Tag: poem

may 27/RUN

2.6 miles
river road trail, south/winchell trail, north
64 degrees

Thought briefly about biking to the lake and swimming, but it’s drizzling off and on, and it’s not that warm, and I imagine the water isn’t that warm yet. Just checked the temp: 61 degrees. What’s the coldest water I’ve been in? Probably colder than 61 as a kid in Lake Superior, but as an adult, I’m not sure. Too cold for me today, so I did a short run.

I wanted to run to the south entrance of the Winchell trail but there was a very large — 40 or more? — kids up ahead, walking and blocking the trail, and I didn’t want to encounter them. So I turned down at 42nd. Before I turned, I enjoyed witnessing the kids from afar. They kept trying to get passing cars to honk by yelling honk! honk! honk! They were not quite in unison, and sounded almost like a vee of geese flying overhead. Nice! A few cars honked, one for several seconds — no quick tap, a long HONK! At first I thought they were part of a school group but would teachers let students yell at cars like that? Maybe it was a walk-out protest?

My weather app disagrees, but I think it was very humid. Now that funding for gathering weather data has been taken away, I don’t trust any forecasts. How could it only be 64% humidity when I ‘m sweating this much, and it is drizzling a little?

I ended my run on the dirt trail that climbs up the edge of the grassy boulevard. I had to watch carefully for roots or rocks. On either side, vivid, abundant (or excessive) green grass. In the middle, bare dirt — brownish gray, fuzzy, almost a nothingness that was difficult to see. The green, dizzying, disorienting. Inspiration for my green sonnet?

excerpt from Desire/ Christopher Buckley

Shuffling down
the path in the park, I go on whistling what was once
considered a lively tune, thankful to even be a satchel
of ligaments and bone still able to transact enough chemicals,
one neuron to another,
                                        that I can appreciate the day lilies,
star jasmine, and have some idea about what’s missing
when a streak of grey engraves hosannas of moonlight,
the spindrift off the rocks, anything that sounds
remotely like a prayer
                                       sent into the air to a god who,
in his infinite memory, must know he abandoned us
here—so many self-conscious molecular assemblies—
specs in a starry whirlwind of desire.

Wow — a satchel/ligament and bone still able to transact enough chemicals,/one neuron to another — what a description of a human!

spin-drift: sea spray; fine wind-borne snow or sand

may 25/RUN

3.5 miles
trestle turn around
63 degrees

Felt good today. Ran a little faster, felt a little freer. Even though the weather is great, it’s Sunday, and it’s almost noon, the paths weren’t that crowded. Was it because it’s memorial day weekend? Whatever the reason, I appreciate not having to dodge bikers or groups of walkers.

10 Things

  1. sea
  2. stacked
  3. stink
  4. staring
  5. shadows
  6. craters
  7. purple
  8. soft
  9. sitting
  10. saw

Running through the tunnel of trees above the floodplain forest, a sea of green. No sky or river or solid ground.

4 stones stacked on the ancient boulder.

Above the rowing club, a slight stink from the sewers — sweet and sour.

Running up the hill, past the old stone steps, 2 walkers and a dog about to descend the old stone steps. I couldn’t see their faces, but I felt like they were staring at me.

At the start of my run, bird shadows: a big one swooping, several smaller ones shooting across the street like bullets.

The craters in the patched crack near the trestle seem to be growing deeper.

Running past a tree, a flash of purple in the otherwise green leaves. Was that a trick of the light?

The soft sound of water falling or wind gently rustling the leaves near the ravine.

I was planning to stop at the sliding bench, but 2 people were already sitting there.

Before I began running, I heard a woman’s voice — you did it! Then the sound of a saw buzzing, then good job! Her tone sounded like she was praising a little kid. I wondered if that were true and how old the kid was that she was teaching to use a power saw — not in judgment, in wonder.

indigo

I have returned to my color poems. Before I ran, I was thinking about indigo again. During the run, an idea popped in my head, so just past the trestle I stopped to record it:

Thinking about indigo and idea of wanting this time, at night, that is dark without stars. Which is referencing how, when I lose all of my cone cells, there may never be true dark. And then thinking also about how true dark is not possible (in the city) because of light pollution. The idea that indigo is something both wished for and feared.

another grass line

It will soon be cold here,
and dark here;
the grass will lie flat
to search for its spring head.
(Love in the Weather’s Bells/ Jay Wright)

may 24/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
54 degrees

Ah, another wonderful morning. Sunny and just the right amount of warm. Ran with Scott. He talked about the book he’s reading — a murder mystery set in Austin, MN and Minneapolis. I talked about turning my color poems in to a chapbook. Also discussed: a YouTube video about taking a train from D.C. to Seattle (me), UAE cycling team doing altitude training (Scott), favorite and least favorite running shirts (me), possibly ordering a new bass (Scott), and voltas and vueltas and a tour as turn as hero’s quest (both of us). We also discussed an annoying woman last summer who wouldn’t let us use one of the drinking fountains because she was using the other to slowly fill up her big water bottle (both of us).

I don’t recall looking down at the river even once. Would I have been able to see it? A rare sight: a rollerblader, not a roller skier. Shirtless runners. The white foam of the falls. A stick flying up from under Scott’s foot. The cool green just before reaching the ford bridge.

bank

The other day I overheard one runner say to another something about banking time. I thought about the word bank and embankment popped into my head. Then I wondered about bank’s origins. Reading the poem-of-the-day this morning on Poetry Foundation, I encountered another bank line:

from Ode to the Midwest/ Kevin Young:

I want to jog
down to the river

& make it my bed—

I want to walk
its muddy banks

& make me a withdrawal.

a return to color

I’ve decided to turn my color poems into a chapbook for a contest. Time to study color some more. I need to write a sonnet about green, indigo, and blue. Maybe yellow, too? Here’s a wonderful yellow poem to inspire me:

Crown of Yellow/ Sarah Audsley

If I stay, I might notice things—the color of buttercups, their bright faces
en masse floating in green-grass-clouds, the lolling fields.

Butter—browned in a pan for the sauce to dress an expensive dead fish.

Yellow yolks make cake, custards, or the exact shade for stasis.

Or shame. I always think of yellow so.

A primary color, it arrives in packages, crushed natural iron oxide from a quarry in France.

Combine yellow with red, make orange. Shades shift by proportion.

The painter tells me about the color wheel, not the grey fear-sphere spinning in my head, or
anything I know something about.

The beehive above, swaying. Yellow bits move in and out.

How yellow the yellow finches’ bodies, how they lift so easily into the air.

The in-between color—traffic lights say, stop. Then, go.

The striking of a single ray of sunlight can cause cancerous cells to grow, mutate.

Paint the kitchen walls a shade—warms and comforts.

Color of the piss puddle I left on the hardwood floor. Little ballerina shoes tiptoed around the mess.
I did raise my hand, I did ask to go, I did try to do the right thing.

Tutus and twirls. Mrs. Stein said, Wait. Hold it! Her black leotard plastered to the curvature of her
small breasts rose with her commands.

If you prefer gold fillings, and can afford them, the dentist will place them inside decayed teeth.
Gold is a soft metal.

Combine yellow with blue, make green.

Are we back in the field, yet? Why do I ever leave it? The forest needs no grammar. Water splits
rock. Hawk shreds yellow birds’ feathers.
The mind, an unending sieve.

Dandelion wine is made from the tufts of heads, collected and boiled.
Alcohol is for adults. Some bitterroot.

Never dress Asian babies in yellow, my mother tells me. Clashes with their skin.
I learned from you, she says.

And, there is a fox running the median line on the bumpy road. I am not there, but I’m driving fast,
headlights off, because there is a full-bodied moon, and I want to move in the dark like I know
exactly, no precisely, without any hesitation, where I am going.

Barreling ahead.

Each hour the light changes, each minute angles shift.

Skylights are key in the studio. Naked. Put on my skin in layers—how many? What can the painter
see?

I prefer to sleep through sunrise. I trust the heliocentric turning of things that are difficult to
understand.

About yellowface I cannot say—enough. What is enough?

The channeling knife is the tool to make a lemon twist. I use it. Hovering over the glass, making the
cut infuses the air in the space above the liquid with the essence of the fruit.

Once, I plucked an entire bucket of lemons and lavender. Made lemonade.

I don’t believe in that phrase…because my mother took to the tug of the bottle.
More often than not, vomit is yellow.

In another dream, I am the lone sunflower swaying, shaken by the anticipation from the smell of the
oncoming distant rain.

may 23/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
56 degrees

Didn’t feel the greatest — unfinished business — but managed to keep running and feeling strong, especially in my legs. Today is another beautiful day. When I walked outside, I whispered, wow! Sun, blue sky, warm air, birds, dry paths.

10 Things

  1. scary
  2. runner!
  3. cooler
  4. busker
  5. bikes
  6. busy
  7. left
  8. cobblestones
  9. unstacked
  10. hitch

In the bathroom at the falls, a little boy in the next stall was scared by the loud sounds — toilets flushing, hand dryers buzzing. His mom said, try putting your hands over your ears and I imagined him trying — wide-eyed with tiny sticky hands up to his ears.

Running south on the trail, a long train of young bikers — a school field trip? — slowly passed me. As each biker approached me, they would call out to the others behind them, runner! I was impressed until one of them yelled it right in my ear. Ouch!

Taking the part of the trail that dips lower than the road and into the shade, everything was darker, dimmer, cooler.

Running through the park, I passed a busker playing an instrument that I couldn’t see because I was running too fast or hear because I had headphones on.

The kids that had biked past me on the trail had stopped at the falls. Their bikes had taken over a grassy hill near the playground. So many bikes!

The park was busy — people walking, biking, taking pictures, eating outside at Sea Salt or near the pavilion.

A woman on a bike with a kid on a seat behind her extended her right arm to signal a left turn. There was something about how straight and stiff her arm was that made me remember the gesture.

Ran over the cobblestones near the falls overlook. Later, leaving the park, listened to Simon & Garfunkel sing about cobblestones and feelin’ groovy. Thought about how my ophthalmologist told me I had signs of cobblestones in my peripheral vision a few years ago.

The white plastic chairs I wrote about a few days ago that were stacked, are now unstacked and set up side by side in the shade of the building.

A runner passed me. I couldn’t see it, but I heard a slight hitch in his step as one foot strike was always slightly louder and longer than the other. I wondered, what do people hear in my foot strikes?

before the run

Reading the poem-of-the-day on Poetry Foundation — We/ Joshua Bennett, I was struck by a word near the end, apprehension.

he is a father now, with a boy he is trying to teach
the benefits of apprehension.

I wanted to dig into apprehension, so I looked it up and found this, on Merriam-Webster:

There’s quite a bit to comprehend about apprehension, so let’s take a closer look at its history. The Latin ancestor of apprehension (and of comprehend, prehensile, and even prison, among others) is the verb prehendere, meaning “to grasp” or “to seize.” When it was first used in the 14th century, apprehension could refer to the act of learning, a sense that is now obsolete, or the ability or power to understand things—learning and understanding both being ways to “grasp” knowledge or information. It wasn’t until the late 16th century that apprehension was used, as it still is today, for the physical seizure of something or someone (as an arrest). The most commonly used sense of apprehension today refers to a feeling that something bad is about to happen, when you seize up, perhaps, with anxiety or dread, having grasped all the unpleasant possibilities.

entry for apprehension

I started to think about prehension too. It feels vaguely religious/spiritual to me. I looked it up: “apprehension by the senses.”

I like how apprehension and its grasp, can mean to understand or “get” something — to grasp it, but also to be seized or held by it — is this seizing always negative/oppressive?

All of this musing over the different meanings of apprehension, returns me to the beginning of the poem and the narrator’s wrestling with different meanings of attention — as the money of the mind or care or access to the Divine. Of course, to care can also lead to caring too much, being preoccupied with, worried, anxious, apprehensive. Now I’m thinking about the color of the therapist’s dress and the disagreement over whether it is a yellow-based red or a blue-based red. And I’m thinking about this line —

still studying the difference between
what a man proclaims in speech and what he says with his
body.

The difference between comprehension (knowing in language) and apprehension (knowing through senses). All of these tensions with opposing meanings. I mentioned this Scott at breakfast and added, wow, the word apprehension comes near the end of the poem. It’s the volta — the moment in which the poem turns, shifts, a door opens to unlock understanding or to upend understanding!

The Italian word for “turn,” a volta is a rhetorical shift that marks the change of a thought or argument in a poem. 

Other common names for volta include turn, fulcrum, or hinge. The volta marks a shift from the main narrative or idea of the poem and awakens readers to a different meaning or to a reveal in the conclusion of the poem. They often use words like “but,” “yet,” or “however” to distinguish a reversal or shift in thought. 

Voltas are part of the sonnet form. In the Petrarchan sonnet, the volta occurs between the eighth and ninth lines. In the Shakespearean sonnet, the volta occurs before the final couplet. Voltas are also characteristics of other poetic forms, and can even occur in free verse poems. 

Volta

And now, writing this last sentence, I’m realizing that the volta is a MOMENT, to put beside my other definitions of moment.

I go to the gorge

I go to the gorge/to find the soft space/between beats. Woke up this morning to the news that a favorite poem of mine, written in the late fall of 2022, will be published this August. Hooray! Yesterday, watching a book trailer for Litany for the Long Moment — a book that I’d like to read, but might have to ILL or buy it to do so, I had an idea for a video project. Something about the mix of music, text on the screen, and the flash of images, made me think about my ritual/circumambulation project and the idea of chanting,

I go to
the gorge

over and over and finishing the phrase differently each time with cuts between text/voice and images from the gorge. I imagine an acceleration of this text and images until something breaks open and ? — maybe silence, the image of the air above the gorge, and then voice-over of the entire poem. After that, a return to more images, softer and slower this time, and more chanting.

I go to/the gorge || to open/a door
I go to/the gorge || to be with/ my mom
I go to the gorge ||to become/ shadow

names

a connection between the two other poems-of-the-day:

1

from Poetry Daily and Visitation/ Kelly Hoffer

my nameis the last name my mother refused
to change. so as not to lose you, the hospital
lists your name with your mother’s on your
baby wristlet. thislife is a repetition that knows
no bounds, tracing a tablet into a waxing
oval that spirals outward. seed of a
seed sowing itself into the ground. this name
just happens to be the size of the concept growing.

2

from Poets.org and Naming/ Julia Kolchinsky

For the first month of life, I was 
unnamed. To my Mama, my body belonged 
to one name, and to my Babushka, another, so 

they called me Lyalya, Lyalichka, little 
doll, baby, because neither would bend 
their letters and though I was already known 

to scream, to refuse sleep and strangers, 
they couldn’t have known then how, 
silently, I’d keep screaming, keep refusing 

any name they’d give me, how in my mouth, 
it wouldn’t feel like mine, and on the tongues 
of others, even less like I belonged. 

may 19/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
54 degrees
wind: 15 mph

Even though I’ve run the past 3 days, I decided to run again today for 2 reasons: 1. it’s supposed to rain all day tomorrow and Wednesday and I don’t want to run in the rain and 2. we have leftover butternut squash mac and cheese, and I always like to run before eating it for lunch. A good run. Managed to keep my heart rate lower until I reached the falls. Had to stop at the bathroom in the park building for some unfinished business. Will that be a problem again this summer? After, I put in my “Moment” playlist and ran again until I reached the bench above the edge of the world. I was planning to stop, but I noticed someone was sitting there. Bummer

Because I wanted to eat right when I got back, I gave myself about 3 minutes to jot down 10 things I remembered from the run (the jotted list was brief; below was written after I ate):

10 Things

  1. didn’t see the falls, but heard it — not a roar, but a rush of water
  2. looking ahead, seeing someone on the dirt trail next to the path — is that a kid? It looked like they were moving towards me. As I got closer — 15 or 20 feet, I realized it was not a person, but a bike — and a bike that had been parked there yesterday too
  3. a strong wind — for one stretch I was worried it would rip my cap off of my head
  4. 2 plastic white chairs stacked on the side of the park building — later in the summer they will be unstacked and people will usually be sitting in them
  5. a long row of port-a-potties (20 or more?) still standing after Saturday’s race. I wondered if they were planning to pick them up or if there was another race this weekend
  6. a walker, passed twice, bundled up in a winter coat, a winter cap (with a ball on top), and a mask
  7. the faint laughter and yelling of kids on a playground
  8. the dim roar and rush and rustle of the wind moving through the trees
  9. a fully parking lot at the falls
  10. noticed beneath the dirt next the trail just north of the 44th street parking lot: netting left behind from a failed attempt at re-grassing this stretch

more on the moment

Looking at my Plague Notebook, vol. 26, I saw that I had written CONTEXT for yesterday’s entry — as in, moments have a context, a history, a location in space. I remember being reminded of context as I walked back home after my run while listening to Rut by Wimps:

Each day is
the same as the last
There is no future
There is no past

I like routine
It’s my favorite thing
No new memories
Don’t change my scenery

Note: I listened to some other songs on the City Lights, the album “Rut” comes from. Wow — it’s all about losing your Self when you become a Mom.

Responding to the word context in yesterday’s entry, for today I wrote: Yes, context is important! A moment is not out of time, but deeper in it — geologic time.

For future Sara, who will want to bring context into any writing we do with the moment, past Sara discussed it in these entries: 6 may, 7 may, 8 may 2025

Poetry Daily’s poem-of-the-day is a great one for thinking about moments: Temporal Saturation by Chloe Garcia Roberts in their book, Fire Eater. I might want to buy this book for my birthday?

temporal saturation—the explanation for why certain moments of your life seem to spill or shrink, to transcend or subvert their physical duration, and color differently their surrounding time.

This is a wonderful description of a Moment!

Temporal saturation is an elusive measurement disproving any correlation between quantity and influence that is used to explain both the canyons that can appear inside moments of great rending, joyous or horrific, entombing an incarnation of the self which will never again exist; as well as the median intervals of floating passivity that resist recollection and whose ending is marked by a feeling of awakening: a drowsy startle or a gradual reconsciousness.

Difficult to measure / length of time does not determine significance / the canyons inside moments — canyons = the Mississippi River Gorge?! / not entombing a past or gone self but holding it / floating passivity = the space between beats?

saturation = the state or process that occurs when no more of something can be absorbed || Can I make a connection with the dew point and its impact on a moving body? dew point = “the temperature at which the air becomes saturated with water vapor”

High levels of temporal saturation are evidenced by a languorous stretching of the experienced present, which then refracts and amplifies the emotion of the moment. The joy making this spreading pleasurable, the fear terrible, though both poles can be described in terms of the sensation of falling. The difference being that the first is a falling into and the latter a falling through

refracts = deflects / distorts / bends / disrupts

falling through = And then a plank in reason broke / And I dropped down and down / And hit a World at every plunge / And finished knowing then (I wrote these lines from “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain,” from memory so the punctuation and capitalization aren’t quite right).

Low levels of temporal saturation are evidenced by malaise, an involuntary refusal on the part of the individual to knit themselves to the place they occupy. Home-sickness—the corporeal and spiritual longing for a physical and temporal point of greatest belonging—is the best diagnosis to describe these ebbs of existence.

No moments = a lack of connection, an untethering, no home

The measurement of temporal saturation then can be used to quantify both the abscesses and the vividities, these gestures floating in great swathes of meaningless automation. Just as the atoms composing a human body can condense smaller than the head of a pin, the self can, like a black hole collapse, like a poem reduce. And the proof of the emptiness that oceans those bright livings is how they sparkle and call to each other despite the expanse of the interims, be they seconds, decades, lifetimes. Inlaid in space, they form the constellation of the soul.

water images: floating, condensation, oceans, sparkle — like waves hit by light
the sparkle reminds me of swimming across the lake and seeing the sparkling water, realizing that each cluster of sparkles was another swimmers’ hand piercing the water

seconds, decades, lifetimes: Aren’t we all just masses of energy and light in a jumbled future or past, stopping to embrace one another for a moment or decades before passing too far for sight? (Halos/ Ed Bok Lee)

The dew point is the temperature when air condenses on the skin and turns into sweat.

Lorine Niedecker and the poet’s work: condensing. “A condensary is where condensed milk is made. In order to make condensed milk, you evaporate a significant amount of water from milk and what you’re left with is
something delicious and much more concentrated and powerful” (Close Reading).

may 17/RUN

5.15 miles
bottom of franklin turn around
44 degrees

More layers today. When I checked the weather on my watch before my run, the feels like temperature was 32 degrees. Didn’t feel that cold, but it didn’t feel warm either. I worked at trying to lower my heart rate as I ran when it as creeping up to 170. It’s getting easier. My goal is to be able to run to the lake (8 miles) for my 14th runniversary on 2 june.

10 Things

  1. the tail end of a race — Women Run the Cities, 1: one of the police cars blocking off the road was blasting “She Works Hard for the Money”
  2. race, 2: cowbells ringing in the distance
  3. race, 3: orange cones in a tight row blocking the entrance to the river road
  4. some sort of vehicle — a train? a truck? — crossing over the trestle. My view was blocked by green
  5. voices below — rowers?
  6. a roller skier climbing the franklin hill
  7. white foam on the river in the flats
  8. the view from the sliding bench is completely blocked by green leaves
  9. noticed for the first time: a dirt path leading behind a fence and down to the river near the 94 bridge
  10. an adult making funny noises, then a toddler giggling across the road — that deep, genuine laugh of delight that toddlers can do

Listened to spectators cheering and cowbells and my feet sliding on wet dirt as I ran north. Put in a new playlist — “Moment” — heading south. Heard U2’s “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out of”; Olivia Newton John’s “Suspended in Time”; “Right Where You Left Me”/ Taylor Swift; “Lose Yourself”/ Eminem; “A Moment Like This”/ Kelly Clarkson. Listening to U2, I thought about ruts vs. grooves. During Eminem I sprinted in the chorus and slowed down in the verses. And with Kelly Clarkson, I thought about big moments then everyday moments, not one but an accumulation of them as a way to create magic or find meaning. This idea of accumulation reminded me of a section of a poem I read during my morning ritual of reading poems-of-the-day.

from Remote Disjunctions/ Mónica de la Torre

You’d taken yourself
to places whose specifics you’d chosen to forget. You said you
weren’t there to keep track, but to experience. Which, when
I’m feeling negative, I translate as ditching the thing as soon as
you’re done with it onto the heap of junk you’re not accumulating.

may 14/RUNWALK

4.15 miles
minnehaha falls and back
68 degrees
dew point: 59

Even though it was warm and the dew point was high, my run was good. Managed to bring my heart rate back down and keep it under 170 until I reached my favorite spot at the falls — 2.25 miles in. Excellent. I’m feeling stronger, mentally and physically.

10 Things

  1. a turkey in the middle of the road, honking? squawking? yelling? at the cars unwilling to stop and let him cross
  2. a hazy green above the gorge
  3. the sun hitting the light green leaves so intensely in the distance that I thought it was a bright yellow crossing sign instead of a tree
  4. the falls were rushing, all white foam framed by green trees
  5. a steady procession of cars on the road
  6. roots and rocks hidden in the shadows on the trail — I lightly twisted both ankles, one from a root, the other a rock
  7. the tree that feel in the creek sometime last year was gray — will they remove it?
  8. a line of a dozen or more cars backed up on the parkway, stuck at the stop sign
  9. a crowded trail heading north — bikers and walkers, a few runners, strollers
  10. the water fountains have been turned on again! I stopped for a drink and to wet down my hat

Listened to the hum of traffic as I ran south, my “Doin’ Time” playlist heading back north.

before the run

Thinking about LN’s poem — that I posted yesterday — about standing in the north woods with birch, which led me to think about becoming a tree, like in Katie Farris’ “What Would Root” and Linda Pastan’s “In The Orchard” — I shall come back as a tree.

I’m also thinking about Mary Oliver and “Can You Imagine” — surely you can’t imagine trees don’t dance from the roots up, wishing to travel a little, not cramped as much as wanting a better view, or sun, or just as avidly, more shade.

during the run

I don’t remember thinking about becoming a tree or rooting or stillness while I ran, but I remembered right after I finished and as I walked back home I recited “What Would Root” in my head. I need to practice the second half of the poem. Then I thought about the illusion of stillness and how nothing, not even rocks or trees, stand still. They’re sinking and shifting and swaying and responding to (being changed) by the world around them.

after the run

Still as not not moving but being stuck in a rut, doing the same thing again and again, as in, you’re still doing that?

Still as not needing more, content, at peace, satisfied, stilled desire or anxiety.

Nox Borealis/ Campbell McGrath

If Socrates drank his portion of hemlock willingly,
if the Appalachians have endured unending ages of erosion,
if the wind can learn to read our minds
and moonlight moonlight as a master pickpocket,
surely we can contend with contentment as our commission.

Deer in a stubble field, small birds dreaming
unimaginable dreams in hollow trees,
even the icicles, darling, even the icicles shame us
with their stoicism, their radiant resolve.

Listen to me now: think of something you love
but not too dearly, so the night will steal from us
only what we can afford to lose.

walk: 1 hour
winchell trail / edmund
77 degrees

Remembered to take Delia the dog for a walk before it got too hot. We walked to the Winchell trail than sauntered, me studying the leaves with my fuzzy vision and fingers, and Delia sniffing them with her snout. Warm in the sun, cool in the shadows.

10+ Things

  1. clumps of tallish grass growing through the mulch — a vibrant green
  2. even taller grasses growing among the flowers on the hill, creating a visual effect that was dizzying as my eyes tried to land on anything solid
  3. little bits of some sort of plant scattered along the top of the fence. It looked like it was growing there — a form of lichen? — but I couldn’t tell. It might have just fallen from a tree
  4. the pleasing, easily identifiable shape of the maple tree on the trees close to the trail
  5. sparkling, blue water
  6. blue water, blue sky, green trees
  7. the laugh of a woodpecker
  8. a yard with several bleeding heart bushes, all in bloom
  9. sprawled tree shadows on the grass
  10. the crotch of a tree — standing beside a tree that branched off into two equally sized limbs which looked like thighs to me. I imagined a person planted head first in the ground, which is what happens in “What Would Root”
  11. walking near Hiawatha Elementary, watching as a gym class “ran” around the block, studying the different approaches to “running” — a steady jog, sprint then stop then sprint, skipping, arms flailing and screaming while moving

As I walked with Delia, stopping at almost every tree or tuft of grass or clump of dirt, I thought about the differences between walking and running, this time in relation to a sense of self. Does one enable you to lose yourself or step outside of yourself more easily? I haven’t decided, but I think while walking you can be more aware of what you are doing, how you are attending to the world and noticing what is going on. While running, the attention is less deliberate; you’re too busy managing your effort to carefully study things. There was more to that thought but I lost in the time that it took me to get home.

may 12/WALK

45 minutes
longfellow flats
70 degrees

Took Delia the dog on a walk to the river. So much green everywhere. Birds, blue sky, soft breeze. Everything out of focus. Walked above the winchell trail and the ravine. Made note of the angle of the leaning tree on the wooden fence. Couldn’t see anything below through the thick leaves. Encountered 2 women with coffees deliberating whether or not to descend the old stone steps. Let’s go further and take the road down. I took the steps down to the trail that leads to the river. The river was blue and sparkling with small waves lapping the shore. A boat must have just come through — I didn’t see it. I wish I could have stayed there for longer but Delia wanted to keep moving. Returned to steps and waited for someone descending. At the bottom, they turned around and walked back up. Did they change their mind, or were they doing a stair workout?

For the rest of the walk Delia was difficult. Refusing to go in certain directions, wanting to stop and pee near every tree, slowing down right in front of me. I want to forget my irritation and remember what a beautiful morning it was, how the river looked, how the air felt. Breathing it in, a sense of calm and euphoria enveloped me.

before the run

Yesterday I came across this call for submissions:

What does it mean to be a poet engaged with the physical material of the world around us? How does poetic form change in the encounter with other beings? How do we write collaboratively with—rather than about—nonhuman beings and ecologies?

For the Fall 2025 issue, Arc is seeking experimental eco-poetry that engages with the possibilities of organic form. We welcome experiments with lyric, visual poetics, material poetries, and sound poetries.

I want to spend today (at least) exploring what this might mean for my writing around/beside/within the gorge. And, if I can manage it, I’d like to find another home for some of my favorite lines: it begins here, from the ground up: feet first, following. I started to write, finally find a home, but then I remembered that I’ve actually used the line in a poem that was published earlier this year: Girl Ghost Gorge

My organic form is based on breathing and foot strikes: 1 2 3 breathe in/ 1 2 breathe out. Is this experimental enough?

How do write collaboratively with the nonhuman? Does my form, based on foot strikes, impose an order on the nonhuman? Does it offer a way outside of myself and into somewhere else?

How does poetic form change in the encounter with other beings? I’m thinking about water and stone and wondering how they inform my poetry about the gorge.

during the run

I tried to think about my form as I walked. Mostly, it’s easier for me to think about the words/content than about form and shapes of the words. I wondered about absence and the gorge as eroding/eroded and how that affects the page. An blank space that is not empty but open. Yes, can I push at the idea more?

after the run

I think some inspiration would help in thinking through how form can be inspired by place. Time to revisit Susan Tichy and her collection North | Rock | Edge.

distills somatic observations down their bones. Tichy describes an immersive, granular experience exploring the contours, rocks, winds, and waters of Shetland, a remote northern archipelago between Scotland, the Faroe Islands, and Norway. In isolated yet accumulative images and line breaks, she details the distances and resonances between geology and language, minutely mutable coastscapes, and how to write and walk in a time of planetary change.

distills / somatic / immersive / granular
contours / rocks / winds / waters
isolated yet accumulative images and line breaks

In the interview, Tracy Zeman suggests:

The islands’ bays, rugged edges, and jagged protrusions correlate with the way the poems look on the page, a varied right margin, short lines, and a proliferation of line breaks. There are few stopping points in the poems, no periods, and sparse punctuation generally, so that pacing and rhythm are made with line, as if the reader is part of one continuous yet staggered experience.

In my poems about the gorge, I’m less interested in having the words look like the place, but I like the idea of the few stopping points, lack of punctuation and a poem that is part of a continuous experience. Maybe a mostly continuous experience with a few pauses?

There are rhythms to walking on rough ground, a step-after-step persistence that swallows obstacles, like irregular lines that nonetheless carry forward through the poem. There’s also a sensory excitement in a sea-rock-light-wind-bird-flower-seal-seep-peat-rain-salt—oh look, there’s a whale!—environment that subsumes attention to any one thing into the press of the whole.

I like this idea of the sensory excitement that doesn’t subsume attention to any one thing, even as there is one thing: the gorge as gap, gash, bowl.

Tracy Zeman: you also eschew the “I.” I feel that the lack of “I” allows the reader to experience the place as the poem’s speaker does, and that the landscape stays primary and the human secondary in the action. Can you explain why you made this choice and what effect you hoped it would have on the reader’s experience of the text?

Susan Tichy: To me, the poems feel so intensely somatic and personal that the grammatical sign felt unnecessary. Here and there, I drafted other people’s words to express the sensation more directly, such as Robert Macfarlane’s thought diffusing /at body’s edge in “Eshaness | Is It Force Failure.”

Where do I/the poet fit into my poems? I wrote in Plague Notebook, no. 25: To be with the gorge, to witness/behold it, demands participation not observation. It is intimate — contact, meeting, interfacing — and transforms you. You transform it (the gorge world), too.

I feel like this poem that read today on Poetry Daily (poems.com) speaks to and against that:

Captivity/ Siddhartha Menon

it is impossible
to kill and question at the same time.
—Louise Glück, “Liberation”

Or to watch and at the same time
to capture.
A restive robin in your path
flew onto a low cable
and you had to choose between
binoculars and camera. You knew
it would not stay for both.
So near: a killing
to capture it forever here.
Only to watch is a kind of questioning.
You are paralyzed.

captivate = to hold something’s attention
captivated = rapt, enthralled, cannot look or turn away

may 11/RUN

4.3 miles
ford overlook
63 degrees

Ran earlier today, which helped. The first half was windy. Windy enough that I needed to take my cap off on the ford bridge. Sunny. A mental victory: thought about stopping on the bridge but then just kept going. Made it through the hard moment. The second half of the run, I felt stronger, everything was easier.

I don’t remember noticing the river sparkling, but I did see scales on its surface as I ran west on the bridge. No rowers, no roller skiers, only a few bikers. One small pack of shirtless runners.

Ran up the steep hill that starts under the ford bridge and ends in Wabun park. At the top, I stopped at the fence and looked down at the dam. I studied the tall grass pushing up against the fence. I thought about fences for a moment, how many I encounter while I run by the gorge, some maintained, some abandoned, many damaged by leaning trees or critters or hikers. Wooden, chainlink, iron, stone. Noticed another fence at the ford overlook: chainlink.

Listened to the wind and birds until I reached the ford overlook, then I put in my “Wheeling Life” playlist. Started with “Windmills of Your Mind,” ended with “Watching the Wheels.” Thought about FWA and how he might appreciate John Lennon’s song.

Speaking of playlists, I forgot to mention this in my entry 2 days ago. Listening to my “Slappin’ Shadows” playlist and Cream’s “White Room” came on. I wanted to remember this description of eyes:

Silver horses, ran down moonbeams
In your dark eyes

Is this a gleam? Or is she crying?

suburban lawns

I’m still thinking about grass. If I were to make a list of grassy things, which I should and will, the suburban lawn would be on it. I’ve thought about it before, imagining my version of Lorine Niedecker’s growing in green (from her poem, “Paean to Place,”) as the lawn and the patches of green that grow on the edge between suburbs and the few remaining farms they haven’t yet consumed. That was my childhood. Here’s a poem I found this morning to add to the image of the lawn:

Observation/ Nicholas Friedman

In the wilds of our suburban lawn,
the natural world inclines to fable:
Gray squirrels, unperturbed by rain,
jockey for position at what our landlord
speaks of, nominally, as the bird feeder.
Below, dark-eyed juncos peck at fallen millet,
masked like hangmen from another time.
The great, unwritten order of it all
scrambles when Max, our landlord’s aging chow,
starts loping toward the scene. This is his work,
so in a sense, he’s adding order, too.

One squirrel has shifted to a fencepost
where it twitches its tail and rearranges
in quarter turns like a guard. In total, there’s
more movement than the eye can account for,
all of it framed in the window’s tic-tac-toe.
The glass weeps condensation. It’s early, but
already the dog has slumped down for a nap.
There’s plenty of time to lumber after thoughts
that rise and disperse, dark-feathered things
returning when I manage to be still.

may 1/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
60 degrees

Warm! Green everywhere — tufts of grass on the bluff, leaves unfurling from the trees. Lots of bikers on the trail today. I ran to the falls without stopping, then took several walk breaks on the way back. My heart rate was high, my legs were sore. I think I should do a post-injury walk/run plan to ease back into moving.

As I write this on my deck, a black-capped chickadee is doing their feebee call. So loud! So constant. No answer yet.

10 Things

  1. Sea Salt is open at the falls — I could smell it as I ran through the park — what was the smell? fried and salty?
  2. a group of kids with adults — students/teacher? — below me on the winchell trail
  3. the falls parking lot was full of cars
  4. kids yelling/laughing on the playground
  5. a park worker driving a big mower, cutting grass on the strip between the walking and biking path — the lawn mower had a bright orange triangle on the back
  6. a biker in a bright yellow shirt with a matching bright yellow helmet
  7. someone swinging at the falls playground
  8. a biker biking in wide circles under the ford bridge
  9. flashes of white though the (already) thick green on the trail below me and beside the creek — I think it was the heads of people taking the path that leads to the river
  10. yellow and red tulips near a parking lot

before the run

Thank you past Sara for posting this beautiful Katie Farris poem — Ode to Money, or Patient Appealing Health Insurance for Denial of Coverage — and giving me inspiration for a May challenge with these lines:

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

Grass! A whole month with grass? Maybe a whole month with green, one week with grass? Yes! And (at least) a week with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gathering moss. Will this challenge idea go the way of last month’s steps? Forgotten after a few days? I hope not.

like Civil War soldiers — the line this is referencing in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was one of my first favorite lines from a poem:

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

I posted this section of Song of Myself on 18 may 2020. Here’s another part I want to remember:

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

And now I’m thinking about Mary Oliver and her line about rising up again like grass, and realizing that she was referencing Whitman with it. She loved Walt Whitman. Uh oh — I’m feeling a shift in direction. Will I forgo grass for a study of Walt Whitman?

during the run

As I mentioned in my 10 things list, while I was running, I encountered a park worker mowing the strip of grass between the bike and walking paths. I decided that that would be my image of grass for today. I could smell the freshly cut grass as I ran by. I wonder what the parks’ department’s schedule for mowing grass is — how often? and how many acres of grass do they maintain across the city?

after the run

1

Read Mary Oliver’s chapter in Upstream, “My Friend, Walt Whitman.” I’m pretty sure I’ve posted this line before, but I’ll do it again because it fits:

I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple–or a green field–a place to enter, and in which to feel.

2

I decided to look up information about minneapolis parks and mowing.

4,660 acres of grass/turf mowed

They divided grassy areas into 3 types: athletic fields, general park turf, reduced mowing areas.

general park turf: “We cut grass to a height of 3 inches on a regular basis as time and weather allows, but grass height may exceed 5 inches at times. This standard applies to most of the Park System including neighborhood parks, boulevards, parkways and active use areas within regional parks.”

reduced mowing areas: “We maintain some park lands through mowing on an infrequent basis. These areas include steep hillsides, erosion prone slopes, shorelines and park lands that are not intensively maintained.”

I love that the parks department posts this information!

Also wanted to add this video. It’s light on sources, especially the early history of grass, but I like the clips from commercials:

And here’s a useful resource to return to, and also to use to supplement the video:

The History of Early American Landscape Design: Lawn

And also this — Get Off My Lawn! — which has an interesting 30 minute podcast, images related to the lawn from the Smithsonian Museum.