, Book of Delights)
What Issa Heard/ David Budbill
Two hundred years ago Issa heard the morning birds singing sutras to this suffering world.
I heard them too, this morning, which must mean,
since we will always have a suffering world, we must also always have a song.
“This is what you’ve been waiting for” (Marie Howe/ “The Gate”)
Goshen/ Ruth Stone
For fifteen years I have lived in a house without running water or furnace. In and out the front door with my buckets and armloads of wood. This is the mountain. This is the fortress of ice. This is the stray cat skulking in the barn. This is the barn with vacant windows that lifts like a thin balsa kite in the northeasters. These are the winter birds that wait in the bushes. This is my measuring rod. This is why I get up in the morning. This is how I know where I am going.
2.5 miles river road, south/north 75 degrees humidity: 77%
Warmer this morning. Sunny. Decided to listen to a playlist this morning–Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher,” Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over”, Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk” and Sia’s “Cheap Thrills”. A relaxed first mile, a much faster second mile mostly because I was behind a roller skier at the start of the second mile that was going about the same pace that I was. I imagined staying in her COVID slipstream for the rest of the run–no thanks! So I sped up a lot to pass her and then kept the pace so she wouldn’t pass me again. First mile: 9:26; Second mile: 8:11.
Because I was listening to music, I didn’t recite the poem I memorized yesterday afternoon, Marie Howe’s “The Gate.” I’ve decided to memorize 5 different poems by her:
The Meadow from The Good Thief (1988)
The Gate from What the Living Do (1999)
What the Living Do from What the Living Do (1999)
Magdalene: Seven Devils from Magdalene: Poems (2017)
I had no idea that the gate I would step through to finally enter this world
would be the space my brother’s body made. He was a little taller than me: a young man,
but grown, himself by then, done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,
rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold and running water.
This is what you’ve been waiting for, he used to say to me. And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This, holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich. And I’d say, What?
This, he’d say, sort of looking around.
The first line of this poem, about the space her brother’s body made as the gate she would step through to finally enter this world, was confusing to me at first but it has something to do with grief and how his death helped her to remember and value living — but I think there’s more to it than that. I love the way she describes that he’s dead, “done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet, rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold and running water.” And I love the use of “This” here — the this, encompassing everything and not one thing in particular.
Spending a little more time googling Howe and thinking about her work, I found a very helpful essay from 2008 on oprah.com: Not to Look Away. In it, she talks about her friend Jason who’s funeral she was attending and the gate:
I’m looking for the gate, Jason used to say when he was in pain. I can’t find the gate, but I’m looking. What was this gate my friend Jason was looking for? Maybe he wanted to find the door in the room of suffering, so that he might walk through it into another story.
and here’s how she describes what story can do:
Is this what a story can do? Emerge from the most painful event and transform it into something else, too? So sad. So funny. Both. And life is there, for a moment, almost adequately represented.
the story as window?
The days and nights of my life walk by, arm in arm with time, and the gate to the new story stands just outside the circle of my attention. Sometimes I lie here, Jason said, and walk through the old house of my childhood, through all the rooms, and look out all the windows.
This might be the most difficult task for us in postmodern life: not to look away from what is actually happening. To put down the iPod and the e-mail and the phone. To look long enough so that we can look through it—like a window.
To be present, not to look away, and to transform suffering into something else also–still suffering but more too. Wow, this makes me think so much about Ross Gay and his idea of joy and suffering in the Book of Delights (I checked it out of the library a year ago, and just ordered my own copy arriving today)!
3 miles 1 big loop + 2 smaller loops* 64 degrees humidity: 79%
*big loop = 36th st to 42nd ave / little loop 1 = 36th st, down hill to 34th st, up hill to 36th st / little loop 2 = 36th st to 38th st to 36th st
Another beautiful morning. Checked out my form in my shadow as she ran beside me. Listened to the cardinals. They were loud enough that I couldn’t hear any other birds–was it all just cardinals? Tried to recite “Love Song For The Square Root of Negative One” but had trouble getting past, “I am the hand that lifts the rock, I am the mind that strings the worm.” Overheard a woman, pushing a stroller, talking loudly on the phone, “I mean…I have a job and some savings…”–not sounding upset but judgmental. What was she talking about and why SO LOUDLY for everyone to hear? Encountered a few roller skiers, bikers, walkers, runners, dogs, cars (when I turned off the river road and went on Edmund). No squirrels or crows or woodpeckers. No rowers or Daily Walker or little old ladies with straw hats or the tall man in black or anyone I remembered ever seeing before. No intense colors or strange running gaits. No views of the river or the ravines. Only an abundance of calming green.
During the last 1/2 mile or so I recited “The Meadow” again which helped the last bit go faster. Then, a minute after I stopped, as I walked home, I recited it into my phone. I have a few pauses because I got distracted by someone walking nearby or when a woman stopped to tell a neighbor how much she loved their garden–I love that garden too. (If you listen closely, you can almost hear it on the recording).
4 miles river road, north/south 66 degrees humidity: 83%
Ah! Such nice weather this morning. Still humid, but cooler. Almost sunny. A thin layer of clouds covered most of the sky. So thin that the sun was still casting shadows on the road. A strange sight. Is there a word for that? I tried looking it up just now and I couldn’t find anything.
I was able to run above the river for a few minutes and saw some blue through the green. Heard several roller skiers, a few bikers, runners, walkers. No music coming out of bike radios or snippets of conversation that made me curious. No rushing water, hardly any birds. I’m sure I heard traffic but I don’t remember that either—actually, thinking about it for a few minutes, I do remember some traffic. As I ran down the hill and under the lake street bridge, I heard cars and trucks on the bridge and kept thinking they were on the river road, just behind me. Noticed many cars in the parking lot at Minnehaha Academy–are they planning to open the campus this fall? I hope not. Also saw soccer practice on the field. Ran past the railroad trestle almost to Franklin. Felt relaxed and strong.
As I ran, I tried thinking about the idea of the dream-like state and Howe’s line, “this might be all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget what you are.” What is this small time? Is forgetting what we are a type of getting lost in a (day) dream (Emily Dickinson’s revery*?) or practicing pure attention (another line from Howe: “speaking for the sound alone”?). And, what is it that we are, that we must forget? Yesterday I suggested that we are creatures who struggle against their solitude, suffering, and the inevitability of death. Here’s another answer from Marilyn Nelson in “Crows”:
What if to taste and see, to notice things, to stand each is up against the emptiness for a moment of an eternity— images collected in consciousness, like a tree alone on the horizon— is the main reason we’re on the planet.
3 miles river road, south/north 73 degrees/ light rain humidity: 89%/ dew point: 70
Woke up to darkness. Rain coming and staying all day. Decided to take Delia the dog out for a quick walk before it started. Not soon enough; by 1 block it was drizzling and by 2 blocks raining. We ran back. Delia did a great job–except for the time when she ran right in front of me and almost tripped me. Maybe I should try training her to run?
Running felt good so I decided if there was a break in the rain, I would go out for a run. There was and I did. Hardly anyone out by the gorge. I was able to run on the trail right above the river for most of the time. Hooray! I saw the river, heard some birds, ran by my favorite benches, heard the roar of the water gushing out of the sewer pipes down to the river near both ravines — at 36th and 42nd. And then, at the end, I ran through the Welcoming Oaks and greeted each one, “good morning!” “good morning!” “good morning!” Haven’t been able to do that in a while.
color
There’s something about cloudy, gray light that makes my vision even stranger than usual, especially when it comes to seeing colors. I am amazed that I can still see any color with almost all of my cones damaged. Here are some colors I saw this morning, some stranger than others:
From about 2 blocks away from the river road, I could see an orange sign for a pedestrian detour. So bright and so prominent, a glowing smudge in the midst of fuzzy dark green and gray.
Twice I encountered, from a distance of about 15-20 feet, a woman in blue running tights. As I approached her, seeing her through my central vision, the tights looked dark, almost navy blue. But when I saw her from the side, through my peripheral vision, the rights were a bright, electric blue. Blue is a strange color with my vision. Last winter, I used to walk by a house with lights in the shape of a peace sign. The circle was red, the inner sign blue. Looking at the sign straight on all I could see was a red circle. It wasn’t until I looked at it from the side that I could just barely see the blue lines.
A walker in a pink–or was it coral?–jacket.
The river was a pale blue, almost white in the gray light.
on the dream, forgiveness, and forgetting
Still thinking about Marie Howe and “The Meadow,” especially these lines, “My love, this might be all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget who you are” and “Bedeviled, human, your plight, in waking, is to chose from the words even now asleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.” In yesterday’s entry in my plague notebook, I wrote: “We forget what we are because what we are are creatures attempting to find the right words to feel better — less alone, less suffering, less closer to death.”
I want to think more about the value of forgetting. Here’s a poem I’d like memorize to get me started:
Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten, Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold, Let it be forgotten for ever and ever, Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.
If anyone asks, say it was forgotten Long and long ago, As a flower, as a fire, as a hushed footfall In a long forgotten snow.
Another beautiful morning! Not much wind, not too hot, some shade. Ran past the aspen eyes and towards downtown, up the hill from under the lake street bridge, then turned around. I think I saw the river, or the idea of the river hiding behind the green. Recited “The Meadow” a few times during the first two miles of my run, then stopped to put on some music and sprinted up a hill while blasting Demi Levato’s “Sorry, not Sorry” — a great song to run to. I got it in my head yesterday after I responded to Scott about something jokingly rude I had just said with, “sorry, not sorry.”
At some point, as I was reciting it, I thought about the line, “The horses, sway-backed and self important, cannot design how the small white pony mysteriously escapes the fence everyday.” I wondered, isn’t small, as in “small white pony” redundant? Aren’t ponies always small? Would it flow as well without the extra syllable of small? Now, sitting here at my desk in the front room, listening to a young child right outside vacillate between cute, calling out “I Love You!” to his mom, and annoying, babbling in a high-pitched voice, I am also struck by Howe’s use of white. Nothing else in the poem has a color–no green meadow or dappled gray horses or golden hay or anything. Why is the pony singled out–given a color and a redundant size? With its mysterious escape, is it a ghost? Still thinking about this line: I like how she uses “design” in this sentence. And I love the self important, clueless horses and the next line’s follow-up: “This is a miracle just beyond their heavy-headed grasp.”
I’m trying to make sense of the meaning of this whole poem (admittedly, I feel like I’m often dense when it comes to understanding poetry) and I’m wondering if these three lines are the most important:
As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them…
My love, this might be all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you forget what you are.
Bedeviled, human, your plight, when waking is to chose from the words that even now sleep on your tongue and to know that among them, tangled and terribly new, is the sentence that could change your life.
In our dreams, we can forget what we are (the meadow forgets how to make wildflowers, the horses are weary of hay, the wasps are tiny prop planes, the knock of a woodpecker becomes a phone ringing). But, we always wake up (the meadow thinks suddenly, “water, root, blossom,” the horses lie down in daisies and clover, we/humans suffer–moaning, and know we will die). The task as human is to find the right (?) words to give meaning to/transform what we are? Does that work? And how does this line fit in: “I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone”?
All the old gray gods have fallen back to their static realms of myth cleared from the benches, thrones, dragged kicking to their strongest tombs, each one grizzled by their swift exile frayed, bedraggled, forced to kneel, give up their guns, armor, swords, hand over their passports, global security identification, and be stripped bare. Justice has relegated them to history, kept nothing but the long rancorous list of crimes (slaughterers all) molded them into dull cement statues not to worship. but as a warning most ominous. Here stood Greed and his brother Pride, note their glazed inhuman eyes, question their puny stature now, how rodent-like, how utterly overthrow-able. Still, remember how long they ruled? Tyrannical and blustering, claiming universal power, until the kinder masses voted the callous thin-lipped lizards out? What a day that was! The end of hatred, xenophobia, patriarchal authority–but yes, we waited too long, first we had to zero out, give up on becoming gods at all.
Cooler this morning with a lower dew point–in the upper 50s or low 60s, I think. As I write this at my upstairs desk, a few hours after my run, I can hear chickadees and it reminds me of the birds I heard as I ran: lots of black capped chickadees doing their feebee call, several cardinals pew pew pewing. Very crowded on the road this morning. Even so, I made sure to keep my 6 feet of distance. Saw many runners, bikers, walkers both be-dogged and dog-less. I think I saw a blue sliver of the river at some point. Ran down past turkey hollow but forgot to check for turkeys–are they here in the middle of the summer? do they hide during the heat of the day and emerge at night?
Recited the entire “The Meadow” a few times through. Such a beautiful poem with wonderful last lines: “Bedeviled,/human, your plight, in waking, is to chose from the words/that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled/among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.” 3 years ago I encountered that line not too long after reading Mary Oliver’s “Invitation” and her final lines, “It could be what Rilke meant when he wrote/You must change your life.” I started thinking about this idea of you could/must change your life and how it works, what it might look like. And then, all of this wondering became the inspiration for my chapbook, You Must Change Your Life.
I’m interested in revisiting those ideas now for many reasons: I’m not entirely happy with my poems and how I worked through the ideas; having dedicated 3 more years to studying poetry and thinking about these ideas, I have new insights to add; it’s fascinating to see how my perspective has/hasn’t changed in these 3 years (for example, in one of the poems I wrote, “Anyway, who cares about the birds?” This year, I do, quite a bit); and I’d like to explore this in relation to the radical change that has happened in 2020 due to the pandemic–but, is it a change/transformation or merely a disruption? I hope it’s a transformation.
Here’s a recording of me reciting the poem after I returned home:
3.15 miles trestle turn around 72 degrees humidity: 81%/ dew point: 65
Thunderstorm early this morning then sun and humidity. I’m pretty sure the Olympian Carrie Tollefeson passed me right before the lake street bridge. Very cool. Heard some black capped chickadees. Ran up 43rd ave then down 32nd st to the river so I was able to run right by the aspen eyes. Didn’t hear any rowers or see the river or any “regulars,” like the Daily Walker or last year’s man in black or the tall, slim, older man in the running shorts. I don’t see any regulars this year. Strange and sad.
Recited the first half of Maria Howe’s “The Meadow” — a poem I memorized 3 years ago when I was injured but have mostly forgotten. I had been planning to memorize Wordsworth’s “I wander lonely as a cloud” but it seemed too cheesy or sing song-y or poem-y (whatever that means). I think I’ll wait to memorize his snowflake this next winter instead.
As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together
and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers. Imperceptibly heaving with the old impatience, it knows
for certain that two horses walk upon it, weary of hay. The horses, sway-backed and self important, cannot design
how the small white pony mysteriously escapes the fence everyday. This is the miracle just beyond their heavy-headed grasp,
and they turn from his nuzzling with irritation. Everything is crying out. Two crows, rising from the hill, fight
and caw-cry in mid-flight, then fall and light on the meadow grass bewildered by their weight. A dozen wasps drone, tiny prop planes
sputtering into a field a farmer has not yet plowed, and what I thought was a phone, turned down and ringing,
is the knock of a woodpecker for food or warning, I can’t say. I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.
On my walk home after I finished, I recorded myself reciting this first half. A few wrong words or forgotten phrases. I love the line, “this is the miracle just beyond their heavy-headed grasp” and the pleasing rhymes in “two crows fight and caw-cry mid-flight, then fall and light on the meadow grass”
The Meadow, first half, July 11
Discovered Antonio Machado, a Spanish poet who lived from 1875-1939, and his delightful “Proverbs and Canticles” yesterday. Here are a few:
canticle: a hymn or chant, typically with a bible verse
I
The mode of dialogue, my friends, is first to question: then . . . attend.
III
The poets does not pursue the fundamental I but the essential you.
IV
In writing verses, seek to give them a double light: one to read square by, one oblique.
Beautiful sunny breezy morning. A little more crowded than usual, but still got over 6 feet of distance from everyone. Heard a black capped chickadee calling out and waiting for an answer 3 times as I started my run:
Hello? Hello? Hello? Listen.
Did I notice the river? I don’t remember.
The run was peaceful and relaxing but at moments, difficult and labored. I recited my poem–Ode to My Right Knee–a few times. Noticed how the alliteration for n was only 2 words: No noise. In some lines I found yesterday in my notes, I had 2 ns too: noisy nothingness
Anything else? Runners, bikers, and several pairs of walkers taking over the road. No turkeys. No way of seeing the river from high up on Edmund–too much green. Glanced at a few benches.
Thinking about green, here are a few lines about green in the spring, inspired by Rita Dove’s alliteration:
Ode to Green
Greedy green gluts gobbling gorges, grifting vistas. Vast views vanished or overrun. Orchestrated take-overs: trees trimmed, tressed, twined, voluminously vined. Air altered. Advancing leaves lining limbs their thick thatches blue-blocking blinding breathtaking. Oh overcrowding obstruction! Oh consuming, constricting color!
That’s all I have right now. I’ll keep working on it. I love the color green and seeing it in the spring, yet I dislike how excessive it is, how it overruns everything.
Started reading Marie Howe’s Magdalene last night. Wow! Love this poem:
“Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven devils had been cast out”
Luke 8:2.
The first was that I was very busy.
The second—I was different from you: whatever happened to you could not happen to me, not like that.
The third—I worried.
The fourth—envy, disguised as compassion.
The fifth was that I refused to consider the quality of life of the aphid, The aphid disgusted me. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The mosquito too—its face. And the ant—its bifurcated body.
Ok the first was that I was so busy.
The second that I might make the wrong choice, because I had decided to take that plane that day, that flight, before noon, so as to arrive early and, I shouldn’t have wanted that. The third was that if I walked past the certain place on the street the house would blow up.
The fourth was that I was made of guts and blood with a thin layer of skin lightly thrown over the whole thing.
The fifth was that the dead seemed more alive to me than the living
The sixth—if I touched my right arm I had to touch my left arm, and if I touched the left arm a little harder than I’d first touched the right then I had to retouch the left and then touch the right again so it would be even.
The seventh—I knew I was breathing the expelled breath of everything that was alive, and I couldn’t stand it. I wanted a sieve, a mask, a, I hate this word—cheesecloth— to breath through that would trap it—whatever was inside everyone else that entered me when I breathed in.
No. That was the first one.
The second was that I was so busy. I had no time. How had this happened? How had our lives gotten like this?
The third was that I couldn’t eat food if I really saw it—distinct, separate from me in a bowl or on a plate.
Ok. The first was that. I could never get to the end of the list. The second was that the laundry was never finally done.
The third was that no one knew me, although they thought they did. And that if people thought of me as little as I thought of them then what was love?
The fourth was I didn’t belong to anyone. I wouldn’t allow myself to belong to anyone.
The fifth was that I knew none of us could ever know what we didn’t know.
The sixth was that I projected onto others what I myself was feeling.
The seventh was the way my mother looked when she was dying, the sound she made—her mouth wrenched to the right and cupped open so as to take in as much air… the gurgling sound, so loud we had to speak louder to hear each other over it.
And that I couldn’t stop hearing it—years later—grocery shopping, crossing the street—
No, not the sound—it was her body’s hunger finally evident—what our mother had hidden all her life.
For months I dreamt of knucklebones and roots, the slabs of sidewalk pushed up like crooked teeth by what grew underneath.
The underneath. That was the first devil. It was always with me And that I didn’t think you—if I told you—would understand any of this—
3.25 miles trestle turn around 39 degrees clear path
Windy. Sunny. Not too cold. Ran in the early afternoon, since I voted in the morning. I loved running on the edge of the path, my feet landing on the grit, making a satisfying scratching sound. I think I looked at the river–did I? Now I can’t remember. I do remember noticing how the snow on the walking path that winds down through the tunnel of trees was melting. With all the warm weather this week–and 61! predicted for Sunday–maybe it will be cleared of snow soon. I also remember lifting my knees as I ran up from under the lake street bridge and noticing how the walking path at the top, which follows the rim of the gorge while the biking path follows the road, was clearing up too. Hooray! Anything else? I heard then saw a small wedge of geese flying north. Encountered a few runners, many walkers, at least one dog. It was a good run. I didn’t think about the coronavirus and the fear and worry and hassle it’s causing for so many people even once!
Before starting the run while I was still walking, I listened to a recording of myself reading 2 poems: 1. a draft of my latest poem, which I’m calling January Joy, and 2. a fabulous poem by Marie Howe, Singularity–I posted it on this log on Jan 19. I liked listening to both of them. I also liked recording myself reciting them. Maybe this will be a new thing I do with poems in 2020? Yesterday I recorded myself reading Love by Alex Dimtrov (posted on this log on jan 21)–over 11 minutes of lines starting with “I love…”! One of the I loves reminded me of Howe’s poem:
I love how the Universe is 95% dark matter and energy and somewhere in the rest of it there is us.
I read this line as loving the idea that we are such a small fraction of what makes up the Universe. I love this idea too–it’s comforting and liberating to me to matter so little. Most of Howe’s poem and the idea of singularity is a little different. It’s lamenting the loss of a time when we were not separate from the Universe, when there was no universe or we or I or us or anything to fuck up (which we have, as we trash the ocean and each other). She has one line that reminds me of Dimitrov’s and that resonates:
before we came to believe humans were so important
I find it’s easier to remember this–that I am not so important, or the most important–when I’m running outside by the gorge, above the Mississippi River, under the oak trees. I like remembering this. Here’s another line this discussion of not being important reminds me of:
You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind (Frédéric Gros/Philosophy of Walking, 84).
And, of course, the minute I write nobody, I think of my introduction to Emily Dickinson:
I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one’s name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!
Wow, that was fun to wander around all of those words! As I was scrolling back through my January entries, I saw a lot of wonderful poems and ideas. More wandering around them is necessary.
Speaking of January, here’s a first draft of my January Joy poem. It’s a collection of things I enjoyed during the month of January for the past 4 years. I’m not quite satisfied with it. I want to find a better way to describe/express how thick slushy viscous water moves–how?
January Joy/ Sara Lynne Puotinen
Oh to see the river! The river, open The river, brown The river, thinly veiled The river, pale blue The river, empty The river, white The river, a big black hole of deep, cold nothingness The river, a thick slow slush traveling to the falls The falls, flowing between frozen columns of ice The ice, cleared from the path The path, no big crowd The crowd, 2 cross country skiers 3 men in red jackets gliding 1 woman floating–confident bodies moving through space The space between sky and tree top, illuminated by sun The sun glowing up the gray gloom The sun warming my face The sun flashing through tall, thin tree trunks My trunk, straight strong steady more machine than gangly human
How wonderful it is to move!
Oh great runs! Oh clearer paths! Oh strong legs and adequate knees and functioning feet! How wonderful it is to move and breathe and feel free on this winter-perfect day, white and woodsy and blueish gray!
4 miles trestle turn around + extra 5 degrees/feels like -8 100% snow-covered
A winter wonderland. Cold, but not too cold–at least not for me. Fluffy flurries in the air. The path was covered with snow but it was packed and not too slippery. Just before starting my run, I listened to the snow, grinding as my foot stepped down and shushing as it lifted off of the ground. Not too long after I started, I saw 2–yes 2!–cross country skiers about to head down into the tunnel of trees. Nice. Had a few brief glances at the river but was focused more on avoiding big snow clumps/ice chunks on the path. Encountered some walkers, dogs, at least one fat tire, a few other runners. Was able to greet the Daily Walker twice, once heading north, and again heading south. Didn’t hear any geese today. Saw lots of cars. While running the cold didn’t bother me after the first mile. When I stopped my skin started to burn. Not sure why, but the part of me that gets the coldest after a run is my stomach. Not my arms or fingers or toes. It burns and for several minutes it’s bright red. Why?
When you exercise, the working muscles call for an increase in blood flow. Oxygen is essential to energy production and blood supplies it. … During running your body is not focusing on digestion, urination or reproduction, so blood is diverted from the stomach area, which may be cause for a cold stomach while running.
Interesting and nothing to worry about. Later in the article it states, “This is no cause for concern. If your stomach is cold, your body is doing it’s job.” Good job body!
Right now I’m reading the awesome book, Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder. Love this description of poetry:
Poems exist to create a space for the possibilities of language as material. That is what distinguishes them from all other forms of writing. Poems allow language its inherent provisionality, uncertainty, and slippages. They also give space for its physicality–the way it sounds, looks, feels in the mouth–to itself make meaning (12).
Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were?
so compact nobody needed a bed, or food or money—
nobody hiding in the school bathroom or home alone
pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept.
For every atom belonging to me as good Belongs to you. Remember? There was no Nature. No them. No tests to determine if the elephant grieves her calf or if
the coral reef feels pain. Trashed oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;
would that we could wake up to what we were — when we were ocean and before that to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was not
at all — nothing
before we came to believe humans were so important before this awful loneliness.
Can molecules recall it? what once was? before anything happened?
No I, no We, no one. No was No verb no noun only a tiny tiny dot brimming with
