Tag: grass

may 6/RUN

2 miles
2 trails
69 degrees

It was nice and I felt good, so I decided to go for a short run this morning. Hot! I wore my summer attire: tank top and shorts. Sunny. Sharp shadows, still air, not much shade. Ran right by the Minnehaha Academy playground and heard all of the kids shouting and shoving and having fun. I peeked at the river through the trees: a flat blue. No turkeys or roller skiers or gushing water. No headphones either. Instead, I listened to the kids and the cars and the loud rumbling of a truck. Also heard: someone’s workout program on their phone, you have complete 3 miles — or something similar to that.

before the run

This morning, I’m reading another chapter of RWK’s Gathering Moss: The Advantages of Being Small: Life in the Boundary Layer. I was excited/please/inspired to encounter this passage:

Mosses inhabit surfaces: the surfaces of rocks, the bark of trees, the surface of a log, that small space where earth and atmosphere first make contact. This meeting ground between air and land is known as the boundary layer. Lying cheek to cheek with rocks and logs, mosses are intimate with the contours and textures of their substrate.

Gathering Moss/ Robin Wall Kimmerer

surfaces / where earth and atmosphere meet / boundary layer / intimate / contours / textures

I’m interested in surfaces, both ground surfaces by the gorge and water surfaces at the lake. I’ve gathered poems and thought about them before. And there is a line from my Haunts project that I’m still trying to write around/beside/through: It begins here: from the ground up, feet first, following. Today, I want to think about surfaces and boundary layers and textures and the intimacy that is created when air and land, foot and ground, meet.

things we did on grass

When you lie on the ground on a sunny summer afternoon to look up and watch the clouds go by, you place yourself in the boundary of the earth’s surface. When you are flat on the ground, the wind speed is reduced, you can scarcely feel the breeze that would ruffle your hair if you were standing up.

Things we did on grass is a line from an XTC song. I’ve been wanting to experiment with it. RWK is inspiring me!

still

the air becomes progressively slower and slower until, immediately adjacent to the surface, the air is perfectly still, captured by the friction with the surface itself. It is this layer of still air that you experience while lying on the ground.

Such a rich word and idea, still. I’ve been orbiting around it for years. And yet, the opposite of restlessness, something I can’t do: sit still, a calmness and willingness to stop and just be.

during the run

Since I’m thinking of surfaces, especially grass, I decided to run on the grassy boulevard between edmund and the river road. After the run, as I was walking home, I recorded some thoughts:

[transcript] may 6th. I’m thinking about surfaces and moss and where air and ground meet and these little spaces that are sheltered, that are a little warmer and still and allow for friction without total erosion. Then I was thinking about how I like those spaces — those small spaces, those enough spaces. Then RWK’s bit at the end of the chapter, about how moss still need to germinate and seed and they can’t in these sheltered spaces so they have to expose themselves. Also thinking about the back deck as a sheltered space. It’s interesting to put this in a context of the pandemic because of how the surfaces and how this dirt trail is surely wider because people were running and walking and using it during the pandemic. All the different ways that (the pandemic) is written on this surface, this boundary layer.

surfaces: asphalt, concrete, grass, roots, packed dirt, soft dirt, mulching leaves, rubbled asphalt, limestone

Earlier in the run, I was also thinking about friction in relation to surfaces meeting. In particular, my feet and the ground, but also RWK’s example of free flowing air being disrupted and altered by rock. My thought: we need that friction to feel bodies, to feel our bodies. A flash of Wittgenstein and his rough ground (as opposed to smooth ice) flashed through my head.

I thought about the benefits of being small and a discussion I had with FWA the other day when he was suggesting that humans are resilient in the way that small trees that can bend and lean with the wind during a heavy storm are.

after the run

Ideas to give some attention:

  • Intimacy and Forrest Gander and Anne Pringles’ conversation about intimacy as an encounter that transforms you and Scott describing two trees growing out of the same spot and intertwining as intimate
  • the texture of wind when encountering objects, makes me think of light on surfaces and how the ancient greeks took that into account in their understandings of, and names for, color
  • surfaces and feet first, following — the encounter between foot and ground is the space where a poem can be written and offered
  • the boundary layer visible to our eye as the horizontal lines I mentioned last month: the line between blue and brown
  • where earth and atmosphere meet = violet
  • grass as threshold (a boundary space): the threshold between neighborhood and park, between life and death — grass as a space where the dead and living can meet
  • the dirt trail through the grass as a record of the pandemic
  • not too deep, at the surface: humus, loam

may 5/RUNWALK

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
59 degrees

Warm! Nothing hurt, it was just hard. My heart rate was higher. Who cares? No back or calf or hip pain! I’m trying to ease back in. Today I ran 4 minutes/walked 1, 8 times. I was proud of myself for sticking with it, even as my heart rate climbed. Yes, I’m ready for some mental toughness!

10 Things

  1. an abundance of sparkles on the river
  2. more green leaves crawling up the trunks of trees
  3. fee bee fee bee
  4. shadow, 1: a straight-ish line on the path from the fence
  5. shadow, 2: soft, sprawling branches
  6. shadow, 3: me — sharp, upright, satisfied
  7. the faint, slightly off tune dinging of the train bell
  8. flowing falls
  9. park workers had the one set of stairs blocked off — I heard water, were they spraying down the steps?
  10. passing another runner from behind, they were dressed warmly in long pants and a a jacket and breathing heavily

enoughness / contentment / not scarcity

Moss lifeways offer a strong contrast to the ways we’ve organized our society, which prioritizes relentless growth as the metric of well-being: always getting bigger, producing more, having more. Infinite growth is ecologically impossible and exceedingly destructive, as it demands the transformation of the lives of other beings into raw materials to feed the fiction. Mosses show us another way—the abundance that emanates from self-restraint, from enoughness. Mosses have lived too long on this planet to be seduced by the nonsense of accumulation, the delusion of permanence, the endless striving for productivity. Maybe our heartbeats slow when we sit with mosses because they remind us that contentment could be ours.

Ancient Green/ Robin Wall Kimmerer

Summer Day/ Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

When I think of green, I think of another concept Robin Wall Kimmerer promotes: abundance — as in, a gift economy and a challenge to the (mostly) myth of scarcity. In May, green is almost too abundant — a gift that is not scarce!

walk: 45 minutes
winchell trail (ravine) / tunnel of trees / edmund
76 degrees

Took Delia out for a walk in the afternoon. The green is taking over. The view from above in the tunnel of trees was only green — no dirt trail below, no sliver of river, no exposed sewer pipe. Just green. As we walked, I thought about another passage I read from RWK in “Ancient Green” this afternoon:

They [green moss] cover the inanimate with the animate. Without judgment, they cover our mistakes, with an unconditional acceptance of their responsibility for healing.

Ancient Green/ Robin Wall Kimmerer

Everywhere green — not moss, but leaves — were covering bare branches, sewer pipes, the gorge. A green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return of the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Did I feel that way about the green I was encountering today? Somewhat, but I also felt it taking over, transforming the floodplain forest in ways I didn’t like: too hidden.

overheard: music from car radios! Someone blasting “Bohemian Rhapsody,” someone else “Rhapsody in Blue.” Until typing these 2, I didn’t make the rhapsody connection.

It must be this rhapsody or none,
The rhapsody of things as they are.
(The Man with the Blue Guitar/ Wallace Stevens)

rhapsody: a portion of an epic poem adapted for recitation

may 3/RUN

3.25 miles
trestle turn around
47 degrees

A little cooler, but sunny. I wore shorts and my legs didn’t feel cold. The green continues to spread. I’m sure I still have a view of the river but I don’t remember looking at it, not even once. I saw some rowers heading down to the rowing club, but didn’t hear them on the water. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker. Was passed by several groups of young and fast runners. High school or college teams? Not sure.

Mostly I felt good. My heart rate is still high. I guess I lost some fitness on my almost 2 week break. Monday, I’ll try some more deliberate walk-run segments.

Listened to other runners, cars, water gushing out of sewer pipes heading north, my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist heading back south.

Ran on the grass for a few stretches to avoid other runners and walkers. Thought about how several sites recommended running on more gentle surfaces, like grass, when dealing with a herniated disc or sciatica.

before the run

I’m thinking more about open fields, meadows, lawns, boulevards, village greens, grasslands both wild and manufactured. Grassy spaces I recall from childhood, living in sub-divisions in North Carolina and Virginia and Iowa: soccer fields, manicured lawns, pastures just beyond my backyard.

I decided to look through the poems I’ve gathered for more meadow poems. Found Robert Duncan’s Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow. Wow.

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, 
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart, 
an eternal pasture folded in all thought 
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light 
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

An eternal pasture with a hall made by light and shadows. After the poem, I wrote about Duncan’s idea of projective verse

poetry shaped by rhythms of poet’s breath. So cool–I want to explore this more, thinking about breathing when I run vs. walk vs. sit.

“Olson argues that the breath should be a poet’s central concern, rather than rhyme, meter, and sense. To listen closely to the breath, Olson states, “is to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical.” The syllable and the line are the two units led by, respectively, the ear and the breath: 

“the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE 
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE”

poetry foundation introduction to “Projective Verse”

The heart, by way of the breath, to the line — This idea will be the start of a moving while writing experiment!

after the run

up to the wind-stripped branches shadow-
signing the ground before you the way, lately, all
the branches seem to, or you like to say they do,
which is at least half of the way, isn’t it, toward
belief — whatever, in the end, belief
is…
(My Meadow, My Twilight/ Carl Phillips)

My husband and I were arguing about a bench we wanted to buy and put in part of our backyard, a part which is actually a meadow of sorts, a half acre with tall grasses and weeds and the occasional wild flower because we do not mow it but leave it scrubby and unkempt. 
(The Bench/ Mary Ruefle)

And, back to the field:

Crossing a field, wading

                   through nothing
        but timothy grass,

imagine yourself passing from
and into. Passing through

doorway after
doorway after doorway.
(Threshold/ Maggie Smith)

After the rain, it’s time to walk the field

again, near where the river bends. Each year

I come to look for what this place will yield –

lost things still rising here.
(After the Rain/ Jared Carter)

may 2/WALK

30 minutes
neighborhood
47 degrees

Brr. Colder today. Walked with Delia around the neighborhood. Purple, white, red, yellow flowers all around, even on the sidewalk. The ephemerals don’t last long! Even with the cold wind it felt like spring. My legs are a little sore from the run yesterday, but my back and glutes are fine. I think I’ve turned a corner with my injury.

before the walk

What’s the difference between a meadow and a field? Looked it up and found this:

A field is used more often to describe an area managed by people. The field before you was once an orchard and pasture belonging to a farmer. A meadow is used to describe a wild area.

Fields and meadows start when trees have been removed from an area. This can occur naturally with a forest fire or flood, or humans may cut down a forest. Seeds from grasses and weeds take root shortly after and a meadow is born.

Meadows can be large or small and can occur anywhere, including in the middle of a forest, alongside a pond or stream, or in the middle of a highway.

Both fields and meadows are open areas with few or no trees. Grasses, and wildflowers are usually the dominant species. Only a limited number of shrubs and trees are present. When allowed to grow larger shrubs will take over a meadow and after years become a thicket. Thickets become forests as tree species take root. This natural process is known as succession.

Fields & Meadows

My family’s farm in the UP had a big field — the front 40. They once grew potatoes, and rocks. When no one mowed it, trees grew quickly. Not fast enough for me to see a forest, just thickets of scrubby trees that housed black snakes and foxes and mice. The back 40 field was a pasture for grazing cattle.

Abandoned orchards reminds me of a favorite essay by Wendell Berry, “A Native Hill.”

I’m inspired by these lines: “When allowed to grow larger shrubs will take over a meadow and after years become a thicket. Thickets become forests as tree species take root. This natural process is known as succession.

succession

A meadow becomes
a thicket. A thicket
becomes a forest.
A forest returns
to meadow. A meadow
grows into a thicket.
A thicket remembers
its forest.

And what about an oak savanna?

An oak savanna is a community of scattered oak trees (Quercus spp.) above a layer of prairie grasses and forbs. The trees are spaced enough so that there is little to no closed canopy and the grasses and forbs receive plentiful amounts of sunlight. The savanna is often thought of as a transition system between the tallgrass prairie and woodland environments, but may contain species that are found only in it and not in either forest or prairie. As a result, it is an important and diverse system containing species from both woodland and prairie, but containing some species that is unique to only savanna.

Once common in Minnesota, the oak savanna is now a rare ecosystem. Before European settlement, oak savanna covered roughly 10% of the state, and now there is only a fraction of that left. What happened? Savannas rely on periodic disturbances such as fire, grazing, and drought to flourish. Such disturbances prevent most tree species from establishing themselves and turning the habitat into a forest community. Fire-adapted trees, such as bur oak trees with their thick, corky bark, and prairie grasses are resilient to fire and do well in environments where fire is a common occurence.

Without fire, tree saplings begin to grow in the savanna and are able to take over, shading out and eliminating the grass and forb species. Soon, where there used to be an oak savanna, there is now a woodland habitat. Oak savannas have become rare because settlers suppressed fires. Farming and development has also helped obliterate the oak savanna ecosystem.

Oak Savanna

Reading about oak savannas, and pastures too, I came across the word, “forbs.” What are forbs? “A forb or phorb is a herbaceous flowering plant that is not a graminoid (grass, sedge, or rush). The term is used in botany and in vegetation ecology especially in relation to grasslands and understory. Typically, these are eudicots without woody stems” (wikipedia).

after the walk

And now I’m thinking about prairies. According to this site, the difference between a savanna and a prairie is the number of trees — less in a prairie.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
A prairie alone will do
If bees are few.
(To make a prairies/Emily Dickinson)

Meanwhile, the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees
(Wild Geese/Mary Oliver)

And the difference between a prairie and a meadow? For many, they’re interchangeable. For some, prairies have more warm season grasses and meadows have more cool season grasses.

As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so
the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together

and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.
(The Meadow/Marie Howe)

Reading up about different grasslands on an Illinois site, I found this curious fact:

Virtually all of Illinois’ native prairies are gone today. Most of the remaining lots of undisturbed prairie are in railroad rights of way, pioneer cemeteries and other spots that were not conducive to farming

What’s the difference: Prairie or Savanna?

With all of the connections drawn between grass and/as graves by poets, I’m particularly interested in the idea of native prairies in cemetaries.

may 1/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
60 degrees

Warm! Green everywhere — tufts of grass on the bluff, leaves unfurling from the trees. Lots of bikers on the trail today. I ran to the falls without stopping, then took several walk breaks on the way back. My heart rate was high, my legs were sore. I think I should do a post-injury walk/run plan to ease back into moving.

As I write this on my deck, a black-capped chickadee is doing their feebee call. So loud! So constant. No answer yet.

10 Things

  1. Sea Salt is open at the falls — I could smell it as I ran through the park — what was the smell? fried and salty?
  2. a group of kids with adults — students/teacher? — below me on the winchell trail
  3. the falls parking lot was full of cars
  4. kids yelling/laughing on the playground
  5. a park worker driving a big mower, cutting grass on the strip between the walking and biking path — the lawn mower had a bright orange triangle on the back
  6. a biker in a bright yellow shirt with a matching bright yellow helmet
  7. someone swinging at the falls playground
  8. a biker biking in wide circles under the ford bridge
  9. flashes of white though the (already) thick green on the trail below me and beside the creek — I think it was the heads of people taking the path that leads to the river
  10. yellow and red tulips near a parking lot

before the run

Thank you past Sara for posting this beautiful Katie Farris poem — Ode to Money, or Patient Appealing Health Insurance for Denial of Coverage — and giving me inspiration for a May challenge with these lines:

America’s optimistic to dye its money
green. Leaves are green
because of chlorophyll, which is the machine
that turns sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into leaf, stem, and root. All
the little blades of grass left behind by the lawn mower like Civil
War soldiers. Same as cash.

Grass! A whole month with grass? Maybe a whole month with green, one week with grass? Yes! And (at least) a week with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gathering moss. Will this challenge idea go the way of last month’s steps? Forgotten after a few days? I hope not.

like Civil War soldiers — the line this is referencing in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was one of my first favorite lines from a poem:

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

I posted this section of Song of Myself on 18 may 2020. Here’s another part I want to remember:

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

And now I’m thinking about Mary Oliver and her line about rising up again like grass, and realizing that she was referencing Whitman with it. She loved Walt Whitman. Uh oh — I’m feeling a shift in direction. Will I forgo grass for a study of Walt Whitman?

during the run

As I mentioned in my 10 things list, while I was running, I encountered a park worker mowing the strip of grass between the bike and walking paths. I decided that that would be my image of grass for today. I could smell the freshly cut grass as I ran by. I wonder what the parks’ department’s schedule for mowing grass is — how often? and how many acres of grass do they maintain across the city?

after the run

1

Read Mary Oliver’s chapter in Upstream, “My Friend, Walt Whitman.” I’m pretty sure I’ve posted this line before, but I’ll do it again because it fits:

I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple–or a green field–a place to enter, and in which to feel.

2

I decided to look up information about minneapolis parks and mowing.

4,660 acres of grass/turf mowed

They divided grassy areas into 3 types: athletic fields, general park turf, reduced mowing areas.

general park turf: “We cut grass to a height of 3 inches on a regular basis as time and weather allows, but grass height may exceed 5 inches at times. This standard applies to most of the Park System including neighborhood parks, boulevards, parkways and active use areas within regional parks.”

reduced mowing areas: “We maintain some park lands through mowing on an infrequent basis. These areas include steep hillsides, erosion prone slopes, shorelines and park lands that are not intensively maintained.”

I love that the parks department posts this information!

Also wanted to add this video. It’s light on sources, especially the early history of grass, but I like the clips from commercials:

And here’s a useful resource to return to, and also to use to supplement the video:

The History of Early American Landscape Design: Lawn

And also this — Get Off My Lawn! — which has an interesting 30 minute podcast, images related to the lawn from the Smithsonian Museum.

jan 6/RUN

5.5 miles
bottom of franklin hill
11 degrees / feels like 5

Another sunny, snowless day. A little wind, some cold air. Wasn’t planning to run 5 miles, but I wanted to get to the bottom of the hill so I could see the surface up close. Iced over — not smooth, but with seams and cracks.

The Mississippi river at the bottom of the franklin hill. White ice, cracks, and shadows on its surface. Beyond it, the east bank with barre branches and blue sky.
ice on mississippi river / 6 jan 2025

I’m glad I took a picture because I did not remember it looking like this! I was visually a surface that was more gray and uniform with cracks creating big and flat sheets of ice. I didn’t remember the shadows or the blue or how uneven it all looked.

As I ran, I listened to my “Remember to Forget” playlist. It started with “I Remember it Well,” from Gigi. I heard the opening lines:

We met at 9
We met at 8
I was on time
No, you were late
Ah yes
I remember it well

I thought — wait, if he thought they were meeting at 9, he wouldn’t have thought he was late if he got there after 8 — yes, these are they thoughts I have as I run. I thought about how subjective memory can be and wondered how certain we could be that she remembered correctly. Then I heard these lyrics:

Ah yes
I remember it well
You wore a gown of gold
I was all in blue

I remembered that meme 4 or 5 years ago with the dress — is it gold or blue? — and thought again about how we can remember things differently. When is it lack of memory, and when did we always just remember it wrong, or unusually, or with a focus on different details, or in a different light?

10 Things

  1. the hollow knocking of a woodpecker
  2. the thumping of wheels over something on the road on the bridge above
  3. 4 stones tightly stacked on the ancient boulder
  4. a section of the fence above a steep part of the bluff, missing, marked off with an orange barricade
  5. the icy river through the trees — blue and white and lonely
  6. daddy long legs at his favorite bench
  7. shadows, 1: mine, off to the side, in the brush next to the trail
  8. shadows, 2: a tree trunk, tall, stretched, looking like a dinosaur
  9. stopping at the edge to put in my headphones, seeing a flare of movement below: someone walking on the winchell trail
  10. the limestones still stacked under the bridge, still looking like a person sitting up and leaning against the bridge

A poem about forgetting:

Said a Blade of Grass/ Kahlil Gibran

Said a blade of grass to an autumn leaf, “You make such a noise falling!  You scatter all my winter dreams.”
 
Said the leaf indignant, “Low-born and low-dwelling!  Songless, peevish thing!  You live not in the upper air and you cannot tell the sound of singing.”
 
Then the autumn leaf lay down upon the earth and slept.  And when spring came she waked again—and she was a blade of grass.
 
And when it was autumn and her winter sleep was upon her, and above her through all the air the leaves were falling, she muttered to herself, “O these autumn leaves!  They make such noise!  They scatter all my winter dreams.”

more forget lines

1

like the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say, it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only all the time.
(Part of Eve’s Discussion/Marie Howe)

2

It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.

And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too
(Dead Stars/Ada Limón)

3

See whatever you want
to see. Even
at the moment of death
forget the door

opening on darkness.
See instead the familiar faces
you thought were lost.
(Squint/Linda Pastan)

4

According to Howe, most (all?) of the critical studies of ED as a poet (up to 1985, when this book was written), read ED’s decision to stay isolated in her bedroom for the rest of her life as tragedy and a failure to celebrate herself as a poet (Whitman) or declare herself confidently as the Poet, the Sayer, the Namer (Emerson). Howe argues that she made another choice and writes the following:

She said something subtler. ‘Nature is a Haunted House–but Art–a House that tries to be haunted.’ (L459a)

Yes, gender difference does affect our use of language, and we constantly confront issues of difference, distance, and absence when we write. That doesn’t mean I can relegate women to what we ‘should’ or ‘must’ be doing. Orders suggest hierarchy and category. Categories and hierarchies suggest property. My voice formed from my life belongs to no one else. What I put into words is no longer my possession. Possibility has opened. The future will forget, erase, or recollect and deconstruct every poem. There is a mystic separation between poetic vision and ordinary living. The conditions for poetry rest outside each life at a miraculous reach indifferent to worldly chronology.

My Emily Dickinson/ Susan Howe

june 7/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
62 degrees

Another beautiful morning. Felt drained by the sun, but still managed to push through a few moments when I wanted to stop. Walked a little. My mantra: keep showing up. It might not get easier but I’ll get better at handling it (it = heat and humidity and doubt and the desire to stop). Listened to my Color playlist for the second half, the birds for the first half. Sparrows and woodpeckers and cardinals. The falls and the creek were gushing. I read the other day that, after 2 years, Minnesota is no longer in a drought. Hooray for the farmers! And the flowers! And the trees!

Today, the green was cool, then scraggly. Sprawling, stretching, overstepping. Almost consuming the narrow dirt trail on the grassy boulevard between edmund and the river road.

something for future Sara to remember: On Tuesday, I went to open the lime green umbrella on our deck and noticed something dark in the corner. With my bad vision, I thought it was a leaf at first. Then I saw something that looked like wings — a bat. I dropped the umbrella cord and ran inside. A few minutes later, Scott cautiously opened the umbrella then freaked out when the bat flew out. He staggered back and rammed into the handle of the door — hard. Knocked the wind out of him. Since then, he’s been having intermittent back spasms, which he describes as “charley horses” in his back. I would be freaking out, but he’s handling it fairly well. The worst part: trying to sleep — too painful in the bed, and we don’t have a recliner. Maybe he cracked a rib, maybe it’s a strained muscled. Hopefully it heals soon.

What I remember is seeing the bat wings as it flew away, looking like a Scooby Doo cartoon. Since then, I’ve cautiously opened the umbrella — no bat! Every time I bird flies overhead, their shadow crossing my legs, I wonder — a bird or a bat? A thought: bats as fully fleshed shadows. What if the dark forms we think are shadows are actually bats? That’s both a creepy and delightful thought!

may 8/RUN

4.5 miles
veterans’ home loop
61 degrees
humidity: 78%

Went out for my run too late (10:30 am) and paid for it. Very hot. I could feel it in my legs, thick and heavy. I was okay for the first half, but needed to walk a few times in the second half. Too much green air. I could feel it in my lungs, heavy and thick.

I could still see the river through the light green leaves, but I don’t remember what it looked like. Was it blue? Probably. Did I see my shadow? I don’t remember. I didn’t hear or see any rowers.

Lots of people at the falls. I ran up the steps by the bridge right above where the creek water falls, two at a time. Looking down from the high bridge that delivers you to the Veterans’ home, everything looked green. I thought I saw one of those stone bridges below but it looked strange — had it fallen into the rushing water? Not sure. On the grounds of the Veterans’ home, I smelled the freshly mowed grass, noticed the dark streaks of wet grass smeared on the sidewalk. Stopped to admire the water rushing over the concrete at the locks and dam #1. Put in my Sara 2020 playlist.

Listened to birds and shuffling feet as I ran south, Lizzo and Billie Eilish and Nur-D on the way back north.

Mary Ruefle and Green

before the run

As spring happens, the sudden shock of new life everywhere, I’m thinking about green, which makes it a good time to read Mary Ruefle’s prose poem about green sadness:

from My Private Property/ Mary Ruefle

Green sadness is sadness dressed for graduation, it is the
sadness of June, of shiny toasters as they come out of their
boxes, the table laid before a party, the smell of new straw-
berries and dripping roasts about to be devoured; 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 weighs no more than an unused handkerchief, it
is the funereal silence of bones beneath the green carpet
of evenly cut grass upon which the bride and groom walk
in joy.

funereal: having the mournful, somber character appropriate to a funeral.

Reading about Ruefle’s “color spectrum of sadness,” somebody else pointed out her final words about her color poems in the last sentence on the last page of her book:

Author’s note: In each of the color pieces, if you substitute the word happiness for the word sadness, nothing changes.

Another thing to note about her note: she describes them as pieces not poems. I wonder if she talks explicitly about how/why/what she names them in an interview somewhere? Answer? I found a 2015 interview with her where (I think) she’s discussing My Private Property and she suggests that it contains fiction, essays, and prose poems, which I’m thinking refers to the color pieces. So I’ll stick with calling them prose poems.

I’m also thinking about green because of the Robin Wall Kimmerer story I encountered in the amazing journal, Emergence. I started listening to her reading of it — she has such a wonderful voice! — but it’s 35 minutes, so it will take some time.

Ancient Green / Robin Wall Kimmerer

One wonderful line I’ve already heard:

Mosses, I think, are like time made visible. They create a kind of botanical forgetting. Shoot by tiny shoot, the past is obscured in green. That’s why we have stories, so we can remember.

Yes, the idea of green obscuring/concealing things. I often think about that as I’m running beside the gorge, unable to see the river or the other side because of so much green.

On today’s run, I hope to think about green.

during the run

My green goal was off to a good start when I spotted a bunny in the alley just before starting to run and thought, the bunny from the line about green sadness, little girls who, in imitation of their grandmothers, decide who shall have their bunny when they die.

10 Green Moments and Feelings

  1. At the start of the run, just above the oak savanna, floating through light green air, both in color and weight
  2. Midway through the run, in Wabun, above Locks and Dam #1, plodding through bright green air, thick and hot
  3. green grass in the boulevard — growing fast
  4. green light shining through the trees — glowing soft
  5. green sinuses, closing up my nose
  6. green voices — kids at the playground
  7. green-stained sidewalks — the whispers of grassy sadness
  8. green sky instead of clean blue air
  9. green weeds pushing through pavers, joining the orange tulips beside Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” at the park
  10. green curiosity — how much of this green am I actually seeing and how much am I conjuring from when I had more cone cells?

As I ran, I also thought about a mood ring poem that I’m revising: incurable. I’m trying to contrast my disdain for searching for a cure for my vision loss which I’m linking to images of pickling, preserving, curing, with my relief in knowing, with some certainty, that there is no cure — this I’m envisioning as being outside in fresh, open spaces with wider views. As I write this description, I think I need to tighten up my fresh images. Anyway, as I ran, I thought that if these images correspond to colors, then curing would be green and fresh would be blue — or should it be another shade (or is it tint) of green?

after the run

a few passages from Ancient Green / Robin Wall Kimmerer:

If success is measured by widespread distribution, they occupy every continent, from the tropics to Antarctica, and live in nearly every habitat, from desert to rainforest. If success is measured by expanse, consider the vast peatlands of the north, blanketed by sphagnum moss. If success is colonization of new places, mosses are the first to occupy new places after an eruption or a forest fire or a nuclear meltdown. If creativity and adaptation are the metrics, mosses have diversified to fill every niche, generating more than eleven thousand uniquely adapted species, an outpouring of biodiversity. If success lies in beauty—well—just look.

Mosses make minimal demands on their surroundings. All they need is a little light, a sheer film of water, and a thin decoction of minerals, delivered by rainwater or dissolution of rock. If they are hydrated and illuminated, they will exuberantly photosynthesize and expand the green carpet. But when times are tough, most simply stop growing and wait until water returns. They don’t die, they just crinkle up and pause, following the rhythms of the natural world, growing in periods of abundance and waiting through periods of scarcity: a wise strategy for life that is in tune with uncertainty.

Moss lifeways offer a strong contrast to the ways we’ve organized our society, which prioritizes relentless growth as the metric of well-being: always getting bigger, producing more, having more. Infinite growth is ecologically impossible and exceedingly destructive, as it demands the transformation of the lives of other beings into raw materials to feed the fiction. Mosses show us another way—the abundance that emanates from self-restraint, from enoughness. Mosses have lived too long on this planet to be seduced by the nonsense of accumulation, the delusion of permanence, the endless striving for productivity. Maybe our heartbeats slow when we sit with mosses because they remind us that contentment could be ours.

Green teachers. Green patience resilience. Green enoughness.

april 25/RUN

3.75 miles
2 trails + extra*
42 degrees

*extra = instead of ending the run at the 38th street steps, I kept going past the oak savanna and the overlook, down through the tunnel of trees, over the double bridge, before crossing over to edmund at 32nd and running back home

Felt warmer than 42 degrees with the sun and too many layers — black running tights, black shorts, long-sleeved bright yellow shirt, bright orange pull-over. The thing I noticed most today were the shadows. Heavy shadows everywhere. The shadows of trees, some stretching across the path, others leaning down, just above me. The shadow of a flying bird, a waiting lamppost.

10 Other Things I Remember from my Run

  1. the loud knocking of a woodpecker
  2. someone complaining to someone else on the phone. I first heard them up ahead of me near the old stone steps, then as I passed them on the trail, then about 10 minutes later from across the river road as I ran on the grass near edmund
  3. the river, blue with less foam, not quite as high. I was planning to admire its sparkle near the south entrance to the winchell trail but I was distracted by 2 walkers just ahead of me on the trail
  4. lower on the winchell trail the gorge below me was all river, no shore in sight
  5. a trickle of water at the 44th st sewer, gushing at 42nd
  6. kids playing at the school playground, yelling, laughing. one adult chanting something
  7. the leaning trees I noticed a few weeks ago are still leaning, almost blocking the trail. A few times, I had to duck to avoid small branches
  8. music playing (not loud enough to describe it as blasting) out of a car’s radio — some sort of rock music that I didn’t recognize
  9. one section of the split rail fence — where? I can’t remember — is broken and needs to be repaired
  10. most walkers I encountered were overdressed in winter coats, hats, gloves

Having finished my series of colorblind plates and feeling unmotivated to read the final sections of Ammons’ garbage, I’m project-less. Not a problem, except the lack of focus makes my mind wander everywhere. Here are just some of the things I thought about before my run this morning:

a new-ish bio

Once or twice a year, I take some time to submit poems to different literary journals. Not sure about the exact math, but I’d say I have about a 5% acceptance rate, which I don’t think is that unusual. I got used to rejection as an academic. Still stings though. Maybe that’s why I don’t submit that often. I think I also haven’t submitted a lot because I don’t care that much about being published, especially as a way to achieve fancy poetry status. But, I’d like to share my poems with a wider audience and if I only post them on my blog they don’t get read by a lot of people and I can no longer submit them to journals (most of the journals I’m encountering consider posting a poem on your personal blog as it being published already). I’d also like to apply for a grant and do an exhibit/installation of my vision test poems and I think having some of them published might help me to get that grant. So, with all that in mind, I’m currently sending poems out to different journals. As part of the submission, you write a cover letter and include a 50-150 word bio. A few days ago, I started playing around with my bio — I included a few in a post log entry on here. This morning I was still thinking about the bio. I was hoping my run would help me find another sentence for this unfinished bio:

Sara Lynne Puotinen lives in south Minneapolis near the Mississippi River Gorge where she enjoys conducting experiments in writing while moving, moving while writing, and doing both while losing her central vision. Sometimes she composes chants while running up hills, or uses her breathing patterns as she swims across a local lake to shape her lines. 

The run didn’t help. In fact, I forgot to even think about my bio. Oh well.

april 21, 2022

As part of my daily, “on this day” review, I was reading through past log entries early this morning. Last year’s was especially good (I almost wrote fire, but thought better of it — okay, I did actually write it, but then deleted it). So many things to put in my ongoing projects list!

First, this:

While I ran, I wanted to try and think about fungi as hidden, always in motion/doing (a verb, not a noun), and below. Had flashes of thought about what’s beneath us, and how I’m often looking down through my peripheral, even as I look ahead with my central vision. 

an experiment to try: While moving outside, give special attention to what’s beneath you, what you see, feel, hear at your feet. Make a list in your log entry.

variation: while trying don’t give attention to anything in particular. Just move. Then, in your log entry, try to remember 10 things you noticed below you.

Second:

I heard the creaking, squeaking branches and thought about old, rusty, long hidden/forgotten doors being opening — a trap door in the forest floor. I didn’t imagine past the open door or the idea that it led to the river basement (using basement here like ED in “I started Early — Took my Dog”). Still, I enjoyed thinking that I could access this door and something in my moving outside was opening a long shut door.

a question to consider: what doors await me in the gorge? where do they lead? how can I open them?

This morning, I was refreshing my memory of a Carl Sandburg poem I memorized a few years ago called “Doors.” If a door is open and you want it open, why shut it? If a door is shut and you want it shut, why open it?

Third: I love this poem — Mushrooms/ Sylvia Plath

Fourth:

An idea I have right now (25 april 2022, that is) for a poem involves playing off of these lines from Mary Oliver:

Listen, I don’t think we’re going to rise
in gauze and halos. 
Maybe as grass, and slowly. 
Maybe as the long leaved, beautiful grass

And this bit from Arthur Sze in an interview with David Naiman:

I began to think I love this idea that the mycelium is below the surface. It’s like the subconscious, then when the mushroom fruits pops up above ground, maybe that’s like this spontaneous outpouring of a poem or whatever.

Between the Covers Interview with Arthur Sze

Something like this?

Maybe like mushrooms, we rise
or not rise, flare
brief burst from below
then a return 
to swim in the dirt…

I (sara in 2023) would like to do something with this fragment, maybe tie it together with some of my thoughts about Ammons and garbage?

grass

Mary Oliver’s mention of grass reminded me of a poem I like by Victoria Chang, which led me to a log entry from Jan 11, 2022:

Left Open / Victoria Chang

We can’t see beyond
the crest of the wooden gate.
We are carriers
of grass yet to be grown. We
aren’t made of cells, but of fields. 

I like this idea of being a carrier of grass yet to be grown. My first thought was of grass on graves — Whitman’s “uncut hair of graves” or Dickinson’s “The color of the grave is green”. Then I thought of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “To the Young Who Want to Die”:

Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.

Of course, all this grass talk also reminded me of this part of the cento I just created as one of my colorblind plate poems:

The world mostly g
one, 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 u
p in bonfires of green, whirl and hurl my green
over the rocks of this imaginary life.

This cento is made out of lines from poems I’ve gathered for this log:
The world mostly gone, I make it what I want (Psalm with Near Blindness/ Julia B. Levine)
I empty my mind. I stuff it with grass. I’m green, I repeat. (Becoming Moss/Ella Frears)
I grow in green (Paean to Place/ Lorine Niedecker)
burst up in bonfires of green (The Enkindled Spring/ D. H. Lawrence
whirl and hurl my green over the rocks (Oread)
this imaginary life (The Green Eye/ James Merrill)

addendum, 26 april 2023: Reading back through my entries about A. R. Ammons as I prepare to post my monthly challenge for April, I encountered these lines from Ammons’ pome “Grassy Sound.” How could I have already forgotten them?!

The wind came as grassy sound 
and between its
grassy teeth
spoke words said with grass

Happy Birthday Ted Kooser!

Discovered via twitter that today would* have been Ted Kooser’s 84th birthday. What a wonderful poet! I’ve gathered 6 of his poems for this log:

  1. Grasshopper/ Ted Kooser
  2. The Early Bird/ Ted Kooser
  3. A Heron/ Ted Kooser
  4. In the Basement of the Goodwill Store/ Ted Kooser
  5. Carrie / Ted Kooser
  6. Turkey Vultures/ Ted Kooser

*I realized on 25 april 2024, that Ted Kooser was still alive. Thank goodness!

march 22/WALK

30 minutes, with Delia
neighborhood, near the river
29 degrees

It rained last night, which helped melt some more snow. Everything wet and dripping today. Mud and muck on the edges, puddles in the middle. Walking by a neighbor’s house I heard a rhythmic drip drip drip. Also heard a pair of woodpeckers pecking, then laughing. Whispered Brooks’ “The Crazy Woman” and Oliver’s “Wild Geese” to myself as I walked.

James Schuyler, Hymn to Life, Page 10

Begin with As windows are set, end with What are the questions you ask?

As windows are set in walls in whited Washington. City, begone
From my thoughts: childhood was not all that gay. Nor all that gray,
For the matter of that.

Yesterday I looked it up and discovered that Schuyler grew up in Washington, which I would have figured out anyway after reading this line.

Gay and gray. My favorite use of this pair is in Gwendolyn Brooks’ wonderful poem:

The Crazy Woman by Gwendolyn Brooks

I shall not sing a May song.
A May song should be gay.
I’ll wait until November
And sing a song of gray.

I’ll wait until November
That is the time for me.
I’ll go out in the frosty dark
And sing most terribly.

And all the little people
Will stare at me and say,
“That is the Crazy Woman
Who would not sing in May.”

May leans in my window, offering hornets.

What a line! Speaking of hornets — or wasps? or yellow jackets? or something that stings like that? — we have a few nests in our eaves. Every winter I talk about removing them before it gets too late in the spring, and every year we forget. Will we remember this year?

The fresh mown lawn is a rug underneath
Which is swept the dirt, the living dirt out of which our nurture
Comes, to which we go, not knowing if we hasten or we tarry.

The daily tasks, like mowing the lawn, a way for us to try to keep the inevitable at bay, or to think we have some control over death, or to avoid confronting it.

May
Opens wide her bluest eyes and speaks in bird tongues and a
Chain saw.

I love this line and how he brings together these two sounds! I’m always thinking about, and writing about, hearing the birds mixed in with the buzz of chainsaws or leaf blowers or lawn mowers. I like imagining that all of these sounds are May speaking.

The blighted elms come down. Already maple saplings,
Where other elms once grew and whelmed, count as young trees.

whelmed = archaic; engulfed, buried, submerged.

Was wondering if there are elms in the Mississippi River Gorge. Found some info about the invasive species, Siberian Elm.

Also, just remembered a poem I posted back in 2019:

Elms/ LOUISE GLÜCK

All day I tried to distinguish
need from desire. Now, in the dark,
I feel only bitter sadness for us,
the builders, the planers of wood,
because I have been looking
steadily at these elms
and seen the process that creates
the writhing, stationary tree
is torment, and have understood
it will make no forms but twisted forms.

In
A dishpan the soap powder dissolves under a turned on faucet and
Makes foam, just like the waves that crash ashore at the foot
Of the street. A restless surface. Chewing, and spitting sand and
Small white pebbles, clam shells with a sheen or chalky white.
A horseshoe crab: primeval. And all this without thought, this
Churning energy. Energy!

Sometimes I can be dense, so here’s a potentially dumb question: is he talking literally about waves — I know the narrator of this poem lives near the ocean — or is this a metaphor for the waves of debris on post-winter streets, reemerging in spring? I imagine it could be both. I’ll take it as a metaphor and wonder about what crushed up crustaceans might be unearthed in asphalt eroded by winter salts. Here in Minneapolis, near the Mississippi River Gorge, we were once part of the Ordovician Sea, so I can imagine some of that might still be present in the crushed up rock used to pave our paths and roads.

The sun sucks up the dew; the day is
Clear; a bird shits on my window ledge. Rain will wash it off
Or a storm will chip it loose.

Ha ha. I love the word shit and what it does to this image — it doesn’t cheapen or tarnish it, but makes it more real, mundane, less precious. Oh — and it makes it a little gross, which I like.

Life, I do not understand. The
Days tick by, each so unique, each so alike: what is that chatter
In the grass?

Sometimes I’d like to understand, to have my questions answered, but more often I like not knowing, or not yet knowing what that chatter in the grass is. I like having the space to imagine all the different things it could be. Perhaps what it is is more magical than I could have imagined. Understanding is necessary, and so is imagination and possibility.

May is not a flowering month so much as shades
Of green, yellow-green, blue-green, or emerald or dusted like
The lilac leaves.

A few days ago, while doing some research on colorblindness for the series of color poems I’m currently writing I came across a video about “what it’s like to be colorblind.” In the video they included some side-by-side images of “normal” and “colorblind.” Both images looked almost the same to me, especially what was green. I could tell it was green, but it also could have been gray or brown (and maybe it was in the image that someone who is colorblind would see). The variations of green, the subtle differences between yellow-green or blue-green or emerald green are mostly lost on me. Instead, I see green or light green or dark green or gray green or brown. This May, I’ll have to pay close attention to green and what I see, then write about it.

The lilac trusses stand in bud. A cardinal
Passes like a flying tulip, alights and nails the green day
Down. One flame in a fire of sea-soaked, copper-fed wood:
A red that leaps from green and holds it there.

I have lost the ability to be shocked or startled by red, especially from a cardinal. There is a cardinal that summers in our yard — my daughter has named him Chauncy — but I never see his red coat. I only know him by the shape of his head, looking like an angry bird, and his birdsong. This month he has decided to help usher in spring by perching himself on the tree outside my kitchen window.

A lot is lost and missed when you can’t see the red flash — the flying cardinal, a small blinking light, a flare somewhere — that everyone else sees and instantly understands and assumes that you see too.

Reluctantly
The plane tree, always late, as though from age, opens up and
Hangs its seed balls out.

It’s not just me, right? You are picturing an old guy with his balls hanging out too?

Winter is suddenly so far away, behind, ahead.

Yes, like it never happened, or it happened to someone else. I call her Winter Sara.

From the train
A stand of coarse grass in fuzzy flower.

I love tall, ornamental grasses with fuzzy ends that look like feathers or flowers! Someday I will plant some in my yard.

I like it when the morning sun lights up my room
Like a yellow jelly bean, an inner glow.

I’m not a huge fan of jelly beans, but I appreciate that Schuyler’s line gave me the chance to think about them and to imagine that intense yellow in the center of a jelly bean, one that has a translucent shell, not an opaque one. As an adult, I’ve grown to love the color yellow. I wonder, would a yellow marble work for this too?

May mutters, “Why
Ask questions?” or, “What are the questions you wish to ask?”

I love this as the last line of the poem!