morning – Page 35

march 31/WALKRUN

walk: 20 minutes
around the block with Delia
36 degrees
light rain with snow coming later

A chance for 6-10 inches of snow later tonight. Before that, rain and thunderstorms. Maybe the snow won’t come? Decided to take Delia out for a quick walk before the rain began falling more heavily. The boulevards are still buried in walls of gray, cratered snow, but the alley is finally clear and our backyard is as much mud as it is snow.

run: 3.15 miles
north/lake street bridge/south
37 degrees

A few hours after my walk. Wasn’t planning to run, but when it stopped raining, I decided this was my chance before the paths are covered in snow and ice again. As always, I’m glad I decided to go. Everything was wet and windy. Big puddles, little puddles, deep puddles. The river seemed to be preparing itself for more weather. Noticed a few runners and walkers, but not too many.

Saw orange everywhere. Orange signs, orange construction cones, dead orange leaves.

Heard the wind, my headphones case banging around in my zipped purple pocket, cars. Smelled smoke from a fireplace. Noticed another new house going up. Soon, the neighborhood will be overrun with the same stupid over-sized houses on every block. Boo.

Near the end of the run, I thought about orange and a phrase popped into my head: keep orbiting around the orange, which means: when you can’t, like me, see the orange, look for what’s happening around where it should be. Is there movement, people acting oddly, anything unusual near a spot where you think orange is? This orbiting works on a literal level, but it’s also more. One thing poetry is about is orbiting things that you can’t quite find the words to describe or pin down with meaning. Becoming obsessed with them. Writing around them again and again. This reminded me of the Frank O’Hara poem about orange, “Why I Am Not a Painter,” and the lines:

One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES.

A possible title for my poem: Orange, an ars poetica Excellent!

A. R. Ammons

Yesterday, i found, read, and posted a wonderful poem by Elizabeth Bishop, “The End of March,” which reminded me of some lines from an A. R. Ammons poem, “Corsons Inlet,” that I’ve admired for some time. So today I’ve started spending some more time with Ammons. I just ordered his 1993 long poem, Garbage, and re-read a New Yorker article that I first read when it came out in 2017. The title of the article, “The Great American Poet of Daily Chores,” makes me think of James Schuyler and all his talk of laundry and yard work and washing dishes in “Hymn to Life.”

A book of Ammons that I haven’t ordered yet, but I might, is The Really Short Poems of A. R. Ammons. Here’s a few poems from it that I especially like:

Weathering/ A. R. Ammons

A day without rain is like
a day without sunshine.

Mirrorment/ A. R. Ammons

Birds are flowers flying
and flowers perched birds.

Equilibrium/ A. R. Ammons

If you walk back
and forth

through a puddle pretty
soon

you wet the whole
driveway but of

course dry
the puddle up.

And here are two Ammons’ poems I found in the New Yorker article:

Project/ A. R. Ammons

My subject’s
still the wind still
difficult to
present
being invisible:
nevertheless should I
presume it not
I’d be compelled
to say
how the honeysuckle bushlimbs
wave themselves:
difficult
beyond presumption.

Love how the line breaks — still the wind still. Also, the strange idea of proving the invisible wind’s existence, which made me think of a poem I’m writing about orange and my faith in it, even though I rarely see it. This faith — an orange faith — is different than a belief in the wind. The wind is invisible to everyone, but most people can see orange, don’t need to believe in it the way I do. And the evidence I have for orange’s existence is less straightforward than evidence of the wind. These lines perhaps only make sense to me right now, but they’re a start of something interesting.

Poetics/ A. R. Ammons

I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:

I look for the forms
things want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:

not the shape on paper — though
that, too — but the
uninterfering means on paper:

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours.

Wind-glittering, possibility, being available to any shape summoning itself. Love these ideas!

march 30/WALKRUN

walk: 45 minues
neighborhood, with Delia the dog
30 degrees

Took Delia out for a walk around the neighborhood. North, then east past Cooper School and the giant mounds of snow plowed somewhere else then deposited on this field. Past the house that had been half-finished then abandoned a few years ago and is now finished and on the market for almost $900,000. Past the new Minnehaha Academy, which replaced the old one that blew up a few summers ago because of a gas leak — I heard it happen when I was out in my backyard mowing the lawn. Such a strange, loud BOOM!

Then south near the spot where some of the best fall color trees used to reside until they were marked for death with orange spray paint then chopped down — the brightest, most wonderful yellow every year. Under the huge, towering trio of cottonwood trees — the Cottonwood 3. Past the house with the oddly terraced lawn and the big windows, rarely covered with curtains or blinds in the evening so we were able to see, when returning by car in the evening from a baseball game or a clarinet recital, all the way to the back wall where letters hung on a shelf spelling out a word that none of us — not me or Scott, RJP or FWA — could ever decipher.

West, past the house with the wonderful butterfly garden on the boulevard, and the house that used to string bright lights around their giant — higher than the house — fir tree every winter. Was 2022/23 the first year they didn’t? Past the house with the bushes that, the first Christmas we lived in this neighborhood suddenly stopped their exuberant chatter when we walked by and Scott started talking. I noticed that those same bushes, birdless today, were a strange orangey, yellowy green. My guess is that they are dying, but maybe it’s just new growth that is confused by the return of the cold winter weather. Past the house that has one of the best gardens in the neighborhood and where I saw/heard someone giving a backyard cello lesson during the first year of the pandemic.

When we started the walk, the sky was blue and it was bright enough for sunglasses. Within a few blocks the sky was a grayish white. Still, quiet, no one around. Thought some more about color and how I still (mostly) see it, but that it doesn’t mean much anymore. It doesn’t mean nothing, just not much (this line is inspired by a line from the Bishop poem below that I read before my walk and run). Color doesn’t brighten or enhance what I see. Everything is soft and subdued. About halfway through the walk, I stopped to record some of my thoughts, including:

orange, which has been the most important color for me practically, doesn’t matter as much anymore
orange sounds (inspired by hearing some dead orange leaves rustling in the wind): sizzle, crackle
The only color that matters to me now is the silver flash of the bottom of the lifeguard’s boat on the other side of the lake; I use the silver flash for navigating during open swim

run: 3.1 miles
turkey hollow
33 degrees

While walking, I noticed at least 3 people running, which inspired me to go out there myself after I dropped Delia off at home. I felt a little stiff as I ran. My hip again? Otherwise, the run was fine. Ran turkey hollow but didn’t see any turkeys. Ran most of it without headphones. Put in a Taylor Swift playlist for the last mile. Was able to run on the walking path a lot of the time. Noticed more people heading below to the Winchell Trail. Sped up to pass a walker and a dog moving fast. Heard some sharp dog barks, saw some car headlights, their reflections flashing on a window.

(before the run)

This poem popped up on my twitter feed this morning. I was drawn to it because of its description of a walk — it’s a walk poem! Also: her use of color and of the phrase, “nothing much,” and how marvelously sets up the scene in the first stanza.

The End Of March/ Elizabeth Bishop (June 1974)

For John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read: Duxbury

It was cold and windy, scarcely the day
to take a walk on that long beach
Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,
indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,
seabirds in ones or twos.
The rackety, icy, offshore wind
numbed our faces on one side;
disrupted the formation
of a lone flight of Canada geese;
and blew back the low, inaudible rollers
in upright, steely mist.

The sky was darker than the water
–it was the color of mutton-fat jade.
Along the wet sand, in rubber boots, we followed
a track of big dog-prints (so big
they were more like lion-prints). Then we came on
lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string,
looping up to the tide-line, down to the water,
over and over. Finally, they did end:
a thick white snarl, man-size, awash,
rising on every wave, a sodden ghost,
falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost…
A kite string?–But no kite.

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house,
my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box
set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?),
protected from spring tides by a palisade
of–are they railroad ties?
(Many things about this place are dubious.)
I’d like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.
At night, a grog a l’américaine.
I’d blaze it with a kitchen match
and lovely diaphanous blue flame
would waver, doubled in the window.
There must be a stove; there is a chimney,
askew, but braced with wires,
and electricity, possibly
–at least, at the back another wire
limply leashes the whole affair
to something off behind the dunes.
A light to read by–perfect! But–impossible.
And that day the wind was much too cold
even to get that far,
and of course the house was boarded up.

On the way back our faces froze on the other side.
The sun came out for just a minute.
For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand,
the drab, damp, scattered stones
were multi-colored,
and all those high enough threw out long shadows,
individual shadows, then pulled them in again.
They could have been teasing the lion sun,
except that now he was behind them
–a sun who’d walked the beach the last low tide,
making those big, majestic paw-prints,
who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.

colors

The sky was darker than the water
–it was the color of mutton-fat jade.
Mutton-fat jade = white to pale yellow, so it must refer to the color of the water, not the sky.
wet, white string
my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box
set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?)
diaphanous blue flame
would waver, doubled in the window
the drab, damp, scattered stones
were multi-colored

a line I like

I’d like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much,

Thinking about the difference between nothing and nothing much. Nothing seems bigger and grander, more dramatic — too dramatic. Is it even possible to do nothing and still be alive? I like nothing much. There’s nothing grand or dramatic about it, yet it still undercuts the idea that we should be Doing Something! all the time. Nothing much is mundane, routine. You’ve done some things but nothing special or worth making a big deal out of.

I like this poem. Even so, the more I read it the darker and heavier it seems. The gross colors (mutton fat jade? boiled artichoke?), the icy wind, everything gone or almost beyond repair. And here’s something else I just realized: according to an essay I read about this poem, it was written after a visit in June. June! (And no random June, but June of 1974, the month and year I was born.)

In June of 1974 Elizabeth Bishop and her partner Alice Methfessel stayed at the Duxbury, Massachusetts beach house belonging to Bishop’s friends John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read. Bishop reported that she initially wrote “The End of March” as a kind of thank-you note to her friends (Biele 55).
“The End of March”: Bishop and Stevens on the Sublime—Union or Relation?

If Duxbury, Massachusetts is anything like the UP (where I was born and visited a lot in the summer until the early 2000s), Bishop could be describing a summer’s day. Icy wind, too cold to walk for long, sunless? Yuck.

In the article I ~~read~~ skimmed, the author puts Bishops’ poem into conversation with Wallace Stevens, specifically his poem, “The Sun this March” but also other poems of his. I kept thinking about it in relation to A. R. Ammons’ “Corsons Inlet”, another walk poem by the sea. It’s long, so here’s just the opening:

I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning
to the sea,
then turned right along
the surf
rounded a naked headland
and returned

along the inlet shore:

it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high,
crisp in the running sand,
some breakthroughs of sun
but after a bit

continuous overcast:

the walk liberating, I was released from forms,
from the perpendiculars,
straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds
of thought
into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends
of sight:

Both poems have wind and only a little bit of sun. Ammons seems warmer, at least at the beginning with its muggy sun and crisp wind. And both involve not doing much. Here’s how Ammons concludes the poem:

I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will
not run to that easy victory:
still around the looser, wider forces work:
I will try
to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening
scope, but enjoying the freedom that
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

Their different perspectives on how a walk, and the world by the sea that they move through, inspire them and their writing is fascinating to me. Bishops is narrow and restraining and finished?, while Ammons is all over the place and almost too free, too formless. And, it’s alive, new, continuously renewed day after day.

I’ve wanted to study A.R. Ammons poetry for a few years now. I think finding the Bishop poem, then being reminded of Ammons, is the nudge I need to make this a mini-project! I’ll end March/begin April with Ammons!

march 29/RUN

5.3 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
18 degrees

Yes, 18 degrees. Brr. Yesterday the weather app predicted 20 inches of snow for next week. Thankfully today it’s predicting 2 inches of rain instead. Who knows what will actually fall (please, please, no snow!).

A nice run. Mostly relaxed, although my left hip/knee was a little tight. No headphones for the first 3 miles, then a playlist for the last 2.

Noticed the river — open and brown just off to the side as I ran down Franklin hill, a bright blue far off in front of me. Also noticed an orange sign announcing a road closure for a race this weekend at the bottom of the hill and to the left. I kept moving my eyes — straight ahead, then off to the right, off to the left — to see how that would change what I saw. Not much, although the orange did seem to disappear in my peripheral a few times. Strange.

Heard the knocking of a woodpecker on some dead wood in the gorge. Ran on more of the walking path. Shuffled on some grit. Felt a cold wind on my face.

Look!

Just restarting my run near the top of the hill, a woman stopped me and asked if I wanted to see a baby screech owl. It was 10 or 12 feet up in a small hollow in a tree. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to see it, but I did! It looked like a little bat to me. I thanked the woman for stopping to show it to me, wished her a great morning, then began running again with a big smile on my face. I have wanted to stop and answer someone’s kind look! for some time now, but I’ve never managed to do it; I’ve just kept running, too intent on keeping moving. Today I stopped and it felt good.

Happy Birthday to my 2 wonderful kids, FWA (20) and RJP (17), born on the same day 3 years apart. I rarely mention their birthdays on my blogs — I just spent the last 5 minutes looking through Trouble, Story, and RUN! and found only 2 instances of it. It’s hard to believe that I started this log, and found poetry again, when FWA was 14 and RJP 11.

before the run

I’m still trying to work on a series of color poems. Right now: orange, later in May: green. It’s a lot of showing up, sitting in front of the page, trying to find a way into ideas about orange as the color that takes up the most space in my practical life. Orange, everywhere. Rarely bright orange — no pops of vermillion or citrus — but orange as usually (not always) the only color that registers as color, something other than gray or dark. In the midst of trying to figure this out, I returned to an essay I remembered reading last year (see: april 16, 2022) about poetry and the void. I thought of it because so much of seeing orange, especially when swimming across the lake in the summer, is about feeling its absence.

sometimes when I’m swimming across the lake I feel a presence that I can’t see — the idea of orange, a hulking shape…I look but nothing is there…yet, I feel its absence…something is there — the trees don’t look quite right

june 26, 2022: hardly ever saw the orange of the orange buoy, mostly just a hulking shape or a void surrounded by a “normal” view — there was no buoy, just an empty space that disrupted the expanse of sky and trees.
from my notes for Orange

Elisa Gabbert offers this interesting line about poetry:

I think poetry leaves something out. All texts leave something out, of course — otherwise they’d be infinite — but most of the time, more is left out of a poem.
The Shape of the Void: Toward a Definition of Poetry/Elisa Gabbert

At this point, I was planning to write more, but it was already 10:45 and I wanted to go out for a run before it got much later, so I stopped. If I had kept writing, I would have included more from Gabbert, like this:

Verse, by forcing more white space on the page, is constantly reminding you of what’s not there. This absence of something, this hyper-present absence, is why prose poems take up less space than other prose forms; the longer they get, the less they feel like poems. It’s why fragments are automatically poetic: Erasure turns prose into poems. It’s why any text that’s alluringly cryptic or elusive — a road sign, assembly instructions — is described as poetic. The poetic is not merely beauty in language, but beauty in incoherence, in resistance to common sense. The missingness of poetry slows readers down, making them search for what can’t be found.

The hyper-present absence of something (orange orange everywhere) as poetry. Its inability to reveal itself in “normal” and straightforward ways to me (as in: look with my eyes and see orange). Its missingness makes me notice/attend to it even more.

In the next line, Gabbert suggests that the frustration of incoherence, mystery, not being able to make sense of something is alluring, erotic. It’s why many of us are drawn to poetry — to slow down, notice, get the chance to dwell in the unknown. Before I left for my run, I was thinking about how my perspective is slightly different. I don’t need to be encouraged to slow down or given the chance to embrace incoherence, resist common sense. Because of failing vision and my overworked brain, I am already slow. Much of what I see is incoherent — or never quite coherent. Common sense ideas of how we see or how to be in the world have already been upended for me. I see poetry, and its way of navigating or negotiating or communicating/finding meaning not as desirable, but as necessary, practical, useful, a way to be that speaks to where I already am.

during the run

I started out thinking about the hyper-presence of an absence as I ran in terms of the open space of the gorge, but these thoughts didn’t last long. I became distracted by my effort. Did I ever return to them? If I did, I can’t remember.

after the run

After highlighting two delightful letters by poets Emily Dickinson and Rainer Marie Rilke, Gabbert writes:

In these letter-poems, poetry reveals itself as more a mode of writing, a mode of thinking, even a mode of being, than a genre. The poem is not the only unit of poetry; poetic lines in isolation are still poetry. The poem is a vessel; poetry is liquid.

Poetry as a mode of writing, thinking, being. Made of more than just poems. Yes! I do feel that often my way of navigating losing my vision, finding a way to be when I cannot see, is through the approach of poetry and embracing uncertainty and the unknown.

The architect Christopher Alexander thought big plate glass windows were a mistake, because “they alienate us from the view”: “The smaller the windows are, and the smaller the panes are, the more intensely windows help connect us with what is on the other side. This is an important paradox.” To state the Forsterian obvious again, adding breaks to a paragraph is not always going to make an interesting poem — but most poets don’t write that way. They write in the line, in the company of the void. That changes how you write — and more profoundly, how you think, and even how you are, your mode of being. When you write in the line, there is always an awareness of the mystery, of what is left out. This is why, I suppose, poems can be so confounding. Empty space on the page, that absence of language, provides no clues. But it doesn’t communicate nothing — rather, it communicates nothing. It speaks void, it telegraphs mystery.

To write, to think, to be in the company of the void — the absence that leaves a residue or that can’t be seen but is always felt.

This idea of communicating nothing (with nothing not as no thing but as something in and of itself) reminds me of something else I read earlier this year about “making nothing happen” but couldn’t remember where I had read it. It took me almost an hour to track it down yesterday. The “make nothing happen” is in W. H. Auden poem for Yeats:

from In Memory of W. B. Yeats/ W. H. Auden

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

And the reading about it comes from Ross Gay and one of his incitements in Inciting Joy, which I first read as an essay for the October 2022 issue of Poetry:

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard conversations about W. H. Auden’s famous line from his poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”: “poetry makes nothing happen.”…At some point, probably I heard someone else say it,⁷ it occurred to me that all these poets, and all these conversations, were misreading Auden’s line, and that he was really talking about (inasmuch as a poem is him talking about something) what poetry makes, the sometimes product or effect or wake or artifact of poetry, of a poem. Granted the line feels emphatic, grand, provocative even—seriously, I can’t tell you how many tweed-jacketed refutations to Auden’s line I have endured; no one has ever explained to me the elbow patch—but what the line makes made is not nothing, but nothing happening. Or rather, nothing happening. The happening it makes is nothing. In other words, a poem, or poetry, can stop time, or so-called time at least. First of all, what a good reminder it is that a poem is an action, and as Auden has it, a powerful one, too. Secondly, and not for nothing, this is one of the suite of poems Auden wrote in the late thirties and early forties, a period when one might have wanted so-called time—the clock, the airplanes, the trains, the perfectly diabolical synchronous goosestep rhythm of time itself—to stop.
Out of Time (Time: The Fourth Incitement)/ Ross Gay

He adds:

you, too, might’ve been praying for a way to stop the march of so-called time, and poems, sometimes, might do that. Poems are made of lines, which are actually breaths, and so the poem’s rhythms, its time, is at the scale and pace and tempo of the body, the tempo of our bodies lit with our dying. And poems are communicated, ultimately, body to body, voice to ear, heart to heart.⁹ Even if those hearts are not next to one another, in space or time. It makes them so. All of which is to say a poem might bring time back to its bodily, its earthly proportions. Poetry might make nothing happen. Inside of which anything can happen, maybe most dangerously, our actual fealties, our actual devotions and obligations, which is to the most rambunctious, mongrel, inconceivable assemblage of each other we could imagine.

Perhaps I’m wandering too far away from the orange void here? Poetry as speaking the void, making Nothing happen, existing outside of the normal/rational/obvious/taken-for-granted. Gay’s explicit connection to time and against capitalism resonates deeply for me. Stop those clocks, those planes, that machinery we’re using to destroy the planet, the future.

The poem’s lines as breaths, as bodily rhythms. In a poem about the color gray I mentioned gray breaths. What are orange breaths? Orange time, orange rhythm?Orange devotions and obligations?

One last thing, and a return to Gabbert’s essay. Gabbert claims that the mystery of poetry is not simply metaphor or making things strange, but how we use or don’t use language to shape our relationship to the Void. And, she suggests it is the missing mountain in Shane McCrae’s “The Butterflies the Mountain and the Lake”:

the / Butterflies monarch butterflies huge swarms they
Migrate and as they migrate south as they
Cross Lake Superior instead of flying

South straight across they fly
South over the water then fly east
still over the water then fly south again / And now
biologists believe they turn to avoid a mountain
That disappeared millennia ago.

The missing mountain is still there. The no longer visible orange buoy is still there too.

added a few hours later: Trying to find a source for this cool butterfly fact, I discovered that it was written about in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

Monarchs are “tough and powerful, as butterflies go.” They fly over Lake Superior without resting; in fact, observers there have discovered a curious thing. Instead of flying directly south, the monarchs crossing high over the water take an inexplicable turn towards the east. Then when they reach an invisible point, they all veer south again. Each successive swarm repeats this mysterious dogleg movement, year after year. Entomologists actually think that the butterflies might be “remembering” the position of a long-gone, looming glacier. In another book I read that geologists think that Lake Superior marks the site of the highest mountain that ever existed on this continent. I don’t know. I’d like to see it. Or I’d like to be it, to feel when to turn.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, page 253-254 in the 1988 edition

Even as I’m disappointed that Dillard didn’t offer any sources for her facts here, I LOVE her last lines: I don’t know. I’d like to see it. Or I’d like to be it to feel when to turn. Not to see, but to be it, to feel it. Wow — this idea is going in my orange poem, for sure. Not to see orange, but to be it, or to feel when to turn around it. I do feel that, but can I ever put it into words?

march 27/RUN

5 miles
veterans’ home loop
32 degrees

Feeling tired after these 5 miles. Is it because this is the 5th day in a row that I’ve run, or because I waited until 11:00 to start, or because there was a cold wind? Probably it was because of all 3. Sitting here, 30 minutes after I finished, at my warm desk, my ears are still burning from the cold.

Still glad I ran. I don’t remember hearing the falls, but I do remember admiring the beautiful river and thinking it looked almost bronze in the sun and with all the brown that’s replacing the white snow.

Running south, I listened to my headphones case banging in my pocket, kids playing on the school playground, grit under my feet, and some woman tell another that she needed to fill out some paperwork for her 401k. At the halfway point, in Wabun park, I stopped and put in a playlist, Summer 2020.

Image of the day to remember

Running across the high bridge that leads to the Veterans’ Home peninsula, I looked down for my shadow. My first glance was of a big dark spot on the gorge floor that almost looked like my shape from the side– my shadow? Nope, too big and too far down. Even though it wasn’t actually my Shadow, I like imagining that she was that big and that close to the creek, listening to the rushing water.

The other day I checked out Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets and I’ve been (definitely not slowly enough) reading through the sonnets. So painfully ugly and beautiful and raw, and necessary, I think, to be read at least once all together. Wow! I’ve already posted a few of them on this log over the past year. Here’s one for today:

[from this bench I like to call my bench]/ Diane Seuss

From this bench I like to call my bench I sit
and watch my tree which is not my tree, no one’s
tree, the quiet! Except for barn swallows which are
not loud birds, how many exclamation points can I
get away with in this life, who was it who said only two
or maybe seven, Bishop? Marianne Moore? Either way
the world is capable of quiet if everyone stays indoors
and no jet planes, my tree, it just stands there
in the middle of everything in a meadow on the bay
looking what Barthes called “adorable,” then I drove
the mile west to the sea which had decided to be loud
that day, the sunset, oh, ragged and bloody as a piece
of raw meat in the jaws of some big golden carnivore,
and I cried a little, for none of it! none of it will last!

After reading this sonnet, I tried unsuccessfully to pin down the exclamation point line — was it Bishop or Moore? Still not sure. In the process of searching, I found some interesting stuff about Emily Dickinson and exclamation points, including that she used 384 in her writing! Does there need to be a limit on the number of exclamation points we use — maybe in writing, but in life? I hope not. When I was an academic, and writing in my TROUBLE blog, I loved the question mark. It was, by far, my favorite form of punctuation. I still love it, but now it’s rivaled by the exclamation point. Sure, I like to wonder about things (?), but I also like to be in wonder of them (!). Right now I can’t imagine it, but there could be a time when I love the period too, although that seems impossible, which means it will definitely happen.

I couldn’t find the exclamation point source, but I think I found the Barthes quote for adorable. I found it on Goodreads:

Adorable
Yet, at the same time that adorable says everything, it also says what is lacking in everything.

I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds, but of these hundreds, I love only one.

The choice, so vigorous that it retains only the Unique, constitutes, it is said, the difference between the analytical transference and the amorous transference; one is universal, the other specific. It has taken many accidents, many surprising coincidences (and perhaps many efforts), for me to find the Image which, out of thousand, suits my desire.

Herein a great enigma, to which I shall never possess the key: why is it that I desire so-and-so? Why is it that I desire so-and-so lastingly, longingly? It is the whole so-and-so I desire.

In that case, what is it in this loved body which has the vocation of a fetish for me? what perhaps incredibly tenuous portion — what accident? The way a nail is cut, a tooth broken slightly aslant, a lock of hair, a way of spreading fingers while talking, while smoking? About all these folds of the body, I want to say that they are adorable. Adorable means: this is my desire, insofar as it is unique.

The adorable is what is adorable. Or again, I adore you because you are adorable, I love you because I love you
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

I haven’t studied sonnets. Well, early on, I wrote one for a class, but I haven’t studied them closely. Not Shakespearean sonnets, or Terrence Hayes’ “American Sonnet for my past and future Assassin.” Maybe I should. I know that the basic form includes 14 lines and a volta. A volta is a turn of thought. I think Seuss’s ragged and bloody sunset is the volta in this poem.

a few sources to remember and explore

march 26/RUN

2.5 miles
dogwood run!
29 degrees

Finished up a 20+ mile week with a shorter run with Scott to Dogwood. According to my log, the last time we ran to Dogwood together was August 1st. Wow. A wonderful morning for a run. Bright sun, low wind, chirping birds, a clear path. So nice to be outside moving! Even though it was below freezing and I was wearing winter layers, it felt like spring. Noticed the open river, heard and felt the grit under my feet, admired the clear view to the other side. Running up the short hill to the greenway trail I heard a goose honking. When Scott didn’t hear it, I wondered (out loud), was it a honking goose or a bike’s bad brakes? Funny what other things honking geese sound like to me. A few months ago I recall comparing a goose honk to a dying car (what my sister would call h-for-c — hurting for certain) that grumbled to a stop near the trestle.

Anything else? Greeted both Mr. Morning and Dave, the Daily Walker, but in both cases I didn’t realize it was them until right as we were passing each other. Noticed Scott’s and my shadow running side by side. Saw a few runners in shorts, including one women in shorts and a short-sleeved t-shirt. Scott mentioned that she had bright pink legs. Passed orange signs for yesterday’s Hot Dash race. Wondered when the walking paths would be fully cleared of snow and mud.

Here’s a random poem found on my reading list that I’d like to gather before the poetry person who tweeted it leaves twitter, or before twitter is finally killed off:

Words/ Franz Wright

Words I don’t know where they come from.
I can summon them
(sometimes I can)
into my mind, into my fingers,
I don’t know why.
Or I’ll suddenly hear them
walking, sometimes
waking—
they don’t often come when I need them.
When I need them most terribly,
never.

march 25/RUN

3.4 miles
river road, south/north
33 degrees
100% clear path

Felt good this morning. Maybe, a week since my 24 hour bug, I’m feeling mostly normal? Today it was colder. No thaw, everything frozen, or not quite frozen. Puddles with a thin sheet of ice on top. Mud hardened. Another layer — gloves, a buff. Ran south and recited the poem I memorized this morning to myself: A Murmur in the Trees — to note. Heard the loud knock of woodpecker nearby — was it in that tree, right there? Also heard a strange version of chickadee’s feebee call and the rhythmic swish of my coat as I moved.

Ran to the locks and dam #1 and decided to head down the hill and back up it instead of running under the ford bridge (I imagined it would be icy and uneven under the bridge). Halfway down, when I encountered a solid sheet of ice, I turned around and ran back up. Nice — I’ll have to add this hill into my routes for the spring and summer. The trails were crowded, some bikers, some walkers with dogs, some runners. Ran most of the route with no headphones; put in a playlist for the last mile.

A Murmur in the Trees – to note – / Emily Dickinson (F433 — 1862)

A Murmur in the Trees – to note –
Not loud enough – for Wind –
A Star – not far enough to seek –
Nor near enough – to find –

A long – long Yellow – on the Lawn –
A Hubbub – as of feet –
Not audible – as Ours – to Us –
But dapperer – More Sweet –

A Hurrying Home of little Men
To Houses unperceived –
All this – and more – if I should tell –
Would never be believed –

Of Robins in the Trundle bed
How many I espy
Whose Nightgowns could not hide the Wings –
Although I heard them try –

But then I promised ne’er to tell –
How could I break My Word?
So go your Way – and I’ll go Mine –
No fear you’ll miss the Road.

I can’t remember if I’ve written about this poem on this log before. When I first read it, I was immediately struck by its connection to “We grow accustomed to the Dark –“. The neighbor’s lamp in that poem, with the long — long Yellow — on the lawn in this one. To meet the Road erect, with no fear you’ll miss the Road. In one poem, ED wants to adjust, for Life to step almost Straight. In the other, she wants to hang out with the little men and the robins in the trundle bed in the Dark. I want to do both of these things too. To find new ways to see so that life steps almost straight. To explore the different ways I see, or the ways I can be without light/sight, to find new, more magical, worlds.

march 23/RUN

4.4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
28 degrees
99% clear biking path

Only 28 degrees this morning, but it sure felt like spring! Sun, blue sky, less snow, warmer air! Heard some black capped chickadees and robins cheering me up. Felt the grit under my feet. Noticed my shadow. Saw more walkers walking below on the Winchell Trail. The river was sparkling and beautifully blue.

Before I went for my run, I read the first (and my final) page of the Schuyler poem and thought more about my “How to Sink” poem. I was particularly interested in thinking about the different ways water might sink or fall. About a minute into my run, I heard water dripping fast down the sewer — tinkling or shimmering or sounding like glitter falling. I held onto the memory of this sound throughout the run to the falls, adding more ideas of water falling as I encountered them. Then I stopped and spoke them into my phone. Here’s a brief list:

water dripping down the sewer drain, a glitter of sound, or little dots of sound cascading down
the slow, steady drip
the seeping in or out of the limestone
the falls –a rush or gush, almost like it’s being dumped, buckets of rain — surrender as a sudden collapsing and dumping, all at once, not gradually, like the abrupt shutting down of everything in early March of 2020

The buckets of rain made me think of a poem, but I couldn’t remember which one. In the recording I said, I bet it’s in Hymn to Life. Yep. Page 9. I recall thinking about writing about the “buckets of rain,” but I guess I didn’t.

The rain comes down in buckets:
I’ve never seen that, though you often speak of it. The rain
Comes down and brings depression, too much and too often.

James Schuyler, Hymn to Life, Page 1

Yes, I’m ending with the first page. It begins with The wind rests its cheek, and ends with Didn’t keep them.

The wind rests its cheek upon the ground and feels the cool damp
And lifts its head with twigs and small dead blades of grass
Pressed into it as you might at the beach rise up and brush away
The sand.

Love it! I need to add this to my collection of lines about the wind. Maybe I should create my own Beaufort Wind Scale. What speed would this be? 2 mph?

The day is cool and says, “I’m just staying overnight.”

I like the idea of the day saying something like this, although I’m not sure I totally understand what it means.

The world is filled with music, and in between the music, silence
And varying the silence all sorts of sounds, natural and man made:
There goes a plane, some cars, geese that honk and, not here, but
Not so far away, a scream so rending that to hear it is to be
Never again the same. “Why, this is hell.”

These first two lines are wonderful. I’d like to use them as epigraph for a poem. And that scream at the end….wow. Have I ever heard a scream like that?

Out of the death breeding
Soil, here, rise emblems of innocence, snowdrops that struggle
Easily into life and hang their white enamel heads toward the dirt

Death breeding soil. To struggle easily. Snowdrops hanging their heads to the dirt instead of up to the sun. Everything flipped

And in the yellow grass are small wild crocuses from hills goats
Have cropped to barrenness. The corms come by mail, are planted.

corms = “a rounded underground storage organ present in plants such as crocuses, gladioli, and cyclamens, consisting of a swollen stem base covered with scale leaves.”

Flowers courtesy of goats and mail-order.

Then do their thing: to live! To live! So natural and so hard
Hard as it seems it must be for green spears to pierce the all but
Frozen mold and insist that they too, like mouse-eared chickweed,
Will live. The spears lengthen, the bud appears and spreads, its
Seed capsule fattens and falls, the green turns yellowish and withers
Stretched upon the ground.

To live! To live!

Tomorrow
Will begin another spring. No one gets many, one at a time, like a long
Awaited letter that one day comes. But it may not say what you hoped
Or distraction robs it of what it once would have meant.

How many people write letters anymore? I don’t because it’s very hard to write by hand with my vision, and I can hardly ever read anyone’s handwriting — not because it’s messy but because of my failing vision. If no one is writing letters anymore, does this metaphor work? How are poets using email in metaphors in compelling ways? Or text messages? Can we even imagine time/life in such slow ways as letter writing and receiving anymore?

Spring comes
And the winter weather, here, may hold. It is arbitrary, like the plan
Of Washington, D.C. Avenues and circles in asphalt web

Here in Minneapolis, the weather remains fairly reliable (reliably bad in spring, that is): a cold March, a big snow storm in April, a lingering chill in the first week of May, then suddenly 90 degrees and summer in mid-May.

and no
One gets younger: which is not, for the young, true, discovering new
Freedoms at twenty, a relief not to be a teen-ager anymore.

My son turns 20! next week. Since returning from his band trip to Spain and France, he is feeling these lines. February and March such big months of transformation for him.

One of us
Had piles, another water on the knee, a third a hernia—a strangulated
Hernia is one of life’s less pleasant bits of news—and only
One, at twenty, moved easily through all the galleries to pill
Free sleep. Oh, it’s not all that bad. The sun shines on my hand
And the myriad lines that criss-cross tell the story of nearly fifty
Years.

In 1951, Schuyler was introduced to Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery at a party in New York. The three poets would go on to share an apartment on 49th Street in Manhattan and to work closely together, often collaborating on a variety of writing projects.
Poetry Foundation

So, which one of them had the piles, which the water under the knee, and which the hernia?

Reading these lines, I was imagining an old man. But, he’s nearing 50! That’s my age. I suppose I do feel old often. I ~~do not~~ will not feel old for the next 30 years. Feeling old is for when I’m 80 — maybe I should chant this to myself every morning, like a spell?

So, that’s it. I read the whole poem. So much fun! Should I leave it at that, or continue exploring Schuyler for a few more days?

march 21/RUN

3.25 miles
trestle turn around
32 degrees

Right before I started I saw some snow flurries but by the time I was running, they had stopped. Windy, humid. A cold 32 degrees. Began the run needing to lose my anxiousness. I did. Some parts of the run were hard; I’m not sure I’m completely over my sickness. But some parts of it were great. For a few minutes I felt like I was flying and free. I did a lot of triple berry chants on the way north. Stopped at the trestle to look down at the brown flat river. Then I put in the Fame (1980 version) soundtrack and ran back south. Timed it so “I Sing the Body Electric” was on as I ran up the last hill. As I sped up, I could hear some geese honking over the gorge, almost like they were racing me. Yes!

10 Things I Noticed

mud — thick, gooey, dark brown — on the edge of the path and alongside the lingering snow
sporadic geese honks throughout the run
the path was almost completely clear, only a few puddles and strips of ice
the wind was strong and in my face as I climbed out from under the lake street bridge
under the bridge, a parked suburu was facing the wrong way
some of the walking path was clear
the river was open and brown. It looked less like water and more like a flat wall
near the end of the run, I stopped for a minute to admire the view between the trees of the lake street bridge and the cars traveling over it
faintly recall hearing some birds chirping in a distinctive way — was it cheer up cheer up?
can’t remember if I heard the sound of my feet striking and sliding on the grit, but I felt it

James Schuyler, Hymn to Life, Page 9

Begins with Have much to thank you for, ends with the evening star seems set.

This page — wow.

And someone
You know well is suffering, sees it all but not the way before
Him, hating his job and not knowing what to change it for. Have
You any advice to give? Have you learned nothing in all these
Years? “Take it as it comes.” Sit still and listen: each so alone.

How often do people, when they’re suffering and tell others about it, want advice? How often do I? Sometimes. Mostly I want acknowledgment. Someone to witness what I’m feeling and to honor that it is real, true. Rarely do I want someone to tell me it will be okay or that I’m making a bigger deal out of it (whatever it is) than I should. I try not to give advice, often falling back on the classic, that sucks. More often than I should — should I ever do this? — I try to relate to the other’s pain, share a story of what I think is a similar experience. My daughter hates when I do this, it makes her feel worse. Often I can’t help myself. Slowly, I’ve been getting better at just listening, sitting still.

“Time heals
All wounds”: now what’s that supposed to mean? Wounds can
Kill, like that horse chestnut tree with the rotting place will surely
Die unless the tree doctor comes. Cut out the rot, fill with tree
Cement, score and leave to heal.

I think about this one in terms of grief, especially my grief over my mom’s death. It’s true that it isn’t as hard, and I’m not as undone as I was right after she died. But, what does it mean to heal? And, how often do things heal on their own, without any effort or attention? Maybe time doesn’t heal but…gives you more practice living with it? I’m sure this doesn’t totally apply, but I always think about what I’ve heard long-time and/or pro runners say about running long distances: it never gets easier, you just get better at enduring it.

And there
Is the fog off the cold Atlantic. No one is at his best with
A sinus headache. It will pass. Stopped passages unblock

I appreciate that he put this detail in. Just before reading this page, I was having what I call, a sinus episode. Not quite a headache, but a strange ache and heaviness that descends. No sharp pain, but discomfort, a queasy uneasiness. Pressure. Sometimes feeling like a thick iron plate is pressing down on my face. I’ve been getting these ever since the pandemic started — are they anxiety? Maybe partly? They used to last all day, but now that I’ve learned to put on a breathe right strip, they usually go away pretty quickly.

why
Let the lovely spring, its muck and scarlet emperors, get you
Down. Unhibernate. Let the rain soak your hair, run down your
Face, hang in drops from facial protuberances. Face into
It, then towel dry. Then another day brings back the sun and
Violets in the grass.

Unhibernate. Face into it, then towel dry. I like this idea better than time heals all wounds.

Far away
In Washington, at the Reflecting Pool, the Japanese cherries
Bust out into their dog mouth pink. Visitors gasp. The sun
Drips, coats and smears, all that spring yellow under unending
Blue.

Why does this poem keep returning to DC? I’ll have to look that up. I did (hours later). Not sure if this is the only answer, but he grew up in D.C.

I love his description of the intense, over-the-top ripeness and showiness of spring. I’m reminded of Ada Limón and her line, “the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton-candied color blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains” (almost remembered it word for word!). The difference is Schuyler’s sun and how it drips, coats and smears, all that spring yellow. This reminds me of living in Atlanta and the yellow pollen, coating every surface. Yuck! For me it just looked gross and stained everything, for others it made it very hard to breathe.

Only the oaks hold back their leaf buds, reticent.
Reticence is not a bad quality, though it may lead to misunderstandings.
I misunderstood silence for disapproval, see now it was
Sympathy.

Are the oaks the last to bud here in Minnesota. I’ll have to watch in the next month. Is it reticence or patience, or maybe a desire to hang back and stay out of the fray of frantic growing and greening? I might be asking this of myself and not the oaks.

Reticent = reserved, holding back, restrained
Patience = not hasty or impetuous, measured

I’m not sure whether or not oaks are the last to bud here in Minnesota, but when they do, they aren’t reticent, and their leaves don’t hold back. Within weeks they have consumed the trees, then my view of the gorge. Never in pleasing, controlled shapes like maples, but a hungry, sprawling green everywhere.

Thank you, May, for these warm stirrings. Life
Goes on, it seems, though in all sorts of places—nursing
Homes—it is drawing to a close. Abstractions and generalities:
Grass and blue depths into which the evening star seems set.

Not sure what to say about this bit, but I wanted to leave it in.
note, 29 march 2023: Looking back at these lines I started thinking about vision — my vision as an old person’s vision — and how details are lost, things appear mostly in the abstract and as forms — outside, blue sky and grass.

march 20/RUN

3.1 miles
ford bridge turn around
29 degrees

First day back after getting slammed with a 24 hour bug (a test for COVID was negative). For the first time in a decade?, I slept all day Saturday after being up all night sick on Friday. Yuck! The run was hard. I felt sore. But I was able to get outside, breathe in fresh air, hear a woodpecker drumming, see the river shimmering, move! Stopped to walk briefly after turning around under the ford bridge and encountering a stretch of slick ice. When I started again, I decided to chant triple berries to keep my rhythm steady. Strawberry Raspberry Blueberry Strawberry Raspberry Blueberry, over and over for at least a mile. Close to the end of the, nearing the oak savanna, I thought about a line from today’s Schuyler excerpt and the difference between contemplation and day dreams (below).

The line,

life in
Contemplation, which is hard to tell from day dreaming,

I started chanting contemplation — con tem pla tion con temp pla tion
Then:

con tem pla tion
con tem pla tion
won der ing
won der ing

When I was done and walking home, I took out my phone and spoke a little poem into it:

con
tem
pla
tion
con
tem
pla
tion
won
der
ing
wan
der
ing

Maybe the
difference
between con
templation
and wonder
ing is the
difference
between 4
syllables
versus 3
even not
odd method
ical not
haphazard
exactness
instead of
spilling o
ver?

Is anything there, in this fragment? Not sure, but it was fun to have it appear in my ears at the end of a run. I didn’t even realize I’d brought the Schuyler with me on my run! As I write this last bit, I’m thinking about the movement and associations in Schuyler’s poem, how he travels from idea to idea. I think 4 counts is a tidier, more exact, everything in it’s proper place kind of a beat. While 3 counts offers more movement, freedom, the ability to shift from thing to thing to thing without needing to pin anything down in one place.

James Schuyler, Hymn to Life, Page 8

Begins with Hoo” he calls, ends with So much, too much. Tried something new today; I listened to Schuyler’s recording as I read the page.

Another day, and still the sun shines down, warming

Ever since I read a line from Ada Limón’s poem “Privacy,” I’m still standing, as I’m standing still and not as I continue to stand, I always read still in both ways when I encounter it. So, still the sun, is not only even so the sun, but calm/quiet/peaceful sun

Life in action, life in repose, life in
Contemplation, which is hard to tell from day dreaming, on a day
When the sky woolgathers clouds and sets their semblance on a
Glassy ocean. At first I thought that Schuyler had made up woolgather, like Gerard Manley Hopkins did with his golden grove unleaving, but then I looked it up. It’s a word! “to indulge in wandering fancies or purposeless thinking; to be in a dreamy or absent-minded state: said esp. of ‘the wits’, etc.” (from the online OED, accessed through my public library).

What are the differences between contemplation and day dreaming? And, is it day dream or daydream — is that another instance of me turning a verb (the day dreams) into a noun (a daydream)?

Only its edge goes lisp.

I love how he uses lisp here. I anticipated limp. The idea of the day going soft, getting quieter instead of stale or stiff or injured is more interesting to me.

On no two days the same.
Is it the ocean’s mindlessness that troubles? At times it seems
Calculatedly malevolent, tearing the dunes asunder, tumbling
Summer houses into itself, a terror to see.

Here I’m thinking of nature’s indifference to humans. On the podcast You’re Wrong About, Sarah Marshall and her sometimes guest co-host, Blaire Braverman, explore survival stories and the comfort they find in recognizing that nature is not out to get us, but is indifferent to us. It might kill us, but not out of malevolence. I’m also thinking about Carl Phillip’s indifferent willow in his poem, In Swept All Visible Signs Away.

They say there are
Those who have never felt terror. A slight creeping of the scalp,
Merely. How fine. Finer than sand, that, on a day like this.
Trickles through my fingers, ensconced in a dune cleft, sun
Warmed and breeze cooled. This peace is full of sounds and
Movement. A couple passes, jogging. A dog passes, barking
And running. My nose runs, a little. Just a drip. Left over
From winter. How long ago it seems! All spring and summer stretch
Ahead, a roadway lined by roses and thunder.

So much movement — wandering — here! From the terror of nature to only feeling terror as a creeping of the scalp, which is fine like the sand and that trickles through my fingers at a beach filled with sounds and movement: a couple jogging, a dog running like my nose which now only drips from a winter ended. Wow!

“It will be here
Before you know it.” These twigs will then have leafed and
Shower down a harvest of yellow-brown. So far away, so
Near at hand. The sand runs through my fingers. The yellow
Daffodils have white corollas (sepals?). The crocuses are gone,
I didn’t see them go. They were here, now they’re not. Instead
The forsythia ensnarls its flames, cool fire, pendent above the smoke
Of its brown branches.

It will be here before you know it, and it will be gone too soon. Sand as time passing too quickly. The flower we wait to see all winter will bloom and die without us noticing. Somehow, we forgot to check that one week they were out. It all happens too quickly.

sepals = The outer parts of the flower (often green and leaf-like) that enclose a developing bud.

From the train, a stand of larch is greener than
Greenest grass. A funny tree, of many moods, gold in autumn, naked
In winter: an evergreen (it looks) that isn’t. What kind of a tree
Is that? I love to see it resurrect itself, the enfolded buttons
Of needles studding the branches, then opening into little bursts.

Have I ever seen a larch? Do they even grow in Minnesota. Looked it up. Yes:

the Tamarack (also known as Larch, or Tamarack Larch) is a deciduous conifer — a tree with needles that drop in the fall. There are around 10 species of Larch in the northern hemisphere; this one is native to Minnesota and doesn’t mind our cold winters and wetland soils.

When the needles begin to form in the spring, the trees are covered in cute, soft tufts that slowly lengthen. Our trees are relatively young (planted in 2012), but eventually they may grow up to 50 feet tall. You might catch a glimpse of these golden beauties in mass as you head north or east of the Twin Cities later in the fall.
Mississippi Watershed Management Organization

a little more (added an hour later): Just finished Rebecca Makkai’s latest book, I Have Some Questions for You. It was excellent — wonderfully complicated and messy and compelling. I finished it a few hours before it was due on a 3-week loan from the library. These days it is a huge accomplishment to actually finish a book before it is due. I can still see words (as opposed to hearing words) enough to read the pages, but it takes a very long time. I get too tired — I often fall asleep after a page — or distracted. The words rarely look blurry; I just can’t seem to read a lot of them. I am very happy to have finished today because this book is new and very popular and if I had put it on hold after it was returned (it’s an ebook that is automatically returned), I wouldn’t get to finish it for months. Hooray!

One other thing to note: I was struck by how Rebecca Makkai emphasized eye contact several times. I might have missed a few, but I tried to screen shot the instances I noticed. I’m collecting examples of the idea that to “look into someone’s eyes” is to truly see them, or to connect with their humanity, or to see the truth, or means you are telling the truth. Here are the examples I found in her book — because I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone, I won’t give any context for these):

I’d been waiting four years to see Omar, to look him in the eyes. I didn’t want or expect anything from him; I just wanted to see his face.

even if I couldn’t quite tell the color of his cheeks, I could see it in his eyes

I stood beside her, sweating, hands on hips, made eye contact with
her in the mirror.

meaningful eye contact across the dining hall, the kind that said We’d both do best to keep our mouths shut?

The few things I know: She was facing him when he slammed her head back, more than once; they were eye to eye.

march 15/RUN

3.5 miles
marshall loop
40 degrees
50% puddles and ice

Lots of stopping to hop over big puddles. Yes, spring is coming slowly. Windy, especially on the Lake Street bridge. For a minute, I had to hold onto my cap so it wouldn’t blow off and into the water. Felt mostly good, although my left knee and left hamstring were a bit tight by the end.

the little wet things of ordinary life

In my discussion of Schuyler below, I mentioned his line, the little wet things. Everything today was wet or about to be wet. The path was covered with puddles. The deepest ones were on the stretch of the east river trail near Shadow Falls. They were also bad at every sidewalk crossing heading south on Cretin. Some mud too. Yuck! Water was dripping down and through drainpipes, gutters, off the railing at the bridge. The river was open and rough with the wind making ripples and little waves. Some of the ripples were shimmery, caught by the sun. The bridge was a mix of puddles, streaks of ice, and narrow slashes of bare, wet pavement. When I was paying attention, I could hear my feet shuffling on the wet, but not too slick, asphalt.

layers

1 pair of black running tights
1 long-sleeved green shirt
1 black running vest
1 gray buff around my neck
my mother-in-law’s quick-dry baseball cap — pink and purple tie-dyed note: I originally typed the last word as tie-died. I think it was because I wanted to mention, bt hadn’t, that this is my dead mother-in-law’s hat. Or, as is often the case these days, it was just another one of my typos.

After finishing my run, I heard the loud knocking of a woodpecker. I tried to find its source, but couldn’t. It wasn’t the utility pole with a slight, but noticeable lean. Maybe it was in one of the far trees? How far can the sound of a woodpecker’s peck travel?

Schuyler, Hymn to Life, Page 6

Begins with And just before the snap, and ends with Old views and surges. Note: the themes of cat, lover, rain, laundry/chores, sun and sex continue. After I’m finished with each page, I might go back through and pull out these themes?

Strongly the pleasure of watching a game well played: the cue ball
Carom and the struck ball pocketed. Skill.

I love watching performances of skill, someone confidently knowing what they’re doing in a task — not arrogant, just performing something well. I call it “having your shit together,” and I keep an ongoing list — I hardly remember who is on it, but when I witness it with my family I say, that person is going on my shit-together list. My main source for this list is: 1. out by the gorge, watching graceful bodies moving confidently and 2. service workers who take orders and solve problems effectively — all the (often) invisible skill needed to keep the line moving without rushing, handle arrogant customers without them realizing it, looking out for others, caring. Oh my god — am I talking about Aristotle’s excellence here? I might be. I KNOW he distinguished between moral virtue and athletic skill — 20 years ago I almost devoted an entire chapter of my dissertation to it. I should find my notes!

Update, hours later: I found something I wrote in my dissertation prospectus on page 13 — passed less than 24 hours before I went into labor with FWA! I was interested in the distinction between virtues and skills (and tactics). I’m not as interested in that theoretical and practical distinction now, but a return to Aristotelean virtue ethics, to play with it of course, could be fun. Instead of making a sharp distinction between skills and virtues, I might want to entangle them. I love how my dissertation, again and again, has given me a guide for the rest of my life. It’s wild how much I’m following what I mapped out in it. I’m not following it exactly; maybe it’s more like a compass? Thanks Sara age 29! Also, thanks Sara age 38 for finding the digital file of my prospectus and creating an online archive for Sara age 48.5 to find easily!

FWIW, I prefer saying shit-together over excellence, much for fun and far less pretentious.

To continue this ramble: Last night I witnessed someone having their shit together during band rehearsal. She was a classmate of FWA’s and has been in the band with me since the year before COVID. She is neurodivergent. Last night I heard her talking about the order of music for next week’s concert so I asked her what it was. She told me that it was up on the board. When she noticed me get closer to the board, she could tell I couldn’t see it. She said, Oh, I’m sorry you can’t see. I’ll tell it to you. It’s possible she had overheard me talking about not being able to see well, but it’s unlikely. I think she is just more aware of people’s struggles and open to noticing and caring about those struggles, and then caring for people with them.

And still the untutored
Rain comes down.

I like this idea of untutored (undisciplined?) rain, but I’m trying to imagine it. Is it falling in all directions? In uneven bursts?

Open the laundry door. Press your face into the
Wet April chill: a life mask. Attune yourself to what is happening
Now, the little wet things, like washing up the lunch dishes. Bubbles
Rise, rinse and it is done. Let the dishes air dry, the way
You let your hair after a shampoo.

The little wet things of ordinary, everyday life? I love it.

All evaporates, water, time, the
Happy moment and—harder to believe—the unhappy. Time on a bus,
That passes,

All evaporates — the happy and unhappy moments. I like the mention of riding on a bus. It seems specific in a vague way, like it is indicating some actual experience by Schuyler. I wonder, is the time on the bus a happy or unhappy moment for him, or both?

and the night with its burthen and gift of dreams. That
Other life we live and need, filled with joys and terrors, threaded
By dailiness: where the wished for sometimes happens,

Burthen = old way of saying burden. The dream life as the other life, threaded by dailiness. Does this dream life compare to Mary Oliver and her extraordinary “eternity” — the one she mentions in Upstream?

Change in everything yet none so great as the changes in
Oneself, which, short of sickness, go unobserved. Why watch
Yourself? You know you’re here, and where tomorrow you will probably
Be. In the delicatessen a woman made a fumbling gesture then
Slowly folded toward the floor. “Get a doctor,” someone said. “She’s
Having a fit.” Not knowing how to help I left, taking with me
The look of appeal in faded blue eyes.

You (should? shouldn’t?) look away.

Between these sharp attacks
Of harsh reality I would like to interpose: interpose is not the
Word. One wants them not to happen, that’s all, but, like slammed
On brakes—the cab skids, you are thrown forward, ouch—they
Come.

His general sense of not actually doing anything about bad things (other than accepting that they will come) fits with the story about the woman having a medical emergency in the diner. He’s not going to interpose, he’ll just look away.

Life, it seems, explains nothing about itself. In the
Garden now daffodils stand full unfolded and to see them is enough.

I love the idea of small things, like blooming daffodils, as enough.

They seem no more passing than when they weren’t there: perhaps
The promise when first the blades pierced the wintry soil
Was better? You see, you invent choices where none exist. Perhaps
It is not a choice but a preference? No, take it all, it’s free,
Help yourself. The sap rises. The trees leaf out and bloom. You
Suddenly sense: you don’t know what. An exhilaration that revives
Old views and surges of energy or the pure pleasure of
Simply looking.

The Simply looking is part of the next page, but it seemed important to add it in here to my thought about looking and not looking. An interesting contrast between the pure pleasure of looking at the trees coming into leaf versus the discomfort of looking at someone else’s suffering. Also thinking about simply looking as only looking, not doing anything more to help or contribute.

walk: 20 minutesaround the block with Delia36 degreeslight rain with snow coming later

run: 3.15 milesnorth/lake street bridge/south37 degrees