Tag: poem

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 there’s an eel come up the stream
I let time go as slow as moss, I stand
and try to get the dragonflies to land
their gypsy-coloured engines on my hand

I love her descriptions throughout this section and the gentle rhymes. Is there a way to translate this eye-quiet, slow attention while running? Is it possible — both in language and as a practice of attention? Something I’d like to think about . . . .

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 9/RUNSWIM

3.25 miles
top of summit hill and back
78 degrees

Warm, sunny. Started in the neighborhood. Ran past the house, a block away, with the guy who is always outside on his front step, usually smoking. No smoking today, thankfully. Have I never not seen him?

Two white mattresses propped up at the end of driveway. Something spray-painted on them that I could read fast enough as I ran by. Graffiti? A message to the garbage guys?

Rowers! At least one 8-person shell on the river below me as I crossed over to the east side.

Shadow falls falling! As I ran up the summit hill, I could hear the water in the small creek slowly making its way to the falls. I tried to see it, but couldn’t.

Other than the rowers, and some sandbars, the water was empty. Brown. Reflections, which looked like dark shadows to me, of trees lining the shore. A small stretch of sparkle. Farther down the river, below the U. the water is foamy, but here it’s just brown.

It was hard, and I walked a few times, but I also pushed myself to run more than I wanted to.

When I reached the bridge again, I put in my “Beaufort Scale” playlist.

look pal, this isn’t the sea

Yesterday, I wrote about looking for a balance between routine and disruption. This morning (7:30 am), I’m thinking about how open swim club offers one model. Swimming across the lake during open swim is a routine with a few set rules: a designated time, lifeguards lining the route, buoys you are supposed to always keep to your right. But, how you choose to follow those rules is up to you. Show up early (often they open the course before it’s officially supposed to start), or halfway through, or even at the last minute. Do just one loop or as many as you can fit into two hours. Swim straight from one buoy to the next in a tight, efficient line or loop wide, taking up as much lake as you can. Swim without stopping, or stop often to catch your breath or orient yourself or feel the openness and solitude of the lake. Round the far buoys or go past them to pause at the shore. Use a kick board or fins, a snorkel. Wear a wetsuit or a tri-suit or a swim suit but always some suit (another rule: no naked swimming).

An open water slogan I’ve seen before: no walls. No lane lines or lanes. But, this isn’t Homer’s sea, Alice Oswald’s unfenced purple. There are shores in sight (well, mostly in sight) and only vines, fish, and swan boats to encounter. No sharks or motorized boats or big waves. Does that mean the lake is all routine? Safe, steady, predictable?

from A Swim in Co. Wicklow/ Derek Mahon

Spirits of lake, river
and woodland pond preside
mildly in water never
troubled by wind or tide;
and the quiet suburban pool
is only for the fearful —

no wind-wave energies
where no sea briar grips
and no freak breaker with
the violence of the ages
comes foaming at the mouth
to drown you in its depths.

Lake Nokomis is affected by wind and watermilfoil reaches out to grip me near shore almost every swim. No, it’s not the sea, but it’s also not a suburban pool.

In the lake, you can’t see much, either above or below. Above: water, vague trees, sky, sand. Below: your hand, ghost vines, silver flashes. No bottom, just void, nothing, or something not-seen.

In an essay about open swimming in the sea, Lauren Groff (love her writing and her awesome Olympic triathlete sister!) writes:

There is danger, a great deal of it. There are sharks that circle her. They wait. Their teeth shine in the murk. Their bodies lazily trail her shadow as it darts over the coral reef.

Lake Nokomis doesn’t have sharks. It has uncertainty, mystery, a floor only 15-20 feet below scattered with things we can’t see because the water is stirred up, murky. I wonder, which is scarier? Swimming above sharks you can see, or above a nothing that could be anything that you can’t?

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
75 degrees

A few hours before open swim started, the sky unzipped and it rained hard. I think that might be the reason the water was so full of vegetation: whole vines, chunks of vines, and some green slimy substance. Gross! Before I realized what was happening, I swam through the slime — bright green, soft but not in a pleasant way. I’m glad my mouth was closed and I had a nose plug in. Hopefully it’s not toxic. In the 10 years I’ve been doing open swim, this is the first time I’ve experienced anything like this slime. I almost stopped after one loop, but decided to swim 2 more.

added, 10 july 2024: Reading back through my description, I wanted to add that I didn’t just swim through one random patch of this green slime. It was everywhere, all around the lake. Starting the first loop, before I realized the slime was there, I recall feeling something on the side of my head and wondering if some of my hair had escaped from my cap. No — I think it was some of the slime. The first loop was the worst, but for every loop, I could see it, often below me, but sometimes near the surface.

Okay, against better judgment — mine and Scott’s — I looked it up and it might be blue-green algae, which could be bad and make me sick. Hopefully not. Probably not. If were blue-green algae I think someone would have seen it and they would have cancelled open swim. Future Sara will let us know.

Sara from 24 june 2026: I can’t believe I’m the first future Sara to weigh in on this one. Oh, naive past-Sara, it was blue-green algae and you will write about it, off and on, for the rest of the month. You will learn that blue-green algae is mostly not a problem — other than being gross to swim through — and that when people see it, they won’t complain to anyone about it (or express concern to anyone in charge). You will also learn that when the people running Open Swim do say something about it on Facebook and through email, they will convey the official advisory statement half-heartedly. Reading between the lines (which I am not very good at), you will imagine that when they post “use caution” and “make sure to avoid bloom areas,” what they really want to say is, we think it’s fine for you to swim. just pay attention to where you’re swimming1. we would tell you this if we could, but we are required by our bosses and so we don’t get sued to repeat the official advisory. You will be grateful to understand this in june of 2026, when open swim begins in lake water with blue-green algae blooms present. You won’t worry about swimming through it.

Speaking of blue-green algae blooms, they will be in the national news in june of 2026 because of not-my-president’s debacle in renovating the reflecting pool on the Mall. Sigh.

  1. easier said then done for someone with low vision who can’t see color that well! ↩︎

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.

july 2/RUNSWIM

4 miles
monument and back*
65 degrees / dew point: 62
drizzle**

*a new route? Through the neighborhood, over the lake street bridge, up the summit hill, over to the Civil War Monument and back
**or as I’ve been known to say, spittin’ (does that come from the UP? the south? the midwest?)

Even though the dew point was high, the drizzle helped it feel cooler. Everything dark and quiet, calm, green. Passed the guy who is always sitting on his front stoop smoking. Also passed kids arriving at the church daycare. Pushed myself to keep running up the summit hill even though I wanted to stop. Made it!

Chanted triple berries for a mile or two. It helped distract me. raspberry / blueberry / strawberry

10 Things

  1. shadow falls was gushing through the trees
  2. the street lamps were glowing on the st. paul side
  3. rowers on the river! an 8-person shell. The coxswain was advising them on where to place the paddles in the high water (we have a river flood warning)
  4. morning! from a passing runner — good morning!
  5. the river was a beautiful gray blue, the trees a rich green
  6. so windy on the bridge heading east that I had to take my cap off and hold it
  7. the whining of a power saw in the distance
  8. alone at the monument overlook
  9. sometimes it was a drizzle, sometimes just a mist — difficult to tell which while running and sweating
  10. enveloped in dark green in the tunnel of trees — the only light was green light and a small circle of white at the top of the hill

As I looked down at the river from high above on the gorge, I thought about the rowers and their paddles and how different their experience of the water was to mine. Down there in the water, I bet it’s choppy and bumpy, with wind and spray. Up here, it’s almost flat and gray blue. No feeling of motion — no waves or the unsettling sense of being higher on water that’s on the edge of spilling over somewhere.

Yesterday I started thinking again about different bodies of water and how poets write about them: Mary Oliver (ponds), Lorine Niedecker (lakes), Alice Oswald (rivers, the sea). I also remembered Cole Swenson and their writing about the river Gave de Pau in Gave. I think I need to buy this book! Anyway, I looked up a few more of their poems and read one titled, “To Circumferate.” These lines stuck with me:

With a careful
adjustment of eye there are
no buildings. A city of trees
and hedges

As I ran back from the monument, looking left to the ravine and the trees, I thought about that line and imagined the stretches of grass, the trees, the green ravine as a city — the only city — no buildings or houses or roads or cars, only trees and tall grasses and bushes leading down to the river.

All of this thinking about different bodies of water reminded me of something I started to read but had to return to the library before I got very far, Visitation/ Jenny Erpenbeck. Here are the first two pages and an amazing description of water:

Approximately twenty-four thousand years ago, a glacier advanced until it reached a large outcropping of rock that now is nothing more than a gentle hill above where the house stands. The enormous pressure exerted by teh ice snapped and crushed the frozen trunks of the oaks, alders and pines that grew there, sections of rock broke away, splintered and were ground to bits, and lions, cheetahs and saber0toothed cats fled to more southerly climes. But the ice did not advance beyond this rocky crag. Gradually silence set it, and the ice began its labor, a labor of sleep. While over a period of millennia it stretched out or shifted its enormous cold body only a centimeter at a time, it gradually was polishing the rocky surface beneath until it was round and smooth. during warmer years, decades and centuries, the water on the surface of the block of ice melted a little, and it places where the sand beneath the ice was easy to wash away, the water slipped beneath the huge, heavy ice body. And so at the every spot where this rocky elevation had hindered the ice’s forward motion, the ice slid beneath itself in the form of water and thus began to retreat, flowing downhill. In colder years the ice was simply there, it lay where it was, a heavy weight. And where in warmer years it had carved channels in the ground as it melted, during the colder years, decades and centuries it pressed its ice into these channels with all is force to seal them up again.

*

When approximately eighteen thousand years ago the glacier’s tongues began to melt—soon followed, as the earth continued to grow warmer, bu all its southernmost limbs—it left only a few deposits behind in the depths of their channels, islands of ice, orphaned ice; later they were called dead ice.

Cut off from the body it had once belonged to and trapped in these channels, this ice melted only much later. Approximately thirteen thousand years before the start of the Common Era, it turned back into water, seeped into the earth, evaporated in the air and then rained back down again, circulating in the form of water between heaven and earth. When it could not penetrate any deeper because the ground was already saturated, it collected on top of the blue clay and rose up, its surface cutting through the dark earth, and now it became visible again within its channel as a clear lake. The sand that the water itself had ground from teh rock when it was still ice now slid into this lake and sank to the bottom, and so at several points underwater mountains were formed, while in other spots the water remained as deep as the channel itself had originally been. For a time this lake would hold up its mirror to the sky amid the Brandenburg hills, it would lie smooth between the oaks, alders, and pines that were growing once more, and much later, after human beings appeared, it was given a name by them: Mårkisches Meer, the Sea of the Mark Brandenburg but one day it would vanish again, since, like every lake, it too was only temporary—like every hollow shape, this channel existed only to be filled in completely some day. Even in the Sahara there was water once. Only in modern times did something come about there that is described in the language as desertification.

Visitation/ Jenny Erpenbeck

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
75 degrees / drizzle

A great swim! Now I’m cold and tired and hungry!

10 Things

  1. more ghost vines glowing below
  2. one menacing white swan
  3. the water below was a deep green with some blue
  4. the water near the shore was still clear enough to see the sandy bottom
  5. the sky was pale — no sun, except for a few times when it almost broke through
  6. it’s the free night for open swim so more bobbing buoys — yellow was the most popular color
  7. breathed mostly every five
  8. tangled in a few vines, one leaf didn’t want to go away
  9. stopped once or twice in the middle of the lake — calm, quiet — I should stop more
  10. some little speck got in my eye at the beginning of the swim — I should have stopped to fix my goggles, but I just kept swimming, now it’s still stuck in there

june 27/RUNSWIM

5 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
69 degrees

Another run that started easy then got hard. My left hip and knee were stiff and sore. Walked several times on the way back.

Listened to feet shuffling on the grit, some keys jangling in a bucket. Smelled something floral and sweet near the franklin bridge. Felt a cool breeze on my warm face, sweat dripping off of my pony tail. Saw blue, red, and orange graffiti under the lake street bridge and a man helping a dog get through a hole in the chain link fence halfway down the franklin hill.

Ran by a break in the trees with an inviting dirt trail and thought again about how I love seeing these trails and wondering where they lead. Then I thought about how I prefer trails that have already been made by others — an invitation from past feet to explore and to step off the paved path.

Saw this poem online this morning and was surprised that I hadn’t already posted it:

blessing the boats/ lucille clifton

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

swim: 3 loops
72 degrees
light rain

I like swimming in the rain — when it’s a light rain. Have I ever swam in a hard rain? I’m not sure. When you are already wet, it’s difficult to tell what’s rain and what’s lake. Another great swim. I’m struggling in my runs, but loving the water.

10 things

  1. a steady rain that I couldn’t feel or see as I swam
  2. water, a darker green with some blue
  3. tangled in several thin, loose vines — one on my head, another my shoulders, and another on my legs — most were just slimy, but one was sharp and scratchy
  4. pale vines stretching up from the deepest parts of the lake — how tall are these vines this year? they glowed like the moon behind the clouds
  5. particles in the water, almost looking like glitter — or, was that raindrops breaking the surface?*
  6. mostly breathing every five — a few sixes, some threes, at least one two
  7. pink orange yellow safety buoys tethered to swimmers
  8. rounding the second green buoy, sighting the first orange buoy — so far off and lonely — just it and water — and only appearing in my vision when it wanted to
  9. some sort of disturbance below me — was it a big fish? — nothing seen, only felt, the water moving beneath me
  10. standing up near the beach after I finished, noticing the rain, then hearing some kids in the water excitedly yelling, It’s raining!

*It wasn’t until I wrote this out that I realized I was noticing the rain. It was very cool. The rain drop glitter made the water feel more alive, active — stirred up and swirling

I was surprised by how many people were at the beach. It had been raining all afternoon. People were still having picnics, kids were still in the water, several dozen swimmers were out on the course

june 25/RUNSWIM

3.1 miles
2 trails
73 degrees / dew point: 66

Another hot and humid morning. Another difficult run. Is it strange that I don’t mind that it’s hard? Some shade, lots of sun.

10 Things

  1. squish! stepping down in thick, gooey mud on the winchell trail
  2. thwack thwack thwack a runner approaching from behind
  3. pardon me that same runner letting me know he was passing
  4. running down to the south entrance of the winchell trail, looking at the river through the trees — not sparkling in the sun, but flat and brown — somehow this made it look even hotter and less refreshing
  5. rowers down below, heard not seen
  6. the sewer at 42nd, a steady stream of water falling
  7. the sewer at 44th, more of a dribble
  8. honking geese
  9. 4 stones stacked on the ancient boulder
  10. a squirrel ahead of me on the winchell trail — running then stopping then running, finally jumping through the fence and off the trail — was it waiting to dart out right in front of me? no

Alice Oswald and Lorine Niedecker and water’s depths

from Paean to Place/Lorine Niedecker

How much less am I
in the dark than they?

Effort lay in us
before religons
at pond bottom
all things move toward
the light

Except those
that freely work down
to ocean’s black depths
in us an impulse tests
the unknown

from Nobody/ Alice Oswald

The sea she said and who could ever drain it dry
has so much purple in its caves the wind at dusk
incriminates the waves
and certain fish conceal it in their shells
at ear-pressure depth
where the shimmer of headache dwells
and the brain goes

dark

purple

from “Interview with Water”/ Alice Oswald

To be purpled is to lose one’s way or name, to be nothing, to grieve without surfacing, to suffer the effects of sea light, to be either sleepless or weightless and cut off by dreams.

swim: 4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
82 degrees

4 loops! A beautiful summer night! The water was a bit choppy but it didn’t bother me. Saw some silver flashes below — fish? Also, beautiful shafts of light illuminating the particles swimming with me and a few ghostly vines reaching up from the bottom. In certain stretches it felt like the water wanted to pull me down to the lake floor — difficult to kick and keep high near the surface.

New breathing/sighting pattern I noticed last night at cedar: 1 2 3 breathe right 1 2 look up to sight (no breath) 3 4 5 breathe left

above the surface: A few times I paused in the middle of the lake to give attention to the surface. Once I saw a dragonfly. Another time, a plane. The water was blue but not as intense as on Sunday.

below the surface: bubbles, my hands, could feel the movement before I saw any swimmers, then bubbles and pale legs kicking. The water was green but with less blue and more yellow.

june 24/SWIM

2.5 big loops (5 cedar loops)
cedar lake open swim
84 degrees
20+ wind gusts

Big wind gusts as Scott and I walked on the gravel trail to the lake. I wondered how choppy it would be — not bad. No waves forcing me to breathe on just one side. Felt stronger than last Wednesday.

I’m writing this entry the next morning. What do I remember?

10 Things

  1. swimming through a loose vine — wrapped around my shoulders for a moment — not sharp or scratchy
  2. a swimmer in a pink cap (this year’s cap color is an ugly bronze)
  3. a tangled patch of vegetation growing up from the bottom right by the buoy
  4. black, wet-suited arms beside me for a few strokes
  5. the water above, a dull blue
  6. the water below, a vague empty green
  7. no waves but sometimes it was hard to stay up on the surface
  8. the lifeguard’s kayak gliding by me, fast and smooth and red
  9. more vegetation from below in the middle of lake — how tall are these vines?
  10. last year, the far buoy was placed very close to the swimming area at hidden beach, this year it is farther out

Alice Oswald and Nobody

I’m having fun returning to Nobody, feeling like I’ve found some ways into AO’s watery dream-world. I love reading it and Lorine Niedecker and then swimming across a lake.

1

Reviewing my notes in my Plague Notebook, Vol 21 (!), I found this, from AO in “Interview with Water”: continuous present, dream time. This reminds me of Mary Oliver’s now and now and now, which comes up in The Leaf and the Cloud and “Can You Imagine”:

but now and now and now

Swimming across the lake is both a continuous present and not a continuous present. I’m not aware of time, but I do keep track of loops. Maybe each loop is its own continuous present? It would be interesting to try and get lost in the loops, to not count them. I can set up an alarm or a distance workout on my watch that will alert me when I reached a certain amount of time or distance. (How) would the dream-state be different in this loopy state?

2

I’d like to remember (memorize?) this part of Nobody which I imagine is about making poems:

About an hour ago she surfaced and shook her arms
and peered around and dived again and surfaced
and saw someone and dived again and surfaced
and smelt all those longings of grass-flower smells
and bird-flower sounds and the vaporous poems
that hang in the chills above rivers

Those vaporous poems! The diving and surfacing and diving and surface! I love this as a description of a poet — me? — finding words hanging just above the surface. Could they be there for me today during my swim?

3

This definition of day turning to night — wow!

I’ve always loved the way when night happens
the blood is drawn off is sucked and soaked upwards
out of the cliff-flowers the way they worn out
surrender their colors and close and then the sky
suffers their insights all the shades of mauve green blue
move edgelessly from west to east the cold
comes ghostly out of holes and the earth it’s strange
as soon as she shuts her sky-lids her hindsights open
and you can see right out through her blindness
as far as the ancient stars still making their precise points
still exactly visible and then not exactly

june 21/RUN

4.15 miles
the monument and back
67 degrees
humidity: 91% / dew point: 65

Yuck! The air is so thick, everything heavy with moisture. We were supposed to have thunderstorms this morning — 90% chance — so I ruled out open swim, but they haven’t happened yet. Bummer. I bet it would have been a good swim.

I ran through the neighborhood, over the lake street bridge, up the summit hill and to the monument. Then I turned around and ran back, this time running south on the river road path instead of through the neighborhood.

10 Things

  1. 3 stones stacked on the ancient boulder
  2. a strange whimpering, soft howling or moaning sound coming from under the bridge on the east side — a non-human animal? a bird?
  3. no rowers on the river
  4. a foul, rotting smell as I ran over the bridge — I thought of the rot* that Alice Oswald mentioned in “Interview with Water” and the scarlet rot that FWA told me about yesterday when he recounted some “Elden Ring lore”
  5. a dark, deep green everywhere
  6. flowers alongside the trail on the east side: green leaves, fanned like ferns, pale white or purple flowers, small, dotting the green
  7. new (or newly noticed) graffiti under the bridge on the east side — brick red, I think
  8. the dark reflections of tree in the water near the shore — so dark that they look like shadows to me
  9. the faintest trace of a sandbar under the bridge
  10. the usual puddles near shadow falls are back, almost covering the entire path

*AO and rot: “anything excessive or out of focus or subliminal — for example: a swimmer seen from underneath, a rotting smell. . .”

Here’s another Alice Oswald water poem that I uncovered in a dissertation about Oswald, Jorie Graham, and water!

Sea Sonnet/ Alice Oswald

Green, grey and yellow, the sea and the weather
instantiate each other and the spectrum
turns in it like a perishable creature.
The sea is old but the blue sea is sudden.

The wind japans the surface. Like a flower,
each point of contact biggens and is gone.
And when it rains the senses fold in four.
No sky, no sea – the whiteness is all one.

So I have made a little moon-like hole
with a thumbnail and through a blade of grass
I watch the weather make the sea my soul,
which is a space performed on by a space;

and when it rains, the very integer
and shape of water disappears in water.

Almost forgot: japan is a new word for me. Here are some definitions, both noun and verb:

noun:

  1. any of several varnishes yielding a hard brilliant finish
  2. a hard dark coating containing asphalt and a drier that is used especially on metal and fixed by heating — called also japan black

verb:

  1. to cover with or as if with a coat of japan
  2. to give a high gloss to

june 18/RUN

3.1 miles
trestle turn around
76 degrees / feels like 82
dew point: 71

Ugh! I knew it was going to be tough when I felt too hot even before I started running. More rain last night — enough to cancel our final community band concert — and more thick, sticky air this morning.

Greeted Mr. Morning! and Mr. Holiday. Saw Dave the Daily Walker but he was too far away to greet. Counted the stacked stones on the ancient boulder: 4. Heard some strange creaks below the trestle — what were people doing down there? Also heard the rowers on the river. Felt the sweat pooling on my face, my shorts sticking to my legs.

When the dew point temperature and air temperature are equal, the air is said to be saturated.

Observed Dew Point Temperature

Almost saturated — temp = 76, dew point = 71.

Looking through the trees somewhere near the trestle, I could see the river burning bright white — even the water looked hot!

Oh, this beautiful poem by Tony Hoagland! He died in 2018 (at the age of 64) from pancreatic cancer. My mom died from pancreatic cancer. It’s terrible. This poem was published in 2007.

Barton Springs/ Tony Hoagland

Oh life, how I loved your cold spring mornings
of putting my stuff in the green gym-bag
and crossing wet grass to the southeast gate
to push my crumpled dollar through the slot.

When I get my allotted case of cancer,
let me swim ten more times at Barton Springs,
in the outdoor pool at 6AM, in the cold water
with the geezers and the jocks.

With my head bald from radiation
and my chemotherapeutic weight loss
I will be sleek as a cheetah
—and I will not complain about life’s

pedestrian hypocrisies,
I will not consider death a contractual violation.
Let my cancer be the slow-growing kind
so I will have all the time I need

to backstroke over the rocks and little fishes,
looking upwards through my bronze-tinted goggles
into the vaults and rafters of the oaks,
as the crows exchange their morning gossip

in the pale mutations of early light.
It was worth death to see you through these optic nerves,
to feel breeze through the fur on my arms
to be chilled and stirred in your mortal martini.

In documents elsewhere I have already recorded
my complaints in some painstaking detail.
Now, because all things are joyful near water,
there just might be time to catch up on praise.

june 17/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
65 degrees / dew point: 61

Today’s word: saturated. What Lorine Niedecker aimed for in her water poetry. Not floating or dry but sinking and soaked.

Rain off and on all day. Maybe thunderstorms starting in the afternoon.

No rain as I ran, but everything was wet or dripping. Moist. My face, more moist than a sponge. The falls, gushing over the limestone then rushing down the gorge to the Mississippi.

Evidence of the rain and thunderstorms last night all along the trail. Above the oak savanna it looked like some creature had tore through the green, ripping small limbs and leaves off the trees and throwing them to the ground.

The parking lot at the falls was packed with cars. Not the best day to be at the falls — but maybe it was? A chance to witness the falls in full cry, I guess. Also a chance to get wet or slip in the mud. I thought I might, but didn’t.

Anything else? A black squirrel sighting, which reminded me of the line from “What Would Root”: scolded by squirrels in their priestly black

Discovered the poet, Maureen N. McLane this morning and was delighted by her serial poem about Mz. N. Requested the book from the library. Possibly an inspiration for some writing about Sara, age 8?

an excerpt from Mz N: the serial/ Maureen N. McLace

The child Mz N sat on her bed
and wondered: that tree
outside her window
shifted
when her eye
shifted. What to make
of that?

                                          §

Mz N and her siblings
had a dog for some time.
They went on vacation &
when they came back
no dog.
They asked the parents:
the dog?
who replied:
what dog?
And some people wonder
why others distrust the obvious.

Speaking of the serial poem — LN’s “Paean to Place” is considered one — here’s a helpful definition:

The serial form in contemporary poetry, however, represents a radical alternative to the epic model. The series describes the complicated and often desultory manner in which one thing follows another. Its modular form–in which individual elements are both discontinuous and capable of recombination–distinguishes it from the thematic development or narrative progression that characterize other types of the long poem. The series resists a systematic or determinate ordering of its materials, preferring constant change and even accident, a protean shape and an aleatory method. The epic is capable of creating a world through the gravitational attraction that melds diverse materials into a unified whole. But the series describes an expanding and heterodox universe whose centrifugal force encourages dispersal. The epic goal has always been encompassment, summation; but the series is an ongoing process of accumulation. In contrast to the epic demand for completion, the series remains essentially and deliberately incomplete.

Seriality and the Contemporary Long Poem/ Joseph Conte

I had to look up a few words from this excerpt that I wasn’t quite sure of:

desultory: marked by lack of definite plan/purpose, not connected to main subject
protean: displaying great diversity or variety, versitle
aleatory: relating to luck, depending on an uncertain event or contingency

This idea of a serial poem as “an ongoing process of accumulation” is very cool and fits with my approach to Haunts and a story in long form.

june 15/RUN

5 miles
bottom franklin hill and back
72 degrees / dew point: 60

Whew! I was sure the dew point would be even higher. It felt very uncomfortable out there. And difficult. But I kept moving and didn’t push myself too hard. I ran to the bottom of the hill then walked up it. Then ran, walked, ran until I was back to the ancient boulder — no stones stacked on it today.

Last night RJP graduated from high school. I’m very proud of her for surviving it. I’m proud of myself too. It was very hard and I am tired. No more k-12 public school! Hooray! I loved many of the teachers and the music programs, but I won’t miss being subject to this schooling process.

RJP’s graduation was delayed by almost an hour because a fight broke out at the previous school’s graduation and someone was hauled away in an ambulance. FWA said he saw the guy, and he looked like he was probably fine and not in much pain. Other than the delay, the graduation was great. The awesome poet Bao Phi gave the address — so good! He, along with the student speakers, centered the experiences of BIPOC students.

10 Things

  1. white sky
  2. dark green mystery
  3. at least 2 specks in the sky — a plane? a bird?
  4. click clack — roller skiers powering up the franklin hill
  5. foamy water
  6. glowing orange shoes on a runner
  7. voices below near white sands beach
  8. one runner to another: well, that killed about an hour and a half — huh?
  9. a greeting from Mr. Holiday!
  10. a few days ago I mentioned something in orange spray painted on the sidewalk — it’s the outline of a cat (but not Garfield, I think?)

a section from Wintergreen Ridge/ Lorine Niedecker

Reading (again, for the 3rd or 4th time?) LN’s “Wintergreen Ridge,” I was delighted by her connections and associations:

Women saved
a pretty thing: Truth:

“a good to the heart”
It all comes down
to the family

“We have a lovely
finite parentage
mineral

vegetable
animal”
Nearby dark wood—

I suddenly heard
the cry
my mother’s

where the light
pissed past
pistillate cone

how she loved
closed gentians
she herself

so closed
and in this to us peace
the stabbing

pen
friend did it
close to the heart

pierced the woods
red
(autumn?)

Sometimes it’s a pleasure
to grieve

june 13/RUNSWIM

5 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
70 degrees / dew point: 60

Overcast, which helped it feel a little less warm. Sticky, thick air. A lot of sweat, especially on my face. Dripping ponytail. So green even the air was green. Greeted the Welcoming Oaks — hello friends! Descended into the tunnel of trees and was enveloped in green. Chanted triple trees: sycamore/sycamore/sycamore/red oak leaf/silver birch. Heard the rowers through the trees. Admired the barely moving, calm water under the bridge — the surface was dotted with foam and reflected clouds. Saw a speck in the sky out of the corner of my eye. Tried to look at it, gone. Tried again, a plane almost covered in fog. Saw a dark ring around it — my ring scotoma? Appreciated how the outline of the treetops on either side of the river road echoed the shape of the river banks. Walked up the hill — it took me 7 minutes — then ran, walked, ran back. Ended with a dozen roller skiers above me while I climbed out of the tunnel of trees.

For the first mile, in the dark green quiet, everything was dreamy. Thought again about how running puts me in a strange, surreal state. Nothing quite real. Then thought about Lorine Niedecker and the physical act of seeing with messed up eyes and using the poetic form to represent that. I’m not aware of how my eyes move as I see except for when I look to the peripheral as a way for my central vision to see something. I imagine having nystagmus makes you more easily register the movement of your eyes. How conscious was LN of her eye movement and how it was mimicked in her lines? When I think about how I see — the mechanics of it and its physicality — I think more about what happens when the corrupt or limited data travels as electrical impulses through the optic nerve and to the brain. Are the effects of nystagmus primarily physical — strain on eyes, the rapid movement creating dizziness and headaches? I should read more about it. . . . The physical impact of my vision sometimes reads as dizziness and light-headedness, but mostly it’s just a vague sense of unease and fatigue — more naps. I rarely feel the eye strain or get headaches from my effort.

In the article I was reading about LN’s nystagmatic poetics, this poem was discussed:

Tattoo/ Wallace Stevens

The light is like a spider.

It crawls over the water.

It crawls over the edges of the snow.

It crawls under your eyelids

And spreads its webs there—

Its two webs.

The webs of your eyes

Are fastened

To the flesh and bones of you

As to rafters or grass.

There are filaments of your eyes

On the surface of the water

And in the edges of the snow.

note at 11 am: Today is my first day of open swim! After the swim, I’ll return to this entry.

I’m spending the afternoon on the deck, reading Niedecker and thinking about Alice Oswald and Niedecker and my Haunts poems. Here are some jumbled thoughts:

You have been in my mind/between my toes/agate — Lake Superior/LN

You’ve been in
my mind

beneath my
feet Mom

Look for me under your boot-soles — Walt Whitman

Ars Poetica/ Arcelis Girmay

May the poems be
the little snail’s trail.

Everywhere I go,
every inch: quiet record

of the foot’s silver prayer.
             I lived once.
             Thank you. 
             I was here.

“We a lovely/finite parentage/mineral/vegetable/animal” — Wintergreen/ LN

I’m interested in how many layers you can excavate in personality. At the top it’s all quite named. But you go down through the animal and the vegetable and then you get to the mineral. At that level of concentration you can respond to the non-human by half turning into it.

Alice Oswald interview for Falling Awake

To write a poem is to be a maker. And to be a maker is to be down in the muck of making and not always to fly so high above the muck.

Poetry is Not a Project/ Dorothy Lasky

We can’t float or fly for long, above. We are part of the muck, not stuck but entangled, beholden

to work down/ to ocean’s black depths/us us an impulse tests/the unknown — Paean to Place/ LN

2 loops / 1.5 miles
lake nokomis open swim
80 degrees

Open swim! Open swim! I was nervous before the swim, wondering if I would see the buoys. I did! The water felt wonderful — a little cold, but not too cold, and wavy but not choppy. I watched the sun filtering through the water, avoided the vegetation growing up from the bottom and the swan boat stuck right by the orange buoy. That menacing swan was a little too close as I neared the buoy. The last green buoy was so far from the orange buoy — it seemed to take forever to reach the beginning of the loop. Oh, I love open swim and what joy to have had a good first swim!

june 10/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls
60 degrees

Ah, summer mornings! Beautiful. Cooler. If I would have slept better, I would have tried to go out even earlier. The first half of the run felt good, then I got hot and it got harder. Today I didn’t worry about what that meant for my training. Instead, I enjoyed the brief minutes of walking, taking in the trees at the falls — so green! so full!

10 Things

  1. the falls, flowing, white, undulating — the water not falling straight, but almost falling over itself — was it hitting some limestone on the way down?
  2. a bundle of something on the ground next to the dirt trail — a hammock?
  3. 2 women with tall hiking packs on their backs walking on the paved path
  4. some animal — a turkey? — upset, calling out, a human voice saying something — hey?
  5. a flash below the double bridge — a sliver of creek almost covered by green
  6. 2 roller skiers near locks and dam no 1
  7. the dirt trail cutting through the small wood near ford bridge looking cool and inviting
  8. happy kids on the minnehaha park playground — happy: green voices, where green = young, outside, tender
  9. (walking back, about to cross 46th ave at 37th street) 2 older women chatting, then greeting me, oh! hello!
  10. (walking back almost to my alley) heard on a radio or from a phone or a computer in neighbor’s backyard, the next one is Scandia — was this talk radio or a zoom meeting or what?

Lorine Niedecker and “Paean to Place”

to dwell with a place:

What is required, however, is sensual, embodied experience—close encounters of awe, wonder, fright, disgust, or even tedium—which remind us both of the real earth with which we dwell, and that we share our home with innumerable cohabitants.

Dwelling with Place: Lorine Niedecker’s Ecopoetics

opening to “Paean to Place”:

Fish
fowl
flood
Water lily mud
My life

in the leaves and on water
My mother and I
born
in swale and swamp and sworn
to water

My father
thru marsh fog
sculled down
from high ground
saw her face

at the organ
bore the weight of lake water
and the cold—
he seined for carp to be sold
that their daughter

might go high
on land
to learn

Wow! Reading this opening, I’m thinking about the Objectivists and the Imagists and Ezra Pound’s 3 rules for writing poetry:

  1. Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective
  2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation
  3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome

What condensery and music in these lines! And what wonderfully effective descriptions of two people dwelling in and with a particular place, especially her mother, born in swale and swamp and bearing the weight of lake water and the cold.

definition of ecopoetics:

The word itself is an amalgam of two Greek words: oikos [household or family] and poïesis [making, creating, or producing], so that ecopoeticsquite literally means the creation of a dwelling place, or home-making. The term came into special prominence after the influential British literary critic Jonathan Bate published The Song of the Earth in 2000. There, Bate defined ecopoetics as a critical practice in which the central tasks are to ask “in what respects a poem may be a making … of the dwelling-place” and to “think about what it might mean to dwell upon the earth.”

Dwelling with Place: Lorine Niedecker’s Ecopoetics

LN’s opening lines and her descriptions of her parents, reminds me of Mary Oliver’s The Leaf and the Cloud and her brief mentions of her parents in the first section, “Flare.” LN and MO have different experiences but they rhyme, somehow, or echo?

My mother
was the blue wisteria,
my mother
was the mossy stream out behind the house,
my mother, alas, alas,
did not always love her life,
heavier than iron it was
as she carried it in her arms, from room to room,
oh, unforgettable!

Like LN, MO was also an amazing poet of place, but she doesn’t extend her ideas of place to her parents — a deliberate severing:

I mention them now,
I will not mention them again.

It is not lack of love
nor lack of sorrow.
But the iron thing they carried, I will not carry.

So much to say about that iron, but I have run out of time right now. Perhaps more later. . .

I’m back. First, the not carrying the iron makes me think of my mom and her desire for displacement from her abusive parents. More than once she said to me that she wanted to break that cycle of abuse — and she did. And I am grateful. But there’s something to explore here for me and my relationship to place, this place 4 miles from where my mom was born and raised, that I can’t quite get at yet.

The iron also reminds me of the wonderful lines from the opening of LN’s “Lake Superior”:

In every part of every living thing
is stuff that once was rock

In blood the minerals
of the rock

*

Iron the common element of earth

Both MO and LN write about their fathers. First, MO:

My father
was a demon of frustrated dreams,
was a breaker of trusts,
was a poor, thin boy with bad luck.
He followed God, there being no one else
he could talk to;
he swaggered before God, there being no one else
who would listen.

and LN:

He could not
—like water bugs—
stride surface tension
He netted
loneliness. . .

. . . Anchored here
in the rise and sink
of life—
middle years’ nights
he sat

beside his shoes
rocking his chair
Roped not “looped
in the loop
of her hair”

The “looped” quote comes from William Butler Yeats and his poem, Brown Penny and it’s about love. I like how she throws in this line from poets or about poets, like this:

Grew riding the river
Books
at home-pier
Shelly would steer
as he read

I noticed another line of the poem in quotes, “We live by the urgent wave/of the verse.” Looked it up and found an article about “Paean to Place” and thanks to my college-attending son, I have access to it! Time to read it: Lorine Niedecker’s “Paean to Place” and its Fusion Poetics


june 3/RUN

4.2 miles
longfellow garden and back
73 degrees / dew point: 75

Sticky again today, but not as bright. Still hard to run through the thick air. Struggled on the way back — walk run walk run. Trying to remember to keep showing up and believing that it will get easier, or I will get better at handling the difficult moments, or I will finally start getting up early. I tried to think about green.

my favorite green

Running south, just past the ford bridge, nearing the locks and dam no. 1, cool air was coming from the green to my right — a small wood. Refreshing! Often I associate late spring green with thick and stifling, but today it was fresh and generous, making it easier to breathe and to run.

Before my run, I read this green poem:

Making Life on a Palette/ Raina J. León

After Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827), “George Washington at Princeton,” 1779

the color of life
takes sun yellow and bluest blue sky and water
for green ferns
chartreuse buds beading above moss
dappled shamrocks
fragrant healing of sage, laurel,
mint, basil, thyme, rosemary, myrtle
amid the tall wonders of juniper
pine, olive, pear
even the meeting of sea and river—
the sky, an intermingling of viridian and chetwode horizons,
and cerulean clarity—
offers its green seafoam,
its seaweed pats,
the crocodile at the edge of a freshwater marsh
its teeth open gritted in green
against the backdrop of hunter rainforest
dripping in green

heaven is a field of persian green
lit by translucent jade and celadon lamps
a many-roomed chateau scented by aromatic tea leaves
the aperitivo: gin, apple, and bitter lime
the time: midnight green
the guardian: a mantis in prayer

joy: harlequin, verdun, spring
magic: kaitoke forest in its energetic whisper and pulse

green must exist
inside brother james
would he call it camouflage
or nyanza or sap
for washington it’s in the colors of flags
the fields far off
feldgrau or military or empire green
or dollar bill or rifle green
revolution with chains the result
mix the green
like a spell in making
safe life
hush arbor life
nurturing abundant life
free life
bring the background to the fore
ease
ease
ease
life

So many greens! How many different greens can I see? Today, mostly, it was just green (or brown or gray).

Offering some advice on being judicious with your use of adjectives, Ted Kooser writes the following lines:

Morning Glories/ Ted Kooser

We share so much. When I write lattice,

I count on you seeing the flimsy slats

tacked into squares and painted white,

like a French door propped in a garden

with a blue condensed from many skies

pressed up against the panes. I count on

you knowing that remarkable blue,

shaped into the fluted amplifying horns

of Edison cylinder record players.

What? Come on, you know exactly
what I’m talking about. I didn’t need

to describe them like that, but I like to

however a little over my words, dabbling

the end of my finger in the white throats

of those __. You fill it in.

I could go on, but all I really needed to do

was to give you the name in the title.

I knew you’d put in the rest, maybe

the smell of a straw hat hot from the sun;

that’s just a suggestion. You know exactly

what else goes into a picture like this

to make it seem as if you saw it first, 

how a person can lean on the warm

hoe handle of a poem, dreaming,

making a little more out of the world

than was there just a moment before. 

I’m just the guy who gets it started.

Do I know that remarkable blue he’s writing about? Does he see the same blue that I do? Do we need to imagine the same blue to make his poem meaningful?

Reading “Making Life on a Palette” and “Morning Glories,” I’m thinking about the different work they ask of the reader, or, of this reader, me. “Palette” is filled with green words with histories that I don’t know; I had to do a lot of googling to dig into the poem. “Morning Glories” asks me to build an image from the name he offers, to draw upon the shared understanding/image of the flower that I already have.

Lately, I keep coming back to the question, how little data can we have and still “see” what something is? Not much, I think. Yet, to assume that we all see the same thing — the thing as it is — excludes a wide range of experiences and detail and ways of seeing. It leaves out a lot of different shades of green.

Speaking of green, I remembered that I had collected ideas about green in my plague notebook vol 3, June 2020:

from plague notebook, vol 3

june 1/RUN

4.15 miles
marshall loop (cleveland)
65 degrees
humidity: 85% / dew point: 60

Mostly overcast, a few moments of sun, no shadows. Sticky, everything damp, difficult. I felt better during the run — distracted by the dew point and the marshall hill — but when I finished, I felt a heaviness: hormones. The NP agrees: perimenopause. The good news: I’m healthy, the new NP I went to is awesome, I don’t feel anxious, I have an order in for an SSRI (lexapro). The bad news: I feel bummed out (depression doesn’t quite fit, I think), there’s some problem with insurance so they can’t fill the prescription so I have no idea when I can actually start taking the medication. But it’s June, I have several cool books to dig into, and I just got a hug from my daughter so I’ll be okay.

10 Things

  1. the red of a cardinal seen as a flash
  2. one small white boat on the river
  3. shadow falls falling, sounding like silver
  4. the smell of breakfast at Black — faint, sweet
  5. pink peonies about to pop
  6. click clack click clack — a roller skier’s poles: orange happiness
  7. the strong smell of fresh green paint on the base of a streetlamp
  8. the next streetlamp base: disemboweled, gray wire guts hanging out
  9. a purple greeting: morning! — good morning!
  10. a group of people in bright yellow vests laughing and walking on the road near the Danish American center — why?

added a few hours later: When writing this entry, I forgot about all the chanting I did. Started with triple berries:

raspberry strawberry blueberry
strawberry blueberry raspberry

Then added in some other 3 beat words:

intellect mystery history
remember remember remember

Then played with remember:

remember
try to re

member try
to remem

ber try to
remember

Then I decided to chant some of my favorite lines from Emily Dickinson:

Life is but Life
and Death but Death
Bliss is but bliss
and Breath but Breath

Life is but life is but life is but life
Death is but death is but death is but death
Bliss is but bliss is but bliss is but bliss
Breath is but breath is but breath is but breath

Life life life life
Death death death death
Bliss bliss bliss bliss
Breath breath breath breath

something important to remember: Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 counts of falsifying business records. He is now a felon and will be sentenced on July 11th. He can still run for office, but most likely won’t be able to vote (for) himself.

I’d like to focus on color this summer: June, July, and August. I’m not sure how I’ll do it, yet. Will I break it down my color? Possibly. Yesterday I picked up 2 color books that I had checked out 4 or 5 years ago. I’m anticipating that I’ll find them more useful now: The Secret Lives of Color and Chroma.

I also checked out Diane Seuss’ latest, Modern Poetry. Here’s one of her poems with some color in it:

Legacy/ Diane Seuss

I think of the old pipes,
how everything white
in my house is rust-stained,
and the gray-snouted
raccoon who insists on using
my attic as his pee pad,
and certain
sadnesses losing their edges,
their sheen, their fur
chalk-colored, look
at that mound of laundry,
that pile of pelts peeled away
from the animal, and poems,
skinned free of poets,
like the favorite shoes of that dead
girl now wandering the streets
with someone else’s feet in them.

At the beginning of the book, Diane Seuss offers a quote from Wallace Steven’s poem, Man with Blue Guitar, which I first learned of while reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. It is a long poem, so I won’t include all of it, just the part that Seuss quotes, with a few lines before that too:

from The Man with the Blue Guitar/ Wallace Stevens

Here, for the lark fixed in the mind,
in the museum of the sky. The cock

will claw sleep. Morning is not sun,
it is the posture of the nerves,

It is as if a blunted player clutched
The nuances of the blue guitar.

It must be this rhapsody or none,
The rhapsody of things as they are.

may 24/RUN

3.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
64 degrees

Another hot and hard run with heavy legs. Not enough water or iron or rest? My body adjusting to warmer, heavier air?

Ran with Scott to the falls. Windy, green. We talked about the runner’s high and I mentioned my log post from may 24, 2017 that included an early poem about the runner’s high. I’d like to edit it, or at least revisit the ideas in it. This revisiting will include trying to experience more runner’s highs. I also mentioned Jaime Quatro’s article, Running as Prayer, and the deepest level of the runner’s high. Scott said he preferred the word meditation to prayer: less Christian baggage. That conversation lasted about 15 minutes, I think. I can’t remember what else we talked about — oh, the wind, the value of having designated spots for returning your ride share bikes, side stitches.

10 Things

  1. slick path or slippery shoes or both — mud, worn-down tread
  2. wind in our face, running south. Scott suggested that the wind was like a trainer holding a belt around your waist as you ran, which is something we noticed happening before the twins game last week with a player and his trainer and a belt
  3. flashes of pale blue, almost white, river through the thick trees
  4. plenty of puddles
  5. kids yelling on the playground
  6. spray coming off the rushing falls — water falling down and from the sides of the limestone
  7. a long queue for paying for parking in the minnehaha lot
  8. the surreys are back — bunched together near the falls overlook
  9. a cooling breeze heading north again
  10. minneapolis parks mowed a wide strip of grass near the trail by the ford bridge but left the meadow — good news for the bull frogs! Today I couldn’t hear them because of the wind and the traffic but I bet they’re there

Yesterday I posted part of a poem from Lucie Brock-Broido. Here’s part of another beautiful one:

from Periodic Table for Ethereal Elements/ Lucie Brock-Broido

A girl ago, a girlhood gone like a phial of ether
Thrown on fire-just

A little jump of flame, like grief, or,

Like a penicillin that has lost its will for killing
Off, it then is gone.

And, here’s a recording of her reading the whole poem.

may 23/RUN

5.35 miles
flats and back
61 degrees

10 Things

  1. globs of white foam on the river surface, moving slowly south, flat, brown, opaque water near the shore
  2. a hissing goose
  3. dazed, dreamy, almost disembodied, running fast up the franklin hill
  4. dandelion stalks on the grass, right before the ancient boulder, illuminated by sun, casting ragged shadows
  5. looking down at the green of the grass, seeing it as just a clump of green, wondering if people with better vision than me can see the individual blades
  6. walking along the cracked concrete wall that holds back the river, comparing the actual wall to its shadow, noticing what I see better in each. The shadow, the line/edge of the wall, especially when it is cracked — noticing how the shadow breaks there. The “actual” wall: texture, not in fine detail but roughly — all over, not smooth / specifically, gray depressions where shadows inhabit the spots the wall has broken off
  7. approaching a person standing in the middle of the path under the trestle, realizing at the last minute they were not alone, but hugging another person — were they comforting them (or vice versa)? or were they just expressing affection? They held the hug for a long time, much longer than one would in a greeting
  8. Hi Dave!
  9. (how could I almost forget!?) catkin fuzz! white fuzz from cottonwood trees, looking like a dusting of snow, lining the edges of the path. White fuzz, not looking like snow, floating through the air. I had fun trying to bat it around
  10. Taking a walk break, feeling a strange drop of water on the back of my knee, wondering what happened, realizing it was a drip of sweat from my ponytail

Not an easy run. Somewhat of a grind. The first 3 miles were fine. Then I stopped to walk for a few minutes until I returned to the bottom of the hill. Put in a playlist and picked up speed as I run up the hill. Walked for a minute near the crosswalk, then ran faster up the rest of the hill. Ran then walked then ran again for the rest of the run.

No rowers or shadows from birds or big groups of runners or frantic squirrels or unleashed dogs or menacing turkeys. At least one roller skier. Today my shadow only appeared at the end of the run, looking strong with broad shoulders.

the shadow of death

Yesterday as I was reading more of C.D. Wright’s Casting Deep Shade, I was thinking about how she unexpectedly died before it was published, wondering what “unexpectedly” meant. So I looked it up. Maybe a little out of morbid curiosity, but mostly because concrete details about death help me (us, I think) to engage with death in deeper ways that go beyond fear or discomfort or dismissal. Anyway, I looked it up and discovered that she died at 67 in her sleep from a blood clot she got on an overly long plane ride from Chile. Woah — that is unexpected. Thinking about this unexpected fact while I was running this morning, I thought that, for the person dying at least, this might not be a bad way to go — in your sleep. Then I wondered what experience of dying you might miss out on in your sleep. Would you dream about going into a light? Would your life still flash before your eyes as you slept? Or would all just be suddenly nothing?

A few days ago, someone somewhere (a poetry person on instagram?), posted a poem by Lucie Brock-Broido: After the Grand Perhaps. She died a few years ago. I remember that it was shocking and upsetting to many poetry people. She had been 61 and it was a brain tumor. Reading another poet’s account of her, I know she knew she was dying for at least a few months. I thought about her as I ran today, too.

2 shadow moments from After the Grand Perhaps/ Lucie Brock-Broido

After the pain has become an old known
friend, repeating itself, you can hold on to it.
The power of fright, I think, is as much
as magnetic heat or gravity.
After what is boundless: wind chimes,
fertile patches of the land,
the ochre symmetry of fields in fall,
the end of breath, the beginning
of shadow

*

After what is arbitrary: the hand grazing
something too sharp or fine, the word spoken
out of sleep, the buckling of the knees to cold,
the melting of the parts to want,
the design of the moon to cast
unfriendly light, the dazed shadow
of the self as it follows the self

may 18/RUN

3.5 miles
trestle turn around
67 degrees

Warm this morning. Humid, too. Lots of sweat and a flushed face. Ran alongside the 10 milers for the “Women Run the City” race — just briefly; they passed me quite quickly. Everything was wet from the all-night rain. Was there sun? I can’t remember. Rowers? Not sure. Lots of people on the edge of trail, cheering on the runners.

Running north, I listened to the spectators. Running south, Beyoncé’s “Carter Cowboy.”

Right after I got back, Scott and I took Delia out for a walk. No more runners, but the road was still closed. So quiet! Scott remarked, and I agreed, that you don’t realize how much car noise there is on the river road until the cars are gone. I wish they could close the road to cars more — like they did during the pandemic.

shadows: cave paintings

The other day, I came across a poem by Muriel Rukeyser that reminded me of a great topic for shadows, especially in terms of painting:

The Painters/ Muriel Rukeyser

In the cave with a long-ago flare
a woman stands, her arms up. Red twig, black twig, brown twig.
A wall of leaping darkness over her.
The men are out hunting in the early light
But here in this flicker, one or two men, painting
and a woman among them.
Great living animals grow on the stone walls,
their pelts, their eyes, their sex, their hearts,
and the cave-painters touch them with life, red, brown, black,
a woman among them, painting.

I know very little about cave paintings. Here’s an article to read: Were the First Artists Mostly Women? Also, I could watch the documentary: Cave of Forgotten Dreams

may 17/RUN

5 miles
bottom of franklin hill
65 degrees

Feels like summer is here. Everything green, my view of the river gone. I did see the river for a few minutes, as I ran down to the flats, but I don’t remember what I saw. Wait — yes, I recall seeing the reflections of trees.

Felt good for the first half, not so good the second. Tired legs, some gastro stuff.

added a few hours later, when I remembered: Along the river road, the workers were out patching asphalt and replacing wires in the street lights that were recently disemboweled again. How many times has this happened? Running north, I saw a guy in an orange vest with a big spool of coated wire, rolling out a lot of it on the bike path. Later, returning south, I saw another worker sitting at the base of a street lamp, fiddling with the wire. It looked like a time-consuming job. I read somewhere that all this stolen wire has cost St. Paul millions of dollars this year. I also read — maybe in the same article? — that the coated wire was stamped with “City of St. Paul” on it and that that stamped wire had been recovered at at least one scrap metal company that frequently bought stolen wire. Is Minneapolis wire stamped too?

I think I partly remembered witnessing the street lamps and the wire because of reading today’s episode of the Slowdown. Major Jackson picked a poem by Liesel Mueller that I gathered a few years ago for my list of vision poems: Monet Refuses the Operation. When I first encountered it, I didn’t really get it. Then, a few months ago (18 feb 2024), I read it again and it suddenly made so much sense. Yes, I thought, she gets it. She starts the poem with an image of streetlights:

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.

I don’t think I see halos around street lamps, but the idea of things blurring together, and edges not being visible (or not existing), is very true to my experience. This poem, along with several others I’ve collected, including Ed Bok Lee’s “Halos” offer ways to think about how I see as beautiful and magical, not tragic. Here’s how Major Jackson (love his poetry!) describes this “bad” vision as beautiful:

Poets and visual artists work to give representation to the world which shimmers and blurs. Sometimes only impressions are available. Rather than a fidelity to things as they are, we desire to represent those very distortions. Today’s dramatic monologue is a gem of a poem, one that reminds how everything around us is divined with light, even our imperfections.

Episode 1120

I can’t remember what I listened to for the first half of my run, but after running up most of the hill, I stopped to walk and put in my “Slappin’ Shadows” playlist. My favorite came from, “Dancing in the Moonlight”: you can’t dance and stay uptight

Favorite song: “Evening” — the haunting flute! the melancholy bass clarinet! love it

Evening makes me think of a wonderful poem that I encountered while rereading old entries from on this day.

Evening/ Jeremy Radin

Another word I love is evening
for the balance it implies, balance
being something I struggle with.
I suppose I would like to be more
a planet, turning in & out of light
It comes down again to polarities,
equilibrium. Evening. The moths
take the place of the butterflies,
owls the place of hawks, coyotes
for dogs, stillness for business,
& the great sorrow of brightness
makes way for its own sorrow.
Everything dances with its strict
negation, & I like that. I have no
choice but to like that. Systems
are evening out all around us—
even now, as we kneel before
a new & ruthless circumstance.
Where would I like to be in five
years, someone asks—& what
can I tell them? Surrendering
with grace to the evening, with
as much grace as I can muster
to the circumstance of darkness,
which is only something else
that does not stay.

I think I’d like to memorize this poem, just so I can spend some more time with it, especially out on the trail.

random line encountered again: “squirrels devote much of their life to not-dying.” Today, I’d like to write around and into this stark line.

silhouettes

On Wednesday, I picked up three books related to my shadow month: the kids’ book, The Shades, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost of, and Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. Today, I’m skimming through Nguyen’s and Walker’s books and thinking about silhouettes again.

When I look at Kara Walker’s work, I see adamantly two-dimensional images — images pinned and flattened in a rejection of Renaissance space.

Forward/ Kathy Halbreich

Okay, I would love to be able to read all of this book, but, wow, there is very little contrast and even with my brightest lamp, I’m struggling to read the words. Bummer.

I observe in Walker’s visual liexicon a world I’ve never seen quite so explicitly: a pictorial vision in which everyone is a mere silhouette of self, a profile drained of facture (def: the manner in which — a painting — is made) or flesh, pushed flat and up against the wall.

Forward/ Kathy Halbreich

Halbreich references an interview with Kara Walker in Index, which I can read much more easily than the book:

The silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that’s also what the stereotype does.  So I saw the silhouette and the stereotype as linked.  Of course, while the stereotype, or the emblem, can communicate with a lot of people, and a lot of people can understand it, the other side of this is that it also reduces difference, reduces diversity to that stereotype.  I was kind of working through this in the tableaus and things that I’ve been doing, where the intention was to render everybody black and go from there.  Go from this backhanded philosophy that blackness is akin to everything.   

Kara Walker

In a quiet voice, she [Walker] might say that her narratives are a radical condensation of a faith in shadows, or “becoming.”

Forward/ Kathy Halbreich

Two silhouettes I recall encountering during my run:

one: Running down into the tunnel of trees, dark and thick with green, I saw a figure ahead moving strangely, something dark trailing around them, almost like flapping wings. Getting closer, I could see it was a dark jacket of sweatshirt tied around their waist. As they swung their arms widely, the sleeves of the jacket were ruffled.

two: Hi Dave! Thinking again about how I (almost) always can identify Dave the Daily Walker because of his distinctive form: one arm that swings out from his side — wide and awkward.

may 16/RUN

4.2 miles
ford loop (short)
56 degrees / humidity: 84%

Sticky with a cool wind. Glad to have my orange sweatshirt on when we started, but happy to take it off after 2 miles. Very moist. I told Scott I felt like one of those sponges you use for moistening stamps — damp all over. This led us to a discussion of how most stamps are stickers now and how hard it is to find non-sticker stamps. I suggested that my comparison — between sweaty me (would that be the tenor of a metaphor?) and the sponge (the vehicle?) — might be a dead metaphor. Then I took it a step further and suggested that stamps and letters were becoming metaphors that no longer worked because people don’t use stamps and send letters as much as they used to. Now it’s all online. This lead us to a discussion of library archives and old papers and what’s being lost when all of our evidence is online (and easily manipulable). I think that conversation was wrapping up as we headed east on the franklin bridge.

I remember admiring the dark, flat river and hearing a far off woodpecker. No sun or shadows today.

note: this paragraph was added later in the today. Earlier I couldn’t remember what we talked about on the east side of the river, finally it came to me. Between Franklin and the trestle on the east side, we talked about Still Life paintings and I mentioned how many dead animals are in the ones I’ve seen — the only way to study them closely — and with pools of blood or strung up, their bodies contorted in grotesque ways — or were those just the still life paintings Diane Seuss picked for her poetry collection? Anyway, I mentioned wanting to play around with different meanings of still: not just keeping still, but enduring. Scott mentioned a whiskey still and I thought that, since we both like bourbon, I should write a poem titled Still Life that was about drinking bourbon.

Sometimes it felt gloomy and sometimes, like walking back over the lake street bridge after we finished, it felt intense, vibrant as a certain slant of light made the green leaves glow. Woah! What a bright green!

After delighting in the green, we talked about the difference between shadows and reflections and I mentioned how I always see the edge of the water, darkened by trees, as shadows and not reflections. Scott couldn’t understand how I would get reflections and shadows mixed up. I couldn’t either until I realized much later that my confusion stems from my vision loss, at least partly. The dark forms at the edge of the shore don’t look like reflections, they look like dark shadows — no details, no evidence that it’s anything but a mass of darkness. When it’s brighter, I can easily see and understand that the smiling bridge in the water is a reflection and not a shadow. Another example: I can picture and imagine easily the difference between the shadow of a cloud crossing over me and the reflection of a cloud on the water.

At the beginning of the run, I recited the Jorie Graham poem I memorized this morning. Then I talked about the other Graham poem I encountered (see below). After I finished reciting the poem — which I did successfully while running! — Scott and I discussed the difficulty of listening to modern poetry and trying to grasp the meaning of strange language, or language used strangely with ears instead of eyes. As part of this, we discussed the oral tradition and its different methods for telling stories that people could make sense of as they listened. Again (because I have mentioned it on this blog before), it makes me want to study more oral forms of poetry, especially as I learn to rely more on hearing rather than seeing words.

a poet speaks to me from across the page

This morning, before running with Scott, after I finished memorizing Jorie Graham’s “Still Life with Window and Fish,” something strange and wonderful happened. Looking through the collection that “Still Life” is from, Erosion, I found another poem I wanted to read: To a Friend Going Blind. I began to read it and, seven lines from the end, there it was, me. Not Sarah but Sara. Out of nowhere, like the narrator or Graham was speaking just to me. Wow. Maybe I’m missing something and her Sara is referencing something earlier in the poem, but reading it for the first time, I gasped. I am Sara, and I am (most likely) going blind, and I know the beauty of the walls.

To a Friend Going Blind/ Jorie Graham

Today, because I couldn’t find the shortcut through,
I had to walk this town’s entire inner
perimeter to find
where the medieval walls break open
in an eighteenth century
arch. The yellow valley flickered on and off
through cracks and the gaps
for guns. Bruna is teaching me
to cut a pattern.
Saturdays we buy the cloth.
She takes it in her hands
like a good idea, feeling
for texture, grain, the built-in
limits. It’s only as an afterthought she asks
and do you think it’s beautiful?
Her measuring tapes hang down, corn-blond and endless,
from her neck.
When I look at her
I think Rapunzel,
how one could climb that measuring,
that love. But I was saying,
I wandered all along the street that hugs the walls,
a needle floating
on its cloth. Once
I shut my eyes and felt my way
along the stone. Outside
is the cash crop, sunflowers, as far as one can see. Listen,
the wind rattles in them,
a loose worship
seeking an object
an interruption. Sara,
the walls are beautiful. They block the view.
And it feels rich to be
inside their grasp.
When Bruna finishes her dress
it is the shape of what has come
to rescue her. She puts it on.

Her use of inside and rich and interruption here surely must be connection to the poem I just memorized: the beautiful interruptions, the things of this world and even the windowpanes are rich and I love it here where it blurs and nothing starts or ends but all is waving and colorless and voiceless.

may 14/RUN

7.5 miles
lake nokomis and back
59 degrees

Whew, that was hard. Running to the lake wasn’t too bad but on the way back, my legs were tired and I was hot and thirsty. I managed to bargain with myself — just keep going until you get to the water fountains or the light or the top of the hill — and do more running than walking in the second half. I think I needed to start earlier and bring some water.

I’m wiped out now, writing this, but I don’t care. It was worth it to get to run to Lake Nokomis and watch the glittering water, hear the seagulls, feel the lake air. Summer and open water swimming is coming! I signed myself, and FWA and RJP up for open swim this year! Will either of them swim? Hopefully at least once or twice. One more thing to note: looking out at the water, then to the little beach, I noticed the lifeguard boat — the main marker I use to navigate when I can’t see the buoys — has been moved. Hopefully it will be moved back again or I’ll have some difficulty sighting this summer.

Listened to the birds and the traffic and a song drifting out of a car window as I ran to the lake. Put in my “Slappin’ Shadows” playlist on the way back:

Moonshadow
Golden Years
The Shadow of Your Smile
I’m Beginning to See the Light
I’m Shadowing You
Shadow Dancing
If You Go Away
Hot Lunch Jam
Watching the Wheels / John Lennon

The last one about the wheels was just added last night. In addition to watching the wheels going ’round, he’s also doing time, watching the shadows on the wall. After he’s done singing, the song ends with random street noise: clopping horses, a person’s foot steps, someone talking. The clopping horses made me think of one of the rooms in an exhibit at Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA). You sit on a bench in the room as a day cycles through, complete with the light changing throughout the day to simulate dawn, midday, dusk, evening, and with a recording of sounds outside of the room, including . . . horses clopping. I recall having some deep thought about shadows and my relationship to them as I listened to this song, but I can’t remember what it was. I recall having a general feeling of agreement: letting it go and just watching the wheels go ’round or the shadows on the wall sounds good to me!

One other random shadow thing I remember: In the middle of the night, during one of 3 or 4 sessions of being restless and getting out of bed, I looked around the room and noticed the shadows. The moon must have been bright last night because there were lots of shadows even though we have the blinds closed. At one point, a car drove by and their headlights looked cool and strange traveling across the wall.

As I ran along the creek and switched from sun to shade to sun again, I thought about how welcome shade is on a too sunny day. When I’m running in the spring and summer, I almost always cheer for the shadows and the coolness they offer.

Yesterday I picked up a book I requested from the library, Margaret Livingstone’s Vision and Art. Very cool. I got it so I could read more about how artists have used luminance and shadows and light to create images that look real.

Another thought I recall as I drifted in and out of sleep last night: I’d like to think about how the way artists manipulate light and shadow to create their illusions of realness, might be similar to how the brain does it for us. The brain as an artist — filling in, filtering, transforming signals into images that we can use and admire.

Yesterday I revisited Jorie Graham’s poem, “Still Life with Shadow and Fish” and understood it in a way I hadn’t before. Wow! I decided to listen to/read something else by her. Listening to this recording helped me to understand it a little better.

Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt/ Jorie Graham

Although what glitters
on the trees,
row after perfect row,
is merely
the injustice
of the world,

the chips on the bark of each
beech tree
catching the light, the sum
of these delays
is the beautiful, the human
beautiful,

body of flaws.
The dead
would give anything
I’m sure,
to step again onto
the leafrot,

into the avenue of mottled shadows,
the speckled
broken skins. The dead
in their sheer
open parenthesis, what they
wouldn’t give

for something to lean on
that won’t
give way. I think I
would weep
for the moral nature
of this world,

for right and wrong like pools
of shadow
and light you can step in
and out of
crossing this yellow beech forest,
this buchen-wald,

one autumn afternoon, late
in the twentieth
century, in hollow light,
in gaseous light. . . .
To receive the light
and return it

and stand in rows, anonymous,
is a sweet secret
even the air wishes
it could unlock.
See how it pokes at them
in little hooks,

the blue air, the yellow trees.
Why be afraid?
They say when Klimt
died suddenly
a painting, still
incomplete,

was found in his studio,
a woman’s body
open at its point of
entry,
rendered in graphic,
pornographic,

detail—something like
a scream
between her legs. Slowly,
feathery,
he had begun to paint
a delicate

garment (his trademark)
over this mouth
of her body. The mouth
of her face
is genteel, bored, feigning a need
for sleep. The fabric

defines the surface,
the story,
so we are drawn to it,
its blues
and yellows glittering
like a stand

of beech trees late
one afternoon
in Germany, in fall.
It is called
Buchenwald, it is
1890. In

the finished painting
the argument
has something to do
with pleasure.

may 12/RUN

3.1 miles
turkey hollow
67 degrees

Too hot this morning! My usual refrain: get up and go out earlier! Lots of shadows, birds — several turkeys in the neighborhood just past turkey hollow! None of them menacing today. I decided to put together another shadow playlist with all my favorites. Called it “Slappin’ Shadows.” I listened to it for the whole run instead of the birds.

I remember these lyrics from “Moonshadow” especially:

Did it take long to find me?
I asked the faithful light
Oh, did it take long to find me?
And are you gonna stay the night?

I’m bein’ followed by a moonshadow
Moonshadow, moonshadow

10 Surfaces I Ran Over

  1. sidewalk
  2. street — smooth
  3. street — cracked, rutted
  4. grass
  5. roots
  6. soft, sandy, slippery dirt
  7. soft dirt that was mud 2 day s ago
  8. curb
  9. paved trail
  10. edge of road, slanted, over a grate

Last week, I checked out Dorianne Laux’s new collection, Life on Earth. I especially love this poem:

Mugged By Poetry/ Dorianne Laux    

—for Tony Hoagland who sent me a handmade chapbook made from old postcards called OMIGOD POETRY with a whale breaching off the coast of New Jersey and seven of his favorite poems by various authors typed up, taped on, and tied together with a broken shoelace.

Reading a good one makes me love the one who wrote it, 
as well as the animal or element or planet or person 
the poet wrote the poem for. I end up like I always do, 
flat on my back like a drunk in the grass, loving the world.  
Like right now, I’m reading a poem called “Summer” 
by John Ashbery whose poems I never much cared for, 
and suddenly, in the dead of winter, “There is that sound 
like the wind/Forgetting in the branches that means 
something/Nobody can translate…” I fall in love 
with that line, can actually hear it (not the line 
but the wind) and it’s summer again and I forget 
I don’t like John Ashbery poems. So I light a cigarette 
and read another by Zbigniew Herbert, a poet 
I’ve always admired but haven’t read enough of, called 
“To Marcus Aurelius” that begins “Good night Marcus
put out the light/and shut the book For overhead/is raised 
a gold alarm of stars…” First of all I suddenly love 
anyone with the name Zbigniew. Second of all I love 
anyone who speaks in all sincerity to the dead
and by doing so brings that personage back to life, 
plunging a hand through the past to flip off the light.  
The astral physics of it just floors me. Third of all 
is that “gold alarm of stars…” By now I’m a goner, 
and even though I have to get up tomorrow at 6 am 
I forge ahead and read “God’s Justice” by Anne Carson, 
another whose poems I’m not overly fond of 
but don’t actively disdain. I keep reading one line 
over and over, hovering above it like a bird on a wire 
spying on the dragonfly with “turquoise dots all down its back 
like Lauren Bacall”. Like Lauren Bacall!! Well hell, 
I could do this all night. I could be in love like this 
for the rest of my life, with everything in the expanding
universe and whatever else might be beyond it 
that we can’t grind a lens big enough to see. I light up 
another smoke, maybe the one that will kill me, 
and go outside to listen to the moon scalding the iced trees.  
What, I ask you, will become of me?

may 11/RUN

5.25 miles
ford loop
60 degrees

Shorts, tank top, sun! Only one rower on the river. Under the bridge the water was sparkling — was it because of the sandbar? There was some sort of informal running event — no signs, but a stream of people, adults and kids, running and people on the edge of the trail cheering.

I ran on the soft dirt trail beside the pave path a lot. Gritty and fun to slide on — not slide as in slip but as in glide.

Encountered other runners, walkers, one rollerblader who kindly said, on your left, as he passed me. I could hear the metallic clunking of his wheels before and after he passed.

Birds, of course. The run began with the haunting coo of a mourning dove. I don’t hear mourning doves that often. I didn’t know, or if I did I forgot, that they are also called turtle doves. Also heard some black-capped chickadees. At the end of the run as I walked back home through the neighborhood, I heard a little kid call out, bird!, and the adult with him say, sparrow.

Lots of shadows: tree trunks, leaves, fence railings, birds, me, beside rocks, under benches. My favorite shadow was mine — running close to the railing, overlooking the gorge and the river on the east bank, my shadow was way down in the trees, near the water. I kept moving closer to the railing, trying to get my shadow in the water. I never got close enough for her to swim.

Another memorable shadow: the sidewalk was almost all gray shade, with just a little light, where the leaves hadn’t filled in it. I imagined doing an erasure poem that mimicked this form. Most of the text shaded out with just a few words sprinkled around — dappled? I want to try it! Speaking of dappled, the other day I was describing all of the shadows in my plague notebook (vol 20!). I noticed the speckled light under the crabapple tree and wrote: crabapple dapple. Told Scott about it and he responded, ugh!

Almost 4 miles in, on the ford bridge, I stopped to put in my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist. Put it on shuffle: “The Shadow Knows,” “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” “We Will Become Silhouettes,” and then a song I haven’t heard yet while running: “Shadows and Light”/ Joni Mitchell. I’ll have to think about her lyrics some more.

Here’s a poem that mentions shadow, and is about questions! Last year, I listened to a wonderful podcast with Alabi: Kemi Alabi vs. Divinity. It’s not available right now; is it because the hosts are protesting Poetry Foundation’s refusal to make a statement against the genocide in Palestine? (added, 15 jan 2025: the episode is back online).

44 Questions to Ask While Bingeing/ Kemi Alabi

After Benji Hart

  1. How many hands have touched this food?
  2. What were their intentions?
  3. How vast is the range?
  4. What makes them hands at all?
  5. How many seeds survived their birth for this?
  6. Did you count yourself?
  7. From sprout to pluck, how many breaths old was the oldest?
  8. What’s become of its homeland?
  9. How many breaths will it add to yours?
  10. Or is this a thing that takes?
  11. Which things were born dead for this?
  12. Did you count yourself?
  13. Which born free?
  14. Which born food?
  15. Is there a state in-between?
  16. How old was the well of that answer?
  17. If governments and their signed scrolls are Plato’s cave wall shadows, where is the real sun?
  18. What’s become of its homeland?
  19. How many generations removed from the land are you?
  20. What floor takes its place?
  21. What is it built on top of?
  22. Are the people who tended that place still alive?
  23. Are there any living descendants?
  24. Is their language still spoken on earth?
  25. If you heard it, would your feet twitch?
  26. Or does dead mean gone?
  27. How many gone things in your place?
  28. Did you count yourself?
  29. What does your body and the day it makes cost?
  30. What is its price, in gone things?
  31. Is this sustainable? Better—regenerative?
  32. Or will this make you the most gone thing alive?
  33. Is god or the human the cave wall shadow?
  34. Who says the shadow is nothing at all?
  35. Are you still eating?
  36. Who?
  37. What for?
  38. What have you grown in its place?
  39. How much is enough?
  40. Is enough a place or a count?
  41. Is there a state in-between?
  42. Or does enough mean gone?
  43. Did you enough yourself?
  44. In the language of the oldest gone thing, how do you say devour?

Who says the shadow is nothing at all?
Did you enough yourself?

So good!

may 6/RUN

7 miles
st. kates and back
60 degrees

Ran with Scott on a beautiful spring morning. Sun, shadows, a welcome breeze. We ran over to St. Catherine’s University, across the river. RJP has almost decided to go there (hopefully she makes up her mind tonight) and we wanted to check it out. I’m impressed and excited to visit her next year. We talked a lot more in the first half of our run; we were both tired the last 2 miles. Scott talked about some Threads exchange involving Drake, Kanye West, and a diss track. We heard a creaking tree and I said it sounded like the squeaking gate we heard yesterday afternoon while we were walking. The mention of the gate reminded me of Marie Howe’s poem, “The Gate,” which I recited for Scott (of course I did). We talked about many other things but I just remember discussing what a wonderful campus St. Cates is and how great it will be for RJP.

On the sidewalk just outside of campus, we encountered several sidewalk poems that are part of the Public Art Sidewalk Poetry project. Scott took a picture of one:

November/ Marianne McNamara and Scott’s feet

November/ Marianne McNamara (2009)

Autumn winds drag leaves from the trees,
clog the streets in dreary finale.
Bare branches crisscross the heavy sky.
Icy rain spatters, ink-blots the pavement.
I settle at the window, stare into the black flannel, search the woolly lining of the night for winter.

I was unable to read this on the sidewalk, so I’m glad I could find it online. How hard is it for someone with good vision to read? I like the idea of this project, but in practice, it doesn’t quite work. Scott suggested they should use black paint on the letters, to make them stand out.

10 Things

  1. smell: lilac, intense
  2. tree shadows, more filled in than last week
  3. a loud leaf blower
  4. a safety patrol on the corner near Dowling saying I hate you, I hate you — who was he talking to?
  5. the soft trickle of water falling from the sewer pipe near the 44th street parking lot
  6. mud and ruts filled with water at a construction site on the edge of campus
  7. feeling a fine film of dust on my face near the end of the run
  8. more than a dozen signs in the grass outside a liquor store, each one said the same thing: wine sale. Scott: I guess they’re having a wine sale
  9. running down Randolph encountering 3 or 4 sidewalk poems, none of them marked on the map
  10. noticing a faint white thing flying through the air, high above us: a bird? a plane? a trick of the light or corrupted data from my eye to my brain?

the allegory of the cave, part 1

I want to read the cave parable and think about its shadows, but I want to read it in the context of The Republic so I’ve been searching my shelves for my copy. Which class in college did we read this for? Probably The Individual and Morality. Maybe a philosophy class? Anyway, it is very hard for me to find one book among almost a thousand. When we moved in I organized them, but over time, books have moved. Also, it’s dim in our living room and I have a lot of trouble reading book titles with my bad eyes. Yesterday I asked RJP to help, and she found it! Maybe I’ll try reading some of it out on the deck this afternoon. Reading physical books, as opposed to e-books, can be hard; there’s never enough light unless I’m reading it under my special lamp (designed for sewers and cross-stitchers and 80 year-olds with bad eyes and me). Reading outside in natural light helps.

an hour spent outside reading and dozing off and reading again . . .

First, two links that connect Plato and his cave with poetry:

Reading through the allegory, I came accross these lines:

. . . the eyes may be confused in two ways and from two causes, namely when they’ve come from the light into the darkness and when they’ve come from the darkness into the light. . . whether it has come from a brighter life and is dimmed through not having yet become accustomed to the dark or whether it has come from greater ignorance into greater light and is dazzled by the increased brilliance.

518a, The Republic / Plato, trans. G.M.A. Grube

Of course, I immediately thought of two of my favorite vision poems (what I’m calling them) by Emily Dickinson. And of course I have both of them memorized — but not her punctuation.

We grow accustomed to the Dark
When light is put away
As when a neighbor holds the lamp
To witness her goodbye.

A Moment — We uncertain step —
For newness of the Night
(We Grow Accustomed to the Dark/ ED)

Too bright for our infirm Delight
The truth’s superb surprise

. . .

The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.
(Tell all the truth but tell it Slant/ ED)

I remember Plato’s cave and the shadows and the inability to access Truth, but I didn’t remember him discussing how both too little light and too much light blind us. The emphasis, as I recall, was always on darkness = bad, ignorance, the problem. Was I just not paying attention in philosophy class?

Searching for “plato cave,” I came across a video about it and decided to watch it:

The School of Life

I’d like to write more about what I find to be missing (also what’s helpful) in this account, but I’ve run out of time. Here’s one more video for comparison that I just started watching. When I have time, I’ll reflect on both:

After Skool

may 5/RUN

3.1 miles
turkey hollow loop
60 degrees

Late morning felt hot today. Bright sun, not much shade. The river road was closed off for the annual Walk MS charity event so I ran on the dirt/mud trail between it and edmund. Listened to my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist for the whole run:

(skipped Shadow Song/Screaming Trees, Shadows and Light/ Joni Mitchell)
Silver Shadow/ Atlantic Starr
Total Eclipse of the Heart/ Bonnie Tyler
Help Me Make It Through the Night/ Kris Kristofferson
Sunshine in the Shade/ The Fixx
The Shadow of Your Smile/ Astrud Gilberto
Evening/ The Moody Blues
White Room/ Cream

I wondered what a silver shadow might look like, then I wanted to see one. The silver outline of the sun behind the clouds? My shadow on the blue-white snow? I know — it’s Eamon Grennan’s birdsong in his poem, Lark-Luster:

. . . when summer happens, you’d almost see the long silver ribbons of song the bird braids as if binding lit air to earth that is all shadows, to keep us (as we walk our grounded passages down here) alive to what is over our heads—song and silence—and the lot of us leaning up: mind-defeated again, just harking to it.

Then I got distracted by mud and people and the sun and didn’t give close attention to the lyrics for the next three songs, only briefly registering that Bonnie Tyler was singing to someone whose love is like a shadow on her, keeping her in the dark; Kris Kristofferson was comparing someone’s hair “laying soft upon his skin” to the shadows on the wall; and The Fixx were declaring that they were the sunshine in the shade of life.

Off the grass, back on the road, I thought about Astrud Gilberto’s affection for the shadow of a smile — was the shadow cast by a very bright smile? Looking at the lyrics now, I understand the shadow to be the wonderful (but haunted?) memory of a love that didn’t last.

I am really digging The Moody Blues, “Evening.” That flute! Shadows on the ground/never make a sound/fading away in the sunset/Night has now become/Day for everyone

I thought about the white curtains in Marie Howe’s dark room instead of Cream’s black curtains in a white room. where the shadows run from themselves.

This is fun! I like thinking about silver shadows as birdsong, and shadows softly caressing the wall, and what it would be like to see shadows running from themselves.

Near the end of “Shadow of Your Smile,” I saw something ahead of me, in the middle of the road. A big black dog? No — it’s that menacing turkey again! The one I wrote about on april 30th and april 11th. Just standing there in the middle of the road, his feather fanned out. This time I didn’t turn around, but walked by him, at a safe distance. I also took a picture:

RJP has named this big turkey Jon.

Zooming in, I see a brave person on the sidewalk, nearing Jon.

Recounting the story to Scott when I returned home, I decided that I wanted to imagine this turkey as a friend, not an enemy — or a frenemy? I also began to believe that he’s trying to tell me something: write about ME! And I will. Well, I already wrote one poem:

Unsettled

by noise

I stop to
witness

a dark shape
draw near

too big for

a squirrel

too small for
a bear.

The moment
suspends

unresolved
until

the shape turns —
pale beak

red wattle
framed by

tail feathers.
This Tom

wants trouble.

What if this turkey is my shadow-self? Will he be around for my next run? I guess it’s the spring of the turkey — maybe the summer, too? I will add Jon — I might name him myself if he appear again — to my list of Regulars!

Inspired by another turkey sighting, and deciding that I will embrace these visits, here’s another amazing poem from Diane Seuss’s Sill Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl:

Still Life with Turkey/ Diane Seuss

The turkey’s strung up by one pronged foot,

the cord binding it just below the stiff trinity

of toes, each with its cold bent claw. My eyes

are in love with it as they are in love with all

dead things that cannot escape being looked at.

It is there to be seen if I want to see it, as my

father was there in his black casket and could not

elude your gaze. I was a child so they asked
if I wanted to see him. “Do you want to see him?”

someone asked. Was it my mother?
Grandmother? 
Some poor woman was stuck with the job. 

“He doesn’t look like himself,” whoever-it-was

added. “They did something strange with his mouth.”

As I write this, a large moth flutters against

the window. It presses its fat thorax to the glass.

“No,” I said, “I don’t want to see him.” I don’t recall

if I secretly wanted them to open the box for me

but thought that “no” was the correct response,

or if I believed I should want to see him but was

too afraid of what they’d done with his mouth.
I think I assumed that my seeing him would

make things worse for my mother, and she was all

I had. Now I can’t get enough of seeing, as if I’m paying

a sort of penance for not seeing then, and so

this turkey, hanged, its small, raw-looking head, 

which reminds me of the first fully naked man

I ever saw, when I was a candy striper

at a sort of nursing home, he was a war veteran,

young, burbling crazily, his face and body red
as something scalded. I didn’t want to see,

and yet I saw. But the turkey, I am in love with it, 

its saggy neck folds, the rippling, variegated

feathers, the crook of its unbound foot,

and the glorious wings, archangelic, spread

as if it could take flight, but down, 
down
ward, into the earth.

may 3/RUN

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
58 degrees

Warm, too warm. I need to remember to start these runs much earlier and to wear a tank top. A beautiful morning. All sun. Perfect for giving attention to shadows. Noticed many, cast from: new leaves on trees, tree trunks, lamp posts, a swooping bird, a parks truck, me.

Listened to water — dripping then trickling then gushing, vigorous rustling in the brush, some frogs in the marshy meadow near the ford bridge as I ran south to the falls. Put in my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist on the way back north.

I’m Shadowing You/ Blossom Dearie
Me and My Shadow/ Frank Sinatra
Shadowboxer/ Fiona Apple
My Shadow/ Keane
Shadow Dancing/ Andy Gibb

I didn’t think too much about the first two songs, but when I got to “Shadowboxer” it hit me: shadow box. I wrote the following before the run:

May is for shadows and I was thinking that I’d like to reread/study Plato’s Cave until I read this line in Readers recommend: songs about shadows — without them everything would be a floating morass of light and colour — drop shadows bring a third dimension to the 2D world. It made me think about one of my ongoing obsessions: ekphrastic poems and visual art. Just yesterday afternoon, I was reading Diane Seuss’ Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl. (The title is a reference to Rembrandt’s “Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl“) In several of the poems I read, Seuss describes the dark and light in some famous paintings — does she ever mention shadows? Here’s one of my favorites, both her poem and the painting:

Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber/ Diane Seuss

Anything can be a marionette. A quince, a cabbage, a melon, a cucumber,
suspended against a black background, illuminated by a curious
white light. In this little show, the quince plays a full gold moon. The cabbage
is the antagonist, curled outer leaves fingering the charcoal void.
Cucumber’s the peasant, nubby belly to the ground like a frog.
That leaves melon, center stage, rough wedge hacked out of her butter side.
Each object holds its space, drawing the eye from quince to cabbage, melon
to cucumber, in a left to right, downward-sloping curve. Four bodies
hang in the box of darkness like planets, each in its private orbit.
It’s a quiet drama about nothing at all. No touch, no brushing
up against each other, no oxygen, no rot, so that each shape, each
character, is pure, clean in its loyalty to its own fierce standard.
Even the wounded melon exudes serenity. Somewhere, juice runs
down a hairy chin, but that is well beyond the border of the box.

This poem is about a painting by Sánchez Cotán: Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber

What would these four objects look like without the shadows around the curves, in the cracks, below the belly? Would they look more real? Less real? This painting is strange and haunting, and both difficult and easy for me to see. Can I remember it on the first part of my run? I’ll try. I’ll also try to notice how shadows offer depth, make things seem real, substantial, not just dots or flat objects.

side note: These fruits and vegetables as subjects reminds me of a movie that Scott and I rewatched the other week: The Four Seasons, with Alan Alda, Rita Moreno, and Carol Burnett. One of the other characters, Anne, has taken up photography and has spent the last 2? years photographing vegetables, one at a time. Her husband thinks this is ridiculous and offers it up as evidence for how little she does, and as one of the reasons he’s divorcing her. Reading Seuss’ poem and staring at Sánchez Cotán’s painting, I am far less judgmental of her choice than my 7 or 8 year old self was when she watched this movie, over and over, on HBO.

I searched for a clip from the movie and found it! Unfortunately it starts right after the photographs of the vegetables are shown.

Still Life with Vegetables and an Asshole Husband

During the run, I kept thinking about the painting and the objects painted in a box. How each of them were separated from each other, isolated, with some amount of light shining on them to display them. I thought about how sometimes I feel like I’m on display, a bright light shining on me, blinded, unable to see other people clearly even as I know they can see me. Disconnected from the world by the box. The shadow box, which brings me back to the Fiona Apple song, “Shadowboxer.” I started wondering about shadowboxing as a verb that didn’t mean boxing at shadows, but the act of putting someone on display, isolating them, turning them into a keepsake in a box on a wall, like the set of small boxes my mom had hanging in our many houses when I was growing up. I also thought about how there’s no reference point for size in the painting. What if the box was a small shadow box, and what if the fruit were miniatures, made out of wood or silk or plastic? (my mom loved wooden fruit) These thoughts made me want to study the history of shadow boxes.

Okay, just looked up shadow box origins and found some interesting stuff, which I’ll get to in a minute.

But first, any connection between Apple’s song and my version of shadowboxing? These lyrics seem promising:

Oh, your gaze is dangerous
And you fill your space so sweet
If I let you get too close
You’ll set your spell on me

Now, the history of shadow boxes. I had no idea —

Sailors were the first to create shadow boxes. They made them out of wood salvaged from their ships. They made them out of fear. Sailors believed that if their shadow reached shore before they did, their life on land would be cursed. The box, containing the sum total of a sailor’s personal effects, protected their true self.

Shadow Box — The Art of Assemblage

In this post, Karen Kao also mentions Cornell Boxes, named after Joseph Cornell who collected objects then arranged them in whimsical and weird ways in little wooden boxes. Adam Gopnik wrote about for the New Yorker in 2003: Sparkings.

Kao opens her post with an intriguing way to think about shadow boxes:

Think of a literal box, perhaps protected by a glass front, inside of which resides a world of whimsy. Think of it as found poetry in three-dimensional form.

Interesting, but what does this have to do with shadows? Not much, or at least not much in the way I expected. Shadow boxes don’t involve literal shadows, but figurative ones — the shadow-self as embodied through cherished objects. Am I getting that right? This shadow-self, serving as proxy for the real self, needs to be protected, plucked out of the world and made safe, preserved, in its own little box.

The idea of the shadow-self and the shadow as the property of the self bothers me a little. Even as I imagine my shadow to be connected to me, I don’t see it as me, mine. This leads me to a question for another day: what is the relationship between an object and the shadow it casts?

I want to return to the painting and Seuss’ poem and the shadows and dark and light within them, but I also want to finish this entry so I can go outside and sit in the sun.

Okay, I sat (and napped) in the sun for about an hour. I’m looking at the painting of the quince, cabbage, melon, and cucumber and thinking about light and darkness and shadows. Then, color. I think that this painting would look the same to me if it were in black and white — I searched for a black and white version, but couldn’t find one. Okay, back to shadows. They offer texture, especially on the cabbage. They also suggest that the light source is coming from the left side — a window? Anything else? I’ll keep thinking about it.

may 1/RUN

4 miles
veterans home and back
57 degrees
wind: 14 mph / 28 mph gusts

Ran with Scott. What did we talk about? I remember Scott talking a lot at the beginning — it was something he was excited about — but I can’t remember what it was. I do remember him complaining about Spotify and how some of their new policies hurt independent musicians like him. I talked about shadows and wind and marveled at a tree branch creaking in the wind. Oh — and I complained (again) about my new yellow shoes. I tried them one more time and they still hurt my feet and make my calves ache. I need to remember: no more yellow shoes!

The water was gushing at the falls. We could smell something being fried at Sea Salt — it’s open for the season! I heard and saw a cardinal. I was dazzled by the bright white paint on the locks and dam no 1 sign — we both wondered if it was a reflective paint that made it so bright. A mile later, I could barely make out the bright yellow sign at 38th — the one I referred to as a bee last month. It was dull and blended in with the greenish-yellow trees behind it.

My favorite thing today: the wonderful shadows the new leaves made on the sidewalk. Tiny little jagged dots or points, making the tree shadow look like something other than a tree. What? Not sure. A strange, magical sculpture? Glitter shadow? The leaves made the shadows strange, the shadows made the path strange. First encountering them on the double bridge, I didn’t think they were shadows but some sort of blob on the asphalt.

During the run I had mentioned that I didn’t know what my May challenge would be but that it would be fun to have a theme that I could make a playlist for. By the end of the run, after witnessing the wonderful shadows, I had my topic: Shadows! As we walked back, I was already creating my playlist.

I’m Shadowing You

  1. I’m Shadowing You / Blossom Dearie
  2. Me and My Shadow / Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.
  3. Shadowboxer / Fiona Apple
  4. My Shadow / Keane
  5. Shadow Dancing / Andy Gibb
  6. Shadow Song / Screaming Trees
  7. Shadows and Light / Joni Mitchell
  8. Silve Shadow / Atlantic Starr
  9. Total Eclipse of the Heart / Bonnie Tyler
  10. Help Me Make It Through the Night / Kris Kristofferson
  11. Sunshine in the Shade / The Fixx
  12. the Shadow of Your Smile / Astrud Gilberto
  13. Evening / The Moody Blues
  14. White Room / Cream
  15. Shadow Stabbing / CAKE
  16. I’m Beginning to See the Light / Ella Fitzgerald
  17. Twilight Time / The Platters
  18. The Shadow Knows / Link Wray
  19. yesterday / The Beatles
  20. Moonshadow / Cat Stevens
  21. Golden Years / David Bowie
  22. Candle Mambo / Captain Beefheart
  23. If You go Away / Neil Diamond
  24. We Will Become Silhouettes / The Postal Service
  25. Crepuscule With Nellie / Thelonious Monk

Discovered this poem on the Slowdown before my run. Oh, Dorianne Laux, what a gift your poem is today!

Life On Earth/ Dorianne Laux

The odds are we should never have been born. Not one of us. Not one in 400 trillion to be exact. Only one among the 250 million released in a flood of semen that glides like a glassine limousine filled with tadpoles of possible people, one of whom may or may not be you, a being made of water and blood, a creature with eyeballs and limbs that end in fists, a you with all your particular perfumes, the chords of your sinewy legs singing as they form, your organs humming and buzzing with new life, moonbeams lighting up your brain’s gray coils, the exquisite hills of your face, the human toy your mother longs for, your father yearns to hold, the unmistakable you who will take your first breath, your first step, bang a copper pot with a wooden spoon, trace the lichen growing on a boulder you climb to see the wild expanse of a field, the one whose heart will yield to the yellow forsythia named after William Forsyth—not the American actor with piercing blue eyes, but the Scottish botanist who discovered the buttery bells on a highland hillside blooming to beat the band, zigzagging down an unknown Scottish slope. And those are only a few of the things you will one day know, slowly chipping away at your ignorance and doubt, you who were born from ashes and will return to ash. When you think you might be through with this body and soul, look down at an anthill or up at the stars, remember your gambler chances, the bounty of good luck you were born for.

april 30/RUN

5.15 miles
bottom of franklin hill
54 degrees
wind: 3 mph

The sun is back! And so are shorts without tights. And rowers and roller skiers and laughing woodpeckers! A beautiful morning for a run. I remember looking down at the river: smooth and still. Heard a creaking noise under the trestle, almost like an old swing. Did someone hang up a swing down there? Smelled urine just above the flats — yuck! Encountered other runners and walkers and dogs and e-bikes — one was powering up the Franklin hill playing a classic rock song . . . I think it was AC/DC.

Running back through the tunnel of trees, almost done, I saw a dark shape up ahead. I assumed it was a dog. Nope, it was that big turkey again and this time he gobbled at me. The trail was narrow with no choice but to run right past him unless I turned around. Since I’m a wimp and he was staring menacingly at me, I turned around and ran until I reached the end of the fence. Then I climbed up to the bike trail. I’m fine with being a wimp.

Listened to the rowers as I ran north. After turning around and running up most of the hill, I put in Beyoncé’s new album, Cowboy Carter. Earlier today I was posting things about bees on a new resource page, Bees, so I have bees on the brain. Listening to Beyoncé, I heard a line with the word honey in it and thought, Queen Bee! Yes, more bees. I’ll have to add Beyonc´e to my bee page!

Before the run, I read this poem by James Schuyler that I’ve wanted to post ever since I discovered it a few weeks ago. I wanted to wait until it was green. Today it is, so I’m posting it:

A Gray Thought/ James Schuyler (1972)

In the sky a gray thought
ponders on three kinds of green:
Brassy tarnished leaves of lilacs
holding on half-heartedly and long
after most turned and fell to make
a scatter rug, warmly, brightly brown.
Odd, that the tattered heart-shapes 
on a Persian shrub should stay
as long as the northern needles 
of the larch.  Near, behind the lilac,
on a trunk, pale Paris green, green
as moonlight, growing on another time scale
a slowness becoming vast as though
all the universe were an atom
of a filterable virus in a head
that turns an eye to smile
or frown or stare into other
eyes: and not of gods, but creatures
whose size begins beyond the sense of size:
lichens, softly-coloured, hard in durance,
a permanence like rock on a transient tree.
And another green, a dark thick green
to face the winter, laid in layers on
the spruce and balsam or in foxtail
bursts on pine in springy shapes
that weave and pierce
the leafless and unpatterned woods.

I know this is a poem about 3 different greens in the fall, nearing winter. I’m posting it because I love his descriptions of green and wanted to use it to think more about different greens today. That was my plan, at least, as I ran. All I managed to do was chant a few 3-beat greens:

emerald green
army green
jungle green
pear green —
lime green —

Mid-chant I noticed the dandelions on the edge of the trail and condensed the 4-syllable word, dan de li on into 3-syllables: dan dy lines

Dandy lines? Love it. Maybe the title of a poem — a cento with flower lines, or is that too much?

The green I remember most was possibly not even green, depending on who you ask. A biker biked by, wearing the brightest yellow-green (or maybe just yellow?) shirt I’ve been able to see in a long time. Usually yellow or yellow-green is muted for me. Not this shirt. Wow! So bright it almost made my eyes hurt. My vision is so strange. How was I able to see the bright color this time, when I usually can’t see it?

added a few hours later: I almost forgot to mention the little wren that I saw as I was walking back to my house. First, a flash — or flutter or flurry or small explosion* — of movement on the street. Something, I could not tell what, ascending. Then a scan, all around until the source was found: a tiny brown bird on the top of the fence. They stayed long enough for even me to see their little face. Such a tiny bird! What miracle today allowed me to see them?

After lunch, while doing the dishes, I listened to the New Yorker Poetry podcast and heard David Baker read his wonderful poem, Six Notes (notes refers to taking notes for a poem, six sections, and the notes of different birds). The beginning of his poem reminds me of my bird sighting, even though my little wren didn’t make a sound and was rising, not falling:

from Six Notes / David Baker

Come down to us. Come down with your song,
little wren. The world is in pieces.

We must not say so. In the dark hours,
in the nearest branches, I hear you thrum—

—

Come up to us. Come up with your song,
little wren. The world is in pieces.

We must not say so. In the dark hours,
on the nearest fence post, I see you thrum–

*Having suddenly added explosion of movement as one of my word options, I feel compelled to add the source of that inspiration. It’s from a Chen Chen interview I read yesterday and had been planning to post sometime soon. Here’s what he said:

Poems are the opposite of habits. They are explosions. Sometimes they are small explosions. But loud. Or huge, quiet explosions.

Chen Chen Interview

So, was this little wren’s small explosion up and off the street a poem? Yes!

april 25/RUN

4 miles
dogwood run
52 degrees

Did a run with Scott to Dogwood Coffee on a beautiful spring morning. Wore my new running shorts. They’re blue and very comfortable, which is a big deal because it’s difficult to find good running shorts. We ran north to the bottom of the franklin hill, then back up it until we stopped to walk for the last stretch. I know we looked at the river, but I don’t remember what it looked like. Was it smooth? Blue? Any foam? I have no recollection. I do remember that there weren’t any rowers on it. No geese either.

I talked about a video I watched earlier today on how to write poetry for beginners by a poetry influencer. (I didn’t like it). Scott talked about some drama happening in the big band he’s in.

After the run, waiting in line at Dogwood, I overheard the woman ahead of us tell the barista her name was Sara. She asked his name: Scott. I just had to chime in that we were a Sara and Scott too! She mentioned that she just met someone the other day who had the same birthday as her. The only 2 people I know that have the same birthday as me are two of RJP’s former frenemies.

Anything else? Not that many people running . . . just remembered that we saw two people running up the franklin hill. One of them was accompanied by a roller skier.

Also: as we ran under the trestle something was crossing the tracks above us. A train? Nope a truck with special wheels for riding on the track. I turned around and ran backwards to watch it for a minute and discovered that running backwards is kind of nice. I liked how it worked by leg muscles differently.

random etymology: Happened upon the origins of gnarled:

We owe the adjective gnarled and other forms of the word to our friend Shakespeare, who created it in 1603. In Measure for Measure, he writes, “Thy sharpe and sulpherous bolt splits the un-wedgable and gnarled oak.” But gnarled didn’t come into use again until the 19th century. In any case, word experts believe it’s related to the Middle English word knar which means “knot in wood.”

gnarled

Today is Ted Kooser’s birthday. I’m happy to report that although I thought he was dead — having posted about it on 22 april 2022, he is not! I’m not sure why I thought he was, but all the results on my google search indicate that he is still alive. He’s a wonderful poet, and person according to what I’ve read from poetry people on 2022 twitter. Here’s a poem I read this morning on poetry foundation:

So This is Nebraska / Ted Kooser

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.

On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.

Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.

You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in the weeds,

clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to. You feel like

waving. You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around on the road. You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

Oh, I love so much about this poem — everything?! You can listen to him read it at poetry foundation (poem title is link). I want to spend more time with his writing.

april 24/RUN

10k
juno and finn, st. paul
44 degrees

A beautiful morning! Perfect temperature for running. Sun. Shadows. Hooray! Tried my new adventure: running to poems that are part of St. Paul’s Sidewalk Poetry project. Fun! Ran south on the west river road, up the hill to the ford bridge, north on the east river road, east on hartford, north on juno, east on finn. It took me a little while, but I found both poems — my navigating skills were not the greatest before my vision loss, but now they’re pretty bad. Difficult to read signs and hard to keep a map in my head. Made a few bad choices on the way back, and probably added an extra mile because of it. Oops.

First impressions — wow, these poems are really hidden — a nice surprise as you walk or run along. Also, there’s not enough contrast for my bad eyes. I couldn’t read the poems at all. I’m glad that you can look them up online because otherwise, I’d have no idea what they said.

Overall: great idea, but not that accessible. Also, how soon before these poems wear away? Even with my (small) criticisms, I love this project and am excited to run to some more!

This was a fun way to run a 10k — I was able to get a nice break in the middle and I was distracted from the effort by my task. Also, it’s good for me to practice navigating. I need to build up those skills so I can get out in the world to new places by myself more.

I wasn’t only focused on finding these poems. I also gave attention to the world:

10 Things

  1. kids at Minnehaha Academy, lower campus, were playing Red Light/Green Light. Green light . . . Red light.
  2. one gutted street lamp on the ford bridge — the one next to it was still on
  3. several streets with no sidewalks, or sidewalks only on one side in Highland Park
  4. bright blue river!
  5. a racket! geese honking beneath the ford bridge
  6. a bright white paddleboat near the shore on the west bank
  7. passed 2 park workers about to put fresh tar on the river road trail
  8. later, running over tar that was put down earlier in the week
  9. fee bee fee bee
  10. bright blue sky, cloudless

Sidewalk Poems — poem + my picture

1

SE corner of Juno Ave and Finn

Dementia/ Naomi Cohn (2008)

I reach for a name, a song, a tune
and memories scatter,


minnows fleeing


a toothy pike.

I catch a few


laggards.


But know these are nothing
to the hundred fish that fled.

2

S. side of Juno Ave, bet. Finn and Cleveland Ave

Untitled/Louis Disanto (2011)

Life magazines for shin guards.
Skates too big, stick cracked and old,
jacket patched and tattered.
I ignored the smirks and winter’s cold,
love of hockey was all that mattered.

A note about this second poem: This is not the poem that is supposed to be here, according to the map.

earlier today

While drinking my coffee, I read about different places along the river to view birds during the migration and found this line:

You can also see a whole hillside of the spring ephemeral bloodroot along the trails near 36th Street.

Must-see FMR spring birding sites along the river

Bloodroot? What’s that, and why is it called bloodroot? This was a useful site for answering my questions.

  • an herbaceous perennial native to eastern North America, from Florida up into Canada 
  • found in undisturbed woodlands, on flood plains and on slopes near streams or ponds
  • the reddish sap that exudes from all parts of the plant, but especially the root, when cut is what prompted the common name of bloodroot
  • used as a natural red or yellow-orange dye
  • the brilliant white – or rarely light pink – flowers up to 2 inches across open in early spring. The blooming period lasts about 2 weeks
  • each flower stalk produces a solitary flower with a number of delicate, elongate petals surrounding the numerous yellow stamens and central green pistil, with a pale yellow, two-lobed stigma at its apex. The flower usually has eight symmetrically arranged petals, with four large petals and four smaller ones

april 22/RUN

3.8 miles
river road, north/south
62 degrees
wind: 16 mph / gusts: 30 mph

62 in bright sun with very little shade feels warm, too warm. Time to start running much earlier in the day. Other weather-related gripes? Had to hold onto my cap several times so it wouldn’t blow off.

Everything is slowly turning green, especially the floodplain forest. The trees are coming into leaf/like something almost being said.

Noticed some cool bird shadows, one on the road from a bird high up in the sky, another on the side of a house.

Heard something beeping as I ran under the trestle — was a train coming soon? Not that I could tell.

Listened to the wind running north, my “It’s Windy” playlist running south. Heard “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Wind of Change” and thought about how an answer blowing in the wind could mean two contradictory things at once: 1. the answer is coming, change is coming, a better, freer world is coming and 2. the answer is just blowing in the wind, out of reach, as futile/pointless as talking to the wind.

back to the Beaufort Scale

Last week I came up with a great plan to create a Beaufort scale out of poetry lines, but it stalled when I couldn’t figure one out for 1. Today I’ll try again.

But before I do that — I think it stalled also because I got side tracked by metaphor and figurative language. The Beaufort scale mostly uses literal language, describing the effects of wind on various things, like umbrellas or people trying to walk. Occasionally metaphor creeps in with the use of white horses to describe white caps on waves. Is this the only use of metaphor in the scale? No.

Use of metaphor in Beaufort Scale:

0 — “sea like a mirror”
1 — ripples like scales
2 — crests like glass
3 — foam like glass
4 — white horses

If I’m reading correctly, the for use on land section is all literal descriptions of wind’s effects: leaves rustling, trees being uprooted, roof tiles ripping off, inconvenient then difficult to walk. I like how 7 is inconvenient to walk, while 8 is difficult.

Okay, now back to a poem scale. Instead of literal descriptions, I think I’d like figurative ones. It’s more fun!

when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by — “Who Has Seen the Wind?”/ Christina Rossetti

Would this be 5, “small trees in leaf start to sway”? or 6, “large branches in motion”? or 7, “whole trees in motion”?

I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble and I am invisible — “Love Song for the Square Root of Negative One” / Richard Siken

2? “leaves rustle”? or 8, “”twigs break from trees”?

I am stirred, I’m stir-able, I’m a wind-stirred thing — “And All Visible Signs Swept Away” / Carl Phillips

Okay, think I know this one: “Leaves and small twigs in constant motion” (3).

Autumn wind chases in/From all directions/And a thousand chaste leaves/Give way. — “Nature Aria” / Yi Lei

I think this should be 2, “leaves rustle”

Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless/ Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:/It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies — “Fall” / Edward Hirsch

7, “inconvenient to walk against the wind”

the dry/sound of applause: leaves chapped/falling, an ending. — “When the Fact of Your Gaze Means Nothing, Then You Are Truly Alongside” / Donika Kelly

3: “leaves in constant motion”

Unglue the fog from the woods from the waist up/ And speak disparagingly of leaves — “Plea to the Wind” / Alice Oswald

This is a tough one for me. Is ungluing the fog violent or gentle? To speak disparagingly of the leaves seems less forceful than yelling at them — I think I’ll go with 4 “wind raises dust and loose paper, small branches move” but I could also go with 9, chimney pots and slates removed

Whip the green cloth off the hills — “Plea to the Wind” / Alice Oswald

10: “Trees uprooted, considerable structural damage occurs”

When winds go round and round in bands,/And thrum upon the door,/And birds take places overhead,/To bear them orchestra, — “Wind” / Emily Dickinson

6 — whistling in telegraph wires, umbrellas used with difficulty

So that the ocean on one side is wild/With foam and glitter. . ./As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways/ And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. — “Postscript” / Seamus Heaney

11: the sea is covered in foam, widespread damage

So, I already found a line last week for 0. With these lines above, I’m only missing 12. Although some of the lines above are used for multiple levels. I’ll fine tune that in a future entry. This was fun!

Here they are in order, so far:

0 —- the white cotton curtains hanging still

1 —

2 — Autumn wind chases in/From all directions/And a thousand chaste leaves/Give way. — “Nature Aria” / Yi Lei

3 — I am stirred, I’m stir-able, I’m a wind-stirred thing — “And All Visible Signs Swept Away” / Carl Phillips AND the dry/sound of applause: leaves chapped/falling, an ending. — “When the Fact of Your Gaze Means Nothing, Then You Are Truly Alongside” / Donika Kelly

4 —

5 — I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble and I am invisible — “Love Song for the Square Root of Negative One” / Richard Siken

6 — When winds go round and round in bands,/And thrum upon the door,/And birds take places overhead,/To bear them orchestra, — “Wind” / Emily Dickinson

7 — when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by — “Who Has Seen the Wind?”/ Christina Rossetti

8 — Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless/ Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:/It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies — “Fall” / Edward Hirsch

9 — Unglue the fog from the woods from the waist up/ And speak disparagingly of leaves — “Plea to the Wind” / Alice Oswald

10 — Whip the green cloth off the hills — “Plea to the Wind” / Alice Oswald

11 — So that the ocean on one side is wild/With foam and glitter. . ./As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways/ And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. — “Postscript” / Seamus Heaney

12 —

april 21/RUN

2 miles
edmund (grass), south/edmund (road), north
52 degrees
wind: 10 mph

A beautiful morning — sun! shorts! Felt sluggish and tired and heavy — heavy legs and thick torso. The dirt trail was soft and uneven. I listened to Taylor Swift’s new album so I didn’t many birds or conversations. I think I heard a few black-capped chickadees, maybe a blue jay? Feeling blah or bleugh today in a way that a run couldn’t fix. No anxiety, just blah.

Before the run, I wrote about yesterday’s image of the gutted street lamp:

Yesterday I offered up an image of the run: the row of street lamps with their wires cut. I want to spend some more time with this image, use it as opportunity to think about image and metaphor, and to give attention to the trails above the river that I run on and the communities — in St. Paul and Minneapolis — that I run through.

So many thoughts prompted by things I’ve been reading lately! Where to begin?

1 — literal and figurative, part 1

the relationship between metaphor and realism—specifically how a poem’s use or rejection of metaphor might double as a commentary on the poet’s relationship to testimony, to bearing witness to the actual world.

When Metaphor Gets Literal

Bearing witness to the actual world. Describing an image in ways that don’t remove it from its context and history and its specificity. Because I’m a poet of place who is dedicated to noticing and documenting the Mississippi River Gorge, I want the specific and concrete in my images. Grotz offers up Czesław Miłosz’s “Blacksmith Shop” as a good example of a literal poem, grounded in concrete reality.

Deep image has had its day, though its ahistorical premises have been taken up in this new method’s assumption that style is merely a manipulable function, easily disconnected from the individual poet’s personal and historical circumstances. . . . In order to record the shocks of contemporary life, the poet must be willing to enter into history, to conjure it not merely as chronological sequence, but as unique texture and feel, what Walter Benjamin called “aura.” Deep image, however, was committed to locating itself in a world of prehistory, as if the mind were a direct conduit to the eternal collective unconscious

Too Much of the Air

What does this “entering into history” and “bearing witness to the actual world” mean to me and the image of the gutted street lamp? It seems important to connect these lamps with the recent spread (for the past 2 years) of copper wire theft across Minneapolis and St. Paul. Scott, RJP, and I have been noticing it for more than a year: all of the lights lining the west river road were out for months, making the river road too dark and dangerous to drive on or run beside at night. The Lake Street Bridge lights and Lake Nokomis lights too. I googled “street lamps cut wires minneapolis” and found a ton of articles about the problem and how difficult and expensive it is to stop the theft. Too many lights, too few police. Possible solutions include enlisting community members — someone has crowd-sourced a map of gutted lamps in Como Park — or targeting the sellers with legislation (imho: a much better solution, especially since it worked with the catalytic convertor thefts a few years back).

Of course, putting this in a historical context also requires thinking about why people might feel compelled to steal wires (economic precarity, addiction) and recent reimaginings of the role of the police in communities. How to recognize this context without reducing the image to it? How to still allow for the figurative in the midst of this literal? How to move beyond chronology and “facts” to texture and feel? Tough questions, I think. Michael Kleber-Diggs offers an answer with his amazing poem, Here All Alone, which I posted on RUN! a few years ago. Wow!

this land, once yours, was flooded and dammed
the same day our Rondo was cleaved for a highway.

the bees are back

I read this suggestion from John Ashbery the other day — “It’s important to try to write when you are in the wrong mood or when the weather is wrong.”– so I have decided that because I am in the wrong mood — the blah bleugh mood — I should try to write something. And I have decided that that something should be about the bees being back in the service berry tree on my deck. Every spring when the tree (or is it a bush? or a bush imitating a tree? wanting to be a tree?) is blooming, the bees come and hover around it. When I sit in my adirondack chair (which I mistakenly called an “andriodak” 25 years ago on St. Simon Island in Georgia and which Scott and I reference every so often) under the tree, I see their shadows crossing over my notebook or my book or my pants. Usually just one or two, today a dozen. Circling and circling, making me almost dizzy. Sometimes I wondered if it was a shadow I was seeing or the actual bee. Then I wondered if they wanted me to move — would they sting me? What a delightful moment! I can’t remember if it was in a poem or an essay or an interview, but I recall reading Ross Gay delighting in the shadow of a bee crossing over his page*. I know I already delighted in these bees before it was endorsed by Gay, but somehow those bees began to matter more once I knew delighting in their shadow was something I could share with one of my favorite writers.

*update, 4 may 2024: I found it! Gay mentions the bees in his delightful poem, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude:

And thank you the tiny bee’s shadow
perusing these words as I write them.

composed under the tree/bush, with the bees above

Beneath the
bush that

tries to be
a tree,

below the
almost

white blossoms — shadow

bees hover,
dizzy

the air, pass
over

my page, write
this poem.

Am I happy with this poem. For now.

april 19/RUN

4.9 miles
veterans’ bridge and back
36 degrees / snow flurries
wind: 16 mph / gusts: 31 mph

Windy, some snow flurries. They started when I started. At first, they looked like glitter falling from the sky, later they felt like sharp pins pricking my face. Difficult conditions, but I didn’t mind — well, not that much.

Saw a BIG turkey heading for the edge of the park. Also saw a bird — a robin, I think — running fast across the grass. It’s fun to watch birds run. Had a sudden thought: Where on the Beaufort Scale would you fit the description, birds opt for running instead of flying or flying is inconvenient for birds? In my head, I began composing lines for a poem that features this bird. Another description to add to the scale: a fallen leaf will outrun you — that’s not quite right, but something about how I noticed a leaf in front of me being pushed by the wind so fast that I couldn’t catch up to it.

Was too busy battling the wind to notice the river. I wonder, were there any foam or white horses on it?

Running south, I listened to the howling wind. Heading back north, I put in Taylor Swift’s new album: The Tortured Poet’s Department

Another 5 on the Beaufort Scale. As I ran I wondered about factors other than wind speed, like wind direction — head winds, tail winds, crosswinds. I never really thought about crosswinds before I started watching cycling races. Now, like many others, I look forward to windy days of a tour when there’s a chance that some bikers will get “caught out by the crosswinds” and the peloton will splinter.

Eula Biss, Pain Scale

Before moving onto level 2 on Biss’ pain scale, I’m trying to think more about 1 and what lines of poetry might fit it. Can’t find anything yet, but I’m imagining level 1 to be the type of pain so minor, so barely there, that we doubt its existence. If 0 is faith, then 1 is doubt.

2

The sensations of my own body may be the only subject on which I am qualified to claim expertise. Sad and terrible, then, how little I know. “How do you feel?” the doctor asks, and I cannot answer. Not accurately. “Does this hurt?” he asks. Again, I’m not sure. “Do you have more or less pain than the last time I saw you?” Hard to say. I begin to lie to protect my reputation. I try to act certain. Okay, so 2 is also doubt. That gray area when we’re not certain. I don’t mind not knowing, when knowing is not possible — embracing the mystery — but not being certain, not knowing when you feel like you should know, are supposed to know, is very difficult.

And here Biss introduces the Beaufort Scale!

Wind, like pain, is difficult to capture. The poor windsock is always striving, and always falling short. There’s the difficulty of describing, and there’s the difficulty of feeling, knowing, experiencing accurately . . .

It took sailors more than two hundred years to develop a standardized numerical scale for the measure of wind. The result, the Beaufort scale, provides twelve categories for everything from “Calm” to “Hurricane.” The scale offers not just a number, but a term for the wind, a range of speed, and a brief description. Creating a standard — a common language from which to communicate and connect with others, a scale that is practical

A force 2 wind on the Beaufort scale, for example, is a “Light Breeze” moving between four and seven miles per hour. On land, it is specified as “wind felt on face; leaves rustle; ordinary vanes moved by wind.”

3

Left alone in the exam room I stare at the pain scale, a simple number line complicated by only two phrases. Under zero: “no pain.” Under ten: “the worst pain imaginable.” Too much is contained between these numbers. . . . This idea of “the worst pain imaginable” produces anxiety. I don’t want to even imagine what the worst pain imaginable might be.

“Three is nothing,” my father tells me now. “Three is go home and take two aspirin.”

“You are not meant to be rating world suffering,” my friend in Honduras advises. “This scale applies only to you and your experience.” At first, this thought is tremendously relieving. It unburdens me of factoring the continent of Africa into my calculations. But the reality that my nerves alone feel my pain is terrifying. I hate the knowledge that I am isolated in this skin—alone with my pain and my own fallibility.

The more I read of Biss’ essay, the more I’m thinking about the purpose of these scales and what other purposes descriptions/words/language can offer. The wind scale is for utility: to help sailors estimate the wind speed using visual observations. The pain scale’s purpose: to better understand and care for patients.

4

conflating physical and emotion pain — is there actually a distinction? hurting vs. feeling?

pain as seen in a face — Biss wonders, no face, no pain? Then she describes how there are no visible markers of her pain — there was nothing to illustrate my pain except a number, which I was told to choose from between zero and ten. My proof. I’m thinking about how invisible my vision problem often is to others and also, how the doctors could tell immediately that something wasn’t right: I got a diagnosis. What relief! I’m also thinking of a New Yorker article I read recently about gaslighting that mentions how the gaslit crave a diagnosis because it offers irrefutable evidence of something being wrong.

Okay, more of the pain scale in the next entry. I’m thinking about a key distinction between the Beaufort and Pain scales: the Beaufort offers brief descriptions to accompany the numbers, not just the numbers.

And, returning to point of these scales: they’re practical, which would seem to make them, at least to some, not poetry. Poetry is impractical and about making strange what we thought was familiar. It removes the utility of language, making it delightfully useless. Of course many poets disagree with this simplistic assessment, myself included. One reason I’ve turned to poetry is because it is useful; it gives me language and a method for describing my strange ways of seeing to others.

I found the following poem in an entry from aug 1, 2019. I think the descriptions might offer a more compelling and practical way than numbers on a scale to understand what pain feels like.

Let us for a moment call this pain by other words/Dominik Parisien

Ask, How many roses does the hammer weigh

when it bears down on your skull? 

Does the sword seem toothed like a toddler’s smile

or sharp as your first ice skates?

On a scale of anglerfish to northern lights

how bright are the flashes in your head? 

When I touch this, here, which constellations

light the sky behind your eyes?

Would you say that pulsing is the flicker of a satellite 

or the stubborn heartbeat of a newborn chick?

Ask, Can we for a moment make of beauty

the measure of our pain? and I will answer.

april 17

5.15 miles
franklin loop
44 degrees
wind: 15 mph / gusts: 30 mph

So windy! A crosswind heading north towards Franklin, then straight into it heading west over the Lake Street bridge. Cooler too. Wore my running tights and my orange sweatshirt. My left knee felt tight for the first few minutes, then fine for the rest of the run.

Wet and green. Noticed that the floodplain forest is filling in. Last week, bare and brown. Today, an outline of green. The river was gray with ripples. When I looked down at it from the bridge I could tell by the ripples that it was blowing south.

All of the pedestrians I encountered were bundled up in hats and winter coats. One runner was in shorts and white shoes. After he passed me I was mesmerized by his heels floating up and down, up and down, up and down. So smooth and rhythmic.

No eagle on the dead tree branch. Spotted 2 lone black gloves discarded at different parts of the path. Heard one woman talking to another. She said something strange, but I can’t remember what. Heard lots of black capped chickadees but no geese or woodpeckers.

more on wind: According to the Beaufort Scale, today was a 5 — fresh breeze. Brisk? Bracing. Stiff. Not breath-taking but ponytail whipping and energy sapping and eye watering. A few times, it howled in the trees. No dust in eyes or big branches falling from trees, but leaves whirling on the ground. At one point, running across the bridge, I felt like I was being held up by the wind — both slowed down and suspended in mid-air. Running south, with the wind at my back, it felt easier, like the wind was pushing me along.

beaufort scale

Thinking about wind some more and wondering if I shouldn’t narrow my focus to the Beaufort Scale? Maybe try to play around with my own Beaufort Scales. Today, while reviewing Marie Howe’s “The Moment” I thought about gathering lines from poems that fit with the scale. The line in Howe’s poem that Inspired this was the last one:

the white cotton curtains hanging still

The poem is about that moment when everything stands still and is silent. No to-do lists. No traffic. No I-should-bes. With these curtains, I think Howe is referencing sitting silently in her brother’s room, as he was dying. I imagine this moment of stillness as 0 on the Beaufort Scale.

And here’s another stillnes from Rime of the Ancient Mariner / Samuel Coleridge

Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
’Twas sad as sad could be;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea

All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

a bird moment, possibly for my bird project: After I finished my run, walking back on Edmund, I heard 2 black capped chickadees calling back and forth. Their notes were slightly different than I usually hear. By the time I got out my phone to record them, only one chickadee was calling. No response. They kept trying their fee bee call, maybe 5 or 6 times, but no reply.

april 16/BIKERUN

bike: 16 minutes
run: 2.3 miles
basement
outside: 54 degrees / rain, wind

Before I started writing this but after my workout, I got up from my chair and my right kneecap missed the groove and slipped out hard. So hard that I uncontrollably yelled, “God Dammit!” No pain and it went right back in, or I was able to pop it back in. But it was shocking — mentally and physically. My LCL or meniscus seem as reticent to walk as my brain does — a strange sentence to write: can you imagine ligaments feeling something independent of the brain? Now I’m nervous about when this might happen again. As is usually the case, I had absolutely no warning. I didn’t do anything abrupt or dramatic; I just stood up and turned. I’ll get over it in a few minutes and stop imagining different scenarios in my head when the kneecap suddenly slides and it hurts and I can’t get it back into place. For now, I’ll breathe and attempt to remember how happy I was to work out before my subluxation.

It’s raining today, and there’s a wind advisory. Decided to go to the basement and do a bike run combo. After pumping up the air in my tire — it is still leaking air even though I got new tires last spring — I found the SuperLeague e-tri championships. I’ve been watching SuperLeague while biking in the basement since it started — when? 2018? Then I ran for 22.5 minutes while I listened to a “If Books Could Kill” podcast and then a playlist.

I don’t remember thinking about much except for that I had to go to the bathroom. Scott and I have new euphemism for it: unfinished business. Anything else? I recall looking straight ahead at the water heater and I remember feeling like a badass when I increased my cadence to try and match the bikers I was watching.

Here’s a victory: I didn’t think at all about the text exchange I had with FWA about what “fun” or “interesting” or “non-music” classes he could take to fill up his pretty bare schedule for senior year. No double major or minors for him. Just music, which he’s very good at, but still . . . . I’m trying to let him figure out his own way, but it’s so hard to watch him make choices that seem foolish or short-sighted. Sigh. Parenting is hard; backing off is hard; trusting is hard. When I worry too much, I’ll go back and watch his recital from Sunday and remember how proud I am of him and that he can (and is) creating an exciting future for himself.

update: I didn’t need to worry; he figured out some great classes on his own: Japanese!, Environmental Geography, and Criminology.

before the bike and run

Yesterday was the poet, Tomas Tranströmer’s birthday. He would have been 92. I’ve posted a few poems from him on here before. While looking for “air” poems, I found this one. It’s an ekphrastic! Those ekphrastic poems keep appearing. Are they trying to encourage me to keep working on my ekphrastic project? I’d like to believe so. Anyway, here’s the Tranströmer poem I found:

Vermeer / Tomas Tranströmer

translated by Robert Bly

It’s not a sheltered world. The noise begins over there, on the other side of the wall
where the alehouse is
with its laughter and quarrels, its rows of teeth, its tears, its chiming of clocks,
and the psychotic brother-in-law, the murderer, in whose presence
everyone feels fear.

The huge explosion and the emergency crew arriving late,
boats showing off on the canals, money slipping down into pockets
— the wrong man’s —
ultimatum piled on the ultimatum,
widemouthed red flowers who sweat reminds us of approaching war.

And then straight through the wall — from there — straight into the airy studio
in the seconds that have got permission to live for centuries.
Paintings that choose the name: “The Music Lesson”
or ” A Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.”
She is eight months pregnant, two hearts beating inside her.
The wall behind her holds a crinkly map of Terra Incognita.

Just breathe. An unidentifiable blue fabric has been tacked to the chairs.
Gold-headed tacks flew in with astronomical speed
and stopped smack there
as if there had always been stillness and nothing else.

The ears experience a buzz, perhaps it’s depth or perhaps height.
It’s the pressure from the other side of the wall,
the pressure that makes each fact float
and makes the brushstroke firm.

Passing through walls hurts human beings, they get sick from it,
but we have no choice.
It’s all one world. Now to the walls.
The walls are a part of you.
One either knows that, or one doesn’t; but it’s the same for everyone
except for small children. There aren’t any walls for them.

The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall.
It is like a prayer to what is empty.
And what is empty turns its face to us
and whispers:
“I am not empty, I am open.”

I love this poem and how it imagines the world outside of the painting and its relationship to the world inside of it. Starting with the first line: It’s not a sheltered world. The noise begins over there, on the other side of the wall . . . . That alehouse, that psychotic brother-in-law. The explosion, the money being dropped into the wrong man’s pocket. Then the airy studio and the seconds that have got permission to live for centuries — the differences between what we notice and try to remember and what we ignore or try to forget — what is worthy of attention, a painting, and what is not.

What is worth noticing in a poem describing a painting, and what is not? The Vermeer painting the poem is titled, “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter,” but there’s no mention of the letter or the woman’s expression, and the blue described by Tranströmer is the blue fabric on the chair, not of the woman’s jacket.

This poem is about the wall, the other side of the wall, the pressure that the other side creates, pressing in on us. The wall between our interior and the exterior world. The edge of the void, the abyss. All of this is kind of, almost, not quite making sense to me. I should spend some more time rereading Tom Sleigh’s“Too Much of the Air: Tomas Tranströmer“.

I’m struck by the last lines:

The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall.
It is like a prayer to what is empty.
And what is empty turns its face to us
and whispers:
‘I am not empty, I am open.’

I’m thinking of the gorge here and the limestone walls that contain it and how it is both empty of land/rock and filled with air and openness. To think of the void — the unknowable, unsayable, mystery — as both frightening (emptiness, nothingness) and inviting (openness, possibility).

Yesterday I talked about believing in the unseen. Today I’m thinking about what it could mean to be believe in the unseeable. Unseen could mean, not-yet-seen or unnoticed, but unseeable suggests that seeing is never possible.

Before writing this, I was reviewing an old log entry from April 16, 2022. In it, I discuss Elisa Gabbert’s article about poetry and the Void.

They [poets] write in the line, in the company of the void. That changes how you write — and more profoundly, how you think, and even how you are, your mode of being. When you write in the line, there is always an awareness of the mystery, of what is left out. This is why, I suppose, poems can be so confounding. Empty space on the page, that absence of language, provides no clues. But it doesn’t communicate nothing — rather, it communicates nothing. It speaks void, it telegraphs mystery.

By “mystery” I don’t mean metaphor or disguise. Poetry doesn’t, or shouldn’t, achieve mystery only by hiding the known, or translating the known into other, less familiar language. The mystery is unknowing, the unknown — as in Jennifer Huang’s “Departure”: “The things I don’t know have stayed/In this home.” The mystery is the missing mountain in Shane McCrae’s “The Butterflies the Mountain and the Lake”:

the / Butterflies monarch butterflies huge swarms they
Migrate and as they migrate south as they
Cross Lake Superior instead of flying

South straight across they fly
South over the water then fly east
still over the water then fly south again / And now
biologists believe they turn to avoid a mountain
That disappeared millennia ago.

The missing mountain is still there.

The Shape of a Void / Elisa Gabbert

This past weekend, Scott and I watched the 2 part documentary about Steve Martin, STEVE! I really enjoyed it. I remember responding to this idea offered by one of Steve Martin’s artist friends:

How to close the void. I think that’s the nature and the drive in art, it comes from that deep awareness of that void.

STEVE! — 53:30, part 2

I agree with the second part of that statement, about the deep awareness of the void, but not the first — at least how it’s worded. It’s not to close the void, but to navigate it, develop a relationship to it, engage with it, learn how to live with it. I mentioned this to Scott and he argued that the void in this quotation is not the unknown or mystery, but something else. Maybe lack or longing? A desire to be whole? To have/feel meaning? I still don’t like the word close. Can you ever close the void? Tranströmer doesn’t think so; it’s always on the other side of that wall. Even with a wall between you and it, you feel its pressure in your ears. And it’s this pressure that drives/shapes/enables your art — that makes each fact float/and makes the brushstroke firm.

A final (for now) word on this ekphrastic poem: I like how Tranströmer is responding to the work of art in this poem, how we uses the image to reflect on the abyss/void, history, interior/exterior, and why we make art. I want to think about it some more and try to write something for my “How to See” project inspired by his approach.

april 11/RUN

3.1 miles
edmund, south/river road, north/edmund, south
56 degrees
wind: 12 mph/ gusts: 22 mph

Shorts and bare legs again today. Hooray! Was planning to do the 2 trails, but when I reached the entrance to the winchell trail I heard some very noisy rustling of leaves. Too big for a squirrel. A dog? A bear? A human? I tried to look ahead but all I saw was a black blob. I thought it was a person with a stroller so I moved a little closer. Nope — a male turkey with its tail spread like a peacock, a red wattle glowing, even for me with my bad color vision. Wow. I mentioned it to a man walking down the hill and he said, well, this is the way I’m going! and slowly and calmly walked toward the turkey. A showdown. After 30 seconds or so, the turkey relented and the man walked past. Not me, I climbed the hill and ran on the trail next to the road. This encounter will be my birding poem for the day!

10 Things Other Than Tom Turkey

  1. a woodpecker cry — pileated, I think
  2. another woodpecker cry a few minutes later — was this bird following me?
  3. loud kids at the playground, mostly having fun
  4. 2 bikers heading north — we can ride the wind now. I thought this meant that they would have the wind at their backs, so I would too, when I turned around. No. Wind was in my face heading north, later in the run
  5. admiring the view of the river from the overlook — the water on the other shore was sparkling
  6. mud and roots on the dirt trail between edmund and the river
  7. the clickity-clack of roller skiers poles behind me
  8. several of the benches had people on them — more than half?
  9. bird shadows
  10. a shrieking blue jay above me

After turning around because of the territorial turkey, I put in my “It’s Windy” playlist: They Call the Wind Maria/ the furies; Dust in the Wind/ insignificant or fleeting

The wind wasn’t overpowering but it was everywhere, coming from every direction. I remember noticing how it played with my hair, making my ponytail bob and my little loose strands fly around my face. Only once did I need to adjust my hat for fear that the wind might blow it off. I don’t remember hearing any skittering leaves or getting dust in my eyes, grit in my teeth. The wind didn’t sing or howl. It did push me forward and hold me back. And I think it made the whole run harder.

Earlier this morning, I checked out Mary Oliver’s West Wind and found this delightful part of a poem about wild turkeys. It seems fitting to include today after seeing several hens — being guarded by the male turkey on Winchell.

from Three Songs/ Mary Oliver

1

A band of wild turkeys is coming down the hill. They are coming
slowly—astheywalkalongthey look under the leaves for things to 
eat, and besides it must be a pleasure to step alternately through the
pale sunlight, then patches of slightly golden shade. they are all hens
and they lift their thick toes delicately. With such toes they could
march up one side of the state and down the others, or skate on water,
or dance the tango. But not this morning. As they get closer the sound
of their feet in the leaves is like the patter of rain, then rapid rain. My
dogs perk their ears, and bound from the path. Instead of opening their
dark wings the hens swirl and rush away under the trees, like little
ostriches.

Returning to my birding poem for the day. I’m having a little difficulty finding the focus, so I thought I’d write a little more around this little poem. What are the details that I remember, that I might want to write about?

  • First thing noticed: an unusually loud rustling sound that I thought was too big for a squirrel, too much for a human
  • the moment of seeing something but not knowing what it was — a bear? a dog? a stroller? Not feeling scared, but feeling like I should stay back until I figured it out, feeling that it was something unusual. This moment last a long time, which was fine because I had time, but wouldn’t have been if I had needed to make a quick decision, like if the turkey was running towards me
  • the turkey was so big! its tail was up and spread out like a peacock, making him look even bigger and framing his face
  • the face — fuzzy but clear enough to know that this turkey was telling me to back off! I couldn’t make out his eyes, but I could see — or, maybe I guessed a little — when he was facing me — yes, it was the contrast of light and dark — when he was turned away, he was just a dark, hulking shape, when he was turned toward me I saw a pale beak
  • the red wattle — was it bright? I can’t quite remember, but I know it was red and big
  • when I felt fairly certain it was a turkey, I still couldn’t see details — just a small, light head with red, framed by broad dark tail feathers — how much of his bigness was because of his tail, how much his body? the form — menacing and comical at the same time, with its big circle for a body and its tiny head
  • the approaching man — I said to him, there’s a big turkey down there! He said something like, well, THIS is the way I’m planning to go! His tone wasn’t too jerky, just matter-of-fact. When he approached the turkey he called out sternly but not too aggressively — hey hey move! At first, the turkey wouldn’t budge and the guy looked back at me, but after some time, the turkey moved

Reflecting on these details some more, I’m thinking that the guy, albeit interesting, is unnecessary for my purposes. I think adding him might take the poem in a different direction. . . although, I am struck by the encounter between me, him, and the turkey. The guy didn’t seem like a jerk, but he did give off some older white guy energy — this is the way I’m going turkey! Your puffed up feathers can’t stop me! I was happy to stand back and observe the turkeys from a (respectful?) distance, while he was ready to keep moving through the turkeys.

The uncertainty from not being able to see what the turkey was is what I’d like to focus on, although I want to weave in the strange mix of menacing and comical too. Here’s a long passage from Georgina Kleege that is helpful in explaining my own process of seeing things. She is able to see most things because she expects to see them; it’s the unexpected things that make it difficult. oh — I like this idea of bringing surprise in here!

Expectation plays a large role in what I perceive. I know what’s on my desk because I put it there. If someone leaves me a surprise gift, it may take a few seconds to identify it, but how often does that happen? . . . . I can recognize most things through quick process of elimination. And that process is only truly conscious on the rare occasions when the unexpected occurs, as when my cats carry objects out of context. A steel wool soap pad appears in the bath tub. I see it as a rusty, graying blob. Though touch would probably tell me something, it can be risky to touch something you cannot identify some other way. . . . I once encountered a rabid raccoon on a sidewalk near my house. I learned what it was from a neighbor watching it from his screened porch. What I saw was an indistinct, grayish mass, low to the ground and rather round. It was too big to be a cat and the wrong shape to be a dog. Its gait was not only unfamiliar but unsteady. It zigzagged up the pavement. I moved my gaze around it as my brain formed a picture of raccoon. The raccoon in my mind had the characteristic mask across its face, a sharply pointed nose, striped tail, brindled fur. Nothing in the hazy blob at my feet, no variations in color or refinements in form, corresponded with that image. Its position was wrong. The raccoon in my image was standing up on its haunches, holding something in its front paws. And what does a rabid raccoon look like?

Sight Unseen/ Georgina Kleege (105-106, print version)

Kleege grew up, from age 11, with a big blind spot in the center of her vision. That was roughly 50+ years ago, so she’s had time to learn how to guess and eliminate and handle identifying unexpected objects. I’m still learning. Mostly, it doesn’t bother me, although i occasionally worry about my safety. Anyway, I find Kleege’s description of her process helpful in enabling me to describe what I did. Kleege saw “an indistinct, grayish mass, low to the ground and rather round.” I saw an indistinct, dark mass, somewhat low to the ground and rather round. My dark mass moved slowly but not awkwardly and was accompanied by a loud racket. I might have guessed turkey earlier if he, and his hens, hadn’t been so loud, and if he hadn’t been so big and round.

How many times have I seen a male turkey with its feathers puffed up? Looking it up, I read that this puffing could be a courtship ritual or a sign of intimidation — in my encounter, was it both? The courtship version involves a strut and a gobble — oh, I wish I would have heard him gobble! The only noises my turkeys made were with their beaks or feet as they rooted around for food. And, maybe his low, un-awkward (graceful?) gait was a strut that I couldn’t quite see?

possible ideas, images, descriptions to add: gobble-less, unexpected and unusual for this regular route, rotund (or round or a puffed up dark dot/circle), rooting racket.

clues to choose from: a dark mass too big for a bird (or so I thought), too small for a bear, a slow strut.

Something to think about: was it just the puffed up feathers that made seeing turkeys strange? I think so.

I almost forgot. I took a picture! Look at me, at a safe distance!

turkey sighting / 11 april 2024

april 10/RUN

5.1 miles
bottom of franklin and back
61 degrees
wind: 8 mph / gusts: 18 mph

Ah, spring! Sun and shorts and short sleeves! Birds — black-capped chickadees, pileated woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers, a turkey! I looked at the river but I don’t remember what I saw. Too distracted by blue sky and sharp shadows and the spring breeze — which is less relaxed than a summer breeze, but still pleasant — a word my mom used to say, or did she say it just that once when I was barely four and was talking with her in our new backyard in Hickory, North Carolina as she hung laundry out to dry. It feels pleasant out here or It’s a pleasant day. It’s a terribly bland word, but I love it because I always think of her and that moment.

Encounters:

  • Dave: Hi Sara!
  • while running up a hill, a woman walking down it: Looking good! me: Thank you!
  • two women walking towards me after I finished my run: Well, you look springy!

overheard:

  • from talk radio across the road: Don’t you think I think about it? Don’t you think it keeps me up at night?
  • distorted music coming out of a bike radio

Listened to birds, my breathing, and the smooth wheels of a rollerblader as I ran north. Ran up the franklin hill and sang, Running up that hill, in my head. Put in “It’s Windy” playlist: Let’s Go Fly a Kite: not childish but childlike; Don’t Mess Around with Jim: karma; Ride Like the Wind: haul ass; You’re Only Human (Second Wind) — be generous to yourself; Summer Breeze: relax

my birding moment: running north, listening to Billy Joel, distracted by the song or memories or some thought, something suddenly appeared in front of me — a turkey! It wasn’t too close, but close enough that I was able to watch it awkwardly run across the path. For the poem: distraction, interruption, awkwardness, dragged out of the inner into the outer

Stuck inside
a thought

Unaware
seeing

only bare
path when

Poof! Bobbing
head sleek

body move
past me

faster than
I thought

possible
I watch

then admire
this show

grateful to
be dragged

out into
the world.

a breeze

Before I run, I decided today’s version of the wind would be: breeze.

breeze 1

The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors,
White curtains softly and continually blown
(from The Work of Happiness/ May Sarton/May Sarton)

breeze 2

definition of breezy: pleasantly wind; airy, nonchalant — as in, breezy indifference

breezy 3

Easy breezy beautiful cover girl
Beautiful skin can be a breeze with sea breeze — or, what my sister Marji used to sing, Beautiful skin can be a breeze with sea grease

breeze 4

Yet again, the ekphrasis appears!

How to Look at Pictures/ Rebecca Morgan Frank

title after Robert Clermont Witt, 1906

Refuse to make eye contact with the subject.
He has been following you around the gallery.
You are certain that he can see down your shirt.
Look at other subjects, but know that they, too,
are not of primary interest. Even when they watch
you. Try not to consider what happened
to the small girl staring furiously, the thin-faced
woman wanly looking away. Do not think about
what they had for breakfast, if the bread was hard.
Certainly do not consider the odors underneath
their arms and skirts. Do not allow a breeze into
the room they sit in. Do not assume I am talking
about any painting: step away from the subject.
All subject. Was the painter in love? Do not ask
the question. Imagine you are the painter,
blocking out everything you don’t want to see.
Everything is out of the picture. Stop looking.
Stop seeking what isn’t there. Tuck your narratives
back in your pocket. Look for perspective, light,
shade. Let your eyes wander back to the girl.
She is trying to say something but her mouth
has been painted deliberately shut. Her lips, thin.

april 8/RUN

10k
the flats and back
48 degrees
wind: 10 mph

Because of the ran yesterday, Scott and I did our long run today. It was wet and dark and so humid that we could see our breaths. First we talked about anxiety — Scott’s was about missing some notes at a rehearsal, mine was about waking up with it, feeling it in cramped feet. Then I described a New Yorker article I was reading before we left about forensic linguistics. My description included misplaced apostrophes, devil strips, and Sha Na Na. Wow. Scott spent the last mile of the run trying to remember the name of the guy who was always on 70s game shows, had curly yellow hair, and shot out confetti — Rip Taylor.

We greeted Dave the Daily Walker — Hi Dave! — and listened to some cool-sounding bird. Heard a seep that had turned into a little waterfall below the U. Smelled the sewer. Watched the river move so slowly that it didn’t look like it was moving. We walked part of the franklin hill then ran the rest.

According to my watch, the wind was 10 mph 18 mph gusts. I don’t remember feeling much wind, or hearing it in the trees, of seeing it move the leaves. In fact, the wind was so calm that the water looked still. Not smooth, but no waves, not even ripples. Am I forgetting?

Here’s a wonderful little poem about wind by A. R. Ammons that I found on a favorite site, Brief Poems:

Small Song/ A. R. Ammons

The reeds give way
to the wind

and give
the wind away

A note about the total eclipse: it didn’t really happen here in Minnesota — it was overcast and we weren’t in the path of the eclipse. Oh well. Here’s a pdf of Annie Dillard’s “Total Eclipse” which I must have read for a writing class but that I can’t find a copy of in my files.

april 7/RUN

3.3 miles
trestle turn around
41 degrees
wind: 15 mph / 35 mph gusts

More wind. Ran between raindrops and beside a 10 mile race. The wind was at my back running north, in my face south. Those racers were hardcore, running the first 5 miles into that wind — yuck! Puddles and mud and an over-sized green rain jacket puffing up like a balloon about to float away:

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

from Ode to the West Wind/ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Listened to the racers, spectators, a drummer drumming, a runner giving a motivational speech as he ran — good job! you can do it! the finish line is almost here! you got this! — which might have been inspirational or insufferable depending on how you felt six miles into a race that started with rain and cold and continued with wind. At the turn around I stopped and put in my wind playlist. Today: Wind it Up — sexual empowerment (I know he thinks you’re fine and stuff, but does he know how to wind you up?). Classical Gas – the 70s, Bohemian Rhapsody – fate, and Don’t Mess Around with Jim – street smarts

After I finished running, as I was walking back, I noticed the flash of a bird fly up from the street to the top of a sign, then 3 or 4 other small birds fly out of the tree and into the air. The small dark dots against the smudged sky looked like static or the stars I see when I’m dizzy or had too much caffeine, or (sorry not sorry to be gross) dropped a big deuce — am I the only one that happens to? I decided that these birds would be the subject of my birding poem for today.

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is

from Ode to the West Wind/ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Yesterday, Scott and I met up with FWA in St. Peter. After taking him shopping for his clarinet recital next week, we went back to campus and took a walk through the Arb. So windy! I didn’t have a hair tie and my hair was swirling around my face as we walked on the uneven dirt trail in the open field. Later, winding through the pine trees we had some shelter. Scott saw the tiniest bird, then I saw it too, first as a flash of movement, then as a small dark form on a low limb. FWA guessed that it was a warbler, which it probably was. We listened for birds and heard a creak: one tree rubbing against another — Shelley’s forest lyre! I told Scott and FWA that I knew a beautiful poem that I wish I had memorized for this occasion — Cello by Dorianne Laux

april 5/RUN

3.1 miles
trestle turn around
54 degrees
wind: 5 mph

What a day! Took Delia out for a walk this morning. An hour later, sat on the deck and was inspired by the birds to write a beautiful little poem conjuring my mom. Then, around 12:30, went for a run by the gorge. Okay spring! The run wasn’t easy, but wasn’t hard either. My legs are sore from running every day since Tuesday. Tomorrow I’ll take a break.

Listened to birds running north, my “It’s Windy” playlist on the way back south. Wind songs heard today: “Ride Like the Wind” — fast? frantic? under pressure? and “You’re Only Human (Second Wind); — forgiving and resilient and a reprieve

I’m sure I looked at the river, but I don’t remember doing it, or what it looked like. I do remember that the floodplain forest looked open and brown and full of trees that had been through a flood or two. No roller skiers or rowers. No radios or impatient cars. Did hear a few unpleasant goose honks near the lake street bridge.

Beaufort Scale

The History of the Beaufort Scale

Before the run I reviewed the Beaufort Scale and rediscovered a Beaufort Scale poem by Alice Oswald. Gave myself the task of trying to describe the wind today:

running north: make your own wind — or breeze?
south: hair raising . . . leg hair raising . . . calf hair raising
east: no need to shield the microphone; a welcomed air-conditioning after a hard effort; still leaves still; the branches moving so slightly my cone-dead eyes cannot detect their movement — no trees waving to me today . . . rude; flag flapping but no wind chiming

Alice Oswald on wind:

Everything you write about the wind really has to be about something else, because the wind itself is so non-existent. I like the way the Beaufort Scale [a system used to estimate wind speed based on observation of its effects] categorizes something so abstract and undefinable. That is partly what drew me to the project. I regard the words as secondary to the silences in my poetry, so I’m drawn to write about things that will exist without the words. The poems are full of gaps and silences through which something that isn’t linguistic can be heard.

A Poem A Day

wind will exist without the words

Beaufort Poem Scale – Alice Oswald

As I speak (force 1) smoke rises vertically,
Plumed seeds fall in less than ten seconds
And gossamer, perhaps shaken from the soul’s hairbrush
Is seen in the air.

Oh yes (force 2) it’s lovely here,
One or two spiders take off
And there are willow seeds in clouds

But I keep feeling (force 3) a scintillation,
As if a southerly light breeze
Was blowing the tips of my thoughts
(force 4) and making my tongue taste strongly of italics

And when I pause it feels different
As if something had entered (force 5) whose hand is lifting my page

(force 6) So I want to tell you how a whole tree sways to the left
But even as I say so (force 7) a persistent howl is blowing my hair horizontal
And even as I speak (force 8) this speaking becomes difficult

And now my voice (force 9) like an umbrella shaken inside out
No longer shelters me from the fact (force 10)
There is suddenly a winged thing in the house,
Is it the wind?

april 4/RUN

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
45 degrees
wind: 12 mph / 21 mph gusts

I thought it was supposed to be less windy today, but it didn’t feel like it. Heading north, I was running straight into the wind. Sometimes it felt fine, and sometimes it felt hard. Listened to birds, especially black capped chickadees but also the faint knocking of a woodpecker somewhere near a house being built. Admired some gnarled shadows from the oak trees I passed by in the park. Heard rushing water at the falls and the recorded ding of the light rail across the highway. Managed to step in almost every pothole without twisting or rolling anything. Remembered to look at the river and notice how it sparkled in the sun.

Listened to the birds and the wind and the water as I ran south. Listened to my new “It’s Windy” playlist, and a LOUD kid on the playground, as I ran north.

wind!

A lot pf wind outside today, and more inside, at my desk (and no, I don’t been gas). Started with a playlist:

It’s Windy

  1. Windy/ The Association
  2. Summer Breeze/ Seals & Crofts
  3. I Talk to the Wind/ King Crimson
  4. Dust in the Wind/ Kansas
  5. The Wind Cries Mary/ The Jimi Hendrix Experience
  6. Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow/ Frank Zappa
  7. Summer Wind/ Frank Sinatra
  8. Wind of Change/ Scorpions
  9. Blowin’ In the Wind/ Peter, Paul & Mary
  10. In the Air Tonight/ Phil Collins
  11. The Chain/ Fleetwood Mac
  12. Ride Like the Wind/ Christopher Cross
  13. Wind Beneath My Winds/ Better Midler
  14. Break Like the Wind/ Spinal Tap
  15. Listening Wind/ Talking Heads
  16. You’re Only Human (Second Wind)/ Billy Joel
  17. Wind Chimes/ The Beach Boys
  18. The Long and Winding Road/ The Beatles
  19. They Call the Wind Maria/ Paint Your Wagon
  20. The Zephyr Song/ Red Hot Chili Peppers
  21. Wind It Up/ Gwen Stefani
  22. Shining Star/ Gwen Stefani
  23. Shining Star/ Earth, Wind & Fire
  24. Runnin’/ Earth, Wind & Fire
  25. Classical Gas/ Mason Williams
  26. Bohemian Rhapsody/ Queen
  27. You Don’t Mess Around with Jim/ Jim Croce

Here are the songs that I listened to today as I ran:

Windy/ The Association
Summer Breeze/ Seals & Croft
I Talk to the Wind/ King Crimson
Wind of Change/ Scorpion
Blowin’ In the Wind/ Peter, Paul & Mary*

*I started with the Bob Dylan version but when he busted out the harmonica I had to switch to the version I remember when I was kid

Somewhere between Summer Breeze and Wind of Change I thought about what words I might associate with these songs: Windy – capricious; Summer Breeze – carefree; I Talk to the Wind – indifferent; Wind of Change – hope; Blowin’ In the Wind – possibility

Listening to Blowin’ In the Wind, I thought about all of the questions posed in it and was reminded of a line I recited earlier this morning from Rita Dove: Someone once said: There are no answers/just interesting questions. I thought about the idea of questions being spoken into the wind and how there are no certain answers to them but that doesn’t mean they’re just rhetorical. Oh — now I’m thinking about the unanswerable questions and the koan.

other things noticed: the word straight was used several times — In I Talk to the Wind: said the straight man to the late man and Wind of Change: The wind of change blows straight into the face of time. In Windy, the wind is tripping down the street. I wonder if the swirls or whirls in any of my songs?

first definitions of wind from the OED: Air in motion; a state of movement in the air; a current of air, of any degree of force perceptible to the senses, occurring naturally in the atmosphere, usually parallel to the surface of the ground.

  • with specific reference to direction from which it blows
  • in reference to navigation, as means of propulsion
  • to take, have, get, gain the wind of, to scent or detect by or as by the wind
  • As a thing devoid of sense or perception, or that is unaffected by what one does to it — talk to the wind, spit into the wind
  • a type of violence, a fury: swiftness, freedom or unrestrainable character, mutability or fickleness, lightness or emptiness — the furies? fates and furies?
  • air in general, as a substance or element
  • gas
  • air inhaled and exhaled by the lungs
  • air as used for blowing or sounding an instrument

So many directions in which to go!

Revisiting a poem from a past entry:

Project/ A. R. Ammons

My subject’s
still the wind still
difficult to
present
being invisible:
nevertheless should I
presume it not
I’d be compelled
to say
how the honeysuckle bushlimbs
wave themselves:
difficult
beyond presumption.

As I wrote about on this log before, wind is a great counter to the claim, what you see is what you get or seeing is believing.

wind thoughts

Early on in this log I was obsessed with the wind, particularly in terms of my run. How much wind was there outside? Would I have to run into it? I disliked running into the wind; it made it so much harder and I needed it to be as easy as it could be. At some point, I’m not sure when (maybe I’ll try to find it?), I stopped caring so much about how windy it was. It’s never really that windy in Minneapolis, not like St. Peter or Rochester. High winds freak me out.

I’d like to search back through my archive, but I have a problem: I mention the wind a lot, over 700 times. I often record the wind speed, or make a brief reference to it in the first lines of the entry like, it was windy today or so windy! Is this an impossible task, to read through and tag all of these entries? Perhaps. I think I might just start looking through entries and see what happens. . . . A few entries in and I’m already remembering some thoughts about and experiences of the wind:

  • shaking the leaves in the trees
  • sounding like sizzling bacon
  • unnoticed, forgotten at my back, but when I turn around I remember!
  • trying to rip my hat from my head — it’s only happened once!
  • making the tassel on my hat tap me on the shoulder, making me think of my mom
  • rushing past my ears, almost forgotten when I have my ears covered
  • making waves on the water, making the river sparkle
  • in the lake, making the waves so choppy — the past few summers it’s been windier
  • summer breeze — on a playlist

two more random wind thought that just popped into my head:

  1. FWA and his love of the Zelda video game, Wind-waker
  2. FWA telling me one day when he was 8 or 9: I hate the wind. When I grow up I want to invent a device that gets rid of the wind

Walking back to the house after my run, I thought about how fun it is to explore an image like wind and how helpful it is to give so much attention to it and to be open to so many possibilities. Future Sara will appreciate all of the wind options I’m giving here, I think.

april 3/RUN

3.15 miles
2 trails
41 degrees
wind gusts: 35 mph

Windy! Overcast. Quiet. A good run. Slow and relaxed until I reached a runner ahead of me with a dog who stopped then started then stopped again. At this point, I passed them and picked up the pace, hoping to avoid any more encounters. It worked! I felt good enough to keep running faster and faster. Fun!

Listened to the wind and some yelling in the gorge running south and on the winchell trail. Put in my winter playlist for the last mile, heading north on the trail.

10+ Things

  1. wind 1: soft, gentle, haunting wind chimes
  2. wind 2: a small branch of a pine tree with some green needles on the sidewalk
  3. wind 3: a swishing ponytail
  4. an empty playground, or a quiet playground
  5. nearing the Cleveland overlook: the memory of the very LOUD knocking of a woodpecker
  6. an open view of the river — can’t remember what the river looked like, just that it was wide and open
  7. mud on the trail
  8. empty benches
  9. the strong smell of weed in the 36th street parking lot
  10. wind 4: leaves scratching the street
  11. wind 5: a white plastic bag rolling across the street, then stopping in the middle, once side being lifted up
  12. wind 6: a waving bush

before the run

The difference between a sunset and a sun set/ting.

or, the moment or the space that exists between a sun set/ting and a sunset. Ever since I read James Schuyler’s “Hymn to Life” and misread a sunset for a sun set, I’ve been thinking about the difference between them — one is a object (sunset), the others an action (sun set) or a process (sun setting). The difference between something fixed and something happening, moving, doing. Why does a sun set/ting appeal to me more? One obvious reason: understanding the sun as a subject, the natural world as an actor. Another reason: movement. A sunset is a fixed image, a sun set/ting moves. Poetry is about movement — associations between ideas, the flow of words and rhythms, the refusal to land (stand still) on one meaning or ending for too long or at all. My life is about movement — restlessness; the practice of running and writing; a difficulty in ever seeing objects as fixed, always slightly fuzzy, buzzing like static, not flickering but bouncing or shaking (or something like that). (quick thought: I’m drawn to light, but just as much to motion. How true is that for people with all of their cone cells?)

note: writing about this sparked new ideas, including a tentative focus for April, and some thoughts for a artist statement — more on that below.

Since last month, I’ve been playing around with a poem that attempts to describe the differences between a sunset and a sun set/ting. It’s slow-going. Here’s something to add to my already swirling, meandering thoughts: it’s a poem by Nikky Finney from Ross Gay’s discussion of her work in his talk, Be Camera, Black-Eyed Aperture. It’s not about a sun set/ting, but one rising. The italics are Gay’s; I’m keeping them because they’re helpful for seeing the connections to the movement of a sun set/ting:

The Squatting Sun/ Nikky Finney

6:38, flying east, I witness birth,
pushing out of the blushing vaginal rim

like some wide cherry-dropped child.
All the colors that make red have come

to the only straight line on the earth.
Ghostly, I blink, my eyes tweak her nipples,

she releases and the head does not wait
for my awe.

I thought I knew what red looked like.
Believed I had seen this daily drama before;

the earth in morning-mother motion,
the first bowl of earth-bread sipped,

but never had I been asked
inside the sun’s womb so deep.

What I see has so much to do
With the permission to look.

My egg-white eyes labor to midwife
this moment out all the way.

The baby day pushes clean,
a quarter rim of cherry-spilled earth

lands in a head-back wail
inside my ladling pupils,

the first rising brightness, its long
equatorial head bursts, then crests;

new life passed on
to a pan of waiting salted water.

Some thoughts on the poem by Ross Gay:

. . .this poem witnesses the quiet interior horizon of experience, during which the unfathomably beautiful emerges, and is the contemplation of it. As Finney says, “I thought I knew what red looked like, / believed I had seen this daily drama.” Indeed, it’s the quiet looking that brings the sunrise, the day, wailing into the speaker’s eyes. 

Be Camera, Black-Eyed Aperture/ Ross Gay

Gay’s mention of quiet looking here is about black interiority and comes from Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet. I’m thinking about the quiet looking as the labor it takes to see something — the process from light to cell to signal, from retina to optic nerve to brain, from being distracted to quieting to noticing. Usually, this labor is invisible; we believe we just see things, they are just there for our camera eye or eye-as-camera to see.

Whew — that’s a lot to think about and to try to make sense of. Anyway, back to what this sunset and sun set/ting thread inspired. An April challenge: wind! And, some thoughts for an artistic statement:

To describe the world (primarily in poetry) from the perspective of the peripheral and from where some central vision exists but is not/no longer centered. . . . new ways of writing about noticing the world that don’t center central vision or that rely on but don’t center peripheral vision (because peripheral vision, by virtue of how it works, can never be centered in the same way that central vision was/is). . . . a few images I’m currently obsessed with: birds, wind, the idea of the Form, not as Platonic but as vague, basic, lacking the specificity of focus — Tree Bird Cloud. 

after the run

After I finished the run, I took out my phone and recorded some thoughts, including:

Somewhat similar to sunset vs. sun set/ting: windblown vs. wind blowing
windblown = evidence that wind existed, witnessed, after the fact
wind blowing = moving through a seemingly invisible force that is happening right now

another example: the absence of birdsong — very quiet, which could have been caused by the birds not singing in the wind, but also by the wind carrying the sound elsewhere

birding: thought about the memory of the woodpecker’s knock near the overlook

i.

an echo
almost

memory
of dead

wood hit hard
somewhere

across the
ravine

ii.

Quiet. Not
absence

of singing
birds but

the presence
of wind

carrying
their notes OR their tune

somewhere else.

A good start. I don’t think I should use somewhere for both.

wind!

So many possibilities for this monthly challenge!

  1. Gathering all of the wind poems I’ve already collected.
  2. A wind playlist.
  3. Tagging related entries with “wind”.
  4. Reading The Wind in the Willows, which I was reminded of by Mary Ruefle when she described it as one of her favorite book on a podcast.
  5. Exploring the idea of wind as both a noun for a weather condition and a verb for wrapping something around something else — a scarf around a neck — or for traversing a curving course.
  6. Returning to the Beaufort Scale

april 2/RUN

5.2 miles
ford loop
38 degrees
snow flurries into rain drops

Woke up this morning to snow. What? A little stuck on the deck but nowhere else. Sometime during the run it turned into rain. Or, was that sweat? I think it was rain.

A good run. Right before I left the house, I had a little calf pain — a few flares of dull pain. Why? Not sure, but I decided it would be fine. In fact, it might help to go out and move. It was and it did. Whenever my calf grumbled, which it didn’t do very often, I sang the song, “Old Friends” from Merrily We Roll Along in my head. Hey old friend/ are you okay old friend? I’m trying to shift my perspective and remember to think about my body, pain, worry as old friends.

Before the run, I was adding some things to my “How to be” project on Undisciplined about not looking away:

An occasional poem by Danni Quintos:

Once I wrote a poem on a bridge
because you told me to find my ghosts.
I remembered you once said, Our job as poets
is to not look away. I looked & wrote
the scariest thing I could think & after
you read it, you gave me a book
(to borrow) which I hugged so hard
that the million synonyms inside
could hear my heart beating.

This looking, described above by Finney and Quintos, this black-eyed opening—this not looking away—is a poetics, yes, but as any poetics is, it is also an ethics. What we look at, what we see, and how, and if we say what we see, is an ethics.

Be Camera, Black-Eyed Aperture / Ross Gay

Unable to see faces, often staring into a void or a smudge or a darkness, it is hard to see, difficult to not look away. How do I reimagine this ethical beholding in ways that I can practice? What might not looking away mean without the looking? Not turning away? 

This is a problem of language, and more than a problem of language, I think. 

Behold is to eyes as ___ is to ears?
An ear-witness?

While I was running, I wanted to think about how I could reframe this not looking away. What does being present, noticing, witnessing mean for me? A thought popped into my head: be with the bird. To be with the bird — to notice them, not try to identify or know or classify them. Ever since I heard J Drew Lanham discuss this concept with Krista Tippett, I’ve loved it. Today I tried to be with the birds. Mostly I was, except for when my calf flared or when I smelled burnt toast —

The other day, I told my son that it smelled like coffee or burnt toast outside. He asked jokingly, are you having a stroke? Maybe I’ve heard this before and had forgotten, but the smell of burnt toast is, according to Scott and FWA, the sign of a stroke. . . . Just looked it up, and there’s no evidence to support that claim. Whew. Anyway, it is irritating and ridiculous and embarrassing to admit that I did contemplate whether or not I might be having a stroke as I smelled the burnt smell. Fairly quickly I concluded: no fucking way. It’s just smoke from somewhere.

Be with the Bird, 10 Things

  1. the soft, sharp knocking on wood somewhere
  2. a flicker from a tree branch, flight, then a shower on my head, then birdsong
  3. an eagle-less tree by the bridge
  4. tweet tweet tweet
  5. chirp chirp
  6. fee bee
  7. a thought: could it be what I’m hearing is not birdsong, but bird warning calls alerting others to my presence?
  8. birds singing in the far off trees
  9. birds calling in the bushes beside me
  10. another thought: do birds like the rain?

a few poetry inspirations

1 — my weather description: snow flurries into rain drops. This transformation of states reminded me of a poem I read in an entry of april 2, 2020:

Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry/ Howard Nemerov – 1920-1991

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow 
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

Of course today, the water went the opposite way, snow to rain. So poetry to prose?

2 — to rain, raining. As I ran beside the gorge, I frequently heard water falling below me. The snow/rain was creating waterfalls on the limestone and through the sewer pipes, making it sound like it was raining. Suddenly I thought: there’s no rain, but it’s raining, which reminded me of a poem I posted a few days ago:

an excerpt from Raining, Outlined/ Margarita Pintado Burgos

Translated from the Spanish by Alejandra Quintana Arocho

The forest. To say the forest. To suggest some music.
To carve the breeze.
To see a landscape. See it raining. Without rain but with raining.