Tag: Maxine Kumin

aug 4/SWIM

3 long loops
lake nokomis open swim
65 minutes
76 degrees

A wonderful night at the lake! The buoys were placed wide, making the course bigger. More strokes, more distance, more time in the lake. It was choppy and challenging, especially nearing buoy 3 (water pulling me down) and between buoys 4 and 5 (waves battering me on my right). I could tell the water was unsettled when I entered it. Before beginning, I watched the small undulations on the surface and they disoriented me.

The water was green and opaque. I admired the bubbles my fingers shed. Below the surface, it was noisy — the same strange whooshing sound that I heard last week. Is it because of construction somewhere nearby? Above the surface, it was noisy too: big military planes flying by — National Guard training. I noticed some menacing swans on the edge of the course, but not sailboats or paddle boarders. Sometimes I felt like my spirit was deepening and quieting. A few times, I felt some twinges of anxiety — would my shoulder start hurting? my foot or my calf cramp? Almost all of the time, it felt easy and natural.

I rarely saw the buoys, but when I did, they were less than flashes or dots, just the idea that a buoy was ahead of me. I marveled out how I’ve learned to trust myself so much, just believing that the brief glimpse of the idea of a shape ahead of me was a buoy.

Before heading over to the lake, I had studied Mary Oliver’s poem. I was struck by these fragments: it is TIME NOW and it will be TIME AGAIN. I thought about the now of time as being in the moment, present — MO’s now and now and now. I thought about the again of time as the loops and repetitions, the habits I repeat, the returning again and again to the lake to swim around and around the course. I also thought about the again as the inevitable restoration of the now when I deepen and quiet. No matter my anxious thoughts, I will come back to the now, when I am not thinking or worrying, but being here, now, in my element, doing what I am meant to do.

1 day of swimming, august 2025

1 — from 5 aug 2025:

I recited Mary Oliver’s, “Swimming, One Day in August” and felt the deepening and quieting of my spirit. Peaceful, calm, relaxed, in my element.

This last line, in my element, reminded me of the Adventure Time clip I posted years ago on this log1:

quieting of the spirit = being satisfied, in your element

This clip also has another thing that I often reference: the demon cat with approximate knowledge. That’s me! Speaking of that cat, as I watched this clip again I realized something: this cat is a twisted reference to the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. Nice! One more thing about this clip: I want a t-shirt with Finn on it, yelling out, “I’m in my Element!”

2 — from 6 aug, referencing 13 july 2025

I go to/the lake // to be held. Thought about the verb, to behold, then beheld, which reminded me of a line in a poem that I love and had pondered on 19 june: Unsee the beheld! / Altitude/ Airea D. Matthews

Unsee the beheld where to unsee is to observe/witness with a sense other than sight, or to unravel, come undone or redone, transformed. Who/what is the beheld? Me, held by the water. So, to unsee me, to let go of me/I and have an encounter/exchange with that which is not-I: the water. I haven’t written about this bit yet, but yesterday I was thinking about Anne Carson and her anthropology of water and I wrote in my Plague Notebook, encounter with that which you cannot contain, control, that is not You — the not-I. In the lake, I am held by the water — rocked, enveloped, lifted — but in the process of being held I dissolve, or the small part of Sara the ecosystem that is I is saturated submerged, soaked, waterlogged.

MO lines: “the sea/which held me, until I grew easy”

3 — the thinker’s the sinker

Just two days ago, I mentioned a line from a Maxine Kumin poem about the thinker being the sinker. I decided to look up the poem and my original post about it. So glad I did! Kumin didn’t write the line; that was my condensing of it in order to remember it. Here’s what she wrote, and a few other lines too, from “Swimming and Believing”:

Each time I tear this seam to enter, 
all that I carry is taken from me,
shucked in the dive. 
Lovers, children, even words go under.
Matters of dogma spin off in the freestyle
earning that mid-pool spurt, like faith.
Where have I come from? Where am I going?
What do I translate, gliding back and forth
erasing my own stitch marks in this lane?
Christ on the lake was not thinking
where the next heel-toe went. 
God did him a dangerous favor
whereas Peter, the thinker, sank. 
The secret is in the relenting, 
the partnership. I let my body work
accepting the dangerous favor
from the king-size pool of waters.

Later in my log entry about this poem, from 22 july 2021, I posted this:

things I like–tearing the seam and erasing the stitch marks; he who thinks sinks; the value of belief and relenting to that which is greater than you; a shucking off of the need to know where you’re from and where you’re going; the connection of all of this to the act of swimming. I like the line about thinking and sinking–maybe not he who thinks sinks, but the thinker’s the sinker? Hmm…anyway, I’m not opposed to thinking–I love doing it all the time and it is very necessary and important–but lately I’ve been very interested in ideas/understandings/poems/new ways of being that come to be or occur to us through methods other than concentration and directing our minds on objects or problems, which is how thinking is often defined. What can come to us when we’re not studying it directly? When we don’t have a specific objective, or need to be in control? Is this a different way of thinking about thinking?

In tomorrow’s entry, I should add to this idea of not thinking with Alice Oswald and her ideas about swimming and the mind and body.

  1. I spent more than 1/2 hour searching for the entry I posted it in, but couldn’t find it. Then I remembered that I had also posted it on Undicisplined, so I found it there. ↩︎

aug 2/SWIM

6 loops
lake nokomis open swim
69 degrees
AQI: 55

6 loops! In the 13 years I’ve been doing open swim, I think I’ve swum 6 loops once before. It took a little less than 2 hours. What a great way to start my swimming one day in August month! The conditions were great: calm water that wasn’t too cold or too warm, sun, a clear sky. As they announced the opening of the course, a lifeguard mentioned that it was slightly shorter because of a staffing shortage. In the past, a shorter course meant eliminating the green buoys and just swimming from beach to beach, but today’s “shortened” course had all 5 buoys and didn’t look that much shorter. Having swum it and checked my number of strokes and the distance, I don’t think it was short.

10 Things

  1. a dozen geese flying not too far above the water — not in a tight formation, but an approximate V
  2. the color of the water near the surface: a pale green
  3. the color of the water, deep below: dark green
  4. the color of the water on the surface: purple
  5. the sky: a pale blueish purple
  6. several planes in the air: most were parallel to the water, one nearly perpendicular, climbing straight up
  7. nearing the buoy #3 (green, closest to the little beach) the water surface was mostly flat, and calm, with flecks of golden light
  8. a tri clinic on the edge of the beach: women preparing for next Sunday’s sprint distance triathlon
  9. stopping in the middle of the lake: quiet, still
  10. the surface of the water glowing green or orange as I rounded a buoy

Today was the first day of my “swimming one day in August” project. A cumulative total of 24 hours spent in the water during August, partly inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem of the same name. As I stroked through the water, I recited the lines and thought about what Oliver means by, It is time now, I said, for the deepening and quieting of the spirit among the flux of happenings. I thought about the deepening and the bottom, about 18 feet below me that I couldn’t see. Then I remembered a line from the poet, Maxine Kumin: the thinker’s the sinker. Too much thinking, too much trying to go deeper into the murky depths, makes you lose your buoyancy. I thought about the quieting of the spirit and ways to understand it in the midst of moving. A strong, steady core? I recalled more lines from the poem, I went down in the afternoon to the sea, which held me until I grew easy. Even when the sea is calm — and how often does that happen? — the waves are not quiet or still, but relentless. A deepening and quieting is about settling into a rhythm. Then I started thinking that that deepening is not about sinking deeper into your own interior, but opening up to the world outside of yourself. The quieting, then, is about quieting the “I” and those things that make us believe we are separate from others and the world.

I think these thoughts, which came and went, probably comprised 10 or 15 percent of my swim. The rest of it was counting strokes between breaths (12345) or between buoys (buoys 3 to 4 = 200 strokes / buoys 5 to 1 = 100 strokes) or trying to sight the course or not running into some swimmers, racing others or noticing colors or listening to my nose squeak and water slosh over my ear or stopping myself from worrying about whether or not my feet were cramping.

When I finished, I was tired and a little sore, but my left shoulder didn’t ache and my calves or feet weren’t cramping. Hooray!

Here are today’s colors. Orange, green, yellow buoys. Water: purple surface, pale green just under, dark green deep below. Pale blueish purple sky with streaks of bright blue and a white cloud or two. Green trees lining the shore, light brown sand on the beach, too white swan boats.

buoys / water / sky / trees – sand – boat

june 24/SWIM

5 cedar loops (2.5 nokomis loops)
cedar lake open swim
76 degrees

A wonderful swim! No numb fingers, no worries about being too cold or cramping or running into thick thatches of milfoil. A little choppy, but no waves crashing over me. During loop 4 or 5 I stopped to tread water for a minute at Hidden Beach while I adjusted my nose plug. As I kicked my feet, I could feel the vines reaching up, touching my toes and heels.

I don’t recall seeing or feeling any fish. No stray vines that wrapped around my shoulders either. I was routed twice: once by a lifeguard on a kayak who incorrectly (imho) thought I was swimming off course, and once by a swimmer taking a sharper angle than I was. Both times I had to stop my stroke. I didn’t care.

I felt good when I was done, like I could have done another loop or two. I delighted in all of the bubbles surrounding my hands. I wondered how close to the oncoming swimmers one swimmer was going as I tracked his cap, his buoy, and his frothy kick. I stopped several times to adjust my new nose plug.

Earlier today, before the swim, I was reminded of these lines from the wonderful poet/swimmer, Maxine Kumin:

from “Morning Swim”

the beat
rose in the fine thrash of my feet,

rose in the bubbles I put out
slantwise, trailing through my mouth.

My bones drank water; water fell
through all my doors. I was the well

that fed the lake that met my sea.

I didn’t think about these lines as I swam, but I did give a lot of attention to my feet and my kicking legs as I moved. Did I notice a beat? Would I describe the kicking of my feet as a fine thrashing? I like the idea of my bones drinking water. It reminds me of the lines from Alice Oswald I re-memorized last week: giving water the full weight and size of myself in order to imagine it, water with my bones, water with my mouth and my understanding.

unravel (this morning)

Watching a behind the scenes video for Olivia Rodrigo’s “The Cure” (it’s very cool to see how they created the red thread unraveling effect) and heard these lines: Why can’t you come stitch me up? I suddenly thought about Emily Dickinson and her lines about seams and stitching. Then I thought about Homer’s Penelope and how she wove the funeral shroud for her father all day, then unraveled it each night, to trick her suitors.

tag: aquatic plants

This morning, I’m searching through past entries for mentions of milfoil and tagging the entries with “aquatic plants.” As I read through the entry for 10 july 2025, I found this description:

Sparkle friends, bubbles. an orange glow off to the side, marble legs, ghostly milfoil, blue sky with a few clouds. Above: blue water, below: a light greenish-blue. An interesting effect: looking up blue, down below green.

10 july 2025

It made me think about my chapbook, inklings, and how to talk and write about it. In it, I have brief poems about my sparkle friends, bubbles, ghostly milfoil. In other entries, I’ve written more about marble legs and the orange glow off to the side. Could I expand on inklings through my waterlogged project? A book-length manuscript combining poems with the descriptions of lake experiences that inspired them? Could Mary Oliver’s Long Life be an inspiration for this project?

Here are a few more bits from my reading through milfoil entries that I’d like to remember and play around with for the rest of this week:

1 — rumors whispered by bubbles, spread through nets of ghostly vines (4 july 2025)

Alice Oswald’s nobody and pondering a word, rumor/rumour:

what kind of a rumour is beginning even now
under the waterlid she wonders there must be
hundreds of these broken and dropped-open mouths
sulking and full of silt on the seabed
I know a snorkeller found a bronze warrior once
with the oddest verdigris* expression and maybe
even now a stranger is setting out
onto this disintegrating certainty this water
whatever it is whatever anything is
under these veils and veils of vision
which the light cuts but it remains

unbroken

*verdigris: a green or bluish deposit especially of copper carbonates formed on copper, brass, or bronze surfaces

A fun rumor to make imagine believe in spread: maybe your brain, or some part of your brain, or your breath, or some other part of you that is not (only) you, has secret conversations with the water in which the water reveals the location of the buoy and the part of you that is you but not (only) you guides you towards it. Of course, this only works if you listen, which I have learned to do. Can you?

rumour (OED): 

General talk or hearsay, not based on definite knowledge

General talk or hearsay personified
1600: “Open your eares; for which of you wi’l stop The vent of hearing, when lowd Rumor speaks?”/ W. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2 Induct. 2

Clamour, outcry; noise, din. Also: an instance of this

To make a murmuring noise

This last one — to make a murmuring noise — reminds me of the idea of bubbles speaking to me in a soft, faint, bubble-whisper. And now, I’m thinking of a book that I checked out of the library years ago: How to Read Water. Since the ebook is available, I just checked it out again! What are water’s languages?

Back to Alice Oswald’s words and her bronze warrior. Have I written about these particular lines (I’ll check later)? I’m thinking of the ghosts — people who drowned, objects forgotten or carelessly discarded — on the bottom of the lake. What do/can they say to me? Do their messages travel through the pale milfoil that stretches up to the light?

2 — a lake is not as wild as the river or the sea, but it’s wilder than a pool (9 july 2024)

An open water slogan I’ve seen before: no walls. No lane lines or lanes. But, this isn’t Homer’s sea, Alice Oswald’s unfenced purple. There are shores in sight (well, mostly in sight) and only vines, fish, and swan boats to encounter. No sharks or motorized boats or big waves. Does that mean the lake is all routine? Safe, steady, predictable?

from A Swim in Co. Wicklow/ Derek Mahon

Spirits of lake, river
and woodland pond preside
mildly in water never
troubled by wind or tide;
and the quiet suburban pool
is only for the fearful —

no wind-wave energies
where no sea briar grips
and no freak breaker with
the violence of the ages
comes foaming at the mouth
to drown you in its depths.

Lake Nokomis is affected by wind and watermilfoil reaches out to grip me near shore almost every swim. No, it’s not the sea, but it’s also not a suburban pool.

In the lake, you can’t see much, either above or below. Above: water, vague trees, sky, sand. Below: your hand, ghost vines, silver flashes. No bottom, just void, nothing, or something not-seen. 

In an essay about open swimming in the sea, Lauren Groff (love her writing and her awesome Olympic triathlete sister!) writes:

There is danger, a great deal of it. There are sharks that circle her. They wait. Their teeth shine in the murk. Their bodies lazily trail her shadow as it darts over the coral reef. 

Lake Nokomis doesn’t have sharks. It has uncertainty, mystery, a floor only 15-20 feet below scattered with things we can’t see because the water is stirred up, murky. I wonder, which is scarier? Swimming above sharks you can see, or above a nothing that could be anything that you can’t?

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
75 degrees

A few hours before open swim started, the sky unzipped and it rained hard. I think that might be the reason the water was so full of vegetation: whole vines, chunks of vines, and some green slimy substance. Gross! Before I realized what was happening, I swam through the slime — bright green, soft but not in a pleasant way. I’m glad my mouth was closed and I had a nose plug in. Hopefully it’s not toxic. In the 10 years I’ve been doing open swim, this is the first time I’ve experienced anything like this slime. I almost stopped after one loop, but decided to swim 2 more.

added, 10 july 2024: Reading back through my description, I wanted to add that I didn’t just swim through one random patch of this green slime. It was everywhere, all around the lake. Starting the first loop, before I realized the slime was there, I recall feeling something on the side of my head and wondering if some of my hair had escaped from my cap. No — I think it was some of the slime. The first loop was the worst, but for every loop, I could see it, often below me, but sometimes near the surface.

Okay, against better judgment — mine and Scott’s — I looked it up and it might be blue-green algae, which could be bad and make me sick. Hopefully not. Probably not. If were blue-green algae I think someone would have seen it and they would have cancelled open swim. Future Sara will let us know. (note: future Sara added an update on the original entry)

3 — working on inklings (1 aug 2025)

Today I’m working on more swimming sonnets and Inklings. Some subjects: water quality, blue-green algae, milfoil, water as the medium, loops at lake nokomis are actually triangles, the color of the water, Alice Oswald seeing self in water, again and more darkly, Mary Oliver and the deepening and quieting of the spirit

note: I should look for the pages document in which I might have drafts of some of the poems that I didn’t use!

4 — some poetry lines (12 june 2020)

O for the rising ozone, the dropping oxygen, for algae overblooming like an omen or an oracle.
(from O/ Claire Wahmanhom

5 — a ramble on lake water testing (14 aug 2025)

a ramble on lake water testing

A revelation just last week. Minneapolis Parks tests the lake water weekly, and testing the water is better than not testing the water. But the slow and rigid system of testing only on Mondays and getting results on Tuesdays (e-coli) and Wednesdays (algae blooms) combined with the fickle changes in quality based on weather and other environmental factors, means the testing is not very accurate for what the conditions are at any given time. On an abstract level, it seems obvious to me that you can’t rely on tests to guarantee safe water, but on an experiential level — that is, being in the water swimming for over an hour at a time roughly 6 times a week for 11 summers — I needed an unquestioned faith in those tests and the park’s ability to let me know when it was/wasn’t safe to swim in order to get in the water.

And, mostly it is safe in the water. And it is clean. I get very irritated when someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about says to me, eww, how can you swim in that dirty water!? Minneapolis Park workers and volunteers do an amazing job of keeping the water quality high. And this is partly due to their regular testing. But, these tests can’t guarantee anything.

What am I trying to do here? I’m not blaming the parks department; these tests are expensive and it would be difficult to test regularly enough to keep up with the quick shifts in wind and rain and the groundwater problems (like unstable sewer systems) that have existed from the beginning of the lake’s modern shape in the 1920s when workers excavated peat and used it to build up the surrounding neighborhood. Not to mention climate change and erratic weather and an excess of nutrients getting into the water from lawn fertilizers. And people feeding ducks who poop in the water which increases the amount of e-coli. No, I think Minneapolis Parks, especially Minneapolis Aquatics, are amazing.

All of this is complicated and messy with no easy answers. And it’s scary. I’ve been wondering for a few years when it’s going to happen — because it seems inevitable that it will happen — that lakes will no longer be safe to swim in, unfiltered outside air will no longer be safe to breathe. And this is how it happens, I think. Not all of sudden, but slowly. More days with bad test results and beach closures. Or inaccurate test results and water that is pea-soup green and slimy and that might get you sick.

I suppose this last paragraph sounds depressing, and it is, and also it isn’t. I love swimming in lake nokomis, and I would do a tremendous amount to keep swimming in it. Maybe it’s time to figure out what I can do to help keep it safe.

6 — in the still water of a lake, land will try to reclaim water (5 july 2025)

. . . ponds and lakes are far from permanent; rivers will tend to grow naturally with time as they do their own excavating, but the opposite is true for still water. Unless ponds and lakes are given some help, they will all eventually return to land, It starts with algae, then the rushes and other shallow water plants getting a foothold, and this allows sediments to gather, water turns to wet mud, and a reinforcing cycle begins that culminates in the water losing the battle against the encroaching land.

How to Read Water/ Tristan Gooley

july 25/WALK

1 hour
to east lake library and back
84 degrees

No open swim today. It wasn’t canceled, but I wanted to watch the tour stage live and the air quality was very bad this morning — wild fires from Canada. Hours later, I might be regretting missing it a little — and if it rains Sunday morning or they close the lake, I’ll be regretting it a lot. Oh well. I walked to the library instead. Hot with bright sun, hardly any shade.

10 Things

  1. leaving the house, a sudden swarm of bzzzzzbzzzzz — bees? nope, a drone hovering above the house. Google earth? Images for a nearby house for sale? Something else, more sinister?
  2. 2 people on bikes in bright yellow vests
  3. an older man walking by the church just behind the library, hunched, his head tilted to the side awkwardly, wearing a rumpled suit
  4. passing by a different church — in the courtyard, heard not seen: a fountain/water feature bubbling
  5. same church: a sign for “little sparks” (preschool?) and silver mushroom shaped lights lining the sidewalk in front of the door
  6. a woman on the public phone in the library — no I don’t have that, but I can tell you my social security number, my address, or my date of birth, which she then did, loudly
  7. someone sitting on a front stoop of a duplex, the front doors separated by 2 garages, listening to BBC news, 5 bodies were recovered, or something equally gruesome
  8. 2 people behind me, walking slightly faster, slowly gaining — not seen, heard: the occasional footstep sliding on sand or dirt or gravel
  9. as I walked past a car parked in a driveway, I heard a noise — sort of like an alert or an alarm or a ring tone. returning later, heard it again when I passed
  10. (noticed many times before) a free library at the edge of a yard, under it 4 or 5 stones, one of them with eyes, positioned to resemble a (book) worm

As I walked, I thought about water and being immersed in it, then I imagined being immersed in the air that surrounded me, not separating me from the world but connecting me to it, in a soft haze of togetherness, hearing all the other sounds, feeling a part of them. I thought about something I read the other day in Darby Nelson’s For Love of Lakes:

Sight insists on separation; hearing, like touch or taste or smell insist on connection.

Scott Russell Sanders, cited in For Love of Lakes

Sight insists on separation. To me, very little feels separate with its blurred lines and fuzzy forms, and sounds are often difficult to isolate and find their source.

Then, another thought: to be present in a moment requires soft absorption: not focused attention on what you are hearing, but an openness to taking in what’s happening now and only reflecting on it later.

Here are the 2 books I picked up from the library:

  1. Pawnbroker’s Daughter: A Memoir/ Maxine Kumin
  2. It is Almost Than: A Collection of Images + Text by Women Artists & Writers/ Lisa Pearson, ed.

Anne Carson, Water, and You

Found this passage from Anne Carson which I think fits with a conversation of immersion and being reminded of the self mid-swim.

There is a moment you are swimming in the pool, stroking forward strongly and down across the fingers of your right hand as you press it through the water, comes a hair. You feel this hair as a jolt of what should not happen. Just a single hair, so slight a sensation you could think you imagined it except, pushed against your fingers by the pressure of the water as you continue to thrust, it clings an instant, it will not go its way, you may have to shake your fingers sideways in the water spoiling your stroke and then it slides off, this hair that has no business there, someone else’s hair, this little nightmare of a hair whose touch has suddenly startled you out of the sleep of self-containment that swimming induces into the fact of dirt. Other people’s dirt. Other people. Your own dirt, you. Not this pure noncontingent forward motion unmarred by agent or accountability but you, a person, a person known all too well, a person in a swamp of others and others’ dirt, hair, skin, fluids, anger, who knows. You in all this. You utterly violable. Of course everyone is aware swimming pools are full of dirt but there is no reason to think of this now. The thought in fact is canceled by swimming by its sound aspect – both deaf and cavernous – that separates you from normal perception; by its blue aspect, an immaterial blue that reminds you vaguely of laundry ads or other planets; by its water aspect, which cannot help but evoke the whole history of purification and lustral joy not to say ritual rightness; and above all by its heroic, streaming, organized, forward motion. What could dirt have to do with this motion?

excerpt from Waterworld/ Anne Carson

Carson’s hair and dirt remind me of the “friends” I’ve written about in the YWCA pool (a few years ago), my sparkle friends in Lake Nokomis, and the floating vines I encounter in the middle of Lake Nokomis or Cedar Lake that wrap around my head or shoulders or slide (like a full body scan) down my torso and legs.