Tag: morning

may 25/RUN

3.5 miles
trestle turn around
63 degrees

Felt good today. Ran a little faster, felt a little freer. Even though the weather is great, it’s Sunday, and it’s almost noon, the paths weren’t that crowded. Was it because it’s memorial day weekend? Whatever the reason, I appreciate not having to dodge bikers or groups of walkers.

10 Things

  1. sea
  2. stacked
  3. stink
  4. staring
  5. shadows
  6. craters
  7. purple
  8. soft
  9. sitting
  10. saw

Running through the tunnel of trees above the floodplain forest, a sea of green. No sky or river or solid ground.

4 stones stacked on the ancient boulder.

Above the rowing club, a slight stink from the sewers — sweet and sour.

Running up the hill, past the old stone steps, 2 walkers and a dog about to descend the old stone steps. I couldn’t see their faces, but I felt like they were staring at me.

At the start of my run, bird shadows: a big one swooping, several smaller ones shooting across the street like bullets.

The craters in the patched crack near the trestle seem to be growing deeper.

Running past a tree, a flash of purple in the otherwise green leaves. Was that a trick of the light?

The soft sound of water falling or wind gently rustling the leaves near the ravine.

I was planning to stop at the sliding bench, but 2 people were already sitting there.

Before I began running, I heard a woman’s voice — you did it! Then the sound of a saw buzzing, then good job! Her tone sounded like she was praising a little kid. I wondered if that were true and how old the kid was that she was teaching to use a power saw — not in judgment, in wonder.

indigo

I have returned to my color poems. Before I ran, I was thinking about indigo again. During the run, an idea popped in my head, so just past the trestle I stopped to record it:

Thinking about indigo and idea of wanting this time, at night, that is dark without stars. Which is referencing how, when I lose all of my cone cells, there may never be true dark. And then thinking also about how true dark is not possible (in the city) because of light pollution. The idea that indigo is something both wished for and feared.

another grass line

It will soon be cold here,
and dark here;
the grass will lie flat
to search for its spring head.
(Love in the Weather’s Bells/ Jay Wright)

may 24/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
54 degrees

Ah, another wonderful morning. Sunny and just the right amount of warm. Ran with Scott. He talked about the book he’s reading — a murder mystery set in Austin, MN and Minneapolis. I talked about turning my color poems in to a chapbook. Also discussed: a YouTube video about taking a train from D.C. to Seattle (me), UAE cycling team doing altitude training (Scott), favorite and least favorite running shirts (me), possibly ordering a new bass (Scott), and voltas and vueltas and a tour as turn as hero’s quest (both of us). We also discussed an annoying woman last summer who wouldn’t let us use one of the drinking fountains because she was using the other to slowly fill up her big water bottle (both of us).

I don’t recall looking down at the river even once. Would I have been able to see it? A rare sight: a rollerblader, not a roller skier. Shirtless runners. The white foam of the falls. A stick flying up from under Scott’s foot. The cool green just before reaching the ford bridge.

bank

The other day I overheard one runner say to another something about banking time. I thought about the word bank and embankment popped into my head. Then I wondered about bank’s origins. Reading the poem-of-the-day this morning on Poetry Foundation, I encountered another bank line:

from Ode to the Midwest/ Kevin Young:

I want to jog
down to the river

& make it my bed—

I want to walk
its muddy banks

& make me a withdrawal.

a return to color

I’ve decided to turn my color poems into a chapbook for a contest. Time to study color some more. I need to write a sonnet about green, indigo, and blue. Maybe yellow, too? Here’s a wonderful yellow poem to inspire me:

Crown of Yellow/ Sarah Audsley

If I stay, I might notice things—the color of buttercups, their bright faces
en masse floating in green-grass-clouds, the lolling fields.

Butter—browned in a pan for the sauce to dress an expensive dead fish.

Yellow yolks make cake, custards, or the exact shade for stasis.

Or shame. I always think of yellow so.

A primary color, it arrives in packages, crushed natural iron oxide from a quarry in France.

Combine yellow with red, make orange. Shades shift by proportion.

The painter tells me about the color wheel, not the grey fear-sphere spinning in my head, or
anything I know something about.

The beehive above, swaying. Yellow bits move in and out.

How yellow the yellow finches’ bodies, how they lift so easily into the air.

The in-between color—traffic lights say, stop. Then, go.

The striking of a single ray of sunlight can cause cancerous cells to grow, mutate.

Paint the kitchen walls a shade—warms and comforts.

Color of the piss puddle I left on the hardwood floor. Little ballerina shoes tiptoed around the mess.
I did raise my hand, I did ask to go, I did try to do the right thing.

Tutus and twirls. Mrs. Stein said, Wait. Hold it! Her black leotard plastered to the curvature of her
small breasts rose with her commands.

If you prefer gold fillings, and can afford them, the dentist will place them inside decayed teeth.
Gold is a soft metal.

Combine yellow with blue, make green.

Are we back in the field, yet? Why do I ever leave it? The forest needs no grammar. Water splits
rock. Hawk shreds yellow birds’ feathers.
The mind, an unending sieve.

Dandelion wine is made from the tufts of heads, collected and boiled.
Alcohol is for adults. Some bitterroot.

Never dress Asian babies in yellow, my mother tells me. Clashes with their skin.
I learned from you, she says.

And, there is a fox running the median line on the bumpy road. I am not there, but I’m driving fast,
headlights off, because there is a full-bodied moon, and I want to move in the dark like I know
exactly, no precisely, without any hesitation, where I am going.

Barreling ahead.

Each hour the light changes, each minute angles shift.

Skylights are key in the studio. Naked. Put on my skin in layers—how many? What can the painter
see?

I prefer to sleep through sunrise. I trust the heliocentric turning of things that are difficult to
understand.

About yellowface I cannot say—enough. What is enough?

The channeling knife is the tool to make a lemon twist. I use it. Hovering over the glass, making the
cut infuses the air in the space above the liquid with the essence of the fruit.

Once, I plucked an entire bucket of lemons and lavender. Made lemonade.

I don’t believe in that phrase…because my mother took to the tug of the bottle.
More often than not, vomit is yellow.

In another dream, I am the lone sunflower swaying, shaken by the anticipation from the smell of the
oncoming distant rain.

may 23/RUN

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

  1. scary
  2. runner!
  3. cooler
  4. busker
  5. bikes
  6. busy
  7. left
  8. cobblestones
  9. unstacked
  10. 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. 

may 21/RUN

5.5 miles
ford loop
44 degrees
drizzle

Wasn’t planning to run the ford loop, but I started it and then just kept going. It felt good, relaxed, not hard to keep my heart rate a little lower. My pace was slow, but it didn’t feel slow, or fast, or any speed really.

10 Things

  1. mist
  2. dripping
  3. spray
  4. mirrors
  5. puddles
  6. graffiti
  7. traffic
  8. bridge
  9. debris
  10. slick

It rained all day yesterday, and some early in the morning. Started again during my run. Everything dripping wet, including me, although I didn’t really feel it, or couldn’t distinguish it from my sweat. Before I started running, as I walked through the neighborhood, I looked into the puddles on the sidewalk and admired how they had become mirrors, reflecting the sky and the trees. Running over the river, I looked down at the east bank and saw colorful graffiti all over the rocks at the base of the lake street bridge. In spots, the trail was slick with mud or covered in debris — fallen leaves, broken branches, grit. Crossing the ford bridge, I looked north and was delighted by the mist, making everything seem fuzzy and unformed. The traffic on the bridge was thick — I couldn’t see or feel any spray coming off of their wheels, but I could hear it.

overheard: one runner to another — you can bank the time.
Another use of time as a commodity.

Listened to the water, in its various forms, for the first half of my run. Put in my “moment” playlist for the second half. The most memorable song today: One Moment in Time/ Whitney Houston

A line that stood out to me:

And in that one moment of time
I will feel
I will feel eternity

I thought about Mary Oliver’s definition of eternity and how Whitney Houston’s doesn’t fit with it. MO understands eternity as creative time that’s outside of the ordinary and beyond the self. Houston’s eternity seems more like eternal glory.

As I listened to all of the lyrics, I thought about Whitney Houston’s tragic life and terrible death — an overdose. I also thought about the idea of one moment and what happens after that moment is over. And this made me think about post-Olympic blues, or post-marathon blues, or post-publishing a poem blues.

To keep myself distracted and steady, I chanted in triple berries —– strawberry blueberry raspberry. Then I chanted my poem — I go to the gorge/to find the soft space/between beats.

more on the moment as between

Read a very brief interview with Marie Howe the other day. She mentioned a poem that inspired her and that she wished everyone would read: The Season of Phantasmal Peace/ Derek Walcott. Beautiful! Here’s a line to remember that describes the moment:

and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace

Before my run, I began listening to a talk by Jennifer Chang, “Other Pastorals: Writing Race and Place“. She mentions one between in the presentation of her thesis statement: how poets of color use pastoral to grapple with the complex composition of place as a tension between lived and learned experience. She recites another between from Rick Barot’s “On Gardens”: somewhere between/what the eye sees and what the mind thinks/is the world, landscapes mangled/into sentences, one color read into rage.

Chang also mentions context: If you look at the word “garden” deep enough you see it blossoming in an enclosure meant to keep out history and disorder.

Chang’s lecture is part of the Bread Loaf conference in 2019. This page has many great links for future Sara to explore.

And here is a helpful essay with some ideas for thinking about the pastoral, and links to poems, like Rita Dove’s Reverie in Open Air, which I’ve already posted on this log. The second half of Dove’s poems fits with early May’s theme of grass:

But this lawn has been leveled for looking,   
So I kick off my sandals and walk its cool green.   
Who claims we’re mere muscle and fluids?   
My feet are the primitives here.   
As for the rest—ah, the air now   
Is a tonic of absence, bearing nothing   
But news of a breeze.

And a few more grass lines from Jennifer Chang:

Stalk of wither. Grass-
noise fighting weed-noise. Dirt
and chant. Something in the
field.
(Pastoral/ Jennifer Chang)

What sound does grass make? Wind through the grass, crunching over dry, brittle grass, feet on grass — bunny’s feet:

 I think my favorite sound was the soft footsteps of the bunny hurrying across the lawn. A silvery whisper only possible to hear on a calm summer morning like today. I love the sound of animal feet moving — running or hopping through the grass

log entry on 16 july 2024

may 18/RUN

3.3 miles
locks and dam no. 1
48 degrees

Still not as warm as last week, but great weather! Sunny, calm, a slight chill so I didn’t overheat. There were stretches on the trail, at least during the first mile, when there were no cars or people, only quiet. Just before reaching under the ford bridge, I decided to turn off on the dirt trail that goes through a small woods beside the bridge. I’ve never taken it, but always wondered how it went — I already knew where it went: up to the trail beside ford that descends to locks and dam parking lot. I didn’t get lost, but was a bit uncertain as to where to go as the trail wound through trees and tall grass and huge chunks of abandoned asphalt or concrete.

another moment: not when you’re lost, but just after you realize you don’t know where you are and just before you locate yourself, or accept and embrace being lost.

Emerging from the woods, I took off my sweatshirt and put in my “Moment” playlist before descending the hill and heading back north.

Listened to:

“Learning to Fly”/ Pink Floyd — I remember liking it, and thinking it was fitting for the theme, but I can’t remember why. I’ll have to listen to it again.

“Between the Devil and Deep Blue Sea”/ Ella Fitzgerald — thought about the moment when you’re faced with a difficult, impossible decision — “Sophie’s Choice” came into my head and I thought about this fall and how I almost had to make one of those impossible decisions over which of my kids to save.

“Threshold” / Steve Miller — This is the opening to another Steve Miller song, or they’ve been mashed together like, We Will Rock You and We are the Champions. The song, Jet Airliner. It was strange to be listening to Threshold and anticipating the opening of Jet Airliner.

“The Moment”/ Tame Impala. Favorite line, I fell in love with the sound of my heels on the wooden floor

“Iris”/ Goo Goo Dolls — RJP’s suggested this one. Very 90s. RJP mentioned that it transports her back to a rough place. I thought about her as I listened to the lyrics and I recalled a 90s song that did that to me: “I Can’t Make You Love Me” / Bonnie Raite.

After I finished my run, I heard, “Vienna”/ Billy Joel, “Rut”/ Wimps, and “Before He Cheats”/ Carrie Underwood. So glad I added “Rut” — never heard of it, but it fits nicely with my theme.

10 Things

  1. a huge trunk of a tree in the woods — hollowed out, having fallen some time ago, empty of any roots or dirt or even bugs
  2. a slab of concrete or asphalt that used to be part of the road or a trail, half buried in dirt in the woods
  3. voices in the gorge — the coxswain and a rower or two
  4. a white pick-up truck turning into the locks and dam no. 1 parking lot then backing up, turning around, and leaving
  5. the sound of water falling softly, or wind through the leaves, or both
  6. persistent (or insistent?) movement out of the corner of my eye — a runner across the road, running in the grass
  7. approaching 2 runners taking up too much of the path as a biker sped towards us — me having to run through the middle of them, squeezing my shoulders tight to fit — the woman seemed to huff, as if annoyed that I was crowding her — did I imagine that last bit?
  8. filled bench, 1: a person sitting
  9. filled bench, 2: a person standing next to a bike — I got the feeling they seemed uncertain but I’m not sure why I thought that — how could I see that, I was moving so fast?
  10. 2 people standing in the middle of the walking trail, looking at their phone — were they confused? lost?

also noticed: a roller skier, a song coming out of someone’s radio, 2 people walking with a dog in the grass that’s across the river road from the double bridge, many runners, port-a-potties and orange cones from yesterday’s race

another moment: Distracted from passing another runner and listening to my playlist, I lost some moments — the moments between the 44th street parking lot and the folwell bench. I can’t recall running them. I remember thinking that I didn’t remember right as it was happening.

moment — some wanderings

“You can never even say what happened, because what happened is rarely said, but it occurs among the glasses with water and lemon in them. And so you can’t say what happened but you can talk about the glasses or the lemon. And that something is in between all that” (Marie Howe).

The other day, I asked FWA why he didn’t talk to his therapist about not wanting to go on a trip before it was too late, and he said I didn’t know I didn’t want to go. I couldn’t put into words what I was feeling. I responded: instead of trying to find the words, why not describe what you are actually doing, or not doing, in your every day life, and he’ll figure out that something is wrong.

The idea of describing the things — habits or lemons or glasses — when you can’t describe what’s happening, seems similar, but not the same, to via negativa. Maybe the other side of it?

Instead of finding meaning by describing what is not there, or what you don’t know (via negativa), you’re determining the meaning of the unknown/absent by what frames it, or surrounds it, or shows evidence of its absence, or its hidden presence.

For more on via negativa, see 7 sept 2023.

I’m thinking of a moment as something out of the ordinary, or something so ordinary it’s exceptional, happening, and instead of being framed by beats (or ticks of the clock) like a minute is, it’s framed by objects or actions of everyday life.

note for post-run Sara: think about the idea of the moment in relation to Mary Oliver’s eternal time.

may 17/RUN

5.15 miles
bottom of franklin turn around
44 degrees

More layers today. When I checked the weather on my watch before my run, the feels like temperature was 32 degrees. Didn’t feel that cold, but it didn’t feel warm either. I worked at trying to lower my heart rate as I ran when it as creeping up to 170. It’s getting easier. My goal is to be able to run to the lake (8 miles) for my 14th runniversary on 2 june.

10 Things

  1. the tail end of a race — Women Run the Cities, 1: one of the police cars blocking off the road was blasting “She Works Hard for the Money”
  2. race, 2: cowbells ringing in the distance
  3. race, 3: orange cones in a tight row blocking the entrance to the river road
  4. some sort of vehicle — a train? a truck? — crossing over the trestle. My view was blocked by green
  5. voices below — rowers?
  6. a roller skier climbing the franklin hill
  7. white foam on the river in the flats
  8. the view from the sliding bench is completely blocked by green leaves
  9. noticed for the first time: a dirt path leading behind a fence and down to the river near the 94 bridge
  10. an adult making funny noises, then a toddler giggling across the road — that deep, genuine laugh of delight that toddlers can do

Listened to spectators cheering and cowbells and my feet sliding on wet dirt as I ran north. Put in a new playlist — “Moment” — heading south. Heard U2’s “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out of”; Olivia Newton John’s “Suspended in Time”; “Right Where You Left Me”/ Taylor Swift; “Lose Yourself”/ Eminem; “A Moment Like This”/ Kelly Clarkson. Listening to U2, I thought about ruts vs. grooves. During Eminem I sprinted in the chorus and slowed down in the verses. And with Kelly Clarkson, I thought about big moments then everyday moments, not one but an accumulation of them as a way to create magic or find meaning. This idea of accumulation reminded me of a section of a poem I read during my morning ritual of reading poems-of-the-day.

from Remote Disjunctions/ Mónica de la Torre

You’d taken yourself
to places whose specifics you’d chosen to forget. You said you
weren’t there to keep track, but to experience. Which, when
I’m feeling negative, I translate as ditching the thing as soon as
you’re done with it onto the heap of junk you’re not accumulating.

may 16/RUN

4.15 miles
trestle+ turn around
60 degrees
wind: 35 mph gusts

Another earlier run. Cooler and windy! Luckily, I wasn’t running straight into it for that long, or if I was, it didn’t bother me. I felt strong and relaxed and like I’m slowly getting back into the groove.

Right after my run, we drove down to St. Peter to help FWA move out of his dorm. He graduated a few weeks ago. I didn’t have time to write this entry until I got back. Can I remember 10 things?

10 Things

  1. the green has taken over the gorge, no more wide open view of the river, only a splotch of bright white through the small gap in the trees
  2. heard, not seen: a roller skier’s clicking poles
  3. Good Morning! to Mr. Morning!, twice
  4. running past the field at Minneahaha Academy, all dug up. Scott thinks they’re putting in a new irrigation system
  5. little purple flowers — not sure if it was Siberian Squill, maybe some other purple flower?
  6. empty benches
  7. passed the dirt rail near the trestle and thought about taking it but didn’t
  8. a small blue ball under the trestle
  9. most of the stones stacked on the ancient boulder — there had been 6 — were blown over in yesterday’s storms, only 2 small pebbles were still stacked
  10. the big crack just past the trestle that they’ve patched up several springs in a row is cracking again. 2 out of the 3 sections of it have big cracks, the one closest to the trestle has a big crater

I decided to stop and take a picture of it:

crack, overview / 16 may 2025
crack, close-up / 16 may 2025

Listened to the blowing wind as I ran north, my “Beaufort Scale” playlist running south.

among / between

When I read and posted Lorine Niedecker’s poem about standing among the birch last week —

For best work
you ought to put forth
some effort
to stand
in north woods
among birch.

I was struck by the word among and wondered how it was different from between. I looked it up this afternoon and, after wading through discussions about how between is used with 2 items, among with more than 2, I came across a helpful distinction in Merriam Webster:

We use between when we want to express a relation to things and have them considered as individual and usually equal entities.

Among, on the other hand is the best word to use when referring to things collectively and imprecisely.

I like among in LN’s poem, although I wonder about the effect of using between (or beside or with) instead. to stand/in north woods/between birch. Among indicates a kinship — among all of us trees, but between suggests an actual place — stand between this birch and that birch and an exchange — between us. I like both meanings. I like imaging my best work as trying to become a tree. But I also like the idea of my best work happening when I stand between birch — giving and receiving air.

I was reminded of among and between while reading this passage from Marie Howe:

That was really a big deal. I was given this place to be without any expectations really. And everything changed so that the particulars of life—this white dish, the shadow of the bottle on it—everything mattered so much more to me. And I saw what happened in these spaces. You can never even say what happened, because what happened is rarely said, but it occurs AMONG the glasses with water and lemon in them. And so you can’t say what happened but you can talk about the glasses or the lemon. And that something is in BETWEEN all that.

You can name/describe the collection of things (among), but you can’t find words to describe how their meaning has changed in that moment. Often when I think about the slight shifts in meaning between small words, like among or between, I’m reminded of an essay I read about Mary Oliver and her mousier words. I love mousy words! Meanwhiles and in-betweens and yous and wes and usses (is that the plural of us?).


…it’s tempting to be blinded by the more immediately visible parts of speech: the monolithic nouns, the dynamic verbs, the charismatic adjectives. Mousier ones—pronouns, prepositions, particles—go ignored.

Mary Oliver and the Nature-esque

may 14/RUNWALK

4.15 miles
minnehaha falls and back
68 degrees
dew point: 59

Even though it was warm and the dew point was high, my run was good. Managed to bring my heart rate back down and keep it under 170 until I reached my favorite spot at the falls — 2.25 miles in. Excellent. I’m feeling stronger, mentally and physically.

10 Things

  1. a turkey in the middle of the road, honking? squawking? yelling? at the cars unwilling to stop and let him cross
  2. a hazy green above the gorge
  3. the sun hitting the light green leaves so intensely in the distance that I thought it was a bright yellow crossing sign instead of a tree
  4. the falls were rushing, all white foam framed by green trees
  5. a steady procession of cars on the road
  6. roots and rocks hidden in the shadows on the trail — I lightly twisted both ankles, one from a root, the other a rock
  7. the tree that feel in the creek sometime last year was gray — will they remove it?
  8. a line of a dozen or more cars backed up on the parkway, stuck at the stop sign
  9. a crowded trail heading north — bikers and walkers, a few runners, strollers
  10. the water fountains have been turned on again! I stopped for a drink and to wet down my hat

Listened to the hum of traffic as I ran south, my “Doin’ Time” playlist heading back north.

before the run

Thinking about LN’s poem — that I posted yesterday — about standing in the north woods with birch, which led me to think about becoming a tree, like in Katie Farris’ “What Would Root” and Linda Pastan’s “In The Orchard” — I shall come back as a tree.

I’m also thinking about Mary Oliver and “Can You Imagine” — surely you can’t imagine trees don’t dance from the roots up, wishing to travel a little, not cramped as much as wanting a better view, or sun, or just as avidly, more shade.

during the run

I don’t remember thinking about becoming a tree or rooting or stillness while I ran, but I remembered right after I finished and as I walked back home I recited “What Would Root” in my head. I need to practice the second half of the poem. Then I thought about the illusion of stillness and how nothing, not even rocks or trees, stand still. They’re sinking and shifting and swaying and responding to (being changed) by the world around them.

after the run

Still as not not moving but being stuck in a rut, doing the same thing again and again, as in, you’re still doing that?

Still as not needing more, content, at peace, satisfied, stilled desire or anxiety.

Nox Borealis/ Campbell McGrath

If Socrates drank his portion of hemlock willingly,
if the Appalachians have endured unending ages of erosion,
if the wind can learn to read our minds
and moonlight moonlight as a master pickpocket,
surely we can contend with contentment as our commission.

Deer in a stubble field, small birds dreaming
unimaginable dreams in hollow trees,
even the icicles, darling, even the icicles shame us
with their stoicism, their radiant resolve.

Listen to me now: think of something you love
but not too dearly, so the night will steal from us
only what we can afford to lose.

walk: 1 hour
winchell trail / edmund
77 degrees

Remembered to take Delia the dog for a walk before it got too hot. We walked to the Winchell trail than sauntered, me studying the leaves with my fuzzy vision and fingers, and Delia sniffing them with her snout. Warm in the sun, cool in the shadows.

10+ Things

  1. clumps of tallish grass growing through the mulch — a vibrant green
  2. even taller grasses growing among the flowers on the hill, creating a visual effect that was dizzying as my eyes tried to land on anything solid
  3. little bits of some sort of plant scattered along the top of the fence. It looked like it was growing there — a form of lichen? — but I couldn’t tell. It might have just fallen from a tree
  4. the pleasing, easily identifiable shape of the maple tree on the trees close to the trail
  5. sparkling, blue water
  6. blue water, blue sky, green trees
  7. the laugh of a woodpecker
  8. a yard with several bleeding heart bushes, all in bloom
  9. sprawled tree shadows on the grass
  10. the crotch of a tree — standing beside a tree that branched off into two equally sized limbs which looked like thighs to me. I imagined a person planted head first in the ground, which is what happens in “What Would Root”
  11. walking near Hiawatha Elementary, watching as a gym class “ran” around the block, studying the different approaches to “running” — a steady jog, sprint then stop then sprint, skipping, arms flailing and screaming while moving

As I walked with Delia, stopping at almost every tree or tuft of grass or clump of dirt, I thought about the differences between walking and running, this time in relation to a sense of self. Does one enable you to lose yourself or step outside of yourself more easily? I haven’t decided, but I think while walking you can be more aware of what you are doing, how you are attending to the world and noticing what is going on. While running, the attention is less deliberate; you’re too busy managing your effort to carefully study things. There was more to that thought but I lost in the time that it took me to get home.

may 13/RUN

3.3 miles
2 trails
66 degrees

Went out earlier today. Already warm. High in the mid 80s today. At the beginning of the run, my body felt awkward. Stiff neck, plodding feet — no, not plodding, but feet that were landing wrong, not pushing off of the ground easily. Gradually my body warmed up and I felt smooth by the third mile. Started my run a little after 7 and enjoyed a different vibe than at 9 or 10. Softer, fuzzier, cool green glow instead of harsh blue light.

My favorite view today was when I turned down from the 44th street parking lot to enter the winchell trail. A path winding down a small hill to a stone wall then hazy, glowing air framed by trees and water. The river was below that sky but I don’t remember noticing it, just knowing it was there.

surfaces: dirt, dead leaves, grass, rubbled asphalt, rutted and slanting asphalt, concrete, smooth asphalt

number of stones stacked on the ancient boulder: 6

bird, heard not seen: woodpecker — a deep, hollow knocking
bird, seen not heard: a little sparrow darting into a bush as I ran by

No rowers, no roller skiers, no turkeys. No thoughts or lines of poetry popping into my head. No shadow, no memories of my mom. Nothing interrupting me.

Chanted triple berries in my head to keep a steady beat: strawberry / blueberry / raspberry.

Listened to the gentle buzz of cars, dripping water, voices as I ran south. Put in my “Doin’ Time” playlist on the way back north. Two versions of “What Time is It?” came on, one from The Spin Doctors, the other from High School Musical 2.

restraint and the work of being still

Yesterday, I found a wonderful podcast episode on Lorine Niedecker and a close reading of her poem, “A Poet’s Work.” So much of the episode was great. Today I’m thinking about the discussion of stillness and restraint in LN’s work, which includes another LN poem:

For best work
you ought to put forth
some effort
to stand
in north woods
among birch

I thought about movement and moving through a place instead of standing still in it, which reminded me of a passage from Cole Swensen:

Then sitting still, we occupy a place; when moving through it, we displace place, putting it into motion and creating a symbiotic kinetic event in which place moves through us as well.

Walk/ Cole Swensen

And now I’m thinking of something I posted, and then condensed, from Wendell Berry:

The slops 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.

A Native Hill/ Wendell Berry

finding a stillness in movement?

Thinking more about moving and how it does/doesn’t fit with stillness — as in, an inner stillness — I turned to Brian Teare and his discussion of writing while moving in En Plein Air Poetics:

I’m heading up the AT to the North Trail, the kind of hike during which my mind goes from translucent to luminous, its usual wash of thought polished to a transparency that lets in the world with a force I adore. After a mile on foot, details come into focus with an oxygenated crispness. Thought can be a block to feeling the intertwining of self and world, the mesh of phenomena and the qualia of self, and hiking unblocks that feeling by muting my mind and allowing it to flood with a kind of proprioceptive ecstasy. My sense of self disappears into smell, color, sound, touch.

En Plein Air Poetics/ Brian Teare

Have I ever heard of qualia? Not sure. Here’s a helpful explanation:

Feelings and experiences vary widely. For example, I run my fingers over sandpaper, smell a skunk, feel a sharp pain in my finger, seem to see bright purple, become extremely angry. In each of these cases, I am the subject of a mental state with a very distinctive subjective character. There is something it is like for me to undergo each state, some phenomenology that it has. Philosophers often use the term ‘qualia’ (singular ‘quale’) to refer to the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives. 

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

proprioceptive: “of, relating to, or being stimuli arising within the organism”

Here’s something else helpful from Teare about shifting away from vision as the primary sense:

Paying attention to a fully intercorporeal relation to a specific site in the field dethrones eyesight as the most valued sense through which we acquire knowledge of nonhuman bodies—the eye is no longer the portal of empiricism through which the rational mind accesses the world.

For instance, hearing and touch are senses rarely accused of the kind of imperialism associated with vision; they are powers that alert other parts of the brain to our embodied relationships with the world.

A listening, touching human mammal is an embodiment that is not all eye and mind, a sensate creature whose language—its rhythms and structures—is derived in part from encountering the sonic landscape, felt textures, and the human and nonhuman bodies that populate and constitute the field.

After all, each ecosystem produces a unique biophony that envelopes us, and writing itself is haptic, a specialized kind of touch.   

may 11/RUN

4.3 miles
ford overlook
63 degrees

Ran earlier today, which helped. The first half was windy. Windy enough that I needed to take my cap off on the ford bridge. Sunny. A mental victory: thought about stopping on the bridge but then just kept going. Made it through the hard moment. The second half of the run, I felt stronger, everything was easier.

I don’t remember noticing the river sparkling, but I did see scales on its surface as I ran west on the bridge. No rowers, no roller skiers, only a few bikers. One small pack of shirtless runners.

Ran up the steep hill that starts under the ford bridge and ends in Wabun park. At the top, I stopped at the fence and looked down at the dam. I studied the tall grass pushing up against the fence. I thought about fences for a moment, how many I encounter while I run by the gorge, some maintained, some abandoned, many damaged by leaning trees or critters or hikers. Wooden, chainlink, iron, stone. Noticed another fence at the ford overlook: chainlink.

Listened to the wind and birds until I reached the ford overlook, then I put in my “Wheeling Life” playlist. Started with “Windmills of Your Mind,” ended with “Watching the Wheels.” Thought about FWA and how he might appreciate John Lennon’s song.

Speaking of playlists, I forgot to mention this in my entry 2 days ago. Listening to my “Slappin’ Shadows” playlist and Cream’s “White Room” came on. I wanted to remember this description of eyes:

Silver horses, ran down moonbeams
In your dark eyes

Is this a gleam? Or is she crying?

suburban lawns

I’m still thinking about grass. If I were to make a list of grassy things, which I should and will, the suburban lawn would be on it. I’ve thought about it before, imagining my version of Lorine Niedecker’s growing in green (from her poem, “Paean to Place,”) as the lawn and the patches of green that grow on the edge between suburbs and the few remaining farms they haven’t yet consumed. That was my childhood. Here’s a poem I found this morning to add to the image of the lawn:

Observation/ Nicholas Friedman

In the wilds of our suburban lawn,
the natural world inclines to fable:
Gray squirrels, unperturbed by rain,
jockey for position at what our landlord
speaks of, nominally, as the bird feeder.
Below, dark-eyed juncos peck at fallen millet,
masked like hangmen from another time.
The great, unwritten order of it all
scrambles when Max, our landlord’s aging chow,
starts loping toward the scene. This is his work,
so in a sense, he’s adding order, too.

One squirrel has shifted to a fencepost
where it twitches its tail and rearranges
in quarter turns like a guard. In total, there’s
more movement than the eye can account for,
all of it framed in the window’s tic-tac-toe.
The glass weeps condensation. It’s early, but
already the dog has slumped down for a nap.
There’s plenty of time to lumber after thoughts
that rise and disperse, dark-feathered things
returning when I manage to be still.