Tag: headphones

feb 6/RUN/WALK

6.2 miles
dog park and back
44 degrees

Another warm, spring-like day. More mud, no snow. Overcast. The wonderful sounds of birds. For 2/3 of the run, I listened to cars and my feet striking and voices and water gushing. For the last 1/3, I put in a playlist — Winter 2024.

I felt good — so much better than yesterday. Most of the time, I was zoned out, listening but not looking more than I needed to. I know that I glanced down at the river, but all I remember is that it was open. Somewhere near the shore little strips of snow still remained.

I felt strong and sore and not amazing, but certain that I’d be able to keep running.

A few hours later, RJP and I took Delia on a walk. I often ask and RJP rarely says yes, so today was a nice surprise. We ended up taking the old stone steps down to the river at Longfellow flats — a fitting destination because I just found out today that my poem about these steps and the spot by the river will be published in Scrawl Place. Wonderful news! The poem is titled `112 steps — the number of steps you take to get to the bottom. I counted 111 today, but I think I forgot to count the top step.

added the next morning: I almost forgot about the turkeys! Running south, somewhere near locks and dam no. 1, I saw them: 6 or 7 turkeys crossing the path. One of them sped up to pass before I got to them — a half walk half run that was more efficient than the human version but just as awkward. Hooray for wild turkeys!

peripheral

some notes from The Plentitude of Distraction

William James: (in his Laws of Habit lecture) the ability to experience subtle degrees of emotion depends on practice, on a regular encounter with non-teleological ways of apprehending the world. Once the brain stops cultivating gratuitous pursuits–music, poetry, painting–and limits its range to the recording of facts, to the single-minded quest for information, then its emotional and aesthetic elasticity deteriorates.

Work, unlike leisure, usually follows one direction and points toward a clear goal. This endows it with a reassuring automaticity. Art and play, on the other hand, tap into untried areas of the brain, calling for greater effort and elasticity not readily available to the untrained mind.

He believes in mental, not just physical aerobics, pushing for a veritable gymnastics of the spirit.

what might a poetics and spiritual gymnastics — that involves the body too — look like?

a problem: when attention is more about busyness than wonder

disengaged engagement

a heightened yet singularly unfocused relationship to phenomena

slow, not fast-paced result-oriented engagement, requires a particular sort of endurance — boredom as a necessary step to lasting absorption

endurance exercises to practice — I love this idea of thinking about disengaged engagement as an exercise, one to be added to my exercise plan: runs, core, stretching, building up ways to be distracted

being human means to inhabit a presence-absence mood — detached attentiveness, letting the minor and major coexist, active and passive

listening to furniture music from Erik Satie

Montaigne: no linear thinking, float along with the light, winged flights of fancy…nothing worthwhile can be harvested immediately — important: this type of wandering/distraction is not the same as our current culture of distraction (finger swipes and taps on screens)

Walter Benjamin: delicious idleness

Focus is useless without distraction, and distraction, without motivation and a pinch of single-mindedness, rapidly dwindles into listless lethargy.

Virginia Woolf, from A Room of One’s Own: “It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”

If you set your goals of efficiency and productivity aside, if you stop measuring your days by what you can report to your boss or to your conscience, you might be ready to call your symptoms of distraction by another name—reverie, daydreaming, ruminating.

Now listening to the score for Better Call Saul.

Roland Barthes and emptiness training — stepping away, slowing down, slowly gaining access to a world that will eventually demand focus

inventiveness can only be culled from the outer margins of consumerism

All this talk of slowness and gradual focus and learning how to not understand the plot right away or to make sense of everything instantly is a key part of my seeing through peripheral vision. Or, is it? Could it be more about not seeing, as opposed to seeing differently? I’ll think about that.

key themes for distraction: slow, gradual, idle, non-linear, reverie/daydreaming, a practice/skill

Aerial View/ Jericho Brown

People who romanticize an Africa
They’ve never seen
Like to identify themselves
With lions. It’s all roar and hunt,
Quick fucks and blond manes.
People love the word pride.
Haven’t you seen the parades?
Everybody adores a lion
But me. I want to be a giraffe.
I’m already tall and long-necked.
In the real Sahara, a giraffe beats
A lion’s ass every day
On Instagram. I’ve seen
A giraffe shake the leaping cat
Off its back and toss it like litter.
I’ve seen a giraffe stomp hooves
Down hard on the lion’s face
Before it got the chance
To meow. I want to be a giraffe
And eat greens of every variety
Straight out the tree. I already
Like to get high. Lions need
Animals like us. We need no prey.
I already won’t chase anybody
For my food. But maybe
I can still be romantic. Maybe
I can still be romantic in spite
Of my pride. Someone will notice.
Up the sky, not down the street.
You can watch me while I watch you
And the rest of the savanna
From my aerial view. Lord,
Let me get higher. Just one of me
Is a parade.

What a beautiful poem! I love Jericho Brown’s work and his interviews and the brief podcast he did about Dickinson. I wish I would have been at Emory when he was there — would I have been brave enough to take one of his classes?

feb 2/RUN

4.7 miles
river road trail, north/south
35 degrees

Another beautiful and disturbingly mild late morning. No snow or ice. Glancing over at the gorge, it looked like April not January. Noticed my shadow — first she was in front of me, then behind and off to the side. Heard a pileated woodpecker laughing somewhere above me. Smelled something sour just below me, near the rowing club. Almost slipped on some mud.

I thought about, and tried emphasizing, my peripheral vision as I ran. What did I see? I can’t remember.

Listened to birds and traffic and my striking feet as I ran north. Put in Jesus Christ Superstar running south.

Peripheral

This month’s challenge: peripheral. The first thing I did was to search through my old entries and tag any mention of the peripheral.

The next thing I wanted to do was to create a playlist of peripheral songs, like I did with windows last month, but not much was coming up — except poet-singer Fiona Apple’s excellent Periphery. So, I’m taking a different approach: peripheral music = incidental music or ambient or background music. Maybe even a movie or tv score? Erik Satie’s furniture music (I discovered this term on apple music last year when I was searching for “chill” music). Here’s something about Satie that I found:

the idea of “music to be ignored” was first articulated by Erik Satie, who wrote what he called “furniture music” (musique d’ameublement).   This was music which had no set form and sections could be re-arranged as a performer or conductor wished, much like furniture in a room, and to act as part of the ambiance or furnishings.

Antecedents of Ambient Music

As I write this, I’m listening to one of the most well-known of the background/ambient genre: Ambient 1: Music for Airports by Brian Eno. In an article about ambient music, Open Culture offers these words from Eno in an interview:

“For me, the central idea was about music as a place you go to,” he said in an interview about his recent ambient album Reflection. “Not a narrative, not a sequence that has some sort of teleological direction to it — verse, chorus, this, that, and the other. It’s really based on abstract expressionism: Instead of the picture being a structured perspective, where your eye is expected to go in certain directions, it’s a field, and you wander sonically over the field.”

Hear the Very First Piences of Ambient, Erik Satie’s Furniture Music

Yes! I love things that aren’t driven by a narrow story or purpose — no teleology — but create a place to inhabit. Poems are often described as places — a house or an open field. The idea of the eye (or the ear) wandering through a field immediately makes me think of peripheral vision — it doesn’t offer focused, detailed images, but a broader sense of the whole picture — less the trees, more the forest.

All this writing about ambient music makes me think of one of Eno’s longtime collaborators, Robert Fripp. In 2020, he released an ambient track, culled from his decades of recording, every Friday. I’m listening to a playlist of them on Apple Music right now: Music for Quiet Moments 1: Pastorale (Mendoza 3rd June 2007). I love what Fripp writes about these moments on his blog (I like the design of his blog too!)

Music For Quiet Moments…

I

A Quiet Moment is how we experience a moment: the moment which is here, now and available.

Quiet moments are when we put time aside to be quiet;
and also where we find them.
Sometimes quiet moments find us.

Some places have an indwelling spirit, where quiet is a feature of the space:
perhaps natural features in the landscape;
perhaps intentionally created, as in a garden;
perhaps where a spirit of place has come into being over time, as in an English country churchyard.

Quiet may be experienced with sound, and also through sound;
in a place we hold to be sacred, maybe on a crowded subway train hurtling towards Piccadilly or Times Square.

A Quiet Moment is more to do with how we experience time than how we experience sound.

A Quiet Moment prepares the space where Silence may enter.

Silence is timeless.

II

My own quiet moments, over fifty-one years of being a touring player, have been mostly in public places where, increasingly, a layer of noise has intentionally overlaid and saturated the sonic environment.

III

Quiet Moments of my musical life, expressed in Soundscapes, are deeply personal; yet utterly impersonal: they address the concerns we share within our common humanity.   

Paradoxically, they have mostly taken place in public contexts inimical and unsupportive of quiet.

Some of these Soundscapes are inward-looking, reflective.
Some move outwards, with affirmation.
Some go nowhere, simply being where they are.

Robert Fripp’s blog post

The peripheral as the space/time where these quiet moments are possible.

jan 31/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
43 degrees

Feels like spring today. Sun, warm air, less layers. Today: black tights, black shorts, long-sleeved green shirt, orange sweatshirt, hat, buff, headband.

No gloves. No winter jacket. No snow on the path. Lots of birds and darting squirrels and shimmering water.

I felt sore from the 30 minute workout I did yesterday, but not too sore. Maybe I’ll try it a few more times.

Thought about how strange it was to be running in January with no snow and such warm air. It’s not just that it’s warm today — we’ve had warm days in past Januarys, but that it’s been warm like this for 4 or 5 days and will continue to be this warm for the next week. And, there’s no snow. Bad for the trees; they’re starting to bud. RJP came home the other day from school and told me how one of her friends was very scared about the warm weather — we’re all going to be dead by the time we’re 30, he said. How terrible to be coming of age in this time, when statements like this are felt so intensely by so many people.

Yesterday, while rereading my July entries from 2023, I was reminded of Christina Sharpe’s amazing book, Ordinary Notes. I read it while quarantining for COVID. I posted a note from it on July 4th:

a screen shot of Christina Sharpe's Note 46

I was particularly struck by her discussion of the shift from guilt to grief because Scott and I just watched (on Monday night) a beautiful story on PBS about Rita Davern and her efforts to reckon with her family’s buying of Pike Island, a sacred space for the Dakota people known as Bdote which was illegally “purchased” by Zebulon Pike in 1805. I’m not sure if Rita utters that exact phrase, but the idea of moving from guilt to grief was a big focus. After reading Sharpe’s note again, I decided to find and watch the documentary she mentions, Traces of the Trade. Found it online from my local library — public libraries for the win! — and watched it yesterday afternoon. It was amazing. One thing I kept thinking as I watched it was Marie Howe’s entreaty: don’t look away. Guilt gives us distance and prevents us from witnessing/beholding. Grief enables us to feel — not just the pain of others, but our own pain — the pain of silence, complicity, denial of connection, fear, helplessness.

I’m not a big fan of guilt; it’s not helpful as a foundation for ethics or politics. As I thought this, I suddenly remembered a feminist ethicist I read/liked, back in the day: Elizabeth Spelman. She wrote a chapter titled “Good Grief” and it was about ways of grappling with racism. She was critical of guilt as a response — what did she like instead? I’m sure I have the article somewhere. Oh well.

Speaking of rereading old entries, I’ve been encountering the idea of the peripheral a lot lately. It’s giving me the itch to work seriously on some peripheral poems. Maybe this could be the February challenge? Maybe this poem could get me started?

In Praise of Being Peripheral/ Jane Hirshfield

Without philosophy,
tragedy,
history,

a gray squirrel
looks
very busy.

Light as a soul
released
from a painting by Bosch,
its greens
and vermilions stripped off it.

He climbs a tree
that is equally ahistoric.

His heart works harder.

This last line about his heart working harder reminds me of something else I’m reading: The Plenitude of Distraction. In it, Marina Can Zuylen argues for the value of distraction. In a bit I read last night she praises how the slowness that distraction demands — wandering through the peripheral and away from one’s central task. Maybe I should read this too — I’ll try; it has a lot of words for my weak eyes.

jan 29/RUN

7.3 miles
lake nokomis and back
40 degrees

Sun! Sun! Finally some sun! After days of gloom, sun and warmer air. Birds. Snow all gone. Greenish grass. It feels like spring. An unpopular opinion, but as much as I like this weather, I want some snow. Big fluffy flakes to run through. The silence only a blanket of snow can create. Crisp, cold air. I’m sure we’ll get some in February.

Ran to the lake for a specific reason: I wanted to see if Painted Turtle, the restaurant, has made any progress on building a structure so they can serve beer this summer. Nope — at least, now that I could see.

The lake still has a thick layer of ice, but the surface is wet and blue. Such a beautiful, intense blue. I don’t think I saw anyone out in the middle on the ice — did I just forgot to look? Or is too wet or too thin?

10 Things

  1. Ran over the recently redone duck bridge, noticed it squeaking
  2. a sparkling river
  3. a truck making a racket as it went over a bump — the noisiest part were its rattling chains
  4. no ice on the creek, no water in the swampy area in my favorite part of the path
  5. what I thought was a teacher’s shrill whistle at the playground was a bird, calling repeatedly
  6. still working on nokomis avenue, had to cross over to the sidewalk
  7. lots of mud near the lake — again, no snow
  8. walking by my favorite bench at the big beach, imagining myself sitting there this summer and my suit, waiting for open swim to begin
  9. no poem on the window at the house that used to put up a poem on their front window
  10. many friendly, kind people on the sidewalk moving over for me to pass

Earlier this morning, reading the Longfellow Messenger, I found an article about Edmund Avenue — the one I’ve mentioned many times here. The Edmund is after Edmund Walton who was the first developer to do a racial covenant on the properties he was selling. He did this in 1910. Some people want to change the name. I’m with them. Racial covenants are terrible; we had one on our house that we didn’t realize was there and just filed paperwork to get it removed a few weeks ago. And, it’s not in the past; our neighborhood, and all of Minneapolis, is still shaped by who could and couldn’t buy a home here. The article mentioned a site: Reclaiming Edmund

Found this poem last week:

an excerpt from Poem/ Shin Yu Pai

for Wolfgang Laib

a life
of collecting pollen
from hazelnut bushes
a life of gathering word-grains
to find all you have wanted
all you have waited to say

five
mountains
we cannot climb
hills we cannot touch
perhaps we are only here
to say house, bridge, or gate

a passage
to somewhere else

House, bridge, or gate. Love this idea. I want to add it to my thoughts on windows and doors.

jan 25/RUN

5.1 miles
bottom of franklin hill
37 degrees / humidity: 91%

Fog. Mist. And is that a very light drizzle or just the over-saturated air? Felt cold in the beginning — that damp, gets-in-your-bones cold — but warmed up by the end of the first mile. Waved at Mr. Morning!, said Hi! to Dave, the Daily Walker. Smiled at many other people I encountered. The fog made everything seem muffled, relaxed.

10 Things, Water

  1. beyond the flood plain forest, the river, glowing a silvery white, iced over
  2. small puddles on the path
  3. my forehead was damp for most of the run — not sweat, but drizzle or the damp
  4. in the flats, the river, almost completely open, only a few chunks of bright white ice floating on the surface
  5. the slick sound of water in car and bike wheels
  6. stepped in some squishy mud where snow had melted on the dirt trail
  7. some people down in longfellow flats, right by the river, laughing
  8. hardly any snow anywhere, almost all melted
  9. low visibility, enveloped in fog
  10. my pink headband at the end of the run: soaked with sweat

Before I ran, I started thinking about a hybrid chapbook idea: combining some of my water poems with the moments in my log where they started. I want to call it Waterlogged. Initially I thought I would just use poems about swimming in Lake Nokomis, but as I ran, I thought about all the different water-related things I’ve written, about the fog (yes, this idea was inspired by today’s weather), the crunching snow, the gorge and erosion, sweat/humidity/dew point. Maybe even a 10 Things list about water?

Running north, I listened to the water and my feet crunching on the sandy debris on the trail. Running south, I listened to Dear Evan Hansen.

jan 23/RUN

4.1 miles
minnhehaha falls
31 degrees / 50+% thin, slippery ice
wintery mix

Stepped outside and felt the sidewalk — at first, it seemed fine, but at the end of the block I realized a lot of it was covered in an invisible sheen of ice. Oh well, too late to turn back. It was never really a problem, although it was pretty slick on the cobblestones at the falls. But I didn’t fall; barely even slipped! Waved a greeting to Santa Claus, heard the kids at the playground, noticed 2 people hiking below under the falls. I watched them step over the rope blocking off the trail.

Stopped at my favorite spot to put in a playlist. Before I started running again on the ice, I took this short footage of the falls:

the falls falling between 2 columns of ice / 23 jan 2024

10 Things Not Seen

  1. the thin layer of ice on the sidewalk and the path
  2. the exact temperature, but I knew it was warm because of how energetic the kids on the playground were
  3. a runner, approaching. I thought I had seen a biker so I was looking for them, meanwhile a runner was approaching me and I had no idea. Saw him a couple seconds before I might have run into him
  4. open water — the river is iced over
  5. the light rail, but I heard its bell as I ran through the park
  6. my shadow — too gloomy and gray
  7. light rain falling — barely felt it either
  8. no fat tires or Daily Walkers or bright blue running tights
  9. the woodpecker knocking on dead wood in the gorge
  10. my breath — too warm today for that!

before the run

I was just about to write that I’ve moved on from windows — my January challenge — to assays and not seing but in midst of thinking it I conjured a new version of windows that I’d like to ruminate on for a moment: a window opening. I like the slight difference that exists between an open window and a window opening. An open window is already open, but a window opening captures the moment when the air first enters and new understandings arrive.

Side note: Suddenly while writing this, I remembered a mention of windows that is almost entirely unrelated to the last paragraph except for it involves windows and not knowing how to open them. I just finished the gothic horror novel. A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone else reading this, but near the end some monstrous creatures are attempting to open a window but they don’t know how. If they did, it would be the end for the main character and her companions. I’ve already returned the book (bummer) or I’d post the actual description here of the strong creatures flailing and not understanding the concept of a window — it’s gross and disturbing and compelling and not recommended when you’re eating lunch (which I was).

I’m about to go out for a run. I’ll try to think about opening windows or windows opening.

during the run

I imagined I might have a few moments where something I noticed felt like a window opening. I didn’t. About a mile in, I decided to do triple beat chants with the word: op en ing/ op en ing — then, op en ing/wel com ing/ won der ing. Thought about the openness of opening versus the confinement of closed, or even closing. After chanting opening for a few minutes, I remember lifting out of my hips and leading with my chest — an opening of my body.

after the run

Walking back after I finished my run, I listened to The Woman in the Window. I heard this and it got me thinking:

“And what’s going with the rest of the block?”

I realize I have no idea. The Takedas, the Millers, even the Wassermen–they haven’t so much as pinged my radar this last week. A curtain has fallen on the street; the homes across the road are veiled, vanished; all that exists are my house and the Russells’ house and the park between us.

Not seeing: being so preoccupied/obsessed with something that everything else doesn’t exist.

Then the narrator continued and I thought some more:

I wonder what’s become of Rita’s contractor. I wonder which book Mrs. Gray has selected for her reading group. I used to log their every activity, my neighbors, used to chronicle each entrance and exit. I’ve got whole chapters of their lives stored on my memory card.

Before the run I had been thinking about what it means to not see. I’d also been thinking about what it means for me to see. I might turn both “Not Seeing” and “Seeing” into poems and submit them to Couplet Poetry for their submissions window next month. Anyway, listening to the first bit from The Woman in the Window, I suddenly thought about how an obsession, being preoccupied with something, like whether a neighbor has been murdered, makes one myopic. And then listening to the second bit, I thought about the new way I see by making note of everything, slowly, habitually noticing all the small, seemingly unimportant and peripheral moments. This is how I see now: moment on moment on moment.

Here’s a poem by Jane Hirshfield. It’s in her “assay” form, which I’ve been studying for the past few days. As I understand it, an assay explores, imagines, tries out different meanings of a word or a concept. Is this an assay about “moment” or am I’m misunderstanding the poem?

Assay Only Glimpsable for an Instant/ Jane Hirshfield

Moment. Moment. Moment.

–equal inside you, moment,
the velocitous mountains and cities rising and falling,
songs of children, iridescence even of beetles.

It is not you the locust can strip of all leaf.

Untouchable green at the center,
the wolf too lopes past you and through you as he eats.

Insult to mourn you, you who mourn no one, unable.

Without transformation,
yours the role of the chorus, to whom nothing happens.
The living step forward: choosing to enter, to lose.

I who am made of you only
speak these words against your unmasterable instruction–

A knife cannot cut itself open,
yet you ask me both to be you and know you.

jan 22/RUN

5.8 miles
the flats and back
26 degrees

(added a few hours later): I almost forgot to mention that this entry is my 2000th post. Not every single one of these entries is about a run, but most of them are. Wow. When I started this project to document marathon training in 2017, I had no idea where it might lead! So happy I’m still here writing and running and noticing!

Hooray for warm (but not too warm) mornings and clear paths and flying geese and frozen rivers and runners in electric blue running tights and frozen seeps and weeping springs and brief visits from shadows and squirrels that don’t dart and not slipping on the few spots where there was snow and chirping birds and laughing woodpeckers and clicking blue jay jaws and running down hills then walking back up them and winter playlists and legs and lungs and hearts that work!

A good run. Before the run, I had a brief wave of anxiety — not for any reason. It just came on all of a sudden — feeling strange, tingly, finding it a littler harder to breathe. Peri-menopause and messed-up hormones, I’ve decided. Running helped, partly because moving always helps and partly because I told myself that I wouldn’t be able to run at a 9:30 pace for so long if something was really wrong with me.

I wasn’t sure how far I’d run this morning, but when I got to the bottom of the franklin hill I had an idea: run until you reach a frozen seep. So I did, which made my run a little longer than usual. What a seep! And falling water from a spring. I thought about crossing the road to get closer to the seep, but there’s no curb and the road isn’t that wide and cars drive faster here then they should, so I didn’t. Instead I took some video from the edge of the trail and then I stood still and marveled at the falling and frozen water, and then the height of the bluff.


frozen seep / weeping spring / 22 jan 2024

After the seep, I ran again until I reached the bottom of the franklin hill, then walked up while I recited ideas for a new poem about the idea of not-seeing. One connection to windows: not seeing a window (or glass) and bumping into it. I’ve read several poems that feature birds who run right into the glass and are dazed. Are there any poems about people? I suppose people mostly (always?) run into glass doors not windows. I’ve done it at least once, while I was studying abroad in Japan. The worst thing about running into glass is the grease smudge your face leaves on the glass. It just stays there, staring at you, embarrassing you — not just because it’s evidence that you ran into the glass, but that your face is greasy.

I’m wondering now: what are the most embarrassing things to not see?

Here’s a poem I found from poem-of-the-day that I’d like to remember.

Arequipa/ Ben Okri

Leaves that fall.
Ought to breed
Fire from stone.
The world counts
On our fall.
Our solitude interests
The butterflies
And the lost gold
Of the afternoons.

Ochre and blue walls
And the fading peaks
Of volcanoes
And the sunlight
Plummeting beyond
The hills waken
Leaves to their
Lost trees.

To discover
You still have
A world
To make
At sunset
Sobers
The stones.

Love the brevity of this poem and the double-meaning of the first line: leaves from that fall and leaves that fall down. Arequipa is the second largest city in Peru (south of Lima, slightly inland — 100km from the coast).

jan 13/BIKERUN

bike: 30 minutes
basement
run: 1.15 miles
outside: 7 degrees / feels like -10

A short run today because I’ve run every day this week so far, and because it’s windy and snowy and cold outside. Watched the first 20 minutes of Jennifer Lawrence’s comedy, No Hard Feelings, while I biked. I like her and I’m finding this movie funny so far. I listened to Taylor Swift’s Reputation while I ran. Tried out my new bright yellow shoes for the first time. I like how they feel and how they look. Quite possibly they will be the shoes I wear when I run the marathon next October. I don’t remember thinking about much as I ran — I focused on my arm swing and staying relaxed and lifting my hips. We turned the treadmill the other way a few months ago so now I won’t see my inverted moon on the dark window anymore. What strange image will replace it? I don’t remember any today. But I’ll have to look for one the next time I run on the treadmill, which will probably be on Monday; it might be arctic hellscape cold then.

Emily Dickinson’s Windows

Here are some useful ideas from an article — Emily Dickinson’s Windows — I found yesterday, which seems to be an extended version of an article I read a few days ago:

  • creative freedom
  • architectural prop: By my Window, The Angle of a Landscape
  • her envelope poems resembled a window with curtains
  • a magic lens — the warped quality of 19th century windows: the world let loose, nature liquefied — her practice of looking/writing — up and out the window/down at the paper — descriptions as incremental fragments (A Slash of Blue! A Sweep of Gray!)
  • the window grid creates a pattern — 12 panes — reflected in the formal structure of her poems (degrees, steps, notches, plunges) — each word, line, or stanza is well-defined slot/pane that spotlights an image/emotional state/quality of experience — ’Tis this – invites – appalls – endows – Flits – glimmers – proves – dissolves – Returns – suggests – convicts – enchants Then – flings in Paradise – (Fr 285)
  • an act of undoing in each pane — nature loosening up (a neat frame in a formless center)
  • each pane a diagram of rapture
  • looking through/touching the glass, she connected with the artisans who made it, who left evidence of their labor –warps and striations that were once the artisan’s breath (windows made through glass blowing? wow)
  • glass blowing and imagery of fiery furnaces, metal flames, boiling, white heat
  • mid 19th century — glass consciousness
  • ED’s poems as her own form of glass blowing — creative process of transforming words into poems = making sand into glass into windows

the window grid creates a pattern — 12 panes — reflected in the formal structure of her poems (degrees, steps, notches, plunges) — ’Tis this – invites – appalls – endows – Flits – glimmers – proves – dissolves – Returns – suggests – convicts – enchants Then – flings in Paradise – (Fr 285)

I love this idea of how the windows influenced the form of her writing. Also, the combination of the orderliness/structure of the frame and the unruliness/undoing-ness of her words. It might be fun to use my windows — 2 sets with 2 panes each, a bar in-between the windows, one set in front, one to my right side — as the structure for a few experiments. As I write this, I’m thinking about Victoria Chang’s truck moving across each window frame and Wendell Berry’s black criss-crossed frame.

Here’s a wonderful ED poem that is mentioned in the article:

By my Window have I for Scenery (797) / Emily Dickinson

By my Window have I for Scenery
Just a Sea—with a Stem—
If the Bird and the Farmer—deem it a “Pine”—
The Opinion will serve—for them—

It has no Port, nor a “Line”—but the Jays—
That split their route to the Sky—
Or a Squirrel, whose giddy Peninsula
May be easier reached—this way—

For Inlands—the Earth is the under side—
And the upper side—is the Sun—
And its Commerce—if Commerce it have—
Of Spice—I infer from the Odors borne—

Of its Voice—to affirm—when the Wind is within—
Can the Dumb—define the Divine?
The Definition of Melody—is—
That Definition is none—

It—suggests to our Faith—
They—suggest to our Sight—
When the latter—is put away
I shall meet with Conviction I somewhere met
That Immortality—

Was the Pine at my Window a “Fellow
Of the Royal” Infinity?
Apprehensions—are God’s introductions—
To be hallowed—accordingly—

The pine tree as a sea with a stem? I love this idea!

jan 12/BIKERUN

bike: 10 minute warm-up
basement
run: 3.5 miles
river road, south/north
9 degrees / feels like -5
wind: 13 mph/ 24 mph gusts

Sometimes running when it’s this cold isn’t that difficult, especially when there’s sun and no wind. Today there was no sun* and plenty of wind and it was hard. Not all of the time, but often.

But who cares when the river looks like it does today?! Half covered in ice, mostly gray and brown, open and vast.

And who wouldn’t want to be out here when the geese are flying overhead, their honks swirling around all of us below, sounding mournful and harsh and wild?

And who isn’t grateful to have an almost empty trail — no thoughts or distractions, only a few other people, and most of them below on the lower path?

*I guess there was some sun, but it was hidden behind the clouds. The only time I noticed it was when I was running north up a hill straight into the wind — I saw the faintest trace of my shadow. Hello friend! If I wasn’t paying attention or if I hadn’t trusted what I saw, I might not have noticed her.

Listened to the cold as I ran south — what does the cold sound like? jagged breaths, sharp sounds suspended, silence. Listened to my Window playlist running back north.

Windows can certainly change lives in all sorts of ways. “Faith goes out through the window when beauty comes in at the door,” quips the English philosopher George Edward Moore. “Well,” says Julie Andrews, not yet breaking into song, but you never know, as she gazes out onto those hills alive with something, “when one door closes, another window opens.” She’s opened us onto the window of film, so how best to set the scene? “An actor entering through the door, you’ve got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you’ve got a situation.” says Billy Wilder.

Pleasure and Pane: songs about windows

This article offered a lot of great suggestions for window songs to add to my playlist, which is now over an hour.

window playlist

  1. Window/Fiona Apple
  2. Window/Genesis
  3. Smokin’ Out the Window/Silk Sonic
  4. Keep Passing the Open Window/Queen
  5. Lookin’ Through the Windows/Jackson 5
  6. I Threw a Brick Through a Window/U2
  7. When I’m Cleaning Windows/George Formby
  8. Skyscraper/Demi Lovato
  9. At My Window Say and Lonely/Billy Bragg & Wilco
  10. My Own Worst Enemy/Lit
  11. Junk/Paul McCartney
  12. In a Glass House/Gentle Giant
  13. Belly Button Window/Jimmy Hendrix
  14. Look Through Any Window/The Hollies
  15. The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)/Missy Elliott
  16. One Way Out/Sonny Boy Williams
  17. Silhouettes/The Rays
  18. The Glass/Foo Fighters
  19. Tip Toe Thru’ the Tulips/Annette Hanshaw
  20. Waving Through a Window/Dear Evan Hanson
  21. Open a New Window/Mame
  22. Open Your Window/Ella Fitzgerald
  23. Fly Through My Window/Pete Seeger

Today I put the playlist on shuffle and heard: 3, 5, 10, 16, 2, 9

an hour later: Not for the first time, I’m starting to read an article about Emily Dickinson’s windows. It’s really good, but dense, so I’ve always put it off. Will I get through it today? Maybe. Anyway, I started reading it, and encountered a map of Amherst with a note: The Dickinson house is circled in red.

an old black and white image (lithograph?) of Amherst, with Emily Dickinson's house circled in red. The only way I'm able to see the circle is if I put the computer screen up to my face and look at it through my peripheral vision.
Amherst, 1886

Can you easily see the red circle? I can’t. The only way I am able to see it is if I put my face up right against the screen and look at it through the side of my eye. Only then do I see a trace of red — the idea of red. Once I see (or feel?) the red, I can see a faint circle and I can tell that it’s red, but it’s not RED! but red?

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

Back to the image with the red circle. The main point of the image is to enable you to quickly and easily see where the Dickinson home is located in the town. If I hadn’t read the text below it, I never would have known there was a circle, and the main point of the image would be lost on me. This happens a lot. Things that are obvious to most people, aren’t to me. More than that, they don’t exist. Of course it’s very frustrating and difficult, but it’s also fascinating to recognize this, and helpful to understand it.

jan 11/RUN

4 miles
almost to franklin and back
15 degrees / feels like 0

Okay winter! A good run even though my legs felt heavy and tired for the first mile. And I was cold — felt it in my lungs. Saw Dave, the Daily Walker, and when he asked, how are you doing?, I replied: I’m cold! To which he said, that’s Minnesota or something like that. The sun was out today and I think I remember admiring my shadow. Heard some strange, almost strangled, noises down in the gorge. Probably honking geese, or maybe a feral kid having fun? Encountered at least one fat tire, a few walkers, no roller skiers. The walking path was covered in slippery snow, but the bike path was almost completely clear. The sky was blue, the trees were empty, the river was? I know I looked at the river, but I don’t remember what color it was or if it had more ice on it.

layers I started in: 2 pairs of black running tights; a bright green tank top; a previously bright green base layer shirt with the sleeves over my thumbs; a purple jacket zipped up to my chin; a pink and orange buff covering my neck and ears; a black cap with fleece lining and ear flaps down; gray socks; raspberry red shoes; 2 pairs of gloves — inner ones were black, outer bright pink with white stripes.

layers I ended in: 2 pairs of black running tights; a bright green tank top; a previously bright green base layer shirt pushed up on my arms a little; a purple jacket unzipped a few inches; a pink and orange buff around my neck; a black cap with fleece lining and ear flaps up; gray socks; raspberry red shoes; 1 pair of black gloves — the bright pink ones were in my pocket.

Listened to my breathing, cars, geese as I ran north. Put in my new “Windows” playlist (see below) on the way back south.

Interruption: An Assay/ Jane Hirshfield

Sometimes you took the shape
of an unseen mosquito,
sometimes of illness.

Presumed most of the time to be passing,
yet importunate as a toddler
who demanded her own way,
as a phone that would not stop ringing long after it should.

Unignorable pavement slap of the gone-flat tire.

All afternoon the thunder was interrupted by sunshine.
All night the rain was interrupted by trees and roofs.

And still, as rusting steel is uninterrupted by dryness
and hunger uninterrupted by sleep,
interruption and non-interruption sat in the day’s container
as salt sits in milk, one whiteness disguised by another.

As a fish in a tank is interrupted by glass, and turns,
a person’s fate is to continue
despite,
until.

Death: an interruption not passing,
weighing
one hundred and fifty-eight pounds,
carried on cut plywood with yellow straps.

Birth: an interruption between
two windows,
trying to think of any joke, any tune, that is new.

Between them:

this navigation by echolocation and lidar,
the weathers of avalanche, earthquake, tsunami,
firestorm, drought;
a moment that sets down—gently, sleepily—its half-read novel
on a bedside table whose side turned toward the wall stays unpainted,
confident the story will be there again come morning.

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

my own interruption

Sitting at my desk, in front of my window, half-listening to the latest Foo Fighter album, an interruption — lyrics: there is something between us/I see right through/waiting on the other side of the glass. A window interrupting me! It’s strange how interruptions work. I’ve written/taught/spoke about the learning to let the world interrupt you. Maybe it’s not about letting the world interrupt you — it will do that anyway — but being open to that interruption, letting it in — opening the window to it?

a few more random window references that recently interrupted me:

  • Maria in The Sound of Music: “When the Lord closes the door, somewhere he opens a window.”
  • She Came in Through the Bathroom Window/ The Beatles
  • My Own Worst Enemy/ Lit — came in through the window last night (thanks Scott)

With all three of these examples, I’m thinking about the window and how it’s not a door. And in The Beatles and Lit examples there’s something not-quite-right, not normal, unacceptable about entering through the window. Using the window instead of the door is another way of saying something about your life is fucked up.

  • unrelated to these other examples, the scene of the window in The Amityville Horror– 1979 (iykyk) — I still think about that window falling on the kid’s hand sometimes. I’m not sure I’ve seen the whole movie — maybe I watched this bit on HBO and was too freaked out to watch the rest?
window pain!

Okay, now I want to make a window playlist to listen to as I think more about windows! (after the run): I did, and I listened to the first

Window/Fiona Apple
Window/Genesis
Window/Mountain Man
Smokin Out the Window/Silk Sonic
Keep Passing the Open Windows/Queen
Lookin’ Through the Windows/Jackson 5

jan 10/RUN

4.85 miles
minnehaha falls and back
23 degrees / feels like 16

Yes! A much better run than yesterday. My legs were sore at the beginning, but the path was clear and I had enough layers to keep warm. As I ran south, I noticed the river was gray — pewter, I think — or was it steel?

Heading towards the falls, I listened to the kids laughing on the playground, the rushing water at the falls, and the ding ding dinging of the light rail bells leaving the station. Heading home, I listened to a playlist (10K 2018). First song: Vampire Weekend’s “Step.” Memorable line: they don’t know how to dress for the weather

10 Things

  1. smoke coming from the house on edmund that always smells like smoke in the winter
  2. a woodpecker’s laugh
  3. pewter river
  4. city workers across the road near becketwood — what were they doing?
  5. the big dip on the edge of the biking path, almost to Godfrey, has finally been patched
  6. a man — not driving an official truck or wearing an official uniform — emptying the cash out of parking meter kiosk near the old Minnehaha depot
  7. traffic rushing by on hiawatha
  8. the creek was dark and open, no ice, just a little foam
  9. 2 humans and a small dog, walking across the grass near the falls
  10. a fast running speeding by me as I stood at my favorite falls spot and put in my headphones

the windows I encounter while running outside:

  • familiar houses, on the route I take almost every day — does a neighbor notice me (like I notice the runners and walkers that pass by my window) and think, there goes that woman running again, or maybe they mark their day with my run: she ran past, time for another cup of coffee
  • car windows — I can’t ever see in these windows — I never visualize people, just imagine what they might be thinking: I wish I was out there running or Why would anyone run in this weather?
  • John Steven’s house windows — are they boarded up from the fires last year?
  • Minnehaha Depot windows
  • Light rail windows — could anyone on the train see me from that far away

question: Do windows have to have glass to be windows? Is an empty frame enough?
answer: Yes? one def: an opening especially in the wall of a building for admission of light and air that is usually closed by casements or sashes containing transparent material (such as glass) and capable of being opened and shut

The other day I wrote in my Plague Notebook, Vol 18: post-pandemic window poems? And here’s something great that’s not a poem. I found it on my reading list in the 21st spot.

The window as isolation, shelter, protection, connection to the outside world, hope, longing. So many wonderful things happening in this story (essay?)! Instead of just posting it, I want to comment on each window.

APRIL 2020, FROM MY WINDOWS/ Kleopatra Olympiou

Second floor window, across:
A man who plays the piano at all times of the day, his keyboard by the window. I see the staccato movement of his fingers but hear no sound. His expression is thoughtful and I can’t say if the notes are right, if he’s pleased, or what he’s feeling. Sometimes he plays in his underwear and I avert my gaze. He could see me if he looks up, but never does – it’s dusk and I have the lights on. When he turns his own light off and leaves the room, I catch a reflection of myself doing the dishes in the mirror at the back of his bedroom.

details that strike me: no sound — why not? too cold (or hot) to have the window open? he has headphones on? my choice: her apartment is sealed up tight — isolation; the piano player’s expression is unreadable or empty; the narrator averts her eyes; the narrator has her lights on, is on display, but he never looks; that reflection of herself in his mirror — wow

Window next door, a wall away from the pianist:
Sometimes, a woman looking bored on her laptop. Most of the time the curtain is drawn, and in the darkness all I can see is the yellow that leaks out. This window doesn’t want to be looked at, so I leave it alone.

the yellow that leaks out; the way the narrator respects the bored looking woman’s privacy; again, no sound

Next door, downstairs:
A living room I often catch in the cool half-light of the TV screen, watching the rippled colour move like the walls of an aquarium. Submerged and elsewhere. On the half-obscured sofa to the right I glimpse a hand slowly stroking a bare calf.

submerged and elsewhere; the stroking hand/stroked calf; limited vision: the cool half-light, half-obscured sofa, disembodied hand and calf

To the left, first floor:
A guy in his twenties, probably, laughing into a video call, or he’s taking a selfie, or updating his Instagram story, I can’t be sure since he quickly lowers his arm and loses the grin. For a long time he types on his phone.

no sound, no clear understanding of what’s happening

In the street in front:
The pavement is partly overgrown with weeds, and in the morning I watch a father and young son diligently clear them away. Through the glass I can’t hear what they’re saying. The boy gesticulates energetically from somewhere within the depths of a coat, hat, gloves, wellies. His dad laughs, and with thick gardening gloves brushes the rough shavings of soil out of the way. The boy is serious when he nods his approval – this is no game, but real community service.

an acknowledgment of the lack of sound: through the glass I can’t hear, people outside — only one window (narrator’s) between them

Further left, in a garden:
A middle-aged man waters some flowers while a woman refills a birdfeeder with seeds. Soon they go back indoors and I can see nothing but the glaze of the white sky on their window.

women outside (one window), visible, women go back inside (two windows — the women’s the narrator’s), hidden by the reflection of sky in a window

From my living room window:
Three veterinary nurses in green uniforms walking dogs on the grass by the graveyard. They play fetch and the dogs fire off into the trees – soon they all go, and will return tomorrow, and the day after.

even if the window tightly shut, can’t you hear the dogs barking? dogs are LOUD.

From the same window, later in the afternoon:
A woman and a little girl stand in front of a fresh grave, neat and lined with wood. Some days ago I watched a man from the church shovel grass and dirt away, and another day five figures gathered while a priest read mutely from an open book. The priest and his book went away to the church (chimney smoking) and, among the guests, I stood silent at my window, part of the ceremony. Today only the woman and the girl visit the grave, holding hands.

the narrator was part of the ceremony

It is dusk again at the living room window:
A magpie stops on one of the bony branches across, later a crow, a pigeon, a robin. In the distance I see the white bobbing of rabbits running among the tombstones.

Birds! a tree branch, a bobbing rabbit (nice work, resisting the impulse to write, bobbing bunnies

Then there is me, quarantined and at my nightly window, weaving my hair into a braid:
I listen to the creaks in the kitchen and Google my building, searching for estate agent photos of the other apartments, trying to piece together a virtual whole. I imagine a flat identical to mine next door, inverted – maybe the silent neighbours I’ve never spoken to are also at their windows, looking out. Maybe the pianist can see us, our kitchens a wall apart, divided. In my living room the curtains are never drawn. At night I sit illuminated and hope, for something.

sound — a creaking kitchen, silent neighbors

And, one more window thing. I’m slowly reading through Wendell Berry’s Window poems. Here’s 15. So good!

15. / Wendell Berry

The sycamore gathers
out of the sky, white
in the glance that looks up to it
through the black crisscross
of the window. But it is not a glance
that it offers itself to.
It is no lightning stroke
caught in the eye. It stays,
an old holding in place.
And its white is not so pure
as a glance would have it,
but emerges partially,
the tree’s renewal of itself,
among the mottled browns
and olives of the old bark.
Its dazzling comes into the sun
a little at a time
as though a god in it
is slowly revealing himself.
How often the man of the window
has studied its motley trunk,
the out-starting of its branches,
its smooth crotches,
its revelations of whiteness,
hoping to see beyond his glances,
the distorting geometry
of preconception and habit,
to know it beyond words.
All he has learned of it
does not add up to it.
There is a bird who nests in it
in the summer and seems to sing of it–
the quick light among its leaves
–better than he can.
It is not by his imagining
its whiteness comes.
The world is greater than its words.
To speak of it the mind must bend.

some thoughts:

WB’s glance can’t capture what the sycamore is

love this:
lightning stroke caught in the eye as description of seeing

the tree emerges at a different pace — not fast/immediate/NOW! that we expect with our glances
emerges partially — dazzle coming into the sun a little at a time

the man of the window

beyond his glances
the distorting geometry of preconception and habit?
beyond words
more than what he has learned/seen/understands
the bird here reminds me of A.R. Ammons and his discussion of language in garbage — see april 10, 2023

mind must bend? be at a slant (Emily Dickinson)?

jan 5/RUN

5.15 miles
bottom of franklin hill turn around
30 degrees

Yes! A great run. A brief runner’s high around mile 4. At the beginning it felt cold, but almost early spring-like: chirping birds, soft shadows, humid air, clear paths. In certain spots the path was dotted with ice.

Passed a group of 4 or 5 runners twice. Smelled cigarette smoke. Watched a car driving over the I-94 bridge. Listened to the group of women laughing, cars passing, ice sizzling heading north. Put it Billie Eilish essentials on the way back — maybe I’m, maybe I’m, maybe I’m the problem.

Something to try today, from Richard Siken: one image

The heart of lyric poetry is music and image. Music is hard to talk about but image is easy. It’s not too late to start an exercise. Write down one image every day that was striking. It’s good as a resource to pull from for writing or just for remembering. Date them. >

Today’s image: sizzling ice on the river chunks? sheets? just starting to form, floating on the surface. I took a video:

ice on the mississippi / 5 jan 2024

Standing there, holding my phone, the ice was moving slowly downstream and sizzling. In the video, I can’t see it moving and all I can hear is the traffic from the I-94 bridge just above. I wish I just kept the phone still; it’s moving around too much. The sizzle sounded like the sizzle I heard in my head after I fainted last week. A sizzle or crackle or static-y sound. The movement of the ice was slow and gentle and persistent (or insistent?).

windows and doors

Yesterday, it came to me: windows and doors. That’s what the theme for January should be. Will it stick? Not sure, but today I begin by thinking about windows and doors as I ran. I held onto a few thoughts and recorded them into my phone right after I finished my run:

Windows as in the frame and how often I see what’s just outside of the frame because I feel it off to the far edge (mainly because of my heightened peripheral vision).

A door as being open — focus on what’s through the other door, the room on the other side, as opposed to the door as framing what you see. Whereas the window is about the frame and about this thing in between you and the is/real. The frame is language, our access to the real. The framing of something as a useful limitation, helping to focus a form. The window is a form where the energy goes, where it’s held in, so the poem still has heat.

I’ve collected door and window poems before on this log, so this isn’t a new idea, I’m just adding to it. Here’s a door and window poem for today — actually, an excerpt from an amazing poem by Victoria Chang:

excerpt from Today/ Victoria Chang

Feb.10.2022
Today the river is in crisis, no
horizon dares to go near it. Today
my father is in a small jar. At dusk,
I went into a painter’s studio,
saw his stretched canvas on the table, white,
empty. What are we without those who made
us? May his memory be your blessing,
people emailed me all week. The artist
was painting a series of doors, which were
so real that I walked through the one that was
slightly open. Inside the room was my
breath that I had held since January
13, an eyelid, a loose eyeball, the
knob the eye fell on, the girl’s hands that tried
to catch him, which were charred and still waving.

Feb.11.2022
The white truck went from one frame to the next
and I thought of the time when someone lied
about me. How day and night I cared so
much about the lie that it split into
two, one part went out the left window frame,
the other out the right. Like the blue car
that disappears at the same time as the
white one, yet I can see both at once. When
they burned my father’s body, I wondered
if the eyeballs spread so far on each side
that they could see Wyoming, these two panes,
me on a small brown chair, looking out the
windows, waiting for oblivion to
travel through with its eighteen wheels and truth.

Feb.12.2022
At the beginning of our family tree
was hope. Or maybe it was just an owl.

Feb.13.2022
The same wind was blowing here eighty years
ago, always snapping families in half.

Feb.14.2022
If I keep the window closed, I am stuck
inside with language as it buzzes back
and forth, trying to get out and start wars.

First, so much of what she writes here (and in the rest of the poem) is echoed in other things I read earlier today and yesterday by Viola Cordova and Jake Skeets. Wow.

Second, at the beginning of the poem, Chang writes: On Kawara’s “Today” Series. Looked it up and found: Paintings: Today Series / Date Paintings

On January 4, 1966, On Kawara began his Today series, or Date Paintings. He worked on the series for nearly five decades. A Date Painting is a monochromatic canvas of red, blue, or gray with the date on which it was made inscribed in white. Date Paintings range in size from 8 x 10 inches to 61 x 89 inches. The date is composed in the language and convention of the place where Kawara made the painting. When he was in a country with a non-Roman alphabet, he used Esperanto. He did not create a painting every day, but some days he made two, even three. The paintings were produced meticulously over the course of many hours according to a series of steps that never varied. If a painting was not finished by midnight, he destroyed it. The quasi-mechanical element of his routine makes the production of each painting an exercise in meditation.1 Kawara fabricated a cardboard storage box for each Date Painting. Many boxes are lined with a cutting from a local newspaper. Works were often given subtitles, many of which he drew from the daily press.

Paintings: Today Series / Date Paintings

In the article, I also found this classroom activity suggestion:

Subtitle Your Days

Many of the Date Paintings have subtitles. Some of these titles record personal anecdotes, such as “I played ‘Monopoly’ with Joseph, Christine and Hiroko this afternoon. We ate a lot of spaghetti” (January 1, 1968). Others record current events, some of them momentous, such as the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Still other subtitles refer to the Date Paintings themselves; one reads, “I am afraid of my ‘Today’ paintings” (May 29, 1966). For this activity, challenge students to record a subtitle for each day of the week for two weeks. These subtitles can be personal, historical, or even arbitrary. What is it like to capture a day with a subtitle?

I like the idea of combining Siken’s suggestion of an image a day with Kawara’s date poems and Chang’s reading of the date as a door into somewhere else. A date as door, an image as door.

jan 1/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
24 degrees
95% snow-covered

Today Scott and I are signing up to run the marathon on October 6, 2024. I believe that the third time will be the charm; I will finally show up to the start line.

Today’s run was a good way to start the new year. Last year had its terrible lows (Scott’s dad dying) and some wonderful highs (being nominated for a pushcart prize). What will 2024 bring? I’ve decided not to be scared or to spend too much time dreading next year’s election. This year is about running and poetry and finding new ways to connect with the world, words, people, a place.

The path was almost completely covered with a thin layer of soft, dry snow. Not slick, but a little difficult in the spots where the snow had covered the potholes. The trick was to notice where the snow was thicker, whiter: that’s where it had accumulated in the potholes.

Greeted a lot of other runners and walkers, noticed the steel blue river — open, no ice, listened to soft crunch of the snow, cars passing by, random voices, the collar of my jacket rubbing against the ear flaps of my cap.

Heard a runner say the number 27. Also heard a noise under the ford bridge that I couldn’t quite identify: brittle clacking which could have been ice or frozen leaves being moved by the wind. Heard the falls rushing over the limestone ledge and at least one kid being obnoxious.

Earlier today I was remembering words related to glitter, like glint and glisk, which is a gleam of light through a cloud. As I ran south, nearing Locks and Dam no. 1, I felt a glisk above me.

I don’t remember any bikes or birds or skiers. No squirrels or music. A few dogs.

Oh–right above the falls I noticed a person with a walker in a bright red coat. I almost called out, I love your red coat!, but I thought better of it. It’s quite possible that the coat wasn’t red but some other color. A strange side effect of my vision: the more wrong I am about something, the more likely I am to announce it to others. Why? I’m not sure.

random thing for future Sara to remember: Over the holiday, there’s been a series of cycle-cross races in Europe, which is biking on a looped course that involves mud and hopping over bumps and carrying bikes up stairs and ruts and steep hills and extremely tight turns. They keep coming up on youtube, and I keep watching them. Very fun to watch. I can’t imagine ever being able to do one of these races. So scary and technical and demanding!

one more thing: I had to return a few hours later to this log to add something I forgot. Geese! In my last mile, running on Edmund, I heard some honking so I stopped running and looked up. A few seconds later, a vee of geese high in the gray sky. A car passed as I stood there, on the edge of the road. Did they wonder what I was doing?

dec 30/RUN

3.1 miles
43rd, north/32nd, east/river road trail, south/42nd, west/edmund, north
29 degrees

My first run since last Sunday, partly due to travel, partly feeling sore. A great winter run. Cold, with layers, but not too cold. And no ice or snow or bad trail conditions. Before we went out for our run, Scott put together his marathon plan for this year — we’ve decided to try again. My goal: to make it to the start line next October, healthy. Should I come up with some sort of a plan? If I did, I imagine it would combine running, walking, and poetry.

As we ran, we talked about how the river road stops being red at certain points where the county or city or state (I can’t remember what Scott said) takes over. In those spots the road is black asphalt. Then I mentioned that we had had a very similar conversation 2 or 3 years ago. Then we talked about time looping and repeating yourself and when it’s ritual, when it’s being stuck in a rut.

10 Things

  1. open, brown river (no ice or snow)
  2. a scratching noise — not roller skier poles but the drum beat on a rap song that 2 white women were blasting as they ran by — wow
  3. one or two patches of ice on the sidewalk by edmund
  4. a runner in a bright orange sweatshirt or jacket, glowing in the gloom
  5. a light grayish-blue sky, everything darker — not feeling like day or night, but some in-between time
  6. a few flurries
  7. pothole 1: what started as a small hole has gotten bigger and deeper every year. 2 years ago they tried to patch it, but it didn’t work. The orange spray paint they used to outline a few years before that has faded, near the oak savanna
  8. pothole 2: at the spot where the bike and walking paths separate, less a pothole, more a deep gash 3 or 4 feet long. Every year they circle it with white spray paint — the shape of paint resembles a tube sock
  9. passing a woman who swung her arm out awkwardly like Dave — wasn’t sure for a minute — could it be Dave? no
  10. looking down at the floodplain forest, pointing out the clear view of the forest floor to Scott. He said if he looked he might faint: vertigo

Winter Song/ Wilfred Owen

The browns, the olives, and the yellows died,
And were swept up to heaven; where they glowed
Each dawn and set of sun till Christmastide,
And when the land lay pale for them, pale-snowed,
Fell back, and down the snow-drifts flamed and flowed.

From off your face, into the winds of winter,
The sun-brown and the summer-gold are blowing;
But they shall gleam with spiritual glinter,
When paler beauty on your brows falls snowing,
And through those snows my looks shall be soft-going.

I like the focus on winter colors in this poem and the idea of snow as flamed and flowing and shift from sun-brown and summer-gold into spiritual glinter and how his looks are soft-going. I might need to use that expression for how I see: soft-going.

dec 24/RUN

3.1 miles
edmund, south/river road trail, north/32nd, east/44th, south
52 degrees

52 degrees! Shorts and one bright yellow long-sleeved shirt! Wow. Scott and I couldn’t pass up the chance to run in shorts in December, so we went out for a 5k. It really doesn’t feel like Christmas.

We talked about the terrible meal we had last night when we went out dinner (Scott’s fish was completely raw) and the double half marathon (a 1/2 in minneapolis one day, in eu claire the next) that Twin Cities in Motion is advertising for April and the time I was running up the hill and a barefoot kid raced me for a few seconds.

Other things I remember: the river was blue and open, the sidewalk on 32nd was in bad shape, the floodplain forest didn’t have any ice, there were a few stones stacked on the big boulder, the colors — rusty green — on the wet boulder near the bench.

Here’s poem I encountered this morning. I love the brevity and the title and the magical moment of hope that it captures.

IN MY DREAMS I BAKE A CROQUEMBOUCHE FOR CHRISTMAS / Megan Williams

& the caramel sticks to my hands & my hands stick to my cheeks & everyone marvels at my choux pastry magic & no one asks what I am going to do with my sad, sorry life

dec 23/RUN

4.3 miles
franklin loop
43 degrees / 95% humidity

Another Saturday run with Scott. We talked about visiting my dad and seeps and the distance from Minneapolis to Seattle versus Seattle to Alaska and Alert, the northernmost town of 2000 people in Northern Canada and different National Park designations. The sky was a heavy white. At the beginning of the run, it was misty and damp. Looking out at the river from the bridge, everything looked soft and fuzzy and barely formed. We encountered a roller skier, lots of walkers, a few runners. Heard some water gushing out of the rock or sewer pipes.

2 happy people with hats on the franklin bridge with the misty and foggy water of the mississippi river in the background
during the run / 23 dec 2023

dec 22/RUN

5.15 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
38 degrees / 93% humidity

Misty with drizzle this morning before the run, misty and damp during it. Everything fuzzy and dreamy, muffled by the wet air. Wonderful weather for a run (rereading this bit an hour later, I realize that it might sound sarcastic. It’s not. I love running in the rain and the mist. There was no wind and it wasn’t too cold.) I felt strong and relaxed and glad to be outside moving.

2 Regulars to greet: Daddy Long Legs and Dave, the Daily Walker. Actually, it might have been 3. I’m not positive but I think I exchanged waves with the women I talked to one day who tried to fix me up with another runner — I called her Mrs. Fixer-Upper, or something like that. Anyway, I exchanged good mornings with DDL for the first time. And then Dave wished me a Merry Christmas — you too! Merry Christmas!

Listened to the dripping and the hum of far off traffic as I ran north. Put in an old playlist for the last mile.

a ridiculous performance

Haven’t made note of one of these for some time — just checked and the last time was last December (14th) and I wrote almost the exact same first sentence! Before getting to the performance, here’s something I wrote on 23 june 2020 explaining my use of the phrase:

This idea of a “rather ridiculous performance” is a line from Mary Oliver’s “Invitation”: “I beg of you/do not walk by/without pausing/to attend to/this rather ridiculous performance.” Maybe I’ll try to make a list of the rather ridiculous performances I encounter/witness?

Today’s ridiculous performance was a guy running up the franklin hill backwards. He was part shuffling part skipping part running up it with a hood on. As I ran down, I could see him ahead of me, but I assumed he was running down the hill. I almost ran into him before I realized he didn’t know I was there. Wow — that would feel strange, I think, shuffling backwards up a hill, unable to see anything you were approaching. I’ve heard of people running backwards for training or coming back from an injury. Was that what this person was doing?

10 Things

  1. a thin mist/fog hovering in the air
  2. new graffiti all over one of the franklin bridge support posts
  3. a walker and their dog crossing the river road then taking the steps down to the muddy Winchell Trail
  4. no chain at the top of the old stone steps, blocking the way down to the river — I bet it’s slippery today!
  5. ice on the edges of the river, below, near longfellow flats
  6. no stones stacked on the boulder
  7. all of the benches were empty
  8. halfway down the hill, I noticed some stairs on the other side of the road I’ve never noticed before. Were they leading to the franklin terrace dog park?
  9. June’s white ghost bike was hanging from the trestle
  10. bright car headlights cutting through the foggy mist

seeps

Before the run, I was reading about seeps and springs. Decided to think about them and why I might want to be one as I was running. In particular I was interested in how being a seep is different than becoming a boulder, which I’ve already written about. I recorded my thoughts after running up the franklin hill.

As I ran down the hill, I thought about how gravity pulls water down. A line: no need to navigate. Spilling over, onto, into. Always exceeding. Relentless. Opening up, making room, creating space. Never encased, contained, fully controlled. Slow, steady, drip drip drip. Saturates, permeates, soaks.

The author of article from 1997 I was reading — Along the Great Wall: Mapping the Springs of the Twin Cities — didn’t think too highly of seeps: little, inconsequential, too abundant for mapping. He focused on springs. I like the small, quiet, unassuming nature of seeps. More to think about and push at with that idea.

From a few poems I found after searching for seeps — things that seep: blood, sun, gas, chill, a seeping back in sleep to glorious childhood memories of baseball, water, light, an hour….and this, which made me stop my search so I could post this poem:

Louisiana Line/ Betty Adcock

The wooden scent of wagons,
the sweat of animals—these places
keep everything—breath of the cotton gin,
black damp floors of the icehouse.

Shadows the color of a mirror’s back
break across faces. The luck
is always bad. This light is brittle,
old pale hair kept in a letter.
The wheeze of porch swings and lopped gates
seeps from new mortar.

Wind from an axe that struck wood
a hundred years ago
lifts the thin flags of the town.

I like this idea of the past seeping from/into the present — like the wheezy echo of an old porch swing seeping from a new building.

dec 20/RUN

5.25 miles
ford loop
34 degrees

Yes! Loved my run today — the light! the shadows! It started when I saw some strange patches of white on the sidewalk — what were they? Suddenly I realized: light, coming through the cracks in a fence and landing on the dark, shadowed sidewalk. Very cool.

10 Things: 4 Lights and 6 Shadows

  1. the light coming through the fence
  2. the shadowed sidewalk it landed on
  3. my shadow down in the ravine, running beside the water leading to shadow falls
  4. on the lake street bridge: the sun on the river — sparkling, stretching down river towards the ford bridge
  5. on the ford bridge: the sun illuminating a buoy below me
  6. the shadows of trees on the river
  7. the pointed shadows of the lamps — fuzzy
  8. my shadow running in front of me –sharp
  9. standing on the grass between edmund and the river road, looking across to the east bank, noticing a very white house shining in the sun
  10. the pattern of the railing shadows on the lake street bridge — criss-crossed, sprawled

I felt strong and happy and steady. For the first few miles, I chanted strawberry/raspberry/blueberry over and over. Occasionally I mixed in mystery or history or intellect. At one point, I chanted: a question/is asked and mystery/is solved

I noticed the empty benches, the darting squirrels. Smelled some burnt toast and weed (wow! must have been from a passing car). Heard some voices in the ravine. Didn’t see any Regulars or hear the bells at St. Thomas. Don’t remember birds or bikes. No roller skiers. No overheard conversations.

added over a day later: I forgot that I took some pictures when I stopped briefly on the ford bridge to put in my headphones:

My view from the ford bridge, looking north and down at the Mississippi river. On the right (almost) half of the image is the brownish-greenish shore. On the left, the blue river with dark shadows from the bridge covering it's surface. The shadows are of the columns and are both thick and thin. If I squint hard I can almost see my shadow at the top taking the picture. Is it there, is it just in my imagination?
ford bridge shadows / 20 dec 2023

For the first four miles I listened to kids playing at the church playground, cars driving by, my feet striking the ground. Then I put in Merrily We Roll Along for the last mile.

Letter to Walt Whitman,
Who Painted Butterflies/ Kelli Agodon Russell

In 1942, Whitman’s handmade cardboard butterfly disappeared from the Library of Congress.
It was found in a New York attic in 1995.

Perhaps, you made them as a child—
cardboard butterflies lining your shelves,
hiding in the pockets of the wool pants
you wore only to church.
Maybe you would wake early
to cut cardboard into small waves
forming wings, and antennae appearing
like exclamation points.
Words fluttered from your pen,
cardboard wings dipped in red paint,
holding patterns of words,
the quiet swirl of wind.
Maybe there are thousands
of your butterflies still lingering in attics,
your secret world of paper insects
still hanging by threads.

I wanted to post this poem because I like how it’s set up, with the brief description, then the wondering/imagining about it. A fun exercise to try: when I find an interesting fact (here I’m thinking about the monarch butterflies that avoid a mountain in lake superior that’s been gone for more than a century), write a poem that speculates/imagines/creates a story around it.

dec 19/RUN

4 miles
curved railing (north) and back*
30 degrees / feels like 22

Wow, what a beautiful morning for a run. Sunny and clear and cold, but not too cold. So many shadows to admire! My favorite was the first one I noticed — from a slender tree, so thin it looked more like a pencil line. I started noticing the trees by how thick their shadows were. Then, when I reached the river, I moved onto the shadows of fence posts. The split rail fence above the ravine made such crooked shadows — no straight lines where rails were leaning or bent. The street lamps shadows almost looked menacing — so sharp, stretched across the path. My shadow was sharp too — clear and confident. Saw squirrel shadows but no bird shadows.

10 Things (other than shadows)

  1. below in the ravine, the water was frozen
  2. a strange howling call from below at longfellow flats — an animal? or a person pretending to be an animal? I looked, but couldn’t see anyone
  3. in the sun the darting squirrels looked silver or white
  4. a stutter step when I squirrel jumped out at me, then turned back
  5. as I ran south, some white thing out of the corner of my eye kept calling out, notice me! So I did: it was an arch of the lake street bridge
  6. walking below on the winchell trail, I encountered (not for the first time) the trunk of a tree in the middle of the trail — wide and tall — 12 feet? jagged at the top
  7. the knock of a woodpecker somewhere below, closer to the river — not sharp, but soft faint, almost an echo
  8. good morning Dave! / morning Sara!
  9. looking down at the floodplain forest, I could see many fallen trees and branches
  10. nearing the bottom of the hill that rises up and out of the tunnel of trees, I saw the bright, burning light of the river far ahead — I knew it was the river, but imagined it might be sky

I listened to strange howls as I ran north, then put it in Merrily We Roll Along as I ran south to home.

Before turning around, I hiked down to the curved fence above the ravine on the Winchell trail and took a few pictures. Then I stood there, looked down at the river, and felt delighted and satisfied, so glad to have gone out for a run this morning and then stopped to take in this view.

A view of the mississippi river. The top third of the image is just BLUE!--a beautiful blue sky. Below the blue is mostly the light brown of the east bank, then the whiteish-tan of the sandy shore. On the edge between the blue sky and brown branches in the left corner is the tower at Prospect Park--the Witch's Hat, which is called that because it looks like a witch's hat. After the brown of the shoreline, more BLUE!--the river. And, in front of all this, closest to the camera, are a few bare branches. When I look at this picture, I mostly see and think, BLUE! then sandy white then witch's hat.
on the west bank, near franklin ave, mississippi river / 19 dec 2023

I discovered a prose poem this morning that reminds me of my February Feels Like Project. I think it could be inspiration for me as I clean up my draft and try to get it published:

Sunrise, All Day Long/ Kathleen McGookey

Today is wind that smells like mint blowing in from the lake. Today is a paper crane, just folded. Today is a bleached sheet pulled from the linen closet, trailing the delicate scent of green soap. Today is a small brown snail’s pearly trail across the ivy. An eggshell cracked open by raccoon or turtle or fox. Today is a sharpened pencil, a sealed love letter, the antique locket in my mother’s jewelry box. A rectangular pink eraser, straight out of the package. That one black and white bird perched on the sailboat’s mast, preening its glossy tuxedo and singing a boisterous, throaty song.

dec 18/RUN

4.65 miles
minnehaha falls and back
18 degrees / feels like 4
wind: 15 mph

Colder today. Bundled up: purple jacket, green long-sleeved shirt, 2 pairs of black running tights; 2 pairs of black gloves; black hat with ear flaps; gray buff. Sunny. Sharp shadows. At the beginning of the run I had the buff pulled over my mouth to warm my breath. Then, within a mile, I was hot.

Running south I listened to kids at the playground — are the Minnehaha Academy kids still in school this week? — and the voice in my head singing “Old Friends” from the new version of Merrily We Roll Along. Can’t get that song out of my head! On the way back, after stopping at my favorite spot, I put in the soundtrack and listened to Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez sing it, and some of the other songs from the musical. I’d love to see this one on Broadway — just checked and it’s there through July 7th. Would it even be possible to get tickets?

10 Things

  1. cold wind in my face, from most directions
  2. hot sun on my face, once or twice
  3. the river burning such a bright white — no ice on it today
  4. a dry, clear, cold path
  5. the view just past the oak savanna, as the hills part and open to the river — wow! so clear and calm and beautiful
  6. the falls were louder this morning
  7. a kid, an adult, and a dog — walking around the falls
  8. the creek water was filled with bits of ice, foam, and orange leaves
  9. the asphalt on the shared path that travels under the ford bridge is in bad shape — it’s crumbling and has several deep, long holes
  10. there’s a path that cuts down from the 44th street parking lot, bypassing the overlook and the steps. For most of the year it’s hidden by leaves or snow, today I could see it clearly. I almost turned and took it — why didn’t I?

When I stopped at my favorite spot, I also took some video of the falls:

minnehaha falls / 18 dec / less ice, more falling water

dec 16/RUN

3.1 miles
marshall loop (cretin)
39 degrees / 90% humidity

The saturday morning tradition: running with Scott. Damp and overcast. Everything quiet and strange. Scott’s bright red jacket looked even brighter and RED! In the distance, a soft mist hovered on the river’s surface. The sidewalk was wet and slick, with some puddles to leap over. We talked about snowboarding and half-pipes and how Ailing Gu is a full-time student (at Stanford), a full-time model, and full-time athlete. Wow.

Entering the bridge, I heard some geese flying by, then a bald eagle soaring low in the sky. At the end of our run we encountered a grumpy goose. Scott warned that they might be ready for a rumble. Not quite, but almost. The goose honked and flapped its wings, then flew up and over a fence to join the rest of the geese.

A gross thing I remember: running over some squishy, slippery mud. Didn’t see it, but felt it — told Scott it felt like stepping in poopy diarrhea. Yuck!

I loved the weather and the quiet, almost reverent, feeling of being out in the world on a gloomy, empty Saturday (late) morning.

Discovered a beautiful poem, and helpful discussion of it by Wendy Pratt:

Good-Night/ Seamus Heaney

A latch lifting, an edged den of light
Opens across the yard.
Out of the low door
They stoop in the honeyed corridor,
Then walk straight through the wall of the dark.

A puddle, cobble-stones, jambs and doorstep
Are set steady in a block of brightness.
Till she strides in again beyond her shadows
And cancels everything behind her.

dec 15/RUN

7.25 miles
lake nokomis and back
41 degrees

Ran to Lake Nokomis and back — a December goal achieved! A few weeks ago, I told Scott that I wanted to do that at least once before the end of 2023. Today was a great day to do it. Overcast, mild, hardly any wind. Everything brown and orange and calm. I felt relaxed and strong and only a little sore in my left hip.

Ran above the river, past the falls, over the mustache and duck bridges, by Minnehaha creek and Lake Hiawatha, then to the big beach at Lake Nokomis. I ran down the sidewalk that leads to the lifeguard stand and the water — the sidewalk I often take in the summer just before starting open swim. I thought about summer and swimming, then took this video:

Lake Nokomis / 15 dec 2023 / above the frame, a bird was flying

Ran on Minnehaha Parkway on the way back.

10 Things

  1. several spots in the split rail fence where the railing was bent or leaning or broken
  2. headlights cutting through the pale gray sky
  3. people walking below me on the Winchell Trail
  4. kids laughing on a playground*
  5. the parking lot at the falls had a few more cars in it then earlier in the week
  6. the creek was half frozen — thin sheets of ice everywhere
  7. a woman called out to a dog — liam or sam, I think? — or was she calling out to me, ma’am?
  8. a young girl testing out the thin ice on the edge of the lake — her name was Aubrey — I know this because a woman kept calling out Aubrey! Aubrey! No, don’t! and then, Let’s go Aubrey. I need to eat!
  9. the sidewalk was wet — in some spots, slick
  10. running north on the river road trail, in the groove, an older man on a bike called out, You’re a running machine! I was so surprised I snorted in response

*as I listened to the kids, I thought about how this sound doesn’t really change. Over the years, it comes from different kids, but the sound is the same. Season after season, year after year.

before the run

I’m trying to stop working on my poem about haunting the gorge, but I keep returning to it and just as I believe I have found the way in, another door opens, leading me in a different direction. When do you follow those doors and when do you stop? I worry that I’ll just keep wandering and never settle on/into anything. As I write this, I’m realizing that the question of when to keep moving and when to stop are a central theme of the poem. Here’s a bit of the poem that I wrote the other day that sums it up:

Stone is
satisfied
water
wants to be
somewhere
else. Sometimes
I am
water when
I want
to be stone
sometimes
I am stone
when I
need to be
water.

What to do with all of this? Maybe a run will help…

during the run

I kept returning to these questions of staying and leaving, moving and standing still. At one point, I started thinking about how nothing really stands still, the movement just happens at different speeds/paces/directions, in different scales of time. I’m interested in slow time, directionless time, time that seems to repeat, drip.

Then I thought about the value of solid (or stable or slow moving) forms in which to put my words. These forms aren’t forever fixed, but are solid enough to hold those words, to shape them into something meaningful.

after the run

Not sure what to do with all of this, but forms I’m thinking about: running form — the running body, breaths, feet; boulders; dripping, seeping, sloping water

Water! Now I thinking about Bruce Lee’s poem, be water my friend:

Empty your mind. Be
formless shapeless
like water 
now you put 
water into a cup
it becomes the cup you put
water into a bottle
it becomes the bottle you put 
it into a tea pot
it becomes the tea pot
now water can flow or it can
craaaaasshh
be water my friend

And all the different types of water I encountered on my run: river, dripping ravine, falls, creek, weir, lake, puddle, ice. Different forms with different properties — some flow, some stay

And also Marie Howe’s lines about learning from the lake in “From Nowhere”:

 think the sea is a useless teacher, pitching and falling
no matter the weather, when our lives are rather lakes

unlocking in a constant and bewildering spring.

And now I’m remembering some lines from a draft of my poem, “Afterglow”:

No longer
wanting to be water —
formless fluid — but 
the land that contains 
it. Solid defined
giving shape to the flow.

And finally, it’s time to post a poem I read from Gary Snyder in his collection, Riprap:

Thin Ice/ Gary Snyder

Walking in February
A warm day after a long freeze
On an old logging road
Below Sumas Mountain
Cut a walking stick of alder,
Looked down through clouds
On wet fields of the Nooksack—
And stepped on the ice
Of a frozen pool across the road.
It creaked
The white air under
Sprang away, long cracks
Shot out in the black,
My cleated mountain boots
Slipped on the hard slick
—like thin ice—the sudden
Feel of an old phrase made real—
Instant of frozen leaf,
Icewater, and staff in hand.
“Like walking on thin ice—”
I yelled back to a friend,
It broke and I dropped
Eight inches in

note: I just checked and I might have missed something, but I think the last time I ran over 7 miles was on September 21, 2021. I ran 7.2 miles to the bohemian flats. And here’s something interesting: I posted a draft, just finished, of “Afterglow,” with the lines mentioned above included for the first time. Strange how that works.

dec 13/RUN

4.5 miles
john stevens house and back
38 degrees

Sunny and warmer! Shadows! Clear, dry paths! A great afternoon run, even if my left IT band started hurting…again. I was able to run on all of the walking paths, even when they split off from the bike path.

Listened to kids, cars, chainsaws, and some guy with a DEEP voice as I ran to the Steven’s house and The Wiz on the way back.

10 Things

  1. the light was lower — it felt later than 2:30*
  2. a walker with a big white dog
  3. the falls seemed to be rushing more than on Monday
  4. a sour sewer smell near the John Steven’s house
  5. kids yelling and laughing on the playground
  6. a bird flying low in the sky, off to my side, almost looking like a fluttering leaf
  7. the soft whoosh of the light rail nearing the station
  8. the bells ringing as it left the station
  9. my feet feeling strange, awkward until I warmed up
  10. the buzz of a chainsaw echoing across the gorge

*the light reminded me of the line from ED:

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons – 

But this light wasn’t oppressive. It was warm and welcoming.

I’m continuing to plug away at my haunts poem, even though I was feeling burned out yesterday. I decided to read Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior” and the translator’s afterword for Perec’s How to Exhaust a Place. It helped and I think I had a break through this morning. Now I’m looking to Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness and 300 Arguments for inspiration. My focus: restlessness and stone and water. And, 2 mantras: 1. let it go and 2. condense! condense! condense!

dec 12/RUN

3.4 miles
trestle turn around
24 degrees / feels like 18

Sunny this morning and colder. I overdressed in my purple jacket, which works best when the temperature is in the teens or below 0. Greeted Dave, the Daily walker, admired the river, only slipped on the ice once. Smiled at several other runners. Took off my second pair of gloves and unzipped the very top my jacket around a mile in.

Writing this back at my desk, I can’t remember what I listened to as I ran north. Running back south, I put in a Billie Eilish playlist.

Before putting in the playlist, I stopped and looked out at the river. Not focusing on details, like color or whether or not it was icing over, but breathing in the feeling of being above a river on a cold day, grateful to be out in the world and not inside at my desk trying to figure out what to write about haunting the gorge (I think I’m burned out for now).

Yes, I need a break from all the writing and thinking about haunts. Too much planning and trying to be clever, not enough just sitting down (or running) and finding words.

dec 11/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
25 degrees
50% snow and ice covered

Cold air! So wonderful to breathe in, to make me feel a little dazed and disconnected. More gloomy white sky. Flurries on my face. Listened to a few birds, the kids on the playground, and the rushing water at the falls on the way there, then Olivia Rodrigo on the way back.

10 Things

  1. the strong smell of weed from behind me — no one in sight, then an old white van with a ladder on the back drove by
  2. much of the walking path was covered in a thin layer of snow/ice — so thin that the dark pavement was still visible, making the snow look light gray
  3. a leaning split rail fence, bent in the middle — not quite broken but almost
  4. a walker with two dogs walking down the steepish trail just past the double bridge — was it icy?
  5. someone in a bright yellow puffer jacket walking with a dog on the winchell trail — they had just crested the short, steep hill right before folwell
  6. the tinny recording of the train bell echoing from across Hiawatha to the falls
  7. the heavy thud of my feet on the cold cobblestones in the park
  8. a walker with a dog emerging from the steps that lead down to the bottom of the falls. As I watched they crossed the bridge
  9. running up the hill at the edge of the park near the sledding hill, remembering my run here a month ago when I imagined it being covered in snow
  10. missing: a view of the river, turkeys, fat tires, orange, red

Stopped at my favorite falls viewing spot and recorded the bridge and the water falling:

minnehaha falls, still falling / 11 dec 2023

At one point on my run back, I suddenly felt a beautiful ache of emotion and thought: tender. Yes, I need to include a few lines in my haunts poem about feeling tender as I run — maybe in contrast with tough and the callouses I mentioned last week (6 dec 2023)?

update, 11 dec 2024: Yesterday, I wrote a section about being tender for my Haunts poem. In the final (so far) draft, I didn’t mention callouses or tough skin, but it was in an earlier draft. I did not remember that I had had these same thoughts a year ago! It took me an entire year to take up this task, which often happens with my writing — it moves slow, or at least slower than I’m used to (or usually seems acceptable in this fast-paced world). Last night, during Scott’s jazz band rehearsal, I mentioned in my plague notebook, geological time. Yes! I want to write a section about how time passes!

dec 8/RUN

3.5 miles
trestle turn around
42 degrees

It didn’t feel as warm as it was because of the wind and the clouds. The sky, smudged white. Gloomy. Clear paths with a few chunks of ice still sticking around. How did they not melt yesterday when it was 49 degrees and sunny? A good run, even if my left IT band was sore.

IT doesn’t stand for iliotibial, it stands for:

  • Itchy Teeth
  • Irksome Toes
  • Incandescent Tonsils
  • Infatuated Trapezoids
  • Indigo Toenails (from Scott)
  • Inconceivable Tracheas (from RJP)

10 Things

  1. a noisy car speeding down the river road — don’t remember the color of the type of car or who was driving it, just remember that it was LOUD and FAST
  2. chick a dee dee dee dee
  3. the floodplain forest was roomy and deep brown and open to the river
  4. click click clack — roller skiers hitting their poles on the path
  5. bright headlights cutting through the tree trunks on the other side of the ravine
  6. can’t remember the color of the river — probably pale brown or gray or brown — just that it was soothing (looked at my video: blueish white)
  7. at the start of the run, the pavement was wet — why? melted snow?
  8. a regular — Santa Claus! we raised our hands in greeting
  9. overdressed — took off my orange sweatshirt at the turn around
  10. a mom on roller skis to her kids, also on roller skis — we’re almost there! I’m assuming she meant the big franklin hill

Listened to my breath, my striking feet, the cars driving by as I ran north. Put in a Billie Eilish playlist running back south.

Before turning around, I took some video at a favorite spot: the curved fence on the Winchell Trail before Franklin:

Not yet winter by the gorge. Listen to the sirens on the other side sing with the chickadees and the cars.

After I finished running, I recalled a line I had composed while running for a poem I’m working on about the bells of St. Thomas:

Have others
outside
forgotten
those bells? 
Or do they
hear them 
ringing still?

I like the double meaning of still here — both: continuing to ring and ringing until they become still/stop. I have to sit with it longer, but I think I’d like ring instead of ringing, but it doesn’t fit the 3/2 form.

As I write this I’m remembering another thought I had: getting rid of all of the longer poems that begin with I — I go to the gorge, I sync up my steps, I want connection, I orbit the gorge, etc. Those are the ghosts that haunt this Haunts poem — they are the traces/residue/palimpsest that is still there, but not fully. I think this makes sense to me, but I’m not sure if I can remove all of those words that I love and have spent so much time with…yet.

dec 6/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
37 degrees

Warmer today. Almost all of the snow has melted. Sunny, bright, shadows. Chirping birds, sparkling water, shimmering sidewalks — melted snow illuminated by sun. I went out feeling a bit overwhelmed, needing a run. It worked. By the end of the run I felt so much better.

I listened to the world around me as I ran to the falls: the birds, kids on the playground, cars whooshing by, the gushing falls. When I turned around, I put in a Billie Eilish playlist on the way back.

At the falls, I stopped at the overlook right beside the falls:

minnehaha falls / 6 dec 2023

10 Things

  1. wet path, shimmering — is it just water, or is it super slick ice?
  2. most of the snow gone, only little ridges on the edges of the trail
  3. empty, open, iceless river
  4. more darting squirrels
  5. encountering a woman in pink running shoes twice
  6. the bells from the light rail ringing and dinging from across the road
  7. my shadow — sharp — running beside me
  8. a runner in a bright blue jacket
  9. an empty parking lot at the falls
  10. the potholes on the path were easier to see because they were filled in with snow while the rest of the path was bare

Thinking about the gorge and WPA walls and riprap and Gary Snyder:

Riprap/ Gary Snyder

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles—
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

I mention the limestone walls made by the WPA in the 30s and 40s in my poem. I’d like to expand on them just a little more. Each rock a word — something there to build on, I think.

riprap: loose stones used to form a foundation

dec 5/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
32 degrees
10% snow-covered

It snowed last night. Less than an inch? Enough to cover everything, making it look like winter, but not enough to cause any problems running on the path. Wonderful! I love winter running. I started out a little cold, with my hood up against the wind, but ended over-heated: lots of sweat and a flushed face. My right IT band hurt a little, but not enough to end the run. I did stop at the halfway point — my favorite spot near “The Song of Hiatwatha,” admiring the falls from a distance. I took some video:

minnehaha falls / 5 dec 2023

video: Minnehaha Creek rushing over the limestone ledge, frozen water on either side of the rushing water, a bridge above, a bridge below.

10 Things

  1. the river: brownish-gray, flat, empty
  2. caw caw caw
  3. the snow is soft and not slick or clumpy, easy to run over
  4. a path winding through the savanna revealed by settled snow
  5. a leaning tree branch, dusted with snow. The snow making visible the trunks texture
  6. rustling in the brush — a squirrel
  7. the voices of kids laughing on the playground
  8. running near the overlook of the falls, not stopping to see the water, just hearing it rushing over the limestone
  9. beep beep beep beep beep beep then a few beats of silence on repeat — a service truck near the roundabout
  10. rabbit footprints all over my driveway — such big footprints!

before the run

This morning, while doing the dishes, I began listening to Chris Dombrowski’s The River You Touch. Here are a few passages I’d like to remember:

What does a mindful, sustainable inhabitance on this small planet look like in the Anthropocene? is no longer an academic question but rather a necessary qualifier to each step we take. For answers, we who have proven ourselves such untrustworthy stewards of our home might look to what Barry Lope called “myriad enduring relationships of the landscape,” to our predecessors, in other words, whose voices are the bells that must sound before any gritty ceremony of community can truly being.

The River We Touch/ Chris Dombrowski

bells — I like this idea of bells as signaling the start of a ceremony. Each loop around the gorge, or run beside the gorge is the start of a ritual, a ceremony, both sacred and mundane. What else do bells signal? I want to review my notes and weave other meanings into my poem.

“listening,” refers to direct contact, engagement, what the forager Jenna Rozelle calls the “primacy of immediate experience.” Callouses on palms formed by friction between human skin and oar handle. Shoulder muscles straining to pull oar blade through current, the oar stroke negotiating with the wave train’s brute liquid force.

The River We Touch/ Chris Dombrowski

The mention of callouses reminds me of Thoreau and his essay on walking:

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character—will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast enough—that the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.

physical dialogue (contact…encounter between feet and land)…sensorial empathy

The faculty of wonder—which, in this context, is simply the unsentimental ability to identify with astonishment the earth and its inhabitants as relational—is diminishing as quickly as any endangered species. If it vanishes as an inevitable byproduct of decreased direct encounters with the physical world, so, too, may go the instinct to protect the very places that sustain us.

Concluding a story about kayaking with his son, encountering a sea otter, attempting to capture the moment with his phone and then dropping the phone in the ocean, Dombrowski writes:

I scanned our ambit for further sign of the otter, weighing the value of what I’d beamed in on 4G versus the salt drying on the hand Luca had dragged through the water. I sensed the latter would form a more lasting kind of knowing.

The River We Touch/ Chris Dombrowski

Before heading out for my run, I wanted to think about some of these ideas, especially: touch, physical dialogue, and sensorial empathy.

during the run

I recall thinking about my feet and rough ground and how much I enjoy feeling the ground as I move. The snow today was fun to run over/through. It wasn’t hard or crusty or sharp or too soft or thick or soggy or slick. It felt almost like running over a carpet of grass. A nice break from the hard asphalt. I also thought about breath and air and how much they are a part of touching/experiencing the gorge.

Near the end of my run, a song came up on my playlist: Breathe (2 AM)/ Anna Nalick. I’ve had it on a running playlist for over a decade now. As she sang, breathe, just breathe, I breathed. Maybe more than feet, lungs and breathing and breath have been central to my writing on this log.

I also thought about the gorge as an emptiness, a void, mystery, the ineffable/inaccessible, that I return to when I run because I want to encounter this void. I want to face the mystery.

after the run

Sitting at my desk now, I’m hungry. After I eat, I’d like to think more about the Thoreau quote and feet and callouses and the physical impact of running around the gorge as part of this haunting experience.

dec 4/RUN

2 miles
ywca track

Back at the end of October, we rejoined the y so that I could swim in the winter and Scott could run and hot tub. With Scott’s busy schedule and my desire to run outside, today was the first day we finally went. The hot tub is closed indefinitely. We decided to cancel our membership and run outside — fine by me. I’ll miss swimming a little, but I’m feeling like 2024 is a serious running year.

I didn’t mind the track, it was fine — not crowded, warm — but it’s not the same as being outside above the gorge. I forgot my headphones so I listened to the sounds around me as I looped the elevated track: a guy lifting weights and muttering to himself, high schoolers playing basketball and dropping a few f-bombs, my own breathing. The people I passed: an older man walking with a cane, a young-ish woman walking then briefly running, an older woman walking, a guy in a red shirt reading a book on his phone as he walked.

added a few minutes later: I just remembered that I was running on the track, feeling my feet bounce on the springy track, I thought about how my feet connect to the ground. Then I thought about how I connect/am connected to a place also through breath — lungs inhaling, moving through air. Wind/air/breath are unseen and less noticed than feet striking the ground, but air is there and we possess/are possessed by it through our breaths.

This morning I woke to the wonderful news that 2 of my mood ring poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. This is a big deal and makes me very proud and pleased that my strange poems are meaningful to others. I’ve worked hard for 7 years, writing almost daily, trying to develop ways to express what it feels like to be losing my vision.

Today A.R. Ammon’s Tape for the Turn of the Year came and I’m excited to read it and be inspired by it. In anticipation, I checked out Ammons’ collected works. Here’s a poem I ‘d like to remember and put beside Mary Oliver’s ideas about writing and language in The Leaf and the Cloud:

Motion/ A. R. Ammons:

The word is
not the thing:
is
a construction of,
a tag for,
the thing: the
word in
no way
resembles
the thing, except
as sound
resembles,
as in whirr,
sound:
the relation
between what this
as words
is and what is
is tenuous: we
agree upon
this as the net to
cast on what
is: the finger
to
point with: the
method of
distinguishing,
defining, limiting:
poems
are fingers, methods,
nets,
not what is or was:
but the music
in poems
is different,
points to nothing,
traps no
realities, takes
no game, but
by the motion of
its motion
resembles
what, moving, is—-
the wind
underleaf white against
the tree.

dec 2/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
30 degrees

Another Saturday run with Scott. Another sunny, mild morning. Sharp shadows, sparkling water, a clear path. Before the run, I was feeling out of sorts, sad, but after I feel much better. Running, and being outside, breathing in fresh air, is the best!

The falls were gushing and framed by ice columns. Making our way through the park, we walked past Sea Salt and I had flash of memory: being here in the hot summer, sitting with a pitcher of beer and shrimp tacos. Then it was thick with people, today the restaurant is closed and only a few people are walking around.

dec 1/RUN

3.6 miles
trestle turn around
27 degrees

What a wonderful way to start December! Love this cold air and the bright sun. And the shadows — mine was able to run below in the floodplain forest. Later, it went down on the Winchell Trail. I greeted Dave, the Daily Walker — Good morning Dave! What a beautiful morning! For the first mile I chanted in threes: girl girl girl/ ghost ghost ghost/ gorge gorge gorge.

I listened to the birds — I think I heard the clicking beak of a jay — and scattered voices on the way to the trestle. Tried out a few different playlists on the way back.

10 Things

  1. running above the floodplain forest: brown and open and bottomless, brown leaves blending in with brown trunks
  2. most of the steps down to the Winchell Trail are closed off with a chain, but not the old stone steps — why not?
  3. the stretch of river just north of longfellow flats was half frozen
  4. 2 people walking below on the winchell trail with a dog — a LOUD conversation. One of them was wearing a bright orange — or was it red? — jacket
  5. steady streams of cars at different spots on the river road
  6. a fast runner passed me with their arms down at their sides, swinging them low. Were they running like this the whole time, or did they just do it when they passed me?
  7. more darting squirrels
  8. there are certain stretches I don’t remember running through — like the part of the walking trail that separates from the bike path right before the trestle. Why can’t I picture it?
  9. after I finished the run, walking back on the grass between Edmund and the river road, heard the knocking of a woodpecker high up in a tree. I craned my neck and arched my back to see it, but no luck
  10. In number 1 I said the floodplain forest was empty, but I just remembered that there was a thin line of orange leafed trees on the southern edge of it

Just ordered A. R. Ammons’ Tape for the Turn of the Year. Reading it might be my December project — will see, when it arrives on Monday. I think it might be a good inspiration for my Haunts poem as I continue to work on it.

One more note: At the halfway point, before heading back, I hiked down on the Winchell Trail to the curved railing. I took a picture. I decided to only take one, but I wondered if I should have taken more. Yes, I should have. When I looked at the picture after the run, there was the shadow of my thumb in the corner. Oops.

nov 30/RUN

5 miles
veterans’ home loop
32 degrees

Warmer today. Sunny, bright, clear. The river sparkled and burned. Shadows everywhere. Big columns of ice next to the falls, a thin sheen of ice on the steps and the bridge over the creek. Saw my shadow far below me while I was above on the bridge over to the veterans’ home. Encountered at least half a dozen darting squirrels, one was heading straight towards me but did a sharp turn away at the last minute. Near the end of my run, I saw and heard a vee of geese flying low in the sky — maybe 12 of them? Something about the blue sky and the brilliant light made their wingtips look silver. I didn’t stop running, but I craned my neck as I moved to keep watching them.

10 Sounds

  1. kids at recess, playing on the playground at minnehaha academy: scattered voices laughing, yelling
  2. some sort of chirping bird — not a cardinal, a robin? finch?
  3. the caw caw of a crow, down in the gorge
  4. the gushing falls — steadily falling creek water
  5. rustling in the leaves, 1: a squirrel
  6. rustling in the leaves, 2: a chipmunk or a bird
  7. rustling in the leaves, 3: a person walking below me on the Winchell Trail
  8. honking geese
  9. a chain link fence rattling — someone playing disc golf near Waban
  10. missing sounds: didn’t hear any roller skiers or music from a bike or a car, no bikes whizzing by or horns honking, and no fake train bell at the 50th street station as I ran near the John Stevens house

Stopped at the Folwell bench to admire the view and to check on my watch which had turned off. Bummer — out of charge, so no data from today’s run. Took a picture of the gorge:

A view from above of the Mississippi gorge and river. Just to the right of center in the image a thick brown tree trunk stands -- well, not that thick, but much thicker than the other trunks surrounding it. To me, this trunk looks like a tall person, with a long neck and a head that's just off the edge of the top of the frame. They have one arm (which is actually a bare branch) that extends up and across and then off the top of the frame. This arm is bent which creates the illusion of an elbow, an armpit, and a torso. Below the tree are dead leaves, light brown, and beyond the tree is a blue river and then a brown bank.
a tree with river gorge / 30 nov 2023

nov 28/RUN

5.5 miles
franklin hill turn around
15 degrees / feels like 2

The coldest day of the season. Brrr. Extra layers: 2 black tights, yellow shirt, pink jacket, purple jacket, 2 pairs of gloves — black and pink/white, buff, hat with ear flaps, hood. Difficult to breathe for the first mile. Sunny, lots of shadows. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker. He was in his warmest attire, even had a stocking cap. There was ice near the shore of the river and sheets of ice on the surface of the water.

The surface of the mississippi river, up close. Thin slabs of ice, cracked with strips of cold water visible, cover the surface. Near the bottom of the frame, the ice looks dark gray and blue. At the top, it's white with a hint of brown.
Brr. River surface starting to ice over / 28 nov 2023

For the first 4 miles, I listened to my feet striking the ground, cars driving by, the wind. For the last 1.5 miles, I put in Olivia Rodrigo.

before the run

Still working on my haunts poems, adding more to the ones I wrote 2 years ago. Yesterday I spent a lot of time working on the first section, trails, and thinking about paths and feet and my interest in following, connecting, learning new stories. As part of that work, I started rereading Wendell Berry’s excellent essay, “A Native Hill.” This morning, before my run, I’m still reading and thinking about it. While I run, I’d like to think about this passage:

Looking out over the country, one gets a sense of the whole of it: the ridges and hollows, the clustered buildings of the farms, the open fields, the woods, the stock ponds set like coins into the slopes. But this is a surface sense, such as you get from looking down on the roof of a house. The height is a threshold from which to step down into the wooded folds of the land, the interior, under the trees and along the branching streams.

“A Native Hill” / Wendell Berry

As I run, I’d like to think about these ideas of threshold and surface, and what it means to be above, always, looping around the gorge, rarely entering it. Is this only surface level? What is at the surface, and is the surface always superficial? What does it mean when the gorge is not a thing to enter, but an absence, an emptiness/void that is still present and shaping the land but is inaccessible?

during the run

Did I think about these things at all? Maybe a little as I looked down at the floodplain forest or the water. At one point, I thought about how I’m not completely inside of this place, but I’m still much more in it than if I were riding in a car.

In a related but different direction of thought, I remembered the lines I had just written this morning:

It begins
here: from
the ground up
feet first,
following.
I want
to go where
others
already
have gone.

I thought about this following and how the others include past versions of me, the Saras that have already, day after day, year after year, travelled these same trails.

after the run

Sitting at my desk after my run, looking out at a mysterious pile of dirt left right in front of my sidewalk by workers for some unknown reason, feeling wiped out from the run, I’m not sure what to do with Berry’s passage. Maybe I’ll read some more of the essay?

Beyond the gate the land leans always more steeply towards the branch. I follow it down and then bear left along the crease at the bottom of the slope. I have entered the downflow of the land. The way I am going is the way the water goes. There is something comfortable and fit-feeling in this, something free in this yielding to gravity and taking the shortest way down.

“A Native Hill” / Wendell Berry

I love this line: The way I am going is the way the water goes.

Berry talks next about human-made erosion and how he laments the loss of land “before the white people drove their plows into it.”

It is not possible to know what was the shape of the land here in this hollow when it was first cleared. Too much of it is gone, loosened by the plows and washed away by the rain….The thought of what was here once and is gone forever will not leave me as long as I live. It is as though I walk knee-deep in its absence.

“A Native Hill” / Wendell Berry

The slopes along the hollow steepen still more, and I go in under the trees. I pass beneath the surface. I am enclosed, and my sense, my interior sense, of the country becomes intricate. There is no longer the possibility of seeing very far. The distances are closed off by the trees and the steepening walls of the hollow. One cannot grow familiar here by sitting and looking as one can up in the open on the ridge. Here the eyes become dependent on the feet. To see the woods from the inside one must look and move and look again. It is inexhaustible in its standpoint. A lifetime will not be enough to experience it all.

“A Native Hill” / Wendell Berry

Love it: Here the eyes become dependent on the feet. I’m finding a place for this line in my poem! Even when I am on the edge of the bluff looking down at the gorge, my vision isn’t very good. Everywhere I run, above or below, I’m dependent on my feet, and not just to get me to new places to see; sometimes I see with my feet.

Berry’s last lines about it being inexhaustible and how a lifetime will not be enough to experience it all brings me to another definition of going beyond the surface: to do more than briefly visit, to stay somewhere (to haunt it), to return to it again and again, each time learning something new, or encountering something slightly altered. This returning to the gorge day after day and giving attention is my way of connecting with it and attempting to experience as much of it as I can.

nov 26/RUN

4.1 miles
minnehaha falls and back
30 degrees
50% snow-covered

It snowed last night and left less than an inch on the ground. The trail was half clear, half snow-covered. A bit slick. I think my feet might have slipped some, but never enough to be a problem. Ran south to the falls. Beautiful! Gushing.

Ran without headphones and listened to my collar rubbing against my cap, a few voices rising up from the gorge, falling water.

Running just past the double bridge I smiled when I saw 2 turkeys up ahead on the path. I was wrong — no turkeys, only trees with plastic rings around their trunks, standing next to the path.

I’ve been working on my haunts poems and as I ran I thought about the plaques/ghosts bikes/flowers I just wrote about this morning. 3 instances of people dying in very unlikely circumstances: a boy picked at random and then shot in the back while biking; a runner hit by a driver who lost control when he had a seizure (or some sort of incident) because of 4 huge tumors in his brain he didn’t know were there; and a woman pulled over, fixing her bike, hit in a parking lot. Unsettling. The last one didn’t happen by the river, but in Germany; the woman was from this neighborhood and is remembered by friends and family. The other two did, and at spots I regularly run by.

Today’s poem-of-the-day on poets.org, The Mountain, begins with these fitting lines:

There is snow, now— 
A thing of silent creeping—

…

There is snow, now— 
A silent creeping . . .

…

Snow, snow, snow—
A thing of silent creeping 

from The Mountain/ D’Arcy McNickle

I don’t mind the snow — in fact, I like it! — but it does silently creep. From now until March of April, adding inches, covering everything.

nov 22/RUN

5.4 miles
ford loop
31 degrees

Brrr, at least for the first mile. Had to put up my hood and breathe deeply. Ran through the neighborhood on my way to the lake street bridge instead of by the Welcoming Oaks. Such beautiful light this morning, bright warm sun. Saw my shadow several times. She kept wandering down in the ravine or right by the edge. I took a picture of her when I stopped at the Monument, which is a Civil War monument and not a WWI one (which is what Scott thought):

update, 22 nov 2025: I’m not sure why I thought it was a civil war monument; Scott was right, it is a monument to WW1 soldiers. Doing a bit more googlin’, I think I thought it was a civil war monument because I was mistaking it for the “soldiers and sailors monument” in Summit Park.

My view from the overlook at the civil war monument. From back to front: sky, lake street bridge, west river bluff, river, bare tree branches, cliff, a shadow of me taking this picture, dirt
view of my shadow/river/bridge / 22 nov 2023

10 Things

  1. water dripping at shadow falls — not quite rushing or gushing, but close
  2. little white caps on the water from the wind
  3. a bird calling out repeatedly, sounding like a car alarm — must have been a cardinal, right?
  4. even less leaves on the trees than last week, although there are still stretches of bright green
  5. one runner passing me slowly, gradually
  6. another running zooming past me up the hill
  7. the satisfying feeling of sandy grit crunching under my feet as I ran on the dirt rail next to the paved path
  8. on the St. Paul side most of the benches have plaques embedded in the concrete, none of them do on the Minneapolis side
  9. spotting a parked car, glowing in the sun on the west side of the river as I ran on the east side
  10. noisy, darting squirrels everywhere

before the run

Today I’m revising and expanding my part of the Haunts poem about the Regulars, the people (both alive and dead) that are regularly at the gorge. I’d like to add something about the “in memory of” plaques along the trail, mostly embedded in the concrete near benches. So I’m giving myself a task: take pictures of more of these plaques to write about in my 3/2 form. Will I do it? Will I be willing to stop and take these pictures? How many of them can I get?

Speaking of plaques, I was curious about how to get one and how much they cost. Here’s the link for Minneapolis: Tributes and Memorials

To get a bench plaque, fill out the interest form on the site. It’s $5000 for a new bench for 10 years, $2500 for a refurbished bench for 10 years. Only 10 years.

Here’s St Paul’s information. Same 10 year deal, although you can add 10 year increments for an additional $1500 at any time. Also: It’s $5000 for a new bench/10 years at St. Paul Parks, except along the Mississippi River Parkway. Those are $10000. That seems like a lot — is it?

during the run

I did it! Starting by the monument, I stopped at every bench and took a picture of the plaque next to it. Lots of stopping, but it was fun! 12 images in total. I didn’t read any of the inscriptions, just stopped, took out my phone, clicked, put my phone back in my pocket, then started running again. I would imagine that some of the people I encountered were wondering what I was doing. I kind of wish one of them would have asked so I could say something like, “I’m working on a poem about the gorge and I’m gathering memorials to include in it.”

after the run

Now, back at my desk, I’m looking through the images. Almost all of them are legible! So far, there’s only one I can’t read and that’s because I made it a 4 second video instead of a photo. Oops. Oh–and it’s always because it’s in a cursive font that’s very hard to read.

It’s moving to read these memorials, many of them about people who died too young. I’m particularly struck by one that says, “Just a kid growing up!” — Tony Basta, 12/1/99

A plaque embedded in concrete. It reads: "Just a kid growing up!" Tony Basta, 12/1/99
Memorial plaque along the Mississippi River Bluff in St. Paul

I had no idea what this meant, so I looked it up. On April 26, 2000, while riding his bike along the Mississippi River (near Randolph) around 10 pm, 17 year old Tony Basta was shot and killed by 3 teenagers who wanted to shoot a random person “just to scare them.” Basta’s parents had the plaque made; the quote is from Tony in his yearbook. Wow. So heartbreaking and haunting — the details in this article (Tony Basta’s Murder 10 Years Ago) about the bystander who heard the shot and thought it was fireworks, his father who owns The Italian Pie Shoppe, the girl who overheard the killers telling the story at a party and reported them, earning a reward that paid for her college, the killer who expresses daily regret.

Will any of this make it into my poem? Possibly? Probably? Who knows? I’m not sure what will come of these accounts, but it feels meaningful to bear witness to the lives of the people on these plaques today.

As I was finishing up my run, my thoughts wandered. I thought about having one of these plaques for when I’m dead and how I’d want poetry on it. Then I thought, why wait until then and why put it on a plaque? What about leaving some poetry around the gorge now? Then I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to leave some lines from my haunts poem — some parts of my repeating refrain that includes, a girl runs and ghost and gorge? And now I’m thinking that I want to do some sort of unofficial public installation of this poem around the gorge. It could be lines left on the path or tied to a tree, or it could be QR codes with links to the text and a recording of me reading it. YES! I should research how others do public installations for inspiration.

nov 20/RUN

6.2 miles
franklin loop + extra*
40 degrees

*ran the regular franklin loop but when I reached the lake/marshall bridge I kept running up the hill on the east side, all the way to the bench at the bend on the bluff. I took a picture of a plaque, then turned around and ran back to the bridge and then over it.

A plaque near a bench. It reads: In Loving Memory of Jeffrey Peter Hanson. "Oh what I would say to you again" from Losing a Year
a plaque in the ground by a bench

I looked up the sentence/title and it’s a lyric from a song by the person remembered on the plaque, Jeff Hanson. It was on his second of three albums. He was found dead in his St. Paul apartment by his parents in 2009. According to Wikipedia the cause of death was “drug toxicity” — a mixture of anti-depressant and anti-anxiety pills with alcohol — and they couldn’t determine if it was accidental or self-inflicted. So sad.

One of the reasons I stopped to take a picture of the plaque was because I’m revising my Haunts poem and I gave myself the task of finding more of the plaques and then putting them into a section of the poem that follows “The Regulars.”

Overcast today, a pale gray. Another nice, relaxed run. Another beautiful morning by the gorge. Greeted Dave, the daily walker just a few minutes in. Admired the Welcoming Oaks and the tuning fork tree. No stones stacked on the ancient boulder. Chanted triple berries for a few miles. Felt good and strong and happy to be running a 10k.

10+ Things

  1. the river is higher — the water has spilled over into the floodplain on the spot below 31st
  2. jingle jingle jingle a dog collar making noise below me on the Winchell Trail
  3. clear open views everywhere to the other side — almost all the leaves are gone!
  4. one tree still full of leaves — the leaves were browned but so light they almost looked silver
  5. a few other trees on the east side still holding onto bright green leaves
  6. encountered several U of M students with backpacks walking over to campus
  7. a sign on the bridge — End the Occupation
  8. every street lamp I passed on the bridge had had their copper wire cut — some of them were also missing the door at the bottom that covers the wires, and one lamp had lost its entire top — it was just a stump
  9. the white sands beach was glowing white from across the river
  10. many of the benches I passed had recently been repaired — the three slats for the back had been replaced — I wondered: did the old boards have “in memory of” plaques, and do those not get replaced?
  11. on the bridge, looked up in the sky and stopped: 3 soaring birds, high in the sky — eagles? hawks? geese? I couldn’t tell

nov 17/RUN

3.2 miles
trestle turn around
36 degrees

Yes! A near perfect morning for a run. Sunny, still, cool but not cold. Deep blue sky, sharp shadows. Relaxed hips, knees, shoulders. A moment to remember and return to when needed. So calm, happy, not anxious. Walking back after I was done, I heard a knock so I stopped and looked up to the top of a tree — a woodpecker! And I could see it! I watched for a few seconds then listened deeper: another chirping bird, leaves rustling underfoot, a leaf blower.

10 Things

  1. good morning Dave!
  2. the floodplain forest is bare and a beautiful, soothing brown
  3. with everything so bare and exposed because of the lack of leaves, I thought about how it all looks bigger (wider, more open) and smaller (no mystery, all out in the open) at the same time
  4. glancing down at white Minneapolis rowing club building, it looked like it was a shimmering mirage in the sun
  5. almost to the trestle — I could see it through the bare trees, stretching across the water. It looked so far away, even though I was almost there
  6. took the recently redone steps just north of the trestle down for a better view of the water — the river was such a deep, dark blue — but a dark blue that was still clearly blue and not black (which is what navy looks like to me)
  7. on those same steps: my shadow ahead of me — hi friend!
  8. another shadow: a runner approaching me from behind. I could hear her slowly gaining on me, then suddenly her shadow appeared, almost lurking behind me for a moment
  9. running on the sandy, gritty dirt just off the edge of the trail
  10. smelling breakfast — can’t remember what type of breakfast, just breakfast — wafting down from longfellow grill

As I was running on the dirt trail just next to the paved path, I had a thought about my haunts poem and the recent ones I’ve added about the trails. So far I have three — the dirt trail on the grassy boulevard, the official paved trail, and Winchell. I think I should add this one, and maybe more. I could sprinkle them throughout the poem, or just add that one in with the others, near the beginning?

I was planning to run a little longer and listen to a playlist for the second half, but a mile into my run I realized that I had forgotten my phone. That has happened maybe once or twice ever, in all of the years I’ve been running. Today, I didn’t care, but still didn’t want to run too long without it, especially since I hadn’t told Scott which way I was running.

nov 16/RUN

5.4 miles
ford loop
63 degrees
wind: 19mph

Another windy day. I had to hold onto my cap several times so it wouldn’t fly off. Running east on the lake street bridge, I put my hood so my cap wouldn’t fall off. Running west over the ford bridge, I took the cap off and held it in my hands. The wind made it difficult, more draining. Is that why my legs feel so sore?

10 Things

  1. ridges and white caps in the blue water, from the wind
  2. kids at the church daycare, at the far end of the fenced-in playground. Running by I could hear their tiny, sweet voices plotting something
  3. more filled benches than usual along the route, including one with a person sitting and a stroller behind it
  4. in the neighborhood: knocks on the roof — not a woodpecker, but roofers … or was it a woodpecker?
  5. running straight into the wind, wondering if would push me up against the railing (not quite)
  6. my shadow down in the ravine near shadow falls — lucky shadow, sheltered from the wind
  7. everywhere hazy — it might have been my vision, but I think it was dust stirred up by the wind. Yuck!
  8. running north, at the end, feeling the wind pushing me, but not in a helpful way
  9. the wind didn’t rush or roar, it just pushed and pulled
  10. a walker, walking in the middle of the path, blasting talk radio

I stopped on the double bridge to take a picture of the ravine and to put in my headphones:

My view from the bridge of some bare-branched trees. Everything mostly brown, with a few streaks of white (or gray?) peeking through. The white is the water, or is it the sky? Difficult to tell. Below the frame of this imagine (just out of the picture), is a branch with green leaves, swaying in the wind. Also out of the frame is a walker with a dog, walking by. I didn't notice them until they passed by and crossed my periphery.
a warm, windy November day / 16 nov 2023

today’s view out my window

It’s snowing leaves. Mostly they are drifting down slowly, one after the other. Sometimes at a distance, occasionally almost on my window screen. My neighbor’s yard is covered with them, a dead leaf carpet. Yesterday, as Scott and I cleared out our leaves we could see that the neighbor’s tree was still full of leaves. I wondered what would happen when the wind came back. Today I found out.

Also, encountered this interesting (and unsettling) article about the effects of climate crisis on Japanese poets who write haikus: Japan’s haiku poets lost for words as climate crisis disrupts seasons

nov 14/RUN

3 miles
under ford bridge and back
55 degrees
wind: 20mph

Almost too warm and definitely too windy. The wind doesn’t bother me like it used to, but this wind was tough. I ran straight into it heading south. One nice thing: it pushed me along in the second half. I wore shorts and by the end of my run I had taken off my sweatshirt and pushed up my short sleeves. Bare legs and bare arms in the middle of November. Strange and disorienting.

10 Wind Things

  1. leaf shards in my eyes
  2. holding onto my hat so it wouldn’t blow away
  3. being pushed to the edge of the trail
  4. a roar in my ears
  5. swirling leaves above me, below me, to the side of me
  6. squaring my shoulders, leaning in as the wind pushed me back
  7. a sudden gust from the side
  8. knocking my ankles together
  9. shaking, swaying trees
  10. more sizzle than howl

I didn’t hear any geese or notice what the wind was doing to the river. I might have seen my shadow; I almost remember. Encountered some other runners, bikers, and a roller skier.

I listened to the wind until I reached the ford bridge, then I stopped and put in an old playlist: “Landslide,” “Cheap Thrills,” “Sorry,” and “Love is a Battlefield.”

I came across Wendy Xu’s “Absolute Variations” today and I wanted to make note of the first few lines. What a way to start a poem!

The first time I read a line by John Ashbery
was in a little café in Massachusetts, from left to right
There it was written across my friend’s collarbone
It felt right to be there with someone
who would show me something like that
when we had never met before

I appreciate how she never explicitly names the Ashbery lines. I suppose if you know a lot of Ashbery’s poems, it’s obvious, but I don’t, so it isn’t to me. But that’s okay; it could be fun trying to find them, and it’s not necessary to know them to enjoy the poem. I think her refusal to be explicit here is an example of trusting the reader to figure it out. I like that.

nov 13/RUN

5 miles
veterans’ home loop
42 degrees

What a day! Sunny and calm and beautiful. I overdressed — didn’t need the gloves or the headband, maybe should’ve worn a lighter sweatshirt? Ran south to the falls, over the creek, behind John Steven’s house, over the creek again, to the grounds of the Veterans’ home, down the hill to the locks and dam no. 1, north on the river road, past the welcoming oaks, down through the tunnel of trees, across to Edmund, then done. Ran 5 miles without stopping. I didn’t even stop while taking off my sweatshirt and wrapping it around my waist. It would have been smart to stop for that, but I wanted to keep moving, so I did, and probably looked ridiculous.

10 Things

  1. chirp chirp chirp
  2. my ponytail swishing and hitting my shoulder
  3. my shadow — sharp and straight and solid
  4. a group of people — was it kids and a teacher, or all adults? I’m not sure — standng silently on the grass between Minnehaha Academy and Becketwood
  5. shimmering scattering glowing river water
  6. rushing gushing falls
  7. the fake bells from the light rail sounding like the beginning of an ABBA song (at least to me) — I thought about listening to an ABBA playlist on my run back, but I forgot
  8. running over the bridge that leads to the Veterans’ home, hearing the creek rushing way below me
  9. encountering a few walkers — a short woman, later a tall man — as I ran down the steep hill to locks and dam no. 1
  10. 4 stones stacked on the ancient boulder

As I ran down a hill into Minnehaha Park, I tried to remember the sun and the warmth and the bare ground, and thought about how this same path will be cold and snow-covered within a month.

Before my run, I thought about how before works in my Haunts poem and revisited a wonderful poem, “Transubstantiation,” that plays with befores and afters. I wanted to explore the idea of after while I ran — what comes before, what after? But I realized as I moved that I am most interested in playing around with the before, creating layers of befores that don’t follow a linear progression, but circle around unresolved. I held onto as many of my thought as I can, then recorded them into my phone once my run was done.

notes / 13 nov 2023

transcript: November 13, 2023. Just finished a 5 mile run and while I was running I was thinking about girl ghost and gorge and befores and how I’m not interested in doing afters, I’m interested in circling around these befores. Not in a linear way, but a circular way. I’ll do another one that is before there was gorge, there was girl. That one will be about me before I started paying attention, before I started running by the gorge, before this practice. Then there will be one that’s before there was girl, there was ghost. This one will involve more of my mom as a ghost. I’m interested in playing around with the befores and making it disorienting; there’s no real origin point. It’s circular and repeats itself, phrases repeat themselves.

repetition: chiasmus and chanting

Thinking more about the circularity of my befores and the chant-like repetition of girl ghost gorge / ghost girl gorge / gorge ghost girl. Before my run, during my morning ritual of coffee and poetry, I encountered Jane Huffman’s poem, “The Rest” and her discussion/explanation of it in, “Backwashes and Eddies: Jane Huffman on “The Rest”“. She mentions the chiasmus, which I had to look up to remember what it meant:

Repetition of any group of verse elements (including rhyme and grammatical structure) in reverse order, such as the rhyme scheme ABBA. Examples can be found in Biblical scripture (“But many that are first / Shall be last, / And many that are last / Shall be first”; Matthew 19:30). See also John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”).

glossary term, Poetry Foundation

Here’s how Huffman describes her use of it in “The Rest”:

Cut red / flowers hung in pink water.
                Cut pink flowers hung in red water.
                Cut red water hung in pink flowers.
                Cut pink water hung in red flowers.

The poem operates in reversals, in mirror images, in symmetries: “Cut [pink or red] [flowers or water] hung in [pink or red] [flowers or water].”

About the water and flowers, Huffman also says this:

Indeed, “The Rest” refuses to move on. It cannot. It is obsessive, recalibrating the relationship between “flowers” and “water” until its options are exhausted. Exhaustion is a teleology of sickness. One cough anticipates the next.

“The Rest” is about her frequent bouts with bronchitis and Huffman uses repetion, especially the chiasmus, for several reasons:

  1. the bilateral symmetry of her lungs — inhale/exhale left lung/right lung
  2. stagnation / the stasis of the bedridden body / back and forth / refusing to move on (the backwashes and eddies)
  3. seeks to capture the banality of the body — daily routine
  4. imperfect — not exactly the same, repetition with variation

poetic forms that use repetition in this way: villanelle, ghazal, duplex, pantoum

Huffman argues that her repetition of the flowers and the water give the poem its emotional thrust. I’m not sure what I want to do with these ideas, but I can feel them informing my choices about how to use repetition in this poem. One idea: maybe my 3/2 form could involve inverted repetition at some points?

Now moving on to chants, after a quick search, I found this essay: Learning the Chant Poem.

repetition: for meaning, memory, magic, music
to only repeat is boring
the best chant poems are expansive
repetition is important, but so is chaos/wildness

One key: it’s okay to use some nonsense words

an hour, or so, later: I’m returning to this entry because I want to make note of how Huffman’s poem has influenced/inspired me. In particular, I was thinking about her formula and the variations she created to play with the repetition, unsettling it and giving it movement and an emotional punch:

Cut [pink or red] [flowers or water] hung in [pink or red] [flowers or water].

After a few minutes of playing around with the ideas, my own formula emerged:

Before [girl, ghost, or gorge], [girl, ghost, or gorge]: or .
[2 beat word — concise and expansive].

Here’s one that I came up with the I’ll put right before the section of the poem about wanting to run with my mom:

Before girl, ghost.
Cancer.
Terminal.
Before ghost, girl:
intact.

Ooo, I like this! I hope it’s an idea that sticks.

nov 10/RUN

5.1 miles
franklin loop
37 degrees

More excellent November weather! A solid, relaxed, non-stop (except for walking up the bridge steps) run. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker and, later, another friendly runner — Hi! Admired the blue river and the occasional flash of red in the trees. Took deep breaths of fresh, cold air. Listened, without headphones, to the traffic and a chirping bird, rustling leaves and an alarm beeping somewhere.

10 Things

  1. a clear view of the forest floor from above
  2. so many green leaves still on the trees on the east side — light, glowing green
  3. somber (or reverent?) wind chimes
  4. smell 1: stinky, sour sewer gas, faint
  5. smell 2: either skunk or weed, probably weed
  6. smell 3: hot chocolate
  7. bright yellow headlights from cars, cutting through the trees
  8. some part of a machine scraping on a sidewalk somewhere in the distance
  9. a tree that I thought might be a person until I saw it in my periphery: a tree with one branch holding a hat at head-height
  10. a woman walker in bright orange pants

At the end of my run, I took a picture from the top of the hill, above the tunnel of trees, across from the ancient boulder:

Overlooking a forest that winds down to the river, which is a faint white -- or no color, just the absence of brown branches and yellowed leaves. Mostly bare branches and a brown ground covered in fallen leaves. In the lower right-hand corner a chain link fence stretches. This fence marks where the Winchell Trail used to go after coming up from the ravine. Now it's barely a trail, mostly hidden by leaves, no longer maintained. Just outside of the frame on the left, a green leaf flutters in the wind.
a view to the river near the 35th street parking lot / 10 november 2023

I love this poem by Donika Kelly, and I love what magic she can do with words!

I love you. I miss you. Please get out of my house. / Donika Kelly

Nothing today hasn’t happened before:
I woke alone, bundled the old dog
into his early winter coat, watered him,
fed him, left him to his cage for the day
closing just now. My eye drifts
to the buff belly of a hawk wheeling,
as they do, in a late fall light that melts
against the turning oak and smelts
its leaves bronze.
Before you left,
I bent to my task, fixed in my mind
the slopes and planes of your face;
fitted, in some essential geography,
your belly’s stretch and collapse
against my own, your scent familiar
as a thousand evenings.
Another time,
I might have dismissed as hunger
this cataloguing, this fitting, this fixing,
but today I crest the hill, secure in the company
of my longing. What binds us, stretches:
a tautness I’ve missed as a sapling,
supple, misses the wind.

I love all the work the title does to set up the poem, how she describes it as watering the dog (and not giving the dog water), and these verbs: cataloging/fitting/fixing. My favorite sentence, and the reason I wanted to post this poem today, is this:

My eye drifts
to the buff belly of a hawk wheeling,
as they do, in a late fall light that melts
against the turning oak and smelts
its leaves bronze.

A late fall light that melts against the tree and smelts it leaves bronze? Wow. I want tp remember that line. I’d also like to find an example of it out by the gorge on my run today (I’m writing this bit before my run), but there’s no autumn sunlight today, just gray gray gray. I wonder, what does gray to those leaves?

during the run: I hoped to think about this question of what gray does to the leaves, but I got distracted, or maybe, it didn’t do much, at least not today. Most of the leaves were gold or orangish-brown, no shimmering or sizzling, just soft and flat.

Instead of thinking about what gray does to the leaves, I was thinking about some lines I’d like to add to my Haunts poem:

A girl runs
four blocks
to the gorge.
She’s all
muscle bone
and breath,
foot strikes and
arm swings.
The river
and ghosts
wait.

transcript: During the run I was thinking about ghosts and girls and the gorge. And I was thinking that what I’m really trying to convey is that there’s a heaviness and a solidness and a there-ness that is both good and too heavy. So there’s a desire to lighten up. What I want to do is convey the heaviness, so maybe using the word, “heavy,” heavy foot strikes. Then I was thinking of Lizzy McAlpine and her song, “all my ghosts.” And then I was thinking about how all these ghosts aren’t primarily a bad thing, but there are a few ghosts I struggle with more than others. I think the ghost of cancer is haunting me the most right now.

the chorus from McAlpine’s “all my ghosts”:

And all my ghosts were with me
I know you felt them too
Watchin’ as I started to get dizzy
‘Cause I hate all of my habits
But I happen to love you
I hope that’s true

another version of my lines:

A girl runs.
She’s all
muscle bone
and breath,
heavy foot
falls and
swinging arms.
At the
river her
ghosts wait.

nov 8/RUN

5.5 miles
ford loop
43 degrees

Ah, November! Ran through the neighborhood, past the kids playing outside at the church daycare, past the house that has a giant Packer’s flag hanging from their fence, past the window of the business where I watch myself run and wonder if the people inside are watching me watch myself, over the lake street bridge to the east side of the river. On the bridge, I passed a couple holding hands. A mile later, I passed another hand-holding couple. An unusual sighting, and twice. Ran up the long hill to the Monument, then beside the river until I reached the ford bridge. Stopped to take a picture on the bridge, then ran the rest of the way back with Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo.

A view from the ford bridge, poorly framed. Not sure what color other people might see here, but to me it's all gray: light gray sky and river, broken up by chunks of dark gray trees. I like how the sky and the river look almost the same color to me.
taken from the ford bridge / 8 november 2023
My view of the river from the ford bridge. I stuck my phone above the railing, pointed and clicked quickly, afraid I might drop my phone into the river. For me, this image is fuzzy, almost furry, with soft greens and golds and grays. Most of the shot is of the past-their-prime trees on the shore of the Mississippi. All along the left edge curved around the trees is the light gray river which, at some point, turns into the sky. This image looks more like a painting than a photograph.
taken, with some trepidation, over the railing of the ford bridge / 8 november 2023

10 Things

  1. kids playing at the church daycare, several of them huddled at the fence, one of them (accidentally?) threw a ball over the side
  2. blue water, some waves, a few streaks or trails from something
  3. running above shadow falls, not sure if I was hearing it dripping or the wind through the trees
  4. running up the summit hill, a stretch of lit street lamps lining the path, the amber lights glowing softly
  5. noticing the gloom and the absence of my shadow as I ran around the ravine
  6. wondering if I would get to hear the St. Thomas bells as I ran close to campus (nope)
  7. chickadee dee dee
  8. turkeys! I’m not quite sure, but I think they were hanging out in the grass, just past the ford bridge, before you head down the hill to the locks and dam
  9. an unnaturally vibrant green on some of the leaves on the east side of the river — is this spring or late fall?
  10. an intense smell of cinnamon shortly before reaching the ford bridge — where was it coming from? someone’s gum? a bush?

before the run

Last night during Scott’s South High Community Jazz Band rehearsal, when I sit and listen and work on poetry, I returned to Susan Tichy’s North | Rock | Edge. Wow! This morning, before my run, I’m thinking about the lines I read and an interview Tichy did for Terrain.

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 love how she describes the environment and her idea of attention to the whole, not just to any one thing.

Rock blurs the categories of time and space by making time visible and place temporal. A poem uses both rest and motion to create a form, which can be seen and must be heard—as the Susan Howe epigraph says, fleeting and fixed. These poems, like many in Avalanche Path, have a surface texture of fragmentation, abrupt change, and brokenness metamorphized into a new whole, voiced in present time, human time. Nothing is still; nothing is uniform.

And here’s a wonderful bit from the first part of Tichy’s poem, 60 North|Arriving, Stand Still:

& here wind

elevates to a theory

of time : to not miss a single

wave’s decay, a verse

of coast becoming dearth

of certainty, to undefine

the edge as noun, dissolving

in the not unyielding mouth

of cliff : verse/reverse

from the root of turn :

wind-wave & swell

compounded to a single

force, broken

by the thing it breaks—

In the next section she offers this line, what place is not. The gorge as what place is not, or where place one was?

during the run

I think Tichy’s poem influenced my thoughts indirectly as I ran. I was thinking about a part of my Haunts poem I’m working on, particularly about how I am sometimes a girl, sometimes a ghost, and sometimes a gorge. Am I the gorge, I wondered as I started running. And as I ran over the lake street bridge I came up with an answer: yes. Later, when I reached to ford bridge, I stopped running to record some thoughts:

I am the gorge because the gorge is the remains, what is left behind, what continues to exist even as ground erodes, self erodes, vision erodes. The gorge, constantly shifting, but always there. The gorge is the eroded. Is the ghost the verb, the eroding? … I am also the gorge because I’m constantly leaving part of myself here and becoming this place and not just moving through the place, becoming the place.

nov 7/RUN

3.5 miles
river road, south/hill to Wabun/river road, north
41 degrees

Gray with a cold wind. I ran south, hoping to see the turkeys that Scott and I had encountered driving on the river road an hour before. No turkeys. Do I remember hearing or seeing any birds? I don’t think so. I do remember having to stutter step to avoid a squirrel darting out in front of me.

I ran past the double bridge to Locks and Dam no. 1, then up the hill to Wabun. What a view! It was steep, but it didn’t bother me. Ran past 2 people playing disc golf in the park.

Heard something or somebody rustling in the dry leaves below the double bridge — is that a white shirt I’m seeing? Possibly. Saw the flashing lights of the street sweepers, sweeping up leaves on the edge of the road. Also heard a teacher’s sharp whistle over at the school playground.

Today’s color palette: green, red, gold, blue, brown, and gray

overheard from one biker to another: So I just started rewatching Ted Lasso.

A nice run. Nothing felt sore or stiff — well, I guess there was one spot below my right shoulder blade that was a little sore, maybe from yesterday’s yoga? I could breathe and wasn’t anxious. Near the end I began chanting triple berries. I don’t remember having any deep thoughts or strange thoughts or curious thoughts — any thoughts? Thanked a pedestrian for moving over to the side of the trail. Tried to keep my cadence high, my footfalls quiet. Had to wipe my nose a few times on the sleeve of my sweatshirt.

I love these November runs — the colder temps with a dry path, a clear view to the other side, soft colors, less people on the trails.

Found this beautiful poem the other day:

Nature startles in familiar spaces. / Dagne Forrest

At noon in the middle of a snowy field, the dry seedhead of a plant bends down and describes a perfect arc in the snow. It traces twin channels where two points of contact brush ice crystals back and forth in a wavering breeze. In that moment, it’s easy to see where the first geometers found their tools, how Newton articulated his first law of motion, and even how different human minds throughout history contributed to the development of the metronome (one of these belonging to an Arab poet-scholar from the ninth century whose name was given to a crater on the dark side of the moon). It’s a lot to take in on a quick walk with my husband and the dog before lunch, and there is simply no adequate way to mark its significance. A photo or even a quick video feel utterly lacking in the reverence that such a moment deserves. Instead we walk on and try to memorize nature’s urgent tattoo: look here, look at what I have to show you.

I often think about how limited language is in trying to capture what I observe/experience in a single moment while running by the gorge. I like how Forrest attempts to describe her quick walk before lunch with her husband and her dog, how she connects it with so much of the world beyond that moment and the place.

nov 6/RUN

5 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
50 degrees / wind: 14 mph

Warmer this morning, so I wore shorts without tights, a short-sleeved gray t-shirt, and my orange sweatshirt. At the bottom of the hill when I turned around, I took off the sweatshirt and ran the second half with bare arms and legs. The only part of me that was cold was my ears, from the wind. A good run. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker:

me: Hi Dave!
Dave: Hi Sara! How are you doing today?
me: I’m good. How are you?
Dave: I’m very good. Thanks for asking.

Today I thought about how both of us almost always say the same thing, but they aren’t empty words. We both are always good when we’re outside, moving; we are our best selves: happy, free, able to forget and to admire everything around us.

10 Things

  1. honking geese, heard not seen, hidden in some brambles
  2. wind chimes, softly ringing at the start of my run
  3. mostly gray and overcast, once sun and my shadow — hello friend!
  4. approaching the Welcoming Oaks, all bare now, a deep red tree — have I ever noticed before that they are a few maples mixed in with the oaks
  5. several of the Welcoming Oaks had broken branches — the branch that remained looked jagged and gnarled
  6. an open view down to the floodplain forest! only a few patches of green
  7. no stones stacked on the ancient boulder
  8. more chickadee dee dees
  9. Daddy Long Legs crossing the street
  10. a slight haze everywhere, covering everything

what the wind can do

A block into my run, the wind picked up and gathered the leaves, pushing them forward. They looked almost like kids running — frantic and fast — towards something fun or away from something boring. This image reminded me of the other day when Scott and I were waiting in the drive-up line at the pharmacy. The wind was pushing an open wrapper. Instead of swirling around, the silver wrapper looked like it was dancing or marching. It didn’t look like a wrapper, but like a bug or some creature that was alive. One more wind/leaves image: Running south, the wind was at my back. A few times it pushed the leaves and we (me and the leaves) raced. I won, of course.

loops, repetitions, projects, time, and echoes

I’m still orbiting around ideas, trying to figure out what to do next. I’m getting closer. I know that it involves my not-yet-finished haunts poems and repetitions and restlessness and the untethering of project from progress, looping and leaving and returning, and time. Time keeps coming up. I’ve thought/written/theorized about time for decades. I even wrote about it in a doctoral exam. On this log, I frequently discuss it — how it drips or disappears when I’m running, my need to slow down the time it takes me to run (pace), rethinking time outside of clocks and the tight boxes of seconds, minutes, hours, trying to imagine time in much larger and longer scales across generations and centuries, Mary Oliver’s eternal vs. ordinary time, Marie Howe’s moments, past present and future Saras, cycles and seasons.

The other day I came across an amazing new endeavor (note: I’m resisting using project here), by Graywolf Press: a series of labs in which several artists come together to discuss, share, collaborate, imagine new possibilities for a theme. The first lab’s theme is time and, as I read through it (I read the transcript first, I’ll listen to their podcast next), I was inspired. Too many ideas to try and write down in this entry. I was particularly struck by Lisa Chen (LC) and her novel (I’m starting it after I finish this entry!), Activities of Daily Living. Here’s how she describes the book:

it’s about this durational artist Tehching Hsieh who was active in downtown New York in the seventies, eighties, nineties. And the, the novel is about a woman named Alice, who’s, has a day job but is trying to make something artistic. And she decides she’s gonna do a project about this artist just because he’s on her mind at the same time that her father is declining from dementia.

And the book is partly organized by going through these six seminal projects that the artist is known for before he stopped making work. And right, so, so the “Time Clock Piece,” he punched a time clock on the hour, every hour for like a year. And he missed, he missed a few. So again, Alice is trying to make a project out of this work so part of it is she’s digging into each of these durational projects and trying to think about what it stimulates or what she can make of it.

In the conversation, LC distinguishes between artist-time and life-time and projects we work on outside of capitalist/work-time. This makes me think of the many discussions I’ve had about being useless and un-productive and engaging in work outside of/in resistance to “the clock.” For me, this sort of time conversation is about what it means to work as an artist — I should return to Mary Oliver and the ways she struggles with this in The Leaf and the Cloud! Haunting questions: what’s the point? but, what does it do?

In the midst of all my thinking about time and progress and projects, I’ve been reflecting on repetitions and echoes in my own work. After rereading an entry from nov 5, 2019, I wrote this in my notes:

Reading through entries from past years on this day and feeling like I could have written/experienced the same thing on a run today — the same river, the same gray sky, the same dying vision, the same words feelings thoughts. This sameness points to a larger time scale and a resistance to progress! and improvement! but I also wonder if it suggests that I’m stuck in the same loop — be outside, move, notice, write. Where is it all going? Does it have to go anywhere? I feel these doubts in these moments when I’m in-between projects, when I have too many doors to enter and I don’t know which one to choose. This tension of restlessness and looping and resisting and in-between and the life of a writer should all be part of this collection. It should be haunted by these themes. 

my notes

I also wrote about this theme in an “On This Day” entry this morning:

I’m thinking about my echo discussion for nov 4, 2020 and how an echo repeats but slightly differently each time — fainter or softer or distorted. So much of what I write (and experience) as I move is almost the same from year to year. The view, or lack of view, of the river. The wonderful cold air. How much I love running in the cold. Often I start with, A wonderful run or a beautiful run or another great run. What distinguishes these entries are the small and brief moments and the images they create, like the snow and the bridge. That moment only lasted a few seconds, but it creates the echo here. (if that makes sense.) 

Sara, age 49, on November 4, 2023, is thinking a lot of repetition and looping and wondering about the differences between being stuck in a rut of repetition and using the grooves to sing a beautiful song. (not sure if that metaphor works). Put another way: I’ve been doing this practice of moving outside, noticing, writing about it for almost 7 years. So many of the entries contain the same descriptions, or almost the same descriptions. Am I just repeating myself, stuck on the same path, or is each entry an echo, a variation, with (sometimes) slight differences, difficult to discern?

On This Day: November 4

Wow, this is a lot. Right before my run, as I was thinking about all of these things in a kind of jumbled mess, this idea flashed in my head: find the echoes. Start with the moments, over the 7 years of writing in this log, in which I repeat myself (sometimes word for word) and put them together into some sort of chant or small poem or something. Sprinkle them throughout “Haunts.” Mix them in with other examples of echoes — in the geography, the history, the setting? How many echoes can I find?

nov 3/RUN

3.1 miles
2 trails
41 degrees

A little warmer today. Another beautiful run. What a view! Clear and through the trees to the river and the other side. I love November and its blues, grays, browns, and golds from a few trees still holding onto their leaves. I felt relaxed and strong — lungs and legs.

Listened to rustling leaves, striking feet, dripping ravines for the first 2 miles of the run. Put in Taylor Swift’s new version of 1989 for the last mile.

10 Things

  1. a single leaf floating through the air, then down to the ground — was it brown or gold or green?
  2. the steady dripping of water out of the sewer pipe
  3. the smell of something burnt — toast? coffee? — but from a house or the gorge and not longfellow grill
  4. a runner in a bright yellow shirt, running across the road, then through the grass below edmund, then onto the dirt trail in front of me
  5. the steps down to the winchell trail are closed, with a chain across the railings, but I went around on the dirt path
  6. the winchell trails was covered in yellow leaves
  7. the roar of a chainsaw from across the gorge
  8. kids’ voices from the playground at Minnehaha Academy
  9. a biker on the walking trail where it dips below the road and hangs above the floodplain forest
  10. a bright headlight from a bike, glowing in the grayish gloom

Found this wonderful little poem the other day:

Injury Room / Katie Ford

Through my
little window, I
see one day
the entire bird,
the next just
a leeward wing,
the next
only a painful
call, which, without
the body, makes
beautiful attachments
by even
attaching at
all.

This poem reminds me of my own experiments in trying to determine how little information (especially visual data) I need in order to recognize or identify or be aware of the presence of some thing.

Poetry is not a Project

Two days ago, at the end of my entry, I posted about a pamphlet I was reading, Poetry is not a Project. I offered some notes from the first section, Habitus, and promised to do the rest in later entries. Here’s the rest. Instead of a lot of notes, I decided to condense it into a key passage from each section.

Poetry is Not a Project / Dorothy Lasky

Habitus

Poems are living things that grow from the earth into the brain, rather than things that are planted within the earth by the brain.

This discussion of dirt/the ground reminds me of Mary Ruefle’s Observations on the Ground and April, 2022, when I spent the month studying dirt.

An Example

To write a poem is to be a maker. And to be a maker is to be down in the muck of making and not always to fly so high above the muck.

This passage reminded me of an essay I posted about in September and finally read yesterday: En Plein Air Poetics: Notes Towards Writing in the Anthropocene / Brian Teare

What is Really Not Intentions, but Life

The road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exists.

On the same site, Ugly Duckling Press, where I found Lasky’s pamphlet, I also found this chapbook, Almost Perfect Forms, in which the author creates the constellations out of ands and ors found in Dreams and Stones by Magdalena Tulli.

How We Write and What We Write For

Because poets make language and make language beautiful. Because beautiful language makes a new and beautiful world. Because poets live and make a new world, which beautiful language itself creates.

nov 1/RUN

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
30 degrees / feels like 22

Yes, another wonderful run! I love breathing in this cold air. Everything that has been almost closed opens up. A lot of the snow has melted, but there were a few patches on the grass. The path was almost completely bare and dry, only one or two short stretches of ice. The falls were roaring. I passed a guy talking on his phone (he was in shorts, of course), showing whoever he was talking to the falls — these falls are so beautiful (at least I think that’s what he said).

I tried chanting in threes:

I am girl /I am ghost/ I am gorge
Girl Ghost Gorge/ Girl Ghost Gorge
Girl / Ghost / Gorge
Girl Girl Girl / Ghost Ghost Ghost / Gorge Gorge Gorge
Girl Ghost Gorge / Ghost Gorge Girl / Gorge Girl Ghost

I was hoping I find some way into words about my haunts poems. It started with one: obsession (which I thought about before my run too. See below). I was thinking about how I return to the gorge again and again, day after day, wanting to be there, wanting to find better words, wanting to establish (once and for all?) that this place is my home. I haunt this place, as ghost and girl.

10 Things

  1. honking geese (just before going out for my run)
  2. snow mixed with ice mixed with yellow leaves
  3. a strange noise — a big pipe clanging mournfully (not exactly sure what was happening, but the noise was caused by a city worker patching the path)
  4. the sharp smell of tar
  5. a woman and her dog walking on the double bridge
  6. a few patches of ice under the ford bridge
  7. running past the cold, silent meadow, almost hearing the buzz of bugs from earlier in the fall
  8. rushing, gushing, roaring falls
  9. crossing over the grassy trail (to avoid the work being done on the path), running over little piles of snow and leaves, my foot sinking into a hidden hole
  10. listening to a playlist for the second half of my run, running on the far edge of the road, being passed by a car hauling a trailer

I was just about to write that I forgot to look at the river, but I just remembered that I did and that I saw one spot that looked like it could almost be ice.

Stopped at my favorite falls spot and took a few seconds of video before turning on a playlist and starting to run again. Watching this video, it seems less white and wintery than it felt when I was there.

minnehaha falls / 1 nov 2023

before the run

I wrote this before my run. It made me feel hopeful that I’m getting closer to a way into a months long obsession.

It’s November and I’m feeling the itch to start (or return to) a big project. Me and my projects. I feel unsettled, lost, irritated, overwhelmed without them.

Not everyone likes the word project as the way to describe what a poet is doing when working on some thing (or, working on nothing, when nothing is not no thing but that empty, unknown space, the void). I guess the idea of a project bothers me a little too — too organized, structured, disciplined. Maybe I’ll start calling it my latest obsession? But an obsession with some direction; the goal = (temporarily) exhausting my feelings/thoughts/understandings/experiences with a certain thing. To write and write and write about a thing until I’m exhausted, emptied or satisfied, at least temporarily.

The difficulty right now is that I have too many obsessions: the periphery, the other side/lifting the veil, living in a land of almosts, girl/ghost/gorge, RUN! as an archive. Where should I land? Which one should I choose? Perhaps I should avoid settling on something so BIG and important, and search for a small, off to the side way in?

Ever since I encountered a chapbook by Dorothy Lasky, Poetry is Not a Project, I’ve been critical/uncertain about my own use of project as a way to describe what I’m doing. I think I first encountered it in year 2 (2018) and I don’t think I actually read it. I just remember feeling uneasy with its title. And that unease has stuck. I think I’ll read it now.

note: I did read it and loved it and then went out for my wonderful run. Now, 3 hours later, I’m back and ready to read it again and then write about it a little.

There’s a lot I could write about in this wonderful pamphlet and its 4 sections: Habitus; An Example; What is Really Not Intention, But Life; and How We Write, and What We Write For. So, I want to break it down over 4 log entries. Today: Habitus

Habitus

I think poems come from the earth and work through the mind from the ground up. I think poems are living things that grow from the earth into the brain, rather than things that are planted within the earth by the brain. I think a poet intuits a poem and a scientist conducts a “project.”

Poetry is Not a Project

She is not satisfied with this distinction, feeling it’s not quite correct, then ends this page with the following hope:

But I do think there is a distinction. And the distinction, I think, is very important to how we come to think of poetry in the 21st century. Because I want this new century to be full of people who write poems, not full of poets who conduct projects and do nothing more.

Poetry is Not a Project

On the next page, she discusses why projects are useful for poets: they bring in money and respect.

A poet with a project has everything set out before he even gets started. A poet with a nameable project seems wise, and better than other poets with unnameable ones.

Poetry is Not a Project

She calls this out as BS. Then she discusses intuition and its importance for poetry, how the outside world of an artist blends and blurs with our internal drives. This blending and blurring can be difficult to name.

Love this bit:

Naming your intentions is great for some things, but not for poetry. Projects are bad for poetry. I might argue that a poet with a “project” that he can lucidly discuss is a pretty boring poet, at best.

Poetry is Not a Project

and this:

when a poet interacts with the field or domain of poetry, she is aware of the immense history she represents in her words enough to let herself be crushed by it.

Poetry is Not a Project

She then argues that poetic “projects” can be toxic to established and new poets, creating pressure by demanding the poets know exactly what they are doing and be able to articulate it to others. She closes this section with,

a poem, as a thing, resists being talked about linearly in its very nonlinearity. In its very nonlinear life. In the poem’s actual life, goddamn them.

Poetry is Not a Project

Here, I was planning to write some of my thoughts, but I’m struggling to describe why/how Lasky’s ideas resonate for me. I think I’ll write about the other 3 sections and then respond.

But, just one more thing: Lasky’s discussion of our inability to know or express what a poem is in the form of a project, reminds me of a definition of wild that I revisited this morning:

wild = capacity of all things to elude the mind’s appropriations

oct 30/RUN

5.4 miles
franklin loop
25 degrees / feels like 20

Yes! A great temperature for running. I love the cold air and not getting overheated. Wore black running tights, black running shorts, my 10 year-old base layer green shirt, an orange sweatshirt, black gloves, a hat and a buff. Such a great run. I feel satisfied and happy and energized. A great start to the winter running season!

10 Things

  1. chatty, chirping birds — sparrows? wrens? finches? chickadees?
  2. the Welcoming Oaks are almost bare. Where was I when the leaves fell? hello friends!
  3. a bright white circle of sunlit river burning through the growing gap between the trees
  4. everywhere more of a view to the other side
  5. empty blueish gray water — so calm and pleasing to my eyes
  6. passed Daddy Long Legs, dressed in black. His hi was so quiet it didn’t register until it was too late to call back a greeting
  7. Hi Dave! — greeting Dave, the Daily Walker in the final mile
  8. crossing the bridge, approaching 2 talkative runners from behind: excuse me. / Oh! [a runner jumps to the side looking freaked out] / Sorry I scared you!
  9. the smell of smoke down below on the east side of the river
  10. a roller skier! I couldn’t hear the clicking and clacking of his ski poles until I was right next to me

bats, bells, noisy road work, and late fall leaves

Found this poem from DH Lawrence the other day while looking for poems about bats. Wow, he didn’t like bats!

 Bat/ D.H. Lawrence

At evening, sitting on this terrace,
When the sun from the west, beyond Pisa, beyond the mountains of Carrara
Departs, and the world is taken by surprise …

When the tired flower of Florence is in gloom beneath the glowing
Brown hills surrounding …

When under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio
A green light enters against stream, flush from the west,
Against the current of obscure Arno …

Look up, and you see things flying
Between the day and the night;
Swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together.

A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches
Where light pushes through;
A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air.
A dip to the water.

And you think:
“The swallows are flying so late!”

Swallows?

Dark air-life looping
Yet missing the pure loop …
A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight
And serrated wings against the sky,
Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,
And falling back.

Never swallows!
Bats!
The swallows are gone.

At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats
By the Ponte Vecchio …
Changing guard.

Bats, and an uneasy creeping in one’s scalp
As the bats swoop overhead!
Flying madly.

Pipistrello!
Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe.
Little lumps that fly in air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive;

Wings like bits of umbrella.

Bats!

Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;
And disgustingly upside down.

Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.
Bats!

In China the bat is symbol for happiness.

Not for me!

Today, writing this bit before my run, I’m thinking about bats and echos and echolocation. Vibrations, reverberations, sounds that haunt by continuing to ring out. Bells. But, back to the echoes. In addition to bats, I’m thinking about a stanza from a favorite Halloween poem that I posted on this day in 2020:

A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:
from Black Cat/ Rainer Maria Rilke

Speaking of haunting, relentless sounds: I am sitting at my desk in the front room and city workers are paving the hole they made in the street in July or August. So loud! Beep beep beep. Rrrruuummmbbbllleee. Scrape scrape, tamp tamp. Even the visual noise echoes — a flash flash flash of the lights on the truck as it dumps the gravel or tar or whatever they’re putting in the hole. Everything is vibrating — the street, my jaw, my chair, the windows. Difficult to think or to write while this is happening!

At the end of my run, having crossed the river road to walk in the grassy, leaf covered boulevard, I was distracted by the delightful noise of fallen leaves. Then I noticed a bare tree, its still green leaves scattered around it.

An image of the ground covered in leaves, most of them green. A strange sight in late fall when most of the fallen leaves are usually brown or orange or gold. When I took this picture, the ground seemed to glow from the green, but now, looking at the image, everything is muted and dull and boring. Is it my lack of functioning cone cells, my inability to take a decent picture, or something else?
green leaves on the ground / 30 oct 2023

oct 27/RUN

2.7 miles
2 trails
37 / feels like 29
wind: 15 mph

Okay winter. Wore tights under my shorts, a long-sleeved shirt under my sweatshirt, gloves and a buff. The only part of me that was cold: my ears. Now, sitting at my desk, they burn. Blustery out there. Swirling wind. A few times I mistook a falling leaf for a flying bird, which was very cool to see. A brown bird, floating by.

My legs were sore. I’m eager to get my blood checked at my physical in a few weeks. My iron might still be low. Until then, more burgers and a new multi vitamin that’s not quite a choking hazard.

10 Things

  1. more of a view today: cold blue water through the remaining red and yellow leaves
  2. slippery leaves covering the trail — don’t fall!
  3. near the sidewalk at 36th and 46th: a deep hole, dug up by the city workers, not as neat or wide as the holes carved out on our street, more like a gash or a missing chunk ripped out
  4. walkers bundled up in winter coats with hats and gloves
  5. the entrance to the Winchell trail, which was shrouded in yellow the other day, was open and bare today
  6. dripping water at the ravine — drip drip drip
  7. looking down at the gorge from the edge, a pleasing palette: steel blue, dark green, gray, brown
  8. a brown leaf fluttering by my face, looking like a floating bird
  9. at least 3 or 4 lonely, empty benches
  10. a kid’s voice below — would I encounter them later? Yes

Revisiting a poem I posted on this day in 2020, My Doubt/ Jane Hirshfield, these lines reminded me of something:

the lines:

I would like
to grow content in you, doubt,
as a double-hung window
settles obedient into its hidden pulleys and ropes.

the something:

Dance with the pain 

That last one is something I describe a lot. What does that even mean?
It means to greet the pain or discomfort like an old friend. Know that it’s always there waiting for you. If you accept it, and envision yourself enjoying its company, it’s much more manageable.

from a race recap at the Chicago Marathon — @emmajanelbates

Being content with the doubt and greeting pain as an old friend. Accepting doubt and being content with it I think I can do, but befriending pain? I’ve been trying to work on that as part of this larger writing/living/moving project. The pain I’m thinking of is the pain in my knees or my back or my hips, but it’s also other, deeper pains: the pain of aging, loved ones dying, living within a body that doesn’t work as well. Not sure if I’d call it a friend yet, more like acquaintances. I think it’s possible, but what does enjoying the company of pain look like, outside of the model of sadomasochism?

oct 26/RUN

3.1 miles
trestle turn around
57 degrees / drizzle

Waited for the rain to stop, then went out for a late morning run. Listened to the squeaks of my feet on the wet leaves, the drips from the trees and the eaves, workers on a neighbor’s roof as I ran north. Listened to a playlist on the way back south. The sidewalks were slippery and covered with red and yellow leaves. The paved trail had some puddles. I remember looking at the river through the trees, but I can’t remember what it looked like. Probably gray.

The strangest moment of the run happened near the beginning as I ran through the neighborhood on my way to the river. The sidewalk was covered in intensely red and yellow leaves and so was the sky, from an orange tree. Everything glowed, even me in my bright orange sweatshirt. Wow! I decided that once I finished my run, I’d come back to this spot and take some video:

A sidewalk covered in red and yellow leaves. In person it glowed, but when I look at it on the screen, it is dull.

oct 25/RUN

3.3 miles
2 trails
51 degrees
humidity: 91%

Yesterday it rained all day. Today it was wet and gray and leaf-littered. For the first mile, I heard a squeak squeak each time I stepped on the wet leaves. Saw and good morninged a regular: Mr. Walker Sitter. Heard kids yelling at the school playground. Smelled the sewer gas. Avoided city workers and roofers and bikers almost over the white line. Admired the “edge of the world,” now open and looking even more edge-y. Worried about slipping on the wet leaves and falling down the steep slope. Dripped sweat in the humid air. Counted drops falling from the sewer pipe in the ravine. Wondered if the distance/pace was not working properly on my watch. Forgot about everything else.

The color of the day is YELLOW.

  1. tunnels of yellow leaves above me
  2. piles of yellowed leaves under me
  3. yellow cross walk signs glowing in the gloom
  4. a runner’s bright yellow running shirt
  5. (writing this entry): a neighbor’s yellow tree outside my window,
  6. yellow leaves on the hydrangea bush
  7. a stretch of yellow trees, just past their peak, beside me near Folwell
  8. a yellow entrance to the Winchell Trail

The yellow I see is mostly bright. Not gold, but with hints of orange and green.

Before I ran I memorized A Rhyme for Halloween. Then I recited lines from it as I moved. Never all at once, but every so often.

As I was searching for another poem to post I thought about how many poems I’ve already posted and why I keep posting more when I hardly have time to read the ones I’ve already posted. So today, I decided to revisit a poem that I posted on October 25th, 2020: Beginning/ JAMES WRIGHT. Beautiful. Reading it right now, I love the opening:

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.   
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.

I love the idea of the moon dropping feathers and the dark wheat listening. And now, as I read the third line, Be still. I’m thinking of it less as a command to not move (to be still), and more as an invitation or a plea to continue to exist (be, still). And then I’m connecting that idea to the last 2 lines of the poem:

The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.

Perhaps my darkness involves an impossible wish, that my mom and Scott’s parents were still alive.