Tag: haunts

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 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 is plays with ideas of decay as erosion and bells with rusted tongues — am I remembering that right?

I hope I didn’t forget anything

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 Baleser

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