Tag: Emily Dickinson

april 29/RUN

4.2 miles
minnehaha falls and back
49 degrees / drizzle
wind: 7 mph / gusts: 14 mph

When I left for my run, I thought the rain had stopped. I was wrong, which was fine, because I don’t mind running in a drizzle, especially when it’s not too cold. Was it a drizzle? Maybe I’d call it a mist — a steady, soft spray that soaked my orange sweatshirt and mixed with the sweat on my face. Mostly I couldn’t see it; I just felt wet or damp or . . . I’ve got it: Moist! That’s how I felt as I ran today, moist. Scott hates this word, but I don’t mind it. What words do I detest? The only one I can think of immediately is nummy. Is that even a word?

So, everything, including me, was moist. Moist sidewalks, moist trails, moist air, moist shorts, running tights, socks. Other words for moist: soaked, damp, dank, saturated, humid

10 Moist Things

  1. the paved path — big puddles everywhere — the biggest puddle was right after the locks and dam no. 1 parking lot heading south
  2. the strip of dirt next to the paved path — muddy ruts
  3. the oak savanna — covered in leaves, light green and dripping
  4. the thick, gray air
  5. the laughing, water-logged voices of kids on the playground
  6. the slick road
  7. my running shoes
  8. my pony tail
  9. my orange sweatshirt
  10. the grass — a sponge . . . squish squish squish

A good run. I felt strong and springy — both because of the weather and my bouncy feet. I listened to the water gushing out of the sewer pipes and over the ledge as I ran to the falls. I put in my “It’s Windy” playlist on the way back. Most memorable song: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (11 on the Beaufort Scale for violent storm).

before the run

It’s almost the end of April (wow) and this morning, before my run, I finished my Beaufort Scale in Verse:

Beaufort Scale in Verse

0 — The Moment/Marie Howe

The whir of I should be, I should be, I should be

slows to silence,

the white cotton curtains hanging still.


1 — Long Life/Mary Oliver

We may be touched by the most powerful of suppositions—even to a certainty—as we stand in the rose petals of the sun and hear a murmur from the wind no louder than the sound it makes as it dozes under the bee’s winds. This, too, I suggest, is weather, and worthy of report.

2 — Nature Aria/Yi Lei

Autumn wind chases in
From all directions
And a thousand chaste leaves
Give way.

3 — And All Visible Signs Swept Away/Carl Phillips

I am stirred, I’m stir-able, I’m a wind-stirred thing

3 — When the Fact of Your Gaze Means Nothing, They You Are truly Alongside/Donika Kelly

the dry
sound of applause: leaves chapped/falling, an ending

4 — Enough/Jeffrey Harrison

The rising wind pulls you out of it,/and you look up to see a cloud of leaves
wheeling in sunlight, flickering against the blue
and lifting above the treetops, as if the whole day
were sighing, Let it go, let it go,
for this moment at least, let it all go

5 — Love Song for the Square Root of Negative One/Richard Siken

I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble and I am invisible

6 — Wind/Emily Dickinson

When winds go round and round in bands,
And thrum upon the door,
And birds take places overhead,
To bear them orchestra

7 — Who Has the Wind?/Christina Rossetti

Who has seen the wind?
Neither You nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
the wind is passing by

8 — Fall/Edward Hirsch

Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless
Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:
It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies

9 — Plea to the Wind/Alice Oswald

Unglue the fog from the woods from the waist up
And speak disparagingly of leaves

10 — Plea to the Wind/Alice Oswald

Whip the green cloth off the hills

11 — Postscript/Seamus Heaney

So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter. . .
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

12 — Wave After Wave/M. Bartley Seigel

In a heartbeat, rollers mass two stories
trough to insatiate tempest, unquelled
by prayer nor cigarette, careless, mean,

a cold-blooded indifference so pure,
a strong swimmer won’t last ten wet minutes.
At the Keweenaw, surf pummels the stamp
sands with ochre fists, ore boats stack up lee

of the stone, and entire beaches stand up
to walk away.

april 22/RUN

3.8 miles
river road, north/south
62 degrees
wind: 16 mph / gusts: 30 mph

62 in bright sun with very little shade feels warm, too warm. Time to start running much earlier in the day. Other weather-related gripes? Had to hold onto my cap several times so it wouldn’t blow off.

Everything is slowly turning green, especially the floodplain forest. The trees are coming into leaf/like something almost being said.

Noticed some cool bird shadows, one on the road from a bird high up in the sky, another on the side of a house.

Heard something beeping as I ran under the trestle — was a train coming soon? Not that I could tell.

Listened to the wind running north, my “It’s Windy” playlist running south. Heard “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Wind of Change” and thought about how an answer blowing in the wind could mean two contradictory things at once: 1. the answer is coming, change is coming, a better, freer world is coming and 2. the answer is just blowing in the wind, out of reach, as futile/pointless as talking to the wind.

back to the Beaufort Scale

Last week I came up with a great plan to create a Beaufort scale out of poetry lines, but it stalled when I couldn’t figure one out for 1. Today I’ll try again.

But before I do that — I think it stalled also because I got side tracked by metaphor and figurative language. The Beaufort scale mostly uses literal language, describing the effects of wind on various things, like umbrellas or people trying to walk. Occasionally metaphor creeps in with the use of white horses to describe white caps on waves. Is this the only use of metaphor in the scale? No.

Use of metaphor in Beaufort Scale:

0 — “sea like a mirror”
1 — ripples like scales
2 — crests like glass
3 — foam like glass
4 — white horses

If I’m reading correctly, the for use on land section is all literal descriptions of wind’s effects: leaves rustling, trees being uprooted, roof tiles ripping off, inconvenient then difficult to walk. I like how 7 is inconvenient to walk, while 8 is difficult.

Okay, now back to a poem scale. Instead of literal descriptions, I think I’d like figurative ones. It’s more fun!

when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by — “Who Has Seen the Wind?”/ Christina Rossetti

Would this be 5, “small trees in leaf start to sway”? or 6, “large branches in motion”? or 7, “whole trees in motion”?

I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble and I am invisible — “Love Song for the Square Root of Negative One” / Richard Siken

2? “leaves rustle”? or 8, “”twigs break from trees”?

I am stirred, I’m stir-able, I’m a wind-stirred thing — “And All Visible Signs Swept Away” / Carl Phillips

Okay, think I know this one: “Leaves and small twigs in constant motion” (3).

Autumn wind chases in/From all directions/And a thousand chaste leaves/Give way. — “Nature Aria” / Yi Lei

I think this should be 2, “leaves rustle”

Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless/ Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:/It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies — “Fall” / Edward Hirsch

7, “inconvenient to walk against the wind”

the dry/sound of applause: leaves chapped/falling, an ending. — “When the Fact of Your Gaze Means Nothing, Then You Are Truly Alongside” / Donika Kelly

3: “leaves in constant motion”

Unglue the fog from the woods from the waist up/ And speak disparagingly of leaves — “Plea to the Wind” / Alice Oswald

This is a tough one for me. Is ungluing the fog violent or gentle? To speak disparagingly of the leaves seems less forceful than yelling at them — I think I’ll go with 4 “wind raises dust and loose paper, small branches move” but I could also go with 9, chimney pots and slates removed

Whip the green cloth off the hills — “Plea to the Wind” / Alice Oswald

10: “Trees uprooted, considerable structural damage occurs”

When winds go round and round in bands,/And thrum upon the door,/And birds take places overhead,/To bear them orchestra, — “Wind” / Emily Dickinson

6 — whistling in telegraph wires, umbrellas used with difficulty

So that the ocean on one side is wild/With foam and glitter. . ./As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways/ And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. — “Postscript” / Seamus Heaney

11: the sea is covered in foam, widespread damage

So, I already found a line last week for 0. With these lines above, I’m only missing 12. Although some of the lines above are used for multiple levels. I’ll fine tune that in a future entry. This was fun!

Here they are in order, so far:

0 —- the white cotton curtains hanging still

1 —

2 — Autumn wind chases in/From all directions/And a thousand chaste leaves/Give way. — “Nature Aria” / Yi Lei

3 — I am stirred, I’m stir-able, I’m a wind-stirred thing — “And All Visible Signs Swept Away” / Carl Phillips AND the dry/sound of applause: leaves chapped/falling, an ending. — “When the Fact of Your Gaze Means Nothing, Then You Are Truly Alongside” / Donika Kelly

4 —

5 — I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble and I am invisible — “Love Song for the Square Root of Negative One” / Richard Siken

6 — When winds go round and round in bands,/And thrum upon the door,/And birds take places overhead,/To bear them orchestra, — “Wind” / Emily Dickinson

7 — when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by — “Who Has Seen the Wind?”/ Christina Rossetti

8 — Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless/ Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:/It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies — “Fall” / Edward Hirsch

9 — Unglue the fog from the woods from the waist up/ And speak disparagingly of leaves — “Plea to the Wind” / Alice Oswald

10 — Whip the green cloth off the hills — “Plea to the Wind” / Alice Oswald

11 — So that the ocean on one side is wild/With foam and glitter. . ./As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways/ And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. — “Postscript” / Seamus Heaney

12 —

march 28/RUN

4.15 miles
minnehaha falls and back
28 degrees

Back outside! There were a few patches of ice and some of the walking trails were covered in snow, but the rest was clear and dry. So bright, not just the sun but the sun reflecting off of the snow. My calf continues to make noise — mostly gentle whispers or soft, short groans. Today I didn’t wear the calf sleeves during my run. Maybe I should next time.

Did my usual thing: ran south listening to the world, north to music — Winter 2024

Heard lots of chirping and tweeting birds. Sharp squirrel claws on rough bark. A noise that I thought was a bird or a drill but decided was a dog that wouldn’t shut up — bark bark bark bark bark bark

The favorite shadow I (thought I) saw: approaching a tree, I suddenly saw a shadow moving up the trunk, then realized it was actually a squirrel climbing up the tree.

birding:

Right after my lower calf near the ankle — or was it a tendon? — tightened a little and I was worried, I saw the shadow of a small bird flying over the snow, almost like it was saying, don’t worry; notice me instead.

tweeting birds. I heard: TWEET tweet tweet tweet tweet — Walking back, this tweeting mixed with water dripping from a gutter, a squirrel’s nails scratching tree bark, a kid across the street squealing with delight.

One mixed with
many

the drips and
squeals and

scratching feet
and the

Tweet tweet tweet
tweet tweet

That’s the version I spoke into my phone. I’ll work on it some more.

before the run

one

Red Shoulder Hawk by Ciona Rouse was the poem of the day on poets.org. Instead of just posting the poem, as I usually do, I

We met in the middle of the street only to discuss 
the Buteo lineatus, but we simply said hawk 
because we knew nothing of Latin. We knew nothing 
of red in the shoulder, of true hawks versus buzzards, 
or what time they started their mornings, 
what type of snake they stooped low 
and swift to eat. We knew nothing.

I like how we meet in the middle sounds. The discussion of not knowing the latin name of the bird reminds me of J Drew Lanham and his interview with Krista Tippet — you don’t have to know the name, just be with the bird. It also makes me think of Robin Wall Kimmerer and how she navigates her scientific and indigenous ways of knowing, how she values the Latin names but also the names beings call themselves. And it makes me think of May Swenson and section 7 of her wonderful poem, “October,” which is part of my My 100 list of memorized poems: His shoulder patch/which should be red looks gray. I like how this first sentence unspools.

Or, I should say, at least I knew nothing, 
and he said nothing of what he knew that day 
except one thing he said he thought, but now I say 
he knew: I’m going to die soon, my neighbor said to me 
and assured he had no diagnosis, just a thought. He said it 
just two weeks before he died outdoors just 
twenty steps away from where we stood that day— 
he and I between the porch I returned to and twisted 
the key to my door to cross the threshold into my familiar 
like always I do and the garage he returned to 
and twisted some wrench probably on a knob of the 
El Camino like always he did every day when usually 
I’d wave briefly en route from carport to door 
sometimes saying “how’s it going,” expecting 
only the “fine” I had time to digest.  

I knew nothing, and he said nothing of what he knew. Is this a chiasmus, where the order of the words is reversed for dramatic effect (I wrote about this device on 13 nov 2023)? Again, the unspooling of the story is wonderful: how the neighbor’s death is revealed, the details that help us to imagine the scene. There is punctuation in these lines, but there are also a lot of lines that are written in a way that make sense without punctuation. I’m reminded of June Jordan’s rules for critiquing other people’s poems:

Punctuation (Punctuation is not word choice. Poems fly or falter according to the words composing them. Therefore, omit punctuation and concentrate on every single word. E.g., if you think you need a question mark then you need to rewrite so that your syntax makes clear the interrogative nature of your thoughts. And as for commas and dashes and dots? Leave them out!)

June Jordan

I don’t know if I completely agree with her, and I know Emily Dickinson wouldn’t, but I do like the idea of trying to focus on each word and trying to have them work without punctuation.

I think I like, to cross the threshold into my familiar like always I do. Do I? I like the use of threshold into my familiar instead of home, but is it too wordy, and awkward with the like always I do?

Except today 
when I stepped out of my car, he waved me over to see 
what I now know to call the Buteo. When first I read its 
Latin name, I pronounced it boo-TAY-oh 
before learning it’s more like saying beauty (oh!). 
I can’t believe I booed when it’s always carrying awe.

Booed instead of awed? Love it.

Like on this day, the buzzard—red-shouldered and 
usually nesting in the white pine—cast a shadow 
upon my lawn just as I parked, and stared back at us— 
my mesmerized neighbor and me—perched, probably hunting, 
in the leaning eastern hemlock in my yard. Though 
back then I think I only called it a tree because I knew nothing 
about distinguishing evergreens because I don’t think I ever asked 
or wondered or searched yet. I knew nothing about how they thrive 
in the understory. Their cones, tiny. And when they think 
they’re dying, they make more cones than ever before. 

A bird casting a shadow — a favorite of mine. The way time works in this poem is interesting. I didn’t know yet. How far in the future is the narrator telling their story? How long after the neighbor’s death did they begin learning trees? note: I keep wanting to refer to the narrator as he — why? I can’t distinguish evergreens and I’m constantly calling pine trees fir trees and all evergreens fir. Will I ever learn? Something in my brain resists this sort of specificity, and not just because of my bad vision. A line from Diane Seuss in “I look up from my book and look out at the world through reading glasses: All trees are just trees/ death to modifiers

How did he 
know? Who did he ask and what did he search to find 
the date that he might die, and how did he know 
to say soon to me and only me and then, right there 
in that garage with his wrench and the some other parts 
unknown for the El Camino and the radio loud as always 
it was, stoop down, his pledge hand anxious against his chest,
and never rise again? 

I’m always fascinated by how people know certain things, like, how did Truman in The Truman Show know that something wasn’t right? What enabled him to trust that knowing and not discount it? Or, another perspective: how do our wandering brains lead us to knowing? I like tracing the strange circuits I take to arrive at ideas.

There are many details in this poem, but also many details left out. What kind of loud music is coming out of the radio?

And now the hemlock, which also goes 
by Tsuga canadensis, which is part Latin, part Japanese, 
still leans, still looks like it might fall any day now, weighed 
down by its ever-increasing tiny fists. And the Buteo returns 
each winter to reclaim the white pine before spring.

The passing of time, vague: now, still, returns each winter

Most hawks die by accident—collision, predation, disease. 
But when it survives long enough to know it’s dying, it may 
find a familiar tree and let its breath weaken in a dark cranny.

to know it’s dying — Back to Swenson’s “October”: this old redwing has decided to/ stay, this year, not join the/ strenuous migration. Better here,/ in the familiar, to fade.

And my neighbor’s wife and I now meet in the middle, 
sometimes even discussing birds but never discussing 
that day. And I brought her roses on that first anniversary 
without him because we sometimes discuss a little more 
than birds. And the Buteo often soar in twos, sometimes solo. 
So high I cannot see their shoulders, but I know their voices 
now and can name them even when I don’t see them. No matter 
how high they fly, they see me, though I don’t concern them. 
They watch a cottonmouth, slender and sliding 
silent in tall grass. 

Birding by ear, the indifference of nature. Another line, this one from Frederic Gros: You are nothing to the trees. To me, this is a good thing.

And the cardinals don’t sing. 
They don’t go mute, either. They tink. 
Close to their nests and in their favorite trees, they know 
when the hawk looms. And their voices turn 
metallic: tink, tink, tink.

A metallic tink as warning call? I’ll have to listen for that. I like how the poem ends with the robins and the narrator-as-transformed-through-curiosity. The narrator has been changed by their neighbor’s death, they have learned to notice and to listen. As I write this, I realize that these last few lines are all about listening and not looking. Very cool!

two

I keep returning to the ekphrastic poem, or ideas close-by/near-enough to the ekphrastic. Thinking about made things and things being made and makers and the world somewhere between wild (as “untouched”?) and civilized (culture/made). Landscapes as not just there, but the living beings/systems, crafted through various “hands” — three in particular: the brain and its way of filtering and guessing and shaping visual data into something I can see; the Minneapolis Parks Department (and maybe other actors in and of the city, too: Army Corps, with its locks and dam and timber and flour industries) and how they’ve managed the land and created the paths I run on, the views I admire — and also created illusions of the “wild”; and water — the river, seeps, springs, drips down to limestone ledge, all carving out and slicing through rock, making: a gorge, rubbled asphalt, cracks, rust, waterfalls.

With all of this I wonder, What is Art? Who is/can be an artist? What is the difference between art and the everyday? There are too many things I could read about how other artists/poets have approached this — that would be the work of past Academic-Sara. And maybe I don’t want to answer these questions, just pose them through my juxtapositions? Or, maybe I should try to stop asking these questions, and just start writing!

march 20/RUN

4 miles
trestle+ turn around
22 degrees
wind: 21 mph gusts

Straight into the wind running north. Not fun, but not nearly as bad as yesterday. Felt stronger, faster for parts of it. Running up the hill just south of the lake street bridge my calf tightened up a little. I stopped, walked, then started again, more cautious this time. Thought about Thomas Gardner and Poverty Creek Journal and his brief descriptions of sore calves after a tough session of hill repeats. After lots of anxiety for weeks, calf pain is now just a normal/regular part of my running. I’m glad — not for the off and on pain, but for the everydayness of it.

Some shadows — soft, crooked, in motion: birds, gnarled tree branches, broken fence rails. Other shadows — dark, on trees, looking like someone standing there. Don’t remember seeing the river but I do remember the floodplain forest — open, bare, beautiful. No chain across the top of the old stone steps. Wondered what will happen in a few days; big snow predicted, well, possible.

Listened to birds and cars and grit on the trail running north, my winter playlist running south.

before the run

Encountered these lines on twitter this morning, from Charles Wright:

When what you write about is what you see, what do you write about when it’s dark?

Charles Wright

I like thinking/reading/writing about the dark. Imagining it otherwise, not as the absence of light, where light = life and happiness and safety, but as where more things are possible, outside the scrutiny of those watching and judging and classifying. The dark, soft. The dark, no need for sharp vision or eye contact. The Dark, where Emily Dickinson’s little men hurry home to their house unperceived and robins in a trundle bed try and fail to hide their wings under their nightgowns. Where Carl Phillip’s willow wants more for compassion than for company. The dark: the moon, the stars, louder silence. The dark, where reds and greens and blues and yellows are no longer necessary —

A strange thing I’ve realized about my color vision. I can still see colors — the light green placemat my computer sits on, the purplish-reddish-blueish of my computer desktop, my bright blue hydroflask. And I can still see when things are in color. But, when something lacks color, like a movie in black and white or the middle of the night in my bedroom, I can’t tell that there isn’t any color. It looks and feels the same.

4 moments when I noticed this:

one and two: from a log entry on 13 nov 2022

1 Yesterday afternoon, in the chapel at Gustavus, which was not dim but not bright either, I started to notice that looking one direction, toward the far window on the other side, the only color I could see was an occasional red square embedded in the walls (I double-checked with Scott; there were also a bunch of blue squares too). The hymnals 15-20 feet away, which I know are red, looked dark but colorless. Staring out at the crowd of people, everyone looked like they were dressed in dark or light — not quite black or white, just dark clothes or light clothes. No variation, no purples or blues or oranges or anything but dark and light. It was strange, partly because it didn’t feel strange. It wasn’t like I thought, where is all the color?

2 It felt more like when I wake up in the dark and, after my eyes adjust, I see the room and it looks like the room, but just darker, dimmer and without color. And, usually I don’t think there’s no color — sometimes I might even think I see color because I know my robe is purple or the pillow is yellow, or I don’t see yellow, but I recognize the pillow on the couch as that yellow pillow because I already know it’s yellow.

three: from a log entry on 12 jan 2024

The other day, Scott, FWA, and I were discussing the scenes in Better Call Saul that are set in the present day and are in black and white. Scott and FWA both agreed that those were harder to watch — they had to pay more careful attention — because they lacked color, which is harder because visual stories often rely heavily on color to communicate ideas/details. I said I didn’t realize that they were in black and white; they didn’t look any different to me than the other scenes, which are in vivid color (at least that’s what they tell me). I realized something: it’s not that I don’t see color, it just doesn’t communicate anything to me, or if it communicates it’s so quiet that I don’t notice what it’s saying.

four: this week

A few days ago, we decided to finally watch Maestro. Wow! We haven’t finished it yet, but Scott and I are really enjoying it. The first scene is in color, which is intended to represent the present, at least the present as it exists in the movie. The second scene is in black and white and represents Bernstein just before his big break. After watching it for a minute or two Scott said, you see that this in black and white, right? And I said, oh, is it? I didn’t notice. I was focused on the contrast — the dark, closed-curtain window and the outline of brightness around it.

Color exists, it just doesn’t speak to me in the same ways (as it used to, or as it does to other people). It’s not a foreign language, it is just turned down, whispering. Yes, it does make it harder to understand visual stories that rely on color to tell part of the story — a favorite: present times = color; the past = black and white — but it doesn’t bother me that much. Instead, I find it fascinating, the opportunity to notice the constructs of color and to see the world (and color) differently.

Okay, that was a long ramble about color and black and white, but I think I’d like to write another color poem about it.

Now back to the quote from Charles Wright on twitter. As is often the case, there was no mention of where it came from, other than it was from Charles Wright. I always find this frustrating. But, I found it easily enough: Littlefoot, 32 in The New Yorker, 2007. Such a wonderful poem!

Back yard, my old station, the dusk invisible in the trees,
But there in its stylish tint,
Everything etched and precise before the acid bath
—Hemlocks and hedgerows—
Of just about half an hour from now,
Night in its soak and dissolve.
Pipistrello, and gun of motorcycles downhill,
A flirt and a gritty punctuation to the day’s demise
And one-starred exhalation,
V of geese going south,
My mind in their backwash, going north.

my old station: love this way of describing a usual spot to sit
the stylish tint: oh, the softness of near-night!
everything etched and precise: I love walking at night in the winter and noticing the contrast between the sky and the bare branches, which I can see more clearly than at any other time. During the day, those branches are a fuzzy blur, but at night they are etched!
Hemlocks and Hedgerows: sounds like a musical act or a comedy duo Scott adds: proto Prog rock/psychedelic band, Margaret’s Electric Forest or Garden, first album: Hemlocks & Hedgerows
a pipistrello is Italian for bat, or “small mouse-like animal that flies”
sounds of day’s demise: a flirt of a bat, the gritting punctuation of a motorcycle’s gun downhill
one-starred exhalation: me, almost every night — o, look at the stars!
I love hearing, then seeing, a V of geese in the evening. The choice of backwash instead of wake is interesting — and flying south/mind going north is a wonderful way to suggest being out of sync

Wow, that is one packed first stanza! I’ll skip the next one to get to the quoted lines:

When what you write about is what you see,
what do you write about when it’s dark?
Paradise, Pound said, was real to Dante because he saw it.
Nothing invented.
One loves a story like that, whether it’s true or not.
Whenever I open my eyes at night, outside,
flames edge at the edge
Of everything, like the sides of a nineteenth-century negative.
If time is a black dog, and it is,
Why do I always see its breath,
its orange, rectangular breath
In the dark?
It’s what I see, you might say, it’s got to be what my eyes see.

I’ll have to think about these lines some more. Right now I wonder, when your peripheral vision is fraying, do you see strange things, like flames, at the edges? What do edges look like to me in the dark? I’ll try to remember to notice when I wake up in the middle of the night tonight, like every night. In the light, they are fuzzy and dance a soft shimmy.

It’s real because we see it? Different ways to respond to this. I’m thinking about how so much of what our eyes see is illusion or guessing based on habits and repeated practice and context and other brain tricks. Even so, most people believe that what they are seeing is real. If they believe, and act as if what they are seeing is real, why can’t I believe and act as if what I’m seeing is real too? All those soft, generous things; those strange headless and legless torsos walking towards me; that river burning with a white heat that sets the trees on fire?

Okay, it’s almost 11 am. I need to go out for my run before I finish this!

during the run

Did I think about this poem at all while I was running? I can’t remember.

after the run

During the run, I noticed bird shadows crossing my feet, both of us flying, the birds in the air, be just above the trail. I decided to add it into a fun poem I’m writing called “Birding.” It’s a series of small verses in my 3/2 form in which I describe how I see birds with my cone-dead eyes.

Not sure if this works:

vi.

a shadow
travels

over feet
running

downhill — flight
4 ways:

the moving
shadow

the descending
runner

a belief
shadows

signal some

thing and

the small form
gliding

closer to

the sun.

shadows

1

And just like that, my plan to return to Wright’s poem will have to wait. Instead, I’m thinking about shadows, which is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I realized, earlier this month, that shadows see more real to me (as in, having more substance, easier to see as solid) than the object from which they’re cast — is that the most awkward way to say that? Here’s what I wrote on march 9, 2024:

As I was admiring the fence railing shadows I thought about how clear and real they seemed to me. Much more there than the actual fence railing, which was staticky and vague.

log / 9 march 2024
2

So, in the draft of my poem, I wrote: a belief/shadows/signal some/thing. In a different version, I wrote: a belief/shadows/have substance. Do I like that better? I can’t decide. I think it was inspired by a passage I read in Becoming Animal (which was a recommendation from my super smart niece):

One of the marks of our obliviousness, one of the countless signs that our thinking minds have grown estranged from the intelligence of our sensing bodies, is that today a great many people seem to believe that shadows are flat. If I am strolling along a street on a cloudless afternoon and I notice a shapeshifting patch of darkness accompanying me as I walk, splayed out on the road perpendicular to my upright self, its appendages stretching and shrinking with the swinging of my limbs, I instantly identify this horizontal swath as my shadow. As thought a shadow was merely this flatness, this kinetic pancake, this creature of two dimensions whom one might peel of the street and drape over the nearest telephone wire.

Becoming Animal / David Abram

I haven’t finished the chapter yet, but I was able to access it through the reading sample on amazon — so I’ll return to finish later.

3

The line about draping the shadow over a telephone wire enabled me to remember a delight poem I read by Paige Lewis a few years ago:

When I Tell My Husband I Miss the Sun, He Knows/ Paige Lewis

what I really mean. He paints my name

across the floral bed sheet and ties the bottom corners
to my ankles. Then he paints another

for himself. We walk into town and play the shadow game,
saying Oh! I’m sorry for stepping on your

shadow! and Please be careful! My shadow is caught in the wheels
of your shopping cart. It’s all very polite.

Our shadows get dirty just like anyone’s, so we take
them to the Laundromat—the one with

the 1996 Olympics themed pinball machine—
and watch our shadows warm

against each other. We bring the shadow game home
and (this is my favorite part) when we

stretch our shadows across the bed, we get so tangled
my husband grips his own wrist,

certain it’s my wrist, and kisses it.


march 19/RUN

4.2 miles
minnehaha falls and back
43 degrees
wind: 31 mph gusts

So windy today! My legs felt heavy. I wonder if part of the problem is that I’m running so late in the morning? I didn’t start until almost 11:30. Still glad I went for a run, but I wish it would have felt a little easier and I would have worn less layers — maybe skipped the buff?

Listened to kids on the playground, birds, random voices, falling water for the first half of the run. Put in headphones and listened to Taylor Swift for the second half.

before the run

Reading through an entry from March 19, 2017 about the new poetry class I was taking, I found this:

In the editor’s note it’s mentioned that Mayer writes hypnogogic poems. I looked up the word and found the definition (a state between waking and sleeping, when drowsy) and an interview with Mayer about how, after suffering a stroke, she experimented with using a tape recorder to record her thoughts in this drowsy/dreamy state. So cool. Currently, I’m writing about running and I’d like to experiment with ways to express the dreamlike state I sometimes enter during long runs.

Reading this bit, I got an idea, which I typed up in my “Notes for Haunts, fall 2023” pages document:

the dream like state of running, when the mind is shut down
haunting = possessing or being possessed — what if haunting was not just being taken over by someone/thing else (possessed) or taking over someone/thing else (possessing) but becoming untethered or loosely tetered from your body — floating on the path in-between in that strange empty space between banks between sky and ground between worlds between You and I? this could be another form of haunting — what if I started writing small-ish poems that offered different definitions of haunt? 

A few definitions of haunt I’m thinking about right now: feeling disembodied, having an out-of-body experience and being obsessed/preoccupied/consumed by a thought or idea — having a bee in your bonnet.

bee in your bonnet

Here’s an article about the origins of the phrase. According to the article, the phrase is still being used in popular culture. I use it, usually when I notice Scott hell-bent on some task — and usually it seems like a task, or idea, that is fool-hardy but that he needs to work through and figure out for himself.

Sometimes instead of saying, bee in your bonnet, I say that someone (or me) is hellbent. Of course, writing that immediately makes me think of Jackie from the 1979 Death on the Nile:

Jacqueline De Bellefort : One must follow one’s star wherever it leads. 
Hercule Poirot : Even to disaster?
Jacqueline De Bellefort : Even to Hell itself.

When I envision a bee in my bonnet, I see something that is relentless, impossible to ignore, urgently needing to be dealt with. That’s not quite how I imagine my preoccupation with haunts and ghosts and writing about the gorge. Still, I like the idea of bees in bonnets, and bees in general, so maybe I’ll spend more time with them this morning?

Reading through several ED “bee” poems, I suddenly had a thought: could the bee in your bonnet be your soul, trying to escape the confines of the body?

This thought was inspired by a poem I wrote about in an On This Day post: Body and Soul/ Sharon Bryan. I didn’t mention it in the post, but the description of the soul in the poem, as leaving the body at night to roam around, reminded me of an ED poem I read a few weeks ago, when I was thinking about the difference between the brain and the mind:

If ever the lid gets off my head/ Emily Dickinson

If ever the lid gets off my head
And lets the brain away
The fellow will go where he belonged —
Without a hint from me,

And the world — if the world be looking on —
Will see how far from home
It is possible for sense to live
The soul there — all the time.

So much to think about on my run (I’m writing this before I headed out). Will I see any bees about by the gorge? Very unlikely, I think.

during the run

Thought about a bee in my bonnet as an obsession that I wanted to release, so I imagined opening the top of my head like the door of a cage and letting the bee fly free. What would/could happen if I did this? Would I find some new ways to think about my experiences?

Also, randomly remembered something about bees in a horror movie, then remembered the movie, Candyman. Looked up, “gothic horror bees” and found this 1978 movie, The Bees.

Not too far into the run I think I forgot about the bee. I was too distracted by my heavy legs and wondering if my calf would do something strange, and the wind. No escape from my body today.

after my run

Now, ED’s poem about the lid of her head coming off makes me think of a favorite Homer Simpson bit:

Homer reluctantly listens to Ned Flanders drone on about the differences between juice and cider. A voice says, You can stay, but I’m leaving, and Homer’s brain exits his head and floats away as we hear a slide whistle. A few seconds later his body collapses on the floor and we hear a thud.

I love the image of the brain floating away. And, instead of a daydream where Homer’s brain gets to wander while his zoned-out body stays and pretends to listen, his body collapses, unable to continue without the brain. This idea brings me back to the Sharon Bryan poem I mentioned earlier:

then they [body and soul] quarrel over which one of them 
does the dreaming, but the truth is, 

they can’t live without each other and 
they both know it, anima, animosity, 

the diaphragm pumps like a bellows 
and the soul pulls out all the stops— 

sings at the top of its lungs, laughs 
at its little jokes . . .

. . . the soul 
says, with a smirk, I was at the end 

of my tether, and it was, like a diver 
on the ocean floor or an astronaut 

admiring the view from outside 
the mother ship, and like them 

it would be lost without its air 
supply and protective clothing,

Okay — I’ve been thinking about a few things here: being weighed down/preoccupied with ideas/thoughts/subjects (obsessed); a desire to be released from the body and obsessions; images of bees in bonnets and bees in general. Maybe I’d like to explore some different images of bees, especially in Dickinson? Also, here are 2 other ways to think about obsessions as repetition and habit:

Camille: Some of the obsessions are never going to leave you, and to me, that was part of what I loved. With each page I thought, Oh, I’ve seen this before, but how is she going to manage it differently? It reminded me of the Miles Davis quote about John Coltrane that was a guiding force for me as I was writing my first book, when I was really worried that I was doing the same thing over and over and over again. And I read the liner notes where Davis wrote about Coltrane’s first solo album. He said, “I don’t understand why people don’t get John Coltrane’s music. All he is trying to do is play the same note as many ways as he possibly can.”

Writing a Grove: A Conversation with Poet Laureate Ada Limón

FADY JOUDAH: There is no life without repetition, beginning at the molecular, even particle level. There is no art without life. To remain viable, art, inseparable from the circularity of the human condition, also repeats. What is a life without memory? And what is memory if not repetition. But not all repetition guarantees what we call progress, a euphemism for wisdom. Repetition with reproducible results, for example, is a foundational concept of the scientific method. Yet science can be an instrument for the destruction of life as for its preservation. This suggests to me that repetition in art is our unconscious memory at work: art mimics the repetition of the life force within us. All art is a translation of life. Take Jackson Pollock’s so-called action painting. What is it if not a rhythm of a life force in all of us? In those paintings, the pattern is recognizable yet unnamable. It’s like watching electrons bounce off each other. The canvas contains entropy. We understand this at a cellular or quantum level.

When It Takes Root in the Heart: Conversations with Fady Joudah

march 7/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
45 degrees

Felt a little heavy and slow today, but happy to be outside, running.

10 Things

  1. wild turkeys! — 2: one on a narrow strip of grass between the paved trail and the road, the other deep in the small stretch of woods near the ford bridge, both quiet and unbothered by my presence
  2. the falls falling — a gush of white, more than a shimmer, less than a roar
  3. imagining the ancient swing of my arms, like a pair of scissors cutting the air — I listened for the sharp swish of blades and almost heard it
  4. running beside a squirrel, wary, wondering if it would dart out in front of me (no)
  5. a strange looking bike propped against the bench at folwell — had to stare to make sense of it — a bike with a makeshift trailer?
  6. black-capped chickadee fee bee
  7. the scratching noise of a leaf skittering against the curb repeatedly
  8. a runner in hot pink shoes and a kelly green vest — hello 80s!
  9. my breath, underneath the silence
  10. the roar of kids having fun on the playground at Dowling

Silence

Before the run, discovered Paul Goodman’s Nine types of Silence via Brain Pickings today.

Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.

9 Types of Silence (Goodman)

  1. the dumb silence of slumber or apathy
  2. the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face
  3. the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts
  4. the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”
  5. the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity
  6. the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear
  7. the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it
  8. baffled silence
  9. the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.

Paul Goodman’s name sounded familiar, so I looked through my past blogs to see if I had written about him. I had: Paul Goodman, troublemaking role model? According to this post, I watched a documentary about him that I don’t remember watching. The link in this post no longer works, but I can watch it on Kanopy through my library if I want to — do I?

There’s the still silence of the Farm’s front 40 field; the cocooned silence of the Downtown Minneapolis Library’s parking garage; the fleeting silence of the river road, briefly emptied of cars or bikes or people.

from 29 march 2017: 3 ruminations on silence (with one of my first poems) — silence is easily broken, deafening, impossible, uncomfortable

a silence in which
another voice may speak (Praying/ Mary Oliver)

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here –
(I felt a Funeral in my Brain”/ Emily Dickinson

Accept what comes from Silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came
(How to be a Poet/ Wendell Berry)

The world is filled with music, and in between the music, silence   
And varying the silence all sorts of sounds, natural and man made
(Hymn to Life/ James Schuyler)

I thought about silence while I ran, listened for silence, stayed silent the entire time — that is, if I take Goodman’s understanding that silence = not speaking. I smiled, I breathed, my feet struck the ground — not all of me was silent. I struggled to remember Berry’s little poem that mentions silence and thought about not wanting to disturb the silence from which it came. I imagined ripples and wondered how big they’d have to be to count as disturbing the surface. Then I thought about Audre Lorde and her essay, “The Transformation of Silence into Language” and when speaking is urgent and necessary.

question mark
the length of silence
after a loon’s call
(Birds Punctuate the Days/ Joyce Clement)

listen to the horrible keep-time of a man walking,
rustling and jingling his keys
at the centre of his own noise,
clomping the silence in pieces
(Dart/ Alice Oswald)

You probably think I’m nuts saying the mountains 
have no word for ocean, but if you live here 
you begin to believe they know everything. 
They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine, 
a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls 
slowly between the pines and the wind dies 
to less than a whisper and you can barely catch 
your breath because you’re thrilled and terrified.
(Our Valley/ Philip Levine)

added on 11 march 2024:

These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow. . the hour
Before the dawn. . the mouth of one
Just dead.
(Triad/ Adelaide Crapsey)

one final silence (for today’s entry): data silence

When I read through the entry that I posted about Goodman on my TROUBLE blog, I found a link to one of my favorite ed-tech troublemakers from when I was still angry about the academic industrial complex and still trying to figure out how to position myself in relation to it: Audrey Watters. I read her new about page and found out that she isn’t writing about tech-ed anymore and has instead become: a multi-sport athlete. Wow! Very cool. She also writes about “health technologies and Silicon Valley’s obsession with engineering bodies and minds” on Second Breakfast. I’m excited to read what she thinks about all of this. For more than a year, I’ve had passing thoughts about my Apple watch and whether or not I should keep wearing it. Earlier this week, after feeling uncomfortable anxiety over a resting heart rate that was a little higher than normal, and had been for several days, I wondered, why is this small change in my heart rate bothering me so much? And, should I really be tracking it this closely? No. So I decided to not wear my watch right after getting up, and not until I went out for a run. The next step is probably to ditch the watch altogether, but I’m not sure if I’m ready for that . . . yet. Anyway, I’m looking forward to reading AW’s takes on “wearables” and health-tech. Increasingly, I’m thinking I’d like to move towards data silence.

march 6/RUN

3.45 miles
trestle turn around
48 degrees

Another run with no calf pain! Wore my compression sleeves again. My left IT band hurt a little and my legs felt heavy and tired, but no calf pain — victory!

IT fun: I think, I theorize, I twist, I triumph, is tall, is taught, is taut, is temerous*, is tiny, itchy tetherballs, iffy tire-swings, impossible teeter-totters

*temerous: this word appears several times in the great book I’m listening to right now: The Ten Thousand Doors of January

Today the river was brown. Is that all I remember about the run? There were a few moments it was easy, effortless, but mostly it felt difficult.

Heard lots of birds — lots of irregular, out-of-sync rhythms. A few drumming woodpeckers. My nose kept almost running. Thought I heard some voices down in the floodplain forest.

Ended at 7 Oaks. Recited “I felt a Funeral in my Mind” and thought about rhythms and interruptions and sense breaking through.

Before the run, I wrote about clocks, priming myself for noticing rhythms while I ran:

That 12-figured Moon Skull!

Today, I’m inspired by my march 6 entry from last year. Here’s what I wrote in that entry:

During the run I listened to the latest “Nobody Asked Us with Des and Kara.” They were talking about recent races, super shoes, fast times, and the future of track. Reflecting on how world records keep being broken Kara asked Des: “What do you think would happen if they took away the clock? Would the race still be exciting?” Des thought it could be, while my mind started wandering. First thinking about how I’ve been trying to forget the clock/watch and not care about pace — mostly, I’ve been successful. Second thinking about Clocks and how I’ve collected some lines (from poems and essays) about the clock, or what Mary Oliver calls it: 

The clock! That twelve-figured moon skull, that white spider belly! How serenely the hands move with their filigree pointers, and how steadily! Twelve hours, and twelve hours, and begin again! Eat, speak, sleep, cross a street, wash a dish! The clock is still ticking. All its vistas are just so broad–are regular. (Notice that word.) Every day, twelve little bins in which to order disorderly life, and even more disorderly though. The town’s clock cries out, and the face on every wrist hums or shines; the world keeps pace with itself. Another day is passing, a regular and ordinary day. (Notice that word also.)

Upstream/ Mary Oliver

So many places to go with the idea of the Clock. Mary Oliver’s ordinary versus extraordinary time. Routines, habits, delight in the daily, repeated events. The Moment between time and its tight ticks, or right before something has happened, or when time (and sense) are disrupted. The time of the day dream. Outside of time and its relentless march forward, towards Death, motivated by progress. Losing time, syncing up with time. What other ways to we have for measuring meaning that don’t involve time passing?

Yes, so many ways to think about the idea of time and clocks!

interjection: Listening to an Apple playlist, ’70s Movie Essentials, and the song, “Time Warp” just came on.

pace definitions (from Merriam Webster)

  • rate of movement, the runner’s pace, especially : an established rate of locomotionrate of progress
  • specifically : parallel rate of growth or development, supplies kept pace with demand
  • rate of performance or delivery : TEMPO, a steady pace, on pace to set a record, especially : SPEED
  • rhythmic animation : FLUENCY
  • a manner of walking : TREAD
  • any of various units of distance based on the length of a human step
  • GAIT, especially : a fast 2-beat gait (as of the horse) in which the legs move in lateral pairs and support the animal alternately on the right and left legs
  • verb: paced; pacing — to walk with often slow or measured tread, to move along : PROCEED, to go at a pace —used especially of a horse
  • to measure by pacing —often used with off: paced off a 10-yard penalty
  • to cover at a walk — could hear him pacing the floor
  • to establish a moderate or steady pace for (oneself)
  • to keep pace with

my new pace: rhythm

I sink in
to a

rhythm: 3
then 2

First counting
foot strikes

then chanting
small prayers.

I beat out
meaning

until what’s
left are

syllables,
then sounds,

then something
new, or

old returned.

My rhythm for breathing, running, and writing. . .and for possessing favorite lines:

from “Practice”/ Ellen Bryant Voight

original:
at night in order to weep, to wait
for the whisker on the face of the clock
to twitch again, moving
the dumb day forward—

mine, in 3/2 rhythm:
wait for the
whisker

on the clock’s
face to

twitch again
to move

the dumb day
forward.

original:
if I came back as a bird
I’d remember that—

mine: 3/2
You — when I
come back

as a bird
will I

remember?

my new pace: a ghost, haunting the trails, inhabiting and possessing words and worlds

Was talking with two of the other clarinet players in band last night about the Calgon, take me away! commercial. Neither of them had heard of it; they’re Millennials. Does a Calgon, take me away, moment disrupt or resist or challenge capitalist time or reinforce it, or both?

Ross Gay and stopping capitalist time: from 29 march 2023

you, too, might’ve been praying for a way to stop the march of so-called time, and poems, sometimes, might do that. Poems are made of lines, which are actually breaths, and so the poem’s rhythms, its time, is at the scale and pace and tempo of the body, the tempo of our bodies lit with our dying. And poems are communicated, ultimately, body to body, voice to ear, heart to heart.9 Even if those hearts are not next to one another, in space or time. It makes them so. All of which is to say a poem might bring time back to its bodily, its earthly proportions. Poetry might make nothing happen. Inside of which anything can happen, maybe most dangerously, our actual fealties, our actual devotions and obligations, which is to the most rambunctious, mongrel, inconceivable assemblage of each other we could imagine.

Gay’s explicit connection to time and against capitalism resonates deeply for me. Stop those clocks, those planes, that machinery we’re using to destroy the planet, the future.

ED’s new grammar of humility and hesitation

Emily Dickinson took the scraps from the separate “higher” female education many bright women of her time were increasingly resenting, combined them with voracious and “unladylike” outside reading, and used the combination. She built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on inteIlectual borders, where confident masculine voices buzzed an alluring and inaccessible discourse, backward through history into aboriginal anagogy. Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philology from alien territory, a “sheltered” woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation. HESITATE from the Latin, meaning to stick. Stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty speaking. “He may pause but he must not hesitate”-Ruskin. Hesitation circled back and surrounded everyone in that confident age of aggressive industrial expansion and brutal Empire building. Hesitation and Separation. The Civil War had split American in two. He might pause, She hesitated. Sexual, racial, and geographical separation are at the heart of Definition.My Emily Dickinson

I really like this idea of hesitation and humility and aboriginal anagogy as a sharp contrast to progress, aggression, confidence/hubris, and time as always moving forwards (teleology). I tried to find a source that could explain exactly what Howe means by aboriginal anagogy but I couldn’t. I discovered that anagogy means mystical or a deeper religious sense and so, when I connect it to aboriginal, I’m thinking that she means that ED imbues pre-Industrial times (pre Progress!, where progress means trains and machines and cities and Empires and factories and plantations and the enslavement of groups of people and the increased mechanization of time and bodies and meaning and, importantly, grammar) with the sacred.

Hesitant
humble —

Okay, now I should go out for a fun. Should I pay attention to rhythms? Chant in triple berries? Look for disruptions? Focus on my breaths?

On my run, I listened to many different rhythms not quite in sync with my own and thought about interruptions and disruptions and how my breathing rhythm is sometimes how I breathe when I run and sometimes my imagined rhythm — real, embodied and also not real, the rhythm I’d like to have.

Concluded the run with an idea that I spoke into my phone: “Regular” time is necessary — I want the conveniences it allows for! — but we need to safeguard that space outside of that time. Poets do that. I try to do that, to keep the door open to that time/space for others.

I’ll end with a wonderful time poem:

[My favorite time is in time’s other side]/ Etel Adnan

My favorite time is in time’s other side, its other identity, the kind that collapses and sometimes reappears, and sometimes doesn’t. The one that looks like marshmallows, pomegranates, and stranger things, before returning to its kind of abstraction. I used to be fond of time as it was a matter that helped us feel intelligent. Those days have gone to where days go, in their own cemeteries. Today I see eternity everywhere. I had yesterday an empty glass of champagne on the table, and it looked both infinite and eternal, though it left me indifferent. At least, I was in good company, and a day closer to all sorts of annihilations.

cemeteries for gone days — to see eternities everywhere — time that looks like pomegranates and marshmallows

march 1/RUN

3.45 miles
2 trails + extra
45 degrees
wind: 15 mph / 31 mph gusts

Everyone knows it’s windy — All week I’ve had that song in my head. Partly because it’s catchy, but mostly because it’s windy. The wind didn’t bother me too much. Ran south to the overlook and was startled by a white truck honking as it drove past — was it honking at me, someone else, the wind? Reached the entrance to the Winchell Trail and entered. The path was thick with dead leaves and some mud. I don’t remember much about the river other than that it was blue and open and there, taking up a glorious amount of space. I heard some kids above playing, also some guy on a bike say, in exasperation, fuuucckk. Felt, more than saw, some shadows. Took off my pink jacket before climbing the 38th street steps — overdressed!

I recited ED’s “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” as I ran. Stumbled over this line a little:

With those same Boots of Lead, again

Not sure why the line was difficult to get right. I thought about sense breaking through, my mind going numb, space beginning to toll. Also: iron boots creaking across my soul. Last night, I asked Scott, after passing a store with the sign “guidance for the soul,” what he thought the difference between a soul and a spirit was — not what he believed — I know he doesn’t believe in either (at least I think he doesn’t) — but how they function theologically. Wait — what I actually asked was, on the scale of most rational to least, where do mind brain soul and spirit fall? I was thinking of ED’s use of mind in the poem as opposed to brain, and her reference to soul. Now I want to look at the Emily Dickinson lexicon and read how she used “brain,” “mind,” “spirit,” and “soul.”

I also want to find another brain poem to memorize — so far I’ve memorized, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” and . . . wait — I was just about to write, “I felt a Cleaving in my Brain,” which I’ve also memorized, but the title is actually “I felt a Cleaving in my Mind.” I think that she uses the terms, like many people do, interchangeably, but I’m fascinated by the small gap between them — the mind and brain are not the same, I think, not exactly. The difference between them gets us to the soul and the self and my thinking about the ultra marathoner Courtney Dauwalter last week — how the mind’s desire to keep going can override the body’s desire to stop. Wow — right now, I seem to be obsessing over and orbiting around ideas of the relationship between the mind and the body, the self and the brain, and surrender and the death of self. Okay, that barely makes sense to me —

I wrote in my plague notebook: brain soul mind self sense will death transformation pain

As I’ve been memorizing/reciting ED’s funeral poem, I’ve been thinking about this funeral in her brain not as a migraine or a mental breakdown or an epileptic seizure, which seem to be the dominant readings, but as the process of transcending the self involving feet treading and the repetitions of a beating drum and a religious ceremony (a service) and bells tolling/ringing and moving beyond reason and Knowing. I first encountered this reading in a comment on The Prowling Bee:

from the line “Then Space — began to toll” through the end of the poem, something else entirely is happening. ED breaks through to an experience that is impersonal and liberating — a direct experience that is unfiltered, not obscured by the depression and stress of the prior stanzas. The experience is vast and lonely — if the self is transcended, what would be the experience? 

The last stanza of the poem describes something far from a mental breakdown. Reason, the logical mind, does not operate without reference points. If the poet is operating from the reference point of self, then everything is measurable and comprehensible — graspable — based on that. With reason and logic, we are in the realm of EDs poems that use metaphors of measurement and mathematics and limits. But in the last stanza of this poem, all that is transcended. What is experienced is beyond reason — but entirely sane. It is the ineffable experience of truth — the poet finishes — knowing — then. If you ask what is known, you have not shared the transcendent experience of the poem.

The Prowling Bee

Reciting this poem while running, I kept thinking about how the treading and the beating, foot strike after foot strike, can lead to a dream-like state where you stop thinking and begin to feel the world (sense breaking through) instead of just observing or knowing it. There’s a lot I could say about the bell, but I’ll save that for later.

note: I worry that I getting lost in theorizing about this, but I also think I’m trying to push at deeper understandings of self and consciousness and how bodies and brains and minds and souls are entangled — especially in my aging, almost-50, often anxious, Sara-self.

feb 27/RUN

4.5 miles
VA bridge and back
46 degrees
wind: 16 mph, 29 mph gusts

What a wonderful morning for a run! Okay, maybe the wind was a bit much, but the sun and the warm air and the clear paths made up for it. I felt good and strong and relaxed. A few times my right calf reminded me it was there — no pain, just a strange stretched feeling. I recited ED’s “I heard a Fly buzz — when I died –” several times, mostly in my head, but once, as I climbed out of minnehaha park, out loud! Should I be celebrating this? Do I want to be that person who doesn’t care if others hear her reciting poems as she runs? Yes, I do.

10 Things

  1. the hollow knocking of a woodpecker on dead wood, echoing across the gorge
  2. lots of black capped chickadees calling to each other
  3. oak tree shadows, sprawled everywhere
  4. the brown creek water lazily heading towards the limestone ledge
  5. rustling below me, on the winchell trail — someone walking over the leaves
  6. climbing up from the part of the path that dips below the road, seeing the shadow of trunk on the path that was so sharp and dark I thought it was a fallen tree
  7. sirens on Hiawatha, getting louder as they off the walls of the tunnel near 50th
  8. passing a runner — What a beautiful morning! — Yes! Almost perfect!
  9. a biker in a bright yellow shirt, as bright as the one I was wearing
  10. the meandering curves of the sidewalks that wind through the part of minnehaha falls near John Stevens’ house

This morning, while drinking my coffee, I decided to write about the delightful noise of geese wings cutting through the air that I’d recalled hearing a few weeks ago on my back deck — I remembered it after reading a list of 10 things from a feb 27th from another year. I wrote a draft of a poem, then decided I’d like to start writing delight poems every morning. No pressure — just patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate — this isn’t a competition but a doorway into thanks and a silence in which another voice may speak (Praying/ Mary Oliver) — just the opportunity to sit with one of the delights I’ve encountered while running beside the gorge. A few minutes later, I had a further idea about including Emily Dickinson:

The practice, elements:

  • write a poem each day
  • the poem should be about some delight noticed on the run — either from that day or a past entry
  • any form running/breathing form: couplets of 3 syllables/2 syllables
  • uses, in some way, a favorite line from an Emily Dickinson poem

Here’s the poem I wrote this morning:

Too Silver for a Seam / Sara Lynne Puotinen

Even more than the sight of them
it is the sounds they make
that move me.

Usually it is the mournful calls
from within a tight formation
then the lone honk of the last in line,

but today the geese were low enough
to hear the sharp swish of their wings
cutting the air.

In their wake only the echo
of scissors and sharpening knives
and movement too silver for a seam.

The ED line is too silver for a seam and it comes from “A Bird came down the Walk”:

And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer Home—

Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam—

I like it! It needs a little work, but it makes me happy and captures my delight in hearing this sound. Scott wondered about the scissors and sharpening knives — such violent imagery — so I explained — the scissors make me think of Scott’s mom and the old scissors I inherited from her that make a wonderfully sharp scissor-y sound when you use them — it also makes me think of my mom who was always using scissors for her fiber art. The sharpening knives make me think of Scott’s dad and the enthusiastic and dilligent way he would sharpen their knives with their knife sharpener. I think I might need to add a line or two that signals my affection for these sounds without making it too obvious.

During the last mile of the fun, I started reciting other ED poems, including:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Note: This seems like an edited version from Mabel Todd, with all its punctuation and no capitalizing of clovers or bees.

As I recited this small poem, I suddenly thought about how I was a bee, wearing my bright yellow shirt with my black running shorts and tights. I kept running, feeling ready to stop, looking ahead and wondering how close I was to being done. Suddenly I saw it: the bright yellow crosswalk sign with black figures at 38th street! I’m almost done when I reach that sign! I watched it getting closer and thought, it takes one bee or, it takes a bee?

update, six hours later: I’m back. Decided that I might want to add one more rule to this ED delight daily practice: I want to use my running/breathing form of 3 syllable/2 syllable couplets. I tightened up the poem I wrote earlier using that form. Here’s the new version:

Today the
geese flew

low enough
to hear

the quick swish
of wings

slicing through
the air. (I could leave air for the unintentional rhyme or switch to sky)

In their wake —
echoes

of scissors
cutting

knives being
sharpened

their blades too
silver

for a seam.

feb 26/WALK

40 minutes
to the river and back
57 degrees

A warm, windy February afternoon. Took a walk with Delia the dog and Scott. Heard some kids on the playground that I mistook for a siren. Then later, heard some actual sirens. Also heard some ragtime music coming from a bike on the path. Marveled at the gnarled oaks and the jagged shadow one cast on another branchless tree. Noticed how high the bluff was above the forest floor. Encountered many happy, chatting walkers, one runner without a shirt.

It’s Windy

Is it the strange, too-early spring weather? The fact that I’m turning 50 in 4 months and that my kids are turning 21 and 18? Not sure, but my thoughts have been scattered lately, flitting from one idea to the next without landing anywhere for too long. Maybe it’s the wind. This morning I said to Scott, what a beautiful morning! Too bad it’s windy. Then Scott started singing “Windy” by the Association — I tried to join in, but I was in the wrong key (as usual). I should have a t-shirt that says, I’m always in the wrong key, I said (which, I think, isn’t always a bad thing to be in). Anyway, I decided to listen to the song and read the lyrics. It’s actually about wind! How delightful!

Who’s tripping down the streets of the city
Smilin’ at everybody she sees
Who’s reachin’ out to capture a moment
Everyone knows it’s Windy

And Windy has stormy eyes
That flash at the sound of lies
And Windy has wings to fly
Above the clouds (above the clouds)
Above the clouds (above the clouds)

I think I might create a page of wind poems/songs and add this, along with “They call the wind Mariah” from Paint Your Wagon and “I Take to the Wind” by King Crimson.

an idea (for the future? now?): Yesterday I posted a poem that uses an Emily Dickinson line in the title (I heard a fly buzz), then obliquely references her in the poem. A year or so ago, I had the idea that I’d like to write a series of poems that use some of my favorite Emily Dickinson lines as titles for my poems about vision loss, how I see, and how I’ve been carving out a new way of being with my moving practice. I’ve already written one that was published this past December in the print journal, Door is a Jar:

The Motions of the Dipping Birds/ Sara Lynne Puotinen

Because I can no longer see
her face, when my daughter talks I watch

her small hands rise and fall,
sweep the air, flutter.

I marvel at the soft feathers her fingers make
as they soar then circle then settle

on the perch of her hips waiting
to return to the sky for another story.

I think Victoria Chang’s collection, The Trees Witness Everything, in which she uses W.S. Merwin poem titles and then writes her own poem, might be a good inspiration. I’ve been wanting to do this project for several years, but I wasn’t quite ready. Am I now? I’ve already been moving towards it with my interest in memorizing 50 Emily Dickinson poems before my 50th birthday — did I mention that in here, or was it just in my “to do” list? Oh, I hope this idea sticks and helps me to write more poetry. Lately, I’ve had tons of ideas that I start, but that really don’t go anywhere.

As part of this Dickinson project, and inspired by yesterday’s poem, I decided to memorize ED’s “I heard a fly buzz — when I died”. After memorizing it, I listened to someone else’s reading of it and noticed a line change:

[original] The stillness in the Room
[alternate in video] The stillness round my form

Which is correct, I wondered. At first, I thought the alternate might be the correct one, but it didn’t seem quite right — form neatly rhymes with the last line of the verse: Between the Heaves of Storm. ED liked slant rhymes, not straight ones. I looked it up and discovered that ED’s first editor, Mabel Loomis Todd, had changed the line to form. She also took out ED’s dashes. I’ve read about the fraught relationship between ED and Todd (who was ED’s brother’s lover) and Todd’s heavy-handed editing, so I’m sticking with the original!

medical term fun!

I’m still working with g a s t r o c n e m i u s and s o l e u s scrabble tiles. Last night’s favorite:

Guess a minute’s colors

I told RJP and she said, 7:42 is yellowish-green. Do I see any particular minute’s colors? No. But I do like trying to describe what colors I see at any given minute.

What happens when I reverse 2 words: Guess a color’s minutes?
Or, Minutes colors a guess?
Or, As color, minutes guess
Or, minutes: a color’s guess (as in, meeting minutes)
Or, a guess colors minutes

Back to ED’s buzzing fly. Whenever I read this poem, I think about an article I discovered a few years ago that discusses how accurately and effectively ED describes the physiology of the dying eye — 15 march 2021