4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
56 degrees
Didn’t feel the greatest — unfinished business — but managed to keep running and feeling strong, especially in my legs. Today is another beautiful day. When I walked outside, I whispered, wow! Sun, blue sky, warm air, birds, dry paths.
10 Things
- scary
- runner!
- cooler
- busker
- bikes
- busy
- left
- cobblestones
- unstacked
- hitch
In the bathroom at the falls, a little boy in the next stall was scared by the loud sounds — toilets flushing, hand dryers buzzing. His mom said, try putting your hands over your ears and I imagined him trying — wide-eyed with tiny sticky hands up to his ears.
Running south on the trail, a long train of young bikers — a school field trip? — slowly passed me. As each biker approached me, they would call out to the others behind them, runner! I was impressed until one of them yelled it right in my ear. Ouch!
Taking the part of the trail that dips lower than the road and into the shade, everything was darker, dimmer, cooler.
Running through the park, I passed a busker playing an instrument that I couldn’t see because I was running too fast or hear because I had headphones on.
The kids that had biked past me on the trail had stopped at the falls. Their bikes had taken over a grassy hill near the playground. So many bikes!
The park was busy — people walking, biking, taking pictures, eating outside at Sea Salt or near the pavilion.
A woman on a bike with a kid on a seat behind her extended her right arm to signal a left turn. There was something about how straight and stiff her arm was that made me remember the gesture.
Ran over the cobblestones near the falls overlook. Later, leaving the park, listened to Simon & Garfunkel sing about cobblestones and feelin’ groovy. Thought about how my ophthalmologist told me I had signs of cobblestones in my peripheral vision a few years ago.
The white plastic chairs I wrote about a few days ago that were stacked, are now unstacked and set up side by side in the shade of the building.
A runner passed me. I couldn’t see it, but I heard a slight hitch in his step as one foot strike was always slightly louder and longer than the other. I wondered, what do people hear in my foot strikes?
before the run
Reading the poem-of-the-day on Poetry Foundation — We/ Joshua Bennett, I was struck by a word near the end, apprehension.
he is a father now, with a boy he is trying to teach
the benefits of apprehension.
I wanted to dig into apprehension, so I looked it up and found this, on Merriam-Webster:
There’s quite a bit to comprehend about apprehension, so let’s take a closer look at its history. The Latin ancestor of apprehension (and of comprehend, prehensile, and even prison, among others) is the verb prehendere, meaning “to grasp” or “to seize.” When it was first used in the 14th century, apprehension could refer to the act of learning, a sense that is now obsolete, or the ability or power to understand things—learning and understanding both being ways to “grasp” knowledge or information. It wasn’t until the late 16th century that apprehension was used, as it still is today, for the physical seizure of something or someone (as an arrest). The most commonly used sense of apprehension today refers to a feeling that something bad is about to happen, when you seize up, perhaps, with anxiety or dread, having grasped all the unpleasant possibilities.
entry for apprehension
I started to think about prehension too. It feels vaguely religious/spiritual to me. I looked it up: “apprehension by the senses.”
I like how apprehension and its grasp, can mean to understand or “get” something — to grasp it, but also to be seized or held by it — is this seizing always negative/oppressive?
All of this musing over the different meanings of apprehension, returns me to the beginning of the poem and the narrator’s wrestling with different meanings of attention — as the money of the mind or care or access to the Divine. Of course, to care can also lead to caring too much, being preoccupied with, worried, anxious, apprehensive. Now I’m thinking about the color of the therapist’s dress and the disagreement over whether it is a yellow-based red or a blue-based red. And I’m thinking about this line —
still studying the difference between
what a man proclaims in speech and what he says with his
body.
The difference between comprehension (knowing in language) and apprehension (knowing through senses). All of these tensions with opposing meanings. I mentioned this Scott at breakfast and added, wow, the word apprehension comes near the end of the poem. It’s the volta — the moment in which the poem turns, shifts, a door opens to unlock understanding or to upend understanding!
The Italian word for “turn,” a volta is a rhetorical shift that marks the change of a thought or argument in a poem.
Other common names for volta include turn, fulcrum, or hinge. The volta marks a shift from the main narrative or idea of the poem and awakens readers to a different meaning or to a reveal in the conclusion of the poem. They often use words like “but,” “yet,” or “however” to distinguish a reversal or shift in thought.
Voltas are part of the sonnet form. In the Petrarchan sonnet, the volta occurs between the eighth and ninth lines. In the Shakespearean sonnet, the volta occurs before the final couplet. Voltas are also characteristics of other poetic forms, and can even occur in free verse poems.
Volta
And now, writing this last sentence, I’m realizing that the volta is a MOMENT, to put beside my other definitions of moment.
I go to the gorge
I go to the gorge/to find the soft space/between beats. Woke up this morning to the news that a favorite poem of mine, written in the late fall of 2022, will be published this August. Hooray! Yesterday, watching a book trailer for Litany for the Long Moment — a book that I’d like to read, but might have to ILL or buy it to do so, I had an idea for a video project. Something about the mix of music, text on the screen, and the flash of images, made me think about my ritual/circumambulation project and the idea of chanting,
I go to
the gorge
over and over and finishing the phrase differently each time with cuts between text/voice and images from the gorge. I imagine an acceleration of this text and images until something breaks open and ? — maybe silence, the image of the air above the gorge, and then voice-over of the entire poem. After that, a return to more images, softer and slower this time, and more chanting.
I go to/the gorge || to open/a door
I go to/the gorge || to be with/ my mom
I go to the gorge ||to become/ shadow
names
a connection between the two other poems-of-the-day:
1
from Poetry Daily and Visitation/ Kelly Hoffer
my nameis the last name my mother refused
to change. so as not to lose you, the hospital
lists your name with your mother’s on your
baby wristlet. thislife is a repetition that knows
no bounds, tracing a tablet into a waxing
oval that spirals outward. seed of a
seed sowing itself into the ground. this name
just happens to be the size of the concept growing.
2
from Poets.org and Naming/ Julia Kolchinsky
For the first month of life, I was
unnamed. To my Mama, my body belonged
to one name, and to my Babushka, another, so
they called me Lyalya, Lyalichka, little
doll, baby, because neither would bend
their letters and though I was already known
to scream, to refuse sleep and strangers,
they couldn’t have known then how,
silently, I’d keep screaming, keep refusing
any name they’d give me, how in my mouth,
it wouldn’t feel like mine, and on the tongues
of others, even less like I belonged.