Tag: poem

july 16/RUN

Rain this early (7 am) morning. Hopefully stopping in a few hours. Watching the tour and rereading old entries from july 16ths. Discovered this excellent description of a buzzing bug:

The Locust/ Leonara Speyer

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.

note: I first posted this poem on 16 july 2022. I posted it again last year in 2024. Maybe I should memorize it?

a few hours later: what a stage of the tour (stage 11)! Pogacar crashing; Visma waiting for him. What will happen tomorrow in the Pyrenees?

It is 10:30 and a light rain. Won’t stop until 12:30. Do I wait, or go now? It’s probably refreshing and it might be fun to run in the rain . . .

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
66 degrees
light rain

I did it, and it was a great run! Back to the 9/1 (9 minutes running / 1 minute walking) and feeling strong and relaxed. The light rain helped to cool me down, and I liked how my feet glided on the wet trail. Glided sounds strange. How about glode or glid or glod? Started the run by chanting in triple berries then turning everything I noticed into triples — river road, dripping trees, running feet, rushing cars. Listened to everything dripping for the first 30 minutes, then put in the “Energy” playlist for the last stretch.

10 Things

  1. gloom with the occasional bright flash from headlights
  2. one flash looked lower — I think it was a reflection in a big puddle!
  3. the ravine by 42nd was gushing like the falls
  4. the falls were giving off a fine, gauzy spray
  5. a stranded surrey near the longfellow house — were they getting wet in the rain?
  6. someone walking up the hill at the edge of the park, carrying an umbrella
  7. above the creek, the grass next to the sidewalk was soaked with a line of big puddles
  8. the sprawling reflection of a tree in a wide puddle on a sidewalk
  9. the silhouette of a bird on a wire, looking very Bird
  10. the bells of St. Thomas — faint, distant

an hour later: I was planning to do open swim at cedar lake tonight but I just got an email: “canceled due to inclement weather.” Bummer.

a few random Alice Oswald bits

1

On her process of translating what she notices into a poem, and on poetry as framing the silence:

She and her husband, playwright Peter Oswald, divide their day in two – walking their sons to and from school through fields. But she doesn’t take a notebook with her. She believes in the subconscious, in what is brewing on a ‘non-verbal level’. She thinks ‘a flavour or feeling builds up, almost a sculptural shape that could be a living creature, or a dance or a painting’. Only later comes the ‘plastic art of finding the words’.

There is also, in her poems, a sense of the silence behind every word. ‘One of the differences between poetry and prose is that poetry is beyond words. Poetry is only there to frame the silence. There is silence between each verse and silence at the end.’ 

into the woods

2

Wood Not Yet Out/ Alice Oswald

closed and containing everything, the land
leaning all round to block it from the wind,
a squirrel sprinting in startles and sees
sections of distance tilted through the trees
and where you jump the fence a flap of sacking
does for a stile, you walk through webs, the cracking
bushtwigs break their secrecies, the sun
vanishes up, instantly come and gone.
once in, you hardly notice as you move,
the wood keeps lifting up its hope, I love
to stand among the last trees listening down
to the releasing branches where I’ve been –
the rain, thinking I’ve gone, crackles the air
and calls by name the leaves that aren’t yet there

Oh, that ending! Now I’m imagining what the rain does when it thinks I’m not around! Today the rain didn’t crackle the air but . . . dotted it? feathered it? poked or punctured it?

3

The other day I came across Alice Oswald’s description of a project she’ll be working on next year as a fellow at Columbia University. She’s calling it Interviews with Anon:

At the Institute, Oswald will write a procession of passersby, not all of whom are human and many of whom are imperfectly seen: “My inspiration is the wandering, bartering, folktale style of Herodotus, who included 940 characters in his Histories. I shan’t be writing history. Perhaps it will be more like a headcount or even a carnival.”

Interviews with Anon

Very cool! I can’t wait to read/hear this in a few years.

july 14/RUN

3.1 miles
locks and dam #1 and back
72 degrees / humidity: 84%
air quality: 117

Hot! Humid! Hazy! The shade helped. Avoided the crowded river road trail. Heading south I ran on the narrow, root-filled dirt trail on the grassy boulevard until I reached the parking lot, then the trail to Locks and Dam #1. Heading back north, I ran on the Winchell Trail.

There was a moment when I heard the soft rush of cars, the trickle of water out of the sewer pipe, and . . .? I know there were 3 distinct sounds that I noticed all at once and that I imagined putting in a contrapuntal poem. Was the third sound the rowers? the birds? the tapping which might have been a woodpecker on a tree, or a squirrel with a nut? It wasn’t the wind, because there is no wind today. I felt its lack, but also saw it on the surface of the water. Still, thick. It wasn’t the buzzing of workers sawing or mowing or building something. What was it? Just remembered! The soft then sharp buzz of cicadas, which came in waves. I knew I’d remember it! (It only took 2 hours.)

The common thread for these 3 noises is their steady, insistent beat, not moving time forward, but around and around, on repeat.

swimming words

Catch water, thumb first then the semi-circle pull,
arms straight, centre, down. Palm push back, twist
shoulder to breath. And recover.
Kick. Kick. Kick.

Catch. Pull. Push. Twist, Recover.
CatchPullPush. TwistRecover.
CatchPullPushTwistRecover.
Catchpullpushtwistrecover
(No Moon/ Tanis Rideout)

The Catch/ Tanis Rideout

Stretch bone to breakwall and the tidal roar of thirty thousand
swamps, refuses to crest, to break. Thirst for the bubbled silence
of midnight, midlake, midstroke when the limelight was all
to reach for, a trap door opening to a world below.

Pulse counts in an orchestra — it’s only a paper moon
waterlogged and beaming up, a lighthouse lamp spinning
in time. A course to decipher all the way to safe harbour.
There’s a table laid in checkered cloth. The catch of the day muscles away.

At the edge, pulled bodily from a lake that holds fast and drags
thighs, shins against stacked stone and laps the bloody threads.
It won’t return you whole to the land.

Love the title of this poem and the last line. Does the lake return me whole to the land? What does it mean to be returned whole? And, is that to be desired?

I was planning to do open swim at Cedar Lake tonight, but there is a heat advisory and it’s 90 degrees, so Scott and I will go on Wednesday instead, when it’s much cooler.

process influences constraint

Last week, I read about Sarah Riggs’ approach to writing her latest collection, Lines:

In my poem “November 14” from Lines we start with “Only hour only thought: speech speech.” At the age of 47 I set out to write the book in 47-minute time periods. Roughly an hour, an only hour so to speak, in a field of time dedicated only to thinking/ speaking. Increasingly hard to do this century, with text messages et cetera punctuating thought.  So on October 15, 2018, I started on a dictation of the mind so to speak, in which second thoughts are also written, and set my phone timer for each writing session, at the same café for many of the poems.  Not written so much as transposed.  I determined each poem would be 47 lines, and the lines do not need to be connected to ones before or after, though they could be. There would be 47 poems. The name of each poem is the date it was written.  To be in time, in the calendar, to have a project that is a book that is a series. To feel in the momentum of it. To slant into dream, to invite that we survive through the tilt and whir of connecting synapses. 

Sarah Riggs on Writing Lines, and the Revolutionary Pleasure of Process, Influence, and Constraints

Process, Influence, and Constraints. I love all 3 of these, and think about them quite a bit. I like how Riggs opens the essay: “The bird song and street noise and lilt of the subway and recent phone conversations go into our poetry. We are made up of influences, there is no blank page or screen, as has been said many times.”

In terms of influence, Riggs offers these suggestions:

Channel an influence or more than one.  You can choose to riff on or translate someone else’s work. You can choose epigraphs. Dedicate or address your work to someone.

I like the idea of translation. I’ve been playing around with something I call form fitters, where I take words from other poets I love and fit them into my running rhythms (3/2 or 2/1 or 3/3/3/4) and swimming breath patterns (5 syllable lines or 3/4/3/4 or 5/4/5/4). I also like the idea of taking a line and making it the title or, what about the last line?, of a poem. Playing around with influences could be a fun month-long project?!

july 7/RUNSWIM

4.25 miles
monument and back
71 degrees
dew point: 64

Hot! I’ve never liked running in the heat but now that I’m taking lexipro my heat intolerance has increased. For some moments of the run I felt great, other moments I didn’t. So I walked some, ran some, and walked again at different stretches.

10 Things

  1. I kept seeing orange flashes — a sign, a cone, a tree marked for removal
  2. kids yelling and laughing outside at a daycare attached to a church
  3. the river from above, on the bridge, heading east: brown, and looking shallow — were those sandbars I was seeing near the surface?
  4. trickling water out of the limestone below the bridge
  5. the sound of shadow falls, falling
  6. a kid’s voice rising from the ravine
  7. construction on the other side of the lake street bridge — orange cones, trucks, yellow-vested workers, the buzz of equipment
  8. the river from above, on the bridge, heading west: blue and covered in the reflections of clouds*
  9. click clack — a roller skier
  10. seen, not heard: a dog, by the clanging of their collar

*stopped at the bridge overlook to take a picture of the clouds reflected on the surface of the water. Is it just me, or does this look like an impressionist painting?

a view from above the river: gray, corrugated water with reflections of clouds and trees
river with clouds, 7 july 2025

the color of water

How to Read Water is fascinating. Here are some things I’d like to remember from the chapter on color:

The colors we see in water depend on the brightness and angle of the light and the water’s depth, as well as what’s on, in, and under that water.

How to Read Water

something to consider: are you looking at water, or something in or under the water, or a reflection on water’s surface. Is it the color of water, or the color of the ground beneath the water (a puddle), or the color of cloud on its surface? What angle are you looking from?

. . . in many circumstances when we think we are looking at the water, we are actually looking at something different and in the distance. Looking out to the sea in the distance is a great example: What we see in that situation is dominated by the reflection of the sky even further in the distance. This is why the distant sea appears blue in fine weather and gray on overcast days.

How to Read Water

This water looks blue because it’s reflection the sky is one I’ve heard a lot, but I think I’ve always heard it as the reason, not one reason under certain circumstances.

What about when we see different colors — which I often do as I run across the bridge and look down at the water? The different colors are based on how much of the water we are actually seeing. Sometimes I see brown, sometimes blue.

You will notice this if you look for it, but not if you don’t because our brain has gotten used ot this effect and so oesn’t register it as at all peculiar.

something to try: Can you find the area/the moment where the shift takes place from looking only at reflections to being able to see water?

the exact color that can travel furtherest through the water without being absorbed: blue-green color, wavelength = 480 nanometers

Is it a big cloud or Jaws? People often think it has gotten deeper or there are fish around when the water darkens, but it might just be a big cloud.

eutrophication = excessive nutrients — algal blooms reduce light, use up a lot of oxygen, change the color of the water

oligotrophic = low in nutrients, clear

my sparkle friends! “A lot of the particles that see in water will be inorganic, a mixture of mud, sand, clay, silt, chalk, and other substances, each one affecting the colors we see.” Do I see them as anything other than the color sparkle?

Today I’m swimming at Cedar Lake, which is much deeper than Lake Nokomis. It is also more of a “natural” lake than nokomis. What impact do these factors have on its colors and my experiences of them?

swim: 2.5 loops (5 cedar lake loops)
cedar lake open swim
82 degrees

The water by the orange buoy closest to Point Beach was almost hot — so warm! It was a little cooler in the middle of the lake and near Hidden Beach, but not that cool. It was also calm. Not much wind, no waves. A few vines floating over and under and around me. Some milfoil by the beach. I forgot to look at the color of the water from above, but I did look below. Blue-green, a few hints of yellow. Opaque.

10 Things

  1. driving past another part of the lake: the surface covered with green vegetation
  2. clear blue sky, then a few clouds, the more clouds, then dark
  3. the first orange buoy seemed much farther out in the water
  4. breathing to my right, seeing some other swimmers halfway across the lake
  5. yellow safety buoys
  6. something in the sky — a plane? a bird? I’m uncertain
  7. the warm water was buoyant; I felt higher on the water
  8. bubbles around my hands
  9. a line of white buoys at hidden beach
  10. a breaststroker, stroking with intensity — are they trying to race me?

Is that what bothers me about breaststrokers I encounter: that they always look so intense and like they are trying to race me or keep up with me? I think of breaststroke as a chill stroke, where you glide and kick as you travel on the surface of the water, able equally to see above and below. But, there’s nothing chill or relaxed about the breaststrokers i encounter!

Before swimming, I worked on memorizing some more lines from Alice Oswald, this time from Nobody, but I got stuck on the beginning and wasn’t able to recite them in my head as I swam:

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
(Nobody/ Alice Oswald)

july 4/REST

Fourth of July, so no open swim. Bummer. Too hot to run, besides I haven’t taken a day off from running since last Thursday. Today a break from disciplined moving outside. But not from thinking and writing and reading and dreaming.

Sometimes when something is missing, what you have left is making and believing (Keith S. Wilson).

Copying this quotation from Keith S. Wilson into this entry, I wasn’t thinking about the missing in relation to the green buoy I couldn’t see last night, yet swam straight towards. But somehow, it was the next thought I had as I stared at the words.

a few hours later: I’m sitting under the crab apple tree in my backyard in the shade — thank you, tree, for this shade on a hot day — and I’m re-reading Alice Oswald’s nobody and pondering a word, rumor/rumour:

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

unbroken

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

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

rumour (OED):

General talk or hearsay, not based on definite knowledge

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

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

To make a murmuring noise

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

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

july 3/RUNSWIM

3.1 miles
2 trails
72 degrees
dew point: 70

8 a.m. and already 72. It’s going to be hot today. Heard some birds and the coxswain and water trickling, then dropping steadily. The river was pale blue through the trees. When I heard the rowers I wondered how hot they were on the water without any shade.

overheard: an adult runner to a kid biking behind them — you’re doing such a good job!

Wore my bright yellow shoes — the ones I bought over a year ago and have tried to wear several times but always give up because they hurt my feet and my calves. They seem to be working now.

10 Things

  1. purple flowers just beyond the fence
  2. blue sky
  3. empty bench
  4. a roller skier holding their poles up instead of using them
  5. noisy birds near the tree that fell a few days ago onto the winchell trail
  6. a small circle of shimmer: sparkling water seen through a gap in the trees
  7. several stones stacked on the ancient boulder
  8. a small group of bikers — 4, I think — speeding past, one of them wearing a bright pink shirt
  9. a women with a dog stepping off the path near the bench above “the edge of the world”
  10. faint lines of yellow and orange and pink and purple chalk on the 38th street steps

orbit

This morning, another orbit around an idea that I’ve been orbiting for a few years now:

1

He aligns himself and moves forward with his face in the water staring down at the bottom of the lake. Old, beautiful shadows are wavering steadily across it. He angles his body and looks up at the sky. Old, beautiful clouds are wavering steadily across it. The swimmer thinks about symmetries, then rotates himself to swim on his back staring at the sky. Could we be exactly wrong about such things as—he rotates again—which way is up? High above him he can feel the clouds watching his back, waiting for him to fall toward them.

The Anthropology of Water/ Anne Carson

Which way is up? Which way down? Which real? Imagined? Symmetries or similarities?

2

I began more seriously than ever to learn the names of things—the wild plants and animals, natural processes, local places—and to articulate my observations and memories. My language increased and strengthened, and sent my mind into the place like a live root-system. And so what has become the usual order of things reversed itself with me: my mind became the root of my life rather than its sublimation. I came to see myself as growing out of the earth like the other native animals and plants. I saw my body and my daily motions as brief coherences and articulations of the energy of the place, which would fall back into the earth like leaves in the autumn.

Native Hill/ Wendell Berry

Brief coherences and articulations of the energy of the place.

3

Reading Berry, I’m reminded of Arthur Sze’s discussion of mushrooms as poems:

I began to think I love this idea that the mycelium is below the surface. It’s like the subconscious, then when the mushroom fruits pops up above ground, maybe that’s like this spontaneous outpouring of a poem or whatever.

4

Then, I returned, as I often do, to the beginnings of a poem:

Maybe like mushrooms, we rise
or not rise, flare —
brief bursts from below
then returns 
to swim in the dirt…

5

Could we be more like fungi/mushrooms, with their nets of mycellium, than trees with their roots and branches and one trunk? Googled it: Animals and fungi are each other’s closest relatives: congruent evidence from multiple proteins

6

And back to W. Berry and the reversing of wild and domestic:

VI.

our word “domestic” comes from the Latin domus, meaning “house” or “home.” To domesticate a place is to make a home of it. To be domesticated is to be at home.

X. 

But if we were really to pay attention to what we’ve been calling “wilderness” or “the wild,” whether in a national park or on a rewooded Kentucky hillside, we would learn something of the most vital and urgent importance: they are not, properly speaking, wild.

XI. 

Our overdone appreciation of wildness and wilderness has involved a little-noticed depreciation of true domesticity, which is to say homemaking, homelife, and home economy.

XII. 

With only a little self-knowledge and a little sitting still and looking, the conventional perspective of wild and domestic will be reversed: we, the industrial consumers of the world, are the wild ones, unrestrained and out of control, self-excluded from the world’s natural homemaking and living at home.

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
90 degrees

Another great swim! Felt strong — no strange calf pain, or feet that feel like they might start cramping, or fear over not seeing buoys. The water was warm and green. The sky was blue with a few clouds. No dragonflies or planes or menacing swans, although there was a lurking sailboat. The far green buoy still looked blue to me, when I could see it as having color. Often it looks like a white dot, or just a colorless dot that I understand as buoy.

I saw pale legs and green globs and a vague orangish red light and sparkle friends and bubbles and ghostly milfoil underwater. No ducks or fish or seagulls. For the last stretch of each loop, I recited the lines from Alice Oswald’s Dart that I just memorized:

1

Then I jumped in a rush of gold to the head,
through black and cold, red and cold, brown and warm,
giving the water the weight and size of myself in order to imagine it,
water with my bones, water with my mouth and my understanding

2

He dives, he shuts himself in a deep soft-bottomed
silence
which underwater is all nectarine, nacreous. He lifts
the lid and shuts and lifts the lid and shuts and the sky
jumps in and out of the world he loafs in.
Far off and orange in the glow of it he drifts

Such great lines that feel familiar when I’m swimming in the middle of the lake.

july 2/RUN

4 miles
franklin loop
68 degrees
humidity: 81%

Started at 7:30 a.m. and it was already hot and humid. That sun! Ran with Scott. We talked about AI and whether or not art was a purely human expression and how, within running circles, humidity is considered a “poor man’s altitude training.” We ran over the lake street bridge and the franklin bridge and above the mississippi rowing club and wondered what the loud buzzing noise below was. Trucks. My guess: doing something with the sewer vents by the rowing club. Scott’s guess: pulling a car out of the river.

10 Things

  1. a single rower on the river
  2. graffiti under the lake street bridge: Stop Hate
  3. cloudless blue sky
  4. everywhere, a thick green veil
  5. all the benches we ran by were facing a wall of green — on the other side of that: an unseen river
  6. 2 runners ahead of us disappearing into the trees — passing the spot a minute later, we noticed a steep dirt trail
  7. the cracked pavement that I’ve been monitoring for years has grown into a sinkhole
  8. the color of the river: brown in the foreground, blue in the background
  9. I don’t remember seeing shadows, just experiencing the cooling effects of shade
  10. beep beep beep — a truck backing up somewhere nearby

We started out doing 9/1, but had to take an extra minute of walking after the second interval. Still, we got outside and moved over 4 miles in the heat. Small victories: we ran more again in the last 2 miles and we ran up the entire section of the franklin hill even though I had initially wanted to walk it.

Found this definition of poetry by Wang Ping. Several years ago, she wrote a wonderful poem about the Mississippi River Gorge.

That’s what poetry is: a wind, a leaf of grass that ties time and space together (Wang Ping).

field

Continuing to think about the visual field test and the idea of my visual field. Today: what is a field? and can I play around with the idea of a field?

The visual field is “that portion of space in which objects are visible at the same moment during steady fixation of the gaze in one direction”; in ophthalmology and neurology the emphasis is mostly on the structure inside the visual field and it is then considered “the field of functional capacity obtained and recorded by means of perimetry”.

wikipedia

A single, fixed view from one direction — the space, and what’s contained within that space that can be seen.

I think I’ll leave thoughts about visual fields alone for now. Instead, I want to turn to a wonderful chapbook I just bought — as part of an entry fee for a chapbook contest — from Driftwood Press: Questions about Circulation

ruins/ Charles Malone

III.

The kitchen ceiling falls to the floor—
soaked plaster, moldy wood.
Hundred-year-old floors warp
something more sinister than time
in the farmhouse.
Plants grow to cover the windows,
the smell chokes
a massive colony of honeybees takes up in the siding,
raccoons come and go from the basement window.

This is the process by which a home becomes not,
a process other than a real estate transaction—
spills, arguments, accidents, cruelties.
You see other farmhouses stripped of paint
ducking behind wilding shrubs and flowering weeds.
The boundary between in and out blurs,
a sign with shameful orange letters on the door.
What action and inaction, what ruins a house
for the body and the lungs and recollection?
Rain, the creep of ivy, the sedimentary accumulation of dirt
this is the opposite of the joy of work.

1

Scott and I recently discovered more seasons of the Great House Revival where people take abandoned houses in Scotland Ireland (oops) and restore them. There are lots of discussions of water damage and rotten floorboards and overgrown yards and critters wandering in and out of basements and kitchens and first-floor (which is the second floor in a U.S. house) bedrooms.

2

Ever since I discovered the concept of re-wilding, I’ve been thinking about my eyes becoming wild again. At some point, my cone cells began scrambling then leaking then scarring then dying. Sometimes, I think of my central vision less like a wilderness, and more like a wasteland. But, there is something wild/feral about the refusal to fix/tame an image. Everything moves slightly — shakes, shimmers, fuzzes, fizzes. Nothing is still.

june 23/RUNWALKSWIM

run: 4.05 miles
minnehaha falls and back
71 degrees
dew point: 66

It felt warmer than 71, the air thicker than a 66 dew point. Had to remind myself a few times that I could stick to my 9/1 plan. And I did — at least through the first 3 cycles. Had to do an extra minute of walking at 32 or 33 minutes in, but then I got right back on track. A victory!

overheard: Just starting my run, I overheard one woman say to the other: that was the first time I ever saw a spider biting me! As opposed to waking up with spider bites, not knowing when you got them, I suppose.

10 Things

  1. one of the recently re-mulched trails that leads down into the oak savanna looked dark and deep and mysterious — partly due to a late June abundance of green leaves blocking out the light, partly the sun behind the clouds
  2. a smattering of young runners in small groups — a high school cross-country team already in training?
  3. empty benches
  4. the steady hum of some construction equipment
  5. a sour smell coming from a trash can
  6. a packed shopping cart parked on the lowest part of the trail that dips below the road
  7. the flash of a very small bird — a hummingbird? — flying past me
  8. an over-the-shoulder sideways glance at the falls: all white foam
  9. 2 people waiting to pay for parking at the falls
  10. mostly overcast with a few stretches of pale sun

A good run. A low average heart rate. A steady pace. A chance to be above the gorge and the river. And, interesting thoughts. Earlier this morning, I was reminded of some ideas about movement and death and the Homeric mind, and they fluttered like loose threads behind and beside me as I ran.

thread 1: entangled, murky, thick-layered

As I ran on the Winchell Trail through the thick green, I thought that when I’m running by the gorge, I think of it in broad, basic ways: tree, rock, bluff, bird, water. Then my mind wandered, and I wondered: (Why) do we need more specific, “technical” names in order to connect with the land? I thought about the importance of names and the violence of occupying and renaming, the value of knowing the history of a place, understanding how it works scientifically, and placing it in a larger context (space, time). Then, as I ran up the short, steep hill by Folwell, I thought about how important it is to learn to think on all of these levels at once, or at least be able to switch back and forth between them. I can experience the gorge as water, rock, tree, bird, wind, or as stolen land occupied and used, abused, restored, protected, ignored, exploited. As a geological wonder, slowly–but not really slowly in geological time, 4 feet per year–carved out by the river eroding the soft St. Peter sandstone. As both wild/natural and cultivated/managed–the site of erosion due to water, and erosion due to the introduction of invasive species, industry, too many hikers, bikers, houses nearby. There isn’t an easy way to reconcile these different understandings and their impacts.

23 june 2021

thread 2: moving as death rearranged

from To chlorophyll, refineries, coal, furnaces beneath early skyscrapers, fossils/ Caroline Kenworthy

Life’s long inhale of nutrients, and longer, hotter exhalation in decay. Packed, still, silent.

Hard to remember that matter hums constantly.
These cars and highways— how much of moving is death rearranged.

I kept thinking about this idea of death rearranged. At point, I thought, of course — recycling, decomposing, rebirth = rearranging. I like this word choice — rearranging.

thread 3: Homeric mind

this physical thing that moves. So, if you imagine a place over the sea, your mind actually has to get there. So, even though it may be as fast as the light, it is physical movement.

 A Conversation with Kit Fan and Alice Oswald

The mind as moving — not just through associations, but literally moving, traveling.

As I thought about movement and connection, and death rearranged on my walk back after the run, I passed by a painted rock at the edge of neighbor’s side garden that read, We are our ancestors with an arrow pointing to plants. Yes. No one is gone, just rearranged, reconfigured. And, we are connected deeply to the green.

walk: 3 miles
east lake library and back
78 degrees

Walked to the library to pick up Anne Carson’s Float. I’ve checked it out once or twice before but I’m thinking this time I might be more interested in it. (2 hours and several naps later: nope. Still don’t understand it or why it’s called float, but I found a review of it and Mary Ruefle’s My Private Property that might help.) It was fun walking through the neighborhood, looking at how different neighbors deal with their slanting lawn. FWA is interested in re-doing ours for us. Wood, rock, stone, mulch, hostas, ornamental grass. My favorite flowers: the vines with the bright purple flowers — clematis, I think, and the dozens of cacti with beautiful yellow blooms. Saw a lime green door, like mine, on a bright blue garage. A perfect blue for the green, but maybe too much for a whole house. And, it clashed with the purple fence. Heard some loud christian rock blasting from a backyard and a 2 story tall skeleton wearing a green t-shirt in a front yard. Kids on scooters, yelling from inside houses, lounging by the pool at longfellow park.

Speaking of kids, we live next to a daycare. It’s never been a problem because the kids usually stay inside so I never hear them. A few months ago, Sheila (our neighbor and owner of the daycare) began letting 2 little girls play outside in their front yard and our side yard. They are very loud and like to scream a lot. And they are right outside of my windows so I hear them and see them flitting and darting out of the corner of my eye. Thankfully they haven’t opened our gate . . . yet. It doesn’t seem like they are being supervised. Today Scott noticed that one of them had picked up a giant branch — taller than them — and was waving it around — through the air, at the other little girl. No adults stopped them until about 15 minutes later when they were scolded. Yikes.

5

point
could
stick
least
first
extra
right
track
other
green
light
cloud
empty
group
cross
smell
front
never
being
story

trash
trail
below
heart
above
loose
thick
gorge
think
basic
bluff
water
order
value
place
short
steep
giant
adult
until

forth
abuse
carve
house
death
early
decay
still
there
about
after
arrow
plant
check
twice
might
later
stone
mulch
hosta

empty group smell
basic bluff order
thick heart track
cloud water light
green house plant
extra loose trash
never think twice

swim: 5 cedar loops (2.5 lake nokomis)
cedar lake open swim
80 degrees

First open swim of the season at Cedar Lake. Wonderful conditions. Warm-enough water and no chop. I felt strong and fast and smooth. I didn’t stray too far to the center. They have a new lifeguard who was actually telling people dogs weren’t allowed in the water and requiring people to have swim caps. Is Cedar Lake going to lose some of its chill vibes?

The water was olive green, but more yellow than the blue of lake nokomis. I didn’t see any fish or get wrapped in vines. No canoes crossed my path, either. Not too many clouds in the sky. No planes or birds.

A great early evening for a swim!

june 22/RUNBIKESWIM

run: 2 miles
2 trails
81 degrees
dew point: 73

Before biking over for a swim, I decided to run a few miles in the heat. 7 am and already 81. Ugh. Even with the heat, it was nice to get out by the gorge. Was able to greet Mr. Morning. I know I looked at the river, but I don’t remember what I saw. Was it blue? Probably. Was it shimmering? Possibly. Didn’t hear any rowers or roller skiers. A few bikes on the trail, 4 bikes on the road, out for a serious ride, hugging the curb to let cars go by. I heard sprinklers and dripping water and scattered voices.

image: walking up the 38th street steps from the winchell trail to the river road trail, the undersides of the steps had a faint colorful glow — one step was purple, another pink, orange, green, red, yellow. Was it the light? No someone had used chalk to color the steps. For Pride month, I’m assuming. Very cool.

The Alchemist/ Louise Bogan

I burned my life, that I might find 
A passion wholly of the mind, 
Thought divorced from eye and bone, 
Ecstasy come to breath alone. 
I broke my life, to seek relief 
From the flawed light of love and grief.

With mounting beat the utter fire 
Charred existence and desire. 
It died low, ceased its sudden thresh.
I found unmysterious flesh—
Not the mind’s avid substance—still
Passionate beyond the will.

mind/body split described as thought divorced from the eye and bone, and breath alone

unmysterious flesh — not pure mind but something passionate beyond mind and will

I like the rhyme here; it doesn’t feel forced

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
84 degrees (there) / 88 (back)

So windy and hot! Difficult, especially on the way there. I seemed to be always biking straight into the wind and out of the shade. Other than the heat and the wind and the bright sun, it was great. I’m feeling comfortable on my bike this year.

5 Bike Things / 5 Swim Things

  1. bike: a big bird — eagle? turkey vulture? — soaring above the falls parking lot
  2. bike: another biker far ahead, looking small and just in the center of my vision, reminding me of the far off barn in the vision test
  3. bike: so many e-bikes on the trail, which I think is good and not good — it’s complicated
  4. bike: more kids splashing and swimming and yelling in the creek — didn’t see them, but heard them and saw an inner tube on the side of the trail
  5. bike: the stand of trees to the right of the bike trail in the stretch between lake hiawatha and lake nokomis looked deep green and cool and inviting
  6. swim: minnows and small 6 inch fish near the shore
  7. swim: the underwater plants looked orange or greenish brown and they didn’t look like plumes or feathers, but like christmas tree branches. did they have an attitude of a plume? what would that be — ornamental? showy? preening? Nope, these plants had an attitude of a fungus or rash or disease — spreading, taking over, menacing
  8. the light underwater: I can see them as bars, a series of them, slanted and spread out from one central point
  9. sparkling water above, sparkle friends below
  10. so choppy from the wind, rocking me — not gentle but not rough either

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
86 degrees

It was so windy and choppy that they couldn’t put the green buoys in. Just 3 orange buoys today and out and back. I thought maybe I would only do 2 loops, but I felt good enough to do a third. Nice work! The choppy water was difficult — especially breathing — but I liked it. I thought about a poem I wrote that has yet to find a home about stroking straight into waves. Not fighting the lake but taking up its challenge.

The water is still fairly clear and I enjoyed looking at the vegetation and the lake floor as I approached the shore. Much easier to tell when it’s shallow enough to stand up!

During one loop, noticing the sparkle on the water, I suddenly felt happy and grateful and content. What a life! I love swimming in this water.

Just remembered something else: stroking roughly through the water, being buffeted by waves, I felt like a boat moving across choppy water, half-submerged. Yesterday, I was talking to FWA about how I imagine myself less of a fish, more of a boat.

more from Anne Carson and “An Essay on Swimming”:

Saturday 6:30 a.m. Swimming.

the motion of the strange white hands. Gold rungs slide past beneath. Red water plants waver up from the bottom in an attitude of plumes. How slow is the slow trance of wisdom, which the swimmer swims into.

Are my hands white when I swim, or is it just the legs and feet of other swimmers?
Not shafts of light but gold rungs?
The water plants are orange or green, but never red, right? (I’ll check tomorrow).
Plumes is a better description than feathers.
The slow trance of wisdom. Swimming for over an hour in lake nokomis puts me in a trance, for sure.

Friday 8 a.m. Swimming.

On the surface the water is navy blue and
corrugated by wind. Spots of white foam crowd hectically up
and down the waves. there is an urgency to it as if a telephone
were ringing in the house. But there is no telephone in the house.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen the lake surface navy blue, but I have seen it corrugated. I like that word as a description for a rough surface.

urgency like a telephone ringing in a house, but there is no house. Is there a name for experiencing the same feeling but in a different context. I don’t think this is just metaphor, or is it?

Wednesday 8:30 a.m. Swimming.

the swimmer inserts himself into the dark green glass.

Wednesday 5:45 p.m. Swimming.

The lake is cool and rippled by an inattentive wind. The swimmer moves heavily through an oblique greenish gloom of underwater sunset

from an earlier essay in The Anthropology of Water: “The Wishing Jewel: Introduction to Water Margins:

My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. This line reminds me of a poem I re-encountered yesterday during my “on this day” reading practice:

from Conversation with a Pebble/Alyson Hallett

I kiss the pebble,
Watch the moisture from my lips sink in.

That’s what I’m hiding,
It says. Water. The tiniest Rivers, lakes, seas.

Ideas of what water
Can be. Yes, pebble says,
I am hiding all the world’s memory.

5

I’ve probably missed some, but here are the five letter words (minus plurals) that I found in this entry:

gorge
greet
river
trail
heard
water
voice
street
trail
faint
green
light
chalk
color
pride
month
split
alone
rhyme
windy
shade
great
eagle
above
ahead
small
think
creek
inner
stand
right
brownplume
point
below
rough
today
maybe
third
still
clear
floor
shore
happy
being
about
white
slide
waver
trance
other
never
check

rough windy rhyme
stand still today
below color trance
waver above water
faint floor shore
above gorge being
think inner creek
never point alone
happy water slide
great white check

This is fun!

june 21/RUN

4 miles
the Monument and back
82 degrees
dew point: 74

Last night I decided I would get up early and do a 7 mile run. Then I checked the forecast. 80 at 6 am. What? No thanks. I went to bed thinking I might skip running today and tomorrow (the low is 80). Then I woke up at 6 and even though it felt oppressive outside, I decided to go for a run. Maybe a 5k. Somehow, without meaning to, I ran 4 miles. It was hard. I felt almost dizzy once as I walked up the lake street bridge steps. And I’m glad I did it. Even with a few extra walk breaks I consider this run a victory.

Yes, it was warm and uncomfortable, but it was worth it for the quiet and for the strange light: darker, a little ominous, the green so deep, not glowing but pulsing? not sure what word I would use.

10+ Things

  1. on the lake street bridge from east to west, to the right a pale blue sky, to the left darker blueish-purple
  2. on the lake street bridge, wind blowing hard from the south, a bird getting a boost and flying so fast
  3. from the monument, I could her Shadow Falls dripping
  4. small white caps on the river
  5. the gentle slope of a mowed stretch of grass between Shadow Falls and the Monument
  6. the shuffling of a runner’s feet across the road
  7. the clicking and clacking of ski poles through the trees and on the other side of the ravine
  8. at the Monument, the line of narrow paving stones near the water fountain — they looked old — when were they placed here and who did it?
  9. the swirling and waving of some wildflowers in the wind
  10. taking off my cap on the bridge because of the wind, feeling it hit my face and grab my hair
  11. encountered the runner who wears bright orange compression socks*

*I’ve encountered this runner enough that they’re officially a regular. I think I’ll call him Mr. Orange Socks

Listened to the wind and dripping water and the heavy air for 3 of the miles. Put in my “It’s Windy” playlist for the final mile. Windy has stormy eyes that flash at the sound of lies.

Encountered two Anne Carson poems this morning and it feels like a sign, or a nudge, to keep reading her The Anthropology of Water. One of this poems was from an 21 june entry in 2022 (Could I), and this one from today’s poem of the day:

Between Us And/ Anne Carson

BETWEEN US AND
animals is a namelessness.
We    flail    around
generically      —
camelopardalis   is   what
the Romans came up with
or  ”giraffe” ( it looked to
them like a camel crossed
with a leopard ) or get the
category wrong — a musk
Ox isn’t an ox at all but
more closely cognate with
the  goat —  and   when
choosing   to    name
individual  animals  we
pretend they are objects
(Spot) or virtues (Beauty)
or just other selves (Bob).

The idea of knowing the names of things has come up before on this blog. There’s the act of naming something, which is addressed in this poem and evidenced in my naming of “regulars,” and there is also the act of learning the name that a living thing calls itself. Robin Wall Kimmerer (Gathering Moss in 22 march 2024 entry), JJJJJerome Ellis (“A Litany of Names” from Aster of Ceremonies), and Alice Oswald (“Violent” in 16 feb 2025 entry) all describe this in their writing.

an hour later: Taking up the nudge to read more Anne Carson, I returned to The Anthropology of Water. I focused on the final section, “Margins: An Essay on Swimming By My Brother.” Wow! So many great descriptions of what it feels like to swim in a lake! I need to make a list.

I may have posted this bit before, but here’s Carson’s answer to the question, How does swimming figure into your writing?

It keeps me from being morose and crabby. Sometimes I think in the pool. Usually it’s a bad idea. The ideas you have in the pool are like the ideas you have in a dream, where you get this sentence that answers all questions you’ve ever had about reality and you get up groggily and write it down, and in the morning, it looks like “let’s buy bananas” or something completely irrelevant. Plus, I like water. Some people just need to be near water.

Interview in Paris Review

I am one of those people who needs be near water.

Back to the “An Essay on Swimming.” I like how it’s structured: journal entries titled with day of the week and time and either swimming or not swimming. Here’s the second entry:

Friday 4:00 p.m. Swimming.

In late afternoon the lake is shaded. There is the sudden luxury of the places where the cold springs come flooding up around the swimmer’s body from below like an opening dark green geranium of ice. Marble hands drift enormously in front of his face. He watches them move past him down into the lower water where red stalks float in dust. A sudden thin shaft of fish smell. No sleep here, the swimmer thinks as he shoots along through the utterly silent razor-glass dimness. One drop of water entirely awake.

I like how there’s no date. It’s placed in time, but vaguely.

that sudden luxury! I welcome those cold patches in lake nokomis when I swim but I don’t think they’re from cold springs. What are they from? Now when I feel them I will think: I’m being flooded with a dark green geranium of ice!

marble hands — yes! that’s how I should describe the pale legs and hands of swimmers that I’ve seen recently.

where red stalks float in dust — for me: curled green feathers that do more than float, they seem to reach up to/for me.

that’s me: one drop of water entirely awake

Recap, and to put on a list of Carson’s water descriptions to use/think about as I swim:

  • I’m being flooded with a dark green geranium of ice!
  • marble hands and legs
  • stalks that reach to/for me
  • me as one drop of water entirely awake

june 19/RUNBIKESWIM

2.75 miles
trestle turn around
73 degrees
dew point: 63

Ugh! Too warm for me today. I wanted to get up earlier, so I went to bed at 9:45, but I still slept poorly and didn’t wake up until 8. A small victory: I wanted to turn around at a mile, but I kept going until I got to the trestle. Took a walk break, then ran a faster mile. I heard rowers and kids yelling. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker and Daddy Long Legs. Dodged a pack of people emerging from the rowing club entrance. Admired the cottonwood fuzz looking light green on the edge of the trail. Counted the stones stacked on the ancient boulder: 3, with another stone waiting for a friend. Stopped and stared at the ironwork of the trestle stretching to the east bank of the river.

before the run

Yesterday, this was the poem of the day:

Altitude/ Airea D. Matthews

Icarus, he advised,
heed the warning: don’t fly 
too near the sun or sea; 
stay the path.

But I mistook the sky for an iris,
and entered at the northern horizon,
where map edges blister,
and the compass wasps. 

I was dutiful but unwooed
by chisel and bench, contracts
scribbled in fig sap, or watching
Ariadne ungold time.

          What awe is there
in earthen labyrinths?

Wax molds itself sublime,
shapes wings each night.
Light refracts my name in
dialect only moths comprehend.

I belong elemental, where trees 
chance to become constellations,
where the bar-headed goose flies
past with the heart of a clock and

Zeus is a silver kite tethered
to Olympus by harp strings
trembling an offering. 

          Of bliss? To remember
the why of it all. 

Bliss is a body absconding
warp speed toward 
a dwarf star whispering,
Unsee the beheld.

My fall, well, yes,
those depths matter less.
What I learned by height—
that’s the story.

Iris? A flower? Part of the eye?

map edges blister
compass wasps
I love these nouns as verbs

ungold time — love how that sounds, but what does it mean to ungold something? to tarnish it? Looked up Ariadne — from Green mythology, gave Theseus a thread to help him survive the labyrinth, kill the Minotaur, known to some as goddess of weaving, also her diadem ends up in the sky as a constellation

light refracts in dialect only moths comprehend — I might want to use that — so good

a goose with the heart of a clock, to belong elemental

bliss
the why of it all
bliss is a body

Unsee the beheld — I want to devote some time to thinking through what this idea might mean to me

And here’s the poet’s expanation:

About this Poem

“‘Altitude’ reimagines the myth of Icarus not as a cautionary tale of hubris, but as a meditation on ecstatic pursuit, disobedience, and the search for transcendent knowledge. The speaker rejects Daedalus’s pragmatic warnings, drawn instead to a metaphysical journey—flying not for safety or ambition, but to answer an elemental, inner urge to transform, no matter the consequence.”

during the run

As I suffered through my run, when I wasn’t thinking about wanting to stop or how hot it was, I thought about the command, Unsee the Beheld. I held onto the thoughts and spoke them into my phone at the end of the run:

Unsee as different than not-seeing (which I ‘ve thought/written about before). Not seeing is a static thing; you just don’t see it. To unsee is more active and also suggests a process of unravelling which is where my vision is at.

A few minutes later in the walk, I thought about flipping the phrase to, behold the unseen.

after the run

I like thinking about to unsee as a verb, an act, a process, a type of prayer? Just as seeing is not a static thing, where you simply see, but a process of light and signals and filtering and guessing by the brain, unseeing is a process of slow (or sporadic) unravelling then adapting — a brain doing mysterious and magical things with the scrambled and limited data it receives, a mind developing new ways to witness/behold without stable and dependable eyes.

And now I’m thinking of unseeing as eroding/erosion and the creation of the gorge. Rock erosion occurs in 2 main ways at the Mississippi River Gorge: 1. soft sandstone slowly and gradually wears away as it encounters water and air and 2. this wearing away weakens the foundation for limestone until it breaks. My unseeing process could be similar: the slow and gradual dying/not working of cell cones until a final break and no central vision. Is this how it will happen? Maybe, but maybe not.

a volta

A few months ago, I briefly wrote about the volta. When? Just remembered: it was during my study of time and thinking about the cyclical time and turning while I was listening to the Byrds — to everything turn, turn, turn. This morning, reviewing a poem I posted on this day in 2022, I think I found a good example of it in Ada Limón’s poem, Calling Things What They Are. For much of the poem, she is writing about what a difference it makes to know the names of birds or trees and how she likes to call things in the natural world what they are. Then she ends the poem with this:

I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates you, and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in, but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.

a thought on time from the novel. The Bear

I’m reading a beautiful novel, The Bear by Andrew Krivak. A bear and a young girl are discussing how all creatures can speak. Skeptical, the girl asks, What about the trees? After instructing her on how and where to listen to the trees the bear said,

the voices of the trees were the voice of the forest, and that when they spoke, they spole with such indifference to time that it would take the girl several moons to hear one of their conversations, the better part of one just to hear a single word.

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
84 degrees

Another anxiety-free bike ride, and no knee pain. Hooray! Hotter and harder on the way there. It felt like I was biking into some wind. The bike back was wonderful. A little cooler, the glow of a lower sun and my satisfied muscles. I thought about how I don’t ever want to take biking for granted. I never know when my last cone cells will go and I’m not sure what that will mean for biking. Will it be too scary and unsettling? I want to bike more this summer.

5 bike things, 5 swimming things

  1. bike: nearing lake nokomis I heard a siren, then saw an ambulance by the lake. Was it coming from the beach?
  2. bike: 3 or 4 kids yelling and running across the path toward the creek with inner tubes. A dad called out to one — not to caution or scold but to collect their glasses
  3. bike: a recumbent bike, slow and low to the ground
  4. bike: going slower so I could keep a good distance between me and a group of bikers up ahead. The last one in line was wearing a dark pink shirt
  5. bike: turning onto the part of the path that’s between hiawatha and the creek and looking down at a part of the creek that I don’t know very well
  6. swim: olive green water
  7. swim: waiting in the shallow water before it started, the kids were so LOUD — I flinched as they screamed near my ear
  8. swim: the visibility underwater was good — I saw a lot of pale legs kicking
  9. swim: clear enough that I could see how deep the water was as milfoil stretched up from the bottom — delightfully creepy!
  10. swim: my sparkle friends were joined by shafts of light

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
84 degrees

Got to the lake early — a half hour before it started — to make sure I got a spot for my bike and my bag. I was hoping they’d start as early as they did on Tuesday. Nope, but still 5 minutes early. My left shoulder hurt a little at the beginning, but by the end it was okay. It wasn’t the easiest swim — I’m out of shape — but it was still amazing. I kept thinking about how I’ll feel after a couple of weeks of steady swimming: amazing.

At one point when I was ready to be done, I had a flash of a thought: what would happen if my body just shut down right here in the middle of the lake. No panic, just curiosity. At another point, I thought about unsee the beheld, both the unsee and beheld part. what was beheld? swimming, a practice in unseeing.

This just popped in my head: See no cola, Hear no cola, Drink uncola. That’s on my favorite sleeping bag from the 70s.