Tag: afternoon

jan 1/RUN

4.6 miles
minnehaha falls and back
11 degrees
100% snow-covered

A wonderful way to start the new year: a run outside, in the snow, above the gorge! There were moments when it felt easy, but mostly it was hard because of the uneven, loose slow. I think my calves are going to be sore all day from the effort! Not injured, just tired from being used to push through and keep balance in the snow. Ever since we got the 5.8 inches of snow last weekend, it has been snowing a inch of two every night. It’s beautiful, but not fun to drive in — I’ve heard; I haven’t driven in at least 5 years because of my vision. It’s not always fun to run in (and on), either. But I’m not complaining, I loved being out there today.

I encountered runners, walkers, at least one fat tire. No cross country skiers or regulars. I heard some people sledding at the park, and the light rail leaving the station — oh, and a woman saying to someone she was walking with, I just need to get the shoes and I’ll be fine. What shoes? Fine for what?

10 Things

  1. a bright while, almost blinding — I’m glad I had some dark tree trunks to look at
  2. snow on the side of a tree making a pleasing pattern on the textured trunk
  3. the falls were falling and making noise — more trickle than gush
  4. the dark gray water of the creek was moving through shelves of ice and snow
  5. the sounds of my yak trax in the snow: crunching and clopping and clicking
  6. the smell of a chimney smoke hovering in the air
  7. a small dome of snow on top of a wooden fence post
  8. empty benches
  9. a crunching noise behind me: crusty ice in my braid hitting the collar of my jacket
  10. overheard: an adult to a kid playing in the backyard, are you having fun?

Running up and out of the park, I had a moment of freedom and happiness — ah, to be outside moving in this fresh air and all of this snow! I thought about my wonderful, low-key New Year’s Eve with Scott and our kids, both of whom are doing so much better at the end of the year than they were at the beginning, both excited and hopeful about the next year.

Today I’m submitting my book manuscript to another press, Yes Yes Books. Before I went out for my run, I drafted a pithy description of my collection, Echolocate | | Echolocated:

“Echolocate, echolocated: to locate using echoes instead of sight, to be located by the echoes you offer. In this collection, a girl and her ghosts visit a gorge daily to locate and be located by the rocks, a river, and the open air and all who are held by it.”

Here’s a beautiful poem I discovered the other day about (not) naming.

Against Specificity / Virginia Kane

Hanif says never put a bird in a poem
without saying what kind of bird.

I want to agree. I like my blues
cerulean, my clouds cumulonimbus.

I prefer my mountains baptized
and my rivers carved with names.

Your reader will find you 
in the details, everyone says,

but when I write about memory
I am just writing about loss.

Here, I forget to tell
the flowers you brought me

they are irises. I decide
the dogwoods we laid under

are just those trees. The months
I knew you, crisp and labeled,

all become that year.
When you leave,

I christen nothing.
I call it what it wasn’t.

dec 30/RUN

2.5 miles
river road, south/north
20 degrees
100% snow-covered

We got another dusting of snow last night, so the path was covered in an inch or two of soft, uneven snow. Harder to run through, but not slippery with my yak trax. A few times, I could feel the spikes digging into slick spots. It was beautiful and I would have loved to run longer if the surface had not been so uneven. Halfway through, I stopped to hike down to an overlook on the winchell trail. Quiet, white, too bright. I encountered a few other runners, 2 trios of walkers. A fat tire. Walking back, I saw a small kin on disc sled sliding down a hill in his yard.

10 Things

  1. the rumble of a blue snow plow
  2. a line of cars driving very slowly along the river
  3. the dark curve of a retaining wall
  4. heavy, white sky
  5. the strong smell of weed coming from a car parked in the 44th street parking lot
  6. a sheet of dirty snow on the road, stirred up and flung by the wheels of a mini-van
  7. a kid sledding down a very small hill
  8. no ice or puddles, only powdery white snow on the path and light gray ridges of snow on the road
  9. empty benches everywhere
  10. the vine with orange leaves on a neighbor’s fence, some of it had snow — little white spots of ice? snow? making patterns on other parts of the fence
vine with ice, snow, orange leaves, on brown fence
vine with ice, snow, orange leaves, on fence / 30 dec 2025

This image is most vivid when I look at it on iPhotos. Is it because the quality is higher? When I noticed the white spots on the fence — directly, not through a phone or computer screen — these spots were only small white dots. In the photo, they look bigger and I can see small vince steps. Very cool and strange. I might make this photo my wallpaper!

With these 2.5 miles, I reached my goal of 950 miles for the year. I took some time off in May (because of my back) and I swam a lot more this summer, so I’m happy with 950. Next year, at least 1000 and the marathon again!

2025 cento: lines I love + lines I can relate to

It’s time for another cento created out of poems I gathered this year. First, I read through all of the poems and tried to pick out (at least) one line from each. Then I pasted these lines into a document, then printed it out. I cut out the lines, which took forever (and is very taxing on my eyes!).

favorite lines in a pile

Then I arranged the lines on a table, in no particular order:

2025 poetry lines

Now, it’s time to have fun! The first experiment: quickly divide the lines into 2 categories: 1. I love and 2. Does this happen to you?

an explanation: Each cut-out included the lines and the poem’s title and author in parentheses at the bottom. I tried carefully to make sure that the lines were always grouped with the title/author. But, on 2 occasions, I noticed lines that had no citation: I love and Does this happen to you? I decided to make those the titles of 2 different sections of the poem.

dec 18/RUNBIKERUN

run: 1.7 miles
neighborhood / river road trail
29 degrees
50% very slick ice

Not ideal weather for a run. Were there any other runners out there? I can’t remember; I do recall seeing one walker. A lot of the sidewalk, road, trail was fine — not slick at all — until it wasn’t. Every so often, a slippery spot, some I could see, some I couldn’t. I skittered several times, having to take little half-steps. No sense that I was almost about to fall. I think I was lucky today that I didn’t twist or strain or break anything.

My body didn’t tense up in anticipation of sliding or falling, but I also wasn’t relaxed. Constantly trying to see or feel the ice. Did I notice anything else?

10 Things

  1. flitting birds, emerging from trees
  2. rusted orange in the floodplain forest
  3. the loud scraaaape from a neighbor’s shovel
  4. na ice-covered river
  5. a strong wind — not heard or seen but felt, burning my ears and my face
  6. car wheels losing traction on snow/ice, turning around in the middle of the street
  7. puddles on the path
  8. the edges of the road, dry then super slick then wet
  9. puddles on the sidewalk, not in the usual spots — the house on the next block, the house past 46th — but just around the corner
  10. noisy trucks near a school, doing some sort of repair work involving banging and backing up and scraping and pounding — heard, not seen

bats!

Reviewing old entries, as part of my On This Day morning ritual, I encountered a poem with the great line,

Fix your gaze upward and
give bats their due,
holy with quickness and echolocation
(Abecedarian for Dangerous Animals/ Catherine Pierce

Give bats their due. Yes! This line led me to other bat poems — last year or the year before I created a bats tag — and to these wonderful lines which I’ve written about before:

Think of it—to navigate by adjustment, by the beauty
of adjustment. All those shifts and echoes.
(Threshold Gods/ Jenny George)

To navigate by adjustment, shifts, echoes. Can I do something with these lines, add them to my echolocated poem at the end, Ringing Still, or another poem in the final echolocated section? Hmmm….echolocated is about being located/found by others. The (current) title of this collection is echolocate || echolocated. There’s a gap/tension between locating and being located, the one doing the locating and the one being located. In past years, I’ve imagined these two subjects (the locater, the located) as one Sara (the Speaker) trying to located another Sara (the reader), a You and simultaneously an I. No. Too much explanation. There’s is a swirl of something in my implied speaker addressing a You which is not me, and also me, and my consistent reference to the person going to the gorge and running and noticing (which is what I am doing) as the girl or she — which, if I haven’t already mentioned it is an actual girl — me, age 8:

Sara, age 8, in my soccer team uniform.

Instead of spelling this out, I’d like this to haunt this collection. Does it?

bike: 30 minutes
run: 1.3 miles
basement

Scott and I were planning to go to the y, but it started sleeting and snowing, and the wind was blowing, so we didn’t. Instead I went to the basement and biked. I started watching a documentary that I’ve been wanting to watch for more than a month: Come See Me in the Good Light. It’s about the poet, Andrea Gibson. Beautiful.

Then I got on the treadmill and ran while listening to my new “Eye Tunes” playlist on shuffle:

  1. Breakfast in America/ Supertramp
  2. Double Vision/ Foreigner
  3. See You Again/ Miley Cyris
  4. Tell Me What You See/ The Beatles
  5. Eyesight to the Blind / The Who
  6. Eye of the Tiger / Survivor

Open up your eyes now, tell me what you see
It is no surprise now, what you see is me
(Tell Me What You See/ The Beatles)

tell me what you see, I can’t wait to see you again, take a look at my girlfriend, not seeing straight, she’ll give eyesight to the blind, he’s watching us all with the eye of the tiger.

look at/stare/gaze/encounter/watch/stalk

dec 17/RUN

3.5 miles
under ford bridge and back
36 degrees
20% slick ice

An afternoon run. Mostly the paths/road/trail were clear but, because of yesterday’s thaw, there were random super slick patches. I didn’t slip, but I was more focused on the path than I’d like to be. Still, there were a few moments of freedom and forgetfulness, almost floating on the path, looking blankly ahead and just moving and breathing and being. Gray and overcast and heavy: thick air. It wasn’t that late, only around 3, but it was darkening fast and the road was crowded with cars. The river was light grayish white and empty and expansive. Encountered several runners, many walkers — any bikers? Yes, 1 or 2, at least one of them seemed to be commuting home from work. I remember watching their back light glowing red.

My favorite view: looking down at the graceful retaining wall then a ravine, then the river and the other shore.

morning ritual routine habit

My morning ritual has altered over the years since I’ve been writing in this log, but a few things have stayed the same: up earlier than anyone else with Delia-the-dog; coffee; quiet; sitting and reading. The reading has changed: it used to be articles about the academic industrial complex, then news headlines and poetry people on twitter. Now only poets.org, poetryfoundation.com, and poems.com. Oh, and my “On This Day” posts from that day between 2017 and 2024. Sometimes only 2 or 3 entries to revisit, sometimes the complete set. Today: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 — what happened to ’23 and ’24? Today was an especially excellent day for poetry. Wow!

1 — The Sign as You Exit the Artist’s Colony Says “The Real World” / Aliki Barnstone (poets.org)

Just check out this amazing first stanza:

Quiet is not silence. Silence is absolute like never and forever. Quiet invites attention to cicadas, the warbling vireo on the wire, the cardinal’s whistle as it wings its brightness over the horizon of the Blue Ridge Mountains, then disappears amid the crape myrtles’ baroque blossoms.

I love this contrast between quiet and silence, and that would have been enough for me to want to spend more time with this poem, but then she continued with lines from Emily Dickinson, and I knew I needed to archive this poem. In her “About this Poem” in the sidebar, she writes:

All the quotations in italics are Emily Dickinson lines. I talk with her across time. 

Yes! I’ve been wanting to write with Emily Dickinson, to find different ways to engage with her words. I’ll have to try this one out. Writing this last bit, I just had an idea for a poem or a lyric essay or a hybrid form and a monthly challenge: My Emily Dickinson. It’s the title of a Susan Howe book, which I’ve read bits of and own. The lecture/chapter in Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey, “My Emily Dickinson,” which I also own and love. And, “My My Emily Dickinson,” an essay in Kenyon Review by Meg Shevenock. I have the title already: My Eye Emily Dickinson, or My Eye and Emily Dickinson, or Eye: Emily Dickinson or My Eyes and Emily Dickinson, or M(e)y(e) Emily Dickinson? In addition to rereading the other “My Emily Dickinson” books/lectures/essays, I would revisit her lines that are about sight and vision and experiment with ways to describe their importance for me as I navigate losing vision. The experiments could include poems and essays and practices and whatever else I can think of. Oh, I hope this idea sticks; I love it!

2 — Last Century, Last Week: Holy Will (Ekphrastic)/ Ajanaé Dawkins (poems.com)

That first line!

What is it ’bout the river that makes even spirits sing? 

I love how this poem is about a river and that’s in a form that I want to practice more in early 2026 and that it embraces alliteration and the letter g. I will order her book: Blood-Flex!

3 — Wendell Berry’s Window poems (17 dec 2022)

4 — Liesel Mueller’s magical light in “Sometimes, when the light“ and her body in things in “Things” (17 dec 2021)

5 — How it Happens/ W.S. Merwin (17 dec 2020)

The middle of this short poem — a single line that continues a sentence of the lines before and after, but also answers the sky’s implied question (The sky said I am watching/to see what you/can make out of nothing):

I thought you

dec 8/RUN

5.25 miles
the flats and back
20 degrees / feels like 5 / snow
100% snow-covered

2 days ago, I mentioned that my next run should be to the flats so I could study the river surface. So that’s where I went this late morning and into the early afternoon: the flats. Unfortunately, there was no surface to study, only white. I had a late start to the run because I was trying to put my yaktrax back on. I might need a bigger size. How long did it take me to finally get them on? 10 maybe 15 or 20 minutes. That’s a long time to be sitting inside wrapped up in all my winter running layers!

Almost everything outside was white. White sky, white ground, white rock, white river. There were a few strips of worn down snow on the path, but a lot of it was lumpy and soft. I twisted my foot/ankle at least once on the uneven ground, but not hard enough to cause a problem. The conditions made it harder, but I didn’t mind too much. It was so quiet and calm and beautiful beside the gorge.

10 Things

  1. another running in a bright orange jacket — encountered them twice
  2. the bright headlights from an approaching bike
  3. under the I-94 bridge, 1: a few streaks of open water
  4. under the I-94 bridge, 2: honk honk honk — some gathered geese, gabbing
  5. heading north, no notice of the wind
  6. heading south, wind in my face
  7. approaching a woman — I was heading north, her south, I could see the snow flying up around her feet from the wind
  8. the bells of St. Thomas chiming and chiming and chiming at noon
  9. brightly colored (I can’t quite remember the colors — maybe pink and orange and blue?) graffiti under the bridges
  10. as I approached the franklin bridge from below, the wind picked up and I felt the arctic air, under the arch, a shopping cart

mental victory of the run: Even though I wanted to stop to rest my legs, sore from the uneven terrain, I kept going until I reached the bottom of the hill.

I had some success writing drafts for my m//other and g||host poems this morning before my run. During and just after the run, on my walk home, I had some thoughts about the third poem, t here involving the dotted line on the map that runs through the middle of the Mississippi River on the map indicating the dividing line between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Here’s a draft that I spoke into my phone. It needs some work!

if you look
on the map
between the
here of this
side and the
there of that
side, a dotted
line was drawn to
represent
that moment
mid-river
when one city
becomes the
other. Do
you think, if
you were to
swim across,
you could feel
this shift, could
find this place
where a there
becomes a
here and a
here becomes
a there? I’m
willing to
believe it
exists, this
space where both
here and there
dwell, a place
where both are
possible.

dec 4/RUN

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
9 degrees / feels like 0
50% snow-covered

The coldest run of the season, so far. All the layers, including the hand warmers, which I wouldn’t have used if I didn’t already have an open pair from FWA. No yaktrax today, and I (think I) regret it. I thought the path would be clear enough today without them, but I was wrong. My feet felt very strange when I first started running without the spikes (and without the more cushiony Saucony Rides that I’ve worn all week — today I wore Brooks Ghosts). It was hard, my legs felt heavy. I only wanted to to run a mile. But I kept going and by the time I got to under the Ford bridge I decided that I could keep going to the falls.

The creek is half frozen, and the water still flowing seemed thick and sluggish. Water was still rushing over the ledge, but there was less of it. About half of the falls is frozen with huge columns of ice.

10 Things

  1. the strong smell of weed in the 44th street parking lot
  2. the voices of kids playing on the school playground
  3. the river surface is more ice than water, and white
  4. very few people out walking or running
  5. the rumble of a park worker’s mini-truck at the falls
  6. empty parking lots at the falls
  7. empty benches, too
  8. the smell of a fire on Lena Smith bvld — coming from someone’s chimney
  9. the wind rushed through dead leaves on a tree — they sounded like rushing water
  10. the green gate at the falls’ steps is now closed and locked

I just checked out Jana Prikryl’s Midwood. It’s all about the middle of things, and midlife.

MIDWOOD 1/ Jana Prikryl

Out of the garment of the land
out of the
of

There in the ravine the place
that’s deepest,
bent

I found an interview with her, and found this last bit interesting:

So there is little punctuation, and I avoided titles at first because they’re so performative. Ultimately I realized that without titles the poems ran together too much, but I stuck to two-word titles to keep them all quiet. Many of the titles repeat words from the poem because often the extracted word pair, as a title, pulls new meaning or significance from the phrase. That kind of underlining, and the other kinds of repetition in the book, seem like ways of tightening the screws, bringing the writer and reader into a smaller and smaller room to study these documents together. Hopefully a transaction takes place that is confidential—somehow secret, transgressive, inexpressible in any other form.

Short Conversation with Poets: Jana Prikryl

I’m using repetition in my collection, but I think (or, I’m hoping, at least) that it creates more space, instead of less.

Random things that happened today:

first, an hour or so before heading out for my run, I got another rejection email about 3 of my poems. Slowly I’m getting better at not letting it upset me. Intellectually, I know how hard it is to get something published (5% acceptance rate, roughly), and how much it’s based on fit or reader/editor preference, or some other thing out of my control. Still, it can sting, especially when I really believe in something I’ve written. Today, I’m okay.

second, RJP had to go to a textile event for her textiles class, so I went with her to the Textile Center. Wow! So inspiring and exciting to see RJP in her element and tender as I thought about my mom, a fiber artist, who would have loved coming here.

Third, I’ve known about this song ever since I saw Camp in the theater, back in 1999 (or 2000?), but I don’t think I remembered that it was a Christmas song. I guess because it has turkey in the title, I thought it was a Thanksgiving song. A video of it being performed on The Ed Sullivan Show came up this morning, and I have decided it’s the Christmas song of 2025:

nov 29/RUN

3.3 miles
trestle turn around
26 degrees / snow
100% snow-covered

Wasn’t planning to run outside today, while it snowed, but something changed my mind — was it seeing people walking out my front window? Was it remembering that I have yaktrax? Was it not wanting to run on the treadmill? I’m not quite sure, but suddenly I found myself getting ready to go out, then leaving the house, then running through a winter wonderland. It wasn’t too cold, or too windy, and with the yaktrax, it wasn’t too slippery. There were times when I was cold or when my feet were a little sore from running with the yaktrax, but mostly I enjoyed being out there in the snow. Snow! Covering every inch of the ground, on the bluff, in the sky. The river was pewter and still open, but for how long? Some dog was losing it down below — maybe they were at the white sands beach, or on the part of the Winchell Trail that descends south from the trestle. So much barking. I’d like to imagine there barks were from the joy and the delight or frolicking through the snow.

Anything else? Some other walkers, at least 2 or 3 other runners, 3 fat tire bikers. Climbing up from under the lake street bridge, I listened to dead leaves on a tree shaking in the wind, sounding like gushing water. I heard more trees later closer to the old stone steps. I stopped at the sliding bench and noticed someone walking on the trail that winds beside the white sands beach.

earlier in the day

It is snowing again this morning. Barely more than flurries, but adding to the thin layer already started a few days ago. Encountered this poem on Instagram this morning, and wanted to remember it. It’s from one of my favorite poets/writers, Wendell Berry:

LIKE SNOW/ Wendell Berry

Suppose we did our work
like the snow, quietly, quietly, 
leaving nothing out.

Something else I encountered this morning that I’d like to remember:

Originally found here: Exploring Dakota Lands and Waters

later, after the run

It may have started as flurries this morning, but it’s bigger flakes now, and they’re piling up. 2 or 3 inches. I shoveled right after I finished running and now, 30 minutes later, the deck is covered again. I wonder how much will we get when it stops snowing?

update, Monday (1 dec 2025): It snowed all night. Apparently we got almost 4 inches, although it seems like more to me.

nov 10/SWIM!HIKE!RUN!

2600 yards / 1.5 loops
104 laps
ywca pool

Another swim. Hooray! It took some time to get my nose plug and goggles sorted — they were leaking — and my cap wasn’t ever quite on right, but it was a great swim. A solid 45+ minutes of moving through the water. I shared a lane with a woman who did some interesting sets. Lots of dolphin kick on her back. Some of the time she swam on her back, feet first — normally to move forward you swim head first. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that before. She was doing a strange spread-finger paddle. She was already swimming when I started, and kept going after I finished. I wonder how long she swims for. I wasn’t trying to be competitive with her, but I probably was, in spite of my best attempts to be chill. Mostly, we were at opposite ends of the pool, but a few times I would catch up to her. Difficult to pass — was she trying to race me? Once our hands hit as we passed each other.

To focus my attention on something else, I looked down at the dancing shadows on the pool floor. Soft, not very distinct, like the floor was moving. It wasn’t that bright outside, so there were no big circles of light. Didn’t notice any pool friends — no fuzz.

hike: 30 minutes
with RJP
around the gorge
35 degrees

Hiked with RJP to some favorite spots that I’ve written about so she could take some pictures. She’s doing a series of colored pencil drawings inspired by GGG poems for her final project in her drawing class! Very cool!

We took the old stone steps to the river, then back up and over to the winchell trail and the oak savanna. RJP took a picture of the tree growing through the fence — I hope she’s able to draw it. She took lots of pictures of steps and rocks and trees. Oh — and the surface of the river.

run: 4 miles
wabun bluff / locks and dam no. 1 / river road
35 degrees

An afternoon run. Only 4:00 and it’s already getting dark. Chilly, but not too cold. The lack of wind helped. Lots of leaves on the trail, but not too many runners. A steady stream of cars, kids playing soccer over at the school — kick it higher! higher! Parents waiting to pick up kids at Dowling Elementary. Some voices down in the gorge. Could it be rowers? I couldn’t tell. The gate into the Locks and Dam no. 1 was closed. Is it closed for the season?

No turkeys or geese or fat tires or roller skiers. No music blasting from radios or droning leaf blowers. Plenty of squirrels, but none of them darted in front of me. Too busy rooting around in the dry leaves, making a racket.

cells remember

Found a great blog post on Poetry Foundation about cells:

symbiogenesis: we came about not only through competition but through acts of cooperation. We carry evidence of species merger in our cells, and of species relation in almost every structure we daily rely upon. Is there one piece of us that doesn’t also, in some form, belong to someone else? Your fingers ghosting chimp as they slender in the air. Lobe-finned fishes did protolungs, acorn worms might have done something like a heart. The more complex organs, like eyes, had to be developed many times, but jellyfish saw first, and not for us. Biology is remembering. Our cells remember ancient chemical interactions, pre-life, and our limbs remember salamanders. A poem remembers our past in language and posits a future in the simplest sense, like a to-do note, hoping that it will be read at some point hence, reminding us of something worth knowing. It can cast back between the “its” and the “octopus” in the second paragraph of this blog and remember the relation. In addition, it’s an ecosystem that, ideally, like any functioning ecosystem, deals with its own waste.

Like the octopus’s smart shadow, a poem’s shadow also always knows more than we do.

Mitosis, Meiosis, Poiesis

Biology remembers. Cells remember. Cells remember? Here’s some future reading: How a cell remembers

oct 29/RUN

4.5 miles
veterans home in reverse
49 degrees

Another beautiful late fall day. Sun, sparkling river, gushing falls, red and orange and yellow leaves. Parts of the run were easy, parts of it weren’t. Felt tired this late morning/early afternoon. Ran up the hill through Wabun to the veterans home, then over the bridge, past John Stevens’ house and to the falls. The bench above the edge of the world was empty but the Rachel Dow Memorial bench had two people sitting on it. ALL of the kids were outside on the Minnehaha Academy playground as I ran past it on the other side of the road. Two memorable things: 1. a teacher calling out to a student — no, no, we do not climb the fence. get down! and 2. I heard a trumpet playing Reveille. It sounded like a live trumpet and not a recording. Is that what they play to call kids in from recess?

Scott sent me this poem. I’m posting it partly for its cleverness, partly for our shared dislike of licorice, and partly because I love the word It.

It/ Gertrude Sturdle

It is never
what it seems to be
unless it is licorice.
And then
sadly
it is.

the cells, cells, cells, cells, cells, cells, cells

Yesterday I mentioned using Poe’s “The Bells” as a template for my own poem about the cells: dying cone cells, strange rod cells, the uncontrolled growth of cancer cells, a narrowing of space (cell as room, place). I started working yesterday afternoon and am back at it this morning before my run. Fun!

version 1

EA Poe’s original first verse:

Hear the sledges with the bells—
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

My version

Feel the leaving of the cells —
the failed cells.

What a world of loneliness their abandonment foretells.

How they tumble, tumble, tumble,
In the fading of the light.

While the cones start to crumble
,
All the rods seem to rumble
in the loosening of her sight;
Then it’s grays, grays, grays,
and a veil of fuzzy haze.
With an undead half possession and the cast of haunting spells
On the cells, cells, cells, cells,

Cells, cells, cells—
On the slumbering and the stumbling cells.

type of bell: sleigh bells
bells / foretells / wells
merriment / melody

tinkle / oversprinkle / twinkle

a line about the night air
night / delight
time time time
time/rhyme
tintinabulation / musically
bells repeated 7 times
jingling / tinkling — slant rhyme

cells: dead cone cells

cells / foretells / spells

world — loneliness / abandonment
tumble / crumble / rumble
grays grays grays
grays / haze
undead half possession

oct 27/RUN

3.25 miles
trestle turn around
59 degrees

A late afternoon run. Nice! I might try doing more of these later workouts this winter — but not outside, in the dark! I like the light at this time (around 5) — softer, longer, winding down, golden. I only stopped once — to take off my sweatshirt. I considered taking it off while I was running, but thought better of it. I felt strong and confident that I could keep running.

10 Things

  1. bright yellow leaves
  2. a roller skier
  3. laughing voices below me in the ravine
  4. bright yellow t-shirts and vest on some of the walkers
  5. still green below the sliding bench
  6. a long line of cars stopped on the river road whenever there was a stop sign
  7. someone speeding by on a scooter
  8. in the tunnel of trees the path was covered in bright red leaves
  9. a loud honk ahead of me, on the lake street bridge
  10. no geese or turkeys or rowers

vision study

I went in for my second vision test appointment at the U. Colin, a post-doc in the psychology of vision department tested me on a fancy machine that takes 300 pictures of my eyes a second to track what and where I’m looking.

First, a calibration. I put my chin on the chin rest, didn’t move my head, and moved my eyes to track a dot as it traveled from the upper left corner and around the lower right. When I saw it, the dot would explode in confetti. Nice!

Second, a reading test. I was given a sentence to read that kept getting smaller. I struggled to read it when the text was big, but it got easier, and I got faster as it got smaller. I could read sentences that were even too small for my tester to read. When that was finished a screen popped up: 390 trials. Colin said, oh boy. What? The screen said I needed to take 390 of the “trials” to determine if my vision/eyes would work for this study. I asked, what’s the average number of tests? Colin: 100. Of course, my weird eyes would require more testing and of course, this delighted me.

Third, the real test. I had to stare between two dots and try to identify the 3 letters that flashed. At first, the text was too big for me, and I couldn’t see any of the letters. Then Colin decided to try and make the letters a lot smaller — way smaller than anyone had ever done, or even that the program could handle. He thought it was very cool and I could tell he was excited. When I asked him why, he said that he had never seen anyone’s vision work this way. Yes! Even among people with strange sight, my sight is strange! I knew it.

It was fun to do the study and talk with someone about my vision. Will I qualify for continuing? Not sure yet. My vision might be too strange, and too much for this program. They’ll let me know sometime in the future. Whatever happens, it was fun and I got more verification that I’m unusual!

This afternoon, I submitted 5 of my Girl Ghost Gorge poems to a journal, and my chapbook, “I Empty My Mind, I Stuff it with Color” to a contest.