Tag: haunt

sept 25/RUN

3 miles
trestle turn around
60 degrees / humidity: 89%

Back to sticky running this morning. Overcast, but humid and wet from an early morning rain. I wore my BRIGHT orange YWCA Tri shirt from 2013 and my BRIGHT yellow running shoes. I wonder, did I brighten the otherwise gloomy gorge for anyone? I’m continuing to do my 3/1 method. The first 3 felt good, the second 3 did not, then after that, they all felt about the same: not hard, but not effortless either. Lots of sweating. After climbing up from under the lake street bridge I saw my first “road closed for an event on oct 4” sign. That’s for the marathon! For the next mile, I had a big grin on my face. It’s coming!

Two days ago, I came across WS Merwin’s “The Light of September” in an log post and I decided I wanted to re-memorize it (I memorized it a few years ago). Then yesterday, I decided to re-memorize Diane Seuss’ “I Look Up From My Book at the World Through Reading Glasses.” Today, it was Jorie Graham’s “Still Life with Window and Fish.” As I ran, I recited the lines in my head: Down here this morning in my white kitchen along the slim body of the light . . . Such a wonderful poem that has so much to say about vision and light. As I was memorizing DS’s poem yesterday, I thought about how brilliant it is in describing my experience of seeing the world sometimes — the world, italicized/Douglas fir blurs into archetype. . .Then I thought about a new project: picking some of the favorite vision poems I’ve gathered by others and writing about how and why they resonate for me. Seuss and Graham would definitely be on that list, along with several Emily Dickinson poems.

10 Things

  1. a small pack of shirtless runners — I heard the loud slapping of their feet first, then saw them as they flew past me
  2. scuff scuff scuff — a runner in a BRIGHT yellow shirt, scuffing his feet on the path with every step — he was slow but had a fast cadence, so there were a lot of scuff noises
  3. a few more slashes of yellow, red — I think a few orange too
  4. the squeaky whirr of wheels on an orange motorized something — not a bike, not a scooter — it was orange and had 3 wheels and the old guy in an orange jacket riding it was moving fast
  5. the sliding bench was empty
  6. any view of the river, forgotten — was I able to see it, or was it blocked by leaves?
  7. a white sky
  8. no geese, no blue jays, no chickadees, one cheeseburger from a carolina wren
  9. cars driving on the river road in bursts — a line-up, then no cars, then a line-up again
  10. waving to Daddy Long Legs who was over on the bike path while I was on the walking path

haunt / overlook

Today, since I’m writing about the overlook — the ones by the gorge, the act of ignoring or passing by without noticing or forgetting — I decided to search for “overlook” on Poetry Daily (poems.com). Jackpot! A great poem by the wonderful Maggie Smith:

In Geologic Time, It Happened Just Seconds Ago/ Maggie Smith

Our honeymoon was a strand             
of scenic overlooks. I first wrote                            
strange—a strange of scenic

overlooks—my mistake, and strange             
enough was the desert penned                           
in red ink. The scene

was either Sedona or Mars. They say             
the iron in the rocks calls                           
to the iron in our blood,

so it tugs on us. It tugged. We stayed             
on Airport Mesa, where we called                           
the crowds drawn to sanguine

sunsets “tourists,” as if we weren’t,             
and where, each night, the Milky Way                           
made a mess of the sky.

Was I the only one who wanted             

to wipe its white smudge away,                           
to polish the night

black again? Our honeymoon             
was a stranded scene I overlooked.                           
We posed for photographs
\

we never took. I remember the moon             
framed above the landscape, looking                           
silvery as a tintype

taken in a modern-day ghost town.             
The last day, we reached the canyon                           
and saw where the river

had over millions of years chewed it down             
to bone, clear to the canyon’s                           
strange marrow, riven

into red, copper, and purple—bands             
like sunsets compressed and recorded                           
in rock. That view

remains. Our honeymoon was a strand,             
a strangeness, a look ahead. I wrote                           
only what I could see.

1 — look / scene (seen) / tourists (gawkers) / a blocked view (Milky Way) / photographs (staged looks) / a view (of the moon) framed / landscape (visible feature of an area of land) / looking like / saw / view remains / look ahead / could see

What a variety of uses of view/see/look here, related to vision! I’d like to try this out in my overlook poem — or, maybe the same approach (gathering and using a wide range of descriptions related to a concept) on my dirt path poem, which has two sections: desire and abandon

2 — overlook as view / overlook as not seeing

3 — geologic time / iron in rock connected to iron in body — references to Lorine Niedecker and “Lake Superior”?

4 — a beautiful description of the carving out of a canyon, both literal and figurative as what happened to a marriage years after the honeymoon

5 — so it tugs on us. It tugged. Love it!

sept 23/RUN

5.6 miles
above locks and dam / ford bridge / under lake street
54 degrees

The first mile was rough. My feet were sore. Mile 2 wasn’t that great either. But, by mile 3, I started to feel better. And by mile 4, I decided that instead of stopping at a certain distance, I’d stop at a certain time: an hour. This run gives me confidence for the marathon. I can remind myself that even if it feels hard in the first few miles, it starts to feel better around mile 4. Better = a little easier, more relaxed, my legs and lungs and arms in sync.

One of the goals for my run today was to visit a few overlooks that I might use in a poem tentatively titled, overlook. On my way back from the ford bridge, I stopped at Horace Cleveland Overlook and took some video. As I ran from there above the river, I started thinking about unofficial overlooks — like above the ravine or above the floodplain forest in the tunnel of trees. Suddenly it hit me: these unofficial overlooks are often overlooked because people aren’t giving them enough attention as they move through the gorge, or because they are hidden from our “normal” ways of looking — the river, the floodplain forest, the steps that wind down to the flats. I decided this poem should have both meanings of overlook — or, maybe even other meanings too, similar to one of Jane Hirshfield’s assays. I need to revisit some of her assay poems to figure out if they fit with what I’m trying to do.

10 Things

  1. a squirrel who had no fucks to give — didn’t even bother to be startled as i ran by
  2. white heat on the river’s surface — the sun bouncing off the scaled surface
  3. a group of bikers meeting up at the locks and dam no. 1 parking lot
  4. a red bag, under a tree, just below the ford bridge
  5. the river near the eastern edge, just off of the ford bridge, was a pale greenish blue
  6. the view of the east bank from the ford bridge: hints of reds and oranges in the trees
  7. a tall guy, running fast in bursts — doing strides? the first time I saw him stop, I heard him wheezing from his hard effort
  8. almost all of the floodplain forest is still green
  9. some little purple flowers on the edge of the trail — Siberian Squill? — so upright and softly colored, looking like little bouquets spread out along the trail
  10. while most of the benches were empty, more than usual were filled — mostly by a single person, but at one, two women were sitting and talking
Horace Cleveland Overlook / 23 sept 2026

Looked through past entries and found a definition for assay from 11 jan 2024:

definition of an assay

Assays began with a poem written after I’d reread Edgar Allan Poe’s stories while writing an essay on how hiddenness works in poems. Some of the qualities of essay exploration and prose step lingered in its music and mode of thinking. At the time, I was regularly seeing the journal Science. On the back would often be advertisements for half-million-dollar machines for performing assays. That word—close to essay and sharing its root in the idea of an attempt, a try—refers to discovering a thing’s nature by breaking it into its elemental parts. The poem became ‘Poe: An Assay.’ That approach to writing, of testing a subject for its discoverable parts, imaginative and factual, caught. I began writing others. ‘Judgment: An Assay.’ ‘Tears: An Assay.’ ‘And: An Assay.’” Jane Hirshfield

assay (def): the testing of a metal or ore to determine its ingredients and quality

Does this fit with what I’m trying to do? Not quite.

sept 17/RUN

7 miles
ford loop+
61 degrees / dew point: 59
drizzle, off and on

Moist. Humid air mixed with sweat mixed with rain-soaked bushes mixed with occasional drizzle. Overcast. Encountered several walkers with umbrellas or rain jackets. Ran past some geese, a few wild turkeys. Heard the bells of St. Thomas.

10 Wet Things

  1. my upper arm after brushing against wet leaves
  2. the sidewalk — a little slick
  3. puddles on the path, making visible cracks I might not have seen otherwise
  4. the surface of the river, crossing the ford bridge: scaled, gray
  5. shadow falls was falling vigorously
  6. the big fountain in front of a fancy house on the river road, bubbling
  7. my shirt, soaked at the top
  8. stopped at the water fountain near the skate park
  9. my pony-tail, dripping
  10. they’re doing work at the old steam plant/ Ford Area C — an orange something looking like a thick lane line in the water near shore, a big crane, yellow-vested workers all around

While working on a poem about Ford Area C and the abandoned power plant yesterday, I read about how Ford, which still owns this building/land, had to submit a plan for cleaning up the toxic dump that has been there for more than 80 years — is that what they’re doing down there, cleaning up? Something else they’ve already done is remove a small building up on the bluff, just off of the trail. Today I made that my turn around point (note to future Sara, if you’re planning to run 7 miles, this is about 1/2 mile short). I walked out near the edge and took a few pictures of the open view to the plant below, including this one:

above the power plant / 17 sept

Friends of the Mississippi River (FMR) put together a helpful timeline of Ford Area C. Here are a few key dates:

1945-1966 — Ford dumps waste solvents over the bluff and deposits barrels of paint waste onto the Mississippi River floodplain, creating what is eventually named “Area C.” (The primary manufacturing campus includes parcels “A” and “B.”)

1965-66 — Ford deposits large amounts of construction debris on top of the hazardous waste at Area C.

1979 — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with Ford’s permission, adds construction debris to the top of the Area C dump during nearby lock and dam reconstruction, making removal of the hazardous waste underneath more difficult. Ford is paid by the yard for the disposed-of waste.

Fall 2025 — Ford has submitted a draft cleanup plan (feasibility study) to the MPCA. The MPCA will hold a community meeting and seek public comments in January 2026 before selecting a cleanup alternative with Ford.

In January of 2026, the MPCA held public meetings to discuss Area C clean-up plans. I haven’t found much more information. Looking at the MPCA site for Ford Area C, I found a timeline that claims 2027 is when the clean-up will happen.

Returning to the MPCA site and their description of Ford Area C:

From approximately 1945 through the mid-1960s, Ford disposed of paint sludge and solvents used in automobile painting operations at the base of the bluff. Although the specific disposal practices are not known, it appears that liquid solvents may have been dumped over the edge of the bluff, while barrels of paint sludge were buried. Disposal of industrial waste stopped in about 1966. Ford also disposed of construction rubble, contaminated soil, scrap metal, and other types of debris at Area C.

During the reconstruction of Lock & Dam No. 1 in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers disposed of a large volume of construction rubble and sand on top of and surrounding the industrial waste. In the mid-1980s, Ford covered the top of the construction rubble pile with a paved parking lot. The city of Saint Paul placed additional rubble at Area C during reconstruction of Mississippi River Boulevard in the late 1980s.

Dumped over the edge of the bluff, buried in the ground, covered with rubble, sand, a parking lot.

sept 16/RUN

3.1 miles
2 trails+
61 degrees / humidity: 73%

I thought about doing my 10 mile run today but I wondered if it might be too much for my sore hip since I ran 5 miles yesterday. I decided to run a 5k instead, and, to make it more relaxed, to stop at the benches I’m writing about for my poem, “Haunt: the benches.”

It was a beautiful morning. Sun, light wind, good air quality, a few more red trees. Just before I started, I listened to the sharp thud of acorns hitting the asphalt. At the end of the next block, city workers were repairing the sewer: lots of orange vests and loud talking and trucks beeping and banging.

Running south, I stayed above on the paved trail near the road. At the Horace Cleveland Overlook, I turned down and entered the southern entrance of the Winchell Trail. The river was sparkling, the sewer pipes in the ravines were dripping, the cars were steadily heading north. Near 42nd street, I noticed that they had patched all the cracks on the trail that had been marked with orange paint last week — strips that looked like toilet paper criss-crossed the path, covering the patches.

the benches

1 — the bench made out of an ancient boulder

This was not one of the benches I was planning to write about, but as I ran near it, I realized I wanted to. The bench made by time and pressure. How long did it take to make it, I wonder. And, what type of rock is this dark gray/black boulder? Is it taconite (imported from up north) or limestone or what?

boulder as bench / above the oak savanna

2 — the WWDD bench (what would dow do — rachel dow)

The view in front of this bench is blocked by small trees, one of them a memorial tree for Rachel Dow. The bench is made from wooden slats, quite worn, and concrete studded with gravel.

3 — the bench at the edge of the world

In an early draft this morning, I wrote about standing beside this bench to look down at the trail below and out at the river, but that’s not quite true: I’m not standing beside it, I’m standing several feet in front of it. Running under this bench, on the edge of the world, I wondered if I should add an additional verse — I mention fall and winter; I could bring in spring or summer, too.

Yesterday, reading the latest issue of The Paris Review thanks to my local library, I discovered this wonderful poem by one of my favorite poets, Diane Seuss:

She is good at curving/ Diane Seuss

against the constellation
of lilies

of the valley, and good
at making a nest

where the watercress
meets the skirt

of the stream and hems
it, and in the green

where the deer dream.
They say she’s playing

dead but
she’s not playing or

if she’s playing she’s playing
living or something in between.

Oh, so good! The line breaks, the quiet rhymes, the idea of someone not playing dead but living.

added a few hours later: I almost forgot about something I wanted the mention — last night, during community band rehearsal, as we did a warm-up exercise with staccatoed quarter notes, the director told us to stop thinking about the notes and just thinking about the space in-between the notes. It reminded me of my poem, “Between Beats” and when I think about the space between foot strikes during my run, when I’m flying.

sept 10/RUN

8.75 miles
the confluence and back
59 degrees / humidity: 86%
100% sun

Cooler, but still warm because of humidity and sun. Only a few minutes in, my face was dripping with sweat and the top of my shirt was soaked. I need some new running shirts that aren’t light green or any other light color that so easily shows sweat. The first mile wasn’t easy — my feet/stride felt awkward and my legs were sore — but I reminded myself that it would get easier once I warmed up and that I could run almost 9 miles. It worked! I just kept going — 3 minutes of running, 1 minute of walking — and, at some point, it wasn’t as hard.

I tried something new: miles 1-4 — 3/1, miles 5-7 — 2 m/45 s, mile 7 — 90s/30s, mile 8+ — 3/1. I was curious which of these ratios might work best (best = easiest or fastest or lowest heart rate). The verdict: 3/1 was the best. 2/45 was too hard to keep track of and 90/30 elevated my heart rate the most.

For the first half of the run, I listened to the cars and the falls and the birds. For the second half, my “Hello, Goodbye” playlist.

10 Things

  1. middle schoolers walking to school, 1: scuff scuff scuff — a boy in shorts, socks, and slides scuffing his feet as he walked towards me
  2. middle schoolers walking to school, 2: 3 girls, dressed almost identically in white t-shirts and sweatpants — very polite, moving over to give me space — after they passed, a cloud of a scent — sweet, artificial, a perfume that reminded me of pink bubble-gum
  3. car after car after car passing beside me on the river road
  4. empty parking lots at the overlooks
  5. the sound of a frisbee hitting a chainlink net — someone playing frisbee golf in wabun
  6. ford bridge view, south: calm, flat water in several versions of blue
  7. hidden falls falling softly, steadily
  8. a new water fountain at the confluence that fills water bottles fast!
  9. empty benches — no one sitting at my new favorite bench just above the dog park
  10. ford bridge view, north: a small motor boat heading south to the lock and dam — a few seconds later I think I heard the bell at the lock that signaled it was being filled up with water so the boat could enter

A good run. I ran marathon race pace. My left knee was sore afterwards, but otherwise, I felt like I could keep running.

Sometime during the run, I started thinking about my Girl Ghost Gorge manuscript. First, I thought about one of the poems I’m working on, Here, We Speak Void, and how the form for it should be small stanzas surrounded by lots of space — maybe the different stanzas, which are different understandings/examples of Void, would be on different pages. This thought led to more thoughts about the whole collection. In addition to being about a girl, a ghost, a gorge, it’s about rock and river and air. Air = lots of empty or open space on the page, Water = words flowing freely, steadily.

we speak in Void

I found these thoughts yesterday and want to condense them into part of my poem. Today’s task, I think.

Gabbert suggests that the frustration of incoherence, mystery, not being able to make sense of something is alluring, erotic. It’s why many are drawn to poetry — to slow down, notice, get the chance to dwell in the unknown. My perspective is slightly different. I don’t need to be encouraged to slow down or given the chance to embrace incoherence, resist common sense. Because of failing vision and my overworked brain, I am already slow. Much of what I see is incoherent — or never quite coherent. Common sense ideas of how we see or how to be in the world have already been upended for me. I see poetry, and its way of navigating or negotiating or communicating/finding meaning not as desirable, but as necessary, practical, useful, a way to be that speaks to where I already am.

log entry from 29 march 2023

Something similar to, not familiar language made strange, but strange language made familiar. I like the word, familiar — a meaning for knowing to put beside, or replace, mastering or (fully) understanding. And now I’m thinking about becoming accustomed — We grow accustomed to the Dark (ED).

sept 9/RUN

3.25 miles
trestle turn around
79 degrees

Afternoon run, in bright sun. Too hot. I’m ready for fall and cooler air! My legs felt a bit strange and tired — how much of it was the effects of the 18 mile run on Sunday and how much was the hot sun? On the way to the trestle, I noticed someone sitting on the sliding bench. By the time I returned, they had left. I heard voices below the trestle, then a flash of movement off to the side. No view of the river. Still too much green. I don’t remember thinking about anything except that I was hot and this run was difficult.

image of the day: a butterfly and their shadow

Even though it was hot and the run was hard, I’m still glad I got outside and ran above the gorge. If I hadn’t gone, I would have missed beholding the monarch butterfly that fluttered beside me. At first, I only saw the actual butterfly rising and falling and bouncing all around. Then, I noticed their shadow. A ball of dark gray on the sunlit trail. It almost looked like a little ball and it felt more solid — in its dark circular form — than the actual butterfly and its slight feather form. So cool!

Looking through my notes from an oct 2025 Girl Ghost Gorge document, and I found these lines:

her concern
was the edge
and the making
of a form
out of the
edgelessness
that dwells be-
yond that edge

These lines, written by me, reminded me of some lines from AR Ammons in garbage that I found in another GGG document:

one thinks, slapping down the lines, making time
with eternity, one will thrive beyond the brink but

beyond the brink is no recollection but a wide
giving way into silver that filters farther away

into nothing

I took these lines and put them into my breathing

beyond the
brink, a
wide giving
way in
to silver
filtered
farther a
way into
nothing 

The edge I am referring to is not the edge of life (death), but the edge of the bluff. And, beyond that edge is not a silvery nothing, but a river, floodplain forests, another edge: a gorge. And, the gorge, I thought as I read the lines, is not a formless nothing, but a container, a bowl. I remembered that Jane Hirshfield wrote a poem about a bowl.

The Bowl/ Jane Hirshfield

If meat is put into the bowl, meat is eaten.

If rice is put into the bowl, it may be cooked.

If a shoe is put into the bowl,

the leather is chewed and chewed over,

a sentence that cannot be taken in or forgotten.

A day, if a day could feel, must feel like a bowl.

Wars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness,

it eats them.

Then the next day comes, spotless and hungry.

The bowl cannot be thrown away.

It cannot be broken.

It is calm, uneclipsable, rindless,

and, big though it seems, fits exactly in two human hands.

Hands with ten fingers,

fifty-four bones,

capacities strange to us almost past measure.

Scented—as the curve of the bowl is—

with cardamom, star anise, long pepper, cinnamon, hyssop.

—2014

sept 6/REST

Today I was supposed to run my 18 miler, but yesterday I woke up to an angry right knee. I think my kneecap shifted and the ligaments around it are a bit inflamed. This morning, my knee is still sore, so I’m postponing the run until tomorrow. Nothing too worrisome, as long as I take it seriously and rest, which I am. Today, I RICE (rest, ice, compression, elevate). Tomorrow, an 18 mile run.

Also, today, I’m writing more poems for Girl Ghose Gorge. First up, Haunts: Lock and Dam no. 1. I decided to look up the Ford power plant because I recently hiked by it and because I’ve mentioned it in an early draft of the poem. I found this video that provides incredible footage of the interior of the steam plant. This plant shut down in 2011 and, even though it’s fenced off, urban explorers, like the creators of this video, frequently visit it.

note: skip the 1.5 min intro and the annoying voiceover

themes: abandoned industry; urban explorers (a form of ghost, often invisible/hidden, haunting certain places, dwelling in the dark edges); a river returning (flooded basements). Mentioned in the comments and a vivid image remembered by me as K and I hiked up the steep road: the vacant parking lot halfway up the road — cracked asphalt, weeds/plants growing through the cracks, several feet high).

Another element: the future of the locks and dam no. 1 (and the 2 other lock and dams in Minneapolis)– it’s currently being studied by the Army Corps of Engineers, who own it, to determine 1 of 3 futures: the Army Corps continues to own and operate it; they sell it to a local, state, or private entity; or they dismantle the lock and dam and let the river flow freely. A report will be released for public review in the spring of 2027. In July, 2026, MPR reported on the uncertain future of the locks and dams: What would removing twin cities locks and dams mean for the Mississippi River?

The report says removing the locks and dams could reshape how people experience the Mississippi in the Twin Cities, with places to explore, hike, fish and bird watch. It also could offer an opportunity to reconnect with sacred Dakota places along the river.

Federal land around the Upper St. Anthony Falls Lock and Dam is being restored by a Dakota-led nonprofit, Owámniyomni Okhódayapi. The organization plans to turn the site into a place of healing, restoration and connection.

Down river, the Wakaŋ Tipi Center, a 27-acre Native-led cultural and environmental interpretive center, recently opened on the Mississippi River in St. Paul. 

What would removing twin cities locks and dams mean for the Mississippi River?

Here’s an ending line that I’d like to think about: removing the dams could take 10-20 years.

The MPR article lists ecological, recreational, economic, and cultural/spiritual reasons. I’m reminded of past park plans I’ve read and the shifting perspectives on what matters most and how to pitch decisions to the public. I’d like to think about this some more and possibly use it a poem I’m thinking of writing that uses text from different documents about managing the park (regional/national).

While exploring resources about the river, I came across a reference to PUBLIC LAW 100–696, November 18, 1988. It’s the establishing by Congress of

(1) The Mississippi River Corridor within the Saint Paul-Minneapolis Metropolitan Area represents a nationally significant historical, recreational, scenic, cultural, natural, economic, and scientific resource.

(2) TThere is a national interest in the preservation, protectionand enhancement of these resources for the benefit of the people of the United States.

source

key language:

preservation, enhancement, enjoyment, and utilization of the nationally significant resources of the Mississippi River Corridor / to protect, preserve and enhance the significant values of the waters and land / establish manage enforce

What about PUBLIC LAW 100–696 as the title of a poem?

It’s 5:31 pm: My knee seems somewhat better. I’ve iced it twice. It is still a little angry. I can’t decide if the kneecap is continuing to shift and agitate it, or if the area around the knee feels tight/inflamed because of an initial shift. My current thought is, whatever has happened, I should be okay to run tomorrow morning.

sept 1/RUN

5 miles
minnehaha falls+
70 degrees
humidity: 82%

Too warm this morning! Sun and humidity and sweat. Tried out my new Saucony Rides. No problems, so I’m optimistic they’ll be good for the marathon. Tried something new: 1 mile run/3 min walk + 2 x 1 mile/2 min walk + 3 x .5 mile/2 min walk. I liked it; I’ll have to try it again.

10 Things

  1. empty benches
  2. a recumbent bike, speeding past me — too close
  3. a few more red leaves on the bushes near the trail
  4. a large group of older, (all?) white people standing above the falls, listening to a guide tell the history of the falls
  5. the faint, fake sound of the light rail bells ringing as it neared an intersection
  6. veteran’s bridge is completely blocked with chain link
  7. a man sitting at a picnic table near John Steven’s house
  8. rushing water as it tumbled over the limestone ledge
  9. a trilling bird
  10. the sound of bike shoes clipping into pedals behind me — sharp, quick, satisfying

Randomly encountered a great interview with many wonderful passages, including this:

There’s also this pressure, I feel, and perhaps this is just an internal pressure I felt, to write about one’s grief from a cold remove. As I was writing in London, I was just telling myself, if I ever write a book about this, it must be conveyed how it is right now: the extreme absolute end of ecstasy and nothing more or less. I made it my imperative: you will be in the heart of it with me, and you, the reader, either stay or leave, and I don’t care what you do.

Interview with Temperance Aghamohammadi

And this:

For me, when we speak of divinity, it is that external sense of transit, trying to move from this realm to another, or to even peer into the other and recover something. But it’s also about puncturing something within oneself to get to that brink, look over into the chasm, and see what’s there.

Interview with Temperance Aghamohammadi

transit / move from one realm to another / look over into the chasm / a puncture

Here I’m thinking about moving around the gorge, and looking/hearing/feeling the chasm/gap between shores, between real/imagined, girl/ghost, daughter/mother, here/there (or, not here). I’m also thinking about that puncture as the wearing down/erosion/leaking/a rent in the veil (see MO Leaf and the Cloud)

Swimming One Day in August, update: Last week, after open swim season ended, I tried to continue accumulating minutes for my 24 hours of swimming, but I felt stuffed up and tired after I was done. Then I found out that the beach was being closed “due to geometric mean of E. coli exceeding 126 MPN/100 mL.” I realized that I almost certainly had swum in that water. I didn’t get sick but continued to feel congested for several days. I also realized that 24 hours was not going to happen this year; I was disappointed, but not that disappointed. I’ll try again next year. I’m sad that swimming is over (is it? will I try again before they take the buoys down?), but I’m happy to be breathing better. Besides, I have moved onto marathon training and revising and expanding my collection of gorge poems. Yesterday, I wrote a poem about The Monument and Shadow Falls that I’m particularly excited about. Today, I’ll try writing about the trestle and/or Bohemian Flats, Locks and Dam no. 1, the tunnel of trees.

aug 16/RUN

12 miles
confluence + falls
66 degrees / humidity: 86%

12 miles! I’m running today instead of swimming because I am sick or have a sinus infection or my allergies are acting up because of the lake water (the e coli is very high at lake nokomis — over 1000). Since Friday, I’ve felt out of it. It started with a sore throat in the morning. I hoped it was just because I slept with the window open, but it wasn’t going away and I started feeling sinus pressure and stuffiness. Saturday was unpleasant (not quite miserable, but close, and I was whiny about it). I really dislike when my sinuses close up and I can’t breathe through my nose. Not being able to breathe is one of my big fears. If the stuffiness is due to the lake water, I might have to end my season early. If it’s because I’m sick, I might be able to swim again next week. As much as I love swimming, I hate being stuffed up and having a lot of trouble breathing. I’ll be bummed if I have to stop swimming already, but not too bummed: I’ve swum a lot this summer, and I need to prioritize marathon training.

But, back to today. 12 miles! I knew I would do 12 miles but, because I’m still stuffed up, I wondered how much of it would be walking. I surprised myself by feeling pretty good for a lot of it. I took one 5 minute walk break in the middle, but otherwise I mostly stuck to a plan: 3 mins run / 1 min walk. I wonder if I would go slower or faster if I switched up the ration to 90 sec run/ 30 sec walk. I’ll have to try that in this upcoming week.

Even though I made a playlist — Hello, Goodbye — for the entire run, I didn’t begin listening to it until my 5 minute walk break after the confluence. Before that, I listened to my key jingling in my pocket, a souped-up car going too fast on the east river road, blue jays screeching, hidden water falling, the clicking and clacking of roller skier’s poles. When I finally put in the playlist, I remember feeling nostalgic while listening to Lionel Richie’s “Hello” — oh, 10 year old Sara watching the video with the blind girl and the creepy, stalker professor! 1984 and 85 were some wonderful years for watching movies and music videos. I also remember feeling tender when Adele sang, “Hello from the other side.” I thought about my mom. She’s been dead for almost 17 years. How is that possible? Running by the falls, the telephone section of the playlist started. I got a boost with Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” and ran too fast for a few minutes. Down by the locks and dam no. 1, I heard Lady Gaga sing, “Out in the club and I’m sipping that bubb” in her song “Telephone” — I’m assuming she means bubbly/champagne?

10 Things

  1. running over the lake street bridge, looking down at the river — blue, scaled, the wake of some small boat streaked across the surface
  2. the steps on the lake street bridge that lead down to the trail: clothes were strewn all over the steps — what happened? I decided to take the road over to the trail instead
  3. running parallel to another runner — first on opposite sides of the trail then, when she crossed the road, opposite sides of the road — I think I was slightly faster than her, so I was creeping up. If I wasn’t running 12 miles, I might have sped up to pass her faster, but I think that would have burned too many matches (or spent too many pennies) and I would have suffered later in the run because of it
  4. noticing all of the dirt trails leading up from the river on the way to hidden falls, remembering my hike with my college friend last week, wondering if we could have taken any of them
  5. a new regular? a short (4.5 feet tall, maybe) older woman who I also saw here last time. She was walking, I was running. Both times she was wearing shorts. should I call her short shorts?
  6. the view from the confluence overlook: a parking lot below — will the view be better once the leaves are off of the trees?
  7. stopping at a “good” water fountain near the skate park, where good = designed for water bottles, so it’s easy to fill them up — most of the water fountains are old school and curves, making it almost impossible to fill up a water bottle
  8. hearing the roar of the water rushing over the concrete dam at locks and dam no. 1
  9. waving a thanks to a guy who moved out of the way as I ran by the parking kiosk
  10. my new favorite bench — somewhere between the 2 entrances to Hidden Falls park, perched on a stretch of the bluff that’s wide open, with a beautiful view of the river below — was empty1

It was supposed to be partly or mostly cloudy today, but I don’t recall see any clouds. So much bright sun! I didn’t hear any rowers or chiming bells, no fragments of conversation. No geese or turkeys.

Memorable haunts I encountered: lake street bridge; above shadow falls; the monument; the ford overlook; hidden falls; my new favorite bench; the confluence; ford bridge; wabun disc golf course; the falls; the bottom of locks and dam no. 1, then the top; the double bridge; the oak savanna; the ancient boulder; the welcoming oaks; the tunnel of trees.

  1. I’d like to do a run that turns around at this bench. I’m thinking it would be between 7 and 8 miles long ↩︎

dec 18/RUNBIKERUN

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

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

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

10 Things

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

bats!

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

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

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

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

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

Sara, age 8, in my soccer team uniform.

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

bike: 30 minutes
run: 1.3 miles
basement

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

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

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

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

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

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

dec 13/BIKERUN

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

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

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

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

run!: 1.25 miles
treadmill

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

Echoes, a Quarry and hybridizing echolocations

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

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

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

Waxwing Submissions

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

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

Before I got my eye put out/ Emily Dickinson

1

I
got
my

eye

put

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

2

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

3

incautious

My poem:

Today stars
are in 

motion, in-
cautious

of birds, Sun.
I see

my way split
before

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

dipping be-
tween soul’s

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

dec 10/SHOVELBIKE

60 minutes
4 inches
22 degrees

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

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

10 Things

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

more manuscript

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

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

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

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

Being outside —
less the light
more the air

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

urban

waterways

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

natural
waterways —
flow through top-
ography

of a landscape

collective
memory

water, un
ruly, will
not be man-

aged
refuses

to obey

cities, planned
neighborhoods
rooted, creeks
rerouted

caverns, sink
holes, passage
ways deep in

archive of
memory
reflection
on all that
has been lost

she wonders
what a day-
lighted world
could look like

a pipe — the
container
for a
muted stream

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

down here it’s
difficult
to trace the

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

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

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

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

arrives, ponds
filled, a
freeway built,
neighborhoods
developed

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

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

bike: 25 minutes
basement

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

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

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

dec 8/RUN

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

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

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

10 Things

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

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

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

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

dec 6/RUN

4.1 miles
minnehaha falls and back
20 degrees
85% snow-covered

Yes! More amazing winter running! Not only wonderful physically, but creatively and mentally too. Near the end of the run, I had some great ideas for my manuscript (see below)! And I had some mental victories: I kept running without stopping to walk until I reached the halfway point; I not only kept running past the yellow crosswalk sign at 38th — a spot that always seems to loom too far in the distance — but I kept going past it until I reached the parking lot at 35th.

I’m glad I wore my yaktrax today. The path conditions were not the greatest — soft, uneven snow, some ice, not too many bare spots. I could tell my legs were having to work harder, which I think is a good thing for building strength.

I’m pretty sure I heard the falls falling, but I was distracted by people. I reached my favorite observation spot alone, but within 15 seconds, a group of 20 somethings were hovering around it, so I left without studying the falls.

The river was white with a few dark streaks. I never got close enough to it to see anything more about it than that. I need to run to the flats so I can study its surface.

overheard: one woman to another as they walked: but what does it mean?

Sometimes the sky was gray, sometimes white, and a few times the palest blue.

After I finished my run, walking past a favorite house (where Matt the Cat lives and whose owner gave me beautiful flowers from her boulevard garden this past summer), something delightful happened: As I walked under a pine tree, the wind picked up and a dust of snow fell on my head. Immediately I thought of Robert Frost’s poem, “A Dust of Snow,” which I memorized a few years ago. Unlike Frost, I was already in a good mood when I felt the snow, so I didn’t need to have it changed, but it was delightful nonetheless. Later at home I realized something else delightful. In Frost’s poem, it is a hemlock tree. I think the tree that gifted me snow is a hemlock, too!

manuscript ideas

  1. change title of poem, “Better here, in the familiar, to fade” to “Vision Lost” — turn better here into a “breathing with: may swenson” poem
  2. turn my, “a gash, a gap, a space of possibility” into 3 poems: m//other (gash) into the story of my mom — her death from cancer her severing of ties from this childhood home / g||host into a poem about my estrangement from my body and the mind/body split — or, my vision loss? / turn t here (possibility) into a poem about the in-between and Nothing space
  3. add in a section in which I offer up, in a list, all of 1, 2, and 3 syllable words in the collection, where 1 syllable = rock, 2 syllable = river, and 3 syllable = air
  4. (before the run I was revising Rush (ed. 2 jan 2026: I think I meant rust) and erosion and JJJJJerome Ellis’ stutter as clearing — see 3 oct 2025 entry for more) do a poem that invokes ED’s elemental rust and plays with ideas of decay as erosion and bells with rusted tongues — am I remembering that right?

I hope I didn’t forget anything

dec 2/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
16 degrees
75% snow-covered

Running in the snow! I love it, especially with my new Yaktrax. Bought 2 pairs at Costco yesterday. The technology of them has improved since I bought my last pair a few years ago. My old pair has coils, almost like the spiral in a spiral notebook — and unfortunately like the spiral in a spiral notebook, they can get twisted and uncoil and poke you with their sharp ends. The new version has plastic knobs with metal, so no un-spiraling. Future Sara can discover the limits of this technology after we’ve run a hundred or so miles in them.

The river was completely covered with snow and ice. Closer to the falls, it was all white, closer to home, it was more gray. The falls and the creek were still flowing.

I wore more winter layers than I probably needed. I had on my below 0 layers: 2 pairs of black running tights, 2 long-sleeved shirts — one black, one green, a purple jacket, a gray buff, a black fleece-lined cap with ear flaps, 2 pairs of gloves — black, pink and white striped, hand warmers — they’re called “Little Hotties”. I probably wouldn’t have worn the hand warmers if FWA hadn’t opened a pair for his Delia walk, but it was nice to have them.

The view of the river, the gorge, the bare trees, the other side was beautiful. The air was a satisfying and sharp cold. Even better than that though were the birds. My favorite part of the run. Tiny birds, black blurs springing up from below as I stood above the waterfall and the creek below. Movement everywhere, flitting up and down and over and out. One time, a leaf imitating a bird. Running on the path, something landed just in front of me. I thought it was a bird, but it was a dead leaf that had been lifted then dropped by the wind. Another time, a tiny bird trying to outrun me on the ground, then leap-flying, then giving up and flying away.

Standing behind the Rachel Dow Memorial Bench, I witnessed another bird land on a tree branch. I only saw it by its movement, and then when it stopped, I believed it was still there. I think I could still see it there for a moment, but I’m not sure.

echolocation, again

One more manuscript to submit — the big one — by the end of this month. Trying to add a little bit more that’s explicitly about echolocation to reinforce it as the thread that stitches it all together. Decided to look up echolocation in the OED (online through my local library, which is awesome):

1944– The location of objects by means of the echo reflected from them by a sound-signal

Coined in an article from 1944 for Science, “Echolocation by Blind Men, Bats, and Radar” by Donald R. Griffin. Was able to get a pdf of it, thanks to RJP’s access to it through school. Maybe I’ll take a phrase from it, or I’ll make an erasure out of it, or? A few minutes later: I read it; it’s short, so I’m not sure about using it. I’ll read it again while I wait for Scott to be done with jazz band rehearsal tonight.

I’m also thinking of offering definitions at the beginning of echolocation, or maybe offering them at the end. Echolocation: locating objects by their echoes / echo location: locations where echoes dwell / echolocate: the act of using echoes / echolocated: the object/subject/something that has been located by echoes

nov 25/SWIM

1.5 loops
100 laps
ywca pool

Another great swim, another 1.5 loops to add to my tally of loops swum in 2025! The pool wasn’t too crowded. At one point, I was the only one in the water. When another swimmer arrived, she called out, we’ve got the whole pool to ourselves! I noticed the shadows on the pool floor flickering. A swimmer next to me, in a black t-shirt and green with a blue pattern, or blue with a green pattern, swam some freestyle, some breaststroke for the deeper part of the lap, then aqua jogged in the more shallow part. There was another male swimmer on the other side of him, swimming freestyle. At first I thought he was fast, and that it might be fun to race (in my head), but he turned out not to be fast enough to make it fun.

I wasn’t planning to, but I decided to do 2 sets of faster 200s: 3 x 200 on 3 min, with 30 sec rest. By decide I mean, the idea of swimming a faster 200 with the clock popped into my head early in my swim, so I did it. As I swam I thought, I should turn this into a set of 3. Then, in the last of the 3 I thought, I should do an easier 800 then do the set again. There was never really a plan, and even though I did choose to do it, I didn’t really; it just happened. As I swam, I thought about how it might help me mentally — specifically for endurance, but also for overall well-being — to add some harder swimming sets this winter instead of only moderate and steady lap after lap.

Anything else about the swim: as always, I saw orange everywhere. No fuzzy friends, I recall staring down at the drain and recalling how past Saras would imagine, only in a fearful flash, that Jaws would pop out of it. I lost track of my laps during a 200 and thought about how ridiculous it is that I can get off track just counting 8 laps — my miscounting today was not my first rodeo (the first time I remember hearing this delightful phrase was when my PT was letting me know that my kneecap had probably suffered a subluxation many times).

a draft almost done

The goal: be finished with this manuscript before the end of 2025. A thought this morning as I read through it and reflect on echolocation: it’s all about locating and being located in this place, in time and space. That locating involves:

  1. being the someone that makes sounds that will bounce off something else to create an echo, and the someone that listens for echoes made by others to locate something
  2. being the something that is located/placed/found
  3. being the echo that is created by one subject’s sound being received by another subject

Always, three. Immediately, I ‘m thinking about my poem, “An Exchange on the Winchell Trail” which involves a walker, a runner, and the You (in thank you/you’re welcome) that passes between them. And then I’m thinking about a line in my poem, “Everything”:

trinity: a baby owl in the hollow of a tree, the woman who points it out, the girl who stops to look

other threes: rock, river, air / girl, ghost, gorge / triple chants — 3 beats / grandfather, mother, daughter

Another think I’m working through: the little poems in which I take the words of another — mostly poets — and fit them into the form of my breathing pattern: 1 2 3 breathe / 1 2 breathe. The original name: form fitters. Can I think of a better one? Breaths? Breathing (with?) [author’s name]?

during the swim

Every so often, as I swam, I thought about naming my form fitters, “breathing with . . .”. I wondered if I should use only the poet’s first name, as a way to indicate more familiarity. Later after the swim, I mentioned it to RJP, and she thought “Breathing with Emily” sounded a little cheesy. I guess I agree and am thinking that “Breathing with Emily Dickinson” sounds better. Does it?

nov 20/SWIM

1.5 loops
100+ laps
ywca pool

Any day I get to swim is a great day! Another good swim that started with my ritual: push off from the wall and swim just above the blue squares on the pool floor until I reach the deep end, which is about 2/3rds of the way, then surface. Today I shared the lane with another good swimmer. She was using pull buoys and hand paddles and had a strong freestyle stroke. Nice. As I swam, I thought about my latest visual, echolocation poem and wondered if I could figure out a form to read (not listen to) that prioritized aural over visual. Saw lots of orange — orange cones off to the side, orange cones ahead of me, blocking off the hot tub, orange swim trunks on Scott. No pool friends — fuzz or clumps or bandaids. Also don’t remember seeing any dancing shadows. Only the intense smell of chlorine and the almost leaking of googles and the familiar feeling of stroking and breathing and flipping at the wall.

This poem-of-the-day on poets.org! All of it is wonderful, but since it’s long, I’ll post only the second half. I love a great winter poem!

from Posture of Devotion/ Kimbery Blaeser

But, in January, we hold this promise. 
While lake ice shifts, dark a murmur, 
a creak. Now moonlight falls on snow crusts— 
always where two touch, night glistens. 
When distant wolf howls, answer comes.

Imagine the upturned muzzle, body  
a triangle of sound. Hazel eyes  
mere slits. This reverence—an ancient hunger 
for pack. See, too, each black branch; 
limbing—bare, suspended in soon.

How pristine the listening posture 
of pine marten, of fisher, of fox— 
each body cocked. To pounce, to dive 
nose-first into snow’s secrets, 
to search winter tunnels for mice.

We, too, poised like supplicants— 
rawness of the world a prayer 
we read but cannot speak. Silence 
an invocation, heavy as tobacco  
sinking into snow—into earth’s altar.

Against moon’s brilliance, slit your eyes. 
Let warmth of reflected light fill you; 
that holy—that glance of tiny gods. 
Make of your hands an empty globe, 
your body a vessel taut as river.

This image of snow at night! I love opening the back door, looking out at the snow in moonlight, and delighting in the snow sparkling like diamonds, or how I remember stars in the sky sparkling in a cartoon from when I was a kid.

Now moonlight falls on snow crusts— 
always where two touch, night glistens.

g listens — I never noticed, or thought about, how glistens is listens with a g. Glistens = sound traveling to ears (and eyes?), glazed with glitter

In her about this poem, Blaeser mentions being inspired by Kaveh Akbar’s talk on poetry and spirituality. You can watch and listen and read the whole thing online, here: The Word Dropped Like a Stone: Sacred Poetics Under the Reign of the Money God. Great title, and opening paragraph:

Today the great weapon used to stifle critical thinking is a raw overwhelm of meaningless language at every turn—on our phones, on our TVs, in our periphery on billboards and subways. So often the language is passionately absolute: immigrants are evil, climate change is a hoax, and this new Rolex will make you irresistible. Interesting poetry awakens us, asks us to slow down our metabolization of language, to become aware of its materiality, how it enters into us. Sacred poetry, from antiquity to the present, teaches us to be comfortable sitting in mystery without trying to resolve it, to be skeptical of unqualified certitudes. This lecture will orbit poems drawn from the past forty-three centuries, poems that remind us language has history, density, complexity. In surveying these examples, we’ll discuss how language art might serve as a potent antidote against an empire that would use empty, vapid language to cudgel us into inaction.  

Poetry and Spirituality / Kaveh Akbar

nov 19/RUN

5.2 miles
bottom and franklin and back
39 degrees

Another great late morning for a run. Overcast, possibly some drizzle/freezing rain/flurries. Not too cold, not too windy. Everything gray with brown and dull yellow. Listened to music because I had the King George song from Hamilton in my head — Billie Eilish, then my time and moment playlists. Even with the headphones in, I could hear a loud rumble below. Some sort of big machine doing something — was it at the white sands beach? I noticed a walker notice the sound too. He was startled, then confused, then curious as he peered down, trying to figure out what was causing the ruckus.

Witnessed a big, dark brown squirrel dart fast across my path. So fast that I didn’t have to stutter-step. Stopped at the bottom of the hill for a port-a-potty stop and to admire the river: blueish gray with little ripples. All open, no ice chunks yet. Stopped again at the sliding bench and in the tunnel of trees just above the floodplain forest. Took out my headphones and listened to the gorge. It sounded like it might be softly raining. Heard loud rustling, saw a flash of movement down below. Felt calm, relaxed.

At the sliding bench, I took a picture of the progress: open! no leaves to block out my view of the white sands beach, only thin branches that I can see through!

sliding bench / 19 nov 2025

One more thing about the run that I almost forgot. During the second half, after I climbed out of the flats, I felt fast and free. I had a huge smile on my face and was almost feeling a runner’s high. I haven’t experienced one of those in a while.

more of echo location

echolocation: using sonar flashes to “see” / interpreting echoes (as sound, as reverberations from the past) / navigation / location / locating and being located / finding being found / placing being placed / listen for echoes / gain substance and become an echo / repeat, not same but similar / the location of echoes / an indication of a big and open space / using words and sounds and syllables to place my self, to become more than ghost, girl

“Echolocation is the act of emitting a sound that bounces off an object or surface and comes back to you as an echo. This echo can help determine distance, location, motion, size, shape or surface material” (source).

Passive echolocation is sound that occur incidentally in the environment. As a car travels through a tunnel, the sound changes as the car enters the tunnel, travels through it and exits the tunnel. The sound your cane makes on the ground as you tap or roll will be different when you are next to a building compared to in an open area without obstruction.

Active echolocation, on the other hand, is sound you consciously produce like clapping your hands or clicking your tongue. Eventually, the sound you create bounces off other objects and comes back to you. Since your brain is familiar with the sounds you make, the echoes are easier for you to distinguish. By consistently emitting a sound and waiting for the sound to change, you can use active echolocation to help you navigate through an environment.

source

 How does the
sound of your
footsteps change
as you move
from tile floor
to carpet?
Listen to
the sound your
voice makes when
you are in
a small room
compared to
a large room.

Sit in a
moving car
passing by
parked cars. Roll
your window
down. Listen
to how sound
shifts between
each parked car
as you pass them.

you learn to
hear doorways
and walls and
wide open
spaces

Echolocation is an interesting metaphor within poetry and an important practical approach to navigating an unseen (or not seen) world.

Location for me is about recognition — being seen, offered a place in the family of things, and recognizing others (being held by/holding). And it is also about literally locating and navigating a world. As my vision fails, what other ways can I safely move through space?

And, here are a few lines from U A Fanthorpe that link echoes with ghosts and remind me of echolocation — especially those humpback whales:

Ghosts of past, present, future.
But the ones the living would like to meet are the echoes
Of moments of small dead joys still quick in the streets

These are the ghosts the living would prefer,
Ghosts who’d improve our ratings. Ghosts
Of the great innocent songs of freedom
That shoulder their way round the world like humpback whales

nov 6/RUN

3.35 miles
2 trails+
49 degrees / feels like 37
wind: 15 mph / gusts: 32 mph

Windy today. Had to make sure my hat was secure. Ran south to the start of the Winchell Trail. Stopped to admire the river — a clearer view, with far fewer leaves. Stopped again, a few minutes later, to study a felled tree. Yesterday, we (me, Scott, FWA) had seen park workers with chainsaws and a truck with a ladder around here as we drove by. This must be one of the trees they cut down. I felt a little safer running through this section in the strong winds, knowing that the tree workers had just been here yesterday removing sprawling branches and leaning trees.

added a few hours later: this came up on my instagram feed. I love these stories and learning more about what park workers do!

The trail was covered in leaves, so I couldn’t see if there were any potholes or big cracks. Of course, I often can’t see them even if the path is clear. So I run lightly and carefully. The worst part of the trail was the graveled bit in the ravine. Ouch! A few times my feet landed on the sharp end of a stone.

10 Things

  1. above the floodplain forest, looking out, no leaves, small branches all around created a veil of mesh, making everything look fuzzy
  2. the wind rushing through the leaves on the bluff, or was it water seeping out of the limestone?
  3. the voices of laughing kids at the playground
  4. swirling leaves
  5. leaves, floating gently
  6. voices above me
  7. a biker with their headlight, their wheel crossing over and onto the walking path
  8. a short, all-white animal on the trail — a dog? no a little kid in a white snowsuit
  9. the limestone ledge in the ravine looking dark and cavernous
  10. something clanging down below near the old stone steps — a dog collar?

cells

1 — juliana spahr

the opening lines of poemwrittenafterseptember11/2001 / juliana spahr

There are these things:

cells, the movement of cells and the division of cells

and then the general beating of circulation

and hands, and body, and feet

and skin that surrounds hands, body, feet.

This is a shape,

a shape of blood beating and cells dividing. 

But outside of this shape is space.

—

cells
the movement of cells
the division of cells

2 — how much of us is not us?

57%. 43% of a human body is made up of human cells, the rest is: “bacteria, viruses, fungi and archaea (organisms originally misclassified as bacteria)” (More than half of your body is not human).

the importance of microbiomes

3 — L Niedecker and dwelling with place

our bodies as place or space (see J Spahr up above)

      It all comes down
to the family

‘We have a lovely
finite parentage–
mineral

vegetable
animal’ 3

Instead of fretting over how such a finite parentage might threaten our “humaniqueness,” Niedecker welcomes our bond with nonhuman life and seeks instead to endow us, as she writes in “Paean to Place,” with a deeper appreciation for the “sea water running / in [our] veins.”

She also insists upon the necessity of our learning to dwell with other biotic elements who share our land-community, including what she calls in one poem “our relative the air” and “our rich friend / silt.”

—

Niedecker’s portrayal of living with beings and things in our environment is not merely a poetic metaphor; it also finds support in the field of biology. We now understand that even our bodies, the things we think of as most us, are in fact shared organisms, with trillions of microbacteria colonizing our guts in such numbers that they may potentially outnumber our own cells. 

Dwelling with Place: Lorine Niedecker’s Ecopoetics

some rambling: And now I’m thinking about all of this and wondering if it fits with Girl Ghost Gorge or is part of a new (series of) poems? It does, I think, in terms of the relationship between the girl and the ghost and the gorge and how the speaker/writer/Sara imagines herself as all three yet also wants to assert a Sara-self (Girl). I like the idea of composing this poem, and assertion of self, with lines from others — a cento! Poets and scientists and geologists and historians.

Questions of what makes us us? and what part of us remains throughout our lifetime? and what is the essence of Sara or, who is Sara, on the cellular level? I do think that these are questions that haunt these poems, as the other side of a deep desire for connection. In light of so many connections and how much of me is made up of stuff outside of or before me, what is sturdy and solid and singular about Girl/Sara/me?

I came up with a draft of a poem responding to these questions that I quite like. I’m calling out “43% Girl”

Happy 4th Anniversary

During today’s On This Day practice, I discovered this, from 2021:

Yesterday, I started working on a poem (or a series of poems?) based on my October focus on ghosts and haunting. I’ve decided to use my rhythmic breathing pattern as the form: couplets with 1 three syllable line and 1 two syllable line (3/2)

from log entry dated 6 nov 2021

4 years. That seems like a long time to be working on one collection of poems, and also not that long at all. It started as Haunts, then became Girl Ghost Gorge. Poems all about haunting a place and being haunted by it. Up until recently, the haunting involved a lot of feeling disconnected and isolated. Perhaps because of all of the attention I’ve given the gorge and those feelings, I feel more connected and more girl, less ghost. I should finish this collection and be done with it before I start editing it too much and lose some of its original story.

nov 5/RUN

4.25 miles
marshall loop (to Summit)
47 degrees

What a run! Late fall/November is the best — half leaved, half unleaved. Cooler, more energy in the air. Two things I want to remember more than anything else:

1

Running down the summit hill, nearing the lake street/marshall bridge, a woman ahead of me, walking with another person, wearing the most amazing BRIGHT pinkish orangish jacket. She glowed. As I ran by I called out, I love your bright jacket. She slapped her thigh in delight and called back, It’s my don’t hit me jacket. Then we both laughed.

2

Just cresting the final hill and almost to the ancient boulder, I passed by two women walking and talking and marveling at how beautiful this place is. They both agreed, they hoped they never had to leave it. Then the younger woman, presumably the daughter, said to the older woman (mother): I only want to live here or where you are. That broke me open in the best way possible. I want to make that the title of a poem.

Reflecting on these moments, I imagined turning them into 2 (very brief) acts of a play. Act 1: the bright colored jacket, Act 2: mother and daughter share a moment.

I had a great run. I did the Marshall hill loop. I ran up the whole thing and didn’t stop to walk until I reached the Monument. Then I climbed down a few steps to listen to the shadows fall. After a few minutes, I ran back home — down the summit hill, past the woman in the bright jacket, over the bridge, up the ancient boulder and past the mother and daughter.

added 5 hours later: I just remembered the river and standing on the lake street bridge, peering over the edge and staring into the glitter path. Such bright, sparkling water! I’m not sure I could have stared at it as long and as directly as I did if I didn’t have so many dead cone cells. Bright lights don’t bother me much anymore.

bells

I’m working on the final (I think) poem in my collection. It’s a reworking of my ending poem for the OG haunts. And it’s inspired by some words from Annie Dillard (in “Seeing” from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) that I’ve fit into my running/breathing form:

My whole life
I’d been 
a bell but
never
knew until
I was
lifted and
struck. Now
I am still
ringing.
—Annie Dillard

Here’s what I wrote in a pages document I’m using to gather some thoughts:

something about becoming a bell, or remembering that I was a bell — vibrating, carrying and passing on the songs — ancient rhythms of grief joy love anger restlessness buried deep within her, knocked loose by this place, by her ghosts, by her never ending movement — everything buzzing, ringing, chiming, pulsing, thrumming, strumming — even the oldest rocks shimmy and shake and shift and settle — her body, an echo, her feet adding to the ruts and the grooves, leaving a trace in foot strikes and words and shadows and, a scattering of Saras all around

For some of my run I thought about bells and Annie Dillard’s quotation about being a bell and Ammons and energy and movement and cells bouncing and shaking and disintegrating and being replaced and movement and — I wish I could remember the rest of what I was thinking, but I can’t.

I do remember one other bell-related thing I thought about. The book closes with Annie Dillard’s bell struck quotation. It begins with some lines from Emily Dickinson and “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” that I fit into my breathing/running form:

As all the
Heavens
were a Bell,
Being
but an Ear

I am both bell and ear. Some substance of the Heavens/the Bell/the Eternal resides within me. And, to be = to notice, to listen

before the run

Yes, to this poem-of-the-day on poets.org and the discovery of a new word (or the remembering of a word long forgotten): vermiculation!

Some Melodious Plot/ Anthony Borruso

The United States government murdered over 12 billion birds over the course of 1959 
threw [sic] 2001. As they killed off the real birds they replaced thim [sic] with surveillance 
drone replicas. Indistinguishable from a biological bird. There are now no real 
birds left. 

—Official Birds Aren’t Real Informational Van Bumper Sticker

i. The Philosophical Ornithologist

It is, as all things are, a problem 
of perspective. What you think

you are watching, watches 
you. Your binoculars convince

themselves they’re quotation marks. 
The spy in the song, the feathered

thoughts, the cold hard data 
you spun into silky fact

that the comment section couldn’t 
wait to run its fingers over.

Of course, the pigeons adapted 
to an urban space—they’re party birds

with smokey plumage, and they grow 
peckish unless they’re bobbing

beaks to Milli Vanilli or waving 
glow sticks around the Sabrett stand.

Ancient Egyptians and Williamsburg 
hipsters have nothing in common

except how their feelings take sharp 
angles in broad daylight when the sun

nests in their beards. What I mean 
is that the bygone is hellbent

on a comeback, i.e., the early bird 
pecks a blog post about the importance

of visually manifesting the worm— 
actually encompassing its wriggle

in your quaint skull before 
taking it to beak. You know though

that we are post-extinction and fully 
flapped out—just look at us,

ogling Mother Nature’s augmentation 
with craned necks, covering every

millimeter of the visible world 
with the vermiculations of a stock

ticker. Something’s wrong. Like, 
real wrong: I knock on mountains

and hear a vast metallic thud. I sleep 
on eiderdown, but can’t seem to

squawk loud enough to stir the other 
Denny’s denizens from their Grand

Slam breakfasts. In Altoona, Pennsylvania 
and Waco, Texas, I can feel my face

being scanned every time I munch 
a Big Mac. On this highway, a pit stop

is a pit stop is a pit stop and overhead 
migration is a chance to grease gears

and re-feather the avian bait-and-switch.

vermiculation: Merriam-Webster entry

1: TORTUOUS, INVOLUTE

2: full of worms : WORM-EATEN

3

a: VERMIFORM (resembling a worm in shape)

b: marked with irregular fine lines or with wavy impressed lines
(line in the feathers of a bird)

cells and spindles

Yesterday I mentioned that a line from Hix’s cell phone reminded me of A.R. Ammons’ garbage. Today, I’m revisiting garbage to find and think about the lines.

Reading through it again, I found this:

we, give rise to to us: we are not, though, though
natural, divorced from higher, finer configurations:

tissues and holograms of energy circulate in
us and seek and find representations of themselves

outside us, so that we can participate in
celebrations high and know reaches of feeling

and sight and thought that penetrate (really
penetrate) far, far beyond these our wet cells,

right on up past our stories, the planets, moons,
and other bodies locally to the other end of

the pole where matter’s forms diffuse and
energy loses all means to express itself except

as spirit, there, oh, yes, in the abiding where
mind but nothing else abides, the eternal,

until it turns itself into another pear or sunfish

These lines stayed with me as I ran today.


oct 31/RUN

5 miles
franklin loop
43 degrees
cold drizzle

This is Halloween. This is Halloween. As I ran, I listened to Apple Music’s Halloween dance mix. A great run. I felt so fast and strong and capable of running hard for long periods of time. And I did — relatively speaking. Faster and longer without stopping than I have in the past year.

10 Things

  1. slick leaves on the path — don’t remember hearing them squeak
  2. running on the east side, near meeker island dam, a large group of kids laughing and playing on the other side. too far to be at a school playground. were they on the white sands beach?
  3. puddles on the franklin bridge
  4. a runner running far ahead of me, then walking, the stopping to sit on a bench — he wore bright blue shorts
  5. bright headlights
  6. the river from the franklin bridge — a view of the trestle and reflections of trees, but no rowers
  7. the river from the lake street bridge — empty pewter river, pale brown sandbar, slight ripples
  8. on the franklin bridge, a small red dot off in the distance, then it turned green — a stoplight
  9. a person with a dog, turning down and entering the meeker dog park
  10. a soft rain, difficult to notice with my hat and tights and sweat

October viewing update

Finished Theater of Blood — so good! Although the second to last death was super gross — let’s just say it involved gluttony and a funnel. And the last “death” — presumably the worst because it was the final one — was more terrible than actually dying; it involved hot knives and blinding the one remaining critic. Sigh — the idea that not being able to see is a fate worse than death, or a living death. Regardless, I really enjoyed the movie.

Also watched John Carpenter’s The Thing. I really liked it — some gross special effects, but a very good movie. Good pacing, good acting, a good premise with haunting questions about trust and how/where enemies lurk.

Current Writing

I’m on a role right now with my writing. I have so many things to work on, that I don’t want to take the time to explaing them right now!

oct 29/RUN

4.5 miles
veterans home in reverse
49 degrees

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

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

It/ Gertrude Sturdle

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

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

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

version 1

EA Poe’s original first verse:

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

My version

Feel the leaving of the cells —
the failed cells.

What a world of loneliness their abandonment foretells.

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

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

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

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

tinkle / oversprinkle / twinkle

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

cells: dead cone cells

cells / foretells / spells

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

oct 28/RUN

4.25 miles
the monument and back
49 degrees

Before running I was thinking about bells (see below), so I decided to run over to the Monument and time it so I could hear the bells from St. Thomas. It worked! Just as I crested the Summit hill: bells! 3 rounds of chiming, which means it was 11:45. Ran to the port-a-potty in the parking lot (yep, a little unfinished business — oh well), then over to above Shadow Falls. Hiked down into the ravine and listened to water falling although I didn’t get close enough to see it so, who knows, maybe I was hearing shadows falling instead? Wow wow wow! That ravine! So wide and open and glowing a pale yellowy green. Amazing! After a few minutes of marveling, I hiked back up and started running again, just as the bells were chiming for noon.

All around, it was peak color. Butter yellow, marigold yellow, cherry red, crimson, orange. Leaves on the trees, leaves on the ground. Did I see any leaves flying in the air? I don’t think so. I did see some turkeys! Almost a dozen grazing in the grassy stretch at the bottom of the hill in the middle of the road. When I returned 20 or 30 minutes later, the turkeys had crossed the road and were blocking the path.

Stopped on the bridge at the overlook to check out the bright colors on the shore and the sandbar just below the water. There were small scales on the water and the reflection of the bridge railing in the water was flickering.

added the next morning: I just remembered the albino squirrel! After exiting the port-a-potty, heading back to the Monument, there it was at edge of the bushes: an albino squirrel.

before the run

During my On This Day practice, reading through my 28 october 2021 entry, I was reminded of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Bells,” and returned to an obsession, something that haunts Girl Ghost Gorge: the bells, bells, bells. In the earliest versions of GGG, when it was called Haunts, the bells commenced and concluded the collection. The vibrations of the bells, ringing like a bell, the soft echo, the fading away, but not really fading away of the sound of bells. Had to stop for a minute to find out what Scott was listening to in the next room. I heard bells and wondered, is that coming from him, or am I hearing wind chimes outside? It was him. I exclaimed, “I am literally writing about bells right now!” and in a Owen Wilson voice, playfully mocking me, he said, “Wow.” Back to the bells — just when I thought I was done with this collection and ready to submit it to the Two Sylvia’s women poets over 50 contest, I must write about the bells. The St. Thomas bells, the bells in poetry, bell as echo, slant rhyme, the image of a stuck bell, ringing, vibrating, as similar to my constantly moving buzzing central vision.

aside: some years ago — was it before or after the pandemic? — I gathered together bell words and ideas and thoughts and made a page for my How to Be project. Not long after I finished, Scott gave me some bad news: something happened to our wordpress sites and anything posted in the last week was lost forever. No! I had written so many things in that time, including my page about the bells. Some of it I remember, some of it is lost.

Here are the original references to bells in my first and last Haunt poems from 2021:

opening

Listen to 
bells on 

the other 
side ring

out sound that
spreads from 

hard center
to soft

edge

close

Echoes.

Bells bounce off
boulders,

bridges, time,
singing

familiar
tunes from

the other
shore. We

are not those
 bells but

their excess,
reverb,

sounds after
the sound

that surround.
Buzzing

persisting
trying

to pass on
songs of

joy love grief
anger

that began
before

we were here,
before

we believed
we were

all there was,
before

we were ghosts.

Hmmm….I really like how I begin and end with the bells, as if signaling a ceremony. And, this collection, is a ceremony! Or, at least, it has a ceremony as part of it. Listening to the bells as a way to prepare yourself for the poem — the one made up of words, the one made up of the family of things at the gorge, the one shaped out of a life from the wearing down of stone and the flow of water.

after the run

Walking home after finishing my run I had a thought: using Poe’s “The Bells” as a starting point, write a chanting poem about the cells, cells, cells — cone and rod cells, the cancer cells that killed my mom. Faulty cells, drying up cells, dying cells, the narrowing of a world (cell as small, confined space), uncontrolled growth (cancer, late-stage capitalism).

What an amazing morning/noon! I felt strong and relaxed and grateful to live near this place and have strong lungs and legs and the discipline to return here again and again.

oct 23/RUN

3.5 miles
locks and dam no. 1*
49 degrees

*ran south to the locks and dam no. 1, then halfway down the hill and over to another hill that climbs up beside the underbelly of the ford bridge and to the bluff and wabun park. Turned around and headed down to the bottom of the locks, then back up it again.

Ran in the late afternoon. The gorge has very different energy in the almost evening. Cars rushing to get home, kids walking home from school, the light longer, lower. Noticed some amazing golden-avocado-orange leaves on a tall tree and some small bright red leaves on a low bush. Twice I ran past a bush/mini-tree with green leaves that yelled out to me, BLUE! What? I stopped the second time to figure out how I was seeing/hearing blue, but couldn’t.

Geese! I haven’t seen as many geese this year. Today, half a dozen of them were floating in the water under the ford bridge. I don’t think I heard them, but I saw one of them spread their wings wide and then flap them furiously.

Turkeys! Running above the winchell trail between the 44th and 42nd street ravines, I saw them across the parkway. 4 or 5 big turkeys rooting through the grass. At least one car slowed way down to witness their awesomeness for a minute.

Anything else? Oh — I heard music coming from a bike speaker. Just the opening chords — I’m 90% sure it was “Just What I Needed” by The Cars. Excellent!

I felt strong and fast and bouncy. Wore the yellow shoes, which were mostly great, although they did hurt my feet a little.

For most of the day, I’ve been working on a poem that is less about form and more about the process of creating it — almost 9 full years of noticing and writing about what I noticed in this RUN! log AND sitting down today and recounting those things from memory. The poem is 2 pages wide. In the upper left corner, loosely representing a gorge wall, are the words, She goes to/the gorge/to notice, and in the bottom right corner, every/thing. The rest of the page is filled with what I have noticed, written across the page with the noticed things separated by slashes. It’s fun! I am about three quarters of the way finished with the first draft. I imagine I’ll want to tweak it a little. The last thing I added before leaving for my run: port-a-potty, clean / port-a-potty, dirty / port-a-potty, tipped / port-a-potty removed to discourage encampments below. Will I keep these? Not sure.

oct 22/RUN

3.1 miles
2 trails
44 degrees

Blustery, cool, full of color. Reds and oranges and yellows. Everything wet from yesterday’s rain. The winchell trail was covered in leaves, some wet, some dry, most of them rusty red. I greeted a guy I passed with a good morning, then realized it wasn’t morning, but afternoon. Oops. He said morning back. I wonder if he realized the mistake. Thanked several other walkers for moving over to let me pass. Heard some kids yelling at the playground and one guy yell out to someone else, that’s Ben. Ben is here. A woman stood at the top of the old stone steps, studying something below. Was she deciding whether or not to take them down? Wondering what was down there, or whether or not the steps were too slick?

Every so often, I thought about a line that I haven’t quite found a home for in GGG: Each loop adds substance, tightens the tether, but never enough to stop the looping.

Began chanting: looping and/looping and/looping again

After I finished running, as I walked back, I had 2 ideas for fun experiments with the lines.

first: switch up the order of the words — mimicking of swirling water falling from a limestone ledge? or, take part of it and create an anagram?

second: do a variation on the golden shovel form by taking the tether/never/looping sentence and ending each line of a new poem with the words from it, in order, so that it spells out the sentence. Or, to mimic the rock walls of the gorge, start each line of the new poem with the first half of the sentence, then end each line with the second half. Too contrived? Future Sara will let me know.

Found a wonderfully wandering poem this morning, “Reading Virginia Woolf in a Women in Literature Class at Bergen Community College.” It’s long, so I’ll just an excerpt:

excerpt from Reading Virginia Woolf in a Women in Literature Class at Bergen Community College/ Carlie Hoffman

when my sister asked if I’d ever
kissed anyone. I was just beginning
freshman year, working to get my time
down for swim team where I’d spent summer
ditching birthdays & the ice cream
truck’s persuasive tune to practice
the butterfly & freestyle & learning to dive
less crooked, which was going as well
as expected until Andrew
sat next to me on the bus
ride home from the pool during tryouts,
his chlorine-dried hand on my shoulder
a little too long without asking when he asked
my name & he has a crush on you
said my friend Becca while faking
a gagging sound in her throat. I said yes
even though I hadn’t kissed anyone & maybe
this was my first true poem, lying
to my sister in support of love, stealing imagery
from the books I’d read in the library
to avoid the cafeteria

I love her definition of a poem: lying to someone in support of love, stealing imagery from other poets

Richard Siken!!

I love Richard Siken’s new book that I picked up from Moon Palace Books Monday night. Read this poem while Scott was rehearsing with the community jazz band:

The List/ Richard Siken

I tried to say something nice to the nurse. I introduced myself. She said we had already met. I thought she was moody until I realized she was several nurses, each working their own shift. To them I was Hamlet in a long line of Hamlets. My problems were unimpressive and not unique. I had a grief counselor, like everyone, and a suicide counselor, because I had said the wrong thing. I wrote in my notebook. I made a list, a working glossary. My handwriting was big and crooked. Meat. Blood. Floor. Thunder. I tried to understand what these things were and how I was related to them. Doorknob. Cardboard. Thermostat. Agriculture. I understood North but I struggled with left. Describing the world was easier than finding a place in it. The suicide counselor said the people who hadn’t shown up weren’t going to show up, that the ones that had stopped coming would not be coming back. She had seen it before, she saw it every day. The person they knew was gone. To them, I had broken the contract: I had left first and they were already grieving. I started a second notebook, for venom and hard feelings—things that would leak into the list if I let them. It was harsh and ugly. It was true and harsh and ugly and it made me feel sick. What do I know? What do I know for sure? I built up meaning with a double set of books. —A doorknob is a rock for the hand. It opens a hole in the wall. —A doorknob is your stupid head. You will not survive this.

I remember reading the line, Describing the world was easier than finding a place in it, as part of “About this Poem” explanation of “Real Estate.” I loved the line so much I turned it into a form fitter — my name for the lines that I shaped into my breathing rhythm of 3/2 syllables. I always thought it belonged in a poem, and here it is. Wow!

Describing 
worlds is

easier 
than find

ing your place 
in them

OR

Describing
worlds is

easy. Find
ing your

place in them
is hard.

oct 21/RUN

3.1 miles
trestle turn around
44 degrees / rain

Brrr. Rainy and chilly today. Time to find my gloves — my hands were going a little numb by the end. Ran north to the trestle. A few other walkers and runners joined me — we didn’t move together, just in the same place (above the gorge), at the same time (early afternoon). Tried to run relaxed and not too fast. The relaxed part happened, but not the not too fast part. The path was wet and leaf-covered and slightly slippery. The sprawling oak by the ancient boulder and at the entrance to the tunnel of trees was a metallic — frosted gold and silver. Wow! The floodplain forest below the tunnel of trees was glowing pear and butter. Double wow! I never looked at the river or heard a bird, but I did smell hot chocolate, burnt coffee, and pipe smoke.

Thought about revisions to my latest poem and the refrain I put at the end of it, created to chant while running. I played around with different rhythms. First, the words:

no after / only here / Remember / Remember / reMember /

Actually, the original, un-tested-out-by-the-gorge-version was: there is no after/there is only here / remember / remember / remember. But as soon as I tried to chant it, I could tell it wouldn’t work — too many words for my running rhythms.

no After
no After
no After
only here

only here
only here
here here here
here here here

Remember
Remember
reMember

Remember
here
reMember
here
here here here

Re Mem Ber
here here here

The lines inspiring these chants are: There is no after. There is only here and a moving away from and returning to it.

Also thinking about my What time is it? (2020) poem that involves a list of o’clocks. I’m thinking maybe I should be brave (a word RJP and I are using a lot these days), and include something about George Floyd. It’s an important part of what I wrote about in May/June of 2020 in this log. What do I mean by brave here? I’m going to think about that some more.

oct 20/RUN

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
49 degrees
wind: 30 mph gusts

Figured out how to switch the pace of my watch from rolling miles to current pace. It was a pain to do and I’m not sure it was worth it, although I did learn that I have difficulty keeping a consistent pace. Windy. I made sure my cap was on tight. I ran to the falls then took the steps down to the creek. Forgot to look at the creek because I was too focused on avoiding rocks and walkers. Walked back up the steps near “The Song of Hiawatha.”

Running back I admired the reddish-orange or orangish-red leaves and thought about how someone fell off of the bluff somewhere around 42nd. Yesterday, Scott heard the sirens and saw the fire trucks and Rosie read that someone fell. Are they okay? I hope so. I tried looking it up, but couldn’t find anything.

As I ran, I recited “A Rhyme for Halloween.” Our clock is blind, our clock is dumb/ Its hands are broken, its fingers numb/ No time for the martyr of our fair town/Who wasn‘t a witch because she could drown. The blind clock with broken hands and numb fingers. Maybe I could use this in the time section of Girl Ghost Gorge?

10 Things

  1. someone in bright yellow standing near the roundabout — ma’am the road is blocked up ahead, you need to turn around
  2. foamy white water at the falls
  3. the dirt and rock-studded trail covered in fallen red leaves
  4. a little girl greeting me, hi!
  5. another runner greeting me, good morning!
  6. a high-pitched whistle then STOP! someone calling to a dog down on the winchell trail?
  7. running on the paved path, above the winchell trail, hearing the voices of walkers, seeing the flash of moving forms
  8. occupied benches: above the edge of the world and Rachel Dow Memorial bench
  9. chainsaws in the oak savanna — buzzzzzz buzzzzzz
  10. the rush of wind through the trees

GGG update

1

Not sure how it will work, or if it will stick as part of GGG, but I think I need to write a ghost story poem. Maybe something inspired by UA Fanthorpe and her poem, Seven Types of Shadow. I should look back at what I’ve written about this poem in the past.

2

I’m experimenting with a poem inspired by Endi Bogue Hartigan and her o’clocks. Here’s what I have so far:

it’s covid
o’clock
twelve minnesota
deaths o’clock

three hundred nineteen

minnesota deaths
o’clock
four thousand minne
sota deaths o’clock
a quarter of a
million half of a
million one million
u.s. deaths o’clock
keep your six feet of
distance o’clock
spit in a cup o’clock

memorize poems
by Mary and

Emily o’clock
read Georgina o’clock
find your blind spot o’clock

oct 13/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
55 degrees

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;/lengthen night and shorten day; (Emily Brontë). Ran at noon because I got my hair cut this morning. A great time for a run, at least today. Sunny, calm, cool. I wore my bright yellow shoes and felt strong. Chanted in triple berries, then one of my Your Are Here poems:

Held up by the openness,
Not hemmed in by the trees.

Admired the golden leaves, but forgot to look at the river. Did I notice it even once? If I did, I can’t remember. I did notice the rushing creek and the gushing water fall. Saw a school bus, then heard some kids laughing at the playground by the falls. At my favorite spot, I stopped to look at the falls. Then I walked up the hill and put in Taylor Swift’s new album.

10 Things

  1. bright blue, cloudless sky
  2. the faint outline of the moon above a still green tree
  3. folwell bench: one person sitting there
  4. bench above the edge of the world: empty
  5. benches at the falls: all empty
  6. a runner behind me — were they catching up? for a few minutes I could hear their shuffling feet, then nothing — did they turn off somewhere, or was I just going faster?
  7. something on the bottom of my shoe was making as shshshsh sound as I ran. Stopped at a rock to rub it off
  8. the sweet smell of tall grass near “The Song of Hiawatha”
  9. a leashed dog spinning around and jumping up, then sitting calmly beside a human
  10. puddles on the part of path near the ford bridge — a result of last night’s rain

GGG — before the run

I think I’m getting closer to being done with this collection? One of the poems I still have to write is called “Everything.” It is two pages wide. In the upper left corner of one page is: I go to/the gorge/to witness. In the lower right corner of the second page is: everything. These lines are the rock walls framing the open space of the gorge above the water/ground. In the open space, I’m planning to fill it with things I’ve witnessed at the gorge, culled from the 10 Things I noticed lists I’ve been making for at least 5 years. Just now, a thought: what if I organize the things to reflect the seasons, so the upper right quarter = spring, lower right = summer, lower right = fall, upper left = winter. In theory it sounds good, but what will it look like?

oct 12/RUN

1.75 miles
neighborhood to old stone steps to winchell
69 degrees
wind: 33 mph gusts

Overcast, windy, a few drops of rain. A fall afternoon. Everything slowly turning golden. Wow! I needed to run less than a mile today to reach my 20 miles per week goal. I decided to mix it up and add in a few detours. Ran through the neighborhood over to 32nd then down to the river road trail. Stopped to walk down the old stone steps and stand on the shore at longfellow flats. The forest was all green and thick. The flats were not flat but a steep ridge. Guess it’s time for the parks department to do some more dredging and dumping here. I stared at a yellowed maple leaf bobbing on the surface of the water. Encountered 2 people on the steps. I said, it’s a beautiful day, because I thought it was, but I wonder if they thought I was strange describing wind gusts and lack of sun and intermittent drizzle as beautiful. When I got to the top of the steps, I started running again and kept going past the welcoming oaks and the ravine to the entrance to the Winchell Trail. I went down the worn wooden steps and hiked in the ravine, above the two ledges. I studied the rip rap at the bottom of one. Some of the stone are wedged vertically, but more of them are horizontal. Should my riprap poems mimic this shape and spread out across the page?

Yesterday’s Ironman Championships was crazy. 80% humidity, a feels like temp of 96. Dangerous conditions. Both of my favorites — Lucy Charles Barclay and Taylor Knibb had to drop out during the run. Taylor Knibb was in first and had less than 2 miles (out of 26.2, 15 minutes out of 8 1/2 hour race) left to run, but she was completely empty. She wobbled and wandered then sat down in the middle of the road on asphalt that had to be more than 100 degrees. It’s scary and a little inspiring (but more scary), to see how deep these athletes can dig. I haven’t heard any interview with her, but I imagine she’ll be a bit disappointed, but also satisfied with her effort; she tried as hard as she possibly could and left everything out there on the melting road.

GGG

I’m working on a looping poem and trying to write some lines that echo these:

Each loop adds substance,
tightens the tether,
but never enough
to stop the looping.

Here’s what I’ve come up with, inspired by the riprap and how they shore up a slope:

Each chant offers a
memory, a way
back to the other
shore, but never more
than a trace of
something witnessed and
found familiar.

Or, should it be made familiar? I like how found sounds, but I like the idea of making it familiar through the looping.

oct 10/HIKE

60 minutes
Minnehaha Off-leash dog park
63 degrees

Wow, wow, wow! A beautiful fall hike with FWA and Delia-the-dog at the dog park. Sun, shade, a cool breeze, yellow and red leaves, sparkling water, soft sand, cute dogs, great conversations — less abstract and theoretical and more personal this time. About anxieties and social norms and traumas and friends that don’t get you.

10 Things

  1. soft sand
  2. a motor boat, floating slowly
  3. small stones just under the surface of the water, near the shore
  4. a small stretch of beach, populated by soft sand, frolicking dogs, the bones of an old tree
  5. a loud cry — was that human? FWA thought a kid, I wondered about a fox
  6. someone far off whistling badly
  7. the surface of the water sizzling white
  8. sitting on the smoothest section of a log — how many other people, and for how many years, have sat in this very spot?
  9. top of the limestone steps — jagged, steep
  10. comparing Delia’s short, quick, little steps to a much bigger dog’s loping, floating strides

GGG (girl ghost gorge), today’s update

before my hike: Reading through the last section of this collection — Air — I had some ideas about time and Endi Bogue Hartigan’s o’clock poems, specifically these lines from oh orchid o’clock:

it is morning 
birds plus 
socket sound of
car closing / 
21st 
century 
pastoral
o’clock

A 21st century pastoral! Yes, I’d like to write some triple chants and offer a twist on the pastoral. The twist = critical of the romanticizing of land, of understanding land as object and background, etc. Fun!

Also, I want to write another poem — possibly a chant? — in this o’clock form that mixes my timeline with that of the gorge.

Other things yet to write: more on air in terms of lungs and breath; a looping poem using the last section of my poem, “Conservation”

anti-pastoral

I decided to start by searching for “pastoral” in my old log entries.

1 — 13 april 2021

I posted and wrote about Forrest Gander’s poem, “Pastoral.” He’s critical of the idea that we observe landscapes/land from a distance, as if seeing were a process, and not an instant act. I appreciate his challenge to the idea of distance, but don’t agree with his suggestion that seeing is instantaneous. Looking does take time to happen, for everyone.

dispossessed (not owned or occupied)
a process
encounter — a process / between two / actors / the beheld / beholder
no study, absorption
immediate, gradual

2 — 28 dec 2021

In the poem, “The Grand Scheme of Things,” Maggie Smith links the eye to the pastoral, too.

We say the naked eye
as if the eye could be clothed, as if it isn’t the world

that refuses to undress unless we turn our backs. 
It shows us what it chooses, nothing more,

and it’s not waxing pastoral.

Yes! The pastoral is all about a certain understanding of sight and vision and how/what we see, how we look.

how we see / a soft sight
filtering
what is “real”?
no access / to the Truth / through our eyes
surely you/can’t imagine/the trees look/like they look/when we are/not looking (MO)

(side note: I’m realizing that the pastoral — paintings/poems — are all about how we look and see. I need to turn to this in my ekphrastic/how I see project. )

after the hike

3 — 6 feb 2022

Pastoral turns up in A Nearly Perfect Morning/ Jessica Greenbaum:

It was a nearly perfect morning—bucolic, pastoral—

bucolic: related countryside, farm fields, pastures, rural, rustic, countrified

bucolic
countrified
a plowed field
managed land
rusticate

4 — 21 march 2022

From an interview with Alice Oswald:

there’s a whole range of words that people like to use about landscape, like pastoral, idyll. I quite like taking the names away from things and seeing what they are behind their names. I exert incredible amounts of energy trying to see things from their own points of view rather than the human point of view.

…more interested in the democratic stories…the hardship of laboring, looking for food…the struggle of a tree trying to grow out of stone…always looking for that struggle. I’m allergic to peace. I like this restless landscape. I like that it won’t let you sit back and say, “what a beautiful place I’ve arrived to.” You’ve never arrived. It’s moving past you all the time.

Landscape and Literature Podcast: Alice Oswald on the Dart River

idyll = “an extremely happy, peaceful, or picturesque episode or scene, typically an idealized or unsustainable one.”

non-human / perspective

AO rejects the beautiful, as in, what a beautiful place, let me just sit and admire it! I’m thinking of 8 dec 2024, and my discussion of beauty as awe inspiring and awful, beauty as not perfect and relaxed, but pain and grief and struggle

struggling
suffering
laboring
a tree’s struggle / to make a home/ out of a stone
a river’s/fight to be free
restlessness / not relaxed
never here / always there
difficult / not easy (see 14 april 2021 and MO)
lacking peace

5 — 2 may 2022

she discusses William Blake’s poem, “The Ecchoing Green” and how the green in it is not the pastoral but the communal/village green, “where people mix with one another, young and old, playing and slowly fading, ecchoing. Green, as it echoes on the green, is the color of human community” (6)

Green Green Green

communal
village green / public space / gathering
not alone / solitude / together
echoing
mixing/ together
mingling
young and old/ animal, / mineral, / plant

6 — 21 may 2023

anti-pastoral poets

As for the pastoral poetry tradition, two poets and influences come to mind: Vievee Francis and the “anti-pastoral” poems in Forest Primeval, and Jennifer Chang’s Bread Loaf Lecture, “Other Pastorals: Writing Race and Place” (June 2019, available here.)

interview with the poet, Sarah Audsley

this is not / nostalgia. / this place has / a context, / histories / visible / and erased.

Many contemporary pastorals investigate power dynamics, status differences, and the hierarchies of classification.

Pastoral in the Back Yard (essay)

7 — 2 feb 2024

Pastorale, mentioned by Robert Fripp in a blog post about his “Quiet Moments” playlists. Ambient music, Brian Eno, music creating a space to dwell in, not a narrative. Not tightly structured, directing the eye one way, but an open field allowing the ear/the eye/the whole self to wander.

open field
opening
wandering
dwelling in / dwelling with / dwell among
solitude

8 — 24 july 2025

OED: landscape — “A view or prospect of natural inland scenery, such as can be taken in at a glance from one point of view.”

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

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

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

as the trees
within my
macula
disappear
my forest
fields and
meadows

cultivate
management
removal
forest fire
open field / empty field / unused field
no longer / occupied

—

So many great ideas from this wander through my archive!


oct 9/RUN

3.6 miles
bottom of locks and dam no. 1
48 degrees

Another cool morning! Today, I glowed: a bright orange sweatshirt, bright blue running shorts with lighter blue swirls, bright yellow running shoes, a purple-pink-blue running hat. Did it make me run faster? Maybe. I felt much better on the run this morning. Was it because I didn’t have any unfinished business, or because I was going only about half the distance? Or a little bit of both? I ran south and recited part of my new You Are Here poem about the grassy boulevard. I like it.

10 Things

  1. red leaves
  2. the occasional thump of an acorn hitting the ground
  3. the loud rumble of a school bus approaching Dowling
  4. scales on the river near the locks and dam — no clear reflection of the bridge today, instead more of an impressionist painting of it
  5. the bridge in the 44th street parking lot was empty, so was the one near folwell
  6. a dog’s bark, deep and loud, in the trees near Becketwood
  7. more golden light through the trees
  8. heading north, descending on the path that dips below the road, seeing a big but not the trail — hidden behind leaves
  9. the bench at the edge of the world: empty
  10. a buoy (not orange) bobbing in the river under the ford bridge

Listened to cars and dogs as I ran south. Put in “Taylor Swift” essentials retuning north.

Since I wrote about the grassy boulevard this morning, and being alone, and freedom, here’s a fitting poem:

Grass, 1967/ Victoria Chang

When I open the door, I smile and wave to people who only
have eyes and who are infinitely joyful. I see my children,
but only the backs of their heads. When they turn around, I
don’t recognize them. They once had mouths but now only
have eyes. I want to leave the room but when I do, I am
outside, and everyone else is inside. So next time, I open the
door and stay inside. But then everyone is outside. Agnes
said that solitude and freedom are the same. My solitude is
like the grass. I become so aware of its presence that it too
begins to feel like an audience. Sometimes my solitude grabs
my phone and takes a selfie, posts it somewhere for others
to see and like. Sometimes people comment on how
beautiful my solitude is and sometimes my solitude replies
with a heart. It begins to follow the accounts of solitudes
that are half its age. What if my solitude is depressed? What
if even my solitude doesn’t want to be alone?

Chang’s version of solitude involves being watched, stared at, judged and assessed, evaluated. And it involves a distance created with eyes and staring and being on display. My solitude, or maybe my loneliness, involves a lack of seeing — not of being seen, but of not seeing when I’m being seen.

oct 8/RUN

6 miles
hidden falls and back
48 degrees

48 degrees! Wore shorts again with my compression socks. Wasn’t cold at all. In fact, felt warm and sweat a lot by the end. Not as easy of a run as it was yesterday. Unfinished business, tired legs. Even so, a few mental victories. Made it to Hidden Falls for the first time this year! (I checked and my last run to Hidden Falls was on 8 dec 2024).

A beautiful run along the river road, on the edge of Wabun Park, over the ford bridge, by the river again, above Hidden Falls. I stopped at the overlook there and marveled at the view. Such a view of the river valley on the way to St. Paul. I thought about the openness of this view: wide, far and also uncluttered, not much to look at, just open space. Nothing to try to see and not be able to. A chance to focus on other senses or not focus at all, but just to be.

There were a few things I saw that delighted me. My view was of the tops of trees. In the distance, some leaves silvered and shimmered in the sun light and wind. Glittering trees — I’ve written about that before. Then, a plane high overhead. At first, dull and dark, but as it hit the light, it sparkled and flashed, a shiny dot in the otherwise blue.

I listened to hammers pounding nails, kids yelling, and cars driving by until I reached Hidden Falls. Then I put in Taylor Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl” on the way back.

today’s study of Air, before the run:

I’m thinking about how/why something becomes/is open: the planning by rich men of spaces, both as inviting — for experiencing wonder and stillness, and as buffers –protecting from the unwanted; the process of succession (see 4 may 2025) and meadow becoming thicket becoming forest becoming open/barren field; how Minneapolis Parks, National Parks, and the Longfellow Neighborhood Association work to keep spaces within the park; how the city of Minneapolis clears out encampments in the gorge. I’m thinking about my own experience with my blind spot: an opening that won’t close, that stays open to how vision really works and it limits, that opens me up and softens me, offering room to dwell in a place without judgment and enabling me to experience the world differently and outside of, or on the edge, of late capitalism and Progress! and excessive growth.

And then, a pivot. I started thinking about Canadian wildfire smoke and air quality and smells — sewer smells. I wondered, why does it sometimes smell so bad, and how do they handle those smells? Looked it up:

Sewage pipes from much of the West Metro converge at this site. Here, they drop their contents into deeper pipes that then carry the sewage under the river and on to the Metropolitan Wastewater Treatment Plant east of downtown St. Paul. When the sewage drops, sewer gasses are forced out. For years, smells were managed through use of a biofilter (a.k.a. woodchips), but results were mixed and local residents and park users requested improvements.

The new odor-control structure will house four carbon filters that should prove far more effective. Scheduled to come online in early 2017, the small building will soon be fitted with a charcoal gray metal roof along with frosted windows in the north and south roof peaks. Next spring, it will be painted more natural colors and the lot will be revegetated with grass.

source

after the run

I think I’ll leave smells and sewers for another day. Back to space-as-buffer-zone. Way back in 2017 or 18, when I first read the Gorge Management Plan from 2002, I encountered a description of the Boulevard that I’ve wanted to write about:

West River Parkway marks the transition between the natural communities of the River Gorge and the residences of the Longfellow neighborhood.

To function as an effective transitional zone, the boulevard should retain the natural character of the Gorge but also be visually acceptable to local residents and those using the boulevard and its pedestrian trails.

Gorge Management Plan, 2002

A transition zone, a threshold space between private (neighborhood) and public (park) land. Back in 2017, I imagined this transition as a way for me to prepare myself for the sacred practice of my run. A place to pass through — to leave behind the mundane world and enter the sacred. A place for getting ready to notice and slow down and let go. I think there is room to imagine that as an intent of Cleveland and early park planners. But, when I discovered the terrible history of Edmund Boulevard, named after Edmund Walton who brought red-lining and racial covenants to Minnesota, I read this buffer-zone differently. A buffer as “protection,” exclusion, denying access, keeping out, creating distance and division. And, Edmund’s white supremacist work is not in the past. These racial covenants and red-lining continue to shape the racial mapping of Minneapolis and who has access to home ownership, especially homes in places with open spaces and good air.

How do I want to reference this context in a poem? I’m not sure, but I’m thinking it will be in a poem titled, You Are There: Lena Smith Boulevard.

oct 7/RUN

3 miles
trestle turn around
51 degrees

Fall, finally! Wore my bright orange sweatshirt and black shorts with gray compression socks. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker. Hi Dave! It’s a beautiful morning! Not too long after that I spotted an albino squirrel by the edge of the bluff. I didn’t stop, but I slowed down and took an extra glance to check that I was seeing what I thought I was. I think so, but how would I know? I saw some rowers emerging from the hill that leads down to the rowing club, but didn’t hear any of them on the river. Since I went north, I didn’t hear any kids on a school playground. Noticed lots of trash bags beside the already full trash cans. Marathon clean-up or a clearing out of camps in the gorge? Also noticed some flowers at the trestle in a makeshift vase — an open cylinder where a railing used to be attached. Orange cones were still next to the crack, warning runners and walkers — stay away. The crack looks like it hasn’t gotten any bigger or longer.

In mile 2, I started chanting a part of my poem, You Are Here: Tunnel of Trees:

Oh, where is the sky?
And where is the ground?
Neither can be seen.

Moving feet strike
only air,
and eyes see
only green.

To fly, to float,
to pass through with ease.

held up
by openness,
not hemmed in
by trees.

The last lines didn’t quite work with my movement, so I changed them slightly:

held Up by
the openness,
not hemmed In
by the trees.

Then I began repeating certain verses instead of reciting them straight through. To float, to fly/to pass through with ease//to float, to fly/to pass through with ease//to float, to fly/to pass through with ease and Held up by/the openness/not hemmed in/by the trees//Held up by/the openness/not hemmed in/by the trees.

I noticed a difference in how it felt as I switched up the lines. To float, to fly had a lot more open space around it. This is how my foot strikes matched up with the words: (x = foot strike without word)

To float x
To fly x
To pass through with ease

The silent extra beat created space and felt slower, maybe a little more labored? In contrast, the last verse was faster and easier for me to sync up my feet with lungs and brain and heart and the gorge.

Held up by
the openness
Not hemmed in
by the trees

No silent foot strikes, just one word per strike.

This experiment was fun and made the run easier, and, as a bonus, it helped me with my poem!

Air

I am little late with picking a theme for this month. I’ve been too haunted by my Girl Ghost Gorge project. Editing and adding new poems every day. Finally, a week in, it has come to me: AIR. Air is the section I am working on right now. It’s the third (love those 3s!) element of the collection: rock, river, Air.

Air as: air quality, good air, bad air, lungs, breathing, syncing up lungs with my feet and the feet and the lungs of others (human and non-human), open space, Nothingness/void, emptiness, a clear view, secrets revealed, thresholds, late October to mid-November before the snow flies, when the veil lifts or thins, boulevards and parkways, ventilation and purification, things not seen but sensed, a stillness within the flux of happenings, fleeting/ephemeral/weightless, smells, plagues, rust, erosion, fire, uncluttered and calm

Walked over to the split rail fence above the ravine and the sewer pipe that freezes in the winter and creates an icy tunnel, then drips blueish greenish water as it melts. The Winchell Trail winds around this ravine, over a steel grate and beside a wrought iron fence that once displayed dozen of keys with social justice-y messages until they were ripped out–by who and why? I wish I could remember the messages. A few: Be nice. We are One. Resist Fear. From up above, at the end of my run, I cannot see the ravine or the sewer or the keys. Sometimes I smell the sewer or hear someone talking below me, but I can’t see anything but green until the leaves fall in late October, early November. This is my favorite time at the gorge. I love being able to see deep into the gorge when its bare bones are exposed, its secrets revealed. I love the color palate of rich browns, pale blues, dull grays, rusted reds. I love the smell of mulching leaves, the sharp, crisp air, the paths that aren’t yet covered with snow but with crunching, crackling leaves.

log entry 7 oct 2019

flame and rust, flame and rust — another October poem (along with Louise Glück’s and May Swenson’s Octobers): Leaves

Today, while I ran, I thought about how chanting in the lines, held up by/the openness/not hemmed in/by the trees, made me feel how I was floating through the air. I noticed the space between foot strikes, that small instant when both of my feet are off of the ground, instead of when they’re striking it. My Apple watch measures my ground contact time while running, the time each foot is on the ground per stride (in ms), but it doesn’t measure the time you’re not on the ground. I guess I could figure it out, but couldn’t the watch do it for me? What percentage of my running is in the air versus touching ground?

With some help from Scott and AI, I determined that my stride time (60/170 — cadence) is 353 ms. Then subtracting my ground contact time from my stride time: 353 – 230 = 123 ms. To find the percentage, it’s ground contact time / total time. For me, I’m on the ground roughly 65% of the stride, and in the air 35% of the stride. It might be fun to work on increasing my cadence (time for the metronome!) and see if that makes any difference in my floating/flying time. Sounds fun!

oct 6/RUN

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
50 degrees

The heat broke! Hooray. My run felt so much better, and dreamier, everything fuzzy and soft. My right knee felt a little strange at the very beginning of the run, but better the longer I ran. The air was crisp, the sun was bright, and the leaves were orange and red and yellow. Today I noticed a stretch of yellow just north of 42nd.

Listened to kids biking to school, water rushing over the limestone ledge and the falls, and at least one song out of a bike radio as I ran south. Put in Taylor Swift’s new album, “The Life of a Showgirl.”

10 Things

  1. Nearing a walker, about to pass them from behind, they suddenly spit. It missed me, but I was grossed out and stuck out my tongue without thinking. Morning! Oh no — it was Mr. Morning!
  2. a row of buses lined up in front of Dowling Elementary — another school week begins
  3. remnants of the marathon — not trash, but barricades, waiting to be picked up
  4. more red and orange leaves — not full trees, but slashes in the bushes
  5. the surface of the river was burning white again
  6. a white truck with an arm and bucket parked in a falls paking lot — was it there to clean up after the marathon?
  7. a rushing creek with foam that looked silvery purpley, oxidized green, blue, then pewter
  8. water trickling out of the sewer pipes
  9. empty benches
  10. the sweet smell of the tall grass — a thought today: is this a smell from my childhood in North Carolina?

some things for future Sara

1

Yesterday, Scott and I walked over to the river and watched the first wave of marathon runners reach mile 17. We saw the wheelers — I love seeing the motion of the silver handlebars turning turning and turning. We saw the men’s lead pack, their heels bouncing rhythmically like balls. We saw the lead woman and second place — a runner I’ve been following for 5 or 6 years now on Instagram. And we saw the GOAT of Ultra running, Courtney Dauwalter. I wish I had remembered to where (added the next day: where instead of wear? wow. a mistake, or is it? In that moment, I was, in fact, lamenting, oh, where are my glasses!) my glasses — in addition to losing my cone cells, I’m near-sighted. If I’m standing still, glasses can help see some far off things, like “exit” signs or moving bodies. Scott and I were inspired and have decided that we want to give the marathon another go, hopefully next year.

2

Finished the novel, Victorian Psycho yesterday. The final section was an epic bloodbath. The violence didn’t seen gratuitous, but fit, and it was so beautifully written. Descriptions of scarlet ribbons streaming from throats. After I finished, I suddenly realized that this final section must be a reference/homage to the Odyssey and Odysseus’s slaughtering of the suitors, which was also a bloodbath.

3

When Scott and I walked into Costco, we discovered that they were offering free, no appointment necessary, flu and COVID shots. Nice! We needed them so we waited about 5 minutes and then got jabbed. So convenient! Past Sara, who drove up to Duluth to get her first vaccine in 2021, would be shocked.

Lena Smith Boulevard

Last year — 29 jan 2024 — I wrote about an effort to rename Edmund Boulevard because of its namesake, Edmund Walton, who was responsible for racial covenants in this area and across Minneapolis. The efforts of community members and a community organization worked! The boulevard is being renamed after Minnesota’s first black woman lawyer, Lena Smith. The renaming was approved on sept 11, 2025. When will we see new street signs?

I’m thinking of this renaming today because I’m working on poems related to Air. Ever since I read a few lines in Gorge Management Plan from Minneapolis parks about this boulevard as a threshold space, I’ve wanted to write something about it. Now I want to add in some lines about the renaming, and the ongoing history of this place, and who is and isn’t given access to these open spaces.

Speaking of AIR, I’ve also wanted to write about lungs and breath and idea of room to breathe out by the gorge. A thought just popped into my head: the Canadian wild fires! I’ve been writing about the Air Quality Index and the thick smoke that travels south from Canadian wild fires for a few years on this blog. Maybe that could be part of my AIR section, too?

oct 3/HIKE

60 minutes
with Delia and FWA
Minnehaha Off-leash Dog Park
80 degrees

A new ritual: hiking at the dog park with Delia-the-dog and my son, FWA. Every Thursday or Friday, more often Friday. What a park. On the edge of Minnehaha Falls Regional Park, next to Coldwater Springs, heading towards Fort Snelling, down in the floodplain, across from Hidden Falls in St. Paul. Such a great space for Delia to run and play with other dogs, and for FWA and I to hike and talk about roots and fungal nets and Mars and abundance and scarcity and Robin Wall Kimmerer, and the sand mafia and Fall Out 76 and poetry and anxiety and . . . . In past years, parts of this park have been flooded. Hiking through, the evidence is everywhere: soft sand, the bones of giant trees, ridges and cracks and wide open spaces with tall canopies, dirt studded with rocks and pebbles and stones.

Earlier this morning, Scott sent me this link: Minneapolis witch coven takes to their paddleboards for spooky lake gathering. I wish I could have seen that!

After reading the witch article, I returned to Girl Ghost Gorge and my air section. A thought: Instead of Girl Ghost Gorge, should I call this collection, River Rock Air? I don’t think so, but I’ll keep it open as a possibility. Today’s focus started out as time and the re-reading of Chloe Garcia Robert’s “Temporal Saturation,” and I’m still thinking about that, but it shifted slightly when I reached this line:

Temporal saturation . . . is used to explain both the canyons that can appear inside moments of great rending, joyous or horrific, entombing an incarnation of the self which will never again exist; as well as the median intervals of floating passivity that resist recollection and whose ending is marked by a feeling of awakening: a drowsy startle or a gradual reconsciousness.

Temporal Saturation/ Chloe Garcia Roberts

canyons. The gorge! The gash, gap, open space where more is possible, between beats, where Nothing happens and where there is (good) Air to breathe. Does it entomb an incarnation of the self which will never again exist? Ooo–I have thought about the idea of different Saras intermingling above/beside/in the gorge. It’s not that they don’t ever exist again, but that they only exist (together) here in this space. It’s the gorge as holding everything — not trapping or entombing, but holding — beholding, witnessing.

inside moments of great rending: rending = tearing — splitting and cracking open, ripping, breaking, eroding

floating passivity — resist recollection, or thinking, those spaces on the trail that are lost, when you let go, stop thinking, soft attention?

amplifies the moment, in joy or terror, both feeling like falling, joy, a falling into, terror a falling through

When I first encountered this book last spring, it wasn’t too long after I had read JJJJJerome Ellis’s amazing book, Aster of Ceremonies, which inspired me to think about my blind spot as (almost) a gorge, similar to how Ellis imagines their stutter as clearing. So now I’m reviewing my old Plague Notebook from that time, vol. 24. Here are some notes:

We all have a blind spot, mine is just bigger than yours (sight unseen/ G. Kleege). Not a lack, not nothing, Nothing. A gap, a gorge, an opening, both solid and unstable / limestone and sandstone / a break, a rupture

And then a Plank in Reason, broke/ and I dropped down and down/and hit a World at every plunge/and finished knowing then (ED — from memory so punctuation is a bit off)

a going under — not a drowning/disorientation/underwater/submersion/immersion/more porous, less divisions

cracks/erosion/waring away

from Octagon of Water, 3/ JJJJJerome Ellis

The name of that silence is these Grasses in the wind, and the name of these Grasses in this wind is that other place on the other side of this instant. This instant is divided by curtains of water and the sound of shuddering time.

time stopping, pause

erosion = pressure + time

ED’s elemental rust: ‘Tis first a cobweb in the soul/ A cuticle of dust/ A borer in the Axis / An elemental rust

big enough to hold all — expansion/room/possibility/generosity/holds multitudes — WWhitman — contradictions, ambiguities

entangled connected not needing to be resolved

a silence — And me and Silence some strange race wrecked solitary here (ED)
unseen unstable

weather — a different language of time (See Jenny Odell, Another Kind of Time)

extraction, dehumanizing, people outside of time, with no history

“Like a clearing in a forest, the stutter, for Ellis, can open a space of gathering for Ellis and the People he is communicating with” (Angel Bat Dawid and JJJJJerome Ellis).

erosion can lead to reclaiming, re-wilding as less abundance, a clearing away

a blind spot — no critical judgment, usually read as uncritical, but what if we read it as free of judgment, a generosity? See 19 march 2025 for more on this!

AOswald on erosion: worn down to abstract form, anonymity of weathered sculptures — “I love erosion: I like the way that the death of one thing is the beginning of something else.”

erosion, a softening, a vulnerability, a tenderness

Find the ceremony in every instant. — Ellis

At this point in the notebook, I moved on to color and my chapbook, I Empty My Mind.

Reading through Plague Notebook, Vol 25, I stopped on a mention of familiar with intimate. Yes! I’ve been thinking about worn in as a form of familiarity. Habit, accustomed to, familiar, family, and now, intimate/intimacy.

Okay, it’s Friday almost evening, and I need to stop!

recap for next time: exposure to air = rust = erosion — write more about the process / I’ve written about the open space of the gorge in time (Between Beats), now I need to write about in space, with an engagement with the blind spot! / the familiar/family/intimacy among us edge-dwellers at the gorge / keep revisiting Roberts’ temporal saturation / and, more on Air

oct 2/RUN

5.3 miles
ford loop
64 degrees

Felt strange when I started my run and wasn’t sure how much I would be able to do. Ended up doing the ford loop. What a morning! Still too warm, but lots of color and sparkles and golden light. My left knee continues to feel strange before I start and during the first mile, like a rubber band is crossing over the kneecap. Is that a tendon or a ligament? No, looked it up: IT Band. It doesn’t hurt at all.

IT Band? Guess it’s time for some more fun with medical terms!

IT, the Halloween version: Stephen King’s IT

  • Stephen King’s Inconsistent Talent
  • Stephen King’s Iffy Takes
  • Stephen King’s Incandescent Tadpoles
  • Stephen King’s Insatiable Teacup
  • Stephen King’s Indigo Trash
  • Stephen King’s Iconic Terror
  • Stephen King’s Inedible Treats
  • Stephen King’s Irritated Throat
  • Stephen King’s Itemized Tally

My IT Band is already feeling better!

Running past the Horace Cleveland Overlook, stopping to fix my headphones, I noticed the river through the trees. Wow — a shimmering, sizzling white. Smelled something sour just south of the Monument. Heard a roller skier. Saw 5 or 6 single rowing shells on the water, encircling the coxswain’s boat below the Lake Street bridge. Greeted several people — runners and walkers. Stepped on dead leaves on the ground. Heard the St. Thomas bells and water tinkling at Shadow Falls.

Another great poem on poets.org this morning. Here are a few lines:

excerpt from This Is Not a Horse/ Blas Falconer

A hoof implies the presence of
the whole horse. A saddle implies

a horse and a rider.

How much information do we need to recognize/identify a form? Only a hoof? The curve of a back? A giant eye?

Earlier this morning, working on Girl Ghost Gorge and the idea of restlessness, I wrote:

worn out / exhausted / made still
worn down / eroded / exposed
worn in / familiar / used

worn in = an accumulation of experiences, having a context, a history, a substance/substantial presence, lasting through time, enduring

oct 1/RUN

4.2 miles
minnehaha falls and back
67 degrees

A good run! I felt strong and relaxed and able to run farther without needing to stop for a walk break. More color on the trees today, lots of orange and red, not as much yellow.

10 Things

  1. workers in bright yellow vests at the Cleveland Overlook next to a big white truck with a long arm and a bucket — trimming trees?
  2. slashes of orange everywhere, not big stretches of it, only a dot here, a dot there
  3. a fine, cool spray coming off of the falls
  4. the smell of fried something at the falls — Sea Salt?
  5. chickadeedeedeedee
  6. kids laughing and yelling on a playground hidden behind trees
  7. a woman walking over to a man near the ledge etched with “The Song of Hiawatha,” saying, I like it here
  8. that tall grass smell that reminds me of cilantro, almost — the common thread: the smell of freshness? and green?
  9. the dirt trail that winds through the small wood near the ford bridge looked muddy
  10. a roller skier on the trail — I don’t remember the click clack sound of his poles, just the fast swinging of his arms as he propelled himself forward

As I ran, I thought about water and erosion and how that might translate into a new form and/or way to play around with my already existing poems. I had a few ideas:

  • water as causing cracks, fissures, splitting words open. New breaks in the lines, in individual words? Making new words out of the already existing ones?
  • water as swirling and falling. A mixing and swirling and wheeling of words?
  • water as wearing down, peeling away layers, condensing forms to their essence

Read (and heard) an amazing poem this morning:

A Bookshelf/ Hua Xi

My father read a mountain aloud.

Opened to a page
where a green bird lands on a thunderclap.

Named for the billowing hands of
brittle blue flowers.

As if the unfinished poetry of the paraffin

is pulled aside like scenery,
so that I may write by the only light I know.

My father read only his one life and recited
the last line over and over.

The book is written in giant letters of fog
that wander like goats across the alpine pastures.

The moon is dog-eared as if the treetops looking up
have studied the idea of love too much.

On a page with some scattered pine needles,
a voice goes on calling out to me.

My father learned to read
in a one-room schoolhouse,

and never read a poem.

A little herd of lightning
gets spoken out loud in the dark.

Change
is scenic and sudden.

One year, I came home
and all the leaves fell off my father.

After that,
he was winter.

I’m thinking about a poem as a life and those last lines about her father and how he became winter. Wow.

sept 24/RUN

2.5 miles
2 trails
70 degrees
humidity: 67%

Tried an experiment today. Instead of running early when it was much cooler, but very high humidity (97%), I waited and ran when it was much warmer, but with lower humidity. The hypothesis: the humidity is more of a problem than the temperature. Observations: fatigue, abundant sweat, slow legs, needing to walk sooner and for longer, not much fun. Tentative conclusion: heat affects me more than humidity. Of course, other factors to consider include: a different time of day, direct sun. My scientific method here might be half-baked, but I’m accepting the conclusion. No waiting until later to run! When in doubt, go earlier.

As (almost) always, I’m glad I went for a run by the gorge. A beautiful fall afternoon! A bright blue sky, rusting leaves, clear paths.

At the beginning of my run, I chanted the opening section of my Running Chant: River — flow flow flow / slow slow slow / flow flow flow / slow slow slow. The goal was to quiet my mind and fall into the rhythm of my feet. An idea: why not have a page filled with these opening words as part of my Girl Ghost Gorge collection?

3 visual options:

  1. a page with a line of flow then a line of the word slow
  2. 2 or 4 columns, one with flow, one with slow — you can read it vertically, down the lines, or horizontally, across the columns
  3. a page of flow flow flow / slow slow slow in very faint print, with only a few of the words in regular (or bold?) print

10 Things

  1. empty bench at the Horace Cleveland Overlook
  2. trickling water at the 44th street ravine
  3. the steady falling of water at the 42nd street ravine
  4. a friendly biker on the walking path below — hello! / hello
  5. 2 people at the folwell bench, one of them leaning over looking at their lap — were they holding a phone?
  6. graffiti — can’t remember color or what it said — on the limestone retaining wall
  7. a squeaking sound from across the river — a bike?
  8. someone squatting at the edge of the 38th street steps, talking on the phone
  9. a trace of color — yellow, pink — on the 38th street steps
  10. kids’ voices drifting over from across the road — recess

sept 23/RUN

4.1 miles
river road, north/south
61 degrees
humidity: 90% / dew point: 60

Yes, it was uncomfortably humid, and that’s all I’ll write about that. I memorized my rock chants before I left, then recited them as I ran. Here’s a snippet:

soft stone
shifts

hard stone
waits

sandstone
rubs

limestone
breaks

They worked pretty well, although it was hard to think of the words fast enough for my feet. Near the end of the run, I switched to some river words (3 1-syllable words):

drip drip drip
drop drop drop
stone stone stone

I was able to greet Dave, the Daily Walker — Morning Dave!, but forgot to greet the Welcoming Oaks. Saw some rowers climbing up the hill and leaving the rowing club. Noticed big bunches of purple wildflowers. Ran by the persistent crack that continues to settle and spread. Will they be able to fix it before the ground freezes? Wondered if the road closed ahead sign was because they were removing the safety fence they put in during their I-94 construction. Stopped at the top of some wooden steps leading down into the dark green of the Winchell Trail. Also stopped at the sliding bench to take a picture. A thought: what if I took a picture every week at this bench to track the slow and subtle changes?

from behind the sliding bench / 23 sept 2025

For future Sara, a brief recap: Jimmy Kimmel returns to his show tonight after being suspended/censored; Trump is claiming aspirin causes autism and that they’ve found a “cure” for it; and more leaves are turning yellow and red at the gorge.

sept 22/RUN

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
61 degrees
humidity: 91% / dew point: 64

It rained last night, so everything was wet, even the air. Puddles, mud, slick leaves. Gushing sewer pipes, a roaring creek, fast-falling water.

I’m working on a series of chants for Girl Ghost Gorge. All triples. One for rock (a 2-syllable word/1 syllable word). One for river (3 1-syllable words). And one for air (1 3-syllable word).

During the first mile, I chanted for air: 

industry
convenience
resilience
persistence
underground
neighborhood

During the second mile, I chanted for rock:

paddle/wheel
roaring/creek
paving/stone

During the third mile, I chanted for water:

drip drip drip
drop drop drop
drip drop drip
drip drip drop

My plan for the chants is to use 1, 2, and 3 syllable words from my long poems for the chants. Right now I’m sorting them out.

10 Things

  1. wet red leaves scattered near the trail
  2. the smell of tar as I passed a park worker patching the trail (yay! they’re fixing the terrible spot on the bike path finally!)
  3. one woman to another: my ex-husband makes over a million dollars in his new job
  4. the yellow-vested park working, leaning and looking at his phone while he waited for the tar to be ready to smooth
  5. the squeak of a bike’s brakes
  6. bare branches poking out of the top of a tree
  7. the white froth from the falls
  8. 2 people sitting on the ledge of the bridge, their feet dangling over the falls
  9. a circle of bright water and sky, made by a break in the trees
  10. the smell of almost-cilantro from the tall grass surrounding the stone etched with Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha”

sept 16/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
73 degrees
humidity: 84% / dew point: 64

Yes, another day of uncomfortably hot and humid conditions. Another morning with sweat and a flushed face. Also, something new: swarms of gnats. Getting in my eyes, my mouth, my nose, on my shirt. After the run, getting ready for a shower, I counted more than a dozen dead gnats on my chest. Yuck!

Do I regret going out for the run? Not one bit. Even with the heat and the gnats, it was beautiful — changing leaves, sparkling water, a bright blue sky, a gushing creek and a roaring falls. Plus, the gnats have inspired me. I want to write about them for Girl Ghost Gorge!

Tried something new for the second half of the run: run 2 minutes, walk 1. It worked out well. I think I’ll try this again. Maybe I’ll experiment with the amounts: 3 minutes of runner/1 minute of walking or 2 minutes of running/30 seconds of walking?

For the first time in a while, I saw the regular, Mr. Santa Claus. We greeted each other with a wave.

gnats Returning to the gnats, I’ve been thinking about them more lately because of Endi Bogue Hartigan and her mention of them in her poem, “Running Sentences,” especially these lines:

c A chorus sings in swarms of gnats.

b First the body on the path, but first the body as circumference,

a First the cloud of gnats first the movement through the cloud

collective noun: a cloud of gnats / a swarm of gnats / a horde of gnats / a rabble of gnats

sept 16/RUN

3.5 miles
locks and dam no 1
72 degrees
humidity: 84% / dew point: 69

Overcast today. Everything dark, everything gray and deep green. A few sprinkles at the start. On my warm-up walk, I heard The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” coming from the corner where some workers were making the sidewalk more accessible. Later at the river, I heard some more music blasting out of a bike speaker that I recognized but can’t remember the name of now.

The first almost 2 miles of the run was okay, then it got hard, then I locked in and zoned out and it was no longer hard or easy, it just was.

10 Things

  1. passing an entrance to the Oak Savanna: a deep, dark, green hole
  2. a yellowish-orangish tree
  3. slashes of red on the side of the path, waist-high
  4. more orange leaves scattered in the trees
  5. dozens of small red leaves on the side of the trail
  6. thwack thwack acorns falling
  7. someone took down the sign alerting people to a conservation area and asking them to stay on the paved trail
  8. one car parked at the bottom of the locks and dam no 1 hill, window slightly open, low music playing, the smell of cigarette smoke
  9. bright headlights cutting through the gray sky
  10. the ford bridge reflected in the water looking like a window or a portal
ford bridge window / 16 sept 2025

Vuelta update: Yesterday, the final stage of the Vuelta was shut down when it entered Madrid. Protesters had occupied the course and pulled down all the signs/flags, toppled the barricades. There was no violence, just chanting and holding up signs that said, in Spanish, Down with the State of Israel. There was a large police presence that was attempting to manage the crowd, but they weren’t using force or rubber bullets or tear gas. Very different from what happened here in Minneapolis in 2020.

Today’s thoughts about my Girl Ghost Gorge project:

1 rituals. What rituals do I do during my run?

  • greet the Welcoming Oaks
  • greet the Regulars
  • listen for roller skiers and rowers and water dropping out of the sewer pipe
  • track the changing of the leaves, especially in the floodplain forest
  • make note of whether or not the benches are empty
  • notice the river
  • stop at the sliding bench or at the bench above the edge of the world
  • stop in the flats or at the bottom of the locks and dam no 1 to study the river surface
  • count the stones stacked on the ancient boulder

2 You Are Here: Trestle: In this poem, I’d like to include something about how it’s rarely used for trains. Now it holds electric blue yarn bombs and ghost bikes and flowers for June

sept 14/RUN

4.1 miles
river road north/south
70 degrees
humidity: 88% / dew point: 68

Ugh! Uncomfortably warm again today. A flushed face and dripping ponytail. Was able to greet 2 regulars: Dave, the Daily Walker and Mr. Morning! Admired sparkles on the water, heard the coxswain from below, smelled the sourness of the sewer. I tried to do my “beat” experiment:

mile 1: triple berry chants strawberry/raspberry/blueberry
mile 2: listen to metronome at 175
mile 3: listen to music

I went too fast with the triple berries, then didn’t have the metronome turned up enough to feel the beat. By the time I got to mile 3, I was overheating. After that, it was difficult to run for that long. Lots of walking. I’ll have to try this experiment again when it is much cooler.

For the Girl Ghost Gorge collection I’m working on, I’ve decided to add some You Are Here poems: poems that locate me/the reader in one particular (and meaningful to me) location above or with or among the gorge.

possible you are here locations

  1. the trestle
  2. folwell bench
  3. sliding bench
  4. the edge of the world
  5. double bridge
  6. ancient boulder with stacked stones
  7. franklin hill
  8. turkey hollow
  9. 44th street ravine
  10. 42nd street ravine
  11. 35th street ravine
  12. welcoming oaks

sept 10/RUN

4 miles
river road, north/south
65 degrees
humidity: 87%

Went out for my run later than I’d like because I was watching the final climb on the Vuelta. I was hoping Vingegaard would do something special but sadly he didn’t have the legs (as commentator Christian likes to say). Other favorite phrases from Bob and Christian on Peacock’s coverage of the tour: going from strength to strength, fire power, full cry, and Jonas & co..

The run was a little difficult, partly because of the humidity, partly because of my need for a port-a-potty. Sigh. Oh — and the front of my left knee felt weird — tight? — for the first 5 or so minutes. Even with the difficulty, there were moments I felt strong and bouncy. I did a few strides (sprints, fast bursts) at the end.

Thinking about Girl Ghost Gorge some more, working on triple chants related to rock.

st. peter sandstone
st. peter sandstone
st. peter sandstone
limestone shale

platteville limestone
platteville limestone
platteville limestone
shale sandstone

10 Things

  1. a big orange X spray painted on a tree
  2. another orange x, smaller, painted on another tree
  3. gushing ravine
  4. more yellowing trees
  5. hello friend! to the still green welcoming oaks
  6. tunnel of trees — red leaves on the path, green on the branches
  7. orange construction signs — road closed ahead E. Franklin
  8. click clack click clack a roller skier
  9. ghost bike for June hanging high in the trestle — dried flowers wound through the spokes
  10. the sharp bark of a dog below, on the winchell trail

sept 8/RUNSWIM

4.3 miles
veterans home and back
61 degrees

Fall! Noticed a few more slashes of orange and yellow and some red leaves on the ground. More acorn shells on the trail. At the beginning my knee — I can’t remember if it was the left or the right one — hurt, a dull not sharp pain. I can’t remember when it stopped. Maybe it was when I started feeling the rumbling of unfinished business. When I reached the falls, I went to the bathroom. I’m ready to be done with perimenopause.

Running south, I listened to chickadees and music blasting from a bike radio — I recognized the 70s or 80s rock song, but now I’ve forgotten what it was. Just past the Veterans home, I put in my “the Wheeling Life” playlist.

10 Things

  1. the sound of the rushing creek, 1: just before it falls over the limestone ledge
  2. the sound of the rushing creek, 2: far below, as I ran over the bridge to the Veterans Home
  3. a soft mist rising from the falling water
  4. a half-filled parking lot at the falls
  5. a full parking lot at the Veterans Home
  6. an empty parking lot at Locks and Dam no 1
  7. above on the bluff at Waban Park, a view of the river, the water rushing over the concrete, one white buoy, several redorangepink buoys
  8. an American flag waving near the Veterans Home
  9. strange flashes and a distorted view out of my central vision as I ran across the bridge — a result of facing the sun, I think
  10. soft shadows from the chain link fence on the bridge

While I ran, I chanted in triples. I was hoping to center or ground or locate myself in the time and place. First, berries, then:

I am here/I am here/I am here
I am now/I am now/I am now
I am here/I am here/I am here
It is now/It is now/It is now
here here here/ now now now/ here here here/ now now now

Then, I added a condensed version of some Emily Dickinson:

Life life life/death death death/bliss bliss bliss/breath breath breath

Then:

I am here/I am here/I am here/Here I am
123/123/123/123

Throughout the run, I thought about locating myself and how I might translate that for my project. A list of surfaces? my landmarks? a topographical map?

Reviewing old notes and entries, including 19 may 2025, which includes a bit on context, I encountered the phrase, there or there abouts. I had written it in my notebook after hearing it several times on the TNT coverage of the giro d’italia (the tour of italy cycling race). Yes. When I locate myself, it’s not here! or there. but there or thereabouts. Maybe that could be the title of a poem for the collection?

there or thereabouts

double bridge
old stone steps
ancient rock / stacked with stones
sliding bench
near the fence
under tree
on the edge (of the world)
high above
down below
in the flats
past the creek
wrapped in green
off the ground / in the air
deep in oak
riverside
locks and dam
sewer pipe
steep ravine
brand new trail
snowy path
in the groove
seeping hill
leaking ledge
eagle’s perch
spreading crack

Do I want to do this poem in triples? Not sure. It is how I locate myself sometimes — by chanting in triples about what’s around me. This syncs up my feet with my breath and my surroundings. But, how does it sound? And does it work as a poem?

A new poet to read and podcast episode to listen to!
Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists/ Laynie Brown
Laynie Brown: Apprentice to a Breathing Hand (tinhouse podcast)

swim: .75 loop
lake nokomis main beach
76 degrees
wind: 29 mph gusts

Another swim! When RJP told me the buoys were still up I knew I needed to swim again. Wow, it was choppy, and wow, that water was cold, but it wasn’t too cold and the choppy water was fun. I think there were whitecaps. In one direction, I could mostly ride the waves, the other direction, I punched water. Both fun, but in different ways. Speed from one, power the other. Got tangled in some vines, but nothing I couldn’t get out of. Noticed: soaring and hovering seagulls, held up by wind; planes, bobby buoys, voices, and water rushing over me, water crashing into me, water dragging me forward and sideways. I wouldn’t want to swim in water like that every time, but it was fun today.

sept 7/RUN

3.5 miles
bottom locks and dam no 1
60 degrees / humidity: 59%

What a difference low humidity and less direct sun makes! Today’s 61 felt much cooler. A wonderful, early fall morning. Often September still feels like summer — that is, it’s uncomfortably warm — but this year it definitely feels like fall. It looks like it too. Leaves changing color already. At the bottom of the locks and dam, looking over at the east bank of the river, I think I noticed changing leaves. Not sure what color, just the sense that they were no longer green green green.

10 Things

  1. at the bottom of the hill, the surface of the river was covered with swirls of green-tinged foam
  2. the pedestrian gates to the lock and dam were open — I thought it was closed?
  3. encountering an adult and a kid on bikes having just crossed the road. The kid: why didn’t they stop? the adult: because they were breaking the law
  4. running parallel to a runner slightly slower than me. me, on the dirt trail in the grassy boulevard, them, on the river road trail
  5. down on the winchell trail, admiring the color of the river: light blue and only partly visible through the green leaves
  6. no puddles, but patches of soft dirt and mud from yesterday’s multiple rain showers
  7. near the 38th street steps, another runner emerged from the trees and the part of the winchell trail that travels down to the oak savanna
  8. the strange shuffle of someone’s feet — part-walk, part-run, part-skip
  9. lots of cars parked on the street, lots of people walking towards the river — longfellow’s annual clean up the river event
  10. water streaming out of the 42nd street sewer pipe

girl ghost gorge

It’s fall, so good-bye my obsession with open swim, hello girl and ghost and gorge. I’m hoping to build on the dozen poems I wrote last year and create a full collection. I want to add some different forms and approach my obsessions from different perspectives.

On the way home, a thought, partly inspired by W Berry’s reversal of wild and domestic: my collection of poems / hybrid pieces is about locating myself and making a home beside/above/near the gorge. In a disorienting time — for many reasons, including my vision loss — I’ve been running by the gorge to orient myself, to find a home space, to establish an enduring location.

connections and re-connections: place, family, others, a larger history, the non-human world, my body, a nation (not sure if nation is the right word here, but I’m thinking about the park system and public works projects in the US), past and future Saras.

a flash: somehow bring in the unigrid brochure that I did, or something like it, into the book — a map, a nod to the national parks — would this fit in this collection, or should it be a separate project? If not the unigrid brochure, take some inspiration from the WPA poets hired to write guide books, like Lorine Niedecker. Add in a few entries inspired by that?

Back to the connections/being located thread: I wrote in my Plague Notebook vol. 26: Locating myself on eroding, shaky ground. Too unstable for a foundation? No, but offering a new way of thinking about location and connection and where I might root myself. Not just rooted in the ground, but connected to water and air — the river, the gorge. The location is and is not a place: a specific location with paths and forests, a river, limestone and sandstone walls AND the absence of land that the gorge frames — space, air, Nothing.

may 12/WALK

45 minutes
longfellow flats
70 degrees

Took Delia the dog on a walk to the river. So much green everywhere. Birds, blue sky, soft breeze. Everything out of focus. Walked above the winchell trail and the ravine. Made note of the angle of the leaning tree on the wooden fence. Couldn’t see anything below through the thick leaves. Encountered 2 women with coffees deliberating whether or not to descend the old stone steps. Let’s go further and take the road down. I took the steps down to the trail that leads to the river. The river was blue and sparkling with small waves lapping the shore. A boat must have just come through — I didn’t see it. I wish I could have stayed there for longer but Delia wanted to keep moving. Returned to steps and waited for someone descending. At the bottom, they turned around and walked back up. Did they change their mind, or were they doing a stair workout?

For the rest of the walk Delia was difficult. Refusing to go in certain directions, wanting to stop and pee near every tree, slowing down right in front of me. I want to forget my irritation and remember what a beautiful morning it was, how the river looked, how the air felt. Breathing it in, a sense of calm and euphoria enveloped me.

before the run

Yesterday I came across this call for submissions:

What does it mean to be a poet engaged with the physical material of the world around us? How does poetic form change in the encounter with other beings? How do we write collaboratively with—rather than about—nonhuman beings and ecologies?

For the Fall 2025 issue, Arc is seeking experimental eco-poetry that engages with the possibilities of organic form. We welcome experiments with lyric, visual poetics, material poetries, and sound poetries.

I want to spend today (at least) exploring what this might mean for my writing around/beside/within the gorge. And, if I can manage it, I’d like to find another home for some of my favorite lines: it begins here, from the ground up: feet first, following. I started to write, finally find a home, but then I remembered that I’ve actually used the line in a poem that was published earlier this year: Girl Ghost Gorge

My organic form is based on breathing and foot strikes: 1 2 3 breathe in/ 1 2 breathe out. Is this experimental enough?

How do write collaboratively with the nonhuman? Does my form, based on foot strikes, impose an order on the nonhuman? Does it offer a way outside of myself and into somewhere else?

How does poetic form change in the encounter with other beings? I’m thinking about water and stone and wondering how they inform my poetry about the gorge.

during the run

I tried to think about my form as I walked. Mostly, it’s easier for me to think about the words/content than about form and shapes of the words. I wondered about absence and the gorge as eroding/eroded and how that affects the page. An blank space that is not empty but open. Yes, can I push at the idea more?

after the run

I think some inspiration would help in thinking through how form can be inspired by place. Time to revisit Susan Tichy and her collection North | Rock | Edge.

distills somatic observations down their bones. Tichy describes an immersive, granular experience exploring the contours, rocks, winds, and waters of Shetland, a remote northern archipelago between Scotland, the Faroe Islands, and Norway. In isolated yet accumulative images and line breaks, she details the distances and resonances between geology and language, minutely mutable coastscapes, and how to write and walk in a time of planetary change.

distills / somatic / immersive / granular
contours / rocks / winds / waters
isolated yet accumulative images and line breaks

In the interview, Tracy Zeman suggests:

The islands’ bays, rugged edges, and jagged protrusions correlate with the way the poems look on the page, a varied right margin, short lines, and a proliferation of line breaks. There are few stopping points in the poems, no periods, and sparse punctuation generally, so that pacing and rhythm are made with line, as if the reader is part of one continuous yet staggered experience.

In my poems about the gorge, I’m less interested in having the words look like the place, but I like the idea of the few stopping points, lack of punctuation and a poem that is part of a continuous experience. Maybe a mostly continuous experience with a few pauses?

There are rhythms to walking on rough ground, a step-after-step persistence that swallows obstacles, like irregular lines that nonetheless carry forward through the poem. There’s also a sensory excitement in a sea-rock-light-wind-bird-flower-seal-seep-peat-rain-salt—oh look, there’s a whale!—environment that subsumes attention to any one thing into the press of the whole.

I like this idea of the sensory excitement that doesn’t subsume attention to any one thing, even as there is one thing: the gorge as gap, gash, bowl.

Tracy Zeman: you also eschew the “I.” I feel that the lack of “I” allows the reader to experience the place as the poem’s speaker does, and that the landscape stays primary and the human secondary in the action. Can you explain why you made this choice and what effect you hoped it would have on the reader’s experience of the text?

Susan Tichy: To me, the poems feel so intensely somatic and personal that the grammatical sign felt unnecessary. Here and there, I drafted other people’s words to express the sensation more directly, such as Robert Macfarlane’s thought diffusing /at body’s edge in “Eshaness | Is It Force Failure.”

Where do I/the poet fit into my poems? I wrote in Plague Notebook, no. 25: To be with the gorge, to witness/behold it, demands participation not observation. It is intimate — contact, meeting, interfacing — and transforms you. You transform it (the gorge world), too.

I feel like this poem that read today on Poetry Daily (poems.com) speaks to and against that:

Captivity/ Siddhartha Menon

it is impossible
to kill and question at the same time.
—Louise Glück, “Liberation”

Or to watch and at the same time
to capture.
A restive robin in your path
flew onto a low cable
and you had to choose between
binoculars and camera. You knew
it would not stay for both.
So near: a killing
to capture it forever here.
Only to watch is a kind of questioning.
You are paralyzed.

captivate = to hold something’s attention
captivated = rapt, enthralled, cannot look or turn away

march 19/RUN

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
38 degrees
wind: 18 mph / 37 mph gusts

Ran south and had the wind at my back for the first half, which was nice but it meant that I’d be running straight into it on the home. Not as difficult as I thought, but still draining. Wore the bright yellow shoes I bought last year and promised myself I’d never wear again because they make my feet hurt and calves cramp. They’ve been sitting in the rack all year, and looked so spring-y today that I couldn’t resist trying them again. Will I regret it? Probably. I should donate them instead of trying to make them happen.

10 Things

  1. little kid voices somewhere down in the savanna
  2. empty benches
  3. something glittering through the trees, up ahead — car headlights through the trees at the bend in the road
  4. a faster runner in a white shirt off to the side, heading down to the Winchell Trail — I followed above, watching as they slowly inched out of sight
  5. I don’t remember hearing the falls, just seeing them at a distance, from my favorite spot — white foam, moving rapidly at the corner of my central vision
  6. pale blue water, soft brown trees
  7. dead leaves on the ground — feeling orange to me
  8. the bluff on the other side was mostly brown with a few slashes of white — frozen seeps
  9. branches rubbing and creaking in the wind, sounding less like rusty door hinges and more like whimpering kids: soft, insistent, whiny
  10. running on the winchell trail, about to head up the 38th steps, I looked back and thought I saw someone approaching — nope, just the wrought iron fence

before the run: my blind spot

Yesterday, I read an interview with JJJJJerome Ellis and was inspired by their renaming of their Stutter as clearing:

Ellis’s glottal block stutter—which manifests as intervals of silence in his speech flow—is represented in this interview with the word clearing. Ellis offers this term as an alternative to words like stutter or stammer. Like a clearing in a forest, the stutter, for Ellis, can open a space of gathering between Ellis and the people he is communicating with.

Angel Bat Dawid and JJJJJerome Ellis

After a little digging, I found out more about the clearing and how it works for Ellis in their work:

Stuttering (especially in the form I present with, the glottal block) creates unpredictable, silent gaps in speech. I call these gaps ‘clearings’. Slaves sang in the fields, and whites heard them; but they also sang (and danced) in the woods at night, out of earshot. Undergirding the clearing created by my stutter is that other clearing, in the woods, where my enslaved ancestors stole away to keep healing, resisting and liberating through music – work that I continue today.

The Clearing/ JJJJJerome Ellis

Wow! What an amazing way to think about the stutter. In their follow-up book, the one that introduced me to Ellis, Aster of Ceremonies, they connect the Stutter explicitly with plants and place. I want to connect my blind spot — that growing lack of functioning cone cells in my macula — with water and stone and the gorge. As I try to explain this more, I have so many thoughts, too many words!

Just looked up blind spot and found these exciting definitions:

an area in which one fails to exercise judgment or discrimination

Merriam-Webster online

In this definition, a lack of judgment is a failure. And it is sometimes. But refusing to judge, keeping a space open for listening and beholding and bearing witness without judgment or the reduction of someone or something to a category (discrimination) is also essential.

Another helpful definition:

a portion of a field that cannot be seen or inspected with available equipment

Merriam-Webster online

during the run: my blind spot

I thought about my blind spot every so often as I ran, especially the idea of how it softens and fuzzes my vision. It’s difficult to see with precision, to scrutinize or make detailed observations that encourage me to identify and classify things. As a result, I devote less time to trying to name them, and more time to being with them. Here I’m thinking of Robin Wall Kimmerer and J. Drew Lanham.

I’m sure I had more thoughts, but I didn’t record them. If I had, would I even be able to hear them over the howling wind in any recording I would make today?

after the run: my blind spot

A space without judgment. Back when I was a scholar and teaching queer ethics, I was exploring what an ethics without judgement might look like, one that emphasized room to breathe and, as Judith Butler puts it, good air. I often invoked a quotation from Michel Foucault:

I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep.

The Masked Philosopher/ Michel Foucault

A few days ago, I read something else about not judging from Cole Swensen:

. . . an instance of witness, with witness defined as the act of being present to something, whether it’s an event, a situation, a person, a view. To be present to is to present yourself, to offer yourself, to attend without judgment, opinion, intervention, appropriation or even evaluation, and yet to be present to is not to be passive; it is an act, the act of anchoring the witnessed in history, confirming it, acting as the “second” that fixes it . . . . It is the ear that turns the falling tree to sound.

Walk/ Cole Swensen

Witnessing, being with, beholding. The gorge — a widening gap, a broad space where fires are lit, the grass grows, the wind howls, and river foam scatters. A generous place for holding all of the messy, entangled, conflicting, complicated stories of a place: of preserving and maintaining it, of stealing it, of losing it, of dead mothers who disowned it, of daughters who are attempting to reclaim it, of erosion and transformation and haunting, of a girl losing her central vision and searching for somewhere to be — to feel less alienation and more connection. There’s a lot here!

For the first half of the run, I listened to kids’ voices, for the second half, my “Doin’ Time” playlist. Speaking of time, here’s something great I read by Hanif Abdurraqib about nostalgia:

Another question I was asked about There’s Always This Year was about the use of nostalgia in my work, and the function of it, and I had this long answer I was going to give, but I look back on recent moments, and I realize that a major function of my relationship with nostalgia is actually tied to a committed and principled relationship with my present life. I am in pursuit, often, of a moment I will live and miss before it’s even gone. And the awareness of the longing to come offers me an opportunity to slow down time, to pay closer attention, to say I know something will end, but I would like a vivid catalog of its existence. My favorite Robert Hayden poem is “Double Feature,” which opens its final stanza with “Oh how we cheered to see the good we were / destroy the bad we’d never be.” I love that line. There’s a lot of bad to dismantle, and only some of it is housed within. The world houses the rest, and it is abundant. I require whatever good I can steal and then hoard. It fuels me to the fight(s,) which isn’t the same as a kind of whimsical nostalgia, but it is me saying that I remember there are things I love enough to fight for, even when it doesn’t feel like it. There are things I miss that I haven’t even experienced yet, and I want to get to them, eventually. And then get to what’s next.

instagram post

added later: I want to add these thoughts from an Alice Oswald interview about erosion here, too:

DN: I wanted to switch to another topic that infuses your work, and that is the process of erosion—erosion by water, erosion by wind, erosion by light—the topic of your first Oxford lecture but also, something that feels very present to Nobody. You said in one interview that the anonymity you were striving after for this book was inspired by eroded Cycladic sculptures, sculptures where the features had been nearly washed away. I was hoping you could talk about erosion in relationship to this and to the text.

AO: I suppose that comes back to your question about thinking. The poem conveys a kind of eroded thinking. It’s as if the thoughts have had reality washing away at them; a sentence sets out then gets blown in another direction. Erosion is important to me in that I think poetry has a particular duty and relationship towards time. Poems are miniature human clots I think, they’re full of time keeping in the way that a piece of music is full of timekeeping. In some way, they set their own time but they need to be awake to actual time moving around them. A poem has to offer itself up to the erosion that’s going on in the world. Nobody, more than any of my poems, I think gives in completely to that force of erosion where I would normally try to maintain some human presence in the face of it. I think Nobody allows itself to get weathered to a Cycladic blankness.

This idea of a poem offering itself up to erosion and to being within time, reminds me of something I heard from Jenny Odell the other day in “Another Kind of Time.” She’s talking about how being part of time, having a past, present, and future — and not just being timeless — makes something/someone a subject/actor instead of thing to be commodified/exploited. To be timeless/without time is to lack a context and a life. I’m also thinking about how preventing erosion often requires a sealing up and away from oxygen, water, wind. Erosion and decay are a necessary part of life.

DN: This talk of erosion and time makes me think of that famous Marguerite Yourcenar essay, That Mighty Sculptor, Time. I’m just going to read a couple of lines from it, “On the day when a statue is finished, its life, in a certain sense, begins. The first phase, in which it has been brought, by means of the sculptor’s efforts, out of the block of stone into human shape, is over; a second phase, stretching across the course of centuries, through alternations of adoration, admiration, love, hatred, and indifference, and successive degrees of erosion and attrition, will bit by bit return it to the state of unformed mineral mass out of which its sculptor had taken it.” I was thinking of this when I encountered your interview with Claire Armitstead where you said you think of your poems less as poems than as sound carvings which made me think that the sound these poems were making is eating away at something which then by extension suggests that both the blank page and silence are not really absences in this framing at all but presences.

AO: Yeah, I like that. I’ve always felt that in some way, a poem is really a framing of its silences, that the musical art poetry is all about leading you to those silences in a way that you hear them where normally one doesn’t necessarily hear a silence or an absence, both the sound is eating away that silence but then also, the sounds are, in their own way, erosions made so I let my voice get blown around by the information it’s taken in if you like. The feeling of not quite holding your own. . . .

DN: Let me ask you something about Homer’s syntax that you’ve said in light of sound carvings being a description of your poems. You said about Homer’s syntax, “The tendency of his grammar is therefore cumulative, like a cairn. Each clause is a separable unit. It might be placed loosely on another and held there with a quick connective, but it never loses its essential singleness; which is why you often find that one end of his sentence turns away from the other.” On the one hand, this feels like a process of accretion rather than erosion, an accumulation, but the singleness and the separateness of each component, and that each is surrounded by silence of the white page made me wonder if perhaps, this accumulation is the product of erosion like I imagine the scree that builds at the at the bottom of a cliffside of all the piles of rocks that are single but also part of this erosive process.

I love erosion: I like the way that the death of one thing is the beginning of something else (source).

jan 1/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
15 degrees / feels like 3 / flurries

2025, I’m not sure how I feel about you. Not dread, but not exuberant hope either. I guess I’m trying not to think about you and what you might bring that much. Running beside the gorge helps. Very few, what ifs, many more now and now and nows. Today’s run was great. I was surprised to see that the feels like temp was 3. It didn’t feel that cold. I guess I picked the right layers: 2 pairs of black running tights, a black fleece-lined cap with ear flaps, a gray buff, a faded green long-sleeved shirt, a bright orange sweatshirt, a purple jacket, gray long socks, black short socks, black gloves, pink and white striped gloves. At the halfway point, one pair of gloves came off.

While I ran, I thought about remembering and forgetting and decided when I returned home, my 10 things list would be of things remembered and things forgotten.

10 Things Remembered or Forgotten

  1. I remembered to look down at the river
  2. I remembered what it looked like: steel blue, a few thin sheets of ice
  3. I remembered to stop at the bench above the edge of the world to take in the openness — soft, almost still except for a single leaf fluttering and several leaves sizzling, and was the water moving very slowly or was that just the staticky buzz of my glitching cone cells?
  4. I forgot about my headache
  5. I forgot about my IT band
  6. In mile 3, I remembered my IT band and thought about how it’s impossible to fully forget your body, which is good, because why would I want to do that?
  7. I forgot the election
  8. I remembered to look carefully, and more than once, before crossing from the trail to the grassy boulevard
  9. I remembered to stop at my favorite view of the falls — the water was gushing over the side
  10. I remembered what I overheard above the falls: a dad — no hiking today, a mom: we can take a walk instead!

I suppose it’s easier to remember what you remembered, than to remember what you forgot!

Reading through a past entry from 1 jan 2019, I was reminded of how I used to gather favorite lines at the end of the year and turn them into a new poem. I’d like to do that again this year!

The poems that I’ve been writing this fall about the gorge, are mostly about water and stone, but the open space of the gorge is important too. I’d like to devote some time to it as air, as openness, as possibility, as room to breathe, as Nothingness, as mystery, as inexplicable, as . . . . Here are two different fragments that may or may not turn into something:

When water cut through
rock, sandstone wore away,
limestone broke up, and
an abundance of
air arrived.

*

When water cut through
sandstone and limestone,
it made of the rock
still standing a frame
to loosely hold the
newly formed space. And
what a space! Such an
abundance of air!
Such room to breathe and
to be! Big enough
to hold more than is
seen or imagined
or witnessed with words.

dec 30/WALK

1.5 mile walk with Delia
the gorge, from 36th to 34th
32 degrees / fog

Good job, Sara. You resisted the urge to run. A walk with Delia was wonderful. So quiet and calm and relaxed! Moist, too. I loved breathing in the cool air and almost floating through the fog. All of it, a soft dream. Occasionally I encountered others — some walkers and runners — but mostly it was just us. At one point, descending through the tunnel of trees, which isn’t really a tunnel anymore because they cut it back at some point, the only thing I could hear was a hammer pounding across the road. No cars or voices or striking feet. Wow! Several times, I felt a warm buzz.

10 Things

  1. a white sky
  2. open water
  3. wet asphalt
  4. grass covered in brown leaves
  5. a dark form descending into the ravine — silent, featureless
  6. a brown view of the floodplain forest — all slender trunks and bare branches, no river or sky poking through
  7. a runner in the neighborhood emerging from an alley in a sprint, then returning to the alley, then appearing again, then disappearing around the corner
  8. thump thump thump the striking feet of a runner across the street — the same one? I’m not sure
  9. the silvery sparkle of the sign at the 35th street overlook — is this sign new?
  10. overheard: a woman running alongside a kid on a bike, talking to the kid — you had your pink backpack and your droopy dog stuffed animal — did she say droopy, or some other word?

I wanted to think about my Ars Poetica poem as I walked, and I did, but I’m still stuck. Something about letting things breathe and be exposed to the air to see what happens and erosion and ruins. I’ll give it until the end of the year, and if I’m still stuck, I’ll put it away for a bit.

forget what you are

While reading poet’s Cynthia Cruz’s explanation of how her poem, “Dark Register” is shaped by Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit, I encountered these lines about habit:

“Habit,” in the third stanza refers to Hegel’s concept of habit: the act of repeating an action that, through this repetition, becomes second nature. For Hegel, habit implies forgetting: we forget what we are doing once the action becomes habit.

Cynthia Cruz on “Dark Register”

we forget what we are . . . . I immediately thought of Marie Howe’s beautiful poem, “The Meadow” and her lines about her dying brother:

I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.

But in this world, where something is always listening, even
murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan

in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be
all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget

what you are.

This forgetting also reminds me of Mary Rueffle’s reference to Levi-Strauss’ “unhitching, which I wrote about on may 31, 2023. First, my rough paraphrasing:

unhitching happens in brief moments when we can step outside of or beside or just beyond — below the threshold of thought, over and above society — to contemplate/experience/behold the this, the what it is, the essence of everything, Mary Oliver’s eternity.

Second, a quote from Levi-Strauss in Mary Ruefle:

The possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists … in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society; in the contemplating of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.

Lévi-Strauss quoted MRH page 52

Wow, all of this is making me think of something I wrote, referencing Mary Oliver, about the gorge. Initially I added it on the end of my geologic time poem, and maybe it should stay there and be extended, or maybe it should be another poem? Here are the lines:

Every day this place
erodes the belief
that rock will stand still,
is here forever,
unmoved, unmoving. 
And yet, with its slow 
slight shifts on a scale 
almost beyond her 
comprehension, these 
rocks might be as close 
as the girl can get
to eternity.

So many more connections I could make with forgiveness and forgetting and remembering and now and now and now!