Tag: biking

june 9/HIKEBIKESWIM!

8:43 am — The first open swim of the year isn’t until the late afternoon, but I’m already excited. Currently I am sitting at my desk. Outside of my window, workers are cutting down the maple tree in our front yard. Someone is up in a bucket with a chainsaw sawing the thick branches then securing them with rope, someone else is on the ground to catch them. It’s a slow, noisy process — and strangely quiet, too. No loud THUMPS! from a branch hitting the ground. Noises: chainsaw, rumble of their big trucks, whine of a leaf blower, thud of the truck bed bottom as the cut limbs are discarded / Noises not heard: no heavy thumps, no shouting from workers to each other1, no beeps or alarms. It is now 9:02. I wonder how long it will take for them to cut it all down.

It’s sad to lose such an old tree — the only (or one of the only?) maples on the block. Everything else is linden/basswood or locust.

It’s also not sad. Mostly this tree has been a nuisance — leaf debris and whirly gigs clogging our gutters, thick tangles of roots taking over our sewer pipe. Every year Ron the Sewer Rat has had to chop those roots up so that our sewer wouldn’t back up.

In front of my window: the bucket is being raised again; it’s herky jerky yet smooth motion almost like a strange dance.

And it’s a relief. Ever since a huge branch fell from this tree last fall, I’ve been worried that another would fall and hurt someone or something. I’m glad we’re finally doing something about it.

currently: branches are gently falling in front of me, a few of them reflecting on the glass of a desktop boom! boom! — as they are tossed in the back of a truck / now it’s raining little twigs and bigger twigs and branches

10 Things About this Maple Tree

  1. Unsuccessfully attempting to weed-whack around it, giving up and hand-pulling the tall, flowering grass
  2. it is a wonderful example of a tree looking like a person, buried upside down, their head and shoulders in the dirt, while their torso and legs stick up in the air
  3. this winter/early spring, I could hear a woodpecker drumming on its dead wood — brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
  4. one summer a few years ago, FWA helped me to try to get rid of some ants “naturally” by pouring boiling water in their ant hill — not sure if it killed the ants, but it destroyed the grass around the base of the tree
  5. last summer, or the summer before, I noticed a new branch growing near the bedroom window and thought, we should really cut that while we can still can, then watching it grow bigger and bigger until it was too late
  6. recently noticed: a big eye in the middle of the trunk where a sizable branch used to be
  7. the leaves on this trees, which turn a golden yellow, are the last to fall in November
  8. all i can see of this tree from the two windows in front of my desk is the edge of its trunk
  9. a sudden thought: I hope we’re not disrupting too many critters’ homes — I don’t recall hearing or seeing any nests in the winter
  10. I won’t miss having to sweep up whirly gigs on the front sidewalk or pull them out of the table on the deck or the planter in the backyard

I’m sure the loss of this tree will have effects (negative and positive) that I can’t even imagine.

hike: 40 minutes
minnehaha off leash dog park
78 degrees

FWA and I cut our walk short today because he had to go to the bathroom. We only hiked to the BIG felled tree. The parking lot was more than half full, but it didn’t feel crowded. Everyone was evenly spaced out and doing their own thing, not clustered at the entrance or on the trail. For the first half of the hike, it was cool and calm, with a gentle breeze. No encounters with aggressive dogs or jerky humans. No dog names overheard. Several very FAST! dogs. So fast that they couldn’t be bothered to stop and play with Delia. One German Shepherd zoomed by so fast that I gasped — wow, that dog is fast!

FWA schooled me on a video game term2: de/buffing. Used in sentence: Walking through that second patch of sun, I was debuffed and never recovered.

de/buffed: (from Reddit because I can’t remember FWA’s exact definition) “Debuff is a game term that means something was hit with an attack that causes negative affects. In this case it “de-buffs” your agility. In games, buff means you strengthen; to improve.”

We talked about how Delia loves to plop down in the soft sand then imagined a t-shirt with the many versions of Delia chilling:

  • ploppin’
  • DOD (dead on deck) when Delia lays down on the deck , with her head landing last, looking like she’s passed out or dead on the deck
  • DOR — a DOD variation: dead on rug
  • wedged between two of Scott’s pillows on our bed
  • wedged between the edge of her bed and the removable cushion
  • sprawled out quietly on the rug, under the dining room table
  • resting misery face: in her bed, her head hanging over the edge, looking miserable

11:01 am Louder thumps as leafless chunks of branches fall / the front yard is strewn with little branch trees / the bucket, suspended halfway up the tree / a big claw reaching up to grab branches, lift them, then toss them in the back of a truck

11:04 am one worker in an orange vest threw up the rope to the guy in the bucket, now the rope is being tied to a branch — when and how will it fall? gently or roughly? with a loud Boom! or a soft thud? / a spray of saw dust is coming down / the branch gently floated down, attached to the rope — I saw it dangling in front of the window! — then boom boom — two quick, deep booms / So much debris in our front yard — very grateful I don’t have to pick it up!

11:10 am

view from my window / 11:10 am

11:14 am

The sound of a big branch falling, then its cylindrical reflection in the glass top on my desk. A very dead, tall and thin branch falling, reflected in the glass / a worker with a chainsaw, cutting a big branch off a bigger branch — grrrrrrrrrrr

1:07 pm

Sawing the trunk: sawdust sparks / dangling from a rope / the ground nears

swimming with Lauren Groff

Sure, I have many ideas and projects and plans for what I’d like to write/make/create this summer, but I also have a strong desire (need? ache?) to just be with the water and the swimming and the words (or lack of words). I want to return to Anne Carson and Alice Oswald and Lauren Groff and Tony Hoaglund and Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin and re-memorize their poetry. I also want to revisit past Sara’s thoughts about water and swimming and first days of open swim.

Speaking of Lauren Groff (which I did, above), I’m currently reading her short story collection, Brawler. Here’s a short video in which she talks about it and how swimming made her a writer:

In addition to finding this video, I also found this short blog entry about Groff’s love of swimming:

I was expecting to enjoy Lauren Groff’s collection of short stories Delicate Edible Birds, but I had no idea that here was another work of swim-lit. Like Groff’s first novel, the marvelous The Monsters of Templeton, these stories take place around bodies of water, and they’re also much concerned with swimming and swimmers. (I’ve not finished the book yet, but I’ve just started reading one story about a deep-sea diver). I realized that I’d read the story L. Debard and Aliette before, in the 2006 Atlantic Fiction Issue, and remember it quite vividly these years later– turned out I liked Lauren Groff before I even knew Lauren Groff. It’s an amazing story of poolside sensuality. The stories linked by these swimming references in a way that intrigues me, and certainly satisfies by latest literary fixation. How positively timely.

More Swim-lit

2:30 pm — workers are done, tree is gone, only a 4 ft stump that we have to figure out what to do with remains — hopefully a gnome home!

blue-green algae advisory

Open Swim is not cancelled, but there is a blue-green algae bloom in the water and a water advisory. The “official” Open Swim Club Facebook page has an announcement with the required warning, but the tone definitely seems to be: we have to warn you, but we think if you use caution, you’ll be fine. We’d like to say it’s fine and you should swim, but we can’t. I’m still going, but maybe I’ll only do one loop. And maybe I’ll try to swim a little slower and to look out for it. Can I see it? Not easily.

bike: 8 miles
lake nokomis and back
85 degrees

Biking to the lake for open swim was great. Warm, but not too crowded and I was able to pass someone without any stress. We didn’t bike fast, but it didn’t feel slow and it’s always safer to bike slow when you can’t focus fast. The bike ride back was harder, with too much wind and clueless walkers walking in the middle of the bike path. Scott rang his “passive agressive bell” (his name for it) half a dozen times and one woman didn’t even notice.

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis
87 degrees

A great first swim. I couldn’t see much, and I didn’t care, my shoulders and brain still swam me straight to the buoys. There were some clueless swan boats and too many vines — it’s crazy how thick they are near the start of the swim! — but they didn’t bother me. I was happy to be swimming and felt strong.

It’s too late and I need to eat, so no more writing about the lake tonight. Tomorrow if I can remember anything, I’ll add some more.

10 Water Things (the morning after)

  1. murky water, but enough clarity for me to be able to see my hand and watch and . . .
  2. bubbles! my bubble friends are back — clear little orbs stirred up as my hands entered the water
  3. a scratchy-squeaky noise as I neared another swimmer — was it their wetsuit? a cracking of a joint or a bone or?
  4. vines 1: started out by swimming straight into a knot of milfoil — when I tried to do a full stroke green strings wrapped around my wrist — join us down below, they seemed to be whispering
  5. vines 2: at the end of the second loop, near the white buoys, ghostly vines emerging from below, not yet close enough to touch
  6. vines 3: rounding the far white buoy, getting stuck in another tangle of milfoil — as I said to another swimmer a few minutes later, I’m a very strong swimmer and those vines made me nervous!
  7. finding one distinctive break in the green in an otherwise generic tree line to use to sight the far green buoy
  8. this year, there are 2 orange buoys and 3 green ones
  9. noticing the pale rope that tethers the buoy to the lake floor as I swam over it
  10. suddenly noticing something in front of me, stopping and hearing a person in a kayak call out, kayak — I think it was a lifeguard, but it could have just been a clueless kayaker crossing the swim course
  1. Mentioned how quiet the workers are to Scott. He found out why when he talked to them: they have headsets. Nice! ↩︎
  2. On our bike ride to the lake I quizzed Scott on this term. He had heard it but couldn’t remember what it was. He said it’s primarily used in first-person shooter games, which he doesn’t play. ↩︎

june 5/HIKEBIKE

50 minutes
minnehaha off leash dog park
71 degrees
humidity: 72%

Steamy this morning at the dog park. Crowded at the entrance too. I started out skittish, reacting every time a big dog passed by. Something in my body worried that they would slam into me. Thankfully my body chilled out by the end. It rained last night so everything looked greener and the ground was softer.

FWA talked about Adventure Time and how Princess Bubblegum was high functioning autistic and her brother Neddy (Neddie?) was low functioning. Something inspired that discussion but I can’t remember what it was.1 I talked about how great it was to have representations of neurodivergent people that didn’t call attention to them as neurodivergent, that just presented them as part of the range of characters you could have in a show. I said something in a voice that reminded me of my sister Marji and then told FWA about how she gave a talk about cyclones wearing a cyclone costume. So Marji, so awesome. I suggested that she could blow up on TikTok with something like that. Then FWA described a TikTok he recently watched in which a teacher talked about how there is a shift away from kids worrying about being too cringe or not cool enough. This led to a discussion of bullies and how they only have power when people are afraid of them and of not being cool. FWA talked about how the show, The Boys, criticizes bullies and people who use power to try to control others. As we ascended through the stifling woods near the fence, FWA described how the character Homelander, a big bully, is defeated by the other characters. Another great, meandering conversation. I love these!

dog name: Fox / Foxy — a biggish-dog whose exuberance was a little too much for Delia.

people to put on my “shit together” (aka Aristotelean excellence) list: Foxy’s humans immediately called to Foxy and asked if our dog was okay. Then they made sure that Foxy left Delia alone and rerouted them to the river. FWA and I discussed our appreciation of how they handled the situation by asking if Delia was okay instead of assuming she wasn’t because she was too small and delicate (which usually happens when people notice Delia playing with bigger dogs).

other dogs:

Two beautiful, St. Benard-esque (were they St. Bernards? — I’m not sure) running down the hill at a gentle pace. Their owner, who was wearing a BRIGHT orange shirt, called out, okay babies, let’s go. (he said babies with affection, not to tease or demean them).

A loping, awkward, enthusiastic golden retriever running ahead of us, then behind us, then ahead of us again. This dog was sweet and delightful, but also made me nervous as I waited for them to run into me

10 Things

  1. as FWA was driving us to the dog park, he pointed out a coyote running through the grass between river road and Lena Smith — I couldn’t see it
  2. plop! crash! heard, not seen — I’m assuming it was a dog in the water
  3. Delia running by us, fast, her feet thundering enough to prompt me to call her thundercat — later I amended it to Thunderdog: a new nickname!
  4. a strange, almost metallic sounding, thump thump thump — FWA guessed, a bird or a squirrel
  5. a pileated woodpecker, laughing
  6. even more beach at the tip of the trail — the river is so low!
  7. everything even more green than on Monday — branches reaching far over the fence
  8. deep, soft, damp sand — so difficult to climb that FWA calls it his least favorite part of the trail
  9. very few bugs — were they not there, or was it the bug spray we put on?
  10. the pungent smell of poop right after we crossed the road — did I step in some? no, I was passing the trashcan where someone must have thrown away a poop bag. Yuck!
  1. About 30 minutes later: I remembered what we had been discussing. FWA had remarked on how green everything was and how the plants seemed to be talking over. I mentioned Richard Powers’ Overstory and the interview I heard with them where he said, the trees have been around for much longer than us, they will survive our current climate crisis. Will we? All of this led FWA to talk about Adventure Time and how Neddie was scared of everything and was almost always suckled to a tree.He actually created Candy Kingdom ↩︎

webs, nets, threads, grids

Today, I’m accepting the invitation from the spider who crawled near my desk yesterday. I decided to google, “how to make a spider web.” Have I mentioned that I am not crafty or skilled with my hands? Because of this, I need the dumb dumb baby version of tutorials (here, dumb dumb baby = basic and without assuming any level of skill) The phrase might sound rude, but I use it with affection. I first used it with my band friend as we joked about how the second clarinet part — the part we play — is the least interesting and challenging of parts. We rarely get solos or stand out at all).

Here’s a video I found that seems useful. Am I crafy enough to create it? I’m not convinced:

Something obvious that I didn’t consider before: I could use tape for the ends of the web instead of pins. I might try that, but I also might just try creating a web on another piece of cork board not mounted on the wall. This tutorial is targeted at people making their own Halloween decorations. I could imagine putting one of these on the inside glass of our front door.

Reading up on spider webs, a (duh) realization: the silk spiders use to make their webs can come in different colors, including gold, but often they are white not black. I suppose black is the common color in crafty versions and images because of the contrast. I’d like to use white in some of my creations. It might not be as visually interesting immediately, but I think it could distort the text/words in a way that more accurately depicted how words look to me. Cool. I also think I’d like to use thread instead of yarn.

I like using this thread to make visible/trace the mechanics of sight. Here I’m returning to thinking about the light that travels over objects and into our eyes as spiders or insects or Dante’s spiriti visivi or fish. Another poem from my recently published chapbook, Inklings:

Fish 1 / Sara Lynne Puotinen

big beach

On the edge near shore
silver spirits scatter
at my feet to whisper
of what waits beyond
in deeper water.

I looked up Dante, vision, spiriti visivi and found this article: Visionary Science in Purgatorio XVII and Paradiso XXX. I’ll have to read/skim it later!

what spiders webs are for:

  • catching and trapping prey (source)
  • hearing — as extended auditory sensors (source)
  • traveling — to catch and sail on the wind to another location (source)
  • to save cute pigs (source)

random spider web reference I just heard a few days ago while moving the backyard:

itsy bitsy stripper

bike: 5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
80 degrees

A new summer tradition: late Friday afternoon (around 4:30), Scott and I bike to the falls and have a few beers while sitting outside at Sea Salt. This is our 3rd or 4th Friday in a row. 2 of the times, RJP has joined us. I love that I can still bike. I love that RJP joins us — today, I hiked with her: down the steps and at the base of the falls. So many dogs, so many interesting people!

may 27/BIKE!

8.5 miles
lake nokomis and back
80 degrees

My first bike of the season. Every spring since I learned I was losing my central vision, I’m uncertain about my biking. Will I still be able to see? Will it be too scary? Has my vision declined too much (what is too much?)? Today, it was fine. I think that’s mostly because I’ve memorized the path and learned to navigate with less sight. Plus, I don’t try to go too fast (or fast at all, really). What a gift to have another summer to bike to the lake or to downtown or the library or wherever I want!

I brought my goggles and swim cap and a nose plug, but when my goggles leaked and the water was a bit scummy and I forgot to put on my nose plug, I decided not to swim any loops. Instead, I just waded out to water past my shoulders and enjoyed how the water cooled me down. Surprisingly, it wasn’t too cold. Maybe I’ll go swimming tomorrow?

10 Water Things

  1. sparkle friends! close-up, they looked like silvery glitter, with a broader view like some sort of green-ish scum
  2. a very bright blue, cloudless sky
  3. someone swimming freestyle just past the edge of the buoys
  4. little minnows near my feet
  5. just outside of the pink buoys the lake floor was slimy and soft — some sort of vegetation
  6. 3 teen girls, locking their bikes up, then complimenting each other on their nails
  7. 2 young boys, locking their bikes up, one lamenting to the other, I should have brought my wallet for ice cream!
  8. sitting on a bench facing the water, behind me, 2 bikers talking to each other as they biked — biker one: I didn’t mind walking in the rain, but I was cold. biker two: you were old? biker one: no, I was COLD! biker two: I thought you said old! biker one: Yes, I’m 80 years old!
  9. rustling on the edge of water, under a tree, hidden — a duck? a person? something/someone else?
  10. drifting sounds: a baby crying, a bike chain rattling, a dog collar clanging softly, giggles, 2 adults and a kid talking about ice cream

It was wonderful, and wonderfully cool, to sit on the bench facing the water in the shade. Every year I tell myself that I should spend more time at the lake, and I do spend a lot of time there, swimming loops at open swim, but I could spend even more time. I want this year to be the year that spend the most time that I ever have! Future Sara, let me know how it works out!

hole 6

I printed out the four panels from essay 6, What to Make of the Mother Who Made You, taped it up, and cut a hole in the center. Then I mapped my words with pins on my cork board. First I wound string around the pins, next: embroidery thread.

hole 6

I like bits of it, but it doesn’t work. Not yet. I’m thinking this one might need to wait until the fall. I think it’s time to finish the 3 or 4 of these that I’m satisfied with and temporarily wrap this project up. It’s time for swimming and water and (possibly) starting a YouTube channel to promote my first chapbook, Inklings.

feb 20/BIKEGETOUTICE

32 minutes
basement

Watched the women’s cross-country relay for most of the bike, then Alysa Liu’s amazing Free Skate for the last 10 minutes. Scott and I watched Liu’s performance last night, and I watched it again this morning. Admittedly, I can’t really see that much of it — no details, not her beaming face, none of her lines, only the feel and speed of her movement, the energy of her joy. And I guess as I watch it I am a little sad not to be able to fully witness her artistry. But I still loved it. And I’ll be watching it again and again as an antidote to all the other shit happening right now.

Bunnies

Earlier today, I read in an old log entry about my discovery, last february, of two backyard bunnies. Then I read a post on Facebook from Minneapolis Parks about how some rabbits pee blue. It felt like a nudge, today you should write about bunnies!

Here are some sources for inspiration (or more) about rabbits/bunnies:

1

Have you seen weird blue spots in the snow lately? There’s a good chance it’s rabbit pee. Eastern cottontails (the most common rabbit in Minnesota, you’ve probably seen them running around yards at dusk) sometimes eat buckthorn branches and bark, especially toward the end of winter. Buckthorn contains a phytochemical that turns urine blue after being exposed to sunlight.
So, don’t be alarmed if you come across one of these spots, it probably means a well hydrated rabbit stopped by. (Minneapolis Parks)

2

Looking out the kitchen window, seeing 2 dark forms in the white snow — bare patches or something more? Staring for a few mnutes — am I imagining that slight shift? No, 2 animals, standing still for minutes. What are they doing? Quick movement, then bounding figures. Rabbit-like. But these animals look so dark — is it a trick of the dim light — bunny fir darkened in the lilac light? [there is no indigo in a backyard illuminated by neighbor’s security lights.] Or, could these creatures be raccoons?

update, 20 feb 2026: A definite answer: bunnies! All late fall and winter, 2 or more bunnies have been hanging out under our crab apple tree — at night, in the afternoon, at sunrise and sunset. They’re very bold, these bunnies, not running off when I walk by. When this happens, I’ve started saying, these bunnies are as bold as brass! Why? Not sure. And, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea: I like bunnies or rabbits about as much as I like squirrels, which is not at all.

3

The idiom bold as brass describes someone who exudes extreme confidence, someone who is brazen or very forward. The term bold as brass is ascribed to the Lord Mayor of London in the 1770s, Brass Crosby. Crosby defied the House of Parliament by supporting the printing of a pamphlet regarding the proceedings of Parliament. The phrase bold as brass was first recorded in Life’s Painter of Variegated Characters in Public and Private Life by George Parker published in 1789, some time after the incident involving Brass Crosby. Some say this disproves the link between Crosby and the idiom bold as brass, others say it reinforces the link. In fact, the word brass was used to mean boldness or brazenness for at least forty years before the appearance of Brass Crosby on the political scene. The idiom bold as brass reached the zenith of its popularity in the early 1900s.

4

an illusion: duck or bunny

5

A cup holds
sugar, flour, three large rabbit-breaths of air.
(My Weather / Jane Hirshfield)

6

But then the rabbits tire
And the fire catches up,
Stuck onto them like the needles of the cactus,
Which at first must be what they think they feel on their skins.
They’ve felt this before, every rabbit.
But this time the feeling keeps on.
And of course, they ignite the brush and dried weeds
All over again, making more fire, all around them.
I’m sorry for the rabbits.
And I’m sorry for us
To know this.
(Rabbits and Fire/ Alberto Rios)

7

The rock that is not a rabbit suns itself
in the field, its brown coat that isn’t fur
furred with light. The rock that isn’t a rabbit
would be warm to a palm but wouldn’t
quicken or strain from touch.
(The Rock that isn’t a Rabbit / Corey Marks)

8

it is the
sadness of the unperceived and therefore never felt and
seldom expressed, except on occasion by polka dancers
and little girls who, in imitation of their grandmothers,
decide who shall have their bunny when they die.
(Green Sadness / Mary Ruefle)

9

A white rabbit hopped beside me and for a moment I thought it was a blob of snow that had fallen out of the sky. The rabbit and I studied each other. Rabbits taste like chickens. My My mother and father had taught me how to hit rabbits over the head with wine jugs, then skin them cleanly for fur vests. “It’s a cold night to be an animal,” I said, “so you want some fire too, do you? Let me put on another branch, then.” I would not hit it with the branch. I had learned from rabbits to kick backward. Perhaps this one was sick because normally the animal did not like fire. The rabbit seemed alert enough, however, looking at me acutely, bounding up to the fire. But it did not stop when it got to the edge. It turned its face once towards me then jumped into the fire. The fire went down for a moment as if crouching in surprise, then the flames shot up taller than before. When the fire became calm again I saw that the rabbit had turned into meat, browned just right. I ate it, knowing the rabbit had sacrificed itself for me. It had made me a gift of meat.
(The Woman Warrior / Maxine Hong Kingston)

I ended up doing other things today and didn’t have much time to work on it. I found a title and some opening lines:

There is no Indigo

In a backyard illuminated
by a neighbor’s security lights
there is only lilac.

I think I’m going to also need to include the line about how I like bunnies as much as I like squirrels, which is not at all.

Get Out Ice

The only ice I am into today is the Olympic ice and Alysa Liu’s free skate!

feb 4/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

bike: 30 minutes
run: 1.4 miles

The trails looked sloppy and slippery, so I biked and ran inside today. I was planning to watch Poker Face while I biked, but I couldn’t find it. Tried “Pluribus” again but it was too much for me . . . again. Finally settled on the new Knives Out movie, which I really enjoyed. While I ran, I listened to a podcast with one of my favorite triathletes, Taylor Knibb. She talked about her season and her experience DNFing at Kona: she had heat stroke in the last few ks and even though she was winning, had to drop out. When they checked her temperature, it was around 105. Yikes.

I don’t remember much about my short run. One thing: at some point I lifted out of my hips, focused on my arm swing, and felt like a smooth, efficient machine. Fun!

Get Out Ice

This morning, read the news that 700 ICE agents will be leaving Minneapolis today. That’s good, but not nearly good enough. All of ICE should be leaving should not exist. On the way to Costco, driving near the road that leads to the Whipple Building where ICE brings the people they’ve arrested or kidnapped, Scott pointed out a truck hauling several Black Jeep Wagoneers entering the freeway. Black Jeep Wagoneers are the type of vehicle ICE often drives.

For much of the day, I was working on another love poem. I wanted to do another erasure poem, but so far, I’ve been struggling with it. Here’s some of the text that I’ve come up with:

Love #`13

My heart breaks
open, will stay
open
for all
who are feeling this occupation

Do I like it? I’m not sure. It all centers around a heart breaking open, instead of just breaking.

jan 26/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

bike: 35 minutes
run: 1.35 miles
outside: 13 degrees

Read a few pages of the Alice Oswald interview in the Paris Review then watched the Las Culturistas podcast with Amy Poehler while I biked. I love Alice Oswald and I love Amy Poehler. So good! I don’t have time right now, but when I do, I want to post some quotes from the podcast episode.

Listened to the first 3 songs on TS’s “Reputation” while I ran. It felt good, and I felt more relaxed than I have in many days. I think it’s the combination of almost being done with my 2-week cold, and news that some Republicans are taking back some of their more extreme statements in support of ICE. But, I know that we’re not close to being done with this nightmare.

1

I think there are places you build in the imagination that become stable. I love the metrical forms, the sonnet and the ballad, but to me the real thing is what I call patience, the idea of creating your own stability within a length of time. I responded to that when I discovered Homer. There was something in that poetry, because it was orally composed—I could feel Homer making forms of patience within the poem, lines coming back and coming back and then coming back. It makes habits. There’s something steady and reliable about its way of moving, while at the same time, it loops wherever it wants to go, and remakes itself.

 an interview with Alice Oswald

2

I could feel straightaway that Homer was quite different from the other types of poetry I’d read. I can remember, when I was told that he was blind, having this dizzy feeling of what a poem would be if you were hearing it and speaking it rather than reading it.

 an interview with Alice Oswald

This year, I want to keep pushing at this question of what a poem would/could be if you’re hearing it and speaking it instead of reading it? I want to do more poetry that does just that.

Get Out Ice

A slightly more helpful, less terrifying day than Saturday. Some Republicans are speaking out against the shooting of Alex Pretti, Walz talked to Trump and he agreed to send Greg Bovino somewhere else; Rand Paul is asking for ICE to testify at the hearing next month. Only very small successes that are possibly only offered to get Democrats to pass the budget and give ICE even more funding by the end of this week. Don’t do it Democrats!

I surrounded myself with the loving words of other Minnesotans again this morning, and created 2 more love poems. Here’s one, both are posted here.

Love #6: How to Be a Better Person

Hold space for pain, anger, confusion.
Make hope happen for others.
Open the door for love, close it in hate’s face.
Wear boots, a lot of wool, scarves, and mittens. Bring extras to share.
Believe in small acts: they matter.
Demand the exit of ICE from our beautiful cities.

jan 25/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

bike: 35 minutes
run: 1.5 miles
outside: 0 degrees

Still too cold and too icy (and ICE-y?) outside, so more time in the basement. Watched the men’s 2024 Kona Ironman while I biked and tried to focus on my posture and my knee lift. As always, I’m wondering why my left knee often gets stiff after biking for a while. Listened to Lawrence, Acoustic-ish while I ran. I tried to empty my mind, but bad thoughts crept in: how far will the federal government go to keep power? I’m always thinking of Heather Cox Richardson’s refrain: it’s going to get worse before it gets better and her prediction that it will go one way (the people win) or the other (democracy in the U.S. dies) by March — or did she say May? Ugh.

Get Out Ice

Still reeling from the terrible murder yesterday, but going to my block’s vigil and witnessing how Minnesotans stayed peaceful and people around the country/world expressing outrage, is helping a little.

I read a post on facebook about how hundreds of Target employees have signed a letter pushing the CEO to do more against ICE. In the post, it was mentioned how people are going to Target at the same time, buying salt, the immediately returning it, as a way to disrupt business. This action is modeled after an earlier one at Home Depot: buying ice scrapers then immediately returning them. Is this effective? Looked it up and found this Guardian article which describes many different actions against Target, including the salt:

On Martin Luther King Day, SURJ-TC said it had gathered 70 people at a Minnesota Target to “interrupt business as usual”. Participants repeatedly lined up to purchase salt, return it and repeat the process as a way to hold up lines, representing a desire “to melt ICE”, the organization wrote online. The organization plans to repeat this tactic at five Twin Cities Target stores until the company speaks out against ICE.

sit-ins and salt purchases: activism takes many forms

Alice Oswald

Started an interview with Alice Oswald in the Paris Review (thanks to my library, which makes it possible to check out current issues of some journals online!). So far, she’s talking about teaching Palestinian kids via Zoom and then getting arrested for protesting against the UK’s designation of Palestine Action as a terrorist group. When she’s asked if she planned on being arrested when she joined the protest, she said she did and:

One direct consequence of allowing genocide, though, is that, in order to excuse it, you have to pass all kinds of laws that destroy democracy from the inside. I’d been angry for a while, and confused about what to do, and as soon as I was decided, I felt a relief.

Paris Review

This is how she describe the arrest:

They read me my rights and asked whether I knew I was breaking the law, and did I want to come easily or did I want to be an obstruction. And I said, ‘I’m happy to be arrested, because I don’t believe it’s an offense,’ and that I didn’t want to come easily, and so I lay down and imagined my heaviest self. I was imagining I was made of gold or lead, just enjoying the difficulty the police were having picking me up.

Paris Review

I love this idea of imagining herself as her heaviest self, as gold or lead. Sometimes I like imagining myself as a boulder — I turned into some poetry lines: be a boulder/too big to/lift too much/trouble to/move.

When asked if she’s always considered herself an activist, she says:

Gilgamesh, the Illiad, the Bible, Paradise Lost — all the poems that profoundly shake me are really about how we manage kings. The texture of a life devoted to poetry is activist, in the deep sense. Quite often it’s not activist in the superficial sense. You come at poetry with the momentum of having failed. It’s only when other communication is absolutely impossible that a poems has to exist.

Paris Review

Yes! I feel that with my poetry about vision loss and the new ways I’m learning to see and be now.

Wow, there is so much in this interview that I love, so much about Oswald that I love, including her discussion of insects as speaking with wings instead of mouths. And then there’s this bit about an old woman, “an angry old battle-ax,” who had only ever been one village over:

I used to go up the road just to talk to her, and during one of these conversations she broke off because she’d heard a bumblebee go into a foxglove and change the tone of its buzz. She said, ‘Did you hear that? I love that sound.’ I remember thinking, If you don’t move away from a village, that’s the sort of thing you notice. I made a determination at the point that I wanted to be that sort of person.

Me too! Oh, thank you Alice Oswald for saying such beautiful and interesting things and making me imagine the current world otherwise for a few minutes!

jan 24/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

Yesterday was a beautiful day in Minneapolis, filled with fierce love as thousands of Minnesotans (I heard 50,000, but I’m not sure if that’s accurate), marched downtown. Today was terrible; another Minneapolis resident was executed by ICE. I’m struggling to write any words right now, but I wanted to at least write that.

bike: 30 minutes
run: 1 mile
-5 degrees

I hoped that working out might help me feel a little less overwhelmed and it did but not much. Guess I’ll have to try more deep breathing.

jan 22/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

bike: 33 minutes
run: 1.5 miles
basement
outside: -4 / feels like -22

Brrrr! And that wind! I was outside this morning, shoveling, but otherwise I’ve been inside. Devoted much of the day to surrounding myself with other Minnesotans words of love and solidarity, then turning them into a cento.

At the start of my bike, I watched the first episode of “Pluribus.” So good! Then I got to the lab scene with the rat and I realized it was too much for me right now. I found an old, “from the vault” 2018 triathlon on youtube and watched that instead. By the end of the bike, my left knee was feeling stiff, like it sometimes does. Hopped on the treadmill and listened to “Mood: Energy” while I ran. The first song was, “Harder Faster Stronger” and somehow it made me feel more anxious instead of less. But, Ok Go’s “Here it goes Again” helped.

Get Out Ice

Here’s what I posted on my new page, Love, Minnesota-style:

After Consulting with our Team, We Are Choosing Love / Sara Lynne Puotinen

This is a call to everyone. This is a call to anyone. 

Here, now, in Minneapolis, our hearts are open.
Here, now, in St. Paul, our hearts beat strong.
Here, now, in Minnesota, we are choosing to take the day
and fill it with resistance, solidarity, reflection, love.

Let us be clear: we are not powerless. 

We are not hopeless. 

Of course we have hope!
And we will find each other.
We will gather,
we will keep moving.

We must raise our voices 
to acknowledge, 
now is not okay.
ICE’s ongoing occupation is fascism.
We are afraid, we are angry, we are exhausted.
And we will continue to show up
and to fill the streets with love.

This is not about choosing sides,
this is about choosing love.

On Friday, January 23, 2026, there is a call for a general strike against ICE: ICE OUT MN. No work, no class, no shopping. As of 22 jan 2026, more than 500 local businesses are participating. 

Many of them have declared their show of solidarity through social media posts. For the past few days, I’ve been gathering their words and turning them into new poems. 

In today’s (1/22) practice, I typed up 3 pages of the words, printed them out, then sat at my desk and read and reread them. I wrote down words and phrases that I noticed on another blank sheet of paper with a jumbo pencil. Then I shifted those around and turned them into new lines. I don’t think it is finished, but I’ll post it here anyway.

jan 20/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

bike: 33 minutes
run: 1.5 miles
basement
outside: 11 degrees

Cold outside, ice on the paths, ICE on the streets. Even if the conditions were better, is it safe for me to go out for a run on my own? Since I am white, probably, but my vision is bad. It’s good enough to navigate the trail — cracks, bumps, curves — but not to get a sense of when I’m in danger. I can’t read signs — words, gestures, signals — and I can’t see faces or identify people well. Out by the river, if someone stopped me, would I be able to tell if they were ICE? If they were threatening me. I don’t know.

Am I being too cautious? Unsure. For now, I’ll go to the Y or the basement. I miss winter running.

Watched Jennifer Lawrence on Good Hang with Amy Poehler while I biked. It’s sponsored by Spotify, which I wish wasn’t the case. I thought it was funny when Amy asked Jennifer what her favorite song was and Jennifer said, ever since the radio went away, I can’t find new music. Where do you find it? I was expected Amy to answer with the obvious: I listen to Spotify. But she didn’t; she said she finds stuff on tik tok then buys it.

I listened to Mood: Energy again while I ran. Pressure / Billy Joel | No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn / Beastie Boys | Final Countdown / Europe | Iron Man / Black Sabbath. When I wasn’t thinking about ICE instead of iron, I heard a line about boots of lead and thought of Emily Dickinson and “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain” — And then I heard them lift a Box/ And creaked across my Soul/ With those same boots of Lead again / Then Space begin to Toll. Love that poem!

Get Out Ice

Earlier today, writing about my bike and run yesterday, I was feeling a bit extremely overwhelmed by the headlines I encountered on Facebook. I sat with those feelings for several hours. Then, I saw this video from the Minneapolis Art Sled Rally this past weekend, and I snapped out of the deepest fear:

Minneapolis Art Sled Rally / 17 January 2026

Such love, as joy, as whimsy, as defiance! I had an idea: I should post an expression and example of Minneapolis / Twin Cities / Minnesota love every day. These examples are not suggesting that things aren’t bad (they are), but are claiming space for a powerful counter-narrative to fear and defeat and Minneapolis-as-lawless-hellscape: Love! solidarity, care, joy. I’m going to try and post something on facebook every day, something I haven’t ever done. I used to be much more comfortable with social media, and tweeted all the time. Then my vision declined a lot and I lost interest. Then I became too intimidated by it, afraid that I’d do something wrong — this is not an unfounded fear; there are many buttons/directions posted that are very clear to others, but are invisible to me and my cone-starved eyes. But, I have decided to try again, to be brave and share these examples with others.

I have also decided to archive all these examples on a page in my “How to Be” project on UN || DISCIPLINED: Love, Minnesota-style

jan 19/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

bike: 10 minutes
run: 10 minutes
basement
4 degrees / feels like -5

note: I’m writing this first section the next morning because I exercised too late to write it then. I’m writing it after reading several headlines/accounts, watching a tiktok that describes how ICE agents are driving around looking for people who look black, brown, or asian to take. Without any cause, they pull these people out of their cars and take them away, leaving the car abandoned, sometimes still running, in the street. Or they break down their doors, pull them out of their houses, half-dressed (in below zero weather), and take them. I read a headline, posted by Senator Amy Klochubar,”St Paul mayor Kaohly Her “livid” after ICE wrongly targets family friend, escorts him undressed into cold and one from the city of St. Paul putting a temporary ban on towing abandoned vehicles. Unreal. Oh, and this was also after reading the message Trump sent to Norway explaining why he wanted Greenland (he didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize) and Heather Cox Richardson’s discussion of the significance of this — could this be the final straw? the one that removes him from office?

A quick bike and run in the early evening. Too late and too cold to be outside, and probably too dangerous. Being sick has also made me not want to go outside. Because I’m inside, I haven’t witnessed a lot of ICE activity. Although, even if I was outside, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t see it with my bad vision. I know it’s out there. They target schools, taking parents/kids who look black or brown or Asian, and we live less than 2 blocks from two of them. Just yesterday they were spotted driving through the alley near the end of school.

I watched a running youtuber’s latest video while I biked, listened to a Mood: Energy playlist while I ran. Didn’t think about much. I don’t remembering noticing much either. One thing: after getting off the bike, before putting in my headphones and firing up the treadmill, I could hear the music Scott was playing upstairs while he made popovers. I asked him later what it was, something by Debussy. That’s his comfort music, I think.

Get Out Ice

note: I wrote this on 19 jan, in the morning

Yesterday, I had a great idea: gather together statements by local businesses on social media about what’s happening here, then turn it into a cento poem. And that’s what I did this morning! So wonderful to spend time with words of solidarity and love (and not hate).

What is happening in Minneapolis is terrifying; what is happening in Minneapolis is full of hope. Earlier today, or was it yesterday?, someone posted on facebook about how NBC needs to work on its sloppy reporting, then gave an example: a reporter suggesting Minnesotans are reeling from the protests. Reeling? Not from the protests. The non-violent and fierce ways so many people in Minneapolis and St. Paul are bearing witness and standing together against ICE is inspiring and beautiful and powerful embodiments of love. Here’s my poem:

Love

Love is not
business as
usual.
Love is not
a business.
Love is
a warm place
to land.
Generous
open
big enough
to hold
all who sit
who stand
who show up
for each other
even in fear
and in grief.

Love is a
space where
our hearts our
mouths our feet
our hands
our eyes
activate
love making
love living
love resisting.

In this heavy
moment, we
want to be
clear: we
no longer
accept hate.

And with
these words, we
affirm
what we know
always
to be true:
We love, we love, we love.

The statements I used come from the following businesses: Lynette, Hai Hai, Dogwood Coffee, Fireroast Coffee, Arbeiter Brewing, Venn Brewing, Mother Earth Gardens, Bull’s Horn, Black Coffee and Waffle Bar, Wrecktangle Pizza, Carbone’s, Longfellow Grill, Merlins Rest.

I’d like to do more of these. I’d also like to use this practice as a way to: develop a rich, messy understanding of love, to counter the narratives that suggest Minneapolis is violent and dangerous and needs/deserves to be occupied and punished.

jan 18/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

bike: 30 minutes
run: 1.5 miles
basement
outside: 100% snow-covered / 12 degrees

I’m inside partly because I’m congested, partly because it’s cold, and partly because I’m a little more nervous to be out there alone these days. I miss the gorge. If I’m feeling better tomorrow, maybe I’ll go out for a short run. At the start of the bike, I struggled to stick with something to watch. I started with The Terminator — too dystopian — then switched to the first season of “The Traitors,” which I’ve been meaning to check out (for some reason I can’t quite remember). It was too much about manipulation and tricking people and not trusting anyone. Finally I landed on the first season of Schmigadoon. Will I return to on my next bike? I’m not sure. I love the show, I watched it when it came out, but I’m not sure I want to watch it again.

For the run, I put in a Mood: Energy playlist. It started with Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” then “Hip to be Square,” then a song I can’t remember, then ended with “Bust a Move.” A strange mix. The run wasn’t too hard, but it wasn’t easy, and I sweat a lot.

Even though I was in the dark, windowless basement, and it was boring on the bike and the treadmill, it felt good to move. The crud in my throat cleared up some, and I felt less tired. Ah, I love moving!

Get Out Ice (written earlier)

Still a little sick — crud in my throat, creaky voice, sinus headache — but feeling much better. I’m so proud of my city and my neighbors and the mayors of Minneapolis (Jacob Frey) and St. Paul (Kaohey Her — the first Hmong American mayor!) and my governor and senators and the attorney general and the congressional representative for my district (Ihlan Omar) and so many of the businesses nearby. All standing up with a fierce love for the people of Minnesota. Such beautiful and powerful expressions of resistance and love!

Keeping the Receipts

Speaking of neighborhood businesses, I’ve been struck by how powerful expressions of love and solidarity are in this moment, and how damning silence is. At the very least, I think a restaurant/business should express a concern for their own workers and acknowledge a need for the safety. This is not a political statement; it is a statement of concern and care for their workers and the community. Scott, FWA, and I were talking about it, and Scott mentioned examples around the city that he has encountered/read about, like, “No ICE” or “We love our immigrant neighbors.” I wrote about Lynette’s instagram statement two days ago and here are some other statements by nearby businesses:

1

At Merlins, hospitality isn’t just what’s on the table. It’s how we show up for the people around us. We stand with our immigrant community. We stand with those feeling shaken, overwhelmed, or unsure. And we stand for the innocent people who deserve to feel safe, seen, and welcome.

If you need a warm place to land, a moment of normalcy, or just to sit among neighbors who care—our doors are open. Always.

Community first. People first. Humanity first.

Merlins Rest Facebook post / 15 jan

2

Closing Early Wednesday January 7th

Out of an abundance of caution we will be closing early today to help protect our neighbors, guests, and staff as we stand with our community.

We truly appreciate your understanding and look forward to serving you again soon.

Hi-Lo Diner / Facebook post, 7th January

3

Everything going on in our city is horrific, that is true. It is also true that we are resilient and adaptable and fueled by our love and care for one another. We will continue to show up, stay alert, and support the growing needs of our community.

Mother Earth Gardens / 14 january

4

You know where we stand. We are stronger together! We know how familiar this feels. We know how to activate our hearts and stand with our community. 

We will always create space to support our neighbors who have been participating in the “good trouble, necessary trouble”, to gather and be together. 

Join us on Saturday, bring your ICE Whistle in solidarity for one free beer with the community. Thank you Southside for taking care of each other and showing up!

Arbeiter Brewing / Instagram Post / 10 January

5

Our posture & sentiment as we stand alongside & amidst our hometown:

May our collective hearts be moved by loss & injustice,
our eyes see past the vain theatre of division.

May our hands open widely in generosity towards all others,
our feet move us in the direction of restorative peace.

May our minds construct new pathways for welcome & belonging,
our mouths speak with empathy & devotion.

May we not forget,
We are all bound to each other – siblings across this earth.

Dogwood Coffee / Instagram post / 10 January

The nearby pub that we’ve been haunting for the past few years — literally haunting; we go there at least once a week — has made no statement, is only using social media to advertise their specials. Scott has reached out to them several times asking why they haven’t said anything about what’s going on. So far, no response. It’s (long past) time to only haunt places that are here for our community.

And, here’s another example of love and support for the community. Hai Hai is not in my neighborhood, but it’s a restaurant I’ve been wanting to go to for almost a year. Now is the time — just not next Friday, when it’s closed for the protest!

Hola Arepa & Hai Hai will be closed on Friday, January 23 in support of the general strike to remove ICE from our cities and get justice for Renee Good. It is important to us to stand with our community in fighting against these injustices and to allow our teams the opportunity to protest or to take a day off for much needed rest and reflection. 

Choosing to close on a Friday night in January is not an easy decision for a small business during a notoriously slow time of the year, but we feel it’s important to take a stand and acknowledge that as long as ICE is occupying our city, it’s not business as usual.

Hai Hai / Fadebook post / 27 January

This is not business as usual. Yes! They continue with some useful ways for supporting them:

If you want to support us and your other favorite restaurants, please choose a different night this week as your Friday. Taco Wednesday date night? Sunday family brunch hang? Or buy a gift card for a future visit. It’s a difficult time for Mpls & St Paul small businesses everywhere, so every bit counts and your support means the world to all of us and our teams.

an idea! Tomorrow, gather a range of statements from local businesses and turn them into a cento poem about love.

Silence Will Not Protect You

As I think about the importance of publicly acknowledging what is happening, I keep thinking about Audre Lorde and her powerful essay, “The Transformation of Silence Into Language” from Sister Outsider. I studied this essay/book 25 years ago in grad school and taught in 15 or so years ago.

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?

We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

Beast Mode Mary

I continue to be shocked/delightfully surprised by the relevance of Little House on the Prairie to life in the US these days. Last night, Scott and I watched “The Bully Boys” (season 3, episode 9). Three brothers — 2 adults, 1 teenager — move into Walnut Grove and begin conning, intimidating, assaulting Walnut Grove. They buy stuff from the Olesons on credit, but never pay; they “buy” lumber from Mr. Hanson, then sell it to another of his customers; they “assault” Ma (in the scene they harass her, make her drop her eggs, restrain her, but there seems to be a suggestion of even worse things happening); they beat the shit out of Pa when he confronts them, breaking 3! of his ribs; and the youngest brother punches Mary and gives her a black eye. Reverend Alden counsels his congregation to turn the other cheek and to welcome the men. Mary tries to cover up what happened and to avoid Bubba — that’s the kid-bully’s name. But near the end, during recess, he steals her school tablet, and that, along with learning what has happened to Ma and Pa at the hands of the older brothers, is a bridge too far for Mary. She goes Beast Mode on Bubba — tackling and punching him. When he fends her off, another girl tackles him, then another. Finally, all the girls — maybe a dozen — jump on him and whoop his ass. Silent, weakened by fear and separation, they suffered alone at the hands of the bully. Together, they were strong and defiant and powerful. Inspired by the girls, Reverend Alden calls out the men at church as doing the devil’s work, pins one of them against the wall (Beast Mode Reverend!), and rallies the men of Walnut Grove to run the bullies out of town — Take only what you brought with you! As they march out in disgrace, the women sing, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory. No, I don’t agree with everything in this episode, but wow, was it wonderful to watch it and recognize what Minneapolis is doing right now (just one example for yesterday)

One more thing: I love this woman.

jan 8/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

minneapolis update: peaceful protests last night, more protests today, Noem/Trump are attempting to escalate it, Walz calls for peaceful protests and “good trouble”, FBI takes investigation away from Minnesota, public school is cancelled for rest of the week after ICE enters campus and threatens staff/students at Roosevelt High School (the threatening was yesterday, the cancellation begins today).

And, just discovered this: Renee Nicole Good was a poet who won an award for this poem: On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs

bike: 30 minutes
basement
run: 2 miles

Icy outside, so inside on the bike and the treadmill. Important to get in some exercise for stress relief. Watched clips from the US figure skating championships while I biked, listened to Mood: Energy” while I ran. Songs: Panama/ Van Halen; We Got the Beat/ Go Gos; I did Something Bad/ Taylor Swift; My Sharona/ The Knack — an at least one other song I can’t remember now. It felt good to move, especially for the second mile of my run. A few times, I felt like I was floating. The thing I remember most: my bobbing shadow off to the side, in the shadows, near the old coal shoot — yes, my house is old enough to have a coal shoot in the basement.

Wow, this poem:

[from the time we were talking]/ Henri Meschonnic

Translated from the French by Gabriella Bedetti & Don Boes

from the time we were talking
to stones
we took on their
meaning their time and now
their memory is in us it
walks in our footsteps it moves
in our warmth we no
longer distinguish
between what they say and us
the time of the stones is us and
we are full of cries that we
leave in our wake like
stones
holding on to each other
to find among them our
path

This morning, barely one day after a woman was shot and killed by ICE here in Minneapolis, this poem speaks to me in a different way than it would have the day before. Before I would have thought about the time of stones as living in geologic time or talking to/with/as stones as echoes or Kafka’s parable of Prometheus in which Prometheus becomes part of the rock (“According to the second, Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.”) but now I’m thinking of the stones — like Emily Dickinson’s granite lip — as tombs and the dead talking (or trying to) talk to us:

If I couldn’t thank you,
Being fast asleep,
You will know I’m trying
With my Granite lip!  

jan 4/BIKE

30 minutes
basement

A bike in the basement to get my legs moving and to have the chance to watch something. Started with the next episode of Wednesday but, when she encountered another man with his eyes pecked out, then peered into his gaping mouth and was assaulted by a stream of crows emerging from said mouth, I didn’t know if I wanted to keep watching. Then she quipped, he was murdered by a murder of crows, and I did know, I didn’t. Next up: the new, 2025 version of Frankenstein. I got as far as the scene where the “monster” begins attacking the crew of a ship heading for the North Pole, but it was too violent for me. Then, I tried Train Dreams and made it to the part when the main character (who is white) is working for a railroad and his sawing partner — a Chinese immigrant — is dragged away from his work by 4 white men and thrown off of a high trestle. Too much for me today, I guess. I remembered that I was in the middle of watching a documentary about the poet, Charles Olson. So I found that, and managed to stick with it for the last 10 or so minutes of my bike. Sometimes I can find something to watch right away, and sometimes I can’t stick with anything. I should make a list of videos to watch before my next bike ride.

wrapping up the old year as I start the new one

Began working on my end of the year review. Realized that I’ve created a lot of new poetic forms. I should document that on my writing portfolio site. Decided I want to have a separate page titled, a year in pictures, since I posted pictures several times. After finishing this entry, I’ll get back to my 2025 cento. I’m not sure I like what I wrote yesterday.

Speaking about the new year, it started with a bang. Trump invaded Venezuela without congressional approval early Saturday morning. Heather Cox Richardson’s latest video does an excellent job of clearly describing why this is such a big deal. According to her, Trump and his administration are in a desperate position and are going to try a lot of bad shit (my words, not hers) to solidify their power. In the next 3+ months (she imagines we will know by May) either his Putin-esque totalitarian regime will take firm hold OR the American people will reclaim democracy and laws will be enforced. It’s going to get bad — much worse — before it gets better, if it gets better.

HCR on 3 jan 2025

All of this sounds bad, and it is, but HCR presents it in a way that is not sensationalized and is informed, informative, and offers hope and a chance for doable action.

note for future Sara: near the beginning of the video she mentions that some people are speculating Trump will do something big for the 5th anniversary of January 6th. Sara from 6 jan 2026, let us know what happens. Hopefully nothing.

update, 3 feb 2026: It’s bad, worse than you might have imagined.

dec 29/SHOVELBIKEWALK

shovel: 30 minutes
12 degrees / feels like 0
bright sun

The official word is that MSP (airport), which is only a couple of miles away, got 5.8 inches of snow. It wasn’t too hard to shovel; thankfully it got a lot colder yesterday and overnight. No longer heart attack snow. Under the powdery stuff, there was some crust, but it didn’t seem too slippery either. I would love to go out for a run by the gorge, but I don’t think that’s a good idea for my glute/hip/back. It’s tough to resist.

10 Things

  1. bright blue sky
  2. warm sun on my face
  3. fogged up sunglasses
  4. an unsettling creaking noise above me: some frozen branches on our big maple in the front which seems to be dying (evidence: big branches have already fallen this fall + several woodpeckers have been drumming on the wood)
  5. the whiny rumble of a snow blower in the distance
  6. a cold spray on my face when the wind blew some of the snow I’d just shoveled
  7. the recycling and trash can lids frozen shut
  8. rabbit prints along the side of the house, near the garage
  9. a sharp rumble nearby: another slow blower, closer and in the alley
  10. sprawled branches of the crab apple tree, weighed down with snow and ice

bike: 35 minutes
basement

Resisted the urge to go outside and run; biked in the basement instead. Almost finished the first episode of season 2 of Wednesday. Like in the first season, she attends a boarding school, Nevermore. Did I know that Edgar Allan Poe was the founder? Probably. Some outcasts are psychics or wolves, can control bugs or shoot electricity out of their fingertips. I can’t remember if there’s only one siren or more. This season has Steven Buscemi as the principal and a scar-faced crow. It was helpful to watch the episode with audio description on — such relief to actually see and understand and to not not know what is going on. Yes, that is a double negative, and yes, I meant to write it — the feeling of uncertainty is not knowing, so the relief is in not being in that state of not knowing: to not not know

walk: 20 minutes
neighborhood
13 degrees

Managed to convince Scott to go outside for a quick walk around the block. It was cold, especially walking into the wind, but I had hand warmers in my gloves, which helped a lot. Scott did not, so he was very cold, and didn’t want to walk for long.

What did I notice? One neighbor had put salt down on their sidewalk (boo). Most of the sidewalks were shoveled. The street 2 blocks over had lights strung up from one end of the street to the other. I never see these lit up, because I don’t walk this way at night. A friendly woman greeted us halfway down another block — hello! / hi!. She was giving treats to a cute dog. Anything else? I can’t remember.

Found a purple poem earlier this morning:

an excerpt from Language Lessons/ Judith Kiros

Translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson with Judith Kiros

is it only words. On and on. If you shook up the words. On a
particular shade of purple being extracted from spiraling shells.
If the repetition had less to do with the broken-apart sea, see my
skin and my arms rippling like a wave, on and on again, I’ve
dyed them navy. On receiving a gift in your childhood, a purple
doll with foaming skirts, beneath them nothing, between her
legs nothing, what a perfect wave of black nymph. On violet.
Or on lavender. On being lowered into an ocean of colors. On
your head being pushed beneath the surface, on and on again,
to the tune of seashells knotting their purple insides. Don’t give
yourself up for free; there is a point in talking back to the sea. On
a particular shade of vague purple. On the way a shadow struts,
violet, across the page.

a particular shade of purple: tyrian purple, made from snail shells
violet, lavender, being lowered into an ocean, pushed beneath the surface: this makes be think of Alice Oswald and Nobody and Odysseus and his purplish-blueish cloak

I like the idea of being lowered into an ocean of colors
shade of vague purple

My favorite: the way a shadow struts,/violet, across the page

I love the word strut, especially when it involves a shadow! Immediately, it reminds me of another favorite line from “My Invisible Horse and the Speed of Human Decency “/ Matthew Olzmann:

I’m not asking for much.  A more tender world 

with less hatred strutting the streets.

Also discovered this morning: Fragment Thirty-six / HD and the reading guide by Dan Beachy-Quick — I’d like to return to this some other day, when I have time.

one final note: I have posted a log entry, either running or biking, on this day every year that I’ve written in this log: 2017-2025. Tomorrow, I’d like to experiment with mashing up or combining or erasing or scrambling or cutting up the words in these entries to make a new piece of writing — most likely, a poem.

dec 28/SHOVELBIKE

shovel
26 degrees

Winter storm warning today. Heavy, wet snow, up to 8 inches possible. It’s supposed to snow all day, but there was enough of a break for me to get outside and clear some of it away. In the middle of shoveling, it started snowing again, but now, less than hour later, it has stopped again — or, at least slowed.

This snow is the bad kind — not powdery or soft, but heavy and wet. Heart attack snow. Branch breaking snow. Power lines going down snow.

While I shoveled, I wore one of Scott’s mom’s winter coats and RJP’s Christmas present: a crocheted neck warmer, in light green with purple trim. So well made — very warm and comfortable!

No running today. My glute/hip pain is back. It aches sometimes when I sit for too long. I need to run 1.7 miles to reach my goal of 950 miles, but I have until Wednesday, so I won’t push it!

a few hours earlier

Looking out the window above my desk and watching the snow fall, I discovered this poem:

Origins/ Laura Ann Reed

Nowhere but in the occasional dream
can I know again
with certainty
those hills, the dead-end road,

the solace of so often walking—
with such little thought
as to where time was leading me—

                    to the place

where the asphalt gave way
to stone, dust,
and an amber imbroglio of manzanita.

No longer fluent in my primal dialect,
the tones rising with the sap
of the blue eucalyptus, I can only recall

that I thought like a child.
And reasoning like a child, I thought
it best to keep secret

                    the certainty of my love

for the aromatic leaves,

        the strips of bark day by day
        peeling back to expose

the radiant layers: a gesture

        toward the desperation to be known.

more time with the safari reading list

1 — an interview with Fanny Howe (FH) in the Kenyon Review (KR) / bewilderment, openness, fear, and secularizing belief

KR: But a tinker, a traveler, is often a searcher, and as you’ve said, lyric is searching for something that can’t be found. In one of your essays you describe a “poetics of bewilderment” which is very intriguing to me: “An enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability.” To me that sounds like a frightening state of being. Not a little mess, but a big one! Is that frightening to you?

FH: I think it is frightening. Staying completely open to what might happen and trying not to prefigure what is coming at you is frightening. The imagination is in jeopardy. Belief is bold. There’s a philosopher I like called Gianni Vattimo and he’s written a book called Belief (he is a nihilist) and in it he talks about the secularization of belief and turns it into a positive event, being the collapse of hierarchical structure; and he says that Christ was attempting to secularize belief, to return it to the ground. And one of the terms he uses is infinite plurality, that the relations and contingencies that mark your movement through time are always taking place in ways that are outside judgment and imagination. That is sort of where I would like to stand, without being terrified. It involves an openness.

Fanny Howe Interview 2004

openness is anti-control

KR: Openness to. . . ?

FH: To . . . everything . . . it’s like seeing the future coming at you instead of yourself walking into the future. It’s a reversal of the time relationship, so that you have to welcome it because it’s approaching and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. That’s the best way I can describe it. It is definitely anticontrol.

currently watching

Scott and I are currently making our way through “Little House on the Prairie.” Last night’s episode was about Laura and Mary, and their sexist/idiot friend Carl, getting stuck on a runaway caboose. It was awesome, especially when Pa ripped some dude off of his horse so he could “borrow” a fresh horse to catch up to the train. As great as that episode was, it couldn’t compare to the one the night before in which Ma is trapped in the house, alone, with tetanus. She’s losing it — passing out in the rain, passing out on the floor — but still has enough wherewithal to heat up a big knife and cut out the infection before passing out again. Damn. This show is dark, and I love it.

Also watched: Die Hard as our Christmas movie, which was also excellent, and The Thursday Murder Club, with a fabulous cast.

And, started a great Poetry in America episode about Robert Pinsky’s poem “Shirt.”

bike: 20 minutes
basement

several hours later: Still snowing. Decided to do a quick bike ride before Scott took over the basement to record. Not much of a workout, but it felt good to move my legs and get my heart rate up a little. Finally started watching the new season of Wednesday — season 2. I can’t remember when it came out — last fall?

dec 20/BIKERUN

bike: 30 minutes
run: 1.5 miles
basement

Windy, icy, cold, so I decided to stay inside. Finally began watching The Thursday Murder Club while I biked. I like it; especially with audio descriptions. Listened to my new audiobook, Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars, while I ran.

No great thoughts or images on the bike or the treadmill. Just a chance to be distracted from difficult feelings — frustration, worry, regret, sadness — felt as I try to help FWA figure out his future.

a fun experiment

For many years now, I’ve been thinking about how I might be able to use a text that’s been meaningful to me in my thinking and writing about the Mississippi River Gorge: a 2002 Gorge Management Plan prepared by Great River Greening. In writing about the gorge, I’ve often referred back to this 140 page document for information about the geography, geology, ecology, and cultural/social history of the area. And I’ve thought about using its text in some way. An erasure poem? A blackout? Those are the two types of found poetry that I’m most familiar with. Today, reading an interview with Lisa Olstein about her new collection, Distinguished Office of Echoes, I was reminded of a third type of found poetry: cut-outs. Here’s an excerpt and another from the book. My first reaction: yes, I should try this! But then, as I (tried to) read Olstein’s examples, I realized that these poems aren’t accessible and are almost impossible for me to read. I don’t want to write in a form that I can’t even read myself. But, maybe I can think about/think through another version of found poetry that is accessible to readers (like me) that have low vision or no vision.

A first thought: find phrases or one syllable words that can be made into chants/running rhythms.

Another thought: expand the words I’m using to include original sources from Horace WS (William Shaler) Cleveland. Maybe, find something in here?

And, I’m realizing that this idea of writing something with Cleveland’s words is leading me a project I’ve been thinking about for a few years: ekphrastic poems + how I see + writing about the gorge/gorge management as a work of art as ekphrastic + anti/anti-pastoral poems. Just the other day I was thinking — maybe I wrote about it, too — about 2 directions I could go for 2026: M(e)y(e) Emily Dickinson, on ED’s vision poems and their importance for me, and How I See — ekphrastic/pastoral/visual art.

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 13/BIKERUN

bike: 36 minutes
basement
outside: 2 degrees / feels like -6

Feels like -6 isn’t too cold for me, but I’m still trying to be careful with my right glute/hip and the snowy, uneven paths seemed like a bad idea. So, I biked and ran in the basement instead. While I biked, I watched the Brooks High School Girls Cross Country Championships. Wow, those girls are fast! And mentally tough. The hills on that course look awful.

As I finished my bike, RJP came down the stairs. She comes over almost every day (from her apartment) to say hi and see Delia. I took a break and we had a great talk about her latest success with knitting and using breathing patterns in deciding how often to knit and purl and the value of small goals that are designed to be about cumulative success instead of one big achievement. I mentioned SWOLF and asked her if she had any good acronyms for it:

Swimming with octopi, looking for fish
Sara wishes October lasted forever

run!: 1.25 miles
treadmill

Last week, Scott tried the treadmill and the belt wouldn’t move, but it did today. Hooray! And I ran without pain during or after the run. Excellent. Did my old treadmill routine of listening to the first few songs of Taylor Swift’s Reputation as I ran. I listened to “Look What You Made Me Do” on my cool down walk and decided that it would be a good song to listen to on the track while doing some speed work. Moderate pace in the verses, much faster in the chorus. I’ll have to try it next week.

Echoes, a Quarry and hybridizing echolocations

A few hours earlier, I came across and wonderful submissions call for the journal, Waxwing:

 Send us your work that hybridizes, blends, resists the boundaries between fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art.

Waxwing wants to publish fiction and nonfiction that can stand alongside poetry: stories and essays where language is the primary concern. We seek writing that is like the characters and creatures we named the journal after—Daedalus made something that had never before existed, Icarus joyfully dared to do what hadn’t been done, and the eponymous birds seem to be what they’re not. We’re interested in narratives that risk, that come close to failing but land on the other side, not in the sea, and like the red tips of feathers that look like sealing wax, we love flourishes. We’re not interested in virtuosity that pleases the masses, but we do crave intensity, and stories that feel a little dangerous. We seek to showcase the particular and the peculiar, the odd and the revelatory—we want to read stories and essays that make us feel like we are learning something, even if it’s something we can’t quite explain. 

Waxwing Submissions

I’m trying to put something together from my manuscript and my echolocation project. At the end of my draft, I have a piece titled, “Echoes: a Quarry.” It is a list of all of the one, two, and three syllable words from my poems. I collected them and used them to create my rock, river, and air echo/chant poems. I want to do some thing with sound (me reading the words altogether, and online — Scott said he could do write code that would scramble up the words to make new chants) and with visuals (a map locating the echoes. I’ll spend the rest of the day trying to think through it.

An experiment with quarrying words. Find all of the one, two, and three syllable words in a favorite poem. Turn them into a new poem that offers echoes of the original.

Before I got my eye put out/ Emily Dickinson

1

I
got
my

eye

put

out
liked
well
see
have
know
way
told
me
might
Sky
mine
tell
heart
would
split
size
stars
much
noon
take
could
birds
road
look
when
news
strike
dead
so
guess
just
soul
pane
sun

2

before
other
creatures
today
meadows
mountains
forest
stintless
between
finite
motions
dipping
morning’s
amber
safer
upon
window

3

incautious

My poem:

Today stars
are in 

motion, in-
cautious

of birds, Sun.
I see

my way split
before

the noon sky.
Tell me,
dead eyes (mine) —
finite,

dipping be-
tween soul’s

meadow and
heart’s forest —
when it
is safer
to look.

dec 10/SHOVELBIKE

60 minutes
4 inches
22 degrees

Not sure why 4 inches took almost an hour to do, but it did. The snow was light and dry and easy to push around but I had a lot of area to cover: a front sidewalk, back sidewalk, side sidewalk, small driveway and a deck. All with a shitty shovel. Now, I’m tired. But I don’t care. While I shoveled, I listened to a musical I’ve never heard before — or only heard one of its songs: 3 Bedroom House — Bat Boy. I liked it, well, most of it. One thing that stood out to me: the songs actually told the story. Usually, if I’m listening to a musical and I don’t know the whole story, the songs don’t help, or they give me some of the story but leave crucial bits out. Camelot, I’m talking to you.

A few minutes later, talking to Scott about the musical, I realized how fitting it is to be listening to it — bats! The title of my manuscript is Echo | | location!

10 Things

  1. a group of young kids — in elementary school, I think — walking to school, laughing, calling out, stopping to throw snowballs at each other
  2. 2 women (moms?) pulling occupied sleds towards a school (1.5 blocks away), then empty sleds back again a few minutes later
  3. a burnt coffee smell
  4. a car with an engine that needs a tune-up pulling up to the daycare next door — sputtering
  5. a little girl getting out the car, trudging through deep snow
  6. robins bursting out of our crab apple tree in the backyard
  7. a thick slab of snow on each of our three garbage cans (organics, trash, recycling) looking like vanilla frosting
  8. a neighbor down the alley starting a snow blower
  9. the sharp, scratchy scrap of the metal tip of our bright green shovel on bare sidewalk
  10. the creak/groan of our wrought-iron gate

more manuscript

Thanks to past Sara who left the tab open . . .

the kids next door just came out to play in the front yard — SNOW!, one kid yelled. They’re completely covered in snowsuits, with their hoods up — I used to be annoyed by these kids, but I’ve grown to really like them. They’re always so kind to RJP and FWA when they see them. HAPPY SNOW DAY — a woman called out to them. HAPPY SNOW DAY!!! — one girl replied.

. . . who left the tab open on the computer to an entry in which I talk about daylighting, I remembered that I wanted to write a poem about it, that is, the effort/desire to bring buried creeks aboveground again. Yes! And I’ll put it in the river section, which needs at least one more poem. Before shoveling, I had the idea to take lines from different descriptions of these creeks/springs/ghost rivers and turn them into a cento.

As I shoveled and listened to a line in Bat Boy: the Musical about being let into the light, I had a flash of a thought and a line:

Being outside —
less the light
more the air

I was thinking about how I want to move away from reinforcing the idea that light = good, and dark = bad. Sometimes, with my vision I want/need more light, and sometimes it’s too bright, too much. I don’t mind the dark. I was also thinking about how much I crave/need fresh air. But — maybe for the underground streams it is not a need of air, but space, the room to flow naturally over the topography instead of being buried in a concrete coffin.

okay — these kids are too cute. They just said hi to FWA (as he walked by with Delia) — HI! Have a good day! And now they’re greeting everyone as they walk by, and everyone is returning their greeting with enthusiasm. Hi! / Hi! Are you having fun in the snow? / Yes! . . . FWA came back from the walk and I asked him about the kids. He told me that they said they liked his dog and then the littlest one said something he couldn’t understand — blah blah blah named Soda. He said, What?, and she repeated, blah blah blah named Soda. FWA replied, oh, you have a dog named Soda? That’s cute!

exhumation of streams from underground and reintroduction of them to the surface

exhuming
of bodies —
buried streams
coffined creeks
returned to
the surface
not only
to light, but
open space
and their place
of origin
(or open space/and their source)

Today, I’ll start with these sources for inspiration:

Reaching the Light of Day
“The Urban Mile: The Subterraeam Streams of St. Paul in Subterraean Twin Cities
Daylighting Phalen Creek
 Bridal Veil Falls

(hours later) I read the above sources, and fit some phrases into my triple (berry) chant form. I think I can some of these and shape them into a poem!

urban

waterways

the same path
but below,
under our
feet, under
the ground

natural
waterways —
flow through top-
ography

of a landscape

collective
memory

water, un
ruly, will
not be man-

aged
refuses

to obey

cities, planned
neighborhoods
rooted, creeks
rerouted

caverns, sink
holes, passage
ways deep in

archive of
memory
reflection
on all that
has been lost

she wonders
what a day-
lighted world
could look like

a pipe — the
container
for a
muted stream

not lost, but
forgotten
hidden from
view, walled-in
yet 
flowing still

down here it’s
difficult
to trace the

pedigree
of a pipe
to unearth
its stories
to trace its
influence,
on a place
its people

a creek, its
meadows and
woodlands re-
placed with new
neighbors: streets,
tunnels, pipes,
ditches, wells,
basements for

new houses.
once mighty
waterway
turned from creek
to brook to
rill to no
thing that could
be seen.
industry
buried the
creek that fed
the falls

from a
300
acre wet
land that fed
a creek that
followed
a bank that
spilled over
a ledge and
into a
river, lots
platted, a
street grid
 laid,
a railroad

arrives, ponds
filled, a
freeway built,
neighborhoods
developed

Some things I’d like to remember from what I read: some of the falls/springs/creeks by the river have dried up, no longer exist, others are not lost, only buried, housed in sewer pipes, flowing through massive underground tunnels. In Subterranean Twin Cities, the author — Greg Brick — mentioned how difficult and costly it would be to even attempt to get rid of these waterways altogether. Burying these creeks privileges a particular set of values over other values, comes at the expense of certain communities, cuts people off from their histories, their connection to a place, their waterways.

echoes of the past, of the still-present waterways: seeps, springs, sewer pipes — the dripping or trickling or flushing gushing rushing of water in ravines — it’s all around, and always there when she runs.

bike: 25 minutes
basement

After sitting for much of the day and feeling a twinge in my right glute (maybe) because of it*, I decided to do a short bike ride in the basement. I watched a short feature on a triathlete I like, Taylor Spivey. It felt good to move and get my heart rate up a little — avg. of 120 — from my resting rate of 54. My range = 49-142. All the running and swimming has given me a very fit heart, I think.

*either reasons why I have a glute twinge: overdid the 1/2 pigeon pose in my yoga session yesterday or a delayed reaction to the uneven snow-covered paths.

Last week, Scott tried the treadmill and it wouldn’t work at all. I decided to see if, magically, it had fixed itself. Yes! It was working. I only walked today, but it’s nice to know that if I’m snowed in, I could run in the basement again.

nov 26/BIKERUN

bike: 16 minutes
run: 1.25 miles
basement

It rained, then snowed last night. Today: 2 inches of icy snow on the ground. Even so, I decided to go out for a run. I got bundled up and headed out. Almost immediately I realized it was too icy and my legs and feet tensed up. I was less worried that I would slip and fall, and more that I would run strangely and strain something. So I ran for a few blocks, then turned up a block and walked back. It was disappointing because it felt good to be outside, to breathe in the cold air. Returning, I heard a strange, almost squeaking, creaking noise. I thought it might be some branches rubbing near a fence, but when I looked at them I couldn’t see anything. A minute later, I encountered a woman with a dog. She called out, it’s the sandhills! they’re migrating! I said — oh, they’re up in the sky?! how cool! I’m assuming she meant sandhill cranes — I just looked it up and yes, it was Sandhill cranes! I listened to their call and it sounded like what I was hearing earlier. Nice! I’m so glad I got outside!

Before I biked, I had to put my bike back on the stand and pump up the tires. It’s the first indoor bike of the season. I watched the rest of Lucy Charles Barclay’s race recap from the 70.3 World Champs. I’m always impressed with the mental toughness of the professional runners and triathletes.

Running on the treadmill wasn’t fun. I needed better music — and a better attitude, I guess. I’d rather be running outside or at the ywca track. I listened to a podcast, which didn’t help me forget that I was running in the dark basement on a treadmill. I’m still glad I did it and that I can burn some energy in the basement when the weather is too bad to be outside or to drive to the y.

sept 21/RUNBIKE

2 miles
lake street bridge and back
70 degrees

Went out for my run just before noon. Too hot! Running north, nearing the lake street bridge, I heard some chanting and drums. People marching on the lake street bridge, heading to the capital. I just back from a weekend with my college friends. Friends for 29 years. Amazing.

bike: 5 miles
minnehaha park
71 degrees

Biked to Minnehaha Park and the falls in the early evening. At some point, a downpour. Luckily we were under the awning. The falls were roaring, A busker was playing saxophone. A tiny human in a blanket, looking like a jedi, was marching. Lots of dogs. A wonderful night at the falls. Biking homd, after the rain, everything wet. Fall!

sept 17/RUNBIKESWIM

4 miles
the monument and back
72 degrees
humidity: 80% / dew point: 64

More gnats, more heat, more sweat. Ran over the lake street bridge and up the summit hill to the Monument. Ran the first mile, did 2 minutes running/ 1 minute walking for the second mile, and mostly running, some walking for the rest. My right knee was sore because the kneecap slid out last night. I had to pop it back into place by going up and down the stairs. When it slides out it rubs the tendons or ligaments or something and they’re sore the next day. No big deal.

10 Things

  1. a bunch of kids sitting on the sidewalk outside of the church with the daycare — an adult called out to some other adult, I checked the website. They should be picking them up by 9
  2. a gnat flew into my eye — all the way, now the corner of my eye is sore
  3. no rowers on the river, only small waves
  4. peering over the side on the lake street bridge, checking out the sandbar. How far below the surface is it? How deep is the water around it?
  5. the faint sound of falling water at shadow falls
  6. a railing in front of a neighbor’s house, adorned with garlands and lights
  7. several wide cracks on the trail halfway down the summit hill, outlined in orange
  8. running up the summit hill, hearing a biker slowly approaching then creeping past me
  9. checking my watch during a walk break, the numbers blurred and difficult to see — a combination of my bad vision and feeling slightly dizzy/dazed from the heat
  10. the jingling of my house key in my pack, the thudding of my pack against my shorts

I don’t remember much from the run because it was hot and tiring. What did I think about?

Listened to kids, cars, random voices, and a dog barking running to the Monument. Put in my “The Wheeling Life” playlist on the way back. First song up, “Day by Day” from Godspell. In this song., the wheel is moving forward, progressing towards a better relationship with God. Wow — Jesus-rock was a thing in the 70s. The refrain for the song:

Day by day, day by day, oh dear Lord, three things I pray, to see thee more clearly, love thee more dearly, follow thee more nearly. Day by day.

bike: 7.5 miles
lake nokomis and back
79/75 degrees

Earlier today, Scott and I drove by lake nokomis and we noticed that the buoys were still up, so we decided to bike over to the lake in the late afternoon. If the blue algae was gone, I’d swim. So we did, and it was! The bike ride was great, even if it was windy. The thing I remember most about the bike was hearing the twack of the pickle ball at a pickle court on the way there, and a tennis court on the way back. Also: someone mowing their lawn and kids playing at the lake nokomis rec center playground.

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis main beach
76 degrees

The water was clearer and warmer and slightly less choppy than the last time I was here. Still too many vines reaching up from the bottom. I had to swim farther out in the lake to avoid them. Saw at least 2 paddle boarders, a sailboat, a kayak. No fish, but seagulls. Heard geese honking from the other shore. Some adult was playing with a kid and calling out, Nestea Plunge. Yes! I can still picture the dude standing with his back to the pool, falling back into the water.

Noticed the mucked-up underside of a once red, now pinkish orange buoy. Was fascinated by the bubbles on the otherwise smooth surface of the water. Felt some thin vine tendrils encircling my wrist, some thicker and sharper vines brushing against my leg. I don’t remember seeing any planes, but I do remember some wispy clouds.

sept 2/RUNBIKESWIM

5 miles
franklin loop
70 degrees

I was planning to bike over to the lake and swim this morning but it looked gloomy and ominous, and then started raining and thundering for several hours. Bummer. By the time it stopped raining it had warmed up and the sun came out. Even so, I went for a hot and humid run. Everything was wet. A slick trail, dripping branches, wet shoes and shirt.

10 Things

  1. someone covered over the graffiti on the steps that read, stop hate, with blue paint
  2. sky, part 1: gray, heavy
  3. sky, part 2; blue and cloudless
  4. empty river
  5. white foam on the edge of the east bank near the franklin bridge
  6. kids laughing on the playground at the church daycare
  7. some orange and red leaves beyond the fence near east river road
  8. the squeal of tires near the trestle — what happened?
  9. orange cones lining the path: there must have been a race or a sponsored bike ride this past weekend
  10. the sliding bench was empty of people but close to a thick veil or green

Listened to voices, cars, and drips for the first half of the run, my “Doin’ Time” playlist for the second half. The song I remember the most was Peter Gabriel’s “Playing for Time.”

Oh, there’s a hill that we must climb
Climb through all the mist of time
It’s all in here what we’ve been through

Not a fan of the phrase, mist of time, but these lyrics reminded me of a few lines from Mary Oliver that I read right before heading out for my run:

Slowly
up the hill,
like a thicket of white flowers,
forever.
(The Leaf and the Cloud/ Mary Oliver)

The lines just preceding these were a series of good-byes to the world: the swaying trees, the black triangles of the winter sea, oranges, the fox sparrow, blue-winged teal, lettuce, turnip, rice fields, the morning light, and the goldfinches.

Down, I’m getting it down
Sorting it out
So everything I care about
Is held in here
All of those I love, inside

Listening to these lines, I thought about Oliver’s deepening of the spirit. I thought about the interior and moving inside of yourself and of burying memories and ideas not as a way to avoid them, but to protect them. I also thought about someone growing older and having memory-loss and trying to hold onto faces and names and experiences. I weighed the possibilities and limitations of going deep inside as compared to opening up to the outside. All of these thoughts came at once — not in a linear progression — in a burst which lasted until I heard these lines less than a minute later:

There goes the sun
Back from where it came
The young move to the center
The mom and dad, the frame

I just remembered: at the start of my run, I was thinking about the difference between ordinary and extraordinary time, which was a continuation of thoughts that began earlier this morning. Habits, routines, activities/events experienced again and again — the mundane — versus the scattered, sporadic occasions that break up the routine. While meaning and memories are often found in the singular moments, I’m drawn to the rituals and repetitions and daily events as where imporant meaning dwells.

Everyday. everyday = ordinary / every day = each day, daily.

Everyday—I have work to do (“Work” in The Leaf and the Cloud/ Mary Oliver)

I love that she writes everyday and not every day, so it’s not, each day I have work to do but, ordinary, everyday life: don’t bug me, I have work to do!

bike: 7.5 miles
lake nokomis and back*
75/71 degrees

*instead of the river road trail, we took 44th until the falls park, which is shorter

A good bike ride with Scott. As usual, better on the way back — easier, more relaxed. On the way there: wind. No problems with panicking about not seeing. The ride home was great: the sun was setting soon. Passed by adults playing soccer or flag football or some team sport in the field by the duck bridge, and kids playing soccer at Hiawatha school. RJP and FWA both played for a season at Hiawatha. I played for 5 or 6 years when I was kid in Northern Virginia. I loved it; they didn’t.

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis main beach
74 degrees

Only 4 other people in the lake, and none of them were swimming laps, just standing around and talking — brrr, I bet that was cold! I swam far from the white buoys and almost completely avoided the milfoil. Only a few times, I got too close and felt the vines on my toes and wrists. For most of the swim there was wind and choppy water. In one direction, it pushed me along. In the other, I got to swim straight into it, which I liked doing. Mostly, a fun swim. The vines were the only bad thing about it. They were too thick by the one buoy so I didn’t want to circle around it. This made it much harder to loop, so I mostly stopped and twisted around. I noticed some birds in the sky and a few planes. Trees on the distant shore were looking less green — were any of them changing?

I thought about how this might be my final swim of the season. It’s cooler for the rest of the week — highs in the 60s, so they might take down the buoys soon. It’s been a great season. I swam for longer, both distance and time. And, I had fun reciting more water lines in my head and writing about water.

aug 27/BIKESWIMRUN

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
64/71 degrees

Hooray for feeling comfortable on a bike! Able to see enough to not feel scared.

…sitting on the back deck to write this, a wave of ear piercing cicada buzz just passed by. Wow! What’s the decibel level of that?

Rode into the wind for a lot of the ride — and not just the wind I was making with my moving body. Wondered if it would be choppy at the lake. (it was). At one point, when the wind seemed particularly strong, I could feel how un-aerodynamic I was — an upright form fighting against air. I tried to get more aerodynamic, leaning low and over my hips, my bike as parallel to the ground as I could get it. Thought about ironman triathletes who can bike like in an even more parallel position for almost 5 hours. Wow, how many hours of training and lifting and working with a coach must you need to keep that form for so long?

The bike ride back was wonderful. What a beautiful late summer day! Sunny, warm in a way that’s welcome because it was cooler in the morning.

swim: 2 loops
56 minutes
lake nokomis main beach
66 degrees

I did it! 1440 minutes, 24 hours, one day swimming in August! Hooray for ambitious goals that push you to do a little more than you would have otherwise. Swimming a total of 24 hours (over 21 swims) was a commitment for sure, but it wasn’t an unreasonable commitment. And the biggest challenge was not getting my body to swim that many minutes — and miles, over 40 — but having clean water and an open lake. Lake Nokomis was closed for 2 weeks in August due to elevated e-coli and algae blooms.

24 hours was a good goal. Enough to challenge me and enable me to get deeper into my swimming and writing about swimming, but not too deep to sink me, to overwhelm and injure me. That’s another definition of Mary Oliver’s deepening and quieting of the spirit: deepening my commitment, steadily chipping away at the time (a quiet = still = steady approach).

The water was empty of other humans. I don’t remember seeing/hearing any ducks or geese or seagulls either. Lots of milfoil, both tethered and floating in segments on the surface. Too many milfoil vines near the white buoys. They seem to be increasing every time I swim. Boo! I went much farther out to avoid them, and when I veered closer, I could feel them wrapping around my wrists and ankles. Join us, I briefly imagined them saying. No thanks!

Yesterday while looking up recent drownings in Lake Nokomis — the ones I remember are the South High football player in 2013 and the 11 year old girl in 2023 — I discovered that someone else drowned last week. A woman who (presumably) took her own life. Rescuers were searching for more than 24 hours, looking for the body. They found it. As I swam out to the white buoys, I thought about this woman and the others that had drowned, wondered how terrified I would be to encounter their dead bodies bobbing in the water. Another meaning of deepening/quieting of the spirit.

The water shimmered in the sun, sometimes like silver, sometimes glass. There were little waves, big enough to make a noise, but not big enough for white caps. Before I got used to the rocking movement, I was slightly dizzy. I liked the chop. I was able to got faster heading north with the wind, and more powerfully heading south against it.

The sky was a deep blue with a few clouds. They were fluffy like cotton balls, some of them big, like a whole ball, some of them wispy and small, like one chunk of the ball. Noticed a plane, parallel to the water.

The water was thick with particles, impossible to see too far in front of me — only my hand and the trailing bubbles.

Heading north, following the path of an open swim loop, I looked up and imagined that the orange buoy was far off in the distance. Oh, to have it appear to be able to swim out and beyond it!

When I finished the swim, I sat on the sand, feeling the sun on my back, looking out at the water and reflecting on the season. What a summer! I hope to come back to the lake more times this week and until they remove the buoys, but whatever happens, I met my goal and have no regrets about how much I swam this summer. Good job, Sara!

today’s inspiration

One of the poems-of-the-day offers inspiration for my Swimming One Day project:

Task/ Ari Banias

There’s a poem I tried to write about
bathing you the last day you were alive.

On one of our drives home:
I want to die without shame.

You didn’t elaborate.
I described standing across from a stranger

paid to do this work, her presence
anchoring me in the task

with you between us.
From this distance I can use the word task.

Your pain the astrologer said A gift
for others

A mixing bowl
filled with warm water

we dipped washcloths into before
wringing them out

rested between your legs.
The phrase utilitarian tenderness served

some containing purpose
I needed at the time.

A great effort
to come up to the surface of yourself

to say what you said to us.
A student writes two lines

about an aging parent
they think are boring and may cut.

That poem did not belong
to language, and surpassed touch

Dough rising somewhere
under a red and white

dishtowel in that bowl

about this poem

“The task is attempting to write the poem again the task is bathing the dying the task is work done for wages the task is recognizing the encounter that refuses containment that insists on experience outside narrative time the task is to not entomb memory in language to not reduce grief to a quotable thing the task is to feel the edge of a void and keep going inside the feeling the task summons in you the task continues despite”

inspirations

  • create a set of poems — one of them is the main poem, another about it, explaining it in some way, sideways or front ways or back ways, and maybe a third one that condenses it (like Hardly Creatures and the original poem, replica, souvenir)
  • a pair of poems, the second, the reflection of the first, as if on the surface of water, and darker, like A Oswald’s line about water letting you see twice but more darkly
  • take an idea — in the poem it is “task” — and play around with a wide range of meaning. I’m thinking: “day” or “quiet/still”

run: 2.45 miles
around lake nokomis
76 degrees

Went back to the lake in the evening with Scott. He started running north, I started south around the lake. I haven’t run here at all this summer. Stopped at the little beach briefly to check out the algae. Since my swim this morning, the test results have come in and there is an blue-green algae advisory at both beaches. They tested it on Monday when it was the worst. It’s better today.

Over halfway around, I passed a young boy walking by himself. After I passed him, I heard somebody running like they were trying to catch me. I think it was him. The footsteps lasted for 30 seconds? a minute? then stopped. I kept running until I reached the overlook on the cedar bridge then briefly stopped to take in the view. I noticed waves and the silhouettes of 2 kayaks in the distance, silvery water.

10 Lake Things

  1. a guy calling out, no! drop it! drop it! no! no! — I’m assuming they were talking to their dog, but I didn’t see
  2. a kid’s loud foot strikes
  3. a group of people crossing the path, heading for the dock
  4. the soft sand of the dirt trail next to the path
  5. 2 kids climbing the leaning tree that I used to run by and think it looked like a woman arching her back
  6. an opening in the vegetation, an empty bench, a person closer to shore
  7. 2 women’s voices on the water near shore — were they in a kayak or a canoe?
  8. the bridge has lane markings for a bike path — that’s new
  9. the smell of cigarette smoke near the booth where they test for zebra mussels
  10. a woman and a man blocking part of the path — the guy practicing a stretch as the woman gave him pointers — his coach?

aug 26/BIKESWIM

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
62/66 degrees

Feeling a bit tired and out of it this morning. Yesterday, Scott and I biked over to the State Fair and spent the entire day walking around with 145,000 other people (a record!). Wow, crowded. And fun. And great to bike there instead of driving or taking a bus. We biked 10 miles and walked almost 9.

Even with all of yesterday’s exercise, today’s bike ride wasn’t too difficult. Not easy to see with the gray sky, but not too many people around so it didn’t matter. Encountered acorns, walkers, runners, a few other bikers, and one dude on a hover board.

swim: 1 loop (6 mini loops)
30 minutes
lake nokomis main beach
65 degrees

The water looked smooth and silvery from the shore, so I was excited to get in. When I did, uh-oh, a film of green. Not quite looking like green paint, but not not looking like green paint either. Blue-green algae blooms? I got out and walked the shore, wondering what to do. Was it an isolated patch? Should I stay out of the water? I was thinking of biking over to the other beach when I saw another swimmer get in. Decided to go for it, but only a shorter swim until the testing results come out later today — they always test the water on Mondays with results on Tuesdays.

It felt great to be in the water, but I was uneasy. Would I run into slime? No, but I encountered even more milfoil than usual. So many vines reaching up to tap my foot or wrap around my wrist. No thanks.

Out, just past the white buoys, the water didn’t seem too bad — no slime, not that green. Quiet, calm. No boats or other swimmers. One seagull that was committed to their perch on a white buoy. 4 geese having a conversation on the edge of the shore. A few ducks. The water was colder. By the 6th loop, my hands and feet were getting a little numb. Time to get out!

10 Things

  1. swirls of green on the surface when looking from abover
  2. goose poop on the sand, feathers in the water
  3. thick, opaque water
  4. a silvery surface in the distance
  5. seagull on a buoy
  6. swimming directly over some clusters of milfoil, inches from my face, its sudden appearance was unsettling
  7. a feathery soft tap on my heel — swimming over milfoil
  8. a kid at the nearby playground repeating the same phrase over and over (6, 7, 8? times) it’s so quiet
  9. wading through water, a line of green at the point of contact between suit and lake
  10. clouds then, at the end, the sun breaking through

Swimming One Day

With today’s morning swim, I’m done to 56 minutes left. If it were actually a day, it would be 11:04 pm. Very close. Hopefully the lake won’t be shut down with algae blooms in a few hours! If that happens, I will still swim the 24 hours by finding water somewhere, but it will be more difficult.

hour entry: That it never/ Endi Bogue Hartigan

-That in 1751 Carolus Linneas conceived of a floral clock, a botanical garden designed with species that blossomed predictably at certain hours of day, so that walking through it, one could tell time from the petals.

That it never worked may have been critical to the pollen of future ruins and revolts, that the lily wrist opacity decided not to show itself, that 6:00 industry was lost to the ants and the nectar chambers, that I got nothing intended done all day and coworkers floated between cubicle sunbeams, that the cockle shell women and the snapdragon breaths and the pin code clues and the politicians’ shoes never quite stood to stand there in a punctuating sequence, that all sequence would stymy and revolt, that Mary mary, alarm and delay and caterpillar-staring, that the empirical battalion of the flower clock disintegrated by noon, that subsequently there would be wilderness of soon and soon and soon where the ruins of the instrument held us.

flowers:
lily / wrist, as in wrist watch?


cockle shell
snapdragons / pin flower?
politicians

Miss Mary Mary

a wilderness of soon and soon and soon!

Is this poem in the collection that mostly directly references the title, on orchid o’clock? Possibly. I love the idea of a botanical clock! And also, I don’t. What a delightful way to connect the natural world with our sense of time and what an impossible way to impose invented time on the natural world. And that wilderness of soon by noon? I love that as a description of rewilding! I want to memorize this poem for tomorrow’s swim!

An idea somehow inspired by giving attention to this poem : 24 short poems — inklings? — about swimming one day in august.

aug 20/BIKESWIMSWIM

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
71 degrees

Hooray for biking to a lake that is open again! Had a few (almost) moments of panic — maybe not panic, but feeling unsettled. Everything blurred or smudged. I could see enough but not as much as I wanted to. The rest of the time, the ride was more than fine.

Nearing the double bridge, I could hear a bike approaching from behind. I slowed down to let him pass and he called out, in a chill and kind voice, you’re good — it’s single file here. After making it through the bridge, as he passed me, he called, those e-bikes are scary! I agreed, but wasn’t sure why he mentioned it. Only now, writing this, did I remember that some e-bike passed me going very fast and without warning me. I suppose that was what he was referring to.

swim: 1.75 loops (6 mini loops)
45 minutes
lake nokomis main beach
72 degrees

The lake and the beach were empty. Noticed some signs near the shore — oh no, is the beach still closed? Nope. Those signs were for more information about blue-green algae and weren’t announcing that the beach was closed.

The water was great. Not too cold, clearer than cedar lake. Saw some of my sparkle friends and a lot of ducks. At least 2 different ducks crossed my path as I swam. quack quack

Forgot to count loops; counted number of strokes for one loop (250) and each of the four white cylindrical buoys as I swam past them, and my five strokes between breaths.

Encountered a lot of pale milfoil, a few paddle boarders, a canoe. No other swimmers.

Right before starting my swim, I heard a dog barking on the other side. Something about the deep sound, repeated half a dozen times, that seemed solemn or ominous.

It was wonderful to be swimming in lake nokomis all alone. So quiet! So relaxed. A definite deepening and quieting of the spirit.

For part of a loop, I recalled the woman I met who had been bit by a fish and was unsettled. Will any fish come and bite me today? Then I remembered that it annoyed her, but it didn’t seem to hurt or haunt her. Barely a nibble.

Later, I recall thinking about how my world is always underwater: distorted and approximate forms, softened features, a sense of disconnection but also a new logic of connection. Right after that thought, I noticed how underwater was green, above blue — blue sky, blue surface, green everything else

hour entry: I made a chart today a beautiful/ Endi Bogue Hartigan

I made a chart today a beautiful weekly chart for links and breakages and shoulder pulls and astronaut walks. Some items are measured in repetitions, some in minutes and I endeavor to note on which days I have devoted my body’s minutes and repeated movements through time space onto this chart. At the end I hope for late endorphin states, and an even gait, and for uncertain ailments to dissipate by my discipline.

chart / shoulders / repetitions / measured minutes / devotion to minutes to repetitions to even gaits to uncertain ailments

What does my watch watch?

minutes / loops / beats / strokes / effort / uneven gaits / balance / breath / pace / distance / errors / miscalculations / days / dates / hours / location / light / how loud that military plane flying overhead was / ambient light / laziness / discipline / dedication / obsessions / hesitations / regrets

swim: 3.25 loops
75 minutes
cedar lake open swim
81 degrees

Another beautiful night for a swim! And the buoys were back where they belong: close to point and hidden beach. I didn’t feel too sore even though I swam earlier today. My shoulders were fine the whole swim, but my right tricep started to ache on the second to last loop.

Everything was great in the water except the vines. So many vines — strands, clumps, nets of vines. I kept swimming through them and as they hit me with their sharp scratchiness, I flinched. I’m glad I didn’t pull something in my neck with all the flinching I was doing! And the vines didn’t want to leave. They wrapped around my feet, my wrists, shoulders, head. One persistent clump wrapped around my safety buoy and kept tapping me on the thigh until I finally realized what it was and ripped it off and threw it.

The sky was blue with a few fluffy clouds and an occasional soaring bird. Oh, and a dragonfly! I haven’t seen many of those this summer.

Today I noticed the spray from my arm as I lifted it out of the water. Dripping in an arc as my hand traveled from my hip to past my head and back into the water.

One more day of open swim club. How can it be over already?

aug 13/BIKESWIMSWIM

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
68 degrees / 73 degrees

Ahhh! What a morning! A relaxed ride. Again, no worries about what I could and couldn’t see. On the way there, I thought about metaphors (inspired by the lines below). An idea, which is not new, but is good to remind myself of: in poetry, it’s not all about meaning with words, but the movement and shifting they create. Thoughts, experiences, ideas flow freely until they bump into words. Words direct the movement (from encounter to revelation or understanding).

The most memorable thing on the bike back. Climbing the hill near the rec center and where bikes cross the parkway, I heard — HEY ASSHOLE WATCH OUT! — a car and a biker stopped in the road, the biker yelling at the driver for not stopping, the driver apologizing. Then — you’re a Minnesota driver, that’s what YOU are! I didn’t really see what happened, but I know it’s hard to see all the bikers when you’re driving. I also know that drivers don’t always look. The driver’s apology seemed sincere; the biker’s yelling was very loud and aggressive. And what’s up with insulting Minnesotans?

earlier today

Heard from an open window, a woman talking to someone, presumably a young kid: it‘s actually a t — saTurday

Returning to some lines from a poem I posted a few days ago, Difference/ Mark Doty:

nothing but something
forming itself into figures
then refiguring,

sheer ectoplasm
recognizable only as the stuff
of metaphor. 

swim: 2 loops (8 mini loops)
50 minutes
lake nokomis main beach
73 degrees

Wow wow wow! What a swim. This might be one of the top swims of the summer, and the one that fits best with Mary Oliver’s words in Swimming, One Day in August:

it is time now, I said,
for the deepening and quieting of the spirit
among the flux of happenings.

…

I went down in the afternoon
to the sea
which held me, until I grew easy.

I think I swam 8 loops. I stopped a lot to tread water and listen to the silence. So quiet! I was all alone, but not. So relaxing. I felt completely at ease, which is not a feeling I have that often. No wind, no waves, the surface flat and still except for the bubbles I was creating that popped on the surface. A few seagulls perched on the white buoys — hello friends! A few clouds in the blue sky. My fingers frequently got caught on milfoil reaching up from the bottom, but it was almost like we were high-fiving or greeting each other — nothing menacing about the vines today. There were 2 metal detector dudes chatting and detecting. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, so no idea about what they found. Neither of them yelled out excitedly, I got it!

10 Things

  1. seagulls — in the sky, on the buoy
  2. water like velvet
  3. a thin skin of something on the surface in the swimming area
  4. the contrast between the sloshing as I swam freestyle and the silence as I tread water and bobbed
  5. the only thing I could see under water were bubbles
  6. the surface: almost a mirror, flat, blue
  7. the roar of one plane overhead
  8. workers fixing the picnic tables — they pulled off the tops and the seats earlier in the week — having fun and listening to country music
  9. standing in the swimming area, facing the sun, closing my eyes and still seeing the reflection of the light on the surface
  10. thinking it was almost too silent — why was there no noise? — then hearing the pounding of a hammer from the workers near Painted Turtle

NOOOOOOOOO!! Got an email this afternoon that both beaches at Lake Nokois are closed immediately due to blue-green algae. They test the water every Monday and, as I just learned, the results for e-coli come in on Tuesday, but blue-green algae comes in on Wednesday. It might clear up before next week, but they won’t test again until Monday, and won’t have the results until Wednesday. So the earliest they can open up the lake is next Wednesday. I’ll miss 4 open swims. Then Thursday will be the last open swim of the season. Such a bummer, but at least I got my magical morning, and I didn’t encounter any algae. I saw it on Monday, but I think it’s already cleared up.

swim: 3 loops (6 mini loops)
65 minutes
cedar lake open swim
79 degrees

Other than the abundance of scratchy, clingy vines, the water was perfect. Calm, smooth, not too cold (or too warm). So relaxing! The water was a little greener than usual, but no algae blooms. Hopefully it will stay that way. There were a few pockets of very cold water near the far buoy. The sun was making the water sparkle. I stopped a few times to enjoy the silence out in the middle of the lake. Encountered a kayak and a paddle boarder who seemed extra tall standing straight up and above me. A strange sight — a giant walking on water.

Only 2 more cedar lake swims this season and no swimming at all until next Monday. Boo.

aug 11/BIKESWIMSWIM

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
69 degrees (there) / 72 (back)

I’m getting serious about my 24 hours of swimming in a month this week. Decided to bike over the lake for a short morning swim. The bike ride was great. I only had to pass one person! I didn’t have any moments of panic when everything seemed a little fuzzy. As usual, the bike ride back was easier and seemed to go by much faster. Biking down the hill between Lake Nokomis and Lake Hiawatha, I noticed another redone path leading down to the dock. Someday I’ll run over here and check it out.

5 Bike Things

  1. a group of kids congregating at the bike safety course that used to be a tennis court
  2. creek water rushing by near the spot where kids like to swim
  3. some sort of rock music that I couldn’t identify coming from a bike
  4. the marsh area near my favorite part of the creek path didn’t have any water, just mud
  5. passing my the wooden bridge at lake nokomis — an intensely sour rotten fishy smell — yuck!

swim: 6 mini loops / 1.5 lake nokomis loops
35 minutes
main beach lake nokomis
70 degrees

A wonderful morning for a swim. Calm, empty water. There were a few kayaks and swan boats, but otherwise, I was the only human in the water, at least near the bench. Plenty of vines and fish below me, ducks nearby, planes and seagulls above. I’m swimming again tonight, so I didn’t want to do too much this morning.

5 Swim Things

  1. a plane flying directly overhead, looking like a shark
  2. swooping seagulls
  3. a kayak crossing in front of me
  4. ghost vines reaching up
  5. thin strips of light extending below, diagonally

I recited Mary Oliver’s “Swimming, One Day in August” and felt the deepening and quieting of my body. Had to give myself a little pep talk during loop 2 — no, there are NOT any giant turtles or things with sharp teeth lurking below, waiting to dart up and drag me down. I rarely have these fears, and they don’t make me panic, but occasionally when I’m swimming alone, off of the main beach, a what-if thought creeps in. What if there is something down there waiting for me?

The lake was great. After I finished, I stood in the swimming area and took it all in. At the edge of the shore, I noticed the water was a bright green — uh-oh, hope there aren’t algae blooms!

swim: 3.5 loops
70 minutes
cedar lake open swim
79 degrees

Double swims today. The water at cedar was choppy. Mostly, I loved it. The only parts I didn’t like: having to breathe on only one side more often and the stretch where the water seemed to be pulling me down. It was harder to stroke. Otherwise, it was great. Oh — except for all of the vines. Lots of full body scans today, with a vine traveling down my body as I swam over it.

5 Cedar Things

  1. a young kid hiding in the buoy near point beach
  2. a lifeguard in a kayak near hidden beach, close to the far buoy — part red blur, part dark silhouette
  3. the idea of orange in the distance as I tried to sight — only a tiny orange dot
  4. cloudless sky
  5. 2 girls laughing and swimming at the beach

added the next morning: Just remembered something I really didn’t want to forget about last night’s swim. Standing in the shallow water, preparing to start my swim, I overheard parents with their 2 young boys — 5 or 6 or 7? They were trying to get them back into their kayaks.

mom: we talked about this. we can’t take the kayaks unless you paddle all the way back. get in the kayak.

kid 1: I’ll get in the kayak if you buy me a nintendo.
kid 2: yeah, a nintendo.

Damn. . . .I didn’t stick around to see what happened, but I’m betting the mom wasn’t falling for this shit.

24 july/RUNBIKESWIM

run: 4 miles
the monument and back
73 degrees
dew point: 69

Thought about going out for a run around 6:30 am but watched Pogacar defend his yellow jersey in the alps instead. Excellent. Finally made it out for a run at 10:30. Not as bad as yesterday, but too warm, especially in the direct sun.

Chanted in triple berries. Admired the reflections of clouds on the river. Heard the kids on the playground at the church preschool. Put in the soundtrack to “Operation Mincemeat” for the second half.

I thought briefly about fields — visual and of tall grass and open vistas — and buoys and dots and simple forms.

Walking home after the run, I noticed someone stopped on the corner with a dog. I wondered why they were stopped — was there a car coming? should I not cross? Got to the other side and realized that it was my son, FWA, and our dog, Delia. It’s happened before — just last week — but it’s always upsetting when I don’t recognize my kids or my husband or my dog. For a moment, they’re only strangers.

Crossing back over the lake street bridge, I took a few pictures of the clouds reflected on the river:

clouds reflected on river
river clouds

note: I had to crop out my finger from the left hand corner. Even with the cropping, I think these are cool pictures.

visual fields, landscapes, meadows

1

At the end of yesterday’s entry I wondered what sighting buoys and swimming in the lake had to do with the visual field test. I’m still thinking about it. On a literal level, the way I’ve trained myself to sight a buoy, lining up its path, then trusting myself to swim straight to it even when I can’t see it, is how I took the visual field test last month: I fixed on the center dot and looked straight at it, or where I knew it to be when I couldn’t see it. My eyes didn’t wander. Another connection: at a distance, the buoy doesn’t look like the shape that it is — a triangle — it looks like a small dot in the center of my vision.

2

Yesterday, reviewing early july entries, I encountered this definition of visual field: “that portion of space in which objects are visible at the same moment during steady fixation of the gaze in one direction.”

It reminded me of definitions of landscape I came across yesterday in the OED: “A view or prospect of natural inland scenery, such as can be taken in at a glance from one point of view.”

the space in which objects are visible at the same time, what all can be taken in (simultaneously) with one glance

3

as
though there
swung at the end
of a tunnel,
a passage dotted
with endless
points of
arrival, as
though our gaze
started just outside
our faces and
corkscrewed its way
toward the horizon,
processual,
as if looking
took time to happen
and weren’t
instantaneous,
offered whole in
one gesture
before we
ask, before our
will, as if the far
Sonoma mountains
weren’t equally ready
to be beheld as
the dead
fly on the sill)
(Pastoral/ Forrest Gander)

What I remember of better eyesight is how the world assembled all at once, an effortless gestalt—the light, the distance, the dappled detail of shade, exact crinkles of a facial expression through a car windshield, the lift of a single finger from a steering wheel, sunlight bouncing off a waxed hood.
(Naomi Cohn)

4

A quick glance — my eyes emerge from the water like an alligator to look ahead for the buoy. Often all I see is a green mass of trees and empty water. Occasionally, a bright dot, far off. I don’t see it every time I look, but enough times to keep steadily swimming towards it. No time to think, not enough data to be certain, but I believe it’s the buoy, and usually I’m right. A few times I’ve mistaken a bright swim cap or a car’s headlight or a sailboat for the buoy.

5

“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.

As the trees within my macula disappear, my forest meadows. here I’m thinking about my classic memory from science class with the inverted tree in the back of the eye.

bike: 8 miles
lake nokomis and back
82 degrees / 79 degrees

Biked to the lake! No worries, felt relaxed and able to see well enough, or if I couldn’t see, able to navigate well enough. No moments of panic. Biking back was the best. Long shadows, cooler, people biking/walking/running and enjoying the calm evening. I admired the shadow of me on a bike, looking larger than life.

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
82 degrees

Yesterday, open swim sent out a warning about blue-green algae. They weren’t closing the lake, just encouraging people to be cautious. I didn’t see any algae blooms, although I noticed that the water was a more vivid, electric green. The water was warm and calm and wonderful. With the sun, it was difficult to see — I could see dots, which I trusted were buoys as I swam towards the little beach, but swimming back towards the big beach, barely anything other than bright sun, sparkling water. I managed to see the buoys at least once and trusted my shoulders to guide me across. I don’t think I’ll ever not be amazed that this works, that I swim straight to the buoys when I can’t (or barely can) see them.

I tried something new as a I swam. Each time I tilted my head to breathe, I thought a word, usually 1 syllable but occasionally 2: squish flash flit fly flush flare zip zap bird tree cloud blue girl ghost gorge life death bliss breath bubbles bike run float lift shut jump black red orange feet toe hand face field grass give take spirit sprite light dark

There were many other words, but I don’t remember them all. I might try this again. Maybe some great words/images will burst out?!

images collected in consciousness
like a tree alone on the horizon
(Crows/ Marilyn Nelson)

july 18/BIKESWIM

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
61 degrees (there) / 68 (back)

It’s great to bike! Independence! Not having to rely on someone else to get me to the lake. And, being on a bike is much more fun than being in a car.

Overcast and cool. Some wind as I biked south and west. I might have glimpsed the river through the trees, looking almost white, but I don’t remember. Heard the rush of the light rail going past on the other side of the barricade. Also heard the rush of the creek, moving past the spot where all the kids like to swim. Heard the rhythmic thwack of the pickle ball hitting the racket. The pickle ball courts by the lake nokomis rec center are always full. And, as I neared the big beach, I heard a shrill sound on repeat. Scott and I had heard it last night and thought it was a person whistling. Nope. Was it a bird? What else could it have been?

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
64 degrees

A little tired today after last night’s swim. Otherwise, I felt good, buoyant, high up on the surface of the water. My sparkle friends were coming right at me as I swam across to the little beach. The sky was covered in clouds. The positioning of the buoys was closer today than last nigh, so a much shorter course. Two things: the green buoy closest to the little beach was farther away this morning than last night and the middle green buoys were closer together — a tighter angle. According to my watch, I swam a mile and 1000 less strokes today.

I had trouble keeping my nose plug on; it was leaking air which made a funny nose underwater. I wondered if other swimmers could hear it. Have I heard the noises of other swimmer’s underwater before? Not in lake, but I’ve heard clicking elbows in the pool.

Mostly my stroke pattern was: 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left
Occasionally: 1 2 3 4 5 6
or 1 2 3 breathe right 1 2 3 4 breathe right 1 2 3 left 1 2 3 4 left

I recited Alice Oswald, mostly the one about microscopic insects that catch pigment on their shivering hair-like receptors. I wanted to recite the new lines I tried to memorize last night, but I got stuck on the first line. I couldn’t remember disintegrating certainty.

Yesterday I watched a little of the 5k open water swim world championships from Singapore. The competitors were swimming in a shipping lane with an over-sized lane line on one side. This lane line was enormous, much bigger proportionately than a pool lane line. It looked strange and unreal.

10 Colors

  1. orange buoy
  2. red lifeguard kayak
  3. white swan
  4. an occasional dot of robin’s egg blue — the green buoy getting closer
  5. lime green buoy
  6. yellow safety buoy
  7. pink cap
  8. green vine, floating
  9. pale greenish-brown vine from milfoil reaching up from the bottom
  10. a smear of green so dark it almost looked black near the ford bridge: a dark dirt trail that winds through the woods

EXAQUA

Last week, I returned to a poem I posted on this log a few years back: EXAQUA / Jan-Henry Gray. So many good lines about water. I decided to request it from the library — it’s in Gray’s collection, Documents. Yesterday RJP and I went and picked it up. Exaqua is several pages long, with multiple sections. Today I’ll start reading it more closely.

I wondered about the title. What does it mean? In a note, Gray writes that the title comes from the “Notanda” section of M.NourbeSe Philip’s Zong. I’ve heard of Zong! before. JJJJJermoe Ellis writes about it in Aster of Ceremonies. I had to do a little more digging to find out what it means in Zong! Found a masters thesis with an explanation:

When Morrison writes, “By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footsteps but the water too and what is down there,” she gestures toward the material remains of the enslaved who we know to have been drowned by those waters—the “Sixty Million and more” to whom Beloved (324). It is in an attempt to remember “the water and what is down there” that NourbeSe attempts to do the work of recovering, reclaiming, or exhuming those bodies from their liquid graves. The term NourbeSe uses to describe this process is exaqua: that is, to exhume the bodies of the Zong’s victims from the water. In lieu of the enslaved’s literal, material remains—their scoured bones— Zong! orients itself toward creating a textual space where their voices may sound out. When we have observed that a voice is singular, this observation has rested on the embodiedness of our voices. As sound, our voices are constituted by the materialities of our bodies that produces them, thereby carrying something of our bodies outside of ourselves and spacing it out into the material world. For NourbeSe, then, Zong! as a material object is like the surface from which the sound of the captives’ voices reemerge.

Listening/Reading for Dismembered Voices

This definition is fascinating. I want to keep thinking about it as I do a close reading of the different sections of the poem. An immediate thought: the idea of surface here is interesting — surface as where what is inside us travels outside.

immersion

The only way to know a song is to sing it.
The only way to know an ocean is to swim it.
(from Across the Pacific Ocean/ Jan-Henry Gray)

These lines are from an earlier poem in the collection, but I’ve been thinking about them and I think they can be put into conversation with EXQUA. I’d also like to put them into conversation with my own thoughts on being in the water as opposed to being near it or beside it or above it (like I am with the river).

I think about all that I know or understand or am familiar with because of the time I’ve been in lake nokomis over the last 12 years. The quality of the water, its currents, its colors, its buoyancy, its temperatures. The sediments, the ducks, seagulls, loons, dragonflies, the vegetation.

In the water, you feel the ripples, the swells, the rocking of the waves, the wind. Out of the water, you might see a textured surface or a whitecap, but you might only see flat, calm water.

july 13/SWIMBIKE

5 loops
lake nokomis open swim
71 degrees

5 loops on a beautiful Sunday morning! Even though we’re still under bad air quality advisory and there was smoke and haze lingering above the lake, I didn’t have any trouble breathing. The smoke-haze made it difficult to see the buoys, however. Who cares — not me! I still swam straight towards the buoys.

My 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left or 1 2 3 right 1 2 3 4 right 1 2 3 left 1 2 3 4 left was relaxed and steady. My arms and legs in constant motion, rotating and kicking.

I call my circuits around the buoys loops, but that’s not quite right. They are more triangles, not curved but a straight line with 3 buoys from the northern end of the big beach to the little beach, then a straight line with 2 buoys from the little beach to the southern end of the big beach, then a straight line parallel to beach from the last green buoy to the only orange one and the start of one circuit, the beginning of another. Swimming in the lake is less about curves and more about lines and angles. Angled elbows, a straight back — parallel, the intersecting legs-as-lines. The first segment was fairly smooth and fast, the second was choppy and sluggish, and the third was smoother and faster.

10 Things

  1. something/someone tapped my toe mid-lake — I couldn’t see anyone, was it a fish? a twig?
  2. particles suspended, glittering — my sparkle friends!
  3. my hands wrapped in bubbles
  4. a loose vine passed over my legs, got stuck in my fingers
  5. a military plane flying fast
  6. light green, a hint of yellow, water
  7. glitter on the surface of the water where other swimmers where
  8. hazy blue sky
  9. a gentle rocking from the water
  10. near the end of the final loop — a sore back

I recited my 4 A Oswald lines about microscopic insects in the eye and surfacing and diving again and giving water the weight and size of myself and lifting the lid and shutting it. Such great lines! Admired the bubbles on my hands, thought of Anne Sexton and shedding them and then believed the bubbles were little thoughts and feelings and ideas that some part of me was shedding and offering to the water and anyone in it.

Thought about my gorge poem that begins, I go to/the gorge / / to find the/soft space. Started composing one for the lake: I go to/the lake // to be held. Thought about the verb, to behold, then beheld, which reminded me of a line in a poem that I love and had pondered on 19 june: Unsee the beheld! / Altitude/ Airea D. Matthews

Unsee the beheld where to unsee is to observe/witness with a sense other than sight, or to unravel, come undone or redone, transformed. Who/what is the beheld? Me, held by the water. So, to unsee me, to let go of me/I and have an encounter/exchange with that which is not-I: the water. I haven’t written about this bit yet, but yesterday I was thinking about Anne Carson and her anthropology of water and I wrote in my Plague Notebook, encounter with that which you cannot contain, control, that is not You — the not-I. In the lake, I am held by the water — rocked, enveloped, lifted — but in the process of being held I dissolve, or the small part of Sara the ecosystem that is I is saturated. Yes, this makes sense to me, but will it to anyone else, including future Sara?

I read mention of May Swenson’s poem “Swimmers” yesterday and I happened to have it in Nature: Poems Old and New. I’m still trying to figure out the different ways I can read the stanzas — across; down the left, then down the right, then bottom?down the left, to the bottom, and up the right? down the left only? down the right only?

Swimmers/ May Swenson

Tossed
by the muscular sea,
we are lost,
and glad to be lost
in troughs of rough

love. A bath in
laughter, our dive
into foam,
our upslide and float
on the surf of desire.

But sucked to the root
of the water-mountain —
immense —
about to tip upon us
the terror of total

delight —
we are towed,
helpless in its
swell, by hooks
of our hair;

then dangled, let go,
make to race —
as the wrestling chest
of the sea, itself
tangled, tumbles

in its own embrace.
Our limbs like eels
are water-boned,
our faces lost
to difference and

contour, as the lapping
crests.
They cease
their charge,
and rock us

in repeating hammocks
of the releasing
tide —
until supine we glide,
on cool green

smiles
of an exhaling
gladiator,
to the shore
of sleep.

However I read it, it’s good!

bike: 4 miles
the falls and back
84 degrees

Biked to the falls with Scott for a beer and a hike and some time to be in the midst of others. Sassy, strong little girls, BIG dogs, small yippy dogs, a hiker with poles, surreys, kids playing soccer, a guy that looked like Mr. Hand, 2 long-haired dachshunds in the ice cream line, a LONG ice cream line, a LONGER food line. A roaring falls, a raging creek, blocked-off steps and wooden path. A dog that plopped down and refused to move, a guy walking by, laughing and calling out to his friend, that dog is done!

july 10/RUNBIKESWIM

2.5 miles
2 trails
71 degrees
dew point: 67

Sticky, but feels cooler because of the cloud cover. Felt relaxed and able to keep running without stopping. Wore my bright yellow shoes, which seem to not be hurting my feet/calves as much. The river was a light gray-blue, the trees dark green. Heard voices near the ravine — was it the workers finishing the new trail? Also heard the clicking and clacking of ski poles up above near the road.

Several trucks and workers in and around the house that used to have the poetry window (it hasn’t had a poem for more than a year). I wonder where the poetry people went?

The tree is still across the winchell trail. Every time I encounter it I’m cautious, looking out for people coming the other way, hidden behind its branches. Today, there were 2 people, but they were paying attention and waited for me to pass. Thanks!

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
80 degrees / 78 degrees

Biked with Scott to the lake. Nice! No scary moments. I felt confident and didn’t once question where I was going or where the trail was or if that thing ahead of me was a crack or not. Loud birds. A car not knowing how to drive in a round-a-bout. High creek water under the echo bridge. An ultimate frisbee game in the field between the duck and echo bridges. Slanting light. Kids wading in the creek.

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
79 degrees

Another orange buoy gone, replaced with a green one. Only one left. For 11 years, seeing the orange buoy has been my thing. I’ve dreamed about them, written poems about them, and now they’re being replaced with green buoys. That’s okay, but I will miss them and all of my orange thoughts.

The water was a little rougher. Not too rough, more like gentle rocking. Some stray vines, lots of breathing only to my right side. Difficult to see the buoys. Recited my Alice Oswald poems as I swam and thought about lifting the lid and shutting it again and the sky jumping in and out. During the second half of the third loop, I stopped in the middle of the lake just to see what it was like. So quiet and wonderful. I couldn’t hear anything from the sky or the beach or other swimmers. Very cool.

Sparkle friends, bubbles. an orange glow off to the side, marble legs, ghostly milfoil, blue sky with a few clouds. Above: blue water, below: a light greenish-blue. An interesting effect: looking up blue, down below green.

A great swim. I feel strong and free and grateful to be moving and pushing my body. Big shoulders, no calf cramps, no numb/tingling fingers.

june 27/BIKESWIM

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
61/64 degrees

Cooler this morning. When I got up I briefly thought, I don’t need to go today; it’s too cold. Silenced that voice and went — a great bike ride! The gray made it harder to see, but I didn’t care. I don’t remember having a single scary moment. Encountered runners and walkers and other bikers, several surreys just past the park, one chill biker with a dog in the front, listening to music (I think it was jazz?) as he went. Heard the creek rushing, had to dismount when the new part of the path was covered with black sandbags, noticed a few people sitting in the grass on the stretch between lake hiawatha and lake nokomis.
My favorite part: rounding the curve, seeing the orange buoys in the water as I neared the beach. Open swim!

swim: 4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
62 degrees

4 loops today! 3 in a row, a bathroom break (out of the water!), then back in for another loop. The water was warmer than the air and clear near the shore. Starting my last loop, I swam through the swimming area and was able to see the bottom the entire way — only “unnatural” thing I saw was a bright colored pair of goggles.

The first buoy was far away from the big beach. The second buoy kept moving — and not just because of wind, I watched as the lifeguard tugged it to a different spot during one loop, then dragged it to the third orange buoy during the 3rd loop — why?

Today there was a sailboat out in the water. Not menacing — it hugged the edge of the shore, staying far from the course.

Most of the bubbles looked like scooby-doo bubbles — translucent and outlined (for clip/discussion, see 2 aug 2024), but the one at the bottom end of visual field kept looking like a glob of snot — gross!

The water was a darkish green-blue. The milfoil was orange-green. The sky, pale blue.

Someone parked in the parking lot had their headlights on and before I realized that, I was using it to sight, thinking it was the far green buoy. Nope.

It was a great morning for a swim. What a loss it would have been if I had skipped it, what a gift to have gone!

overheard, at 11:15 (open swim ends at 11:00): one swimmer talking to another — I kept making excuses until I finally said to myself, you have to go! stop doing the dishes!

birds

On mornings when the birds singing — which is most days, but not today — I’d like to remember and chant these lines from the end of “Birdsong of Shaker Way” by Ann-Margaret Lim:

one more day, filled with birds—
brightened, lightened, trilled by birds:

precious, diamond-throated
sweet song, miracle-toting birds
the-gift-of-day-is-here birds.

Bird, bird, bird. Hello bird.
You lift me up bird.
You sing the day beautiful, bird.

finds from my On This Day practice

1

Reading my past entries from 27 june, I reunited with some favorite lines from the wonderful poet, Tomas Tranströmer in his poem, “Under Pressure.” I decided to fit them into my breathing form:

You can see
beauty

only from
the side,

hastily,
Dense grain

on the field,
colours

in a yellow
stream. Rest-

less shadows
in my head

are drawn there.
They want

to creep in
to grain

and turn gold.

2

From 27 june 2023, definitions of about:

about: reasonably close to; almost; on the verge of; on all sides; around the outside; in many different directions — here and there; near; concerning . . . out and about (oot and a boot — Minnesota style)

3

From 27 june 2024, blessing the boats/ lucille clifton

As I read this poem, I thought about how I often imagine myself as a boat in the water. Not a fish deep in the lake, but a boat, on the line between surfaced and submerged, half of me underwater, half always exposed to the air.

5

today
voice
curve
water
beach
clear
shore
think
third
green
sight

great
scary
chill
biker
front
music
heard
creek
black
grass
would

today: great — a chill felt on the curve
I heard music: a grass voice a water voice a green voice a shore voice a creek voice — all here today, singing together
here in the water, would clear sight make anything less scary?
a chill in the water

update, 28 june, 2025: This morning, reading through past entries, I remembered a few more things about the swim yesterday. First, breathing. I did my usual 1 2 3 4 5 breathe, but also 1 2 3 and 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left. Then I tried 1 2 3 breathe right 1 2 breathe right 1 2 3 breathe left 1 2 breathe left. I’ve been trying out how it feels to stroke less between breaths. I also was conscious of how my sighting fit into all of this — 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 sight 4 5 breathe left. I never breathe when I sight; I just lift my forehead out of the water. Why does this matter? Beyond its impact on the biomechanics of my stroke and on my ability to keep straight and moving towards the buoy even when I can’t see it, stroke/sight/breath is fascinates me in terms of the spaces/moments it creates above and below the surface, in water and air, as fish and human, boat body and mind. Which of these spaces is more real, which less? If both are real, what reality do they offer?

When I’m swimming, how much time do I spend with my head and half my body submerged versus above the water? That is, how long do I get to inhabit my water world?

Second, planes. Lake Nokomis is near the airport, so there are often planes high above — circling like sharks, I like to imagine. During the swim I noticed several places that seemed to be sped up. It looked like they were moving extra fast? Where they? Or was I just seeing them strangely?

may 8/BIKE

8.5 miles
lake nokomis and back
60 degrees

The first outdoor bike ride of the year. I’m always nervous, not knowing how it will go. Can I still see enough to bike? Will it be too scary? Yes, I can see! No, I wasn’t scared! I was a bit disoriented with all of the dappled light and I had to take some deep breaths a few times, but it went well. It’s a combination of: a memorized path — all of the cracks and bumps and tricky spots from years of biking; a familiarity and acceptance of not knowing or seeing everything; a few still-working cone cells and the ability to compensate with peripheral vision and other senses; and a belief that I can bike. Oh — and biking a little slower.

The lake was beautiful. I can’t wait to swim across it in a month. I signed up for open swim yesterday — signed FWA and RJP up too. Summer is almost here.

7 Grassy Things

  1. there’s a certain stretch of grass on the bike trail that separates it from the road and helps me to see where to go — I need because the gray of the trail can blend in with the gray of the road
  2. had to bike through the grass when I turned off the trail too early — I remembered biking through this grass with FWA 2 summers ago
  3. an open field between the duck and echo bridges — a beautiful green studded with bright yellow dandelions
  4. someone spread out a blanket and is sitting in that grass — how buggy is it?
  5. what a bright blue sky! a great contrast with the green trees and grass
  6. shadows of new leaves waving in the wind on the grass near lake nokomis
  7. a bright yellow trailer and half a dozen cars parked on the grassy hill between lake hiawatha and lake nokomis — they’re redoing the path and (I had to look it up) adding a pedestrian bridge: “A new pedestrian bridge over Minnehaha Creek next to Lake Hiawatha is scheduled to be installed May. The bridge will be delivered in pieces, assembled onsite and then set in place with a crane.”

Other things: someone listening to a song on their phone as they walked — a new one from Lorde?; the bog near my favorite part of the path was completely dry; a sign, loose gravel — thankfully there wasn’t any; bird shadows on the path; lots of people walking around the lake

a grounding, a frame, a context

I mentioned in my entry for 7 may that I would post a quotation from Jenny Odell about context here:

I think a really interesting mental exercise to do with anything or anyone is to think about whether they have been afforded experience, the ability to experience, which means like having a past and a future. So one of the most fascinating things that I came across in researching the book, that I talk about somewhere in the middle of the book, is a study about the lesser minds bias. It’s not something you would immediately think has to do with time, but it’s a bias that other people, especially people in out-groups—so people you don’t identify with—don’t have as rich of an emotional inner life as you do. And so in this study that I referenced, the people running the study ask the participants to think about houseless people and show that the part of their mind that has to do with theory of mind, and imagining that someone has an inner life, is not lighting up when they’re thinking about these people. And then they ask them the question, what kind of vegetable do you think they would like, this person? Just imagine that and then suddenly it is lighting up, right? And my interpretation of that in the book was, well, someone who wants something and has desire must have a past and must have hopes for the future. For something to have desire, it has to exist in time. And so it’s almost like—that participant who’s thinking about them—it’s almost like this person has entered a time with them. Like this person is now also an actor. This person has wants and needs and regrets. And I think that kind of flipping is a really helpful and interesting way to think about why we do or don’t afford that to, you know, the nonhuman world, and also many groups within the human world—like out-groups, as they were talking about in the study. And it is that relegating of part of life to the realm of the timeless—like it might be cyclical, but it’s considered timeless—that is so much at the root of the logic of extracting it. It’s lifeless. But it’s the same mechanism that’s behind dehumanizing someone, because you’re seeing a person as almost like an instance. To go back to people without housing, it’s interesting that people don’t think about how someone might go in and out of housing within their life. You know, what led to that? What might be in their future? They’re just sort of seen as they’re just there. And so I think that’s an example of what happens when you take something out of time, or it doesn’t seem to inhabit time in the same way you do.

Another Kind of Time/ Jenny Odell

As I write this, I’m listening (by pure accident) to the Rolling Stones, “Time is on my side” and now I’m thinking about returning to time. Reviewing past entries for 2025, it seems like I’m all over the place. Maybe, but I’m also orbiting around a cluster of ideas related to the gorge and my larger poem, or series of poems, about haunting the gorge. At some point, something will stick and I’ll stop to write, but for now I’ll keep moving and circling ideas.

is a really helpful and interesting way to think about why we do or don’t afford that to, you know, the nonhuman world

What is desire to the grass? And, what is the grass as a subject? One blade/leaf? A lawn? A clump in a sea of dirt? I suddenly thought about the smell of freshly cut grass, a frequent scent in May. As a kid, it was one of my favorite smells, then I read or heard somewhere that it was the grass crying or bleeding, and I stopped liking it. I decided to look it up and found a PBS segment, That Fresh Cut Grass Scent is Really a Signal of Distress. But, according to PBS, the grass isn’t crying, it’s communicating, sending out a message to other plants, or other parts of themselves, to be prepared for trouble.

The idea that the grass is crying, or screaming, still abounds. Here’s the opening line from an article for Lawnstarter, a lawn care company:

Inhale deeply. That heavenly fresh-cut grass smell you savor while mowing your back 40 is actually your lawn screaming in pain from the hell of a hurtful haircut.

Fresh cut grass is your lawn’s shriek of despair, science says

Science (not scientists, or a scientific study), says? Wow. Anyway, I’m struck by how the idea that grass is communicating (the PBS clip) offers more agency to the grass than depicting them as shrieking or screaming in despair (the article). The article offers some of the science, then moves onto a discussion of why we might like the smell of freshly mown grass and then gives examples of how that love is depicted in song.

I wrote in my Plague Notebook, vol. 25, what is the root system for grass. Looked it up and found this helpful resource: How does Grass Grow?

Grass typically has a fibrous root system, characterized by a dense network of fine, thread-like roots that spread outward and downward.

Fibrous? I posted something a poet said about being fibrous a year or so ago. Can I find it again? No. It had something to do with someone thinking of themselves as made up of fibers, of their idea of the self as fibrous? I wish I could remember!

One last thing: Over the past weeks, I’ve encountered references to Dads and their obsessions with the lawn, how lawn maintenance is gendered male. I found this interesting site when I searched “gender lawn” from Lady Science: Liberate Your Lawn from the Legacy of Masculine Science.

In Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, Kenneth T. Jackson shows that the American Neighbor’s attachment to his lawn, since its takeover of the suburban consciousness after the Second World War, is the result of the affluence and financial security that the lawn represents. The lawn is a simple status symbol that signals to the little-n neighbors that The Neighbor has achieved a level of economic comfort that affords him both the money to pay his exorbitant water bill and the free time to mow thrice weekly in the summer. I think, however, if we want to break the American Neighbor of the lawn — and we should, because it’s not good for the environment that 2 percent of the land in the U.S is taken up by monocultural swathes of ornamental grass — we might consider that the lure of the lawn is deeper.

Hmm. . . this crabgrass book looks interesting.

march 16/BIKE

35 minutes
basement
outside temp: 28 degrees

Decided to bike in the basement and read an e-book (The Kind Worth Killing). Wasn’t sure I’d be able to do it with my bad vision, but I managed to read for 20 minutes. Then I watched some YouTube and tried to find something on Netflix, but couldn’t. Is that why I stopped at 35 minutes? Probably. Also, I remember feeling a twinge in my left knee.

Discovered a wonderful poem by one of my favorite poets, Rita Dove. Was able to listen to her read it. Wow — she’s good. I’d like to check out one of her audio books so I can listen to her read more. Unfortunately, my local library doesn’t have one. Bummer.

Here’s the last part:

excerpt from Prose in a Small Space/ Rita Dove

Then is it poetry if it’s confined?  Trembling along its axis, a flagpole come alive in high wind, flapping its radiant sleeve for attention — Over here! It’s me! — while the white spaces (air, field, early morning silence before the school bell) shape themselves around that one bright seizure . . . and if that’s so what do we have here, a dream or three paragraphs?  We have white space too; is this music?  As for all the words left out, banging at the gates . . . we could let them in, but where would we go with our orders, our stuttering pride?

I like her “About this Poem” description. Especially this line:

What began as a continuation of our good-natured ripostes went from anti-ars poetica to lyric reverie to—surprise—a praise song to the prose poem! 

Should I try writing a praise song to the gorge or to writing while running and running while writing or to my strange vision or to poetry?

That line about the one bright seizure made me think of poetry as an explosion of the extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary, or of the Stutter, or a pause, or an interruption.

march 9/WALKBIKE

walk: 15 minutes
neaighborhood
52 degrees

Wow! What a wonderful morning. Did a quick walk with Delia and Scott around 2 blocks. Heard several cardinals and their torpedoed call. Admired the bare and dry sidewalk and street. I talked about how I/we need to remember to let FWA figure out his own path. A mantra I should repeat in my head anytime I want to step in and “help”: let him be — maybe I’ll sing it to the tune of the Beatles’ song?

bike: 47 minutes
basement

A beautiful day outside, but still not time to run. I’m being cautious — too cautious? — with my back. I didn’t mind being on the bike. For the first 40 minutes I watched a wonderful documentary, The Only Girl in the Orchestra, on Netflix. So good!

This is my theory of how to enjoy your life incredibly. You don’t mind playing second fiddle. The idea of being a public figure and having applause and being in the limelight, and then all of a sudden you’re deprived of that as you get older and then not being in the limelight. I think it’s better to love something so much you do it for its own sake and also for the wonderful people that you’re playing with. You’re creating something together, which is better than something alone.

Orin O’Brian

After the short doc was over, I listened to 3 songs on my latest playlist, Doin’ Time: Too Much Time on my Hands/Styx, No Time to Die/ Billie Eilish, Time Warp/ Rocky Horror. Thought about the meaning of no time to die — no time = too busy/not enough time on your hands and also not the right time. When Time Warp came on it sounded strange. I realized that I had put the Broadway version instead of the movie one. I’ll have to fix that. Noticed these lyrics today:

Drinking those moments when
The blackness would hit me
And the void would be calling

Here’s some time lines I’d like to remember:

The turning of the globe is not so real to us   
As the seasons turning and the days that rise out of early gray   
—The world is all cut-outs then—and slip or step steadily down   
The slopes of our lives where the emotions and needs sprout.
(Hymn to Life/ James Schuyler)

Cut-outs, silhouettes, shadows. That is not all the world is for me, but it is what looks the clearest and most real.

march 8/BIKEWALK

40 minutes
basement

Good job Sara! You wanted to run outside even though you should give it at least another day for your back to recover, and you didn’t. You biked instead. And you biked for 5 more minutes today, which was the plan. I felt stronger than yesterday. Could this be the spring/summer I bike more?

Watched more of Fame. Somehow I missed the screen that read, Junior Year. Did they have one? They didn’t have a great speech by the acting teacher, describing the focus of the year. Bummer.

I watched the rest of sophomore and all of junior year. Doris and Ralph get together, Irene Cara sings “Out Here On My Own,” Leroy hooks up with the waspy ballerina. The Rocky Horror Picture Show — a cool documenting of the history of it. As I listened to “Time Warp” I thought about creating a Time playlist — “Too Much Time On Hands,” “Time Warp,” “Summertime,” Hazy Shade of Winter,” “Seasons of Love,” “Time After Time.” I think this interest in time is always there, simmering beneath the surface, but today it’s here for two other reasons: 1. talking to my older sister recently and hearing about her latest work on time travel and 2. the lines/ideas I gathered about time in past entries and just reread — 6 march 2024, 8 march 2024.

Time. Moments. Minutes. Pace. Linear, circular, looping. Dragging. Flying. Seasons. Beats — foot strikes, heart rate. Inside Outside On the Edge of. Too much. Too little.

If nothing else, it’s time to gather together my discussions of time and post them on unDISCIPLINED.

more OR

Yesterday afternoon Scott and I went to Arbeiter Tap Room to write and drink beer. I picked out some favorites from my “or” list:

At Any Given Moment You Might Feel This or This or This, but Rarely at the Same Time

Ardor arbor or
forest fortitude
or sorrow’s origins or
porphyrion interiors
or befores or
no mores or
mortal organs
or distorted mirrors’
evaporating forms
or spores adored or
dictators abhorred
or terror ignored
or

walk: 40 minutes
neighborhood
45 degrees

A blue sky, empty, at the start. A blue sky, mixed with fluffy and streaky clouds, halfway through. Bright, warmer, breezy. The snow on the streets is almost all melted. Only a few streaks. The field at Cooper has a flat layer of snow but no mini-mountains this year. This is the field where the plows dump the snow. Usually by March it has transformed into the badlands, with lumps and hills and jagged craters of dirty snow. Not much snow to plow or dump in the winter of 2024-25.

added, 9 march 2025: This morning, as I read past 9 march entries, I remembered a few more things from the walk:

  • the wind passing through the brittle leaves on a tree, sounding like water falling — not like rain, but like a cataract
  • the wind passing through a giant cottonwood causes it to sing like a door creaking open — creeeaaak
  • a white plastic bag stuck high in the tree — the quick flash of white reminded me of the moon

peripheral vision

I’m reading Peter Swanson’s book The Kind Worth Killing and this reference to peripheral vision came up:

A few years earlier I’d gone out fishing with a colleague, a fellow dot-com speculator who was the best open water fisherman I’d ever known. He could stare out at the surface of the ocean and know exactly where the fish were. He told me that his trick was to unfocus his eyes, to take in everything in his visual range all at once, and by doing that he could catch flickers of movement, disturbances in the water. . . . I decided to use this same trick on my own house. I let everything sort of blur in front of my eyes, waiting for any motion to draw attention to itself, and after I’d been staring at the house for less than a minute I caught some movement through the high window. . . .

My eyes are always mostly out of focus and I often see flashes of movement. In fact, it can be very distracting and irritating how my eyes, without wanting to, are drawn to the movement. One particularly form of movement I can’t not see: someone’s twitching legs, especially out of the corner of my eye at a band concert.

march 7/BIKEWALK

bike: 35 minutes
basement
outside temp: 34 degrees

It would be wonderful to be outside running, but my lower back is still a bit sore and I’m trying to be careful. Ugh — it’s hard to be disciplined, to not do something you want to because you know you shouldn’t. Oh well, the bike felt good. And I was able to watch more of Fame. And my back doesn’t hurt. And my legs feel good.

Anything in particular I remember from Fame? Mrs. Sherwood was being terrible to Leroy again — very old school in her efforts to be tough. Lisa, the dancer who never tries, was finally kicked out and almost jumped in front of a train in despair. At the last minute she stopped herself and said, Fuck it. If I can’t dance, I’ll change to the drama department. Another character’s response (Irene Cara): I tell you, you’re a fucking good actress. Bruno’s dad parked his cab and blasted Bruno’s music — the theme song. All the students poured out of the school and danced in the street, on the sidewalk, on the top of a cab. Bruno’s dad yelled out, This is my son’s music! Bruno Martelli!

A theme for their sophomore year: time to grow up and be honest with yourself and others. Dig deep, turn inward, expose your truths to others:

Last year we worked on simple observation. This year we’re going to turn that observation inward — work on recreating emotional states: fear, joy, sorrow, anger. And it will be more difficult, because you have to expose more of you, what’s on the inside of you.

Fame, sophomore year acting class (1980)

Yesterday I described the teacher’s description of freshman year acting class: to study your own mechanicalness. Then I thought about it in relation to running:

I could also imagine using this exercise while running or walking as a way to achieve “extreme presence” (from CAConrad). Focusing on breathing or the lifting of the foot or the swinging of the arms, etc.

While scrolling through instagram a few minutes ago, I found some running advice that fits with this. Focus on the elbow and think up up up as you run.

OR

Also yesterday I wrote about the poem “And” and an exercise inspired by it — pick another conjunction and turn it into a poem. I picked OR. Yesterday I wrote a list of words that had “or” in them. So much fun! This morning, I began picking out particular ones and trying to put them together. This is fun! I like it as an opportunity to open up more and become untethered from a particular outcome and idea of what I think my OR poem should be about. I wrote the list in my plague notebook. Note how I repeated some words. Also, if you look closely, you can see instances of words too crowded together or crossed out. Those are vision errors, when I didn’t see the words already written — they were in my blind spot.

from my Plague Notebook, Vol. 24

Here are some word combinations/fragments I’ve come up with so far:

  • author arbor ardor
  • orchard porphyrion interiors
  • enforce forest fortitude
  • orphan sorrow’s origins
  • distort mirrors
  • orchestrate forms for dishonored categories
  • forgive mortal organs
  • support porch organizing
  • reorganize ordinary colors
  • mentor porous discord
  • savor tomorrow’s flora encore
  • scorch rigor
  • torch dictators
  • foreswear ordinary pinafores
  • favor befores. adore no mores
  • record evaporated forms
  • flavor labor for transformation
  • endorse Morris choreography
  • reforest former ford factories
  • sponsor spores
  • border shores
  • orbit remorse
  • forge lorikeet collaborations
  • forgive french horns, former neighbors, candy corn for horrible flavor
  • forget hornet porn
  • humor minor opportunities

Almost all of these (or, is it all?) begin with a verb and seem to issue a command. Where are my nouns?

  • neighborhood semaphore
  • oracle oration
  • orange dictators
  • scored arrows
  • ornamental meteorology
  • adorable albacore
  • torrential labor
  • stork storms
  • born bored
  • enormous unicorn orchestra
  • pork-belly pallor
  • factory folklore

So much fun!

walk: 20 minutes
neighborhood
41 degrees

An afternoon walk with Delia-the-dog. Everything melting in the warm sun. Drip drip drip! Gushing gutters, sloppy sewers. Bare pavement except where the plow or shovel missed. I’ll take it!

popped into my head: fORtune favORs fORgetful sailORs

Fortune favors affordable tailors
Fortune savors forceful flavors

I read these to RJP and she wanted to join in the fun:

Dolores ordered hors d’oeuvres
Fortuna major

march 6/WALKBIKE

walk: 25 minutes
neighborhood
27 degrees / patches of slippery ice

Where people shoveled yesterday, the path is mostly bare with a few streaks of slippery ice, but where they didn’t it is not. Slabs of thick, untouched snow. The slick spots were the most unwelcome, especially with my tight lower back. Aside from the ice, it was wonderful to be outside. Bright blue sky, chirping birds, warm sun. So warm that I took off my hat.

At one point Scott mentioned how the strip of grass between the sidewalk and road is not called a boulevard everywhere. It’s a regional thing. He couldn’t remember what else it was called and where he heard about it, but I did — at least where he heard about it; I couldn’t remember what else it was called. He heard about it from me, during one of our runs together. I couldn’t remember much else, so I had to look it up. Yep — here it is:

I described a New Yorker article I was reading before we left about forensic linguistics. My description included misplaced apostrophes, devil strips, and Sha Na Na. 

log entry on 8 april 2024

A linguist solved a crime in which someone left ransom notes that read, “Put it [the money] in the green trash kan on the devil strip at the corner 18th and Carlson.” Here’s the important part in the article:

And he knew from his research that the patch of grass between the sidewalk and the street—sometimes known as the “tree belt,” “tree lawn,” or “sidewalk buffer”—is called the “devil’s strip” only in Akron, Ohio.

Wow, I’ve amassed a lot of information on this blog. Some of it I always remember, and some of it comes back when my memory is triggered, like today.

bike: 30 minutes
basement

I wanted to move my legs and get my heart rate up today so I biked. Watched part of Fame — the end of freshman year and the beginning of sophmore year. Two scenes I especially recall: 1. when Mrs. Sherwood shames Leroy for not being able to read in class — terrible and 2. when the acting teacher instructs the students to pay attention to the details — chewing, talking — of their life:

I want you to observe yourself doing ordinary everyday things. You’ll be asked to duplicate those here in class. An actor must develop an acute sense memory so concentrate on how you deal with things in your world. How you wash your face or hold your fork or lift your cup or comb your hair. Observe and study your own mechanicalness. See if you can catch yourself in the very act of doing something or saying something. See if your actions and reactions fall into patterns and what those patterns are. And in particular, pay close attention to the physical world. Isolate and concentrate on the details.

from Fame –first year (1980)

I’ve been doing this with my vision for several years now, partly because I’m curious and partly because I think it’s necessary for me to function. To isolate and understand and work around the strange and unexpected ways my eyes work (or don’t work).

I could also imagine using this exercise while running or walking as a way to achieve “extreme presence” (from CAConrad). Focusing on breathing or the lifting of the foot or the swinging of the arms, etc.

It felt good to bike. My back didn’t hurt at all. Only my left knee, a little, which is normal. Maybe I’ll do a week of biking. Could I work my way up to an hour on the bike?

conjunction junction, what’s your function?

In late fall or early winter, I wrote a haunts poem about all that the gorge could hold. I named it And. This morning, I found another poem with that title:

And/ Nicole Sealey (click link for audio)

Withstand pandemonium

and scandalous

nightstands

commanding candlelight

         and

         quicksand

and zinfandel

clandestine landmines

candy handfuls

and contraband

         and

         handmade

commandments

and merchandise

secondhand husbands

philandering

         and

         landless

and vandal

bandwagons slandered

and branded

handwritten reprimands

         and

         meander

on an island

landscaped with chandeliers

abandon handcuffs

standstills

         and

         backhands

notwithstanding

thousands of oleanders

and dandelions

handpicked

         and

         sandalwood

and mandrake

and random demands

the bystander

wanders

         in

         wonderland.

Along with the poem, there was a link to a writing exercise inspired it: Conjunctions/Connections, After Nicole Sealey by Maggie Queeney

  1. Read the poem “And” and listen to it several times. Jot down some notes.
  2. Pick a conjunction other than and — or, but, for, nor, yet, so. Make a list of words that contain your chosen conjunction.
  3. Turn your list of words into a poem. “Keep the sound of the word in the air as long as possible through rhyme and repetition.”

I think I’ll choose “or.” When I was writing my and poem in November, I told Scott about it on one of our runs. He mentioned how “and” and “or” work in his coding of web databases:

A mile later, Scott described how you code and in css (where and means both this and that must exist to make a statement true) and how you code or(where or means either this or that can exist to make a statement true). I was fascinated by how and was restrictive and narrowing in the code while orwas expansive. In my poem, I’m understanding and as generous and open and allowing for more possibilities not less. I told Scott that I might need to write an or poem now. And is accumulation, more layers while or is a stripping down. 

And = all these things can be true, and moreOr = at any give time, any one of these things could be true

log entry on 24 nov 2024

There’s also a great “or” poem in this entry.

feb 19/BIKERUN

bike: 30 minutes
run: 3 miles
outside temp: feels like -13

Thought briefly about going outside for a run then remembered if I stayed inside I could bike and watch more of The Gorge, which I did. I have 30 minutes left. Lots of action and jump scares and secret military operations and old film reels that reveal science experiments gone wrong and evil private corporations forming unbeatable mutant armies and chemical leaks and spiders with human skulls and more spent ammo than seems possible and . . . . I’m not sure how I feel about it all yet. One thing: earlier, when they first entered the gorge, the poet-sniper-main character (Levi) quoted T.S. Eliot and “This is how the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” This sure sounds like a bang. Two possibilities: 1. he nods to the line and has some witty quip about it, like if we’re going to end, let’s do it with a bang, not a whimper (ugh!) or 2. a much quieter conclusion, where they are not destroyed and the gorge is not destroyed evil is only slightly contained and will continue to slowly simmer and spread. Will Levi finally read Drassa his poem about her? Will he quote some other poetry? Will the movie end in poetry instead of war?

While I ran, I listened to an amazing podcast with a poet I just happened to write about yesterday: Rebecca Lindenberg. Wow! What an amazing conversation.

about how acceptance and resistance co-exist for her as she lives with chronic illness (type 1 diabetes)

I mean, what I feel is not acceptance. I did use that word earlier, but I don’t think that that is what I feel. I think what I feel is persistence more than anything.

And I feel ongoingness and I feel hope. . . . I don’t experience hope as a passive feeling, like hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul, I’m like, maybe, but you have to feed it and change the food in its cage and take it out and let it fly. . . . I understand hope as a series of acts of meaningful devotion. And I feel that because so much of the maintenace of a diabetic body is routines that you do every single day, if I think of them as small rituals instead of routines, then it doesn’t feel like I’m obeying my disease.

Poetry off the Shelf with Rebecca Lindenberg

Persistence, ongoingness, the practice of hope, a series of (small) acts of meaningful devotion. I feel these things in me as I navigate diminished vision and potential blindness.

the purple hour

4:05 am / dining room

Tried to sit down and think about Monica Ong’s “Lavender Insomnia” but was too restless, agitated — not from thoughts, but a buzzing left leg.

11:10 am / front room

the violet hour (twilight)

T.S. Eliot’s violet hour in Waste Land:
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

3 types of Twilight: (defined by how far the sun is below the horizon)

  1. civil twilight
  2. nautical twilight
  3. astronomical twilight
3 types of twilight

Civil twilight = dim but artificial light is not needed, bright stars are visible = violet

Nautical twilight = dimmer, sailors can use stars to navigate horizon, you need artificial light to do things = plum?

Astronomical twilight = almost full darkness, dark enough to see galaxies, nebulas = eggplant

I’m still thinking about T.S. Eliot and “The Hollow Men.” Hollow is such a great word. I didn’t realize T.S. Eliot lived until 1865 (edited on 19 feb 2026 — that’s quite a typo! not 1865 but 1965), and long enough for there to be a recording of him reading it. Those last lines!

added 19 feb 2026: Listened to this poem again. Wow! I can’t believe I didn’t tag this with shadows. So much shadow!

excerpt from The Hollow Men/ T. S. Eliot

Between the idea  
And the reality  
Between the motion  
And the act  
Falls the Shadow 

                                  For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception  
And the creation 
Between the emotion  
And the response  
Falls the Shadow 

                                  Life is very long

Between the desire  
And the spasm  
Between the potency  
And the existence  
Between the essence  
And the descent  
Falls the Shadow 

                                  For T

feb 18/BIKERUN

bike: 30 minutes
run: 3.05 miles
outside temp: -1 degree / feels like -18

Public schools were canceled today because of the cold. I don’t have a kid in public school anymore (hooray!) but I do rehearse at a high school on Tuesday nights for community band. When schools are closed band is canceled. Bummer.

I have run when it felt like 20 below, but 18 below was too cold for me today. Also, I figured out something I wanted to watch while I was biking: The Gorge. There is very little talking in it; it’s almost all visual. Luckily, I had the audio description on. I think I would have missed most of the movie without it. What a relief, for my eyes and brain, to hear the descriptions. About 20 or 30 minutes in, the movie was dragging and I wondered if I could keep watching it. Then bam, a suprise! I was done with my bike so I stopped, but I’m looking forward to watching more of it now. The lead actor is a poet and writes every day. Will he ever mention one of his favorite poets, or quote a line from them? In one of the last scenes I watched before I stopped, he told the other main character that he was writing a poem about her. He would only give her the tentative title: She collapsed the night (I think it was collapsed, but it could have been collapses?). added, 20 feb 2025: Finished the movie and Levi’s poem is mentioned, but Eliot’s line is not — an unsatisfying ending.

I started the run with a podcast, but moved to my energy playlist again. Listened to a few rock songs with electric guitar and thought: electric purple. Then, purple sparking on the surface or on the underside of the surface shimmering shaking distorting and dis or mis or strangely coloring my perception of the world. Purple as energetic electric chemical reactions with ganglion cells. Then I heard another song — why can’t I remember which song? — with a great beat that I was able to get inside of: feet, the beat of the song, the speed of the treadmill, a chorus in tight unison. Could this be the purple part of the beat?

During my morning poem-a-day practice, I read this:

The title is from [Immanuel] Kant’s description of reason, and I want to pry what’s moving and plaintive about it apart from what’s world-ending. Not because I care about Kant but because, from the standpoint of reason, genocide can be justified.

the author’s note about their poem, “What can I know what should I do what may I hope/ Benjamin Krusling

This explanation brings me back to my first year of grad school — fall 1996, Claremont, CA — in a class on Horkheimer and Adorno and critical theory. I remember learning about the limits of reason and the violence of modernity and the hypocrisy of claims for freedom and democracy by those in power.

the purple hour — feb 17th and 18th

2:10 am / dining room / 17 feb

  • raisins
  • plums
  • prunes
  • figs
  • dates
  • beets

Plums!

This Is Just To Say/ William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

8:42 am / dining room / 17 feb

plum plumb plump (source)

plum = part of the rose family, prunes when dried, something sweet — a plum job, a plum deal, plummy (adj)

plumb = pipes/plumbing, plumbum (Latin/lead), lead weight attached to line — used to indicate vertical direction, vertically (adj), absolutely — plumb wrong / exactly — plumb in the middle (adv), plumb the depths (v)

plump = having a full rounded form (adj), dropping placing or sinking suddenly and heavily — they plumped down (v), making or becoming plump — plumping a pillow (v)

a plum assignment
plumb out of luck
plump up an ego

Thinking more about William Carlos Williams:

Love Song/ William Carlos Williams

I lie here thinking of you:—

the stain of love
is upon the world!
Yellow, yellow, yellow
it eats into the leaves,
smears with saffron
the horned branches that lean
heavily
against a smooth purple sky!
There is no light
only a honey-thick stain
that drips from leaf to leaf
and limb to limb
spoiling the colors
of the whole world—

you far off there under
the wine-red selvage of the west!

Yellow and purple. Reminds me, again, of Robin Wall Kimmerer and asters and goldenrods!

If a fountain could jet bouquets of chrome yellow in dazzling arches of chrysanthemum fireworks, that would be Canada Goldenrod. Each three-foot stem is a geyser of tiny gold daisies, ladylike in miniature, exuberant en masse. Where the soil is damp enough, they stand side by side with their perfect counterpart, New England Asters. Not the pale domesticates of the perennial border, the weak sauce of lavender or sky blue, but full-on royal purple that would make a violet shrink. The daisylike fringe of purple petals surrounds a disc as bright as the sun at high noon, a golden-orange pool, just a tantalizing shade darker than the surrounding goldenrod. Alone, each is a botanical superlative. Together, the visual effect is stunning.

Why do they sand beside each other when they could grow alone? Why this particular pair?

Color perception in humans relies on banks of specialized receptor cells, the rods and cones in the retina. The job of the cone cells is to absorb light of different wave lengths and pass it on to the brain’s visual cortex, where it can be interpreted. The visible light spectrum, the rainbow of colors, is broad, so the most effective means of discerning color is not one generalized jack-of-all-trades cone cell, but rather an array of specialists, each perfectly tuned to absorb certain wavelengths. The human eye has three kinds. One type excels at detecting red and associated wavelengths. One is tuned to blue. The other optimally perceives light of two colors: purple and yellow.

The human eye is superbly equipped to detect these colors and send a signal pulsing to the brain. This doesn’t explain why I perceive them as beautiful, but it does explain why that combination gets my undivided attention. I asked my artist buddies about the power of purple and gold, and they sent me right to the color wheel: these two are complementary colors, as different in nature as could be. In composing a palette, putting them together makes each more vivid: In an 1890 treatise on color perception, Goethe, who was both a scientist and a poet, wrote that “the colors diametrically opposed to each other . . . are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye.” Purple and yellow are a reciprocal pair. Our eyes are so sensitive to these wavelengths that the cones can get oversaturated and the stimulus pours over onto the other cells.

Goldenrod and asters appear very similarly to bee eyes and human eyes. We both think they’re beautiful. Their striking contrast when they grow together makes them the most attractive target in the whol emeadow, a beacon for bee.s Growing together, both receive more pollinator visits than they would if they were growing alone.

Braiding Sweetgrass / Robin Wall Kimmerer

3:06 / dining room / 18 feb

  • the rattle of the vent as the warm air is forced through it 
  • my dark reflection on the stainless steel dishwasher door, caused by the dim string of lights in the front room cast on me as I stood on the rug in the dining room — silvery purple
  • a creaking house, settling after the heat stopped
  • a hiss in my head
  • what are the origins of magenta? why were the vikings purple and gold?
  • purplish blue = indigo
  • reddish purple = magenta, purplish red = fuchsia
  • the crab apple trees and their fuchsia funnels (Ada Limón)
  • Magenta is named after a town in Italy (Magenta) and a bloody battle for independence in 1859

10:00 am / front room

Searching for magenta on poetryfoundation.org, I found some very cool looking exercises from Rebecca Lindenberg about perception, including one using Ezra Pound’s ideogram. Lindenberg offers this example:

CHERRY FLAMINGO
ROSE IRON RUST

Say the students choose, for example, yellow. It is likely they will start by suggesting, again, the usual concrete items we associate with that color—lemons, bananas, the sun, corn on the cob, sunflowers. After they’ve exhausted those, it’s important to keep asking—what else is yellow? Taxis, rubber duckies, corn tortillas, rain slickers, caution tape, butter. Then, onion skins, sticky notes, school buses, yield signs, egg yolks, urine, grapefruit rinds, fog—and now we’re getting somewhere. Now we’re not talking so much about what we think of as yellow, we’re talking about what we actually see as yellow.

Once the board or screen is full of things we see as yellow, it’s worth pausing to remind students that we aren’t just making a picture of yellow. What the class chooses will suggest something about yellow—but it doesn’t have to be everything there is to say about yellow. It doesn’t have to be comprehensive, just visceral, evoking “yellow-ness” (or “teal-ness” or “tan-ness”). Then, another vote. Or rather, a few rounds, in which each student gets two votes, until you narrow it down to the final four. And ka-pow! You’ve made an ideogram.

A Poetry of Perception

Lindenberg suggests a homework assignment: pick a color, brainstorm at least 25 things related to the color, narrow it down to four, write a paragraph of explanation. I think I’ll try this with purple — just one, or a series of purple moods?!

note: I’m resisting the inclination to dig deep into articles/essays/posts about Pound and imagism. I might (will) get lost in theories and concepts and schools and jargon and devote all my time to understanding and knowing instead of making and feeling. That’s Dr. Sara’s style, not mine!

updated a few hours later: Watched about 20 more minutes of The Gorge. In one scene they’re walking through a yellow fog and into a purple wood. I used my phone to take a picture. Don’t think it quite captures the intense colors.

yellow into purple

In this scene, yellow and purple are used to evoke a hellscape. The half-dead skeletons with trees growing out of them are referred to as hollow men, which is a reference to T.S. Eliot’s poem. The poem keeps coming up; I think I should read it. Wow — just read it. Here’s a bit from the middle and the last lines, which Levi, one of the main characters, recites as they walk in purple (violet) air.

excerpts from The Hollow Men/ T.S. Eliot

Shape without form, shade without colour.  
Paralysed force, gesture without motion; 

Those who have crossed 
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom 
Remember us—if at all—not as lost  
Violent souls, but only  
As the hollow men  

                              II 

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams  
In death’s dream kingdom  
These do not appear: 
There, the eyes are  
Sunlight on a broken column  
There, is a tree swinging 
And voices are  
In the wind’s singing  
More distant and more solemn  
Than a fading star.

—

This is the way the world ends 
This is the way the world ends 
This is the way the world ends 
Not with a bang but a whimper.

feb 11/BIKERUN

bike: 25 minutes
run: 3 miles
outside temp: 1 degree/ feels like -7

Too cold for me today. Watched some races while I biked — I need to find a good movie or show!, listened to “Energy” while I ran. I stopped at 15 minutes for a few seconds, but when a good song came on — I can’t remember what — I decided to start running again. Then I kept going until I hit 30 minutes. Nice! My small victory for the day.

During the first half of the run I couldn’t quite lock into a rhythm. My feet seemed slightly off with the belt; I was on the edge of the beat. When I made the treadmill just a little faster, I entered the beat. I could barely hear my feet striking and I couldn’t feel the belt moving. Very cool. It felt similar to when I’ve locked in with the metronome. The other thing I remember is looking up at the dark window with the reflection of the light — the one that I’ve written about several times before, describing it as looking like an inverted moon on lake superior — and thinking it didn’t look like the moon anymore. I remembered why: Scott changed the light bulb from a round one to a rectangle one. It’s brighter too. My moon is gone. Bummer.

the purple hour

3:10 am / bedroom
Full moon bright, spied through the dark slats of the blinds
Slanted square of window with blinds cast in the carpet

Shadow of the blinds cast on McPherson* forearm: stripes
Only seen in dim light; the light of this iPad erases it

*a typo — I decided to keep it in here. I don’t remember what I was trying to write that would have been autocorrected to McPherson. Was it just a slip of my fingers as I typed my?

(written 11 feb, 9:30 am) I remember the moon early this morning. Wow! So bright through the blinds. I wanted to walk over to the window and peek through the slats but I was afraid that it would wake Delia the dog, asleep on the couch. It was so bright that even from the floor with the blinds closed all the way, I could see it if I tilted my head just right.

I turned down the brightness of the iPad as much as I could, but it still made the room too bright. Right after I put my iPad away, the shadows were gone. I wondered if clouds were covering the moon. But once my eyes adjusted, the shadows were back.

We inherited these blinds from the old owner of this house. They let light in even when fully closed. How dark would it be in this room if we had different (better?) blinds? How much longer would it take my eyes to adjust to (grow accustomed to?) the dark?

I think these blinds, with their gaps, create a dark that has some light: purple light.

purple thoughts/stories

violet: the very shortest spectral wavelength humans can see
to re-create the color purple requires excess: shellfish, lichen

Reading about mauve in The Secret Lives of Colors, I was reminded of the connection between old woman and purple. (I recall thinking about the connection as I ran the other day when the Red Hat Ladies with their purple clothes popped into my head.)

Soon enough, however, mauve went into that most Victorian of things: a decline. Overconsumption, as well as the continuing loyalty of an older generation, meant that the color soon became shorthand for a particular kind o faging lady.

The Secret Lives of Colors / Kassia St. Clair (170)

Then I thought about the final stanza of a poem (this whole poem is amazing, btw). I gathered for this blog a few years ago:

It’s a small deposit,
but I’m putting my faith in reincarnation. I need to believe
in the sweetness of one righteous image,
in Bill Parcells trapped in the body of a teacup poodle,
as any despised thing,
forced to yap away his next life staked to
a clothesline pole or doing hard time on a rich old matron’s lap,
dyed lilac to match her outfit.
I want to live there someday, across that street,
and listen to him. Yap, yap, yap.
(I Heart Your Dog’s Heart/ Erin Belieu)

Which led to another random thought about a recent (2019?) hair trend: lavender gray. Looking at some of the pictures I wonder if I could pull this look off — I already have the gray.

The Color Purple

Inspired by my study of purple, I decided to reread Alice Walker’s The Color Purple which I read and wrote about in my masters’ coursework. I was really into Walker and Morrison and the link between women’s spirituality and sexual pleasure. I haven’t read it since then — 25 years ago. So far — 40 pages in — I’m enjoying it. Why is it called The Color Purple? I had to look it up, because I’ve forgotten. There are plenty of answers, here’s one:

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.

Shug Avery in The Color Purple/ Alice Walker

A helpful source: Unearth the Root of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. It describes the importance of nature and flowers to Walker’s vision of spirituality. This reminds me of Walker’s wonderful essay, “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens.” Of course, I can’t find my copy of it right now. I’ll have to keep searching. The article also discusses the importance of horticulture for Black Americans and their African ancestors. I’m reminded of JJJJJerome Ellis’ Aster of Ceremony and their project of researching, naming, invoking the Plants that grew in the area where their enslaved ancestors “ran away”. A big chunk of the book is a Benediction, including the names of these plants, printed in purple. I’ve been reluctant to read it because it looked overwhelming with my bad eyes, but now I want to try. I think it will be another version of “The Purple Hour.”

update, a few minutes later: I started to read this section with my eyes, but it was difficult. I looked it up and discovered that my local library has the audio book. I requested it! A 2 week wait, but hopefully sooner. I’ll start on this whenl I can read the audiobook along with the paper book.

feb 8/SHOVELBIKERUN

shovel: 4? inches
bike: 15 minutes
run: 1.5 miles

Woke up this morning to snow! Big flakes floating down. I watched them through the kitchen door. Beautiful. Within a few minutes, more flakes, faster, smaller. I sat in the arm chair inherited from Scott’s mom and watched the snow fall as I drank my coffee. A great way to start the day. Several hours later, when the snow had almost stopped, I layered up and went outside to shovel. Soft, fluffy snow, very easy to shovel. I listened to Season 2, Episode 3 of the Severance podcast. There was some wind, but it wasn’t too cold.

an image: shoveling in the back, I watched as a small, dark form swirled and skittered. It moved like a little bird. Was it? No, a leaf. Such a strange sight, watching a leaf that looked alive and not just animated by wind.

After sitting around all day — reading, napping, tracking the runners in the Black Canyon 100k Ultra, doing a FaceTime with FWA — I decided I needed to move. Went to the basement and biked. Then moved over to the treadmill and ran. Watched a few indoor track races during the bike, listened to the rest of the Severance podcast while I ran. That third episode of Severance — woah! The final minutes really freaked me out and triggered a memory from when I passed out last Christmas. Intense.

the purple hour

Woke up with very restless legs at 2:38 am. Too restless to sit and write anything. All I have in my notes is: more restlessness — shaking my legs

feb 6/YOGABIKERUN

yoga: 30 minutes
bike: 20 minutes (basement)
run: 1.5 miles (basement)
outside temp: 11 degrees (-3) / wind: 30 mph gusts

Low vision yoga in the morning. Biking and running in the evening: 8 pm. This has to be one of the latest runs I’ve ever done. Will it help my sleep and restlessness? Make them worse? Do nothing? I’ll report back tomorrow.

While I biked I watched an old 70.3 triathlon race. While I ran, I listened to the Energy playlist: Pump Up the Jam, Ballroom Blitz, Hip to be Square. During the bike, my left knee occasionally hurt, which sometimes happens. After the run, my lower back was a bit sore. Should I do something about my back, like take a break or get it checked out?

Anything else I remember? The shadows my swinging arms made. How warm I felt after just a few minutes on the bike. A parched throat. Feeling relaxed and happy to be moving inside.

purple hour

Woke up at 2 am last night. Unlike the night before, when my legs were so restless that I had to shake them for a few minutes, I felt calm and chill and unbothered by being up. Instead of going downstairs to sit at the dining room table, I bounced gently on my exercise ball in the bedroom. Here’s what I wrote:

  • Bedroom in low light — a quiet still purple, light and dark
  • Quiet? Silent heavy and light soft and thick
  • A fan — not white noise but purple noise the agitation of stirring air
  • A steady hum to cover other noises and to counter the stiff stuck frozen nature of sleep when we slow to almost a stop unable to move in sleep
  • A world not lacking color but possessing an abundance of purple
  • purpled pulsing heart pumping purple blood
  • steady relaxed rocking on my feels (a type: heels, but I like feels, so I’ll keep it!)
  • cracking spine small purple sparks

I typed up my notes on my iPad. I love the typo: rocking on my feels.

Just now, reading through these notes I thought, is purple noise a thing? Looked it up and, yes it is! It’s used in sound engineering and sound/color therapy and for help with sleep. Here’s a helpful video highlighting sound colors:

I appreciate the descriptions and examples in this video, even if I can’t quite understand all of it. I wonder — what color of noise was I hearing in my bedroom? The sound was produced by a fan. Maybe I’ll ask Scott to analyze it — he loves sound production/engineering. I don’t think it’s purple noise; purple noise seems too high. Listening to a purple noise album on Apple Music, I’m a little agitated.

Speaking of color noise — I wonder what color the wind howling through the gaps in screen and front door is?

dec 12/BIKERUN

25 minute bike ride
1.5 mile run
basement
outside: 2 degrees / feels like -8
dew point: -6

No running outside for me today. Earlier this morning, when I would have gone out for a run, it felt like -21. Brrrr. I did a short bike and a run in the basement. I don’t remember noticing or thinking about much. One thought: I wonder where the mouse who lives down here is right now? This morning, Scott discovered evidence that it had made its way upstairs: 3 pebbles of poop on the cutting board. Gross!

Watched a T 100 triathlon race while I biked and Taylor Swift’s “Reputation” as I ran.

Here’s a poem I found about Emily Dickinson yesterday:

Emily Dickinson at the Poetry Slam/ Dan Vera

I will tell you why she rarely ventured from her house.
It happened like this:

One day she took the train to Boston,
made her way to the darkened room,
put her name down in cursive script
and waited her turn.

When they read her name aloud
she made her way to the stage
straightened the papers in her hands —
pages and envelopes, the backs of grocery bills,
she closed her eyes for a minute,
took a breath,
and began.

From her mouth perfect words exploded,
intact formulas of light and darkness.
She dared to rhyme with words like cochineal
and described the skies like diadem.
Obscurely worded incantations filled the room
with an alchemy that made the very molecules quake.

The solitary words she handled
in her upstairs room with keen precision
came rumbling out to make the electric lights flicker.

40 members of the audience
were treated for hypertension.
20 year old dark haired beauties found their heads
had turned a Moses White.

Her second poem erased the memory of every cellphone
in the nightclub,
and by the fourth line of the sixth verse
the grandmother in the upstairs apartment
had been cured of her rheumatism.

The papers reported the power outages.
The area hospitals taxed their emergency generators
and sirens were heard to wail through the night.

Quietly she made her way to the exit,
walked to the terminal and rode back to Amherst.

She never left her room again
and never read such syllables aloud.

nov 20/BIKE

30 minutes
basement
31 degrees / flurries

This afternoon, I decided to do my first indoor bike ride of the season. Not because it’s too cold or because it’s snowing, but because I’ve run 3 days in a row and I wanted to bike instead. Cross-training in the winter isn’t nearly as fun as it is in the summer. Maybe this year, I’ll actually try some winter-specific activities, like snow-shoeing or ice-skating. I re-watched part of the women’s triathlon from the 2016 Rio Olympics. Love that race. I’ve already written about it back in 2017.

Another reason I didn’t run this morning was because, Scott and I took RJP to the post office to renew her passport. Between the lack of music, the surly workers, the flickering light, and the clueless customers, it was a vibe. (am I using that right?) At first, I thought the woman behind the counter was just rude, but when she was nice to us because we had our shit together, I realized that it was more that she didn’t suffer fools — like the woman who didn’t make an appointment, or the woman who could have but didn’t fill out her paperwork ahead of time and didn’t have her old passport or remember the number for it.

Another random thing for future Sara to remember: Pointing at some stamps, I thought Scott said, I like these Leonard Nimoy ones, but what he actually said was, I like these Lunar New Year ones.

Today, I’ve been trying to work on the “and’ section of my Haunts poem, but I’ve been a little stuck. This section is about open space and possibility and the place between beats and breaths and foot strikes. It’s about the gorge as a container holding everything and holding Nothing (air, the void, mystery). It’s about thresholds and room to move/breathe/be and the space created from absence (of land, words, functional cone cells, mothers). Wow, just typing up this summary has given me some ideas!

april 16/BIKERUN

bike: 16 minutes
run: 2.3 miles
basement
outside: 54 degrees / rain, wind

Before I started writing this but after my workout, I got up from my chair and my right kneecap missed the groove and slipped out hard. So hard that I uncontrollably yelled, “God Dammit!” No pain and it went right back in, or I was able to pop it back in. But it was shocking — mentally and physically. My LCL or meniscus seem as reticent to walk as my brain does — a strange sentence to write: can you imagine ligaments feeling something independent of the brain? Now I’m nervous about when this might happen again. As is usually the case, I had absolutely no warning. I didn’t do anything abrupt or dramatic; I just stood up and turned. I’ll get over it in a few minutes and stop imagining different scenarios in my head when the kneecap suddenly slides and it hurts and I can’t get it back into place. For now, I’ll breathe and attempt to remember how happy I was to work out before my subluxation.

It’s raining today, and there’s a wind advisory. Decided to go to the basement and do a bike run combo. After pumping up the air in my tire — it is still leaking air even though I got new tires last spring — I found the SuperLeague e-tri championships. I’ve been watching SuperLeague while biking in the basement since it started — when? 2018? Then I ran for 22.5 minutes while I listened to a “If Books Could Kill” podcast and then a playlist.

I don’t remember thinking about much except for that I had to go to the bathroom. Scott and I have new euphemism for it: unfinished business. Anything else? I recall looking straight ahead at the water heater and I remember feeling like a badass when I increased my cadence to try and match the bikers I was watching.

Here’s a victory: I didn’t think at all about the text exchange I had with FWA about what “fun” or “interesting” or “non-music” classes he could take to fill up his pretty bare schedule for senior year. No double major or minors for him. Just music, which he’s very good at, but still . . . . I’m trying to let him figure out his own way, but it’s so hard to watch him make choices that seem foolish or short-sighted. Sigh. Parenting is hard; backing off is hard; trusting is hard. When I worry too much, I’ll go back and watch his recital from Sunday and remember how proud I am of him and that he can (and is) creating an exciting future for himself.

update: I didn’t need to worry; he figured out some great classes on his own: Japanese!, Environmental Geography, and Criminology.

before the bike and run

Yesterday was the poet, Tomas Tranströmer’s birthday. He would have been 92. I’ve posted a few poems from him on here before. While looking for “air” poems, I found this one. It’s an ekphrastic! Those ekphrastic poems keep appearing. Are they trying to encourage me to keep working on my ekphrastic project? I’d like to believe so. Anyway, here’s the Tranströmer poem I found:

Vermeer / Tomas Tranströmer

translated by Robert Bly

It’s not a sheltered world. The noise begins over there, on the other side of the wall
where the alehouse is
with its laughter and quarrels, its rows of teeth, its tears, its chiming of clocks,
and the psychotic brother-in-law, the murderer, in whose presence
everyone feels fear.

The huge explosion and the emergency crew arriving late,
boats showing off on the canals, money slipping down into pockets
— the wrong man’s —
ultimatum piled on the ultimatum,
widemouthed red flowers who sweat reminds us of approaching war.

And then straight through the wall — from there — straight into the airy studio
in the seconds that have got permission to live for centuries.
Paintings that choose the name: “The Music Lesson”
or ” A Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.”
She is eight months pregnant, two hearts beating inside her.
The wall behind her holds a crinkly map of Terra Incognita.

Just breathe. An unidentifiable blue fabric has been tacked to the chairs.
Gold-headed tacks flew in with astronomical speed
and stopped smack there
as if there had always been stillness and nothing else.

The ears experience a buzz, perhaps it’s depth or perhaps height.
It’s the pressure from the other side of the wall,
the pressure that makes each fact float
and makes the brushstroke firm.

Passing through walls hurts human beings, they get sick from it,
but we have no choice.
It’s all one world. Now to the walls.
The walls are a part of you.
One either knows that, or one doesn’t; but it’s the same for everyone
except for small children. There aren’t any walls for them.

The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall.
It is like a prayer to what is empty.
And what is empty turns its face to us
and whispers:
“I am not empty, I am open.”

I love this poem and how it imagines the world outside of the painting and its relationship to the world inside of it. Starting with the first line: It’s not a sheltered world. The noise begins over there, on the other side of the wall . . . . That alehouse, that psychotic brother-in-law. The explosion, the money being dropped into the wrong man’s pocket. Then the airy studio and the seconds that have got permission to live for centuries — the differences between what we notice and try to remember and what we ignore or try to forget — what is worthy of attention, a painting, and what is not.

What is worth noticing in a poem describing a painting, and what is not? The Vermeer painting the poem is titled, “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter,” but there’s no mention of the letter or the woman’s expression, and the blue described by Tranströmer is the blue fabric on the chair, not of the woman’s jacket.

This poem is about the wall, the other side of the wall, the pressure that the other side creates, pressing in on us. The wall between our interior and the exterior world. The edge of the void, the abyss. All of this is kind of, almost, not quite making sense to me. I should spend some more time rereading Tom Sleigh’s“Too Much of the Air: Tomas Tranströmer“.

I’m struck by the last lines:

The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall.
It is like a prayer to what is empty.
And what is empty turns its face to us
and whispers:
‘I am not empty, I am open.’

I’m thinking of the gorge here and the limestone walls that contain it and how it is both empty of land/rock and filled with air and openness. To think of the void — the unknowable, unsayable, mystery — as both frightening (emptiness, nothingness) and inviting (openness, possibility).

Yesterday I talked about believing in the unseen. Today I’m thinking about what it could mean to be believe in the unseeable. Unseen could mean, not-yet-seen or unnoticed, but unseeable suggests that seeing is never possible.

Before writing this, I was reviewing an old log entry from April 16, 2022. In it, I discuss Elisa Gabbert’s article about poetry and the Void.

They [poets] write in the line, in the company of the void. That changes how you write — and more profoundly, how you think, and even how you are, your mode of being. When you write in the line, there is always an awareness of the mystery, of what is left out. This is why, I suppose, poems can be so confounding. Empty space on the page, that absence of language, provides no clues. But it doesn’t communicate nothing — rather, it communicates nothing. It speaks void, it telegraphs mystery.

By “mystery” I don’t mean metaphor or disguise. Poetry doesn’t, or shouldn’t, achieve mystery only by hiding the known, or translating the known into other, less familiar language. The mystery is unknowing, the unknown — as in Jennifer Huang’s “Departure”: “The things I don’t know have stayed/In this home.” The mystery is the missing mountain in Shane McCrae’s “The Butterflies the Mountain and the Lake”:

the / Butterflies monarch butterflies huge swarms they
Migrate and as they migrate south as they
Cross Lake Superior instead of flying

South straight across they fly
South over the water then fly east
still over the water then fly south again / And now
biologists believe they turn to avoid a mountain
That disappeared millennia ago.

The missing mountain is still there.

The Shape of a Void / Elisa Gabbert

This past weekend, Scott and I watched the 2 part documentary about Steve Martin, STEVE! I really enjoyed it. I remember responding to this idea offered by one of Steve Martin’s artist friends:

How to close the void. I think that’s the nature and the drive in art, it comes from that deep awareness of that void.

STEVE! — 53:30, part 2

I agree with the second part of that statement, about the deep awareness of the void, but not the first — at least how it’s worded. It’s not to close the void, but to navigate it, develop a relationship to it, engage with it, learn how to live with it. I mentioned this to Scott and he argued that the void in this quotation is not the unknown or mystery, but something else. Maybe lack or longing? A desire to be whole? To have/feel meaning? I still don’t like the word close. Can you ever close the void? Tranströmer doesn’t think so; it’s always on the other side of that wall. Even with a wall between you and it, you feel its pressure in your ears. And it’s this pressure that drives/shapes/enables your art — that makes each fact float/and makes the brushstroke firm.

A final (for now) word on this ekphrastic poem: I like how Tranströmer is responding to the work of art in this poem, how we uses the image to reflect on the abyss/void, history, interior/exterior, and why we make art. I want to think about it some more and try to write something for my “How to See” project inspired by his approach.

march 27/BIKERUN

bike: 4 minutes
run: 3.5 miles
outside: feels like 13

Snow and ice on the ground. Wind. Feels like 13. Inside today. I would have done more on the bike, but my calf started to feel a little strange — tightening, but no pain.

The run was good — a few flares, then my heel made some noise at the end, again, no pain, just tight, I think. I locked into a steady, slow pace and listened to the latest episode of Nobody Asked Us. Des told a story about her recent NY 1/2 marathon and how she should have woken up 30 minutes earlier in order for the coffee to do its job — iykyk. The story was funny — I laughed several times — and also fascinating. She talked about how she couldn’t push the pace because if she tried, it would have been a big mess. She was able to control it by managing her effort and working with her body, not against it.

Later, giving a pep talk to Kara for her upcoming race she said something like, You’ll be running along and then suddenly someone in a banana costume will pass you and you’ll say, “hell no, that ridiculous thing can’t beat me!” and you’ll speed up. Thinking about our encounter with the fast banana in our 10k race I wonder, are bananas a thing in races now? Will I see more bananas next month?

before the run

Yesterday I mentioned that it was Robert Frost’s 150th birthday, but I forgot to mention 2 things.

First, when I told FWA about it, he said, And I took the road less travelled and that has made all the difference — or something like that. A few minutes later, as we were walking to the garage to leave for the airport he called out, Mom, look — then walked off the sidewalk into the grass, looped around a bush, then returned to sidewalk and said, See, the road less travelled. Wow.

Second, in honor of Frost’s birthday Poetry Foundation posted his poem, Acquainted with the Night, which I recall first reading through Edward Hirsch’s essay, “The Pace Provokes My Thought.” Acquainted. Another word for familiar with, know of or known to, on friendly terms. I want to add this word to my list of alternatives to know/ing, along with ED’s accustomed, as in We grow accustomed to the Dark. I like the friendliness of acquainted, which is slightly different than the “getting used to” of ED’s accustomed. I also like that it’s friendly, but not too friendly; there’s still some distance from whatever it is that you are acquainted with — an acquaintance not an old friend.

Now I’m thinking about the word familiar. Two immediate thoughts. First, an idea from Alice Oswald that I revisited the other day:

citing Zizek: we can’t connect, be one with nature. It’s extraordinary, alien. It’s this terrifying otherness of nature that we need to grasp hold of and be more courageous in our ways of living with it and seeing it.

Landscape and Literature Podcast: Alice Oswald on the Dart River

So, familiar is bad for poetry? We need to make the familiar strange, fresh.

Second — I just spent 15 or 20 minutes attempting to find the log entry and poem that made think of this second thing and couldn’t, so I am very reluctantly giving up on it. — thinking about poems and how they can also take the strange and make it familiar, or take strangers and make them friends. I recall reading a poem — I think it was something about ROBINS! — I’m keeping this strange sentence in as evidence of my mind at work. After I gave up on finding and just tried to remember what I said, suddenly I recalled what the poem I was searching for was about and how reading it connected me to a stranger: robins. So I searched back through my posts for “robins” and finally found it. Hooray!

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about how poetry makes the familiar strange, but I think poetry can also make the strange familiar. Give us a door into the unfamiliar so we can get to know someone else and their experiences. The door in for me with this poem was all the robins. This past week, I saw so many fat robins on my crab apple tree, swaying and bobbing and getting drunk off the shriveled up apples. 

log from 14 jan 2023

Here’s the line from the poem that helped me get acquainted with its author, David Eye:

Cousin–When a dozen robins blew into the yard yesterday–
I’d never seen so many–I watched them hop, cock their heads,
grab the thaw’s first worms. Such a pleasure, those yam-
colored breast feathers.
(from Letter from the Catskills/ David Eye)

And now I’m thinking about the different ways that poetry has helped make the strange familiar to me, especially in terms of my vision. Since I rediscovered poetry in 2017, I’ve been reading, studying, and writing it as a way to better navigate my strange and uncertain and difficult experiences of slowly losing my cone cells. I’m building a new world and a new way to be that’s heavily populated with poetic lines, ideas, methods.

Last year, I wrote a cento in which I gathered lines from poets invoking color. The original title of it was, “When Poetry Replaces Dead Cone Cells, a cento”

The world mostly gone/ Sara Lynne Puotinen

The world mostly gone,
I make it what I want.


I empty my mind. I stuff it with grass.
I’m green, I repeat. I grow in green,


burst up in bonfires of green, whirl and hurl
my green over the rocks of this imaginary life.


Meanwhile the wild geese, high
in the clean blue air, are heading home


again. (Isn’t sky-blue brighter than any sky
you really see? Canned sky, Crayola blue.)


The sun is the yellowest squash. More yellow,
I think, of course more yellow.


A shiny switch plate in the otherwise ongoing green
flickers like a match held to a dry branch


and the whole world goes up in orange. Orange
as pumpkins in a field humming.


I write a line about orange.
Pretty soon it is a whole page


of words, not lines. Then another page.
And that orange, it makes me so happy.

march 24/BIKERUN

bike: 15 minutes
run; 1 mile
basement
outside: snowing

A big storm, just starting, but not quite. Now, light snow. We’re expecting 5-9 inches. I wasn’t sure how icy the sidewalks were or how ready my calf was to run, so I decided to work out in the basement.

calf update, for future Sara (and maybe her physical therapist?): during the race yesterday, my calf felt a little strange a few times — a slight tightening? no pain — but was otherwise fine. After the race: some soreness and tightness. today during the bike: a few more flares, an occasional twinge with a little pain. during the run: started feeling sore about 8 minutes, then a little strange. It’s so hard to know what the right thing to do is — stop running? ignore it as nothing, or as a calf that cramped and is now recovering? schedule a pt appointment? If I can get an appointment, I’d like to see a pt. Even if the calf is nothing, it would great to be checked out before serious marathon training begins.

Watched the women’s road race (cycling) from Tokyo while I biked. When the silver medalist, Annemiek Van Vleuten, crossed the line, she thought she had won gold; she didn’t realize that someone in the breakaway had stayed away. background: A. Van Vleuten had been about to win the gold in Rio but had a horrific crash into a cement barricade. She put off retiring for another 5 years just to try and win the gold in Tokyo. Wow. How do you recover from that disappointment? I’m always amazed at the resilience of athletes.

While I ran, I listened to a winter playlist. Other than my calf, I felt good.

Earlier today, I found an article about James Schuyler and this wonderful poem, which I may have read before, but was delighted by today:

The Bluet/ James Schuyler

And is it stamina
that unseasonably freaks
forth a bluet, a
Quaker lady, by
the lake? So small,
a drop of sky that
splashed and held,
four-petaled, creamy
in its throat. The woods
around were brown,
the air crisp as a
Carr’s table water
biscuit and smelt of
cider. There were frost
apples on the trees in
the field below the house.
The pond was still, then
broke into a ripple.
The hills, the leaves that
have not yet fallen
are deep and oriental
rug colors. Brown leaves
in the woods set off
gray trunks of trees.
But that bluet was
the focus of it all: last
spring, next spring, what
does it matter? Unexpected
as a tear when someone
reads a poem you wrote
for him: “It’s this line
here.” That bluet breaks
me up, tiny spring flower
late, late in dour October.

The analysis in this essay is all helpful to me, but I was particularly struck by this bit:

. . . Schuyler’s description of the flower transforms it into art, and that this kind of transformation is his signature poetic activity; it happens again and again in his poems: he describes what he sees before him as if it were a painting so that observation of the natural world becomes ekphrasis. That’s why—to skip down a little—the leaves are likened to a rug, crossing outside and inside, nature and culture, and those leaves “set off” the gray the way a painter or sharp dresser uses one color to set off or complement another, why the air is like a made thing, too, if one you eat, and why the bluet is called “the focus,” the way art critics say something is “the focus of the composition.” Schuyler’s words are paintbrushes, what he describes becomes a painting (though he treats it as already painted)—paint, a medium that splashes and then holds. There are examples of this everywhere in his books. In “Evenings in Vermont,” for instance, a rug again mediates between inside and outside, art and nature: “I study / the pattern in a red rug, arabesques / and squares, and one red streak / lies in the west, over the ridge.” In “Scarlet Tanager,” the bird in the tree provides “the red touch green / cries out for.” In “A Gray Thought,” “a dark thick green” is “laid in layers on / the spruce …” And so on. Touches, layerings: color as paint, natural phenomena perceived as art.  

It’s This Line / Here” : Happy Belated to Birthday James Schuyler

This idea of natural phenomena as art and of Schuyler as describing flowers with painting terms and of him doing ekphrastic poems might be a way into my “How I See” ekphrasis project!