Tag: poem

aug 22/RUNSWIM

3.7 miles
marshall loop
61 degrees / humidity: 80%

Cooler, but thicker air. Did the Marshall loop for the first time in months. Running up the Marshall hill wasn’t too bad. I don’t remember what I thought about, except briefly hearing my steady foot strikes and imagining them to be a stillness in contrast with the traffic and the wind and the noises everywhere around me.

10 Things

  1. running up the hill, I felt the presence of orange — pinkish orange light. Was it from a wildfire sun? an orange sign?
  2. zinnias! more orange and pink
  3. running past Black coffee, noticing a man sitting at the counter, facing the window — I think he was reading the paper
  4. running past a walker on the hill, breathing as hard walking as I was running
  5. messed up slats on blinds in the window of the garage that is up against the sidewalk — blinds in a garage?
  6. steady traffic on the east river road
  7. overheard, a runner talking to 2 other runners: and when you got injured, and you got covid, I realized, ok they’re human too
  8. the river, running towards the marshall bridge — slate blue, empty
  9. yellow leaves on one of the earliest trees to change color
  10. an unusual stone stacking! 3 different stacks precariously placed on the slanted part of the boulder

Running on Cretin, I saw (but didn’t stop to read it) another poem from the St. Paul poetry project. I checked the map and maybe it was this one?

Untitled/ Pat Owens (2010)

A dog on a walk,
is like a person in love – You can’t tell them
it’s the same old world.

Saw this quote from Louise Glück and wanted to remember it:

I tell my students who believe passionately in explaining the work they’re sharing, “You know, when you’re dead, you can’t go around explaining this thing–it has to be right there on the page.”

Interview with Paris Review/ Louise Glück

Continuing to think about still and its many meanings.

still (def.)

  1. a static photograph, movie still
  2. an apparatus used for the distillation of liquids
  3. inactive, motionless, static
  4. silent, soundless
  5. placed, quiet, unruffled, tranquil, smooth
  6. noneffervescent, not sparkling
  7. free from noticable current
  8. calm down, quiet, lull, tranquilize
  9. hush, silence, shut up
  10. allay, relieve, ease
  11. without change, interruption, or cessation
  12. howver, nonethelss, yet, all the same, even so, nonetheless

swim: 5 nokomis loops
cedar lake open swim
74 degrees

Since Lake Nokomis is closed due to the sewer break, the final open swim was at Cedar Lake. It was windy and felt much cooler, both in and out of the water, than mid 70s. Brrr! Even before I got in the water, I had goosebumps. The water was very choppy — lots of breathing on my right side, some breathing every 2 strokes. I’m glad I didn’t really need to sight because it was difficult to see anything in the choppy water.

10+ Things

  1. sailboat with a white sail — have I ever seen a sailboat at cedar?
  2. a tall person, upright, on a paddle board with a dog
  3. scratchy vine, stuck on my googles
  4. scratchy vine, wrapped around my shoulders
  5. scratching vine, feeling almost like a full body scan as I crossed over it
  6. vine, reaching up from the bottom, clinging to my foot
  7. faint feelings of red and orange in the trees
  8. following behind a swimmer with a pink buoy, always just ahead, sometimes getting lost in the waves
  9. the soft, fading light as the sun dipped lower
  10. pale blue sky with feathery clouds
  11. a seagull span soaring above the water, looking for fish?

The last open swim of the season. As I swam my final loop, tired out from the waves and cold, I tried to take the moment in. Such a wonderful season. I leveled up — swimming much longer and for more loops. I felt strong and confident and not afraid when I couldn’t see anything but water and sky and Tree. Part of me wishes open swim would never end, but the rest of me knows that 10 weeks of swimming this much, especially outside in a lake, is enough. In January and February, I’ll remember the first orange buoy looking like the moon in an afternoon sky or the glow of orange when the light hits the buoy just right or the gentle rocking of the waves or that satisfied feeling after 90 minutes in the water.

aug 14/RUN

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.

aug 2/SWIM

4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
75 degrees

An almost perfect morning for a swim: sunny, warm, barely a ripple in the water. Amazing. I couldn’t see the orange buoys, but it didn’t matter. Steady and straight, right to them. On the first loop, something hard bumped into me — a twig? — and, for a moment, I was startled out of my stroking and breathing trance. I thought about what was down below me, imagining some fish swimming up and bumping into me. Then I forgot about it and almost everything else.

As I entered the water, more than a dozen tiny minnows parted at my feet — the fish in me escaping!

10 Things

  1. cloudless blue sky — bright, but not quite cerulean
  2. a dragonfly near the surface — at least I think it was dragonfly, it looked big, but too small for a bird — size is often distorted when looking in the lake
  3. swimming south towards the bridge, shafts of light were rising up from the bottom of the lake
  4. a few planes in the air
  5. both green buoys were easy to sight — bright, white dots in the distance
  6. hardly any other swimmers in the water — in the best way possible, I felt alone
  7. water surface: blue, flat, smooth
  8. stopping briefly in the middle of the lake, hearing the sloshing and rhythmic splashing of someone else’s strokes
  9. after the swim, walking near the bike rack: the solar panels on top of the picnic structure were casting pale orange shapes on the sidewalk
  10. swimming east towards the little beach, the bubbles my hands make were sparkling and glittering in the sun, too sparkling to be real, looking like something you’d see in a cartoon*

*Days after writing this, I happened to be watching classic Scooby-Doo and saw the bubbles I was thinking of:

unreal, sparkly, bubbles-as-outlines

Speaking of bubbles, I searched for them on Poetry Foundation and found these lines:

Its bubbles are words
meant for no one.
(from In the Aquarium/ Dunya Mikhail)

I like imagining my underwater bubbles as words being released, not as speech intended for any one, but as something else: a letting go? an accident — leaking words all over the lake?

I’m reminded of Alice Oswald’s restless thought bubbles in Nobody released from the body and traveling across the water, there and there and there.

I’m also reminded of Anne Sexton and “The Nude Swim”:

We calmly trailed over them
and under them, shedding
air bubbles, little white
balloons that drifted up
into the sun

What patterns do I leave on the surface with my strokes, and how long do they last? What if my bubbles could float above and witness them?

aug 1/BIKESWIM

bike: 8.5 miles
lake nokomis and back
77 degrees

What an evening for a bike ride! Since it had just rained, there weren’t that many people on the paths. I didn’t have to pass anyone and I didn’t experience any scary, I-can’t-see moments. The bike ride on the way back was the best — evening light, cooler air, getting closer to dusk. So much better to be on a bike, outside, than in a car. Heard the rushing creek and some kids playing in the water. Felt satisfied after 80 minutes in the water.

5 loops
lake nokomis open swim
77 degrees

The first loop was surprisingly difficult. Sometimes it felt like I was swimming through syrup — heavy, slow — and sometimes like I was against a current — never going anywhere, or being pushed off course. How strong can the current be in lake nokomis? I thought about the Seine and the Olympic triathletes and how hard it must have been to swim in that current. I’m not sure I’m tough enough for that. How will the open water swimmers do it, swimming a 10k in that current?

Gradually the loops got easier. Sighting the green buoys was almost impossible. I couldn’t really see the buoys until I was about 20 strokes from them; I relied on my knowledge of the lake and the general outline of the course to guide me and believed that I was going the right way. I think my brain was receiving some data from my eyes that I wasn’t consciously aware of — isn’t that strange? Whatever was happening, I was always swimming straight for the buoys, even when I didn’t know that I was.

The stretch from the last green buoy to the first orange one took forever. I was experiencing that Poltergeist hallway effect where the buoy was never getting closer. Since it had worked before to break than never-ending hallway spell, I decided to count my strokes, not 1 2 3 4 5 over and over, but 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 . . . 50. At first, it wasn’t working, but slowly — too slowly — the buoy got closer. With each loop this effect lessened. By the fifth loop, I was in the groove. I almost swam a 6th loop, but I thought it might be hard to bike after that and get up tomorrow morning and swim again. 5 was plenty.

I saw planes and dragonflies and sailboats. Felt a few vines. Heard some sloshing. Admired my bubbles. Experienced this weird visual effect — not an optical illusion or a hallucination, or was it?: I kept seeing the tree line, far off in the distance, as a lifeguard on a kayak. Again and again. It was irritating, because I kept adjusting my direction so I wouldn’t run into the phantom lifeguard.

Paused a few times in the middle of the lake — alone in a blue quiet.

Felt happy and strong and pleased with all the work — 10 years of showing up at this lake and gradually increasing my distance — I’ve put in to be able to swim for 120 minutes without stopping or cramping or feeling exhausted. Thanks past Saras, and good job Sara, age 50!

in the morning, while it softly rained

Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t study poets! You read them, and think, That’s marvelous, how is it done, could I do it? and that’s how you learn.

Interview with Paris Review / Philip Larkin

I love this about poetry.

On Ghosts V. Zombies/ Suzanne Buffam

Soul without a body or body without a soul?
Like choosing between an empty lake
And the same empty lake.

For the past few years, I’ve devoted a lot of attention to ghosts and haunts, but I’ve rarely thought about zombies. Is it partly because Scott hates zombies so much? I’m not sure why. This poem is making me want to think about them now. So many directions to go with it — the relationship between the body and the soul or the body and the spirit or the body and the mind; how, because I can’t see people’s faces or make eye contact, they look soulless to me — I’m a ghost among zombies; Alice Oswald and the Homeric mind — our thoughts traveling outside of our bodies; Emily Dickinson and the soul that wanders; the fish in us escaping (Anne Sexton) or the bees released, returned to the hive/heaven (Eliot Weinberger). Zombies can be my fall project! Maybe I can even convince Scott to give zombies a chance?! Now I’m excited for fall!

I want to wait for fall to begin studying zombies partly because fall is spooky season and partly because right now I’m still immersed in water. For August, I want to write a poem every day about water. It doesn’t have to be good, I just need to put some words on the page.

in the afternoon, after the rain, before a swim

I’m reviewing my entries from July for a monthly assignment summary. It’s giving me ideas for what to notice/think about during my swim tonight:

  1. water and light, above and below the surface; types of light; sparkles and shimmers and glimmers and glints
  2. what are lake nokomis’ rules and offerings?
  3. different perspectives of the water: from the sidewalk, above the beach; on the beach; in the shallow water; mid-lake; before/during/after a swim

I didn’t think much about the rules or the different perspectives, but I do recall noticing the light. Swimming into the light, from the little beach to the big beach, the light was too bright, blinding. Impossible to see the green buoys clearly — as green, as buoys. After a few loops, I realized that at certain angles the sun sparkled off the green buoy — just a quick flash, once. Enough to keep me believing I was swimming towards it; I was. No shafts of light underwater, but enough light to see my sparkle friends — the sediment in the water. No reflections off of the buoys, or under the water. Nothing glinting, no swimmer’s shimmering splash.

july 29/RUN

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

  1. 4 or 5 stones stacked on the boulder
  2. the blue graffiti under the lake street bridge is not letters, but shapes of some sort
  3. a park worker on a big, lawn mower/tractor, whipping around trees, cutting the grass
  4. hello friends! — greeting the Welcoming Oaks
  5. a mother yelling at her kid — Carly Jane (or something close to that), put your legs down NOW!
  6. river water moving fast — I could actually hear it flowing south
  7. another park vehicle with bright headlights, trimming trees next to the trail
  8. gushing seeps in the limestone below the U of M campus
  9. a radio blasting out of a car window — didn’t recognize the song
  10. 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.

Other sources to remember:

Cole Swensen and bridges

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.

july 27/RUN

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

  1. a large stack of stones on the boulder — 5 or more?
  2. rowers, down below — a coxswain’s voice
  3. bright blue bubble-letter graffiti under the lake street bridge
  4. smell: hot chocolate — in this heat? deep, rich, feeling like winter
  5. overheard: 1 runner to another — and of course, she made all those passive-aggressive comments
  6. a big group of shirtless runners (10 of them?), a smaller group of runners with shirts (5 or 6)
  7. a runner, in all black, including black pants (in this heat!?), steadily running up the franklin hill ahead of me
  8. sparkling water through the gap in the trees
  9. a very tall runner — young, long and gangly legs
  10. roller skiers — 2 or 3 — clicking and clacking with their poles
  11. 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 thre’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 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 . . . .

july 22/RUNSWIMBIKE

run: 4 miles
to lake nokomis
73 degrees

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

  1. park workers out near the trail, moving and weed-whacking
  2. 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!
  3. a little mud, some soft, sandy dirt, scattered tree limbs
  4. water rushing out of the sewer pipe — steady, soft
  5. someone biking on the walking path
  6. the creek was high and tumbling over rocks, impersonating a babbling brook
  7. 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?
  8. thwack thwack people playing on the pickleball court, hitting the balls hard
  9. a haunting call — was it a mourning dove or a kid? difficult to tell
  10. 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

  1. Mishearing
  2. Misunderstanding
  3. Mistranslating
  4. Mismanaging
  5. Mislaying
  6. Misreading
  7. Misappropriating cliches
  8. Misplacing objects belonging to roommates or lovers
  9. Misguided thoughts at inappropriate times, funerals, etc.
  10. 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.

Another year when I can see well enough to bike!

july 17/RUN

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!

Found this green poem this morning.

Mount Grace Priory/ G.C. Waldrep

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.

july 16/RUNSWIM

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

  1. a chorus of BIRD — chattering, chirping, cheeping
  2. a little toddler voice trying to repeat binoculars after his mom said it in a neighbor’s backyard
  3. the shshshsh of my feet striking grit on the sidewalk
  4. overheard from one biker to another — and it was so quiet you could hear the water lapping against the shore
  5. a male coxswain below instructing rowers
  6. my house key softly jingling in my pack
  7. a walker’s keys jangling loudly in his pocket
  8. whoosh after whoosh after whoosh of car wheels passing on the road
  9. the buzz on a riding lawn mower — a park working mowing the grass beside the trail
  10. 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
  11. the quiet hops of a bunny moving across a neighbor’s grass
  12. a lawn mower hitting a twig or a root — thwack!
  13. 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.

I posted this poem on here 2 years ago:

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.

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].

Ears don’t lie

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

CARL ZIMMER: About a quarter of a second.

Never Quite Now

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 you suddenly hear a loud noise, within 50 milliseconds, that’s 50 thousandths of a second, so you’re talking 20 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.

Never Quite Now

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.

july 4/RUN

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!/ Emily Dickinson

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!

the prowling Bee

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.

Hundreds of Minneapolis Park Workers Poised to Strike for a Week

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.