Tag: grids

june 4/MAKE

holes and webs and strings and grids

Finishing up this morning on my 4th hole poem, I was committed to setting this series aside for a few months. But as I made my final-ish bloom by pinning shreds of the essay, something kept crawling by me. Back and forth and back and forth, on the edge of the desk. I pushed my stool away from the table, giving this something room to move without needing to crawl on me. An ant? A tick? I watched as it suddenly dangled before me on a thread. A spider! My first thought was, go away!, but later as I told FWA about the encounter, I thought about it differently: what if this spider was communicating with me — Sara! Don’t forget about me. Where are the spider webs you were planning to weave over the words of your poems? Of course I could interpret what was happening as an indifferent spider just doing spider things (what are spider things?), but I could also interpret it like I did those rabbits back in February: an invitation to keep exploring this project in new ways.

a flash — the webs return me to thinking about spiriti visivi and Dante and Wallace Stevens’ light as spiders spreading its webs over our eyeballs and invisible strings in the water that hold us like nets, then light as an insect, then back to my visual poem with specimen boards.

The trick: to tie it in with water, which isn’t a difficult trick, I think. Something about invisible forces/grids/strings/nets that hold us, where holding = tethering, connecting, trapping, restraining and containing.

another flash: Looking at my hole 3, I’m thinking about how the lines shooting out from the center of each verse, are offering a visible trace of the movement of an eye. Cool. I want to play with this idea some more — of tracking and embodying that movement of an eye receiving (capturing?) light and reading words.

Fall through the hole eyes can’t see, land in a logic of blur and almost

other random thoughts with some connection to accepting invitations

*at least to me

1 — On Floundering / Poetry Off the Shelf episode, Don’t Make Any Noise

I think that I was very fortunate in an early career where I did well.
But I wish I believed in myself enough to have allowed myself to financially flounder for a couple of years, instead of doing well. Because I now see, oh, life is a marathon, not a sprint. I would have gotten there.

Yeah. And what would you have done in the floundering? What is something that you’re like, oh, I might have gotten this or that out of it?
Because I think a lot of people who are young and who are currently floundering feel like it will never work out. Right? But I encourage the flounder. First of all, it’s more likely one is going to flounder right now because there are not so many defined career paths, unemployment is impossible. A college degree buys you nothing.
A grad degree buys you maybe something, maybe not. And debt is so high. I think floundering, while the young people I know are incredibly anxious and justifiably so, with my retrospect, I think it’s the best thing you can do.

Yes. I know because I think it also flies in the face of this sort of productivity “narrative, you know, like everything has to yield, like every extracurricular has to yield, you know, your degree has to yield, like, oh my god. And so I do like that you’re like in defense of floundering.
I am, I hope one day you will write a book.
In defense of floundering.”

Don’t Make Any Noise

2 — On keeping that window open / Matt Damon on Conan Needs a Friend

 Ben said this great thing, which was, “Judge me for how good my good ideas are, not how bad my bad ideas are.” And and it was it’s a very profound thing for a 20-year-old to say. um because he recognized that we needed the freedom to kind of barf out all those ideas you know and so often as you know when you’re writing it’s not you write down the bad idea because it’s iterating, you know it that can build into a good idea right and so he was basically giving both of us the permission to just keep the window as wide open as we could.

Conan needs a friend, Matt Damon

I think there was something else I wanted to add here, perhaps from Richard Powers’ archival interview for Between the Covers, but I can’t remember now.

may 30/RUN

3.7 miles
bottom of locks and dam
71 degrees

Warm, sunny. Not too bad in the shade. Ran down to the entrance of the locks and dam no. 1, turned around, stopped to walk for a few minutes, put in my “Moment” playlist, then started running again, When I got to “Lose Yourself,” I did a few strides. Felt a few brief flashes of a runner’s high.

10 Things

  1. bawk bawk cockadoodle doo! heard from far away, slowly approaching — what is that? A bike with an open bike trailer passed by, 2 kids in the back pretending to be a chicken and a rooster
  2. no cars on the way down to the locks and dam, only one car parked at the bottom
  3. some voices above me, on the trail going up to Wabun or on the ford bridge
  4. an orange water cooler with a sing, “Mill City Running” near the bench above the edge of the world
  5. empty benches — maybe one or two occupied
  6. a biker passing, blasting techno music — even if there had been a doppler effect on the music how would you be able to tell?
  7. swallowed a bug — forgot about it until an hour later when I had a few coughing bouts — Bug! I called out, to no one
  8. the rush of leaves through the trees sounding like falling water
  9. stopping at a water fountain near the end of my run, waiting for another runner to finish, soaking my hat — I have no memory of what it felt like to put the wet hat on. Did it drip down my face? Did it feel cool? I have no idea
  10. Walking back, noticing a grid on the lattice of a neighbor’s fence — at first I thought, squares, then lines

I started thinking about grids and lines and my interest in them, which led to thinking about how open swim involves some lines, or maybe not lines but trajectories — from buoy to buoy to buoy, and it also has an imaginary grid and points on that grid. But, open swim also has no lane lines. You are tethered/connected to the world and others in a different logic. I’ve already written about this in a few different ways, including in this poem, from my recently published chapbook, Inklings:

My geometry

of open swimming:
an eye, lake water.
Both of us now grids
with one dot in our
centers — a cone cell
that works, a buoy
that beacons. A line
drawn between passes
through vacant lots and
murky seas as it
tethers us to each
other — swimmer and
vision, buoy and
body, to sight and
to rarely see.

may 7/RUN

3.4 miles
2 trails
52 degrees

52 in the afternoon is not warm enough for spring, but it was fine for my run. Sunny, still, beautiful shadows. All over the sidewalk: little explosions of shadow buds on the tips of branches. While on the upper trail I listened to my “Sight Songs” playlist, when I went below I listened to voices floating above, rustling below, and the warning cries of black-capped chickadees.

I took the lower trail through the oak savanna, past the ravine, up the gravel trail to the ancient boulder, down to the tunnel of trees, then down the old stone steps to the river.

10 Things

  1. rustling below — an animal, maybe a turkey? No, a human in a bright red jacket
  2. ruts and cracks all over the few parts of the lower trail that are paved
  3. green exploding everywhere, new leafs on a tree, pushing through the slats of the wrought iron fence
  4. voices of kids, playing at the school playground
  5. blue water
  6. tree shadows, some sprawling, some exploding
  7. a new layer of gravel
  8. ran through a small cloud of gnats and trapped at least two in my eye juice — yuck!
  9. very soft and deep sand on the small trail winding through the floodplain forest
  10. loose gravel on the hill out of the ravine, making it more challenging to run

more holes

Still playing around with how to visualize the different hole poems and how to introduce/present the different elements: word, line/string/thread, hole. A wild idea last night that I can barely imagine executing. For a poem in which I have a double grid — one grid drawn directly over the poem, another created out of thread elevated above it — I would use needles instead of pins for stringing the thread. Yes, this is ridiculous — if I’m doing the math right, that would be 84 needles to thread, which I will never have enough spoons for. But wait — what if I put 2 needles on the center dot and used pins for the perimeter? How would this look? I’ve been thinking of the needle as eye ever since I used the phrase, threading the eye of a needle. Hmm, that idea needs to simmer some more.

This morning, I returned to Holes 1 and thought about how to find the words on the pages of the New Yorker essay. This poem was the start of this w/hole journey, so I imagine it as an introduction to the series and to the key elements — in particular: hole = blind spot and line/string = lines of amsler grid. Sara this second has decided on this plan: a grid with my blind spot on it for each panel, drawn over the words of the poem / the words printed out on other paper, then cut out and pasted on top of the grid, each numbered / an additional grid with blindspot/hole drawn at bottom as key/for explanation. Here’s the first stage:

text with 4 grids, each containing a dark blob (my blind spot) and the words: another name for barely not blind is a hole in your vision that makes for an uneasy fellowship with the word.
Holes 1 / phase 1 (7 may)

an hour or two later . . . Next, I drew on an Amsler Grid then glued on a caption and the title of the poem. I still need to draw the hole in my vision directly on the grid. This will require scaling the hole down. I’m thinking of trying out the Chuck Close grid method on another amsler then cutting it out and tracing it on the “real” one. That’s post-run Sara’s job.

holes 2 : phase 2, 7 may

I like it! I was able to (very) roughly approximate my hole to fit in the smaller grid, but I won’t post it here until it has been published somewhere.

may 6/RUN

4.7 miles
veterans home in reverse
42 degrees

Brr. Was glad I wore my winter tights this early afternoon. I almost wish I had had gloves near the beginning. Saw the parks crew out near the savanna, looking like they were getting ready for another controlled burn. Overcast, windy.

10 Things

  1. the smell of freshly cut grass somewhere — was it near Wabun, or was that at my last run through Wabun
  2. the top of a wooden fence, missing
  3. another fence top, broken and slanted
  4. gushing water below, 1: on the bridge connecting the veterans home and the river road
  5. gushing water below, 2: above the falls, the creek below
  6. gushing water below, 3: the sewer pipe in the 42nd street ravine
  7. shshshsh of the soft suface on the dirt trail next to the paved path
  8. the very LOUD monthly severe weather siren that blasts the first Wednesday of every month
  9. a few school buses in the falls parking lot, at least one group of people clustered above the falls
  10. empty benches

grids and holes 1

A favorite journal, Unlost, is open for submissions. They feature found and visual poems. I’d like to submit a few of my found poems, so today I started fine-tuning holes 1. First I finished drawing grids and my blind spot/hole on the panels of the essay:

holes 1 / 5 grids

I could keep all the pages intact, then place some plastic over all them OR I could cut out the grids, put plastic over each, then place them beside each other to create the poem. I also like the idea of the double grid with pins and thread. Maybe I’ll try the pins tomorrow (and maybe I’ll leave the plastic for non-hole poems?).

may 5/RUN

5.2 miles
franklin loop
42 degrees

Initially I was planning to run south but then I remembered that Scott and RJP had seen a cool art display near the trestle so I ran north to find it. First I ran through the neighborhood, past the daycare playground which was empty of kids, and over the lake street bridge to the east side of the river. Then I ran north to franklin, west over the bridge, and then south to the trestle.

A beautiful morning! Ran into the wind for the first half, with it behind me for the second half. I had to adjust my cap a few times to make sure it wouldn’t fly off, but otherwise the wind didn’t bother me. In fact, I liked what it did to the surface of the water as I ran over the lake street bridge: a wide stretch of rough scales.

I did 9/11 and it helped me to not run too fast. I felt strong, especially in the second half of the run.

As I neared the trestle from the north, I began looking for the art display. I finally found it in a grassy stretch near the part of the walking trail that splits from the bike trail. It’s a cluster of mitten tulips! We’re not sure who did it, or why, but I love it!

After stopping to take these pictures, I kept running south. As I neared the tunnel of trees, I saw that the road was closed. Then I saw smoke — a lot of smoke. Were they smoking the sewers in the neighborhood. Then I heard the crackling of fire on the hill below lena smith boulevard. Oh — a controlled burn. I stopped to take some video. For some reason, most of it is in slow motion again. Only the first five and last five seconds of it are at normal speed.

controlled burn / 5 may 2026

holes, grids, other worlds and other mothers

Yesterday I gave myself a task: weave thread through the plastic grid, sew thread on paper, sew thread on a plastic bag. A preliminary2 verdict: thin yarn on the plastic grid is possible iff I find the right purpose; paper might work if I think more deliberately about it; plastic has a lot of possibility. I’d like to try replicating a drug-induced spider web on it! My sewing skills are very limited — limited = 7th grade home-ec class + the occasional darning of pants/shirts + sewing up the rip on the brand new couch that Delia the dog made when we first got her 10 years ago. Will that stop me? Maybe in the past, but not today! I’ve already cleared the first hurdle: I threaded a needle! Yes, with my very bad vision, I managed to thread the eye of a tiny needle. Oh — the eye of a needle?! That’s an interesting connection to this project and my poem about the string that ties eye to words to world.

eye = needle / string = thread

I posted about this last week (I think?), but I’m reminded of Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Tattoo,” again and the lines, light is like a spider . . . it crawls under your eyelids/And spreads its webs there–/Its two webs./The webs of your eyes Spiders and threads and eyes. Now thread = light = that invisible thing that connects us to words and meaning. So good!

Maybe I should also try creating the web on the latch hook grid? I don’t have a needle with an eye big enough for the thin yarn I’m using, so I’ll try to do it with my hands.

I just watched a clip from Coraline on YouTube titled, “Coraline — Meeting “Other Mother.” I want to think more about the other mother’s button eyes and the idea of the hole as a portal between the world of her mother and other mother. Question: So far, I’ve taken inspiration from Alice in Wonderland and Coraline about holes to other worlds, but what other classic kid movies/books feature a hole/portal? Just as I wrote those last words I recalled Narnia and “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” which I loved reading as kid. A connection: the portal/hole/door is in a wardrobe, closet and through clothes. Is the thread/cloth connection significant?

other mother, button eyes
through the small door between

  1. 9 minutes of running, 1 minute of walking ↩︎
  2. preliminary = spending about 1 or 2 minutes trying each out ↩︎

may 4/HIKE

55 minutes
minnehaha off-leash dog park
59 degrees

More green, less dogs, a lot of wind, loose sand. Delia the dog was in her element — such joy in her body as she ran and leaped and sparred with other dogs. FWA and I talked about a distracted dog owner who failed to recognize that her big dog was overwhelming Delia. We both noticed how the beach was much smaller and the river much larger. Most of the mucky shoreline gone.

As we headed back, there was shouting ahead, then an older woman approached us and asked if she could walk with us. She explained that when she asked a man to get his big dog away from her small dog he called her a cunt and then yelled at her, then he kept harassing her. She didn’t feel safe. When the red-faced man (that is, according to FWA; I couldn’t see his face) paused and denied what happened, FWA successfully de-escalated the situation, saying to the man, just walk away. He did and we walked part of the way with the woman and her dog, Scotchie, short for Butterscotch. Love that name! After we parted ways, FWA and I analyzed our re/actions. I’m proud of FWA and I’m glad the situation was quickly defused.

We heard the pileated woodpecker, black-capped chickadees, and some corvid that didn’t sound like a crow and wasn’t screechy enough to be a blue jay.

grids

Scott and I went to Costco and loaded up on Grapefruit. I noticed a lattice/grid on the bag. Can I use it? It’s red (or orange? or pink?) so I’m not sure, but maybe?

grapefruit bag grid

I placed the grid directly over another holes poem just to see what it would look like. A thought: if this visual poem was in black and white, how would it look?

grapefruit bag grid — black and white

One inspiration for this switch to black and white: a story from Scott about the set on the Adams Family tv show1. While the show was in black and white to make it look more gothic, the actual set was in crazy colors. Nice!

While gathering a few different plastic bags from our Costco shopping to play around with, I thought about how my interest in plastic bags — because they seem to be an effective way to describe the distance between me and words and the world — is giving me a chance to give attention to the (over) use of plastic in packaging. So much plastic. More broadly, my interest in using everyday objects in my visual poetry is helping to give attention to objects that I would otherwise not notice. A door to a new way of being in the world is opening!

I almost forgot about another grid I discovered. Yesterday, RJP and I were at Michaels picking up a few supplies — yarn for her, needles and pins (no, not The Searchers song) for me. Sudden inspiration hit: what about the grids used in latch hook?!2 We asked a very helpful employee and found them. Yes! There is potential, I think, for using this in my Holes 4 poem. I wish I would have bought more than one!

1
2
3

1: panel with words of poem cut out
2: panel with bigger words of poem pasted on
3: both panels

I’m wondering what it would look like to play around with thread or yarn woven through the holes?

tomorrow’s plan: weave thread through plastic grid; sew with thread through/on plastic bag; sew with thread through/on printer paper.

  1. Fun fact: I loved watching this show when it was on reruns; I had a crush on Gomez/John Astin. ↩︎
  2. I know about latch hooking from my older sister MLP who loved to do it so much that once she latch hooked a map of China for a school report! ↩︎

may 2/RUN

7 miles
lake superior boardwalk, duluth
37 degrees

An impromptu trip to Duluth with Scott. Our first trip alone since last April when we went to visit my best friend in Iowa. We need more of these. This morning, we ran together above Lake Superior through Leif Erikson park and 3 miles north, then turned around and headed back. As we ran, I told Scott that the theme of the run was water.

10 Water Things

  1. thin sheets of ice on the water! earlier from the window of our room, I had noticed the texture of the water and wondered what was causing the strips of rough water amongst the smooth stretches
  2. water gushing out of a sewer pipe embedded in a ravine
  3. crack crackle crackle the ice sheet butting up against the rocks near shore and cracking — such a cool sound!
  4. drip drip drip water dripping out of some pipe deep in a backyard
  5. the rushing of the creek under the high wooden bridge we ran over
  6. Lake Superior — blue and beautiful, one giant ship, anchored miles from shore
  7. drip drip drip sweat dripping off my face
  8. a pool of water on the floor of the port-a-potty
  9. benches dotted on the bluff, filled with people enjoying the view
  10. almost all of the ice gone — I thought all of it was, until I noticed a few sheets still on the surface as we walked up the steps after the run

While we ran, we talked about our kids and Star Trek and an article Scott had read about fraternal twin girls with the same mother but different fathers. I saw my shadow and started singing Me and my Shadow. Scott asked who had sung it and when I said, I wasn’t sure but I had a version with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis on my shadows playlist, he said, Sammy Davis Jr. is his shadow? Yikes. And I said, Jesus, how have I never noticed that before. Then a string of associations: I mentioned that they sang it on a tv special which led to a discussion of the Andy Williams Christmas special, then the kids in it, which reminded Scott of the scared kid on the Ray Coniff Christmas Special who hears a creepy story about a little gray lamb read to her by the guy who played Wilbur on Mr. Ed — Scott couldn’t remember the actor’s name. Scott started reminiscing about watching Mr. Ed with his mom on Nick at Nite, which prompted me to start singing the theme song from “The Patty Duke Show” — because, of course I would.

It was a good run, and a great mental victory. As I said to Scott, I’m excited to push myself mentally to run these longer distances. It is a wonderful feeling to successfully push through these tough moments.

a quick note about grids

Yesterday, while driving back from 2 Harbors to our hotel in Duluth we started talking about the show Alone and then what it means to be “off the grid,” Yes — another meaning of grids! How can I play around with this in my exploration of grids?!

april 17/RUN

5.25 miles
franklin loop
63 degrees / drizzle
humidty: 85%

I beat the storm! Yes, there was drizzle, but no strong wind or thunder, so I’ll take the victory. Today I felt strong and relaxed and capable. Not anxious or overwhelmed. Today I also feel vulnerable and open to the world, ready to embrace any slight shifts in perspective.

Image of the Day: Running north on the east bank, looking down at the river: a sea of bright, fresh green. On this side of the gorge, between lake and franklin, there used to be a park down below, so there’s wide stretches of cleared land and open grass. Even knowing that, the green looked like water not grass to me, high up on the bluff.

Realization of the day: Returning to the west bank, running south, admiring the straight-ish ridge line across the gorge and wondering how it could be almost uniform, I realized something: this ridge line was made by humans — leveled after logging and road and residence building. What did it look like before settler colonists arrived?

on training for the marathon: Today I ran 9, walked 1. After crossing over Franklin, I did a 5 minute walk to get my heart rate below 170. Then another 9/1. After this last one I checked how long it took to get my heart rate down to 135: 2 minutes. A goal for future Sara: cut that time in half, or even more.

10 Things

  1. flashes of white flowers on the edge of the bluff: the spring ephemerals!
  2. little kid voices, laughing, somewhere deep in the gorge
  3. a guy yelling near a car parked across the parkwy on seabury — was it “fun” yelling as he played with a kid, or “unhinged” yelling at someone?
  4. chickadeedeedee
  5. a verbal greeting with a walker: good moring! / good morring!
  6. honking geese, a honking car horm
  7. a grayish-brownish-blue river, empty
  8. bright LED headlights, cutting through the thick gray air
  9. slashes of bright green are beginning to appear in the floodplain forest!
  10. several stones stacked on the ancient boulder

grids and strings and threads (oh my)

It’s a few hours after I returned from my run and it’s hailed twice and thundered and dropped 15 degrees since then. Boo. I tried a new thing with Holes 3: drew a graph directly on the words, mapped the words on the xy axis, lightly shaded in the words, repinned the grid over that, and then used thread to finish it. I like the doubling, almost out of focus feeling that the pencil grid and the string grid create. I don’t think the words are clear enough yet. I’ll have to keep working on that.

double grid
double grid, a slightly closer look (find fall and almost)

Here’s something else I tried: encasing the words in circles (using a penny) then roughly erasing the circles:

ghost hole effect

Another thought: map the words on a grid, then color in the rest of the grid box around the word or phrase from the poem. How would that look? Maybe I’ll try it on a smaller scale?

april 15/RUN

4.65 miles
ford overlook and back
63 degrees

Hot! Time to start running much earlier in the day! Yes, a return to morning running could be the next step in my efforts to regain some healthy discipline.

Earlier today I found another song to add to my “Remember to Forget” playlist — Forget Me Nots / Patrice Rushen, so I decided to listen to it while I ran for 9 minutes, then walked one. Midway through the playlist, “Forget Me Nots” came on and as I listened to it, I thought about Emily Dickinson’s “If recollecting were forgetting”. Listening to Elvis Costello’s “Veronica” about a woman with dementia, I thought about how the new name Scott came up with for present Sara, Sara this second, has a much different meaning when applied to someone who has no memory beyond the now.

10 Things

  1. flashes of bright green in my periphery as I ran by trees with new buds
  2. hot sun
  3. music coming from the grassy boulevard: people sitting in chairs, listening to music
  4. squirrels squawking at each other
  5. a loud thumping noise at the skate park
  6. someone in white sitting on the ledge looking over the river
  7. a biker in an orange shirt, biking very slowly over the ford bridge
  8. the voices of kids laughing and yelling on the playground
  9. a biker in a winter coat with a stocking cap and gloves on
  10. the desire path on the grassy boulevard is a mix of packed dirt, mud, roots, and greening grass

holes and grids and threads

The saga continues. I said to Scott earlier, after pushing my eyes to the limit with measuring 9/16th of an inch and attempting to cut straight slits and placing 84 pins 1/2 inch apart to create a grid, why I am so stubbornly committed to this project when it is to fiddly and challenging for my limited vision? I am not sure, but something in me won’t quit. I want to make a series of visual poems that use grids made out of thread and string and yarn and that require skills far beyond my ability (at least my ability right now) and that are exhausting and frustrating and take a lot of time. And, I WILL make it, dammit! I could use graph paper for the grid, but I want to use thread/string and have the lines be 3-dimensional. The thread/yard is partly as a connection to my fiber artist mom and my fiber artist daughter. The 3D is for the shadows and for what the floatinggrid boxes do to how we see/don’t see the words within them. I just finished my first attempt on placing the grid over Holes 3. I measured a 10×10 square over the words and then placed 21 pins on each of the 4 sides. Then I wound the thread around the pins to create the grid.

a 10×10 grid made of black thread and pins, placed over a NYer book review of Helen Oyeyemi’s new book
a closer look at the grid and the first word of the poem, fall

I really like this grid overlay, even as I recognize that I need to do more to it to make it make sense to a reader/viewer. The pins are difficult to work with on the thin cork board. They twist and bend out of place. What will I use for a different/the final version of this poem? I showed it to Scott and he suggested a frosted plexiglass layer with only the words of the poem visible. At least, I think that’s how he described it; I’m not quite understanding what he means. I’m wondering if encasing the words in a small dot (both a reference to the center dot of an Amsler grid AND xy coordinates on a graph) might work. One problem: I don’t want to remove the pins and draw the dot in, then have to re-string/pin the grid. I need a better solution for that!

I do like the elevated grid and the way you have to look through and around it to find the right word. I also like the thin thread that you almost can’t see. That’s how my vision often works: it’s not a solid wall of black, but the faint trace of something, sometimes feeling like a net or a screen that makes it harder to focus on anything. One more thing: when I ‘m reading, it does feel like each word or phrase is encase in a grid, with nothing outside of the grid in focus.

note: I’m warming to Scott’s plexiglass idea, even as I’m still not totally understanding what Scott means. What does the plexiglass do to the effect of the grid-thread? The focus on this poem is the graph-grid and the x = blur, y = almost coordinates.

It’s 5:38 and the sun is streaming in my front room studio. I’m waiting for it to hit my grid poem, and hoping it leads to cool grid shadows!

It’s 6:38 pm and some shadows have finally arrived! I asked Scott to take the picture because I wasn’t sure I could capture it effectively.

pin shadows

At first I didn’t notice the pin shadows, I just thought the pins had become twisted out of shape. But no — the pins are fine; it’s their shadows that are all askew. Nice!

Delighted by the result, I decided to take my own picture:

grid shadows in the early evening sun

april 14/RUN

4.3 miles
falls and back
56 degrees

Only 56 degrees? It felt much warmer than that! My hair is soaked with sweat, my face feels flushed still, minutes after finishing. Spring is here! I listened to a piece we’re playing for community band concert in a week, Bookmarks as I ran south, and my “Doin’ Time” playlist running north.

I waved and smiled at as many people I encountered as I could. Did I ever speak? I think I did, once. Even with my music playing, I could hear the kids having fun on the playground and the roar of the falls at the park. At least a dozen people were walking around the park, 4 of them were standing at my usual spot. As I stopped to take off my sweatshirt, I heard a thump thump thump behind me: a young kid running over to the steps. They were fast! A few minutes later, I heard several people calling out, woooooo or weeeeee, close to those steps. It sounded like someone was being swung in the air, or lifted up and down.

Anything else? Several of the benches were occupied, but not the one above the edge of the world. I stopped there to admire the river. I don’t remember what it looked like, just that it was open and wide and peaceful.

at the clinic (earlier this morning)

Today I had to go to the clinic to get two cervical polyps removed. No big deal — an easy procedure with only a 1% chance that the polyps would be cancerous. I was hardly anxious at all, even when they took my blood pressure, which is huge improvement from my last visit in early February. Hooray!

A few observations: Passing by a door, hearing a kid on the other side losing their shit. Hearing them a minute later while in the bathroom at the lab. This was never verified, but I think they were also at the lab, getting blood drawn. Yikes for the drawer of that blood and for the one getting it drawn!

Heading towards the lobby, passing an older woman (with all gray hair) about to be weighed, taking off her shoes and jacket, saying, hold on, I want to take off as much as possible to weigh as little as I can! I’m kidding. Was she, though? Hearing this, I though about my mom and how, when she was on chemo for stage 4 pancreatic cancer, she desperately didn’t want to lose weight because she was already too thin, and I thought about the doctor on a Facebook post who specializes in peri/menopausal discussing how being strong is so much more important than being skinny, especially for older women. With these thoughts, I wasn’t giving shade to the woman getting weighed; I was reflecting on the discord with older women’s bodies and the impact of oppressive beauty standards on their bodies.

Anything else? Oh — on my back on the table, feet in the stirrups, I looked up at the ceiling and noticed a dot. I stared at it, trying to imagine the Amsler Grid and to see my blind spot. Did I? I can’t remember now.

Driving home, I struggled to find a fun/pleasing/alliterative way to describe Sara in the present moment. I mentioned to Scott how well it worked with our daughter’s name: RJP right now. Scott suggested two awesome versions for me:

Sara this second
Sara since Saturday

I love both of these so much. How much? Enough to try and write a poem about them! I’ll try to think about them on my run1. One reason I like Sara this second is because I love the idea that I have so many present Saras that they can’t be contained in minutes; I need seconds! And Sara since Saturday? I said to Scott, this is an example of alliteration helping you to find more meaning. Sara last Saturday isn’t nearly as awesome as Sara since Saturday!

grids holes thread

I was planning to work on the grid for Holes 3 this afternoon — current options: drawing a grid directly on the text OR creating a loom frame and making a grid out of thread to place over the text — but I’m not sure I have enough energy or vision for it. Maybe I need some more food?! The snack has happened, some water too. A recharge! I want to start with a loom frame for my 2 panel poem. I’ve cut out the frame and figured out the measurements for the grid, but now I’ve run out of time!

  1. Well, I tried to think about them, but I forgot before I reached the river. I recall a flash of Sara since Saturday and then wondering why he chose Saturday, with 3 syllables, instead of Sunday, with two. Is it because Sunday doesn’t sound quite right? ↩︎