Tag: no headphones

june 21/RUNSWIM

3.25 miles
2 trails
69 degrees

Ran earlier today, at 7:15. A little cooler, quieter. For the first few minutes, I recited Alice Oswald’s “A Short Story of Falling” which I memorized yesterday. Ran south on the grassy boulevard between edmund and the river road. Crossed over at Becketwood, then ran down to the southern entrance of the Winchell Trail.

Listened to the gentle whooshing of car wheels. the clicking and clacking of ski poles, and birds for most of the run. Put in a Bruno Mars playlist for the last mile.

After I finished my run, I recited Alice Oswald’s “A Short Story of Falling” into my phone. Only messed up one line (I think).

10 Things

  1. click clack click clack
  2. the rambling root spread across the dirt trail
  3. the steady dripping — more than a trickle, less than a rush — of the water falling from the sewer pipe
  4. the soft (not mushy) blanket of dead leaves on the winchell trail
  5. the sharp sparkle of the light on the water
  6. shhhhhh — the wind passing through the leaves on the trees
  7. the soft roar of the city underneath everything
  8. the leaning branches have been removed — thanks Minneapolis Parks People!
  9. an almost exchange of the You and I — me: right behind you, excuse me an older woman with a dog: mmhmm
  10. no bugs, no gnats, no geese

wordle challenge

3 tries: front / brine / crane

front runt stunt blunt hunt shunt grunt redundant
brine sign fine line shine dine design unwind spine twine
crane explain refrain detain rain insane

front

frontispiece:

1

a: the principal front of a building
b: a decorated pediment over a portico or window

2

: an illustration preceding and usually facing the title page of a book or magazine

brine

Cliché/ V. Penelope Pelizzon

Its back and forth, ad nauseum,
ought to make the sea a bore. But walks along the shore
cure me. Salt wind’s the best solution for
dissolving my ennui in,
along with these protean
sadnesses that sometimes swim
invisibly
as comb-jelly
a glass or two of wine below my surface.
Some regrets
won’t untangle. Others loosen as I watch the waves
spreading their torn nets
of foam along the sand
to dry. I walk and walk and walk and walk, letting their haul
absorb me. One seal’s hull
scuttled to bone staves
gulls scream
wheeling above. And here… small, diabolical,
a skate’s egg case,
its horned purse nested on pods of bladderwort
that still squirt
BRINE by the eyeful. Some oily slabs of whale skin, or
—no, just an
edge of tire
flensed from a commoner leviathan.
Everywhere, plastic nurdles gleam
like pearls or caviar
for the avian gourmand
and bits of sponge dab the wounded wrack-line,
dried to froths of air
smelling of iodine.
Hours blow off down the beach like spindrift,
leaving me with an immense
less-solipsistic sense
of ruin, and, as if
it’s a gift, assurance
of ruin’s recurrence.

crane

“The Crane Wife” parts 1, 2, and 3 from the Decemberists

swim: 1 small loop (1/2 big loop)
cedar lake open swim
88 degrees

First open swim with FWA at cedar lake! A great night for it: calm, clear, not too crowded. The buoys were up tonight. Hooray!

june 19/RUNSWIM

5.1 miles
franklin hill turn around
71 degrees

Warm again this morning. I need to start my run sooner. I heard the coxswain below instructing the rowers, but I forget to look for them as I ran down the franklin hill. I don’t remember looking at the river at all. Did I? I was too distracted by people — bikers, runners, walkers.

Best part of the run: heading down the hill, feeling good, someone else running up the hill called out, looking strong! I called back, you too! Her words made me feel good and even stronger. Such a kind gesture. I started thinking again about these small exchanges and how they give us the chance to be both an I (who recognizes) and a you (who is recognized).

Listened to rowers, birds, and cheering runners as I ran north. Listened to Hamilton on my headphones on the way back south. it’s a blur sir

wordle challenge

6 tries (with a hint from FWA): chirp / doubt / smoke / flank / wagon / KAZOO

In the morning

when the birds chirp
doubt goes up in smoke
delight outflanks grief
and regret hitches a wagon ride
out of town.
Only the faint buzz of his kazoo lingers
then joins in the cardinal chorus.

swim: 2.5 big loops (5 little loops)
cedar lake open swim
88 degrees

The first open swim at cedar! Wonderful. The water wasn’t too choppy or cold. Everyone was (mostly) swimming the right way. No leg cramps or worry about swimming off course.

10 Things

  1. the beach was packed with people
  2. the water, which is usually clear here, was opaque
  3. a few silver flashes below me — fish?
  4. stopping near the beach for a minute, I looked down in the water and saw shafts of light
  5. itchy vines, floating into me
  6. I swam over one vine floating horizontally and it felt like I was getting a full body scan
  7. many of the vines were attached — at both beaches I swam through a thick forest of underwater vegetation
  8. no buoys, only lifeguards on kayaks set up in the middle of the lake, which was no problem for sighting (at least for me)
  9. 2 different paddleboarders crossed right in front of me
  10. birds flying over the lake above me — I couldn’t tell how big they were

june 17/RUN

4.6 miles
marshall loop to cleveland
67 degrees

Nice to be home and able to run this loop after a few days away, moving a parent out of an apartment in one city and into another in another city. Wasn’t sure how it would feel to run up the marshall hill, but it wasn’t too bad. I remember noticing things as I ran, but now I can’t remember what I noticed, except —

screeching bluejays, leaves on trees shivering in the wind, voices floating up from the gorge, sparkling river water, a sandbar emerging from just below the lake street bridge. Bikers, walkers, runners

almost getting hit by a bike (my fault) — not sure how close it was; my body didn’t tense up in panic, so I’m guessing it wasn’t that close. It happened because my eyes/brain can only see one thing at a time and I was distracted by some stopped bikers who looked like they were going to cross, but weren’t. Why weren’t they crossing, I wondered, thinking maybe there was a car that I couldn’t see (it’s happened before).

a shell with 2 rowers on the river, the bells at St. Thomas chiming nine times, sprinklers, tree roots, hard-packed dirt, almost losing my balance on the edge of the east river trail but managing to stay on the path, looking strange to anyone who might have seen me, I’m sure

Listened to birds, voices, my breath for most of the ran. Put in a Bruno Mars playlist for the last mile.

wordle challenge

4 tries: tough / beach / march / ranch

tough: and the grass was as tough as hemp and no color no more than sand was a color(I Remember/ Anne Sexton)

beach: from Dan Beachy-Quick (This Nest, Swift Pasterine) in april 24, 2023 entry

the eye sees
also through the ear a double infinity

march: Dear March — Come In — (Emily Dickinson)

branch: from Winter Branches/ Margaret Widdemer

Clear-cut and certain they rise, with summer past,
For all that trees can ever learn they know now, at last;

june 14/RUN

3 miles
2 trails
67 degrees

Ran on the dirt trail between edmund and the river road heading south, then down to the winchell trail for the way back. A good run where I mostly ran slow with a few stretches of fast.

Listened to the water dripping, the cars gently whooshing, giant mowing machines whirring on the way south and for most of the winchell trail north. Put in Lizzo for the last mile.

9 Things I Noticed

  1. the water was blue when I had a clear view and a blinding, shining white through the gaps in the trees
  2. another friendly exchange and shift from I to You when I thanked a pedestrian for moving over for me: Thank you! You’re welcome!
  3. couldn’t hear the water dripping below 42nd because of the dizz dizz dizz of a giant machine up above
  4. the same almost fallen branches, leaning over the winchell trail
  5. rowers! never saw them, but heard the coxswain prepping them on what to do in a race
  6. lots of cars steadily and gently moving north on the river road
  7. birds birds birds — didn’t see them, only heard them
  8. wet dirt on the trail — was it dew or did it rain last night?
  9. lots of bikers and walkers — less runners, no roller skiers

wordle challenge

3 tries: plaid / write / crime

3 poems:

plaid: The Plaid/ Edna St. Vincent Milay
write: How to Write a Poem/ Laura Hershey
crime: Severed Head Floating Downriver/ Alice Oswald

june 12/RUN

5.45 miles
franklin loop
61 degrees

Cool-ish this morning. Sunny, a little wind. Good running weather. If I had gone out when Scott did, at 7, it would have been great running weather. It was in the 50s then.

As I ran north towards the franklin bridge, I suddenly wondered, have I run the franklin loop since the snow melted, when I could run on the walking path? I didn’t think so. [I was right; I looked it up and my last franklin loop run was april 6th.]

Running over franklin bridge, the river was blue with flecks of silver that I could barely see from behind the railing. Not a single rowing shell. No big paddleboats either.

Running over the lake street bridge, I didn’t really look at the river. Instead I watched a worker in his orange and yellow vest standing by the railing. What was he doing? It took me a little time to put the scene together: the worker was standing at the railing on one side of the sidewalk. On the other side of the wall, parked on the road part of the bridge was a truck with an arm that reached above our heads and over the edge of the bridge. I assume someone was in the bucket below. My first thought: are they inspecting the bridge and is it about to collapse? As I got closer to the worker, the truck, and the arm, I saw another guy standing near the truck. He seemed to be letting the first guy know when it was clear (meaning, after I had passed by). Why write this tedious description? Partly to demonstrate how my vision works. I imagine a normally sighted person could take this entire scene in with one or two glances. I have to stare for 20 or 30 seconds at least, slowly putting together what I see. As best as I can remember, here was my thought process:

hmm….that guy up ahead has a bright orange and yellow safety vest on.

Does he work for the city, or is he some random walker being extra careful?

Is he taking a break, admiring the view, or doing something else?

He’s not peeing off the side, is he? No, of course not.

Oh, there’s an arm from a truck reaching over — they’re working on the bridge!

Can I run by, or do I need to turn around?

I’m sure many people have some of these thoughts, but if you can see “normally” they probably come all at once and are answered almost instantly. My thoughts come slowly and sometimes get stuck.

wordle challenge

3 tries: first/ drown/ wrong

the first time she almost drowned, she knew something was wrong.
First, drown the mushrooms in white wine. There’s no wrong way to do it.

When you first jump into very cold water
it might feel like you’re drowning.
A shock, a heaviness, panic. Something seems wrong.
It is.

at first, a burst
in a gown, you might drown
any song with a gong will be wrong

There was an old lady on first
whose cheesecake was always the worst
she’d bake it so long
that the texture was wrong
and all of the berries would burst

first burst worst rehearse reverse cursed
drown down frown renown found clown town crown
wrong song long bong gong along oblong elongate

There was an old lady on first
who always believed she was cursed
convinced she would drown
at the hands of a clown
she wandered the streets in a hearse

The lady on first was so cruel
she drowned all her cats in the pool
her heart, it was wrong
it sang a bad song
and tasted like boarding school gruel

Like yesterday, I could spend a lot more time with these words, trying to come up with something, but I’ll stop for now.

june 10/RUN

3.6 miles
marshall loop
70 degrees

Another run with sore legs. I ran all the way up the marshall hill without stopping to walk. Didn’t stop to walk until I got back to the bridge. Then I put in a playlist.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. 2 tiny dogs in a fenced-in yard a few blocks from my house barking tiny, yippy, delightful barks
  2. waveless water — no ripples or sparkles, flat and blue
  3. heading east: no rowers
  4. returning west: at least one rowing shell, far off to the south
  5. equal numbers of runners, bikers, and walkers (last week it was mostly bikers)
  6. the soft trickling of water at shadow falls
  7. voices below in the gorge, voices behind slowly approaching
  8. rounding a corner near minnehaha academy: a refreshing sprinkler/mister!
  9. at the top of the hill, near summit, a graduation party already in full swing at 8:45 am
  10. lots of birds making noise — can’t remember any one bird, just birds

No roller skiers or radios. No brightly colored running shirts (but several runners without a shirt). No honking geese or drumming woodpeckers or floating cottonwood fuzz or gnats.

Yesterday I forgot to mention that I saw someone on a unicycle! At first I thought the biker was just really tall. Nope, he was on a unicycle. Nice.

wordle challenge

5 tries — mouth/ready/blank/gnaws/again

empty, again

your mouth may be
ready but your mind
is blank. A hunger
for words gnaws at your throat.


june 7/RUN

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
68 degrees

A few degrees cooler this morning, but still warm.

I’m listening to a very (too?) long audio book right now and I’m trying to finish it before it’s due back at the library in 7 days — The Covenant of Water, 31 hours. I decided to listen to it for the first half of my run. Sometimes I like listening to audio books while I run, not so much today. My mind kept wandering and I had trouble paying attention to the story. Plus, because I had headphones on, I felt disconnected from the gorge and the trail.

Even in my distracted state I still managed to notice a few things:

10 Things I Noticed

  1. Mr. Walker Sitter was perched on his walker just above 42nd street ravine
  2. the falls roaring gushing rushing down the limestone
  3. more bikers than walkers or runners on the trail
  4. the surreys lined up, ready to take over the trails
  5. an older woman, biking, calling back to some other bikers, did I miss the turn-off? Oh, here it is!
  6. a sprinkler watering the flowers near the fountain which no longer works and the low limestone wall with “Song of Hiawatha” etched on its top
  7. the dirt trail leading into the small wood on the hill up to ford parkway, looking both inviting and buggy
  8. approaching a guy who had been running when I saw him far ahead of me, but now was walking. Right before I reached him, he started running again
  9. a big black something on the ground — an oversized glove? a hat? a knee brace? I couldn’t tell
  10. most of the dirt on the trail between edmund and the river road was tightly packed, but a few stretches where loose and sandy

Wordle Challenge

5 tries: tough/wheat/haste/hated/hater

Nap-Hater

Middle-aged, it’s tough to watch
wheat gently waving in the wind
without haste and not want to slow down yourself
but as a kid I hated anything slow —
snails, sermons, that quiet time right after lunch
when you were supposed to be still on your cot.
Wedged between other writhing bodies
all of us desperate to be done with this dark room
we felt the dripping of each second
and despised it.

Today’s Water: Water Sign :: Cancer

In comes and goes in waves, but today I’m not worried that I have cancer. This irrational and rational fear took hold of me a few years ago and it’s been hard to shake, especially as I witness family and friends struggle with and die from it. Yesterday I read about a friend’s ovarian cancer and the terrible life-extending drugs she has to keep taking post-chemo to prevent the cancer from coming back. They cost $24,000 a month. Her insurance covers it, but what if it didn’t? What would she do? Would my shitty insurance cover these costs, if I had cancer?

Ode to Money, or Patient Appealing Health Insurance for Denial of Coverage/ Katie Farris

I don’t know what money is. Moss? The mink’s crescent
teeth? Or maybe money is
the morning I woke
at dawn to wander
past the orange
blossoms, a smell with four
dimensions, touching me through
time. Is that

                    currency?

My uncle, Christopher Marlowe,
mad, drank the visions until he died.
You bury
treasure.

To determine a family’s net
value, make a list of assets, then subtract
liabilities. Asset: Geraldine Fox’s 1948 degree in
chemistry. Liability: William Marlowe’s propensity
for hurting his daughter. Am I doing this right? Is this

       the gold standard?

Asset: seeing light that isn’t there,
like a ship passing through the narrow harbors
of my eyes, scraping—
is burying treasure a cash
transaction?

I once buried a half-
decayed skunk I fished from my Uncle Christopher’s
garbage can, covered in bees. X marks the spot.

In sum: perhaps the moon’s an insurance adjuster.

America’s optimistic to dye its money
green. Leaves are green
because of chlorophyll, which is the machine
that turns sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into leaf, stem, and root. All
the little blades of grass left behind by the lawn mower like Civil
War soldiers. Same as cash.

                      A heavy-bodied moth

caught between glass and screen casts its shadow down
into the palm of my hand: one dark coin.

I’ve been thinking about buying and reading Katie Farris’s collection about her breast cancer, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, even before it came out in April. Maybe I should get it and read it this summer?

june 5/RUN

3.1 miles
2 trails
79 degrees
dew point: 62

Hot, thick, very poor air quality. There’s a warning about the bad air until midnight: “fine particle pollution” from wild fires in Quebec. I don’t think it really bothered me as I ran.

I ran south on the dirt trail in the grass between edmund and the river road, crossed over to the trail, then headed down to the southern entrance of the Winchell Trail. Ran north until 38th, took the steps up, returned to trail past the ravine, through the tunnel of trees, then crossed over the edmund at 33rd.

Listened to cars whooshing by, kids heading to school, water sprinkling out of the sewer pipe for the first 2 miles. Listened to a Bruno Mars playlist for the last mile.

Before the run, I was thinking about water and The Odyssey — I was reading it all weekend — and how much Odysseus and his men ache for home. And I was imagining how restless they’ll be if and when they get home and stay for too long. Restlessness and staying reminded me of a few things:

Mary Oliver’s restless water and her satisfied stones in The Leaf and the Cloud:

It is the nature of stone
to be satisfied.
It is the nature of water
to want to be somewhere else.

Faith Shearin and the ones who stay, including Penelope:

Odysseus spent years trying to come home
but Penelope never left. He was seduced

by women with islands and sung to by sirens;
he held the wind in a bottle. But Penelope
slept differently in the same bed, weaving

and unweaving the daily details while men
she did not love gathered in her kitchen.
Her face grew thinner, her son grew taller.

And my own thoughts and words about restlessness in the wordle experiment for today:

details: 5 tries, trend/plane/neigh/skein/ENNUI, 2 poems

Ennui
The latest trend
among those trapped in a post-pandemic plane
is to neigh with horsey impatience
softly scream into a skein of restlessness

The Horse Girls
trending:
on the plane between child and young adult
wild neigh and reserved whinny
they skein obsessions
out of their edgy ennui OR out of their ennui

So, I started the run with all of these thoughts still lingering. Within a mile, I started thinking more about restlessness and water. At the end of the run, I pulled out my smart phone and recorded some of those thoughts:

june 5, 2023

transcript: June 5. Just finished my 2 trails run, a 5K. Today I was thinking about restlessness and water and the idea that usually water is restless, constantly moving. But today, in this thick humid morning with haze and poor air quality, it is everything else that is restless, and the water that refuses to move. The river stills. The sweat hovers on my chin, refusing to fall, to bring relief. We are restless: the cars, impatient, as they move past me on the road. Even my legs, as I try to run down hills, refuse to move with any speed. Contrast between the restless and the still.

I remember looking at the river and seeing haze. The only water that was moving at all was the water steadily dripping out of the sewer pipe.

Another thing I just remembered from before my run: I briefly thought about a vision poem I encountered last week and have wanted to post here. Today’s the day!

Motion/ Jessica Goodfellow

Because my husband is going slowly
blind, the lights in our house have motion
sensors. As I walk through the rooms
I am the star of the show, lit one-by-one by
spotlights as I go. Desiring the dark,
I must sit motionless. One itch, one twitch,
and up come the houselights, rendering
me suddenly—again—audience of me.

Tonight we are sitting in the dark
beside the Christmas tree. Its strands
of blinking lights remind my husband
of his childhood, when he could see.
I find it funny they don’t remind him of
the blinking lights that ring the edges of
his eye field, proof of his rods and cones
one-by-one dying. Not ha-ha funny, the other kind.

There are things ha-ha funny about going
blind though. Like that time he walked
wearing a three-piece wool suit into the deep
end of a swimming pool in a hotel in Italy.
I wasn’t there—he told me later.
I was at home, turning lights on and off
through only my anxious pacing.

Sitting by the Christmas tree, I squeeze
my husband’s hand—squeeze and release,
squeeze and release—my hand blinking
in his. It’s such a tiny motion the sensors
don’t detect it. Someday my husband will
sit in the dark and wave his arms wildly
and still be in the dark. One-by-one every-
thing happens, every disappearance appears.

june 3/RUN

3.75 miles
marshall loop
70 degrees
humidity: 78%

Hot and sticky. Sprinklers everywhere. Ran through one just before I reached the lake street bridge. Crossing, I glanced down at the rowers on the river. Rowers! I couldn’t hear them, and I could barely see them over the bridge railing, but they were there. Was it a nice day to row, or too hot and windless? The trails were crowded with groups of runners taking over the paths.

Listened to the sprinklers, water falling over the limestone at Shadow Falls, birds for the first 2/3 of the run. Put in my headphones as I walked up the steps of the lake street bridge and listened to Billie Eilish and Dolly Parton and Elton John as I ran (with a few walk breaks) home.

Now, after the run, I’m wiped and can’t think of much to write about the run or water or anything, really.

Just one more thing. Before I ran, I read through this Carl Phillips poem — not a slow, close reading, but a quick one. As I ran, I occasionally thought about rivers and what kind of subjects/selves they are and how loving them is different than loving lakes (which is something I focused on 2 years ago).

Sunlight in Fog/ Carl Phillips

Maybe what a river loves most

about the banks that hold it—that appear to hold it—

is their willingness or resignation to being

      mere context for the river’s progress

or retreat, depending. And maybe how the cattails

and reeds flourish there means they prefer

      a river-love—how the river, running always away

the way rivers tend to, stands as proof that reliability

doesn’t have to mean steadfast, how the river

itself would say so, if a river could say…I’ve forgotten

entirely what it felt like to enter his body

      or to be entered by his. But not how he’d spend

long afternoons—as if to look away had become

impossible—just watching his face get routinely

      blurred by the river’s motion, like an

inside-out version, psychologically, of a painting

where the model sleeps beneath a portrait

      of himself not sleeping, if that makes

any sense…Not, I mean, that he wasn’t capable

of love, but that—like history already mistaking itself

      for myth again—he loved a river.

june 2/RUN

6 miles
bottom franklin hill and back
76 degrees / dew point: 64

Hot! I much prefer running in the cold to running in the heat. Still, today is my 12 year anniversary — my runniversary — and I had to get out there to celebrate it. 12 years ago today I went out for my first couch to 5K run.

Was able to say good morning to Mr. Morning! Noticed the river. Higher above, it burned white through the trees. Down below in the flats, it looked stagnant and brown and not refreshing at all. Heard some birds and a woman saying to her friend, during times of war they…, as I ran past. Smiled and waved at many walkers and runners. Thought I heard the rowers but I was wrong. Wondered if the roller skier I passed as I ran down the hill and she skated up it was using poles — I couldn’t tell because we were both moving too fast. Watched the red flash flash flash of a bike’s back light disappear into the distance. Felt the sweat dripping and trickling and seeping out of my skin.

Listened to the birds and the cars as I ran north. Recorded some thoughts into my phone as I walked up the hill. Put in a playlist — bday 2018 — as I ran back south.

Be Water My Friend

It’s the beginning of the month; time for a new challenge. For June 2023, more on water. I’d like to read Alice Oswald’s Nobody, but I need to read The Odyssey first. I started yesterday. I love Emily Wilson’s recent translation. Very fun. Anyway, I’ll finish The Odyssey, then read Oswald’s take on it in Nobody. At the same time, I’m thinking of reviewing some water poems I’ve already collected — maybe memorizing a few, then using them for inspiration. Maybe I’ll even do another cento? Today I started with Oswald’s Evaporations, partly because it came up as a poem I posted on june 2, 2021. I also watched a clip of Bruce Lee’s Be Water My Friend.

Empty your mind. Be
formless shapeless like
water now you
put water into a cup
it becomes the cup
you put water into a bottle
it becomes the bottle
you put it into a tea pot
it becomes the tea pot
now water can flow or
it can craaaaasshh
be water my friend

before the run

As I ran I hoped to think about water subjectivities and what it is to be water . I think this was also inspired by a quote from Oswald that I re-read yesterday:

I sometimes wonder whether I’m a very keen swimmer, and whether for me, poetry is equivalent to swimming. I’ve often noticed when I swim, the strangeness of the way the body literally turns into a fish, but the head remains human and rather cold, and looking around at this strange flat reflective surface. I’m often very piercingly aware of the difference between my head and my body when I’m swimming because I’m not necessarily someone who goes underwater, I love swimming along the surface of rivers. Perhaps, my poems do feel a need to convey that continued separation of the head remaining human and the body becoming animal, or plant, or mineral, or whatever it can be. In some way, I suppose I’m trying to find rhythms that will heal that divide.

*

I think that’s exactly it, that we seem to exist as bodies and minds. That’s always slightly troubled me that I can’t quite make them be the same thing. I always have two narratives going on and it’s extraordinary the way the mind is floating around seemingly quite untethered and yet the body has all these laws like gravity, and limit, and size, and hunger, that it’s obeying. How those two interact and how they come to define what it is to be human is again—I’m wary of using the verb think because I don’t think poetry is necessarily about thinking—but it gets hold of questions, and reveals them as questions, and then reveals what’s underneath them, and then what’s underneath that. I suppose each book tries to peel away a layer of that problem and present it again.

Between the Covers interview with Alice Oswald

during the run

Halfway through the run, I stopped to record my thoughts by speaking into my smart phone: Almost 3.5 miles in, just walking back up the franklin hill on a super hot, humid day. Before I started running, I was thinking about water and I read and then listened to Alice Oswald’s “Evaporations” and Bruce Lee’s “Be Water My Friend.” So I was thinking about how there’s a line in the Alice Oswald about how water prefers to be disorderly and slapdash —

 I notice
The Water doesn’t like it so orderly
What Water admires
Is the slapstick rush of things melting

I was thinking of this dog bark I heard across the road on Seabury and my thought was that this bark was slapdash. Then I was thinking of Bruce Lee’s “Be Water” and how I feel even more like water right now because I’m not just damp, I’m dripping sweat in this humidity. And I’m not sure why this happened but I started to think about — oh, I was thinking about how I had locked into this rhythm and I could really feel it in my glutes, which is great because I think that’s what you ideally want, and I was feeling that I was in a steady rhythm, not really thinking, more animal, and then I thought about how it feels more like a machine to me (than an animal). Then I was thinking about how when machines are being designed/engineered, they look to the bio-mechanics of various animals. Machines are really animals with a very strict routine. Animals and machines and Donna Haraway and cyborgs — the idea of us being both machines and animals. What part of us is the I, the animal, the machine, the — ?

[a few minutes later] I almost forgot, when I turned around at the 3 mile point and went on the lower trail right by the river, the river looked very still and un-refreshing. I looked at it, and because it was so still, the clouds were reflected in it, and I thought about Huidobro’s line, 8 glances to turn the sea into sky. I thought what I was doing was turning the river into sky….And now I’m thinking about these different subjectivities we inhabit — the I, the animal, the machine — when you recognize that you’re all of those things, that doesn’t mean you are free from subjectivity and your specific historical, material location; it just means that you’ve eliminated division, you’re immersed in the water where it’s all together. It all is entangled — a better word? [thinking of Ross Gay here]

after my run

A lot of thoughts on water and subjectivity and the I/animal/machine are reoccurring ideas that I’ve been writing about/wrestling with for years. I think it was last year that I started to imagine myself as less of a fish in the water, more of a boat. What does it look like, how might it feel to be all of these things — water, boat, fish, human/brain?

note: I added the second part of Evaporations to my list of poems to memorize.

A few days ago, I found some summer heat poems on the NYTimes Book Review. I thought I saved the link, but now I can’t find it. My favorite was this one:

Summer Studies/ Tony Hoagland

When Ellen told Mary about the secret lake
she swore her to silence

but Mary invited Jerome
who couldn’t even swim and Luanne

came with him and it was funny that summer
the way that scarce resources

collided with the whole system
of who was cool, or not

the old rule being that who was cool
would get to stay that way

by jumping into the lake
and who was not would have to stay

hot and dirty
by simple omission of information.

But that dry summer the rumors spread:
someone was giving out maps, someone

was giving tutorials in every twist and
bobby-pin turn

you had to take in the red dirt road
that got you there.

When you got near you could hear
through the trees

splashes and cries of people who
might not even be friends.

And the clear water, like the social milieu that summer
was quite frankly stirred up, confused

thanks to the leaky lips, Ellen said,
of certain persons

who would let anyone in.