12 miles franklin-ford-past hidden falls 66 degrees / showers
12 miles! It took a long time, but I did it. And, other than needing to go to the bathroom, I felt good at the end.
For the first 2 miles, I ran alongside a 1/2 marathon race. Three things I remember: 1. the loud slap of a fast runner’s feet, 2. another fast runner calling out as she passed slower runners, on your left, and 3. near the top of franklin someone from the race was playing music — Sia’s “Cheap Thrills”
Throughout the run, it rained. Not all the time, but in brief bursts. Mostly light and refreshing, but near Hidden Falls the sky unzipped and I got soaked. For the last half hour, my shorts were drenched. Yuck!
Heard the rowers near the beginning of my run, saw Dave the Daily Walker at the end. Also at the beginning I was passed by 2 runners, one was shorter and did most the talking (and mostly about running), the other was tall and agreed a lot. Saw these runners again about an hour in, and then near the end. They must have been doing a long run too!
The view of the river from the ford bridge was beautiful: blue water framed by green trees. The view of the gorge near Hidden Falls was also wonderful. I couldn’t see much, but I could feel the openness.
Between miles 6 and 7, I passed a woman who was breathing heavily as she ran. When I stopped for a minute of walking (I was doing run 9 mins, walk 1 at that point), she passed me. Then I passed her when I started running again. I was worried that this would keep happening and that I’d hear her wheezing and gasping behind me for the rest of the run, but she turned off when we reached ford. Whew!
Aside from getting drenched at mile 8, the weather was good for running. The on and off showers were refreshing. Running near Hidden Falls, the sun came out from behind the clouds for a minute, and it got hot. I worried that the rest of the run would be too warm, but then the clouds rushed in and I got soaked.
For 10 of the miles, I listened to the rain and other runners and the falls. Then I put in my winter playlist for the last 2 miles.
8 miles ford-franklin loop 70 degrees / dew point: 64
Oh that sun! Too bright and warm! Advice for future Sara: get up earlier and pick a route in the shade. The sun sapped my energy and made me sweat even more than usual. Dripping ponytail, wet shirt, damp face. Had a few brief thoughts about cutting the run short and crossing at lake street, but didn’t. I remember reaching that bridge and hearing a voice in my head whisper, there’s no turning back after this. I’m proud of myself for continuing with the run. Did it get easier? I’m not sure, but I didn’t think about stopping again or doubt that I could keep going, and the last mile felt good, like I could have run longer.
On the warm-up walk before starting my run, I walked over dozens of acorns on a neighbor’s sidewalk, under their huge tree. As I walked, I could hear more acorns falling. I wondered if one would land on my head (it didn’t). I’ve been noticing the acorns for the last couple of weeks, hearing them hit garage roofs and the alley asphalt while sitting on my back deck. Usually the acorns begin falling at the end of July, so mid-August is a little later for me to start noticing them.
All I remember about crossing the ford bridge was that I had just started and I was already overheated. So hot in the sun! Running (and walking) across the franklin bridge, I looked for rowers (none) and noticed the sandbars just beneath the surface and the current, moving fast. It reminded me of some lines I read from Gave by Cole Swensen:
from Gave/ Cole Swensen
You walk alongside the river. No; you walk always with. Not down, or along, or beside. And you can’t help but measure–is it moving faster? And does that mean each molecule of water? Or does a body of water form internal bodies, pockets that move in counterpoint, in back-beat, in eddies? And does the surface ever move? Or is it something underneath that does? Of course, yes, the molecules of water that form the surface must certainly go forward, but does that mean that the surface itself moves too? Then what is a standing wave? What stays? I watch a large branch being carried down by the river, and then a kayaker, moving faster, then turn to walk back upstream like I’m walking into the arms of some thing.
I haven’t thought much about the distinction between being with and beside. I like beside as next to, and imagine it as a possible form of being with the thing you are in proximity to — a new way of being in community with others?
Reading through a great article about Lorine Niedecker, Dwelling with Place: Lorine Niedecker’s Ecopoetics, I’m wondering if a focus on with, and not just beside, is partly about seeing the river as another community member, not a thing/landscape/scenery you walk beside, but someone you walk with. And now, reading the CS’s lines again, I’m thinking of the idea that the walking with the river is describing how the water is moving too, so you’re not just walking past something that’s next to you.
I’m also thinking about the Sheldrake quotes I posted at the end of yesterday’s entry, on stability and flux and how we (bodies) are processes, not just things. Some of CS’s questions seem to be getting at this, wondering what part of the river fluctuates, and what part of it is stable.
4 miles without stopping to walk and negative splits on each mile. A mental victory! That’s good because marathon training is getting serious now. A 12 mile long run this week.
A beautiful, cooler morning. Sunny and still. Quiet and calm. I tried to see the river, but the trees were too thick with leaves and the railing at the trestle was just slightly too high to see anything but sky. Heard 2 different coxswain’s voices and tried to imagine the rowers slapping their oars on the water. One of the coxswains called out, 22 — 22 strokes? 22 seconds? Greeted Mr. Morning! who seemed a little subdued today — not morning! but morning. Noticed an empty blue sky, a black sweatshirt tossed behind a bush in a neighbor’s yard, and a black baseball cap with an Addias logo on a retaining wall. Wondered why there weren’t any stones stacked on the ancient boulder — did a wind blow them off?
overheard
1: one runner to another after running up Franklin hill — I think my quads are okay
2: someone coming out of the portapotty to their companion — I’m glad it was clean!
3: a kid on a bike to an adult walking while looking at their phone — do you like walking 20 miles?
sharks
There is no such thing as shark-infested waters, in the same way that there is no such thing as a child-infested school. You cannot infest your own home. Fear is, of course, a great good. It can be a form of wisdom. But if we could reorient the sentiment–and direct it, for instance, toward those humans whose vested interests lie in persuading us to acquiesce in the living world’s destruction–we would fare better. Beware an ExxonMobil-infested State Department; beware a fossil-fuel-infested politics. These are dark times, and there are many things to fear. But none of them are found swimming under a vast sky as the waters around us warn and empty.
swim: 6 little loops / 3 big loops cedar lake 82 degrees
Finally, a chance to swim at cedar lake again! Perfect weather: calm lake, warm air, sun. The surface of the water was smooth. Below, the water was opaque. I couldn’t even see my hand. Got tangled up in some sharp and scratchy vines. Noticed some birds soaring high in the sky, some canoes crossing the path. Before the swim, I smelled cigarette smoke. After the swim, weed. The water was more than one temperature: almost bathwater warm, then freezing, then no temperature at all.
10 miles! It’s been some time since I ran 10 miles. I can’t run it as fast or as effortlessly as I did back in 2017 or 2018, but I did it, and it wasn’t bad, and I don’t feel terrible. Each week, I’m getting a little better and mentally tougher.
Sunny, cool, calm. I liked the moments when I was able to run on the soft dirt, on the boulevard or beside the paved path — the feel of fine grit under my feet, the sound of it shushing — sh sh sh, it is time, now, for the deepening and quieting of the spirit.
Heard a coxswain’s voice, below in the gorge. I just realized that I usually write, “heard the rowers,” but I hardly ever hear the boats or rowers talking or oars cutting through the water unless I’m down in the gorge, next to the river. What I hear is the coxswain’s voice and I think, Rowers!
I don’t remember seeing the river, but I did admire the beautiful blue of the lake. So blue! So inviting! The lake was crowded — some people walking, running, sitting, other people preparing to set up the course for tomorrow’s ywca tri. Halfway around the lake, I started hearing sirens, more and more of them. A few minutes later, I saw them parked on the road, lights flashing. I’m not sure what happened, but I hope everyone’s okay.
On my way back from the lake, I passed by a coffee shop where we used to get coffee when we lived over here. The outdoor seating was full of people. I liked listening to the buzz of conversations — no intelligible words, just the pleasant, relaxed sound of a Saturday morning in the summer.
10 More Things
a roller skier’s wheels — squeaking, sounding old or rusted or rickety
a fine mist above the falls
a runner blasting some music as he ran by — can’t remember what he was listening to
a view of the water from the bridge: a stretch of sparkles
ducks, taking over the water at the little beach
a little kid to his dad at the beach, can I throw a rock in the water? dad: since no one else is here, you can
turkeys! 4 of them by the overlook, a kid calling out to his dad, turkeys! turkeys!
a few seconds later, a dog barking at the turkeys
a group of runners listening to “treasure” by bruno mars
Mr. Walker-Sitter! sitting on his walker next to the fence on the edge of the trail
Cooler! I’m looking forward to fall running. It’s coming. Today’s mental victory: I didn’t stop at the spot I always stop at, but kept running up the hill and out of the park. Heard the falls gushing and the sewer pipes dripping, but my favorite sound was the rush of wind through the trees. It reminded me of my family’s farm and the glittering leaves of the aspen trees in the front yard. Sometimes, I really miss that farm and the late 90s – early 2000s version of my family. Everyone alive, almost all of us together for my birthday and the fourth of july.
10 Things
roller skiers — at least 2, one coming up from behind, then turning towards wabun park before they reached me
shimmering water spied through the trees near the overlook
a kid kicking rocks in the parking lot, an adult calling out, I just have to pay for the parking. Wait there!
the summery, sweet and fresh smell of a certain type of tall grass near short wall with “The Song of Hiawatha” etched on top — did it almost smell like cilantro? I used to smell this same grass in front of an apartment building running up the marshall hill
a few spots of light on the double bridge
the creek, just before spilling over the limestone ledge, was high
the faintest spray of the falls as I ran by
birds singing in stereo — by the gorge, in the neighborhood, across the street
a cloud-free blue sky — bright blue, not brightblue
a neighbor’s boulevard garden, filled with tall grasses and flowers and something tall and feathery that looked and smelled like dill — can dill get that tall?
Watching the Olympics — not at night, but during the day, getting to see (well, what I can see, sitting close up to the tv) the events in their entirety, nerding out on the rules and habits specific to each sport. My favorite new-to-me sports: kayak slalom cross and dinghy sailing. Wow.
A year ago, on 8 August 2023, I wrote about Mary Oliver and her swimming poem:
Recited Mary Oliver’s “Swimming, One Day in August” in my head as I swam the last loop and realized something. She writes:
Something had pestered me so much that I felt like my heart would break. I mean, the mechanical part.
The mechanical part? I realized that her heart breaking is a good thing here and that her mechanical heart is the one that follows the beat of organized, tightly contained time, broken down into hours and minutes and seconds so we can be as efficient and productive as possible. Yes! Swimming in the lake can break me open and out of time’s rigid boxes.
I want to think about this breaking open and stepping or stroking? out of time while I swim.
swim: 5 loops lake nokomis open swim 68 degrees
Brr! The water was warmer than the air temperature and wasn’t too bad for most of the swim, but that last loop! The cold creeped in. First my hands, then my feet. I was in the water — didn’t stop — for an hour and 25 minutes.
Rough water: starting the loop, swimming towards the little beach, I was almost swimming with the current. Mostly the water pushed me forward, occasionally it pushed me off to the left. Rounding the far orange buoy, I swam into the waves/swells. We (the water, me) didn’t fight, but it was difficult to see or sight, and I often had to breathe to my right. I wasn’t trying to rhyme so muchin this last sentence. The final stretch between the last green and the first orange was the calmest — a reprieve before beginning another loop.
I did try to think about Mary Oliver and the mechanical part of my heart breaking. I thought about rhythm and my steady stroking and my (hardly ever) stopping. Then I thought about how I had no idea how much time had passed — 30 minutes? an hour?
I’m writing the swim part of this log entry the next morning. Can I remember 10 things from the swim?
10 Things
loose vines, briefly clinging to my cap — not slimy or scratchy
something in the water, out in the middle of the lake — water milfoile?
seagulls!
ducks!
opaque water — I don’t remember the color, except for that it was not yellow
puffy clouds in the sky, one off in the distance, near the parking lot, looking almost like a plume of smoke
planes!
movement out of the corner of my eye — usually a wave, sometimes a swimmer
a sailboat on the edge of the course with a white sail
finishing the swim, having a brief conversation with someone: hello. what are you doing? / I’m swimming across the lake. / why? / because I love to and there’s an open swim club. / what’s that yellow thing behind you? / it’s a safety buoy so I can be seen. I carry my phone in it. / oh, thanks for talking to me!
9 miles lake nokomis (cedar bridge) and back 61 degrees
9 miles! Decided to break it up into blocks of 3. Miles 1-3: easy, no stops / Miles 4-6: run 9 min, walk 1 min / Miles 7-9: heart rate zones. Well, I didn’t really follow it on the last mile; I ran the whole way. Another mile would have been water — especially without water — but by next week, I’ll be ready for it. (3 sept 2024: I’m not sure what I was trying to write here? Would have been harder?)
10 Things
LOUD leaf blower
lawn mower
overheard audiobook line coming from a passing biker: she walked through the airport
an adult yelling at a kid: it’s only 10 am, and you’re already covered in fricking dirt!
sparkling water, 1: the river, through the trees
rowers!
sparkling water, 2: from the bridge, lake nokomis
boats waiting at the dock to be checked for zebra mussels
a pickleball tournament at the rec center — thwack thwack thwack thwack
2 bikers yelling to their friend — Laura! Sue! Laura and Sue turn around and bike back to them. Biker 1 explains, this is the turnoff to go over the bridge. Laura or Sue, oh, it’s been so long since I’ve biked over here
swim: 4 loops lake nokomis open swim 76 degrees
Another great night for a swim! There’s still a blue-green algae advisory, but I didn’t encounter any, only one or two vines. Wasn’t sure how I’d feel after running 9 miles in the morning, but I was fine. Tonight’s 4 loops were on the longish side. Here’s a comparison that future Sara will appreciate:
6 aug 2024: 4 loops / 2.5 miles / 2490 strokes 2 aug 2024: 4 loops / 2 miles / 2212 strokes 28 july 2024: 4 loops / 2 miles / 2276 strokes
The green buoy closest to the big beach was a lot farther south than it has been in the past week. I almost missed it during the first loop. I had to stop and look around. When I finally saw it, it was so far out that I doubted my eyes, almost thinking it might be the sail on a boat. A moment/image: treading water that was calm and flat, everything quiet, no one around, facing the sun, seeing the green buoy to my left looking enormous and far away. A double-take, then cautiously swimming towards it. Difficult to put into words the feeling, out in the lake, when I stop to tread water — such wonderful solitude and peace, maybe it’s not solitude, but a sense of nothingness or an emptying of self, a joining with the water and sky.
10 Things
swimming away from the sun (heading east), seeing a strange red-orange spot in my left goggle
clouds — a feathery pattern
a plane, parallel to the water
a seagull, then a flock of seagulls high above me — I turned my head to watch them as I breathed
orange reflections on the water, near the buoy
sighting the buoy, far off in the distance, emptied of its orange, looking white
not too many yellow safety buoys tethered to swimmers, more orange and pink
another regular swimmer saying to me before the swim, I’m glad you’re here. I thought I was the only one!
a repeated squeaking noise that I couldn’t quite place — my swim cap? nose plug?
3.5 feet visibility — barely a hand or bubbles, nothing below me, swimming in pale green nothingness
My swimming one day in August project update: So far, I have 5 hours 34 minutes 44 seconds of my 24 hour goal. Can I do it? Of course I can!
Kamala Harris has picked Mn gov Tim Walz as her running mate. He’s a wonderful choice. Joy, hope, possibility.
9:40 am: I’d like to run today, but it is currently raining. A soft, steady rain with occasional rumbles of thunder. If the thunder stops and the rain turns to drizzle, I might still try to run. In the meantime, I’ll listen to the rain and think about water and waterways — local and international.
In international water news, Belgian triathlete Claire Michael withdrew from the mixed relay event due to illness. Several sources reported that this withdrawal was due to e. coli in the Seine and that she was hospitalized, but the BBC reports that a “source from the Belgian team told BBC Sport that, contrary to reports in Belgian media, the 35-year-old has not contracted E. coli.” Also, she wasn’t hospitalized. How many people will misremember this story as proof that the Seine is dirty and that French organizers wasted billions of dollars on a water project that was never going to work? I must admit that before digging into it a little more for this entry, I spread the misinformation (or hasty, speculative information) to Scott. Glad I looked into it. Maybe it will come out that she did get sick with E. coli, or other athletes got sick from the river, but for now, it hasn’t been verified.
In terms of local waterways, 2 days ago, I posted about daylighting and efforts to restore previously rerouted and buried creeks. This morning I reread Bridal Veil Falls and am returning to that discussion. Not only is this history fascinating, but it is a way for me to access a different time scale — a longer, slower time scale that offers a deeper connection to this place and everything and everyone that has shaped it and is still shaping it.
It’s 10:15 and it looks like there will be a lull in the rain/thunder for at least 30 minutes. Time to go out for a quick run!
2.5 miles Horace Cleveland Overlook and back 67 degrees tree drips to drizzle to downpour
The forecast was wrong, which it often is these days. Within 5 minutes, the rain had returned. First it was light, but soon it got heavier. I contemplated continuing on to the falls, but when I heard thunder at the overlook, I turned around. Not interested in getting struck by lightning today!
At first, there was no one else on the trail, but within 10 minutes I encountered another runner, then another, then a walker. Did I see any bikers? Yes, one.
10 Things
bright headlights
a fine mist, hazy
gushing sewers
the inside of a neighbor’s all-season porch, illuminated by dark skies, open blinds, and lamps
deep puddles
a tow truck, outlined in red lights, towing nothing
a shirtless running running fast
a runner with a sweatshirt tied around their waist, running less fast
a bright yellow crosswalk sign that looked like a person
a boom that could have been thunder, but maybe wasn’t
more info about bridal veil falls:
What is now known as the Bridal Veil Watershed was once a 300-acre wetland that drained into Bridal Veil Creek, which wound its way to the East Bank of the Mississippi River, spilling over the edge at the site known as Bridal Veil Falls. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the wetland was drained and the creek was put into a culvert; yet the falls survived, albeit in a lessened state. Lots were platted, a street grid was laid down, and railroads began to crisscross at the northern edge of the Bridal Veil Watershed, establishing an industrial area of Southeast Minneapolis that remains today. Along with the industrial landscape, the residential neighborhoods of St. Anthony Park in St. Paul and Southeast Como and Prospect Park in Minneapolis were also developed.
Over the years, the area continued to be altered by industrial development, the construction of Highway 280, the filling of ponds, flooding, and the reconstruction of sewer lines and drainage systems. In the 1960s, as I-94 was being constructed, Bridal Veil Creek was almost entirely eliminated. Some of the spirit of the old Bridal Veil Creek endured, however, thanks to residents of the area who talked roadway engineers into saving the creek.
Unfortunately, decades of industrial use have polluted the watershed, including the natural and artificial ponds near Kasota Avenue and Highway 280 at the creek’s northern edge, as well as the creek itself. As a result, remediation efforts on Bridal Veil Pond began in 2008.
It is remarkable that Bridal Veil Creek and its once famous falls have survived, avoiding the fate of two other nearby East Bank falls—Fawn’s Leap and Silver Cascade, both once found on what is now the University of Minnesota campus. Bridal Veil Falls can still be seen today from the Franklin Avenue Bridge or from a pedestrian path near the bank of the river.
Bridal Veil Falls
I’ve seen these falls at least once from below the franklin bridge. I’d like to go check them out again on a run, especially after a rain.
new term: kame This term came up in the creek document — St. Anthony park, prior to European settlers, was a kame. Kame = a short ridge, hill, or mound of stratified drift deposited by glacial meltwater (Merriam-Webster).
5.5 miles ford loop 73 degrees humidity: 77% / dew point: 62
I thought it was going to be cooler this morning, but I was wrong. Hot, humid, lots of sweating — not moist, soaked. Didn’t bother me too much, and I’m not wiped out now. More progress! Felt strong at the end, like I could have run for longer.
10 Things
rowers on the river, at least different groups with 3 different coxswains
one of the coxswains gave out orders and then changed her mind: no, do this first — take one stroke, just one stroke
3 kids on bikes on the east side of the river — let’s go to your house!
those same kids, a mile later as we all (me running, them biking) reached the overlook.One kid: It’s the Mississippi! Let’s get off our bikes and explore!
3 or more big groups of runners
water gushing, 1: from a storm drain in front of a house
water gushing, 2: at shadow falls
water gushing, 3: the sewer pipe at 42nd
the cool, dark shade under the trees on the way down from the ford bridge
the street lamps were on on the St. Paul side — have people stopped stealing the copper?
a new term discovered: daylighting
In recent decades, these rivers have also rallied a growing chorus of advocates in the fields of restoration, architecture, and city planning who champion an idea once seen as extreme or even dangerous: to bring them aboveground again. This idea is known as daylighting, the exhumation of streams from underground and reintroduction of them to the surface. There is ample research-based evidence for what seems intuitively true: natural waterways—meaning, those that flow through the topography of a landscape and not through a sewer—support healthier ecosystems than those encased in concrete darkness. Daylighting brings benefits to water quality that include nutrient retention, prevention of algal blooms, and overall more supportive environments for a diversity of species. It also keeps clean water out of the sewer system, where, currently, huge volumes of it unnecessarily go through the sewage treatment process, a waste of resources that can also cause sewers to overflow.
“The water’s going to flow where the water wants to go” (Eric Sanderson).
I’ve read about the rerouting and covering over with concrete of creeks and waterways near the Mississippi River Gorge. Looked it up and found this: Daylight Phalen Creek.
The article also mentions, ghost rivers. I want to use that in my haunts poem! Found this cool art installation in Baltimore: Ghost Rivers. I didn’t realize it, but this project is featured in the article!
I’m reminded of Bridal Veil Falls, near the Franklin loop and the underground stream. Here’s an article I found and posted way back in February of 2019: Bridal Veil Falls
5.2 miles bottom of franklin hill and back 77 degrees / dew point: 72
I’m ready for this heat to break. That was a hot one! Difficult to keep my heart rate down in this humidity. But, it wasn’t miserable and I’m pleased with the run. I stuck to my plan and didn’t feel terrible at the end. Heard the rowers, smelled some tree that reminded me of the farm, greeted Dave, the daily walker.
Overheard, one biker to another: Their boss is on strike, so they don’t have anyone to lead them. I think he was referring to the park workers painting the fence on the bike path, above the tunnel of trees. Are the park workers still on strike? I thought they reached an agreement. Looked it up and yes, they did reach an agreement and are back at work.
8 miles almost to downtown and back 71 degrees humidity: 90% / dew point: 69
8 miles! I ran first half without stopping, slow and steady. The heat and humidity didn’t bother me too much. I can tell I’m getting mentally stronger. Not too long after the turn around, at the Bohemian Flats parking lot, I stopped for water and the port-a-potty. Stopped at the next port-a-potty too. So glad they were there! I know most runners have at least one terrible poop story, but I didn’t want today to be the day I made mine! Other than gastro issues, the run wasn’t too bad. I was slow, but I kept going and stuck to the heart rate plan: when it hit 168, I walked until it dropped to 135, then I started running again until it hit 168 again.
10 Things
4 or 5 stones stacked on the boulder
the blue graffiti under the lake street bridge is not letters, but shapes of some sort
a park worker on a big, lawn mower/tractor, whipping around trees, cutting the grass
hello friends! — greeting the Welcoming Oaks
a mother yelling at her kid — Carly Jane (or something close to that), put your legs down NOW!
river water moving fast — I could actually hear it flowing south
another park vehicle with bright headlights, trimming trees next to the trail
gushing seeps in the limestone below the U of M campus
a radio blasting out of a car window — didn’t recognize the song
there was a crocheted sweater — orange and lime green, I think — in the port-a-potty at the flats
Cole Swensen and rivering
opening line from Gave/ Cole Swensen
no river rivers
What is to river? I can imagine rivering as the act of being beside and with the river — walking or running — or in it — swimming, rowing — witnessing the river.
Here’s another use of river as verb from swims/ Elizabeth-Jane Burnett
The river is something that happens, like exercise or illness, to the body on any given day I am rivering.
On 16 august 2022, I posted this line from Burnett’s poem, I am rivering, and wondered, could there be such a thing as lake-ing? And how does it differ from rivering?
Rivering and lake-ing and streaming and brooking and creeking made me think of a line from Anne Carson’s “1 = 1”:
Every water has its own rules and offering.
What are rules and offerings of the Mississippi River and Lake Nokomis?
Cole Swensen is particularly interested in walking, both generally and specifically beside the Gave River. Here’s an interview I’d like to read in which she talks about her walks and walking.
Swensen has a section in Gave where she lists different bridges, and “other ways of crossing.” I’d like to archive the information about Mississippi bridges that I’ve gathered — names, interesting histories, etc.
clear water
Skimming through Gave, trying to find the section on bridges, my eyes fell on the phrase, the water is brilliantly clear, and I suddenly remembered watching surfing competition in the Olympics. It’s taking place in Tahiti and the coverage was great. They even had a cameraman in the water. At one point, we got a view underwater of the surfers’ legs sitting on boards. So clear! Such visibility! When I swim in the lake, I can barely see my hand. What would it be like to swim in water that was that clear? Amazing and frightening and a bit overwhelming at the beginning, I think.
5 miles bottom of franklin hill and back 76 degrees humidity: 80% / dew point: 71
Brutal out there this morning. Beautiful, too. Ran 2 miles without stopping then started relying on my heart rate to determine if I ran or walked. Above 168 = walk / Below 136 = run. Tried to stay slow and relaxed and unbothered by other people passing me. It worked!
10+ Things
a large stack of stones on the boulder — 5 or more?
rowers, down below — a coxswain’s voice
bright blue bubble-letter graffiti under the lake street bridge
smell: hot chocolate — in this heat? deep, rich, feeling like winter
overheard: 1 runner to another — and of course, she made all those passive-aggressive comments
a big group of shirtless runners (10 of them?), a smaller group of runners with shirts (5 or 6)
a runner, in all black, including black pants (in this heat!?), steadily running up the franklin hill ahead of me
sparkling water through the gap in the trees
a very tall runner — young, long and gangly legs
roller skiers — 2 or 3 — clicking and clacking with their poles
a big bird, soaring above, a huge wingspan
Thinking about the Mississippi and what it means to me and my practice. Finished a first read-through of Cole Swensen’s Gave — lots of inspiration. And just now, out on the hot deck, I was rereading Alice Oswald’s Dart. I want to remember this passage from the perspective of the naturalist looking for eels:
from Dart/ Alice Oswald
the elver movement of the running sunlight three foot under the road-judder you hold and breathe contracted to an eye-quiet world while an old dandelion unpicks her shawl and one by one the small spent oak flowers fall then gently lift a branch brown tag and fur on every stone and straw and drafting burr when like a streamer from your own eye’s iris a kingfisher spurts through the bridge whose axis is endlessly in motion as each wave photos its flowing to the bridge’s curve if you can keep your foothold, snooping down then suddenly two eels let go get thrown tumbling away downstream looping and linking another time we scooped a net through sinking silt and gold and caught one strong as bike-chain stared for a while then let it back again I never pass that place and not make time to see it there’s an eel come up the stream I let time go as slow as moss, I stand and try to get the dragonflies to land their gypsy-coloured engines on my hand
I love her descriptions throughout this section and the gentle rhymes. Is there a way to translate this eye-quiet, slow attention while running? Is it possible — both in language and as a practice of attention? Something I’d like to think about . . . .
What a morning! Blue sky, sun, shade, legs and lungs that work. During my warm-up walk towards the river, I was surprised by the absence of birds. Where are they this morning? Maybe it’s because I got a late start: after 10. Continue to feel better about my runs. I’m finding ways to slow down and lower my heart rate. A new goal: be able to keep my bpm below 165 for more (most?) of the run. Right now, it’s around 168-170.
Heard, but didn’t see the falls, both at minnehaha and locks and dam no. 1. Ran past a stopped surrey. Thought about stopping at the park bathroom, but didn’t. Encountered some big branches blocking part of the trail under the ford bridge on the trail just below wabun. Passed by a group of workers in bright yellow vests painting the fence. Enjoyed the sound and feel of soft, sandy dirt under my feet as I ran beside the paved path.
to swim or not to swim?
Yesterday, I received an email from open swim club that unacceptable levels of blue-green algae were found at the main beach and that Minneapolis Parks has issued an advisory. They are not closing the beach, just encouraging people to use caution. For context, when the e-coli is too high, they close the beach. It’s a little unclear, but it looks like open swim club is still happening. An advisory didn’t stop open swim club in 2022. I just searched in my log and found mentions of it — and me not caring about it — on July 26 and 28, 2022. I guess 2022 Sara was much chiller than 2024 Sara. Sigh. That means I definitely have to go and swim at open swim tonight!
I think at least 3 factors have contributed to my worries around blue-green algae: 1. swimming through the green goo last week. It was so gross and unsettling!, 2. my unfortunate willingness to google things and read descriptions of what can happen to you in blue-green algae — I need to stop doing this!, and 3. reading this passage in a beautiful essay about swimming:
Sometimes, in the lakes and the tarns where I like to swim, there is another kind of blue. The blue-green of algal bloom. The Environment Agency and the Lake District National Park tell us that this algal bloom is a naturally occurring phenomenon. That is true, in the same way that cholera is a naturally occurring phenomenon. They tell us this because they do not want us to worry. Algal blooms are made up of cyanobacteria, a kind of naturally occurring photosynthetic organism. It ranges, apparently, from unicellular and filamentous to colony-forming species. (I like those words: unicellular, filamentous. Sometimes I imagine my thinking has become filamentous.)
Some types of blue-green algae produce toxins. You cannot tell whether it is toxic or not by looking at a Harmful Algal Bloom—toxic to me or to wildlife or to the dog over there that is now swimming through the water to fetch the stick I threw in before I’d even noticed the blue-green bloom.
One website tells me that “In humans,” algal blooms “have been known to cause rashes after skin contact and illnesses if swallowed.” I know this to be true because once, before any of us swimmers knew what an algal bloom was or what it might do, I swam through the blue-green scum. My skin began to burn, then it came up in large blotches of red, and some of them began to blister. I thought if I stayed in the cooling water, it would stop. It didn’t. I had seen the bluegreen water but had not known, and anyway, if I had known, apparently you can’t tell only by looking. I got out of the water and drove to the doctor’s surgery. He couldn’t tell. He poked the blotches and asked how long I’d had them and more of those kinds of questions because in those days even doctors didn’t know the right kind of questions to ask.
When the levels of the lakes fall because of the lack of rain, or when there has been another extended period of unusually hot weather, that’s when the algae come out to play. To make us not know which one is which. Sometimes the algae are the result of human sewage build-up in the lake. This one is not nice to play in. And sometimes the algae occur because of agricultural fertilizers running off from the surrounding fields and fells that have built up over time. So yes, it is natural. Of a kind.
According to scientists, cyanobacteria and the toxins they produce “represent one of the most hazardous waterborne biological substances that produce a range of adverse health effects from mild skin irritations to severe stomach upsets and even fatal consequences.” And it doesn’t end there. If the bloom lasts and continues to build, it blocks sunlight from the water, depriving fish and the plants that bloom in their own funny, unseen way on the bottom of the lakes and tarns, and aquatic insects too. If it all goes on too long, the plants can’t obtain oxygen and can’t assimilate the blue-green-grey filtered light of the sun.
filamentous (def): thread-like; the backs of feathers are filamentous
Thinking that is filamentous? Thread-like — small, tenuous ideas combining. Is a net filamentous? I’m reminded of my month with dirt and this bit from 21 April 2022:
many fungi live in the soil, where their thread-like filaments, called hyphae, spread into fans and tangle into cords through the dirt. If you could make the soil liquid and transparent and walk into the ground, you would find yourself surrounded by nets of fungal hyphae (137).
Mushrooms at the End of the World
Thought about imagining the soil was liquid and transparent and then entering it, surrounded by nets of fungal hyphae. What if I could swim in the soil? Swim through these nets of fungal hyphae?
Some nets I’d like to swim through, some I don’t!
Also, I think the blue-green algae in lake nokomis is because of lawn fertilizer run-off.
24 pools
Here’s some more Olympic swimming facts to put next to my discussion of water quality in the Seine from last week. Olympic swimming events start tomorrow and, apparently, some swimmers are concerned about the depth of the pool: deeper = faster = less waves and the Paris pool is just barely over the minimum required depth: 2.15 meters/2 meter min req). While reading this article on swimswam, Paris Swimming Pool Depth Raises First Concerns, I discovered this delightful fact: there are 24 pools for the Paris Olympics, including competitions pools and warm-up pools. Wow!
bike: 8.5 miles lake nokomis and back 82 degrees
My first solo bike ride to the lake this year. Hard to believe. Some of it was because Scott has been coming with me to run while I swim and some of it was because I thought my tires were leaking air. I think it might be that I’m not pumping them up properly. The bike ride was great. I wasn’t worried about seeing at all. No scary moments, wondering where the curve was or having to check again and again and again before passing someone. Also, no pain in my left leg during the bike. In past years, this has been an unexplained problem.
swim: 4 loops lake nokomis open swim 82 degrees
I did it! It was a beautiful night for a swim. There were some open water swimmers, but not as many as on Tuesday. Lots of non-club members wading in the swimming area, even with the advisory. I watched out for blue-green algae as I swam, but didn’t notice any anywhere. A few times, I had an itchy-prickly sensation — a toe, my calf, a finger. Was I imaging it? I decided the reason I’m more nervous about the algae this year is because I swam through so much of it last week.
So, the algae wasn’t a problem. Instead, I had to contend with swan boats pedaling and boarder paddling across the swimming area. When I first sighted them, I often mis-identified them as lifeguard boats. Also a problem — well, maybe not a problem, but a challenge — was the sun. Not only bright, but doing something to the air so everything looked hazy. Difficult to see anything, especially on the way back to the big beach. The stretch between the first and second orange buoys was strange. The sun was hitting my goggles in such a way that caused a weird red streak underwater in my left eye. Not bright red, just red.
Other than streaks of red, the water was a pale, almost yellow, green. Low visibility. No sparkle friends or bubbles, barely a view of my hands. The water was full of swells. No waves crashing into me or going over my head, but a lot of rocking. Occasionally I had to breathe just on one side to avoid inhaling water.
7 miles flats and back 67 degrees / humidity: 84% ending in drizzle
7 miles! And I didn’t feel like I was about to die at the end! Big progress. Ran the first 3 miles without stopping, then tried out what Scott did yesterday in his run: zones/heart rate training. Run until my heart rate reaches 170, then walk until it reaches 135. My heart rate is usually between 170 and 175 for all of my runs, so 170 is actually on the low end. I rev high. This worked remarkably well. I felt relaxed and managed to stay around 167 for most of it. And focusing on my heart rate distracted me.
10 Things
started by running north through the neighborhood: the guy who usually sits on his stoop and smokes wasn’t there this morning
smelled breakfast — sausage, toast — as I ran by longfellow grill
between lake street and franklin it was difficult to see the river — too many leaves, only the occasional flash of blue-gray
nearing the trestle, voices — rowers below! heard, but not seen
at least twice I’ve mentioned the orange cat spray-painted on the sidewalk. It’s not a cat, but a turkey. Today I noticed all the feathers
honking geese (I think) under the franklin bridge
the river was brown and half clear, half streaked with foam
a spring below the U of M was gushing — a little waterfall spilling out over the road. Water heard 2 ways: 1. seeping out of the rocks and 2. spraying up from under car wheels
near the bottom of the franklin hill, under the 1-94 bridge, leaves stick out from a leaning branch, looking like a leg to me. Several times I’ve thought there was a person there before I realized it was a tree
cool rain drops on my hot face at the end of the run
Listened to my feet, the rowers, cars, seeping water for the first half. Put in my color playlist for the second half.
swim: 4 loops lake nokomis open swim 77 degrees
Finally, I get to do another open swim! A beautiful evening with no swells and warm water. The first 2 loops were a little intense with a group of triathletes training for an upcoming race swimming in a line. But the third and fourth loops were much more peaceful, quiet. I didn’t stop at the shore between loops, and mostly swam freestyle without stopping, but once or twice I switched to breaststroke and took in the solitude and the smooth-as-glass water and the silence. Wow! Swimming freestyle without stopping, your head barely out of the water, is a much different experience than swimming breaststroke, with your head almost always out of the water. I like it; I feel less like a human and more like a fish, underwater for an hour.
Today’s swim was wonderful but didn’t involve much giving attention to anything other than sighting buoys, looking out for other swimmers, and counting strokes. Did I notice 10 things?
only one or two globs of algae
the water was olive green, or was it lentil green?
the sun was lower in the west and muted because of the clouds
no vine or twig encounters!
no sailboats, either — was that because there wasn’t any wind?
a wet-suited woman swimming a fast freestyle, then stopping to sight, then fast, then power breaststroking
feeling something up ahead disturbing the water, then seeing it, finally: a breaststroker’s powerful kick
at the beach, people with picket signs, park workers on strike and/or park worker supporters — I support the park workers!
leaving the beach overhearing 2 women who just finished swimming: women 1: I think I did more than the race distance women 2: you did double the distance! You can do this! women 1: Yes, I can do this!! I’m assuming they were both training for an upcoming triathlon
no planes or birds or shafts of light or glittering water or sparkle friends
a description of swimming
I cannot imagine a cessation to swimming, to my arms making their endless arcs, my hands gone to paddles, my body propelled forward a pull at a time, my feet feeling more like seal flippers, my shoulders rolling and rolling, and the slow whip of the turn, my head down and the push through the bubbles and blue andthe great intake of air, a breath that keeps a human able to move through water as if we were not gone from our breathable blue past (I will Always Inhabit the Water/ Lidia Yuknavitch).
Did a one-way run to the lake to meet RJP for a swim. Now that she’s 18, she’s old enough to swim across the lake, but she needs to get used to the scary, unsettling feeling of lake swimming, when you can’t see anything and scratchy vines reach up to grab your leg and there’s no bottom to touch. Her first attempt overwhelmed her — staring into a void of yellow, nothing to see in front, nothing solid to feel below. I told her about the first time I swam out to the buoys and across the lake. It was hard and I was scared. I kept thinking about Jaws. I could only swim 1 loop. It’s taken me 10 years to build up physically and mentally to swim as much as I do, I said. Later, when we were home, she said she wants to try again; she liked how it felt after she swam and maybe it wouldn’t be so scary once she got used to it. I hope it works out. I love swimming with her and feel so much joy watching her strong arms cut through the water.
One more thing about the swim: After RJP got out of the water, I swam a loop. If you ignored the algae scum, it was perfect water: still, not cold, empty. As I neared each white buoy, I displaced a seagull from their perch. Seagulls! I haven’t seen them much this summer, maybe that’s because I haven’t been swimming alone, in the morning?
Before meeting RJP, I ran. Hot! Some shade, lots of sun. I felt pretty relaxed for the first 2 miles, then I started negotiating with my legs: Can you make it to the turn-off past the mustache bridge before we walk? How about until we get over the duck bridge? Okay, we’ll take a quick walk break under the echo bridge. And we did, 2.6 miles into the run, but only for 10 or 15 seconds. When I started running again, I thought about how hard it is to notice anything when you’re distracted by the heat and the effort and your legs pestering you to walk. Can I name 10 things I noticed?
10 Things Noticed While Distracted by Heat and Fatigue
park workers out near the trail, moving and weed-whacking
since the last time I ran on the dirt trail between edmund and the river road someone has trimmed the tree branch that leaned over the trail — thank you, park worker!
a little mud, some soft, sandy dirt, scattered tree limbs
water rushing out of the sewer pipe — steady, soft
someone biking on the walking path
the creek was high and tumbling over rocks, impersonating a babbling brook
through the trees, a kayak gliding down the creek — would they stay in until just below the mustache bridge? Does anyone turn around and paddle against the current?
thwack thwack people playing on the pickleball court, hitting the balls hard
a haunting call — was it a mourning dove or a kid? difficult to tell
heading to the water fountain, wondering if that was where the person approaching was heading too, realizing finally that it was RJP — always unsettling when I don’t recognize the kids or Scott
Found this poem that I had archived in a document named, “Reading Links List” a few years ago: My First Black Nature Poem/ LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. So many great lines. Here’s what I wanted to remember today:
the green clearness. so mud olive I cannot see the bottom.
Mud olive — that’s the color I’ve been trying to name. That’s the mix of yellow and green with a hint of blue that I’ve been seeing as I swim across the lake!
But not this morning. This morning the lake was pale yellow; near the surface it almost looked white. Not nearly as pleasing as olive colored!
Before the run and swim, I drank coffee and looked for inspiration from the few people still on twitter. Jackpot! Found some wonderful poems from Moist (which I’ll save for another entry) and the Ten Muses of Poetry — from the writer, Andrei Codescru, in his book, The Poetry Lesson. I’ve never heard of Codescru — he’s great. I found the chapter his Ten Muses are in and read it. Funny and strange and great. I wonder, would I enjoy taking a class from him? Probably.
The Ten Muses of Poetry
Mishearing
Misunderstanding
Mistranslating
Mismanaging
Mislaying
Misreading
Misappropriating cliches
Misplacing objects belonging to roommates or lovers
Misguided thoughts at inappropriate times, funerals, etc.
Mississippi (the river)
Ending with the Mississippi? Yes!
read / heard / watched
read: Just finished reading this book excerpt on lithub: Kinds of Blue: On the Human Need to Swim. It’s an excerpt from Abundance/ Karen Lloyd. After reading the wonderful essay, I requested to book from the library!
heard: Listening to a 6 part series called Tested, written and recorded by Rose Eveleth for NPR and CBC.
Who gets to compete? Since the beginning of women’s sports, there has been a struggle over who qualifies for the women’s category. Tested follows the unfolding story of elite female runners who have been told they can no longer race as women, because of their biology. As the Olympics approach, they face hard choices: take drugs to lower their natural testosterone levels, give up their sport entirely, or fight. To understand how we got here, we trace the surprising, 100-year history of sex testing.
watched: This short video about Katie Ledecky came up on YouTube for me the other day. As a long distance swimmer, I think Katie Ledecky is amazing. I wanted to archive it for 2 reasons. First, starting at 2 minutes when she discusses how she knew that she loved swimming when she broke her arm and still wanted to get into the water. She even put a plastic bag over her arm so she could. I was thinking about this idea, but not remembering where it came from, when I was talking to RJP about trying to swim again in the lake. When you love something, you’re willing to try almost anything to keep doing it.
The second reason I wanted to archive this video was because of the story about her kid-self and how she never loses sight of the fact that swimming is something she “started just for fun, on a summer league swim team” (video start: 4:08). That idea, combined with the old footage of her as a very young kid, makes me think of Sara, age 8, and how much of what I’m trying to do now, is to reclaim her spirit and try to translate it for Sara, age 50, without losing the fun and the passion and the exuberance I had back then.
bike: 3 miles arbeiter and moon palace books 84 degrees
I was planning to do open swim at cedar lake at 5:30, but I checked the weather and learned that an intense storm would be moving through at 6 — high winds, thunder, hail. Not good for the car, or for someone swimming in the lake. What a bummer! I had a book to pick up at the book store, Gave / Cole Swensen, so we decided to bike to Moon Palace and then wait out the storm at Arbeiter Tap Room. What a storm! Wind, rain, thunder, but no hail. We thought we were leaving after the storm, but as we unlocked our bikes, more rain.
All ready to swim this morning: suit on, goggles de-fogged, bag packed. It started to drizzle, then rain, then thunder. All morning. No open swim today. Bummer. Instead, I watched the final stage of the Tour de France live. Pogacar! 6 stage wins. Wow. Then, I went out for a run. Today’s progress: I didn’t stop to walk at the turn around spot — a good mental victory. Also, I’m back on track with my weekly mile total by running over 20 miles this week.
10 Things
puddles in the usual spots: one block over, stretching across the sidewalk. No dry spot. A choice: leap over it or step gingerly on the muddy grass. I lept
the big tree that fell last week and blocked the road has finally been removed
a squirrel that looked like it might dart out in front of me — it didn’t
slick, slippery asphalt on the part of the trail that dips below the road just after the double bridge
a runner ahed of me pushing a stroller
a walker walking with two medium-sized dogs on either side of them
dripping ponytail
water gushing out of the sewer at 42nd
dirt and mud covering the sidewalk a few houses down after the rain
at the end, walking back: chirping birds
Earlier this morning, I was reminded of a book I had checked out of the library a few years ago, but returned before I finished: Fen, Bog, and Swamp/ Annie Proloux. I think I checked out the e-book before; today I decided to try the audiobook — partly because I was reminded of it while reading an article about the top audiobooks of 2022.
Finishing this last sentence, RJP just called down the stairs, Mom, Biden dropped out. So many complicated feelings about this news and the election and the future.
Listening to the opening minutes of the book, I heard these lines about the need for a slower form of attention:
To observe gradual change takes years of repetitive passage through specific regions week after week, year after year, season after season. Noticing sprout, bloom, and decay. Observing the local fauna. Absorbing the rise and fall of waters. Looking carefully (Fen, Bog, and Swamp/ Annie Proloux).
Yes! I’ve been running at least 3 times a week, almost always above the gorge, noticing leaves and trees and water and stones (and more) then writing about them for over 7 1/2 years now. I haven’t collecting the detailed data that Proloux describes Thoreau doing, but I have been noticing subtle changes in the seasons.
5.8 miles bottom of franklin hill and back 69 degrees / humidity: 84%
More progress! Running a little longer before stopping to walk, then running a little longer before stopping again. Increased my distance and time on my feet too. Step by small step I’ll get there.
Almost 9 am on Saturday morning. As I warmed up with a walk, it was quiet, calm. No cars or kids or other adults around. Just birds and my footsteps on the sidewalk. Ah, I love summer mornings!
During the run: hot, humid, lots of sweat. Greeted the Welcoming Oaks. Passed a group of runners in the tunnel of trees — good morning! Noticed an orange water station set up at the top of lake street, above the rowing club. Chanted triple berries — strawberry/raspberry/blueberry. Someone running up the hill turn around in front of me and descended again — hill repeats? Some bikers bombed down the franklin hill, others crawled up it. No rowers. The surface of the river seemed to have an oily skin on it. No foam or waves. Two runners passed me, one of them talking about his sister’s upcoming wedding. Waved at a regular runner, the white-bearded Mr. Santa Claus. At the bottom of the hill, two men fished in the river. Did they catch anything?
image: an older man running in BRIGHT blue shorts and matching long socks. As blue as a cloudless sky.
For the first half of the run, I listened to the quiet. Walking up the hill, I put in some music: Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” and then the movie soundtrack to “The Wiz.”
4.5 miles longfellow gardens / minnehaha falls 65 degrees
What a morning! Cooler and less humid. Ran to Longfellow Gardens to check out the flowers. In full bloom, mostly red and purple. People sitting on the benches — I couldn’t see them that well, but I imagine some of them were painting or taking photographs.
image: A portable red lawn chair in the shade under a tree. A person sit in it, facing the field with the statue of Longfellow, their back to the flowers.
Returning to the falls, I noticed a few trucks and heard voices chanting. Was it some religious thing? Or military training? A protest? RJP might know; one of her best friends works at the restaurant at the falls.
Took the steps down to the bottom of the falls, which were roaring. So was the creek. Walked then ran beside the water as it rushed by. Eventually it reaches the mississippi, but I crossed the bridge well before that happens. Admired the water that collects in a pool — sparkle and shimmer. In the afternoon, kids congregate here, wading and splashing, but not this morning. Just me, and a few diggers in the distance. What are they digging up?
Took the steps — more than 100 of them — back up to the park. Wow, what a leg burn! Glad I didn’t try running them!
It was not a question of not having the language for it— having two, in fact. The walking towards it, and then the walking away. How that felt, all the green gathering itself to the idea of green, lingering right at the edge of the dark, what we call the dark. And the languages, both of them, noticing that, envying it. From their places at the beginning & at the end.
all the green/gathering itself to the idea of green
I want to think about this green and the two languages and the dark, or what we call the dark, some more.
4 miles river road, north/south 73 degrees humidity: 86% / dew point: 60
A wonderful sunny morning. Not too hot yet, although the humidity took its toll. By the end of the run, I was dripping sweat. Another improved run. Went farther before I stopped for a quick break, then convinced myself to keep going on the way back. Believing again that I can do the marathon in October.
Decided to listen today. Thinking about how delightful it is to move through the neighborhood, passing from sound to sound.
Sounds
a chorus of BIRD — chattering, chirping, cheeping
a little toddler voice trying to repeat binoculars after his mom said it in a neighbor’s backyard
the shshshsh of my feet striking grit on the sidewalk
overheard from one biker to another — and it was so quiet you could hear the water lapping against the shore
a male coxswain below instructing rowers
my house key softly jingling in my pack
a walker’s keys jangling loudly in his pocket
whoosh after whoosh after whoosh of car wheels passing on the road
the buzz on a riding lawn mower — a park working mowing the grass beside the trail
2 sets of tap tap tap tapping from roofers — about a dozen taps each, at slightly different speeds, then a short break, then more taps
the quiet hops of a bunny moving across a neighbor’s grass
a lawn mower hitting a twig or a root — thwack!
the clicking of a roller skier’s poles
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, thundering over hard dirt, scampering in the soft snow.
Its hot voice sizzles from some cool tree Near-by: It seems to burn its way through the air Like a small, pointed flame of sound Sharpened on the ecstatic edge of sunbeams.
Speyer is describing a locust but as I wrote on the 16 july 2022, her description makes me think of a brood of cicadas. This sound is LOUD and interrupts you, demanding you notice it. The bunny’s soft footsteps were quiet and easily unnoticed. It feels like an accomplishment to have been quiet and aware enough to hear them.
So, I’m thinking about sound today. Another inspiration: Ears don’t lie.
Hearing is our fastest sense. (Who knew?!) Horowitz says that it takes our brain at least one-quarter of a second to process visual recognition. But sound? You can recognize a sound in 0.05 seconds. And our brain is so adept at hearing the differences between sounds, we can sense changes of sound that occur in “less than a millionth of a second,” according to Horowitz’s book [The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind].
This source led me to a Radiolab story that includes Horowitz: Never Quite Now. This story is not just about sound, but our nerves and neurons and how long it takes for us to process the world. Here’s a helpful description of how our body sees and then wants a pen:
JAD: Okay, so the eye takes the light that’s reflected off the pen, turns it into a little electrical signal, and then sends that deep into the middle of the brain.
CARL ZIMMER: Takes a couple hundredths of a second.
JAD: Bounces around for a bit, and then within …
CARL ZIMMER: A few more hundredths of a second …
JAD: The signal has made it …
CARL ZIMMER: All the way back to the rear end of the brain, where you start processing vision.
JAD: But this is just the beginning.
CARL ZIMMER: Right. Now you’ve gotta like figure out what you’re seeing.
JAD: So our jolt is off again, this time toward the middle of the brain and then down toward the bottom.
CARL ZIMMER: To these other regions ..
JAD: That start to decode the signal.
CARL ZIMMER: The first visual region is called V1.
JAD: Next up …
CARL ZIMMER: V2, V4, and so on. And they’re gonna sharpen the image, make out contrasts, edges.
JAD: And then electricity goes back towards the front of the brain.
CARL ZIMMER: After, let’s see, another tenth of a second or so …
JAD: We finally get to a place where we think …
CARL ZIMMER: “Oh, that’s a pen.”
ROBERT: We haven’t gotten yet to “I want it”.
CARL ZIMMER: Exactly.
JAD: For that to happen, the electricity has to jump from one part of the front of the brain to another and another before you can finally say …
CARL ZIMMER: “That’s a nice pen. I could use a pen.”
JAD: [laughs]
ROBERT: [laughs]
CARL ZIMMER: And we are still not done, you know. Then—then—then …
JAD: Little jolt heads northCARL ZIMMER: To sort of the top of your brain. So we—we’ve gone from your eyes to the back of your brain, around up to the front of your brain again. And now we’re up to the top of your head where you set up motor commands, and then you can grab the pen.
ROBERT: Christ!
JAD: So I mean, you add all this up and what are we talking about here
Later in the story, Seth Horowitz describes how hearing is the fastest sense and mentions the startle circuit:
SETH HOROWITZ: A sudden loud noise activates a very specialized circuit from your ear to your spinal neurons.
JAD: You mean it bypasses the brain?
SETH HOROWITZ: Yeah, it’s the startle circuit. If yousuddenly hear a loud noise, within 50 milliseconds, that’s 50 thousandths of a second, so you’re talking20 times faster than cognition, your body jumps, will begin the release of adrenaline. No consciousness involved. It’s five neurons, and it takes 50 milliseconds.
I’ve written about the word startle before — I especially like Emily Dickinson’s startled grass. There’s a poem in here somewhere, involving bodily recognition (or reaction?) versus brain cognition.
swim: 5 loops lake nokomis open swim 79 degrees
5 loops! What a great night for swimming in the lake! Calm, goo-free water, strong shoulders, a willing back, enough time to swim an extra loop. Amazing. Writing this a few hours later, I’m wiped out, but I felt good the whole time I was swimming. I swam for 80 minutes without stopping.
I wanted to give attention to sound as I swam, and I did. Mostly, I heard the sloshing of the water as I moved through it. Once I heard a plane roaring above me and another time I heard a lifeguard calling out. Not much else. In past years, I’ve heard squeaks or strange clanging noises, but not tonight. Just slosh slosh slosh.
The water was a pale green with the idea of pale yellow — I didn’t see yellow as much as feel that it was there. Visibility was limited, but I could see my hand in front of me, bubbles, and the underside of the water’s surface, which was very cool.
There were a few menacing swans and some kayaks.
From the shore I could see that the orange buoys were in a straight line. In the water, swimming past them, it didn’t seem as straight. At least once for each loop, I could see the orange dots of the three buoys. The green buoys were more difficult. I didn’t care; I knew where they should be and swam that way.
4.2 miles minnehaha falls and back 73 degrees / dew point: 69
Woke up early, but thunderstorms were coming so I had to wait until after 10 to go out for my run. Gloomy, dark green, thick, but a slightly better run. Ran longer before I stopped to walk. Felt stronger while I ran. Kept running farther after I walked before stopping again. Progress!
10+ Things
the usual puddles have returned, blocking the sidewalk (one block over) and the trail (near the entrance to the locks and dam no. 1)
more big branches down, or the same big branches from last week’s storm, not yet removed
dripping sewer pipes at 42nd and 44th
mud and dirt washed up onto the asphalt
exuberant kids running around the grass at minnehaha park
roaring falls
passing by 2 surreys biking up from wabun
a soaked backpack in a driveway, half open, clothes slipping out, 2 books next to it, one of them with the pages rolled over
a pile of clothes tucked under the trees next to the path between the locks and dam no. 1 and the ford bridge
2 roller skiers, their poles clicking and clacking on the pavement
a chainsaw in the distance — below in the gorge?
wildlife update: Scott talked with a company who informed him that a wasp nest can’t just be removed because the wasps will build another one; it needs to be treated. One problem: it is illegal in Minnesota to treat fruit trees and the wasp nest is in our crab apple tree. Oh well, I guess our neighbors are staying.
So hot and humid this morning! Decided to go for a run before the storm arrived. Ran around the neighborhood just in case it started pouring or thundering. It didn’t and still hasn’t even though the forecast said there was 100% chance. Strange weather this summer. So many expected storms not happening, so many unexpected storms happening.
Greeted Mr. Holiday, a regular — good morning! He replied, Morning! It’s so humid out here! I agreed. Noticed the street one block over closed for tree work then saw a very tall crane halfway down the street. No tree dangling from its claw yet. Heard water gushing at the ravine. Did it rain overnight? Felt relaxed and strong and not too warm at first. A little overheated later.
Earlier this morning, watched Courtney Dauwalter win the ultramarathon, Hardrock 100. She’s amazing. Also saw one of my favorite cyclists, Lotte Kopecky gain 2 more seconds in the Giro D’Italia. She’s only 1 second behind Longo Bourghini heading into tomorrow’s final stage!
wildlifeupdate: It’s been a busy summer in our yard. Distraught sparrows, wild turkeys on the fence, dead bunnies, bats hiding in umbrellas, and now a big ass wasp nest perched on one of the highest branches of our crab apple tree. Yikes! RJP noticed it yesterday. Time to call in the experts!
I’m still reading Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock. I love her sense of humor and enjoyed her thoughts on being afraid to swim alone because of sharks:
I am scared to swim alone not because I might drown but because I might be attacked by a shark. Mine is an unwarranted phobia (shared by basically every person in my generation, i.e., those of us who grew up with Jaws); companionship is an illogical cure. To date, there have been no shark attacks in our harbor. Should a shark, against all statistics, appear, a friend (unless he or she is swimming with a machine gun) will be unable to save me from it. But I feel safe in knowing—before I am pulled underwater to my death by an animal, I can share a final what the fuck? moment with a sympathetic human.
Ran with Scott around the lake before open swim. Hot! For most of it, I felt fine, but the last few minutes were hard. I can’t remember what we talked about — Scott mentioned something about selling a few subscriptions to his plugin during his band rehearsal last night — nice. I remember admiring the sparkling water and noticing some small waves, hearing many different birds singing, feeling the lack of shade in the stretch between the bridge and the little beach. Saw some geese and ducks — oh, here’s something I talked about: I mentioned to Scott how I wasn’t seeing many birds while I swam — no ducks crossing my path and no seagulls perched on the white buoys. I wonder why I’m not — are they not there, or am I just not noticing them?
swim: 4 loops lake nokomis open swim 80 degrees
Warm, both the air and the water. Even so, it was refreshing after the run. The green slimy stuff was everywhere. Most of the swimming area at the big beach had globs of it on the surface. I told Scott it made me think of ectoplasm from Ghostbusters. Still gross, but I’m getting used to it, and now that I know it won’t get me sick, I don’t care that much. Some of it was dried out, a little more brittle, less slimy.
The water was rougher than I expected. No big waves, but enough chop that I had to breathe mostly on my right side and felt more tired at the end of each loop. Also, it was difficult to see much because of the swells.
My favorite part of the swim was the reflections on top of and below the surface. Above, the bright buoys made the water glow orange and green as I rounded them. Noticing this I wondered what reflections I might see on the underside of the surface. I swam a little deeper and looked up at the surface of the water from below: a reflection of my hands! Very cool looking.
My least favorite part of the swim was the algae and the thick branch that I swam into in the middle of the lake. First I was startled, then I had a flash of memory: Chief Brodie sees something in the surf and wades out; a charred dead body falls on him (from Jaws). Watching that movie when I was a kid still haunts me.
The color of the water was delightful. Mostly, I looked at it and thought green. Sometimes the green had hints of blue. Sometimes, when I was swimming near the ectoplasm-algae, it was bright green. And sometimes, when I noticed light streaming down from above, it had flecks of gold. Writing this last bit I realized that I haven’t seem much of the sediment this week — all the vibrating flecks looking like sparkles. I hope they come back (and the algae leaves!).
added several hours later: A few things I forgot: man walking in the shallow water with a metal detector, two women expressing concern about the algae floating near the start of the swim, and two women celebrating after checking their watches and seeing how far they swam. Finally, the “official” name for the green slime in the water is algae scum, according to the lake quality site. For the water quality at Lake Nokomis main beach, there’s a note in the special consideration section: “Stay out of algae scum if blown into beach area.” Well, I tried! Algae scum seems a fitting name for this gross stuff.
Yesterday afternoon, torrential rain, thunder, wind, and hail whipped through our neighborhood. It lasted only 20 minutes, but it was intense. Not scary — except to Delia-the-dog — but wild. It looked like it was snowing: Christmas in July! And the hail was so loud on the roof and the skylight. Today as I ran, I surveyed the damage by the river. Big branches on the dirt path, leaves scattered, a whole tree at the end of edmund:
big tree, felled
Of course I only took one picture, so I had to use it. Not sure if it effectively conveys the size of the tree?
Decided to take the winchell trail to check out the damage below. Some branches down, but nothing blocking the path. Dirt and mud and muck everywhere. I started chanting in my head,
silt / loam / glacial till silt and / loam and / glacial till
Listened to water gushing out of the sewer pipe and down the slope at 42nd. Also listened to the birds — not one type in particular, but a chorus of BIRD. Noticed the shade on the path and the tiny spots of light. Looked at the river, a hazy heat hovering just above and thought, hot! No relief from that view.
Before I run, I read an excerpt from the novel Elixir. I wanted to think about this quote as I ran:
We were near water. There is a river. If you couldn’t hear it or see it, its ions vibrated in the air and you inhaled water, day and night.
In the summer when the leaves block my view and I can’t see the river, I still know it’s there and it is always part of my run in some way.
the Seine, open water swimming, and water quality
I’ve been seeing lots of headlines about the problems with water quality in the Seine for open water swimming events at the Olympics. I mentioned it to RJP and she said she’d heard (on TikTok, natch) that people were pooping in the Seine in protest. Is that true? While looking it up, I found this helpful video: Can Paris fix it’s poop problem?
Okay, read some more, and the “Paris Poop Protest” is a thing. People were encourage to do it on June 23rd, when the President of France and the mayor of Paris were planning to swim in the Seine to prove it was safe. When Macron and Hidalgo postponed their swim, the poop protest was postponed too. So many interesting things to think/write about with this in terms of city infrastructures, rivers, threats to cities’ waterways, the negative and positive impacts of hosting the Olympics, and more. Swimming in public water, feeling the effects of how it’s managed in my body, has given me a deeper perspective on this issue of water quality and water management. I’m so grateful to have access to safe water here in Minneapolis.Everyone should have access to safe water.
time and water
Reading more of The Folded Clock, I was inspired to think about the relationship between time and water. Here are a few thoughts:
1 — anne carson
. . . the staining together of mind and time so that she is no longer miles and miles apart from her life, watching it differently unfold, but in it, as it, it.
1 = 1 / Anne Carson
2 — heidi julavits
As we stroked past I thought I saw George growing older and older. His grandchildren beside him grew older, too, taking his place before being replaced themselves by their children. It was like a trick of stop-time photography, everyone shading into everyone else. . . . Time passed. I started to doze. The cold water had slowed our pulses but everything else spun at great speed. I worried I would awake to find myself an old woman, my husband dead, my daughter grown and turned into me. But life, when I woke up, was as I’d left it.
The Folded Clock / Heidi Julavits
3 — samantha sanders
[on swimming in Lake Michigan in the winter] The exhilaration is remarkable. I feel like we’ve discovered the fountain of youth.
Swimming Through / Samantha Sanders
4 — alice oswald
it is not me but close to me a kind of cloud or smoke-ring made of nothing and yet it will outlast everything because it is deep it i sa dead field fenceless a thickness with many folds in it promiscuous and mingling which in its patience always wears away the hard thing
or is it only the hours on their rounds thinking of the tides by turns twelve white-collar workers who manage the schedules of water
nobody / alice oswald
In their lunch hour I saw the shop-workers get into water They put their watches on the stones and slithered frightened Into the tight-fitting river And shook out cuffs of splash And swam wide strokes towards the trees And after a while swam back With rigid cormorant smiles Shocked I suppose from taking on Something impossible to think through Something old and obsessive like the centre of a rose And for that reason they quickly turned And struggled out again and retrieved their watches Stooped on the grass-line hurrying now They began to laugh and from their meaty backs A million crackling things Burst into flight which was either water Or the hour itself ascending.
from Evaporations/ Alice Oswald
5 — darby nelson
I posted this quote back on 16 august 2021, but I want to post it again here:
We talk of time as the river flowing. I never questioned the implications of that metaphor until I was struck by the words of Professor Dave Edmunds, Native American, on a display in the Indian-Western Art Museum in Indianapolis. Edmunds wrote, ‘Time as a river is a more Euro-American concept of time, with each event happening and passing on like a river flows downstream. Time as a pond is a more Native American concept of time, with everything happening on the same surface, in the same area—and each even is a ripple on the surface.’
If I think of time as a river, I predispose myself to think linearly, to see events as unconnected, where a tree branch falling into the river at noon is swept away by current to remain eternally separated in time and space from the butterfly that falls in an hour later and thrashes about seeking floating refuge.
But if I think of time as a lake, I see ripples set in motions by one even touching an entire shore and then, when reflected back toward the middle, meeting ripples from other events, each changing the other in their passing. I think of connectedness, or relationships, and interacting events that matter greatly to lakes.
For Love of Lakes/ Darby Nelson
When I think of time and water, I think of erosion and geologic time, and the wearing down of things by the water over years, decades, centuries. I think of generational time, and the family members, the hearty Finns on my dad’s side, who loved and excelled at swimming. I think of Sara-time and one of the key constants in my life and many selves: I love water and swimming in it. I think of losing track of time while swimming, and tracking it on my watch to look at later. I think of time measured by strokes and loops instead of minutes, measured by open swims instead of days.
swim: 4 loops lake nokomis open swim 84 degrees
I swam 4 loops but the buoys were set up in such a way that the distance of 4 loops today was almost the same as 3 loops on other days. Oh well, I’m still counting it as 4. The water was very warm, too warm. Lots of stuff in it, but not as much as on Tuesday. More green slimy stuff, but now that I recognize and know it’s not toxic, it didn’t bother me as much.
I decided I wanted to listen as I swam. I didn’t hear much, just water sloshing over my head. The water was still, flat, sometimes feeling fast, sometimes slow. There was a haze in the air that made it as difficult to see as if my googles were fogged up. I felt strong and smooth and fast and happy.
Before the swim, I asked a few women if they had swum on Tuesday and if they had seen the green goo. Neither of them had. I realized later, as I swam, that I wasn’t asking because I wanted reassurance that whatever it was was not harmful. I just wanted to find someone else to acknowledge that it was strange and gross and something worth reacting to. On Tuesday, no one else seemed to care or be talking about it.
10 Things
2 women laughing and talking as they tread water between the last orange buoy and the shore
impossible to see either of the green buoys with the sun and the haze
at least 2 menacing swans
the ghost vines are multiplying in numbers and size — creepy!
cloudy sky
a few pockets of cold water throughout the lake
crowded swimming area, beach and park — everyone here on a hot day
the surface of the water above was blue and calm and shiny and smooth
the surface of the water below was greenish-brownish-yellowish
I swam high on top of the surface, feeling extra buoyant
3.25 miles trestle turn around 78 degrees / dew point: 66
For the first mile, in the shade it felt almost cool or, at least not HOT! Hardly any bugs, but tons of chirping birds, one black-capped chickadee calling out for a response which never came. A few other runners, walkers, a group of bikers. After turning around at the trestle I passed by 3 women instructing a fourth on how to use an unfamiliar bike. Somewhere I smelled tobacco — from a car? below on the winchell trail? a walker’s clothes? Admired the glowing purple flowers on the edge of the trail and the stretch of the path that was all shade, except for a few splotches of light. One splotch was big enough to see my shadow in before we both disappeared into the shade. The river was calm and pale blue. The green was thick excess. The stretches of trail in the direct sun were warm. At least twice I pushed myself to keep running when I wanted to stop. At the trestle I put in my old “Winter” playlist
immersion
This summer I’m devoting a lot of attention to water and swimming and my experiences during open swim. After reading Lauren Groff’s essay, Swimming, Anne Carson’s story 1=1, and watching Samantha Sanders’ mini doc, Swimming Through, I’m thinking about why I love open water swimming and how to describe the experience of moving in/with/through water. Here are 3 descriptions from Groff, Carson, and Sanders.
1 – Groff
there is a moment in swimming when, after a while, the body’s rhythm grows so comfortable that the swimmer loses awareness of herself. There is a marrow-deep letting go. She isn’t thinking. Her brain is off, her body is on autopilot. She is elevated; happy is not the word for it. To be and not to be, simultaneously: some people call this state ecstasy, others call it zen. They are, perhaps, different names for the same phenomenon. It is difficult to attain, and there are a thousand ways to attain it. Some meditate, others do peyote, others focus so hard on their art that the world itself falls away and they look up, days or hours later, to be staggered by what they have created in the full flare of their own white heat.
Groff’s last bit, “in the full flare of their own white heat” reminds me of Mary Oliver and one of her poems that I posted on 10 july 2022: “The Ponds”:
from The Ponds/ Mary Oliver
Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled — to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. I want to believe I am looking
into the white fire of a great mystery.
The white heat also makes me think of Emily Dickinson. But, the flare of white heat seems like the wrong sort of metaphor for what happens to you in the water. Also, even as we float in the water, we are still fully in it, not above it.
2 — Carson
. . . no interaction with another person ever brought her a bolt of pure aliveness like entering the water on a still morning with the world empty in every direction to the sky. That first entry. Crossing the border of consciousness into, into what?
And then the (she searches for the right word) instruction of balancing along in the water, the ten thousand adjustments of vivid action, the staining together of mind and time so that she is no longer miles and miles apart from her life, watching it differently unfold, but in it, as it, it.
To swim, especially freestyle, with your head mostly underwater, only surfacing to breathe (as opposed to breaststroke, where you always have a frog-eye view), is to be immersed in water, not floating above it. And not burning a white heat, but —? Something I can’t quite name yet. The it you are in, is not just water, but life.
3 — Sanders
There are many wonderful, beautiful moments in this doc about resilience and community and transformation, but I especially love this moment, starting 10 minutes in, in which they describe the shift from tracking the temperature to giving attention to — witnessing — the ice. To me, this might speak to Carson’s idea of crossing the border of consciousness into something/somewhere else.
We became very obsessive about how cold the water was getting. You know, it’s 50, then it’s 40, then it’s 40.2, then it’s 39. I had two thermometers that both busted this year in the cold water, I didn’t get another one. We just figure that it’s cold. So then it’s about I can’t wait to swim in the snow. Then it was like, I can’t wait to swim when there’s ice.
And then we had no idea what did ice mean? You know, this winter it meant so many different kinds of ice because you know, there’s the first ice that was like a very thin, thin layer of ice. Almost like snowflakes on the water. Break them as I stroked and then turn around and they would have reformed behind me. Ice that was so sharp that you actually were getting cut and you needed to be careful.
The feeling of swimming is the feeling of noticing the world, not existing above it, but fully in it, immersed, aware, witnessing the slight changes in temperature, or where waves usually start, or how the weather affects the opacity of the water.
A few minutes before this ice part, one of the women says this about the experience of swimming in very cold water: I feel metallic! I love that — maybe that should be the title of a poem, “To feel metallic”?!
added a few hours later: I almost forgot to include some sources that I’d like to gather then read then archive:
“The Anthropology of Water” / Anne Carson in Plainwater — go to the U library for this one
*several years ago — maybe 10? — I put The Folded Clock on my wishlist and got it for Christmas of that year. Apparently this was before I got into the habit of writing the date on the first page, so I can’t remember exactly what year that was. I also can’t specifically remember why — maybe because I was into memoirs? Anyway, I know I read some of it before but I didn’t realize that she wrote about swimming in lakes!
Julavits is swimming in a Berlin lake, filled with algae. This is the last paragraph:
The best thing about my first Berlin swim was this. When I took off my bathing suit, the crotch was bright green from the algae that had collected there. It was like getting my period for the first time and seeing the shock of color where normally there is only white.
The Folded Clock
When I took my suit off after my green algae filled swim, the muck that usually collects beneath my suit on my stomach and under my breasts included some bright green bits? chunks? traces? I’m glad that it collected there and not in my crotch!
3.35 miles ford bridge and back 68 degrees / dew point: 62
Ran an hour earlier today, but it was still hot and muggy. Quiet, calm, not too many walkers or bikers or runners on the trail. With the thick green, I don’t recall seeing the river once. Chanted triple berries. Heard the faint trickling down in the ravine, then from the sewer pipe. Some rustling in the brush. Construction sounds — big planks of wood being dropped? There were birds, I’m sure, but I don’t remember hearing them. No roller skiers or rowers or shadows. Lots of water in the form of humidity and sweat and post-rain run-off.
Repetition, Routine, and Quotes Taken Out of Context
After my run, scrolling around (reading old RUN! posts from today and poetry people tweets), I came across 2 ideas about repetition/routine. The first was a quote from Karlheinz Stockhausen about repetition and walking and breathing:
Repetition is based on body rhythms, so we identify with the heartbeat, or with walking, or with breathing.
I always want to find the context for these context-less quotes spread online, so I looked it up. Sometimes it can be tedious, finding the source, but today, quick satisfaction! I didn’t know who Karlheinz Stockhausen was, but now I (kind of) do: a big deal — an experimental composer, very influential in 20th century music, including hip-hop and techno (is that the right umbrella term?), according to this cool documentary, Modulations. I also found the unpublished interview from which this quote comes. Here’s some context for the quote:
Q: One of your comments is that a lot of times it’s too repetitive?
A. Yes. I think it’s more interesting to create music which transforms, shapes figures, so that one can follow a process. Repetition is based on body rhythms, so we identify with the heartbeat, or with walking, or with breathing. This has been the tradition for thousands of years of basic musical songs, tunes. But since the middle of the century in particular, the music has become very irregular in rhythm. And the invention of transformations of certain figures has become the most important in musical composition. I think it’s simply more interesting than repetitive technique.
When I read the out-of-context quote (which is shared a lot), I thought it was about the value of repetition and its connection to breathing, but in context, the quote is criticizing repetition as something to move beyond. Context matters (imho)!
This discussion of repetition and disruption of that repetition reminded me of a poem from Carl Phillips (posted on 8 july 2023), Western Edge, that I had just re-read
I need you the way astonishment, which is really just
the disruption of routine, requires routine.
I like need repetition and routine and establishing habits that my brain can visually interpret, but I also need love disruption, interruption, moments of astonishment. My ongoing question — how to balance the routine with the astonishing?
swim: 3 nokomis loops (6 cedar loops) cedar lake open swim 78 degrees
A beautiful night for a swim! Calm water, warm air. Too many vines floating in the water. They kept passing over me, trailing, lingering. I said to Scott that it felt almost like a violation, the way they slowly moved from my shoulder, down my torso, then my leg. Yuck! He joked, it was a vine-olation. The vines were also a problem near shore, growing up from the bottom in a thick tangle. It’s not difficult to imagine someone getting stuck in them and drowning.
The buoy across the lake was fine for the first loop, then partly deflated for the second loop, then completely flat for the rest of the loops. Just an orange blob on the water. I’ve never seen that before! Of course it happened at Cedar lake.
Another Cedar lake moment: A woman to the lifeguard: Excuse me, my son doesn’t have a cap, and he’s not 18 (the minimum required age for open swim), but could he swim across? Lifeguard: As long as he’s a good swimmer, it should be okay.
Maybe I would have been critical of these things in the past, but I’m not now. Deflated buoys and underage swimmers are just part of the cedar lake vibe.
10 Things
blue sky with a few puffy white clouds
something flying through the air — a plane? a big bird? I turned on my back for a minute to check: plane — I could hear the roar of the engines
the orange blob from a distance, not whispering orange, more like a random very quick blip — orng
scratchy vines poking my arm
murky water, difficult to see my hand, yellowish brown
log rolling — a giant red fake log
before the swim, standing by the lifeguard stand — creeaakk — the lifeguard opened a big trunk, looking for something. I wonder how often they open it? Judging my how much it creaked, not too often!
the deflated buoy was far away from hidden beach — no chance to see or hear how many people were swimming there
the water was warm, but near the shore where it was still deep, there were pockets of very cold water
on the last loop, I could feel the muck under my suit, against my skin, scratching me. I almost stopped to pull it out, but when do I ever stop?
Finally, the water was warm! Warm enough that I wasn’t freezing on the drive home, wrapped in blankets. And I didn’t have to take a long, hot shower to thaw out. Another wonderful swim. Strong, confident strokes. Steady, barely a break in the rhythm — 1 2 sight 3 4 5 breathe left 1 2 3 breathe right 1 2 sight 3 4 5 breathe left — once to adjust my nose plug, a few times to avoid drifting swimmers, and once to stand at the big beach between loops 3 and 4.
today, 4 loops = 3800 yards
10+ Lake Things
getting ready to start, overheard: a tiny, older woman in wetsuit to another women in a tri-suit — are you ready to swim? the tri-suit replies: no, I don’t want to do this wetsuit: you don’t want to swim? tri-suit: no, but I have a race on the 14th
a delightfully creaking swing, sounding almost like it was calling out or scolding me — creeaakkk creeaakk
glittering sediment in the water
pale, ghostly legs near the buoys
lifeguards for the win: the course set up and open 5 minutes early! and the buoys were fairly in line with each other!
no swans or geese or ducks or minnows (at least that I recall)
loop 1: sun, a few clouds
loop 2: less sun, more clouds, half the sky turning white
loop 3: more sun again
bubbles, bubbles everywhere from exhaling and piercing the water
I added to the collection of sad, scattered hairbands at the lake floor by accidentally dropping mine at the end of the swim
at the beginning: a metal detector dude, wading in the water!
A few random thoughts: I don’t miss the silver-boat bottom and even if it were still here, the course is set up in a way that would make it unhelpful for guiding me. I only breathe through my mouth when I swim because of my nose plug. Longterm, what kind of impact does that have on my swimming, breathing, fitness? It’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me: breaststrokers always seem to be trying to race me. They irritate me. Not that I’m complaining, but how come I never see any snakes in this water (or eels)?
During loop two, I recited Anne Sexton’s “The Nude Swim” as I swam. All this in us had escaped for a minute is still my favorite line, although I also like, we entered in completely and let our bodies lose all their loneliness. I also recited a bit from MO: It is time now, I said, for the deepening and quieting of the spirit among the flux of happenings.
scott’s big band concert
Last night, FWA and I went to Scott’s big band concert. It was outside beside a beautiful lake in a small town northwest of Minneapolis. It lasted for 2 hours. Sitting there, I witnessed the changing light — from bright to shadows to sun descending, sky suggesting pink. At one point, I turned to FWA and mentioned the pink then asked, is it pink? And he said, no and looked at me a little strangely. I responded, I love how my vision makes everything magical. It didn’t look PINK! but more like a whisper, a trace, the slightest hint of pink, as if someone was whispering to me, pink. Was I anticipating the sunset I expected? Or maybe just more attuned than FWA to the changing light, having given so much attention in the past few years to subtle shifts in color?
10 Things During the Concert
at the end of a song, just as the singer was hitting a fabulous high note, a train passed nearby, its horn blaring, sounding like part of the music
someone was smoking a pipe nearby — later Scott complained that he could smell it on stage; I smelled it, but it didn’t bother me
a woman behind me cackling
another woman in a flowing turquoise skirt walking by then stopping to listen to the Stevie Wonder medley then swaying to — now I can’t remember which Wonder song it was, Sir Duke?
no bugs!
birds! — high in the sky, one bird awkardly flapping its wings, frantic with speed
birds! — shooting up in the sky like fireworks or static on a screen, one at a time
the lake behind me — I could feel it but couldn’t see it because to turn and look would seem as if I was staring at the people behind me — oh, why didn’t they position the band shell in front of the lake!
during the concert, people were playing basketball at the court next to the stage — I don’t remember hearing them, just seeing bodies moving back and forth
in the distance, to my right, carnival rides — a spinn-y ride lit up in red and green and blue lights — as dusk neared, I watched the lights glow
It was a long night — we left the house at 3:45 pm, got to the concert venue at 5, waited around until the concert started at 6, then listened for 2 hours, and finally got home at almost 10. But I’m glad I went, and grateful that FWA came too. So many cool images to witness and remember.
The struggle continues. Another difficult run, another beautiful morning. Birds! Flowers! Blue sky! Sweat. Sore legs. Weak will. Chanted triple berries for a few minutes, which helped me keep going longer than I thought I could. Had fun running to “Virtual Insanity” — it helped me pick up my cadence for a few minutes
10 Things
running on the dirt path between edmund and the river road, a sharp pain on the shin — not a muscle but a bug stinging me
flowers: purple orange red yellow pink
walking past the house with a dog named Merry, 2 cars with canoes on top, excited voices — returning from a trip or leaving for one?
one of the people: Shit! I’m already sweating
the meadow just beyond the ford bridge was silent — no buzzing cicadas or croaking frogs today
above on the ford bridge, voices somewhere — no intelligible words just 2 women making noise
traces of mud on the trail — not gloppy, just wet
the trail, busy with zooming bikes
thud thud thud a power walker approaching from behind during my cool-down walk
a big boulder on the side of the trail, a small, hollowed out part of top, filled with water — water and stone
Seeing this stone, I was reminded of Octavio Paz’s poem “Water, Wind, Stone”:
Water hollows stone, wind scatters water, stone stops the wind. Water, wind, stone.
Wind carves stone, stone’s a cup of water, water escapes and is wind. Stone, wind, water.
Before the run, I gave myself the task of trying to think about water and stone as I ran. The only thing I remember is this rock with the small pool of water in it.
3.2 miles trestle turn around 71 degrees / humidity: 78% light rain
Raining all day today. After talking to FWA about how he likes to walk in the rain, I decided to run before the rain got heavy — thunderstorms are predicted in the late afternoon. I never mind running in the rain, but I’m usually reluctant to start in it. I’m glad I went for it today. What a beautiful green: deep, rich, fresh (but not refreshing!), comforting. The rain was light enough that I barely felt it — no soaked, clinging shirt of shorts (that happened a few weeks ago).
I’m not sure if it was raining all the time or it stopped sometimes or it was a combination of light rain with dripping trees. It was fun to run under and beside the trees when the rain-soaked leaves rustled. One time I misjudged how low a branch was and ran through it instead of under it — the cool water on my face was a surprise then a relief.
Under the lake street bridge somebody had parked a lime scooter in the middle of the walking path, forcing walkers/runners to veer out into the bike path. Dangerous — bikes bomb down the hill and cut close to the edge of the path without warning. Also, I can’t always see these scooters, or I can sort of see that they’re there, but can’t properly judge my distance from them. Hard to believe I haven’t already been impaled by the handlebars of one of these scooters (or bikes)!
I was not alone on the trail. Mostly walkers, many with umbrellas — no menacing blue umbrella guy who takes over the entire path and won’t budge an inch. Some runners, one talking on a bluetooth headset. No roller skiers. Any bikers? I can’t remember.
Bright car headlights. The whooshing of wheels through the puddles on the road.
In honor of a run in the rain (more fun to say than a rain-run, or is it?), I decided to look to my friend, Emily Dickinson, for a poem. She did not disappoint!
The Skies can’t keep their secret! They tell it to the Hills – The Hills just tell the Orchards – And they—the Daffodils!
A Bird – by chance – that goes that way – Soft overhears the whole – If I should bribe the little Bird – Who knows but she would tell?
I think I won’t – however – It’s finer – not to know – If Summer were an Axiom – What sorcery had snow?
So keep your secret – Father! I would not – if I could – Know what the Sapphire Fellows, do, In your new-fashioned world!
I found this poem on a favorite site, The Prowling Bee. I love how the blog author, Susan Kornfield, describes ED’s role as a poet:
Dickinson again chooses the naturalist’s approach to the world rather than the academic’s or theologian’s. She observes in rich detail but is quite reluctant to draw conclusions. Better, to her, the wonder than to have the Latin names and dry scientific knowledge. I suppose this is a poet’s eye, looking at each event, each bit of the world that catches the eye, afresh. Those of us who name, categorize, and systemetize, inject at least one layer between us and the actual world. This preference for questions over answers is one reason why we love our poets!
This poem reminds me of Tony Hogland poem that I memorized as part of my 50 for 50: The Social Life of Water
All water is a part of other water. Cloud talks to lake; mist speaks quietly to creek.
Lake says something back to cloud, and cloud listens. No water is lonely water.
a few hours later: No thunder storms yet (at 2:40 pm), just a steady rain, a dark sky. I’m writing in this already finished post to add an article that I read on MPR News about Minneapolis Park Workers going on strike. The article offers some powerful descriptions of the difficult labor — physically, emotionally — that many park workers do.
Lane [a park worker] says he’s been with Minneapolis parks for more than a decade, arriving at 5 a.m. daily in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, during 2020 riots that followed the murder of George Floyd and regularly, when tasked to clean up homeless encampments.
It can be a grueling job, he said. He’s frequently cleaning up broken glass, needles and feces, ensuring the public spaces are safe to enjoy. On one of his most difficult days, Lane said he watched a woman die from an overdose. But like any other day on the job, he pushed on.
“Just to see the poverty was disheartening,” he said. “It touched me, man. I cried a few times just thinking about how people are living out here.
Wow. I often notice and appreciate the park workers, but it’s usually related to tree-trimming or road patching. I don’t think enough about this other, less visible, labor. What a difficult task to clear out encampments, especially if you disagree with the decision that they need to be cleared out. Last month, while running with Scott, I recall pointing out all of the tents and tarps and stuff propped up near a trash can on the trail just above the gorge. I wasn’t sure why it was there, but now I imagine it was the aftermath from an encampment clear out by park workers.
4 miles monument and back* 65 degrees / dew point: 62 drizzle**
*a new route? Through the neighborhood, over the lake street bridge, up the summit hill, over to the Civil War Monument and back **or as I’ve been known to say, spittin’ (does that come from the UP? the south? the midwest?)
Even though the dew point was high, the drizzle helped it feel cooler. Everything dark and quiet, calm, green. Passed the guy who is always sitting on his front stoop smoking. Also passed kids arriving at the church daycare. Pushed myself to keep running up the summit hill even though I wanted to stop. Made it!
Chanted triple berries for a mile or two. It helped distract me. raspberry / blueberry / strawberry
10 Things
shadow falls was gushing through the trees
the street lamps were glowing on the st. paul side
rowers on the river! an 8-person shell. The coxswain was advising them on where to place the paddles in the high water (we have a river flood warning)
morning! from a passing runner — good morning!
the river was a beautiful gray blue, the trees a rich green
so windy on the bridge heading east that I had to take my cap off and hold it
the whining of a power saw in the distance
alone at the monument overlook
sometimes it was a drizzle, sometimes just a mist — difficult to tell which while running and sweating
enveloped in dark green in the tunnel of trees — the only light was green light and a small circle of white at the top of the hill
As I looked down at the river from high above on the gorge, I thought about the rowers and their paddles and how different their experience of the water was to mine. Down there in the water, I bet it’s choppy and bumpy, with wind and spray. Up here, it’s almost flat and gray blue. No feeling of motion — no waves or the unsettling sense of being higher on water that’s on the edge of spilling over somewhere.
Yesterday I started thinking again about different bodies of water and how poets write about them: Mary Oliver (ponds), Lorine Niedecker (lakes), Alice Oswald (rivers, the sea). I also remembered Cole Swenson and their writing about the river Gave de Pau in Gave. I think I need to buy this book! Anyway, I looked up a few more of their poems and read one titled, “To Circumferate.” These lines stuck with me:
With a careful adjustment of eye there are no buildings. A city of trees and hedges
As I ran back from the monument, looking left to the ravine and the trees, I thought about that line and imagined the stretches of grass, the trees, the green ravine as a city — the only city — no buildings or houses or roads or cars, only trees and tall grasses and bushes leading down to the river.
All of this thinking about different bodies of water reminded me of something I started to read but had to return to the library before I got very far, Visitation/ Jenny Erpenbeck. Here are the first two pages and an amazing description of water:
Approximately twenty-four thousand years ago, a glacier advanced until it reached a large outcropping of rock that now is nothing more than a gentle hill above where the house stands. The enormous pressure exerted by teh ice snapped and crushed the frozen trunks of the oaks, alders and pines that grew there, sections of rock broke away, splintered and were ground to bits, and lions, cheetahs and saber0toothed cats fled to more southerly climes. But the ice did not advance beyond this rocky crag. Gradually silence set it, and the ice began its labor, a labor of sleep. While over a period of millennia it stretched out or shifted its enormous cold body only a centimeter at a time, it gradually was polishing the rocky surface beneath until it was round and smooth. during warmer years, decades and centuries, the water on the surface of the block of ice melted a little, and it places where the sand beneath the ice was easy to wash away, the water slipped beneath the huge, heavy ice body. And so at the every spot where this rocky elevation had hindered the ice’s forward motion, the ice slid beneath itself in the form of water and thus began to retreat, flowing downhill. In colder years the ice was simply there, it lay where it was, a heavy weight. And where in warmer years it had carved channels in the ground as it melted, during the colder years, decades and centuries it pressed its ice into these channels with all is force to seal them up again.
*
When approximately eighteen thousand years ago the glacier’s tongues began to melt—soon followed, as the earth continued to grow warmer, bu all its southernmost limbs—it left only a few deposits behind in the depths of their channels, islands of ice, orphaned ice; later they were called dead ice.
Cut off from the body it had once belonged to and trapped in these channels, this ice melted only much later. Approximately thirteen thousand years before the start of the Common Era, it turned back into water, seeped into the earth, evaporated in the air and then rained back down again, circulating in the form of water between heaven and earth. When it could not penetrate any deeper because the ground was already saturated, it collected on top of the blue clay and rose up, its surface cutting through the dark earth, and now it became visible again within its channel as a clear lake. The sand that the water itself had ground from teh rock when it was still ice now slid into this lake and sank to the bottom, and so at several points underwater mountains were formed, while in other spots the water remained as deep as the channel itself had originally been. For a time this lake would hold up its mirror to the sky amid the Brandenburg hills, it would lie smooth between the oaks, alders, and pines that were growing once more, and much later, after human beings appeared, it was given a name by them: Mårkisches Meer, the Sea of the Mark Brandenburg but one day it would vanish again, since, like every lake, it too was only temporary—like every hollow shape, this channel existed only to be filled in completely some day. Even in the Sahara there was water once. Only in modern times did something come about there that is described in the language as desertification.
Visitation/ Jenny Erpenbeck
swim: 3 loops lake nokomis open swim 75 degrees / drizzle
A great swim! Now I’m cold and tired and hungry!
10 Things
more ghost vines glowing below
one menacing white swan
the water below was a deep green with some blue
the water near the shore was still clear enough to see the sandy bottom
the sky was pale — no sun, except for a few times when it almost broke through
it’s the free night for open swim so more bobbing buoys — yellow was the most popular color
breathed mostly every five
tangled in a few vines, one leaf didn’t want to go away
stopped once or twice in the middle of the lake — calm, quiet — I should stop more
some little speck got in my eye at the beginning of the swim — I should have stopped to fix my goggles, but I just kept swimming, now it’s still stuck in there
Feeling a little off since yesterday afternoon — the slightest sore throat, a little stuffy, tired. Can’t decide if it’s allergies from swimming in the lake or something else (tested, not COVID). Future Sara, let me know.
This first July run was the same as most of my June runs: difficult, but worth it. The first half was fine, the second half hard. Sore legs, hard to keep going. I think a lot of it is mental, but I’m not sure how to fix it. For now, more swimming, shorter runs.
One thing that helped in the first half was reciting two poems: Still Life with Window and Fish / Jorie Graham and The Social Life of Water / Tony Hoagland. It was a good distraction. I think it might help if I figured out a task or project or activity before each run. That has helped me in the past.
10 Things
greeted the Welcoming Oaks — good morning! good morning!
admired the green view down to the floodplain forest — deep green, scraggly excess
noticed the purple flowers lining the trail
heard the rowers below — not yet on the river, but down below near the boathouse, laughing
encountered a long line of unevenly spaced kids in yellow vests on bikes — lots of stragglers near the back
not a single view of the river that I remember
heading north: wind pushing from behind, heading south: in my face, cooling me off
one bug almost landing in my eye
several stones stacked on the ancient boulder — was it 4 again?
the outline of an orange cat spray-painted on the sidewalk — even though it probably doesn’t look like Garfield, every time I see it I think, Garfield
Why was the cat named Garfield? The other day, when Scott and I were walking, I thought I heard a woman call out to their dog, Neil! Come here Neil! And I thought that that would be an awesome name for a dog, but not as awesome as Bob Barker. Update: In mid-July, running by this orange spray-painted figure, I realized that it looks more like a turkey with feathers than a cat. Of course, I still haven’t stopped to study it more carefully; I only see what my diseased eyes can see as I run by. I should probably stop to check, but I doubt I will.
Alice Oswald and color vision
I’m fascinated by something that I read in Alice Oswald’s interview with Kit Fan:
and this may again be an effect of thinking about the project with an artist, I was just thinking an awful lot about light and vision and the way … well, light as an insect, really, which is not just Homer, it’s also Dante. I always loved this part of Dante where he talks about the spiriti visivi, I think they’re called. And this idea that when you look at things, what’s happening is these kind of, you know, these creatures are sort of moving out from your eye to the world and moving from the world back into your eye. I was trying to sort of slow down my senses while I wrote this poem and imagine even a sort of passage between myself and the world was a creature, living creature of some kind
And here are 2 places where that idea shows up in Nobody:
from Nobody/ Alice Oswald
page19
There are said to be microscopic insects in the eye who speak Greek and these invisible ambassadors of vision never see themselves but fly at flat surfaces and back again with pigment caught in their shivering hair-like receptors and this is how the weather gets taken to and fro and the waves pass each other from one color to the next and sometimes mist a kind of stupefied rain slumps over the water like a teenager and sometimes the sun returns whose gold death mask with its metallic stare seems to be
blinking
page 30
When trees take over an island and say so all at once some in pigeon some in pollen with a coniferous hiss and run to the shore shouting for more light and the sun drops its soft coverlet over their heads and owls and hawks and long-beaked sea-crows flash to and fro like spirits of sight whose work is on the water where the massless mind undulates the intervening air shading it blue and thinking
I wish I was there
or there
I was planning to think about these lines as I swam at the cedar lake open swim, but when we got there it was too windy. No buoys, no lifeguards. People were still swimming, and I might have too, if I didn’t feel so tired and — not stuffed up, but congested in some way, like I’d swallowed too much lake water at the last swim. So many waves, almost 30 mph wind gusts.
A beautiful morning for a birthday run! Green shade, breeze. The run wasn’t easy, but it was wonderful to be outside with everyone else — bikers, runners. walkers, roller skiers, rowers, birds, river, rocks, trees, wind, glittering leaves, stacked stones.
For a little while, I chanted Emily Dickinson:
life is but life death is but death bliss is but bliss breath is but breath
Today I am 50. I’ve decided that I will recite the 50 poems I’ve memorized gradually — possibly spread out over a week or a month — to Scott. Maybe a few to the kids too. No formal thing. How long would it take, I wonder, to recite all 50 poems at one time? Too long!
So far, I’ve recited Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms” and Mary Oliver’s “Swimming, One Day in August”
Other fun birthday things: celebrated at the amazing Millie’s Wine Bar last night with Scott, FWA, and RJP. Walked to the library and picked up Mz N. Had a pint of Bee Sting at Arbeiter. Watching the first stage of Le Tour tonight! Tomorrow, open swim. A wonderful birthday!
5 miles bottom of franklin hill and back 69 degrees
Another run that started easy then got hard. My left hip and knee were stiff and sore. Walked several times on the way back.
Listened to feet shuffling on the grit, some keys jangling in a bucket. Smelled something floral and sweet near the franklin bridge. Felt a cool breeze on my warm face, sweat dripping off of my pony tail. Saw blue, red, and orange graffiti under the lake street bridge and a man helping a dog get through a hole in the chain link fence halfway down the franklin hill.
Ran by a break in the trees with an inviting dirt trail and thought again about how I love seeing these trails and wondering where they lead. Then I thought about how I prefer trails that have already been made by others — an invitation from past feet to explore and to step off the paved path.
Saw this poem online this morning and was surprised that I hadn’t already posted it:
may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that
swim: 3 loops 72 degrees light rain
I like swimming in the rain — when it’s a light rain. Have I ever swam in a hard rain? I’m not sure. When you are already wet, it’s difficult to tell what’s rain and what’s lake. Another great swim. I’m struggling in my runs, but loving the water.
10 things
a steady rain that I couldn’t feel or see as I swam
water, a darker green with some blue
tangled in several thin, loose vines — one on my head, another my shoulders, and another on my legs — most were just slimy, but one was sharp and scratchy
pale vines stretching up from the deepest parts of the lake — how tall are these vines this year? they glowed like the moon behind the clouds
particles in the water, almost looking like glitter — or, was that raindrops breaking the surface?*
mostly breathing every five — a few sixes, some threes, at least one two
pink orange yellow safety buoys tethered to swimmers
rounding the second green buoy, sighting the first orange buoy — so far off and lonely — just it and water — and only appearing in my vision when it wanted to
some sort of disturbance below me — was it a big fish? — nothing seen, only felt, the water moving beneath me
standing up near the beach after I finished, noticing the rain, then hearing some kids in the water excitedly yelling, It’s raining!
*It wasn’t until I wrote this out that I realized I was noticing the rain. It was very cool. The rain drop glitter made the water feel more alive, active — stirred up and swirling
I was surprised by how many people were at the beach. It had been raining all afternoon. People were still having picnics, kids were still in the water, several dozen swimmers were out on the course
Another hot and humid morning. Another difficult run. Is it strange that I don’t mind that it’s hard? Some shade, lots of sun.
10 Things
squish! stepping down in thick, gooey mud on the winchell trail
thwack thwack thwack a runner approaching from behind
pardon me that same runner letting me know he was passing
running down to the south entrance of the winchell trail, looking at the river through the trees — not sparkling in the sun, but flat and brown — somehow this made it look even hotter and less refreshing
rowers down below, heard not seen
the sewer at 42nd, a steady stream of water falling
the sewer at 44th, more of a dribble
honking geese
4 stones stacked on the ancient boulder
a squirrel ahead of me on the winchell trail — running then stopping then running, finally jumping through the fence and off the trail — was it waiting to dart out right in front of me? no
Alice Oswald and Lorine Niedecker and water’s depths
from Paean to Place/Lorine Niedecker
How much less am I in the dark than they?
Effort lay in us before religons at pond bottom all things move toward the light
Except those that freely work down to ocean’s black depths in us an impulse tests the unknown
from Nobody/ Alice Oswald
The sea she said and who could ever drain it dry has so much purple in its caves the wind at dusk incriminates the waves and certain fish conceal it in their shells at ear-pressure depth where the shimmer of headache dwells and the brain goes
dark
purple
from “Interview with Water”/ Alice Oswald
To be purpled is to lose one’s way or name, to be nothing, to grieve without surfacing, to suffer the effects of sea light, to be either sleepless or weightless and cut off by dreams.
swim: 4 loops lake nokomis open swim 82 degrees
4 loops! A beautiful summer night! The water was a bit choppy but it didn’t bother me. Saw some silver flashes below — fish? Also, beautiful shafts of light illuminating the particles swimming with me and a few ghostly vines reaching up from the bottom. In certain stretches it felt like the water wanted to pull me down to the lake floor — difficult to kick and keep high near the surface.
New breathing/sighting pattern I noticed last night at cedar: 1 2 3 breathe right 1 2 look up to sight (no breath) 3 4 5 breathe left
above the surface: A few times I paused in the middle of the lake to give attention to the surface. Once I saw a dragonfly. Another time, a plane. The water was blue but not as intense as on Sunday.
below the surface: bubbles, my hands, could feel the movement before I saw any swimmers, then bubbles and pale legs kicking. The water was green but with less blue and more yellow.
3.15 miles river road south/north 67 degrees 93% humidity / dew point: 65
Very tough on the legs! That dew point — ugh! Another difficult run. Still glad I did it. I heard some chattering birds and water gushing out of the sewer pipe near 42nd. Ran over puddles, slippery leaves, mud, recently re-tarred asphalt, dirt, roots. I remember looking at the river through the trees but I don’t remember what it looked like — probably a very pale blue or white, like the sky.
Inspired by all of my time with Alice Oswald lately, I’m thinking of starting Nobody again this afternoon. Listening to an interview she did with Kit Fan, back in 2020, I’m intrigued by what she said about her approach to writing it:
[The poem] sets out really to drown the reader. I wanted it not to feel like a sort of intellectual exercise where you would emerge kind of clarified and simplified, but literally to be as if you were inhaling water. … I find the people who I think get most out of it are those who don’t expect it to be conveying a thought, but expect it to be more like the experience of being outdoors, where you simply are assaulted by all kinds of different tunes and beings.
Well, I always feel that the Odyssey is a very bright emerald green because it has this incredible sort of vegetative life in it. It’s like a plant that just cannot stop growing. You know, the sentences grow all over the place. So, even though it’s a poem about the sea, I actually feel that kind of bright green of spring leaves in it. But I mean, I did kind of quite terrifying things to my mind when I was writing this poem, because I got quite interested in theories of color and sort of trying to watch what my mind was doing, particularly looking at colors in water and how your mind will tell you that’s green because you know it’s a leaf, but actually when you look at it, it’s not because it’s in a black river. And so, just trying to notice what the mind does and try, as I’m always trying, to get away from my own mind and out into the world. I was trying to see what colors are beyond my mind. And I think they probably don’t exist beyond the mind. So, it was actually an experience of almost unsettling all my perceptions really.
And being stuck, and going nowhere — is this similar to my looping!?
So these stories don’t get anywhere. They’re all stuck. And I like sort of, you know, Celtic patterns that just go on and on doing the same thing. So I didn’t want to make a poem that got anywhere, really. I wanted a poem that was stuck, whose stories couldn’t quite move forward, that had simply been tossed about by the weather, really.
later (5 pm): At the risk of making this entry too long, I’d like to add a few thoughts/notes after reading part of AO’s Nobody again, having read it before in 2022. It was very helpful to listen to AO’s lecture, “Interview with Water” and listen to/read the transcript of her interview with Kit Fan.
Before the poem begins, AO describes the similar (using similar like she does in “Interview with Water” — not the same, but resembling but varied, like water by currents) stories of Agamemnon, whose wife was not faithful and Odysseus, whose wife was.
This poem lives in the murkiness between those stories. Its voice is wind-blown, water-damaged, as if someone set out to sing the Odyssey, but was rowed to a stony island and never discovered the poem’s ending.
Nobody/ Alice Oswald
It helped me to read that beside AO’s words in her interview with Kit Fan:
. . .the poem is very much a kind of strange reading of the Odyssey. The Odyssey I see is a beautifully patterned wedding hymn about Odysseus’s marriage to Penelope and how they are driven apart by the Trojan War, and then they come back together. But embedded in that story, you’ve got the opposite story, which is the wedding of Agamemnon who goes off to the same war and comes back and is murdered by his wife whose taken another. And it’s that reverse Odyssey that I was writing in this poem, partly because the poet who is abandoned on the island is part of Agamemnon’s household. So, from his point of view, the Odyssey is being seen differently, from that other, much darker story.
Her use of darker here, reminds me of something she said in “Interview with Water”: “when you look at water, it allows you to exist twice but more darkly.”
4.15 miles the monument and back 67 degrees humidity: 91% / dew point: 65
Yuck! The air is so thick, everything heavy with moisture. We were supposed to have thunderstorms this morning — 90% chance — so I ruled out open swim, but they haven’t happened yet. Bummer. I bet it would have been a good swim.
I ran through the neighborhood, over the lake street bridge, up the summit hill and to the monument. Then I turned around and ran back, this time running south on the river road path instead of through the neighborhood.
10 Things
3 stones stacked on the ancient boulder
a strange whimpering, soft howling or moaning sound coming from under the bridge on the east side — a non-human animal? a bird?
no rowers on the river
a foul, rotting smell as I ran over the bridge — I thought of the rot* that Alice Oswald mentioned in “Interview with Water” and the scarlet rot that FWA told me about yesterday when he recounted some “Elden Ring lore”
a dark, deep green everywhere
flowers alongside the trail on the east side: green leaves, fanned like ferns, pale white or purple flowers, small, dotting the green
new (or newly noticed) graffiti under the bridge on the east side — brick red, I think
the dark reflections of tree in the water near the shore — so dark that they look like shadows to me
the faintest trace of a sandbar under the bridge
the usual puddles near shadow falls are back, almost covering the entire path
*AO and rot: “anything excessive or out of focus or subliminal — for example: a swimmer seen from underneath, a rotting smell. . .”
Here’s another Alice Oswald water poem that I uncovered in a dissertation about Oswald, Jorie Graham, and water!
Green, grey and yellow, the sea and the weather instantiate each other and the spectrum turns in it like a perishable creature. The sea is old but the blue sea is sudden.
The wind japans the surface. Like a flower, each point of contact biggens and is gone. And when it rains the senses fold in four. No sky, no sea – the whiteness is all one.
So I have made a little moon-like hole with a thumbnail and through a blade of grass I watch the weather make the sea my soul, which is a space performed on by a space;
and when it rains, the very integer and shape of water disappears in water.
Almost forgot: japan is a new word for me. Here are some definitions, both noun and verb:
noun:
any of several varnishes yielding a hard brilliant finish
a hard dark coating containing asphalt and a drier that is used especially on metal and fixed by heating — called also japan black
Overcast this morning. Cool, but humid, sticky. Another run that wasn’t easy or effortless. Keep showing up. It will get easier or you’ll get better or it will (eventually) get cooler. I’m not too worried. Is it the lexapro, or am I just satisfied being able to get outside and move by the gorge?
10 Things
the crater with the tube sock/Florida outline is gone, filled in yesterday
a gnat flew in my eye — a fullness, than a small sharpness, then a watery eye, finally gone!
a motorized scooter on the bike path — hey, you’re supposed to be on the road! (thought, not said)
today’s color palette; green and gray
dark mud, not gooey but slick
laughing kids on a playground
the surreys, all lined up at the falls, one being readied for a family as I ran by
rushing falls, roaring creek, gushing sewer pipe near 42nd
some loud rustling in the bushes
passing a walker, a whiff of subdued perfume — fresh, floral / passing a biker, a sniff of cologne — fresh, earthy
At some point, looking up at the green trees, remembering green water, I thought about Alice Oswald and the connection between water and grief. Then I recalled Tony Hoagland’s poem about swimming and cancer and thought about water and relief.
a few hours later: It’s raining — a soft, light rain — right now (2:30 pm). I’m hoping that open swim will still happen at 5:30. Tomorrow it probably won’t: thunderstorms all day. Anyway, I’m continuing to listen to and think about Alice Oswald’s “Interview with Water.” Very cool! Here’s the next little bit:
Find yourself in the silence underneath an overhanging wave that or thereabouts is the color of a bluish violet ultramarine gown so the great poet sang, “But Odysseus taking his bluish gown in his big hands drew it over his head and hid his face ashamed to let the Phaeacians see his tears.” The gown goes over the head like a wave, the human sits under its sea color with salt water pouring from his eyes. It is one of those places where the form of the poem hurries us forward, the form of the language pulls us back. Porfurion is a word with water inside it like a bucket down in the middle of a line. Already if you look hard at the word you can see the widow’s simile underneath it but Homer is not yet ready to make that gift. With magnificent theatricality, he draws a blue gown across the mind and we, like the Phaeacians, are left looking at it, waiting.
Homer is the foremost poet of the visible. Homer delights in surfaces, but the surface of water is complicated by transparency, and its transparency is complicated by refraction. Water is never the same as itself. Rivers can only exist as similarities, lakes reflect more than their own volume, and what’s more, when you look at water, it allows you to exist twice but more darkly. When you look at it again it evaporates as if moving in and out of existence — it simply requires a bit of sunlight then it reappears as frost. Perfectly symmetrical as if discovering pre-drawn diagrams in thin air. Then it reappears as tears so that any attempt to describe the surface of water tells you to hide your face and inspect your innermost thoughts. All these waverings are part of the word porfurion. The physics or nature of water is metaphysical meaning that its surface expresses more than itself.
Interview with Water
All of AO’s mention of surfaces makes me want to think about surfaces during my swim. I swim on the surface, wanting to stay with my head just below as long as possible. What does the surface look like or feel like when I’m breathing every five (or more) strokes? What if I tried every 2 or 3? What is the color of the surface — from above or below?
swim: 2 loops lake nokomis open swim 68 degrees
Wow, what a perfect swimming night! The water was warmer than the air temperature. The sky was white and heavy. Everything calm, quiet. I felt fast and strong cutting through the water, breathing every 5 strokes with the occasional 3, at least once, after 2. I tried to give attention to the surface. Just under the water, I watched my hands stretch out in front of me, covered in bubbles. The water was a beautiful deep (but not dark) green, with the feeling of deep blue and gray. I could see the sediment swirling. Above the water, the surface was silver, still.
A quick run before meeting my college friends for lunch. Cooler today. Heard the rowers. Spotted: at least 2 bright yellow shirts, one bright pink. City (or county or park?) workers were out re-tarring a few more spots on the trail. Hooray for less craters! Last week, they finally filled in the big crack that had white spray-paint around it, making it look like a tube sock or Florida (I’ve written about it before). I wonder if they’ll finally fill in the hole that’s been getting deeper every year? The one that would definitely twist your ankle if you stepped in it. I hope so.
I don’t remember hearing any birds or roller skiers or laughing kids, but I do remember the squishy mud on the winchell trail and the bug bite I got as I walked home.
color in/on/under water
Listening to Alice Oswald’s lecture, Interview with Water, I came across this great passage about color. First she’s mentions that poets performing The Odyssey always wore blue robes, then she mentions a line from book 8:
Odysseus with his strong hands picked up his heavy cloak of purple, and he covered up his face. He was ashamed to let them see him cry. Eachtime the singer paused, Odysseus wiped tears, drew down the cloak (8:84-89)
Then she references something she said a few minutes earlier —
I keep a bucket of rainwater under my window and it delights me that green leaves reflected in a black bucket are not quite green. I don’t know what color they are. At certain moments, early in the day, they might be called pre-green, but then the clouds change or the wind moves the surface mark and all at once they seem bright dark and blind silvery then foggy emerald.
— and says this:
To go back to that bucket of water — to wave a blue gown above it and ask, What is that color which Homer calls porfurium? It is not blue exactly; it gets translated as purple but purple is a settled color whereas Homer’s word is agitated. It derives from the sea verb porfurion which means to roll without breaking, so it is already a fluid word, a heaped up word, a word with underswell, not a pigment but an emanation from the nature of water. To get a true sense of porphyrion you need to see the sea in it and for Homer the sea is unhuman full of strange creatures missed colored unplowable and this is my favorite word it is a peritone meaning unfenced. If you want to imagine the colour of Odysseus’ gown you will have to swim out into the unfenced place, the place not of definitions but of affirmations. Yes I’m afraid you will have to find your way to the p volume of Johnson’s unwritten dictionary. There you will discover a dark light word an adjective for edgelessness — a sea word used also of death smoke cloth mist blood between bluish purple and cobalt mauve. It appears mid-ocean when the wind perhaps makes a network of backblowing glitters that the underswell moves sideways as when a big sea swells with noiseless waves. It is used of the heart meaning his heart was a heaving not quite broken wave. It indicates a surface but suggests a depth a mutation of flatness or noiseless sheen, a sea creature, a quality of caves, any inlet or iodine or shaded stone, a type of algae or rockfish, anything excessive or out of focus or subliminal — for example: a swimmer seen from underneath, a rotting smell, a list of low sounds, an evening shadow or sea god, a whole catalogue of simmering grudges storms waves and solitudes or deep water including everyone who has drowned in it. To be purpled is to lose one’s way or name, to be nothing, to grieve without surfacing, to suffer the effects of sea light. to be either sleepless or weightless and cut off by dreams — find yourself in the silence underneath an overhanging way that or thereabouts is the color of a bluish violet ultramarine gown so the great poet sang.
Wow! So many wonderful things to do with this passage! For now, I want to think about how color works underwater. In an hour, I’m heading over to deep (at least, deeper than Lake Nokomis) Cedar Lake to swim across it. How will color work as I swim? Below water? Above? Is this agitated, moving purple similar to how I see all the time? (Yes, I think.)
swim: 4 cedar loops (= 2 nokomis loops) cedar lake 72 degrees
The first swim at Cedar Lake! As I’ve mentioned here before, Cedar has a very different vibe than Nokomis. Hidden away, at the end of a gravel road. A small beach. No buildings, the only bathroom a port-a-potty. Chill lifeguards. Today the water was cold but (mostly) calm. Not too many swimmers. 2 lifeguards on kayaks, 2 orange buoys, too much vegetation growing up from the bottom of the lake. I overheard another swimmer mentioning the vines too.
color: Inspired by Alice Oswald, I tried to think about the color of the water. Cloudy, not clear. I could see the vines and the bubbles from my breathing and my hands entering the water but not much else. Not purple or blue but green — not dark green but pale green. Maybe some pale blue — yes — and light gray. Occasionally a shaft of light from above, a dark vine below. Textured bubbles. Not much to see, but not nothing there. Instead, everything small, packed, too dense to decipher. No color and too many colors. Impossible to pin down with “green” or “gray” or “blue.” Not grief, but uncertainty.
3.1 miles trestle turn around 76 degrees / feels like 82 dew point: 71
Ugh! I knew it was going to be tough when I felt too hot even before I started running. More rain last night — enough to cancel our final community band concert — and more thick, sticky air this morning.
Greeted Mr. Morning! and Mr. Holiday. Saw Dave the Daily Walker but he was too far away to greet. Counted the stacked stones on the ancient boulder: 4. Heard some strange creaks below the trestle — what were people doing down there? Also heard the rowers on the river. Felt the sweat pooling on my face, my shorts sticking to my legs.
When the dew point temperature and air temperature are equal, the air is said to be saturated.
Looking through the trees somewhere near the trestle, I could see the river burning bright white — even the water looked hot!
Oh, this beautiful poem by Tony Hoagland! He died in 2018 (at the age of 64) from pancreatic cancer. My mom died from pancreatic cancer. It’s terrible. This poem was published in 2007.
Oh life, how I loved your cold spring mornings of putting my stuff in the green gym-bag and crossing wet grass to the southeast gate to push my crumpled dollar through the slot.
When I get my allotted case of cancer, let me swim ten more times at Barton Springs, in the outdoor pool at 6AM, in the cold water with the geezers and the jocks.
With my head bald from radiation and my chemotherapeutic weight loss I will be sleek as a cheetah —and I will not complain about life’s
pedestrian hypocrisies, I will not consider death a contractual violation. Let my cancer be the slow-growing kind so I will have all the time I need
to backstroke over the rocks and little fishes, looking upwards through my bronze-tinted goggles into the vaults and rafters of the oaks, as the crows exchange their morning gossip
in the pale mutations of early light. It was worth death to see you through these optic nerves, to feel breeze through the fur on my arms to be chilled and stirred in your mortal martini.
In documents elsewhere I have already recorded my complaints in some painstaking detail. Now, because all things are joyful near water, there just might be time to catch up on praise.
4 miles minnehaha falls and back 65 degrees / dew point: 61
Today’s word: saturated. What Lorine Niedecker aimed for in her water poetry. Not floating or dry but sinking and soaked.
Rain off and on all day. Maybe thunderstorms starting in the afternoon.
No rain as I ran, but everything was wet or dripping. Moist. My face, more moist than a sponge. The falls, gushing over the limestone then rushing down the gorge to the Mississippi.
Evidence of the rain and thunderstorms last night all along the trail. Above the oak savanna it looked like some creature had tore through the green, ripping small limbs and leaves off the trees and throwing them to the ground.
The parking lot at the falls was packed with cars. Not the best day to be at the falls — but maybe it was? A chance to witness the falls in full cry, I guess. Also a chance to get wet or slip in the mud. I thought I might, but didn’t.
Anything else? A black squirrel sighting, which reminded me of the line from “What Would Root”: scolded by squirrels in their priestly black
Discovered the poet, Maureen N. McLane this morning and was delighted by her serial poem about Mz. N. Requested the book from the library. Possibly an inspiration for some writing about Sara, age 8?
The child Mz N sat on her bed and wondered: that tree outside her window shifted when her eye shifted. What to make of that?
§
Mz N and her siblings had a dog for some time. They went on vacation & when they came back no dog. They asked the parents: the dog? who replied: what dog? And some people wonder why others distrust the obvious.
Speaking of the serial poem — LN’s “Paean to Place” is considered one — here’s a helpful definition:
The serial form in contemporary poetry, however, represents a radical alternative to the epic model. The series describes the complicated and often desultory manner in which one thing follows another. Its modular form–in which individual elements are both discontinuous and capable of recombination–distinguishes it from the thematic development or narrative progression that characterize other types of the long poem. The series resists a systematic or determinate ordering of its materials, preferring constant change and even accident, a protean shape and an aleatory method. The epic is capable of creating a world through the gravitational attraction that melds diverse materials into a unified whole. But the series describes an expanding and heterodox universe whose centrifugal force encourages dispersal. The epic goal has always been encompassment, summation; but the series is an ongoing process of accumulation. In contrast to the epic demand for completion, the series remains essentially and deliberately incomplete.
I had to look up a few words from this excerpt that I wasn’t quite sure of:
desultory: marked by lack of definite plan/purpose, not connected to main subject protean:displaying great diversity or variety, versitle aleatory: relating to luck, depending on an uncertain event or contingency
This idea of a serial poem as “an ongoing process of accumulation” is very cool and fits with my approach to Haunts and a story in long form.
5 miles bottom franklin hill and back 72 degrees / dew point: 60
Whew! I was sure the dew point would be even higher. It felt very uncomfortable out there. And difficult. But I kept moving and didn’t push myself too hard. I ran to the bottom of the hill then walked up it. Then ran, walked, ran until I was back to the ancient boulder — no stones stacked on it today.
Last night RJP graduated from high school. I’m very proud of her for surviving it. I’m proud of myself too. It was very hard and I am tired. No more k-12 public school! Hooray! I loved many of the teachers and the music programs, but I won’t miss being subject to this schooling process.
RJP’s graduation was delayed by almost an hour because a fight broke out at the previous school’s graduation and someone was hauled away in an ambulance. FWA said he saw the guy, and he looked like he was probably fine and not in much pain. Other than the delay, the graduation was great. The awesome poet Bao Phi gave the address — so good! He, along with the student speakers, centered the experiences of BIPOC students.
10 Things
white sky
dark green mystery
at least 2 specks in the sky — a plane? a bird?
click clack — roller skiers powering up the franklin hill
foamy water
glowing orange shoes on a runner
voices below near white sands beach
one runner to another: well, that killed about an hour and a half — huh?
a greeting from Mr. Holiday!
a few days ago I mentioned something in orange spray painted on the sidewalk — it’s the outline of a cat (but not Garfield, I think?)
a section from Wintergreen Ridge/ Lorine Niedecker
Reading (again, for the 3rd or 4th time?) LN’s “Wintergreen Ridge,” I was delighted by her connections and associations:
Women saved a pretty thing: Truth:
“a good to the heart” It all comes down to the family
5 miles bottom of franklin hill and back 70 degrees / dew point: 60
Overcast, which helped it feel a little less warm. Sticky, thick air. A lot of sweat, especially on my face. Dripping ponytail. So green even the air was green. Greeted the Welcoming Oaks — hello friends! Descended into the tunnel of trees and was enveloped in green. Chanted triple trees: sycamore/sycamore/sycamore/red oak leaf/silver birch. Heard the rowers through the trees. Admired the barely moving, calm water under the bridge — the surface was dotted with foam and reflected clouds. Saw a speck in the sky out of the corner of my eye. Tried to look at it, gone. Tried again, a plane almost covered in fog. Saw a dark ring around it — my ring scotoma? Appreciated how the outline of the treetops on either side of the river road echoed the shape of the river banks. Walked up the hill — it took me 7 minutes — then ran, walked, ran back. Ended with a dozen roller skiers above me while I climbed out of the tunnel of trees.
For the first mile, in the dark green quiet, everything was dreamy. Thought again about how running puts me in a strange, surreal state. Nothing quite real. Then thought about Lorine Niedecker and the physical act of seeing with messed up eyes and using the poetic form to represent that. I’m not aware of how my eyes move as I see except for when I look to the peripheral as a way for my central vision to see something. I imagine having nystagmus makes you more easily register the movement of your eyes. How conscious was LN of her eye movement and how it was mimicked in her lines? When I think about how I see — the mechanics of it and its physicality — I think more about what happens when the corrupt or limited data travels as electrical impulses through the optic nerve and to the brain. Are the effects of nystagmus primarily physical — strain on eyes, the rapid movement creating dizziness and headaches? I should read more about it. . . . The physical impact of my vision sometimes reads as dizziness and light-headedness, but mostly it’s just a vague sense of unease and fatigue — more naps. I rarely feel the eye strain or get headaches from my effort.
In the article I was reading about LN’s nystagmatic poetics, this poem was discussed:
Tattoo/ Wallace Stevens
The light is like a spider.
It crawls over the water.
It crawls over the edges of the snow.
It crawls under your eyelids
And spreads its webs there—
Its two webs.
The webs of your eyes
Are fastened
To the flesh and bones of you
As to rafters or grass.
There are filaments of your eyes
On the surface of the water
And in the edges of the snow.
note at 11 am: Today is my first day of open swim! After the swim, I’ll return to this entry.
I’m spending the afternoon on the deck, reading Niedecker and thinking about Alice Oswald and Niedecker and my Haunts poems. Here are some jumbled thoughts:
You have been in my mind/between my toes/agate — Lake Superior/LN
You’ve been in my mind
beneath my feet Mom
Look for me under your boot-soles — Walt Whitman
Ars Poetica/ Arcelis Girmay
May the poems be the little snail’s trail.
Everywhere I go, every inch: quiet record
of the foot’s silver prayer. I lived once. Thank you. I was here.
“We a lovely/finite parentage/mineral/vegetable/animal” — Wintergreen/ LN
I’m interested in how many layers you can excavate in personality. At the top it’s all quite named. But you go down through the animal and the vegetable and then you get to the mineral. At that level of concentration you can respond to the non-human by half turning into it.
We can’t float or fly for long, above. We are part of the muck, not stuck but entangled, beholden
to work down/ to ocean’s black depths/us us an impulse tests/the unknown — Paean to Place/ LN
2 loops / 1.5 miles lake nokomis open swim 80 degrees
Open swim! Open swim! I was nervous before the swim, wondering if I would see the buoys. I did! The water felt wonderful — a little cold, but not too cold, and wavy but not choppy. I watched the sun filtering through the water, avoided the vegetation growing up from the bottom and the swan boat stuck right by the orange buoy. That menacing swan was a little too close as I neared the buoy. The last green buoy was so far from the orange buoy — it seemed to take forever to reach the beginning of the loop. Oh, I love open swim and what joy to have had a good first swim!
Still struggling with endurance, still showing up. How much of this is mental, how much physical? The sixty-four thousand dollar question, as my dad used to say. I think it’s both, but probably more mental. Maybe the lexapro is already kicking in, but my struggles aren’t bothering me. After the run I thought, these struggles will make showing up at the marathon start line, then finishing 4-5 hours later, much more meaningful.
It rained this morning, so everything was wet, even the air. Everything was also green. Green green green. Any other colors? Nope, not much to break up the green. Green green green green green.
10 Things
lush green, dark, on the part of the path that goes below the road
puddles
a woman ahead of me, running, wearing only one compression sleeve on her right calf
a group of kids walking to the playground at minnehaha
a much bigger group of kids walking near 42nd — a long line, 3 across, took me 10 or 15 or more? seconds to pass them
gushing water near the ravine by the oak savanna
the bright yellow crosswalk sign — my bee — was muted in the gray sky
crossing the bridge high above the creek, all green, no view of the water below
lush green, dark, on the steep hill descending to the locks and dam no 1
a pile of e-bikes parked near a bench — black with blue accents
paean to place/ lorine niedecker
Before my run, I started writing out, by hand, Niedecker’s poem. It’s so long! My hand started cramping up. I had to write slowly to account for my visual errors, like not seeing the words I’ve already written and writing words almost over them or above them instead of below them. The slow work is good, giving me time with each word and line.
Ah, summer mornings! Beautiful. Cooler. If I would have slept better, I would have tried to go out even earlier. The first half of the run felt good, then I got hot and it got harder. Today I didn’t worry about what that meant for my training. Instead, I enjoyed the brief minutes of walking, taking in the trees at the falls — so green! so full!
10 Things
the falls, flowing, white, undulating — the water not falling straight, but almost falling over itself — was it hitting some limestone on the way down?
a bundle of something on the ground next to the dirt trail — a hammock?
2 women with tall hiking packs on their backs walking on the paved path
some animal — a turkey? — upset, calling out, a human voice saying something — hey?
a flash below the double bridge — a sliver of creek almost covered by green
2 roller skiers near locks and dam no 1
the dirt trail cutting through the small wood near ford bridge looking cool and inviting
happy kids on the minnehaha park playground — happy: green voices, where green = young, outside, tender
(walking back, about to cross 46th ave at 37th street) 2 older women chatting, then greeting me, oh! hello!
(walking back almost to my alley) heard on a radio or from a phone or a computer in neighbor’s backyard, the next one is Scandia — was this talk radio or a zoom meeting or what?
Lorine Niedecker and “Paean to Place”
to dwell with a place:
What is required, however, is sensual, embodied experience—close encounters of awe, wonder, fright, disgust, or even tedium—which remind us both of the real earth with which we dwell, and that we share our home with innumerable cohabitants.
in the leaves and on water My mother and I born in swale and swamp and sworn to water
My father thru marsh fog sculled down from high ground saw her face
at the organ bore the weight of lake water and the cold— he seined for carp to be sold that their daughter
might go high on land to learn
Wow! Reading this opening, I’m thinking about the Objectivists and the Imagists and Ezra Pound’s 3 rules for writing poetry:
Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective
To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation
As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome
What condensery and music in these lines! And what wonderfully effective descriptions of two people dwelling in and with a particular place, especially her mother, born in swale and swamp and bearing the weight of lake water and the cold.
definition of ecopoetics:
The word itself is an amalgam of two Greek words: oikos [household or family] and poïesis [making, creating, or producing], so that ecopoeticsquite literally means the creation of a dwelling place, or home-making. The term came into special prominence after the influential British literary critic Jonathan Bate published The Song of the Earth in 2000. There, Bate defined ecopoetics as a critical practice in which the central tasks are to ask “in what respects a poem may be a making … of the dwelling-place” and to “think about what it might mean to dwell upon the earth.”
LN’s opening lines and her descriptions of her parents, reminds me of Mary Oliver’s The Leaf and the Cloud and her brief mentions of her parents in the first section, “Flare.” LN and MO have different experiences but they rhyme, somehow, or echo?
My mother was the blue wisteria, my mother was the mossy stream out behind the house, my mother, alas, alas, did not always love her life, heavier than iron it was as she carried it in her arms, from room to room, oh, unforgettable!
Like LN, MO was also an amazing poet of place, but she doesn’t extend her ideas of place to her parents — a deliberate severing:
I mention them now, I will not mention them again.
It is not lack of love nor lack of sorrow. But the iron thing they carried, I will not carry.
So much to say about that iron, but I have run out of time right now. Perhaps more later. . .
I’m back. First, the not carrying the iron makes me think of my mom and her desire for displacement from her abusive parents. More than once she said to me that she wanted to break that cycle of abuse — and she did. And I am grateful. But there’s something to explore here for me and my relationship to place, this place 4 miles from where my mom was born and raised, that I can’t quite get at yet.
The iron also reminds me of the wonderful lines from the opening of LN’s “Lake Superior”:
In every part of every living thing is stuff that once was rock
In blood the minerals of the rock
*
Iron the common element of earth
Both MO and LN write about their fathers. First, MO:
My father was a demon of frustrated dreams, was a breaker of trusts, was a poor, thin boy with bad luck. He followed God, there being no one else he could talk to; he swaggered before God, there being no one else who would listen.
and LN:
He could not —like water bugs— stride surface tension He netted loneliness. . .
. . . Anchored here in the rise and sink of life— middle years’ nights he sat
beside his shoes rocking his chair Roped not “looped in the loop of her hair”
The “looped” quote comes from William Butler Yeats and his poem, Brown Penny and it’s about love. I like how she throws in this line from poets or about poets, like this:
Grew riding the river Books at home-pier Shelly would steer as he read
I noticed another line of the poem in quotes, “We live by the urgent wave/of the verse.” Looked it up and found an article about “Paean to Place” and thanks to my college-attending son, I have access to it! Time to read it: Lorine Niedecker’s “Paean to Place” and its Fusion Poetics
Warm and windy. Lots of sweat. Another day of telling myself to keep showing up. A hard run with lots of walking. But, one faster, freer mile, and some scattered thoughts that might lead to something! I’ll take it.
11 Things
under the lake street bridge, the side of the road was packed with parked cars — rowers?!
yes, rowers: heard the coxswain calling out instructions
briefly watched the rowers through a gap in the trestle: a head, an oar, a boat gliding by
ran into a branch while avoiding another runner, just a few inches from my eye, imagined a scenario in my head where the branch had cut my eye
in the tunnel of threes: a sea of swaying green
a woman stretching in the 35th street parking lot, blasting music out of her phone
wind pushing me from behind, making my ponytail swing to one side
a cartoonish figure spray-painted on the sidewalk: bright orange outline
loud rustling in the nearby brush then a hiker emerging from below
whoooosssshhh — the wind rushing through the trees
dragonflies? running near the trestle, an insect with a long, narrow body and wings almost flew into my mouth — no iridescent color, no color. Later, pausing at the top of the steps, I saw half a dozen of them. They opened and closed their wings in the sun
Yesterday, I decided that the theme of color or green wasn’t working for me this month. Instead, I’d like to return (again) to Lorine Niedecker. I’m particularly interested in her form of condensing and how I might apply it to my Haunts poems. Yes, the haunts poems are haunting me again. Before heading out for my run, I found a few lines from LN’s “Paean to Place,” that I especially like:
grew in green slide and slant of shore and shade
Child-time—wade thru weeds
Maples to swing from Pewee-glissando
sublime slime- song
A few times, I recited the first big: I grew in green/slide and slant/of shore and shade. As I thought about those lines I wondered what I grew up in. Green, for sure, but not by water. Then it came to me: I grew up on the edge of green in subdivisions that butted up against farms and woods, creeping, consuming those green spaces. I also grew up in carefully managed and cultivated green — bike paths through small stretches of trees offering the illusion of nature, privately owned by the subdivision. A very different green than the rural green of my dad’s farm in the UP or the urban green of my mom here by the Mississippi River. I thought about the managed green I run by and the difference between it, a public, national park, and the managed green of my suburban childhood, with its private green parks and private (No Trespassing!) acres of farm land, soon to be sold and converted into more “little boxes.”
Yes! The green I grew in was in-between col-de-sacs, and within small ravines and the slight stretches of trees or creeks developers left for aesthetic reasons. This green has deeply influenced my understanding of the wild and “green” spaces and is one reason why I’m fascinated by the management of nature.
Another beautiful morning. Felt drained by the sun, but still managed to push through a few moments when I wanted to stop. Walked a little. My mantra: keep showing up. It might not get easier but I’ll get better at handling it (it = heat and humidity and doubt and the desire to stop). Listened to my Color playlist for the second half, the birds for the first half. Sparrows and woodpeckers and cardinals. The falls and the creek were gushing. I read the other day that, after 2 years, Minnesota is no longer in a drought. Hooray for the farmers! And the flowers! And the trees!
Today, the green was cool, then scraggly. Sprawling, stretching, overstepping. Almost consuming the narrow dirt trail on the grassy boulevard between edmund and the river road.
something for future Sara to remember: On Tuesday, I went to open the lime green umbrella on our deck and noticed something dark in the corner. With my bad vision, I thought it was a leaf at first. Then I saw something that looked like wings — a bat. I dropped the umbrella cord and ran inside. A few minutes later, Scott cautiously opened the umbrella then freaked out when the bat flew out. He staggered back and rammed into the handle of the door — hard. Knocked the wind out of him. Since then, he’s been having intermittent back spasms, which he describes as “charley horses” in his back. I would be freaking out, but he’s handling it fairly well. The worst part: trying to sleep — too painful in the bed, and we don’t have a recliner. Maybe he cracked a rib, maybe it’s a strained muscled. Hopefully it heals soon.
What I remember is seeing the bat wings as it flew away, looking like a Scooby Doo cartoon. Since then, I’ve cautiously opened the umbrella — no bat! Every time I bird flies overhead, their shadow crossing my legs, I wonder — a bird or a bat?A thought: bats as fully fleshed shadows. What if the dark forms we think are shadows are actually bats? That’s both a creepy and delightful thought!
A quick run before taking FWA to buy his biggest purchase ever: an A clarinet. Not an easy run, but a sunny day with fresh air and clear trails. More cool, refreshing green coming from the floodplain forest. Everywhere, mundane, flat green. A green greeting: saying good morning to a runner with headphones on who didn’t me coming. A green sound: a bird’s clicking jaw somewhere below.
A green chant to keep me going:
Sycamore Cottonwood Slippery elm
Spoken in my head over and over. It helped me in the tougher moments when I wanted to stop and walk.
green
Even as green is my favorite color, I do not like when green takes over everything. Green = busy doing things, producing, connecting, crowds/crowded/crowding out.
4.2 miles longfellow garden and back 73 degrees / dew point: 75
Sticky again today, but not as bright. Still hard to run through the thick air. Struggled on the way back — walk run walk run. Trying to remember to keep showing up and believing that it will get easier, or I will get better at handling the difficult moments, or I will finally start getting up early. I tried to think about green.
my favorite green
Running south, just past the ford bridge, nearing the locks and dam no. 1, cool air was coming from the green to my right — a small wood. Refreshing! Often I associate late spring green with thick and stifling, but today it was fresh and generous, making it easier to breathe and to run.
After Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827), “George Washington at Princeton,” 1779
the color of life takes sun yellow and bluest blue sky and water for green ferns chartreuse buds beading above moss dappled shamrocks fragrant healing of sage, laurel, mint, basil, thyme, rosemary, myrtle amid the tall wonders of juniper pine, olive, pear even the meeting of sea and river— the sky, an intermingling of viridian and chetwode horizons, and cerulean clarity— offers its green seafoam, its seaweed pats, the crocodile at the edge of a freshwater marsh its teeth open gritted in green against the backdrop of hunter rainforest dripping in green
heaven is a field of persian green lit by translucent jade and celadon lamps a many-roomed chateau scented by aromatic tea leaves the aperitivo: gin, apple, and bitter lime the time: midnight green the guardian: a mantis in prayer
joy: harlequin, verdun, spring magic: kaitoke forest in its energetic whisper and pulse
green must exist inside brother james would he call it camouflage or nyanza or sap for washington it’s in the colors of flags the fields far off feldgrau or military or empire green or dollar bill or rifle green revolution with chains the result mix the green like a spell in making safe life hush arbor life nurturing abundant life free life bring the background to the fore ease ease ease life
So many greens! How many different greens can I see? Today, mostly, it was just green (or brown or gray).
Offering some advice on being judicious with your use of adjectives, Ted Kooser writes the following lines:
Morning Glories/ Ted Kooser
We share so much. When I write lattice, I count on you seeing the flimsy slats tacked into squares and painted white,
like a French door propped in a garden with a blue condensed from many skies pressed up against the panes. I count on
you knowing that remarkable blue, shaped into the fluted amplifying horns of Edison cylinder record players.
What? Come on, you know exactly what I’m talking about. I didn’t need to describe them like that, but I like to
however a little over my words, dabbling the end of my finger in the white throats of those __. You fill it in.
I could go on, but all I really needed to do was to give you the name in the title. I knew you’d put in the rest, maybe
the smell of a straw hat hot from the sun; that’s just a suggestion. You know exactly what else goes into a picture like this
to make it seem as if you saw it first, how a person can lean on the warm hoe handle of a poem, dreaming,
making a little more out of the world than was there just a moment before. I’m just the guy who gets it started.
Do I know that remarkable blue he’s writing about? Does he see the same blue that I do? Do we need to imagine the same blue to make his poem meaningful?
Reading “Making Life on a Palette” and “Morning Glories,” I’m thinking about the different work they ask of the reader, or, of this reader, me. “Palette” is filled with green words with histories that I don’t know; I had to do a lot of googling to dig into the poem. “Morning Glories” asks me to build an image from the name he offers, to draw upon the shared understanding/image of the flower that I already have.
Lately, I keep coming back to the question, how little data can we have and still “see” what something is? Not much, I think. Yet, to assume that we all see the same thing — the thing as it is — excludes a wide range of experiences and detail and ways of seeing. It leaves out a lot of different shades of green.
Speaking of green, I remembered that I had collected ideas about green in my plague notebook vol 3, June 2020:
13 years of running today. I had been planning to celebrate it with a long run, but even before I went outside I knew it wouldn’t happen. Mostly because it already felt too warm and too crowded (at 8:30 am). A rule I should remember to follow: no long runs on the weekends. Too many bikers and runners out on the trails. I also felt tired. During the first mile I chanted triple berries and tried to convince myself I could run 8 miles. By the time I reached Beckettwood, a mile in, I knew it wouldn’t happen. I ran down to the overlook and admired the river for a few minutes. Wow! A circle of white light in one spot, sparkles in another. I watched the light dance on the water through the trees and breathed.
The green and the sparkling water reminded me of a line in “Bein Green” by Kermit the Frog. Yesterday I started working on a color playlist and that was the first song I added:
It’s not easy bein’ green It seems you blend in With so many other ordinary things And people tend to pass you over ‘Cause you’re not standing out Like flashy sparkles in the water
This blending in and not being flashy makes me think of the line from Wallace Stevens that I posted yesterday:
It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
rhapsody: a portion of an epic poem adapted for recitation
When green is all there is to be It could make you wonder why But, why wonder? Why wonder? I’m green and it’ll do fine It’s beautiful, and I think it’s what I want to be
An epic poem about green as green as mundane, ordinary, everywhere? These days, green is especially ordinary for me. Often I can’t tell the difference between brown and green or gray and green or blue and green.
green
yesterday while waiting to pick up my lexapro at the pharmacy, I noticed an unusual green in the vitamin aisle. A whole section with white and green bottles. Branding. I asked Scott what color green he thought it was, but he didn’t have any answer. Somewhere between jungle green and olive green? I forgot to check what brand of vitamins was using this color. update 28 june 2024: a few days later, I was back at the pharmacy and I did check — Walgreen store brand
overheard on the winchell trail: (a woman describing her breakfast to her friends) and a shit ton of arugula
(from The Secret Lives of Colors) Scheele’s green: named after Swedish scientist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1773 when he discovered the compound, copper arsenite. Scheele’s green was used to print fabrics and wallpapers; to color artificial flowers, paper; and as an artist’s pigment. By 1863, it was all over England. Then people started dying and it was determined that copper arsensite was very poisonous — one 6 inch square sample of paper containing the compound could kill 2 men.
Mostly overcast, a few moments of sun, no shadows. Sticky, everything damp, difficult. I felt better during the run — distracted by the dew point and the marshall hill — but when I finished, I felt a heaviness: hormones. The NP agrees: perimenopause. The good news: I’m healthy, the new NP I went to is awesome, I don’t feel anxious, I have an order in for an SSRI (lexapro). The bad news: I feel bummed out (depression doesn’t quite fit, I think), there’s some problem with insurance so they can’t fill the prescription so I have no idea when I can actually start taking the medication. But it’s June, I have several cool books to dig into, and I just got a hug from my daughter so I’ll be okay.
intellect mystery history remember remember remember
Then played with remember:
remember try to re
member try to remem
ber try to remember
Then I decided to chant some of my favorite lines from Emily Dickinson:
Life is but Life and Death but Death Bliss is but bliss and Breath but Breath
Life is but life is but life is but life Death is but death is but death is but death Bliss is but bliss is but bliss is but bliss Breath is but breath is but breath is but breath
Life life life life Death death death death Bliss bliss bliss bliss Breath breath breath breath
something important to remember: Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 counts of falsifying business records. He is now a felon and will be sentenced on July 11th. He can still run for office, but most likely won’t be able to vote (for) himself.
I’d like to focus on color this summer: June, July, and August. I’m not sure how I’ll do it, yet. Will I break it down my color? Possibly. Yesterday I picked up 2 color books that I had checked out 4 or 5 years ago. I’m anticipating that I’ll find them more useful now: The Secret Lives of Color and Chroma.
I also checked out Diane Seuss’ latest, Modern Poetry. Here’s one of her poems with some color in it:
Legacy/ Diane Seuss
I think of the old pipes, how everything white in my house is rust-stained, and the gray-snouted raccoon who insists on using my attic as his pee pad, and certain sadnesses losing their edges, their sheen, their fur chalk-colored, look at that mound of laundry, that pile of pelts peeled away from the animal, and poems, skinned free of poets, like the favorite shoes of that dead girl now wandering the streets with someone else’s feet in them.
At the beginning of the book, Diane Seuss offers a quote from Wallace Steven’s poem, Man with Blue Guitar, which I first learned of while reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. It is a long poem, so I won’t include all of it, just the part that Seuss quotes, with a few lines before that too:
4.5 miles bottom franklin hill and back 65 degrees
Windy but sunny. Ran faster than I should have and it wiped me out. Made it to the bottom of the hill — I had to bargain with my shadow to keep going — then paused to notice the river. It was moving a little, some white foam, the water a mix of brown and purple and blue. No rowers or birds or paddle boats.
Listened to the wind shaking the leaves and some cheering somewhere running north. Put in “Billie Eilish Essentials” on the way back south. Picked up the pace for the third mile, especially when “Bad Guy” came on.
Greeted Dave the Daily Walker —
Good morning Dave! Hi Sara, how are you? I’m great! How are you? I’m good, thanks for asking!
I don’t know how many times we have had this almost exact exchange over the years, but it’s a lot. As I’ve written before, these words aren’t empty but part of the ritual of being outside, moving, noticing, and connecting.
I was distracted today — worrying about why I feel so strange — not dizzy but light-headed?, with a tight left leg. I talk to the doctor tomorrow. I think it’s the latest intense version of anxiety triggered by hormones and unusual (for me) aches and pains. Thanks, perimenopause! In this distracted, uncomfortable state, can I remember 10 things I noticed?
10 Things
a tall stack of stones on the ancient boulder
greenish white fuzz on the edge of the trail
clicking and clacking of a roller skier’s poles
an e-bike zooming up the franklin hill
a group of school kids speaking spanish in the tunnel of trees
a minneapolis road crew tarring more craters on the path — the tar smelled sharp
the solid, wide forms of the bridge columns at the bottom of the franklin hill
graffiti: the outline of a shape I can’t recall in black
a runner in orange shorts doing hill repeats on the franklin hill
another runner powering up the hill. I watched their steady rhythm and beautiful broad shoulders run out of sight
I did it!
silhouette and concrete poetry
Nearing the end of my shadow month, I’m still thinking about silhouettes. Today, the silhouette of a poem and how poets make their words into a recognizable shape. The most obvious version of this shaping words into form is the concrete poem.
one
I suppose you could call my mood rings concrete poetry. Some of the words are the shape of my blind spot, some the shape of my total central vision, and some the shape of what’s missing:
two
Reading more of Ted Kooser’s The Poetry Home Repair Manual, I came across a mention of concrete poetry. He doesn’t like it:
Each of us must make a thousand choices in every poem. Nobody is going to take away your poetic license for playing with typography or punctuation or spelling. It can be lots of fun to write a poem about a flying seagull in the shape of a flying seagull, but you need to understand that that bird shape will interfere to some degree with the ability of the reader to pass through the surface of the poem behind that clever silhouette.
A shaped poem with a serious message will never be taken as seriously as the same poem without the trick of shape. A lovely elegy to your dead mother is not likely to be quite as moving as it might have been if you’d not shape the typography to look like a coffin.
The Poetry Repair Manual/ Ted Kooser
A page earlier, referring to other distracting techniques, like of haphazard line breaks and ampersands, Kooser writes:
In business, executives make cost-benefit analyses. I used this term earlier. They never want the cost to exceed the benefit. Every choice you make in a poem, thinking to make it better, can also have a corresponding cost. If you want to make a line look shorter by using an ampersand or an abbreviation of a word, you face the cost of drawing the reader’s attention back to the surface while he or she wonders why you decided to use Sgn for surgeon.
The Poetry Repair Manual/ Ted Kooser
I’d prefer to steer clear of the economic metaphors, but I agree with the idea of giving care and attention to the choices you make and their consequences.
three
On this day in 2017, I wrote about Linda Pastan’s poem Vertical, which I love and have since memorized. Near the end of the entry, I mention how the shape of the poem fits with the title and topic:
Pastan’s poem is vertical in form. [the words are] Long and lean, stretching upwards.
This month, partly inspired by an ongoing discussion of silhouettes, I’ve been revisiting Diana Khoi Nguyen’s brilliant book Ghost of. The visual poetry in it is strange and stunning and not a gimmick. Her poem, “Triptych,” was an inspiration for my mood rings. Here’s a video of her reading it — WOW!
Triptych
Ghost of is not all visual poems, there are other forms too, but the ones in which she writes within and around the space of her brother’s silhouette are amazing. In the following poem, instead of a triptych, she uses gyotaku:
Gyotaku / Diana Khoi Nguyen
And here’s what Nguyen says about these gyotaku poems:
Several poems in Ghost Of are titled “Gyotaku.” You’re referencing this traditional method of printing from fish because you’re “printing” from the absent body of your brother?
Essentially, there’s the absent body which I fill in with text, so the absence is rendered into a visual text. Gyotaku is a practice using dead fish to create an impression of what had been captured, an old practice before photography existed. It still goes on today. I liked the idea that gyotaku creates just the impression. You can’t capture the whole of the fish, just wherever the ink or the paint was able to touch the body, the scales, and you get an idea of the thing. Thinking about the act of writing and printing—bookmaking is also inked fabric—it makes sense to also begin to claim, to manipulate, to capture this image-text in a visual way. source: Diana Kyoi Nguyen, To Cut Out
Open water swimming is having a moment
Okay, open water swimming. First the awesome, Nyad, and now this:
A beautiful morning for a run! Sun! Shadows! A slight breeze! Ran with Scott to the falls — no stopping today. Mostly it was fine, but the last mile was hard. My left leg was tight. I kept going because Scott wasn’t stopping and I knew I could do it. And now, since I did do it, I know I can do it the next time. Because of my effort, I can’t remember what we talked about. But I do remember encountering some little kids on the path — I was too distracted by the old guy muttering, share the path, as they passed to hear them, but Scott did: the kid, pointing to some flower near the path: We used to have those, but now they don’t grow anymore. Scott was delighted by the way the kid said one of the words — now? — and tried to imitate them.
Oh! Just remembered something I talked about: Emily Dickinson’s “To Make a Prairie.” I was trying to recite it, but I could only remember 2 of the 3 things it took to make the prairie, a/one bee and reverie. Had to look it up: a clover! Of course.
seen: the fine spray of water coming off of the falls, making everything look hazy and dreamy felt: that same spray, soft, cool, refreshing, barely perceptible heard: the song, “Eye of the Tiger” from a painter’s radio at a house we passed by at the beginning of our run smelled: our neighbor’s lilac bush, overpowering, sickly sweet, giving off intense floral energy taste: anything? probably the salt from my sweat at some point
A few weeks ago, I requested Victoria Chang’s The Trees Witness Everything. Love the brevity of her form! Back in Jan 2022, I got an early, chapbook version of this collection. In the notes of that chapbook, she describes her project:
notes from Victoria Chang’s chapbook, Another Lost Year
Her project of using the different court poetry of Japan is inspiring me to do more with my breathing and striking rhythms: 3/2, 2/1, 3/3/3, and 3/3/3/4. Also, her use of Merwin titles makes me want to use titles/lines-as-titles from Emily Dickinson and other “vision” poets! Yes!
Here are a few:
Losing Language/ Victoria Chang
We were born with a large door on our backs. When will we know if it opens?
The Flight/ Victoria Chang
I no longer watch the birds during the day. I prefer to save them for my dreams where an owl’s face has more than one expression.
In the Open/ Victoria Chang
Weather is wet, it doesn’t have joints. How snow just becomes rain, what’s that change called? Trees witness everything, but they always look away.
Thinking more about my running rhythms, I’m realizing that I want to tighten up the form some more by limiting the number of lines and total syllables. I like 5, but that might be too few?
Late Wonders/ Victoria Chang
My face is now gone. Instead, I have a hawk’s face. None of the poets notice, they only want fame. Fame is a bucket of eyes.
and for this month’s focus on shadows:
The Time of Shadow/ Victoria Chang
The zookeepers feed all the shadows light and meat. The shadows wish so badly to leave their bodies, but they stay for the children.
Thinking about Chang’s use of Merwin titles and my interest in using ED titles, I am reminded of a discussion in Ted Kooser’s book, The Poetry Home Repair Manual:
You can open just about any book of poetry and find poets using titles to carry information. Just look at a table of contents and you’ll see how useful titles can be in suggesting waht poems will be about. . . .
In short, a title isn’t something you stick on just because you think a poem is supposed to have one. Titles are very important tools for delivering information and setting expectations.
