In honor of an entry I posted a few years ago on this day in which I gathered triple phrases, I’m giving a summary in triples today:
Sunny day crowded trail noisy kids singing birds got my shoes stuck in mud almost fell dangerous overdressed dripping sweat apple watch stopped again my legs hurt difficult not much green lots of brown and some blue sewer pipe drip drip drip muddy path slip slip slip
This morning, I began listening to David Naimon’s interview with Jorie Graham for Tinhouse. Wow! So many amazing ideas. In it, she’s talking about her latest collection, Runaway. I checked it out of the library and look forward to reading it. Here’s the first poem in it read by Graham. I love how she reads and how much her reading helps me to slow down and sit with the words.
After the rain stops you can hear the rained-on. You hear oscillation, outflowing, slips. The tipping-down of the branches, the down, the exact weight of those drops that fell
over the days and nights, their strength, accumulation, shafting down through the resistant skins, nothing perfect but then also the exact remain of sun, the sum
of the last not-yet-absorbed, not-yet-evaporated days. After the rain stops you hear the washed world, the as-if inquisitive garden, the as-if-perfect beginning again of the buds forced open, forced open – you
cannot not unfurl endlessly, entirely, till it is the yes of blossom, that end not end – what does that sound sound like deep in its own time where it roots us out
completed, till it is done. But it is not done. Here is still strengthening. Even if only where light shifts to accord the strange complexity which is beauty. Each tip in the light end-outreaching as if anxious
but not. The rain stopped. The perfect is not beauty. Is not a finished thing. Is a making of itself into more of itself, oozing and pressed full force out of the not-having-been
into this momentary being – cold, more sharp, till the beam passes as the rain passed, tipping into the sound of ending which does not end, and giving us that sound. We hear it.
We hear it, hands useless, eyes heavy with knowing we do not understand it, we hear it, deep in its own consuming, compelling, a dry delight, a just-going-on sound not
desire, neither lifeless nor deathless, the elixir of change, without form, we hear you in our world, you not of our world, though we can peer at (though not into) flies, gnats, robin, twitter of what dark consolation –
though it could be light, this insistence this morning unmonitored by praise, amazement, nothing to touch where the blinding white thins as the flash moves off what had been just the wide-flung yellow poppy,
the fine day-opened eye of hair at its core, complex, wrinkling and just, as then the blazing ends, sloughed off as if a god-garment the head and body of the ancient flower had put on for a while –
we have to consider the while it seems to say or I seem to say or something else seems to we are not nothing.
Graham’s poem inspired me to create a writing/noticing experiment for my list:
Follow along as Jorie Graham reads her poem, All. Then one day after it has rained, go to the gorge with her lines: “After the rain stops you can hear the rained-on” and “After the rain stops you hear the washed world”. Listen. Can you hear the rained-on? What does the washed world sound like? Make a list of your answers.
6.2 miles hidden falls scenic overlook loop 42 degrees
It looks like spring is finally coming (for good?) this week. Not yet, but by Wednesday. I was in Austin, MN for the weekend, and it felt like 34 degrees yesterday morning. 34? Boo. Anyway, today’s run was nice. It felt a little difficult, but I kept going and enjoyed it.
Another Monday, another run to above hidden falls. Maybe this is a new tradition? Today I ran past the overlook to some steps that lead down to the falls. They’ve repaired the road and the bridge. As I ran back, I thought that they should rename the falls the “No Longer Hidden Falls” or the “Falls Formerly Known as Hidden” or something like that because they used to be hidden, but now they’re not at all.
Heard some geese freaking out, a few crows, a black capped chickadee or two. Also, some chainsaws and leaf blowers and kids yelling and laughing at the Minnhaha Academy playground. Water trickling, then flowing down the gorge on the st. paul side. Some wet, crudded-up bike wheels slowly approaching from behind. The thud of my feet striking the ground. A woman talking to someone through her phone as she ran.
Noticed the river as I crossed the ford bridge. Blue, framed with brown branches. A few streaks of foam. A white buoy. A construction worker in a bright yellow vest with a shovel near the bridge above hidden falls. The very steep and open rim of the gorge just before hidden falls, a dirt trail leading off of it into nowhere.
Before I went out for my run, I re-visited “The Trees” by Philip Larkin. I recited it in my head throughout the run: “The trees are coming into leaf/Like something almost being said.” This is a great poem to recite while running. Only one line tripped me up rhythmically: “Yet still the unresting castles thresh”
I don’t remember my thoughts as I ran, other than: how am I going to run for 6 miles?, Am I almost done?, This feels amazing!, Wow, that bluff is steep!
their greenness is a kind of grief
The 4th line of Larkin’s poem is: “Their greenness is a kind of grief.” Before my run, I started reading a book I bought earlier in the year and that I’ve been waiting to read until spring: Green Green Green. It’s not green here in Minneapolis yet, but I’m hoping that if I think hard enough about green — and say green green green over and over– it will appear faster. I started the first chapter, “The Eccho in Green.” She describes how green represents both life, newness, hope, health, vitality almost too an intoxicating level AND death, where to look green is to be pale or ill, out of sorts, nearer to death. Then she discusses William Blake’s poem, “The Ecchoing Green” and how the green in it is not the pastoral but the communal/village green, “where people mix with one another, young and old, playing and slowly fading, ecchoing . Green, as it echoes on the green, is the color of human community” (6).
This idea of the public, in-community land, made me think of a passage I encountered this morning that I’d like to return to many times:
These days, it seems like the highest praise a poem can get is someone tweeting in all caps, “This destroyed me!” I have often wondered why someone would want to be destroyed. Rather than immolating the reader, Keene’s poems keep opening up, rippling dynamically outward, playing back and forth between self and other, scene and setting, softly encouraging you in each line to be more generous with your intimacy. What is most startling about reading Punks is that, perceiving the world through Keene’s eyes, you begin imperceptibly relaxing your own spiritual narrowness and start to notice yourself doing the unthinkable. You start loving others beyond the usual perimeter of your affection.
The author of this paragraph is writing about a new poetry collection by John Keene, Punks. I like this idea of being openned up and how it enables connections — and expressions of love with/for others. Not sure if this makes sense yet, but I wanted to make note of it so I can reflect on these ideas of green space and openness and expansion instead of narrowing.
Here’s the poem by Blake — and recording of someone reciting it:
The sun does arise, And make happy the skies. The merry bells ring To welcome the Spring. The sky-lark and thrush, The birds of the bush, Sing louder around, To the bells’ cheerful sound. While our sports shall be seen On the Ecchoing Green.
Old John, with white hair Does laugh away care, Sitting under the oak, Among the old folk, They laugh at our play, And soon they all say. ‘Such, such were the joys. When we all girls & boys, In our youth-time were seen, On the Ecchoing Green.’
Till the little ones weary No more can be merry The sun does descend, And our sports have an end: Round the laps of their mothers, Many sisters and brothers, Like birds in their nest, Are ready for rest; And sport no more seen, On the darkening Green.
3.5 miles 2 trails + extra 53 degrees wind: 13 mph with 23 mph gusts
Windy. Sometimes sunny, sometimes not. Ran south up above, north below. Just after turning down onto the Winchell Trail, spotted a runner heading even deeper into the gorge. Wow, I’ve hiked that bit, right down by the water, with Scott. There’s not much of a trail and it’s steep and rocky. As I ran above, I looked for them again. Nothing. Had I imagined it? I don’t think so.
Ran over some mud; it rained last night. Past the 38th street steps, nearing the oak savanna, I noticed even more mud and spots where it looked like the trail was eroding. I wondered, how soon before this bit of the trail is impassable?
Almost finished, running on Edmund above the trail, I heard a man on a bike call out, “good job guys!” At first I thought he was a coach, calling out to his athletes, but then I realized he was talking to some young kids (his kids?) biking with him. I also heard him say something like, “you need to push down harder on the pedals to go fast!”
As I passed by the short hill near 42nd, I heard some black capped chickadees singing to each other. Usually it’s a fee bee song, with the first bird singing 2 ascending descending notes of equal length, and the second bird singing 2 descending notes back*. Today I heard one bird follow the formula of “fee bee.” The other responded with one flat note. Was this second bird a different type of bird? Do they ever respond with one note? Was it a juvenile just learning how to sing? Not sure, but it was strange and delightful to hear this new song.
*sometime in April of 2024, I finally realized that the first set of fee bees were not ascending but descending from a higher note than the second set. Now, whenever I’m reading through an old entry that describes them incorrectly, I’m fixing it.
before the run
One final before/during/after for the month. Yesterday I took a break from running, but not from thinking about entanglement and mycelium and hyphae and dirt. Here are some of the things I thought about:
1 — fungi at the mississippi gorge
Earlier in the month I wrote about the mushroom caves in St. Paul, but I was curious what other fungi is around here so I googled it and found an amazing picture of “Dead Man’s Fingers,” or Xylaria polymorpha (“Xylaria” means it grows on wood, “poly-” means “many,” and “morpha” means “shapes”).
Dead man’s fingers is found in deciduous forests throughout North America and Europe where it grows at the base of rotting tree stumps. The FMR conservation team found this spooky looking fungus deep in the oak forest ravines at Pine Bend Bluffs Scientific and Natural Area in Inver Grove Heights. Maple trees seem to be their preferred host in our area, but they also favor oak, locust, elm and apple.
While most fungi either consume the cellulose of wood or the lignins, dead man’s fingers is somewhat unusual in that it digests the glucans or “glues” that bind the cells together. As they feed, they literally help break down dead or dying trees in the forest.
9/13/2012: Harriet Island/Lilydale Regional Park Hike (St. Paul)
Join the hiking group for a hike along the south bank of the Mississippi River west from St. Paul’s historic Harriet Island through the former Lilydale town site. The hike passes a three-kilometer reach of the Mississippi River gorge that is known locally as “Mushroom Valley” because of the abundance of man-made mushroom caves carved into the sandstone bluffs. Mushroom growing lasted a century, from its introduction by Parisian immigrants in the 1880’s until the last cave ceased production in the 1980’s, during the creation of the Lilydale Regional Park. Some of the approximately 50 caves originated as sand mines, but other common uses were the aging of cheese (Land O’ Lakes,) the lagering of beer (Yoerg’s Brewery,) and storage (Villaume Box & Lumber.) The Lilydale Regional Park area was settled early in Minnesota’s history, but because of repeated flooding, the original town was moved up on top of the bluff. In the Lilydale Regional Park, a mesic prairie has been recreated along the Mississippi River floodplain. Shale beds in the Lilydale Regional Park also are a good place to find fossils.
Directions: From I-94 on the east side of downtown St. Paul, take the Highway 52/Lafayette freeway exit south and cross the Mississippi River on the Lafayette bridge to the Plato Boulevard exit. Go west on Plato Boulevard about 2/3rds mile to Wabasha Street and turn north (right). Proceed a short distance to Water Street and turn east (right) and then turn left onto Levee Road. Proceed on Levee Road under the Wabasha Street bridge. The parking lot is on the left.
This is another place I need to hike around this summer! Here’s one more link from Greg Brick, the Subterranean Twin Cities guy, with information: Lilydale Caves / Mushroom Valley
2 — mushrooms are strong!
They can burst through asphalt!
The rapid growth of mushrooms is well known, how they can come up overnight, but how they exert such force is not so obvious. The hollow stalk of the mushroom is made up of vertically arranged hyphae that grow at their tips, much like those balloon used to make balloon animals. The wall of a hypha is composed of fibres of chitin that are arranged helically and limits the ability of the hypha to expand in width. All the pressure of growth is through elongation and growth at the tip (Isaac 1999). It is this concerted pressure applied by each expanding hypha that can create the pressure to lift the pavement.
In Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake discusses polyphony (Anna Tsing does too). He mention this recording:
and discusses how each woman sings a different melody, each voice tells a different musical story. Many melodies intertwine without ceasing to be many. Voices flow around other voices, twisting into and beside one another. There is no central planning, nevertheless a form emerges….attention becomes less focused, more distributed — mycelium is polyphony in bodily form, when streams of embodiment come together and commingle.
I wrote this in my notes:
I’m thinking about this in relation to peripheral vision and movement and distribution, less focused and singular, involving a bigger picture, encompassing many voices, images, organisms, happenings (?) — the idea of learning how to hold these different voices together into a form — what would it look like to try and grasp/notice/attend to a world this way? How does that change what we notice, and how we notice it? How we experience delight? wonder? awe? how we understand the relationships between a self and other selves/communities? Less interested in the details, the focus on one person, more interested in the form we create together — the bigger picture…
I imagine this as part of my larger project on shifting away from central vision (which barely works for me anymore) and toward peripheral vision. How does peripheral vision enable me to see things in a new, potentially highly beneficial, way?
4 — more whimsy, please!
I found this poem that other day that delighted me, and reminded me that I’d like to write more stuff that taps into my strange and wonderful whimsy. Often, the things I write are too serious (I think). I’d like to write something about fungi and mushrooms that tapped into my delight of how strange and alien and gross they are.)
The small blue Nissan ahead of Me at the stoplight has a plastic License plate holder that says I’D RATHER BE AT A RICK SPRINGFIELD CONCERT, and buddy, wouldn’t we All rather be catching a tan In the summertime lawn seats at Some amphitheater off the
Highway, wearing sunglasses to Protect our eyes form the sun and The gleam of Rick’s professional Teeth, watching his wavy dyed brown
Septuagenarian goatee Frame his mouth as it sings “Jessie’s Girl” with his mind on autopilot, Wondering what he’ll have for dinner
Later as he croons Where can I Find a woman like that? for the 100,000th time as we Dream of this life we’re in for the
100,000th time instead Of cubicles and gray, teh beige Hallways we walk for decades before Demise? We dream, relaxed in the
Warm air we ignore for another Decade as some gulls try to steal Fries from a couple who are busy Groping their fifty something bodies,
Their bodies here still, soft & alive, Sagging in the lawn but fifteen Again and lost in their friend’s basement Again making out on the bean bag
In the corner, frantic in hazy Afterschool limbo before The friend’s parents get home from work. They know over what’s left of a
Margarita in a can. It Trickles green through the grass as Rick’s Band cuts straight to the opening Riff for “Love Somebody.” The drummer
Pounds the toms, the thuds summoning 1984 as the guitar Chimes and harmonies swoop in and Swallow the heating air. You better
Love somebody / it’s late, the frogs Evaporating in the wetlands By the offramp.
during the run
I thought about melodies and voices and sounds I was hearing simultaneously, sometimes difficult to distinguish, blending into each other. At the beginning of the run: birds, a car, my breathing, my feet striking the ground, the wind through the trees. I’m not sure if that was all of the sounds. Now I wish I had stopped and recorded some of my thoughts.
I also thought about dirt and what, under my feet and deeper in the ground, I might be disturbing/disrupting/destroying as I ran.
I probably thought about more, but I’ve forgotten it now. It scattered in the wind, I guess.
after the run
Now, after the run and after writing this log up to this point, I’m thinking about lichen and Forrest Gander and telling everyone in the house about how lichen can be killed, but if it has what it needs, it might never die (which I heard him say on a podcast I listened to this morning while doing the dishes). I wouldn’t want to live forever, but I like imagining a world in which inevitable death didn’t overshadow almost everything else. I’m not consumed by it, but it’s in all of our stories, our understandings, our philosophies, how we frame and experience joy and delight. How would we orient ourselves without that endpoint, without that guaranteed conclusion?
I’m also thinking about something I read about the biggest fungi in the world — at least the biggest that has been found and documented by scientists, the “Oregon Humongous Fungus.” Everything else I’ve heard about this fungus, and the one in Crystal Falls, MI, involves awe and fascination and wonder. In contrast, this report describes the fungus “as the baddest fungus on the block.” It’s killing tons of trees in the forest and, even after diligently trying for 40 years, they can’t get rid of it. The perspective here seems to be from timber companies who are losing all their trees/assets/profit. Interesting…
4.25 miles top of franklin hill and back 32 degrees
Full winter running clothes: black running tights, green base layer shirt, pink hooded jacket, black running vest, “black” baseball cap (well, it was black, but now has faded to a brown-ish gray. I imagine, although can’t really see with my vision, that it looks gross and I should be embarrassed to wear it — mostly, I don’t care, but I am looking for a new hat), pink headband, black gloves, dark gray buff. Brr. I am over winter-in-April. Normally, I’m not too bothered by the weather, but this never-ending cold is wearing me out. I want to sit on the deck in my new chair without a coat on! I want to run in shorts!
I was cold for the first 15 minutes, but once I warmed up, it was fine. I felt strong and relaxed and grateful to be outside breathing in fresh air, being with the birds. They don’t seem to be bothered by the cold. Thought about rot and noticed all the trees down just below me. How long does it take fungi to move in and begin breaking down the wood to digest the needed nutrients? Looked it up and found an article, How Fungi Make Nutrients Available to the World, which is helpful for understanding how fungi break down trees, but not how long it takes.
Running under the lake street bridge, I saw a few Minneapolis Parks vehicles, heard chainsaws down by the river, then noticed one of the trucks was filled with twigs and branches. I thought about the fungi and all the food they weren’t getting with the removal of the dead/dying limbs. I also thought about important it is to remove those branches so they don’t fall on my head while I’m running under them.
On the stretch between the trestle and Franklin, I thought about what it might mean to shift my values away from progress and toward the fungi, including thinking about motion/moving as not always producing something “useful” for capitalism, or aimed at progress (like running to be faster or better). How do we understand and value movement — making, doing, moving — outside of the goal of improving or mastery or being used by others?
I also thought about an article someone posted on twitter this morning about tapping into spinach’s ability to sense a compound that is often found in landmines by attaching censors to them that, when triggered, send an email back to a lab. The article was terribly titled, Scientists have taught spinach to send emails, and as I read it I thought about how often these pop science articles view plants (or fungi or “nature”) only as resources/assets for maintaining or improving the lives of humans. Fungi is only valuable because of what it does for us, how it might save us from the terrible mess we’ve made of the planet, not because it’s just amazing. How dreary to think of spinach having to send emails! And, this is not teaching spinach to send emails but hacking into their communication networks to receive the data they’re sending elsewhere.
I’ve written a lot about mushrooms and fungi, here’s a poem about lichen. Lichen is another big deal for poets.
Back then, what did I know? The names of subway lines, busses. How long it took to walk 20 blocks.
Uptown and downtown. Not north, not south, not you.
When I saw you, later, seaweed reefed in the air, you were grey-green, incomprehensible, old. What you clung to, hung from: old. Trees looking half-dead, stones.
Marriage of fungi and algae, chemists of air, changers of nitrogen-unusable into nitrogen-usable.
Like those nameless ones who kept painting, shaping, engraving, unseen, unread, unremembered. Not caring if they were no good, if they were past it.
Rock wools, water fans, earth scale, mouse ears, dust, ash-of-the-woods. Transformers unvalued, uncounted. Cell by cell, word by word, making a world they could live in.
3.5 miles 2 trails + tunnel of trees 43 degrees light rain / wind: 15 mph
Raining today. When it stopped, I headed out to the gorge. Within a few minutes: more rain. I could barely feel it. I was more bothered by the wind. Even that didn’t bother me that much. Everything was wet and dripping. I looked at the river, but I can’t remember what color it was or how the surface looked as the rain fell. I probably couldn’t have seen that anyway because I was too far away.
Heard lots of water rushing through the sewers in the street, then water falling from the sewer pipes in the ravines at 36th, 44th, and 42nd. Just after I turned around at the 44th street parking lot, I stopped at a bench overlooking the river. It was at a slight angle above the Winchell Trail and faced St. Paul, on the other side. Next month the view from this bench will only be green leaves, but today I could see the river (even if I don’t remember what it looked like), and the trail below, and the other side.
Didn’t see Dave the Daily Walker this morning, but I did say “good morning” to one walker, and then laughed in recognition when another walker said, “What is it? Hot or cold?”
Thinking about revising a haibun I wrote a few years ago and submitting it. Could I shape it into something that speaks to ideas of entanglement and nets and mutuality?
On the Dirt Path Near Folwell Avenue
Even if you try to time it just right, when you climb the steep, short hill up to the dirt packed path you cannot avoid the swarming swath of sex-crazed gnats or the little old lady slowly shuffling by, swinging her hiking poles, a voice TED-talking out of her phone’s speaker reminding you that this is why we are all here. Do not bother the bench resting on the rim of the gorge to ask what this is. If looking through the thickly thatched oak leaves to gather glimpses of the silvery river sparkling in the morning sun doesn’t already answer everything, the bench certainly won’t be able to help.
Bugs and old ladies wake early in July but so does the river.
I think I especially need to rework the last sentence and the idea of what this is. Maybe also the haiku at the end? Looking through my pages documents, I found some notes I took while trying to figure out how to write about this encounter with the little old lady. The second paragraph reminds me of a great sentence I read in an article describing entanglement. Every organism is an ecosystem.
which reminds us why we are all here…
We are here. Me and joints and muscles and bones and ligaments and lungs. Us. me and blood and cells and electrolytes and sweat and saliva. we. me and hands and feet, a heart, two diseased eyes, a knee that displaces. we. me worn out running shoes, threadbare worries. we. me and those oak trees, that wrought iron fence, this rutted, dirt path, that short, steep hill. we. me river. that we are here with the old woman who slowly shuffles in her straw hat with her hiking poles and a voice that calls out from her radio speakers, “which reminds us why we are all here.” here. above the river and the gorge and the floodplain forest, below the bike path and the road, the cars and the boulevard. here. in this heat and humidity and haze. here. on a monday morning. here.
We are all here.
Me bones joints muscles ligaments blood, sweat, saliva inhaling exhaling lungs lungs and heart and hands diseased eyes, easily displaced kneecaps feet, worn out running shoes, threadbare worries Us. All. Here. oak trees wrought iron fence rutted, rooted, packed dirt path short, steep hill an old woman slowly shuffling in a straw hat with hiking poles Us. All. Here. The river gorge
The mention of the phone TED-talking is a central aspect of my poem and its critique (of what? something about sound bites and the monstrous mixing of self-help and spirituality and capitalism and the idea of blasting these words on an early morning walk outside by the gorge) seems central to what I’m trying to say in this poem and how it fits with entanglement, especially as Anna Tsing describes it. Decided to do a search on the Poetry Foundation site for “ted talk.” Found this excellent poem:
money will build anywhere there’s a view or a coastline all those tangled shrubs and thorny bushes your ancestors cut through centuries ago to claim in the name of a queen and a king with foul smelling hair these days even the ecotone between the living and the dying has to be privatized & sold at auction all the steps between next year and the first human year ever recorded melted so flagrantly it became stylish to be poetic for the end of the world everyone’s collecting coins on every interface a thousand identical posts about 2019 being the year of paper straws and reusable cups indigo dyeing from Kyoto is the new 36 hours in Tbilisi all the people with phones don’t think twice about buying onboard wifi on their way to the latest Caribbean island still recovering from last year’s hurricanes would it be so wrong to wish everyone with global entry be grounded until extinction is off the table I don’t think I can date another digital nomad or a normie with a dog who doesn’t know what it’s like to be too poor to buy their way out of disaster why do the rich treat blame like it’s obscenity or a fossil is it because they hate seeing blood think they are noble for taking quick little showers and using silicone at the farmer’s market I have never seen someone forgive themselves as elaborately as the wealthy everyone who paid for their wellness is infecting the rest of us yes I am sick sick sick and want to sterilize all the ruinous overseers though it is not like me to dream so much I have managed to hoard something that cannot be replicated it will die when I die let no one say we didn’t try to let a different kind of life bloom and let no one say we didn’t touch what was there from the beginning
Okay, I can’t resist. Searching through other results for TED talk, I found this excellent poem by the wonderful Ted Kooser. Most of the search results where poems by poets named Ted; I guess there aren’t a lot of poems about TED talks, or at least ones that made it into Poetry magazine. That’s a Ted talk I’d attend!
In musty light, in the thin brown air of damp carpet, doll heads and rust, beneath long rows of sharp footfalls like nails in a lid, an old man stands trying on glasses, lifting each pair from the box like a glittering fish and holding it up to the light of a dirty bulb. Near him, a heap of enameled pans as white as skulls looms in the catacomb shadows, and old toilets with dry red throats cough up bouquets of curtain rods.
You’ve seen him somewhere before. He’s wearing the green leisure suit you threw out with the garbage, and the Christmas tie you hated, and the ventilated wingtip shoes you found in your father’s closet and wore as a joke. And the glasses which finally fit him, through which he looks to see you looking back— two mirrors which flash and glance— are those through which one day you too will look down over the years, when you have grown old and thin and no longer particular, and the things you once thought you were rid of forever have taken you back in their arms.
Oh, I love this poem. I’ve posted several others poems by Kooser. I think he recently died, which is a great loss. I read a thread on twitter last year — or the year before? — discussing what a generous mentor and person he was to so many.
Sun! Warmth! Spring! Felt much warmer than 45 degrees, at least once I warmed up. I remembering now, as I write this, that I was chilly for the first 10 minutes.
15 Things I Noticed:
there were 3 stones stacked on top of each other on the big boulder heading down into the tunnel of trees
water was dripping or streaming out of the limestone on the st. paul side — I didn’t see it, but heard it
my feet were shshshshshshing as I ran over grit on the edge of the path on the franklin bridge
one laminated notecard was still attached to the railing on the lake street bridge. It was the one I stopped to read last week: “your story doesn’t have to end.” What happened to the others? Why was this the only kept?
at least one runner was wearing shorts
the wind was in my face as I headed north on the west side, at my back heading south on the east side
there were no rowers on the river and no roller skiers on the path
the edge of the paved path was white. I decided it was stained from salt, not covered in lingering ice or snow — too warm
the walking path under the lake street bridge on the east side is still closed off — I think Scott said the path had crumbled there. Can they (will they) fix it?
there was a tree trunk down on the winchell trail that looked like a sitting person, at least to me
the shadow of a bird crossed over me. I looked up but couldn’t see it in the sky
lots of honking geese, sometimes the sound of their honks became indistinguishable from a yelling kid or a moving car
a peloton of 6 or 7 bikes passed me. Their spinning wheels were so loud! Spinning, whirring, rumbling. My sudden thought: how loud the 200+ bikes I see at the bike races I watch must be!
a deep voice off the side, carrying clearly across the road, cutting through everything, almost rattling my skull
the top of a split rail fence at a steep part of the path is missing — how did that happen?
I was planning to do a list of 10, but I kept remembering more things that I noticed. I like this exercise as a way to remember things from my run.
before the run
For every other “before the run” I’ve done, I write it in a saved post before I go out for my run. Today, I was busy reading Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, and didn’t have time. It takes some time to read and post all of the stuff I’m thinking about before the run. Maybe too much time? Now, after the run, I don’t have much time either, so I’ll keep this brief. Just listing a few things that I read/did before the run:
Finished re-memorizing Katie Farris’s “What Would Root”
What used to be a rope descending my vertebrae to the basement of my spine grows thin.
In solidarity with my chemotherapy, our cat leaves her whiskers on the hardwood floor, and I gather them, each pure white parenthesis and plant them in the throat of the earth.
In quarantine, I learned to trim your barbarian hair. Now it stands always on end: a salute to my superior barbary skills. In the event of my death, promise you will find my heavy braid and bury it–
I will need a rope to let me down into the earth. I’ve hidden others strategically around the globe, a net to catch my body in the wearing.
Thought about nets and this passage from The Mushroom at the End of the World:
Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungi. Fungi are diverse and often flexible, and they live in many places, ranging from ocean currents to toenails. But many fungi live in the soil, where their thread-like filaments, called hyphae, spread into fans and tangle into cords through the dirt. If you could make the soil liquid and transparent and walk into the ground, you would find yourself surrounded by nets of fungal hyphae (137).
Thought about imagining the soil was liquid and transparent and then entering it, surrounded by nets of fungal hyphae. What if I could swim in the soil? Swim through these nets of fungal hyphae?
Wondered about networks and the comparisons Tsing describes between fungi networks and the internet (the wood wide web) and the infrastructure of highway systems. What are some key differences between how the internet and highways work?
during the run
Thought about nets and what they do, what they’re for, as I ran. Nets can trap and confine things, like fish, but they can also hold things — carry, hold together, be a container for, not sealed or airtight but open with many holes, ways to breathe. I thought about these nets as loosely holding organisms/selves together without sealing them into a self-contained, separate Subject.
after the run
There’s a lot to ruminate over with entanglement and fungi and mutuality as a starting point instead of competition. I need to sit with all some more, and maybe do some writing around/with a few lines from the book. I’m hoping to turn my thoughts into a poem for an call for work on entanglement.
In my notes in Plague Notebook, Vol 11 I made a list of words related to nets:
Sun. Slightly warmer. Less wind. Hooray! Still wore my running tights, winter vest, and gloves, but felt like spring is almost here. Ran around the falls. They were gushing, but the creek was barely moving. Ran past the “big feet” statue. I can’t remember his name — Gunther something, I think — but I do remember that he was a poet, a hymn writer, and a politician from Sweden. Ran the Winchell Trail too. At the start of it, I slipped, but didn’t fall, in the mud. Said a lot of “excuse mes” as I encountered people from behind. Not irritated at all. A good run on a beautiful morning.
before the run
Thinking about roots and how things become rooted in the ground today. This topic is inspired by a favorite poem that I memorized in May of 2020: What Would Root/ Katie Farris. Here’s what I wrote in an entry from may 20, 2020:
I like the idea of this long, wild story, being rooted at the rock from the beginning of the poem. And I love this idea of rooting, being rooted and how the story unfolds around it. I want to spend some more time thinking about what it means to root, be rooted, take root. I’d also like to write a poem like this–with a story at the gorge–about sinking.
I used to have this poem memorized, and I think I can again, with a little practice. For now, I’m going to record myself reading it, then listen to that recording a few times while I run today.
during the run
Started by listening to the recording of myself reading the poem. It was very cool — dreamy, almost disembodied — to listen the words as I ran through the neighborhood and toward the river. Then, when the recording was done, I put my headphones away and thought about roots as I ran south above the gorge. I remember imagining my skin as more porous and open to the world and grass growing through my pores (instead of Farris’ roots).
Halfway through the run, in Wabun park, I stopped to record my thoughts. Here’s a summary:
Thought about being rooted in a place, then being on the inside or the outside and how being rooted means being both in and out, or neither, at the same time. Just there, part of what’s happening.
Then, I wondered, Does rooted always mean we’re tethered or stuck in one place, immobile? What would it mean to be rooted in a place while you were moving?
Then: how are the roots formed? Instead of one solid, thick, sturdy root that’s difficult to cut down, what if we were a network of roots spread throughout the ground, connected and tangled with other? Roots can be networks — shallow and easy to pull out, like weeds, but multiplying and growing when you do that (rhizomes and nodes).
Getting at the root, radical feminism and the root of oppression, the origin/cause of the problem I often think about the origins of my running story — there is no one root or cause or start, but a series (a network) of reasons.
Chanted: root root root root/root root root root/ roo ting roo ting/root root root root/root root root root/roo ted root less I like these simple repetitions. I’d like to try chanting these for several minutes, then seeing what other words/ideas/chants might appear.
Thinking about being inside or outside of yourself and being rooted and what of self/Self that suggests, I’m reminded of a poem I put on my reading list the other day:
Full of yourself— a friend’s touch is sharp as a thorn. A buzzing fly drives you mad.
Forget yourself and what friend can hurt you? You mingle with wild elephants and enjoy the ride.
Caged in self, you drown in anguish. Storm clouds swallow the sun. Your lover flees the scene.
Outside yourself, the night is moonlit. Lovers drink Love’s wine. It flows through you.
Self-conscious, you’re dry as autumn leaves. You bite like frost.
Melt yourself, and winter’s frozen meadows will become spring’s fragrant fields.
(How) can we travel outside of ourselves? What does this untether/uproot us from? I posted this quotation from Jamie Quatro in a log entry from April 19, 2018 about running as prayer:
a state of prayerlike consciousness. Past the feel-good vibes, past the delusions, my attention moves outward: I’m intensely aware of the cadence of a bird’s song, cherry blossoms weighted-down after a rain. Things light up and I experience an interior stillness that somehow syncs me more profoundly with the exterior world. It’s a paradox: only when I’m fully present in my body do I begin to experience the absence of myself.
Does fully present in a body = rooted? I’m also thinking about entanglement and Ross Gay’s critique of buoyancy and floating free (see april 12, 2022). Can we be a self, rooted in a body and a place, and still be other than ourSelf? How do I fit Rumi’s idea of forgetting the self with entanglement?
4 miles marshall loop 35 degrees / feels like 25 wind: 16 mph / snow flurries
Before heading out for a run, watched the Boston Marathon. The thing I remember most about it was during the men’s push-rim race, when the announcer (who I think was a push-rim racer himself) talking about the racer’s gloves: they’re plastic and 3D-printed for precision, and when they bang on the metal wheel rim, they create a steady rhythm that the racer’s use for pacing themselves. Very cool. Later, I remembered this fact as I neared the end of my run.
Today, it is cold and windy and snowing again, but the birds are singing and calling — lots of fee bees — so I know spring will be here soon. Maybe by next weekend? I picked the right route for the direction of the wind. It was at my back as I ran over the lake street bridge and up the Marshall Hill. The only part where I was running directly into it was on the way back over the bridge.
Heard: the bells chiming near Shadow Falls; a dog barking and kid yelling below in the gorge; and the branches creaking from the wind again. This time the branches creaking sounded almost like a rusty hinge, with a door slowly creaking open. I like that image and the idea that some sort of door to somewhere was opening for me at that moment — and that there was something mysterious and scary about this door leading down into the woods or the earth. I like mysterious and scary.
Near the end of my run, I think after I remembered the rhythm of the gloves hitting the push-rim, I started chanting some of an ED poem:
Life is but life/And death but death/Bliss is but bliss/And breath but breath Life is but life/And death but death/Bliss is but bliss/And breath but breath Life is but life/And death but death/Bliss is but bliss/And breath but breath
Stopped to study the river for a minute — and to get a break from the wind — on the lake street bridge: it was a steely gray with ripples and a few eddies.
One more thing: Running above the floodplain forest and the Hiawatha Sand Flats, I heard a ferocious dog bark, then a whimper, almost but not quite, like a squeaky toy. Was the dog chasing or killing a bunny down there? Possibly. A minute later, I heard the deep voice of a human calling out repeatedly, then a steady rhythm of dog barks and sharp commands of some sort.
before the run
Scrolling through poems I’ve archived on my Safari Reading List, I found one that builds off of being dug up and excavated, but is also about returning, caring for, and re-planting:
A flood unzips a graveyard. Cadavers sluice down Main St. It’s my job to find the dead, chauffeur them back to their plots. The problem being the dead speak. They want to swing by their old places, check on spouses, kids grandkids glimpsed in sepia windows beneath the blue of evening news. They whisper: “That tree was a sapling when I planted it,” or: “I forgot what her laugh was like,” or they call a dog that refuses to come. Then, embarrassed by their weeping, by how dry it is, the dead ask me to take them home, and on the drive I recite this line I’m working on about the graininess of two-day-old snow. “Pear snow,” I call it. The dead say nothing in response. The air velvets as if it’s going to rain, though the sky is clear, the moon wet as the light in a child’s pupil. Gentle, I lower the dead back into their cradles. The earth, for all its stripped rancor, heavy in my shovel. The work hard, but familiar. The pay, at least, good.
What do we do with the ghosts that resurface, whether we want them to or not? How do we care for the stories of those who came before us?
Here’s another poem I posted last year about what the earth can yield and how we might notice it:
After the rain, it’s time to walk the field again, near where the river bends. Each year I come to look for what this place will yield – lost things still rising here.
The farmer’s plow turns over, without fail, a crop of arrowheads, but where or why they fall is hard to say. They seem, like hail, dropped from an empty sky,
Yet for an hour or two, after the rain has washed away the dusty afterbirth of their return, a few will show up plain on the reopened earth.
Still, even these are hard to see – at first they look like any other stone. The trick to finding them is not to be too sure about what’s known;
Conviction’s liable to say straight off this one’s a leaf, or that one’s merely clay, and miss the point: after the rain, soft furrows show one way
Across the field, but what is hidden here requires a different view – the glance of one not looking straight ahead, who in the clear light of the morning sun
Simply keeps wandering across the rows, letting his own perspective change. After the rain, perhaps, something will show, glittering and strange.
during the run
I tried to think about these two poems and excavating truths and caring for ghosts and noticing the things that are buried in the ground, but I couldn’t hang onto my thoughts. It could have been wind or the effort I was making to run in it that distracted me. Near the end of my run I thought about this before/during/after the run experiment and how it works sometimes and not others. I think I need to fine-tune it — maybe narrow my focus, or be more deliberate with what I want to think about before I head out on my run?
One other thing I remember was thinking about surfaces and depths, and the value of both. And now, writing this entry hours later, I’m thinking about how both of the poems in my “before the run” section involve water (rain) and how it brings the things buried to the surface. This reminds me of writing about water last July and Maxine Kumin’s idea of the thinker as the sinker (july 22, 2021). I’m also thinking about floating and bobbing to the surface and how humus (which I wrote about earlier this month) is the top layer of soil — 12 inches at the surface.
after the run
I want to return to the creaky branches sounding like the rusty hinge of a door. Last April, I read a poem by Mary Oliver with a hinge in it:
from Dogfish/ Mary Oliver
I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery
I’m thinking of door hinges and poems as opening a thousand doors and the wings of the seven white butterflies and “how they bang the pages/or their wings as they fly/to the fields of mustard and yellow/and orange and plain/gold all eternity” (Seven White Butterflies/ from West Wind)
1.5 miles winchell trail, south/42nd st east/edmund, north 41 degrees
Headed to the gorge with Scott this morning — a quick run above the river. I know I looked at the river, but I can’t remember much about it. Most likely, with this gloomy sky, it was a brownish-gray or grayish-brown with no sparkle. We talked a lot about Lizzo and what a great job she did on SNL last night, both as the host and the musical guest. The only other thing I remember right now is running the opposite way on the Winchell Trail (usually I run north on it) and noticing how much longer the Folwell hill was this way. The other way it’s steep but short, this way it’s slightly less steep, but winding (or wind-y?) and long.
before the run
Yesterday I suggested that my next dirt topic should be gardens/gardening. Here are a few ideas:
1 — tune my body and my brain
My exploration of dirt began when I started thinking about the phrase from a kids’ song, or a song often sung to or by kids: “the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out.” Here’s another kids’ song that doesn’t have the word dirt in it, but is about dirt and death and life and gardens. Both my kids sang it in elementary school concerts:
Here are a few verses:
Inch by inch, row by row Gonna make this garden grow All it takes is a rake and a hoe And a piece of fertile ground
Inch by inch, row by row Someone bless these seeds I sow Someone warm them from below Till the rain comes tumblin’ down
Pullin’ weeds and pickin’ stones Man is made of dreams and bones Feel the need to grow my own ‘Cause the time is close at hand
Rainful rain, sun and rain Find my way in nature’s chain Tune my body and my brain To the music from the land
2 — Alice Oswald and “echo-poetics”
It is perhaps this blending of the ecological sensibilities learned through gardening with those of the poet that makes reading Oswald’s editorial and poetic work so compelling, and not only for the many pleasures it brings. It also offers an acoustically informed aesthetic, a way of re-tuning how we think about and make beauty and meaning in verbal forms, especially those inspired by the earth’s processes, things, places. Principled with the desire to bring living things unmediated into text, Oswald’s writings illustrate a heightened and recursive sensitivity to the acoustics of environment, with the ear, of course, in its critical role as converter of signals. They recognize sound as summons, access, and mode. They value gardening (and other physical work) for the ways it creates possibilities for encounter by situating the body in motion and out-of-doors. They invite and invent expressive forms that are organic to these encounters, or that modify existing forms so they are apt and up to the task. They reveal a rootedness in rhythm, syncopation, harmony, or some other musicality within the external world. They practice acute hearing and engage in humble, patient, and empathie listening. They gesture toward the sonic rounding out of envi-ronments and their many natural, social and cultural complexities. And they practice accretion as a writer’s technique inspired by a natural process. Thus Oswald begins to define what I might term an “echo-poetics.”
Voice(s) of the Poet-Gardener: Alice Oswald and the Poetry of Acoustic Encounter/ Mary Pinard
3 — digging work
It’s certainly true that when you’re digging you become bodily implicated in the ground’s world, thought and earth continually passing through each other. You smell it, you feel its strength under your boot, you move alongside it for maybe eight hours and your spade’s language (it speaks in short lines of trochees and dactyls: sscrunch turn slot slot, sscrunch turn slot slot) creeps and changes at the same pace as the soil. You can’t help being critical of any account of mud that is based on mere glimpsing.
“The Universe in time of rain makes the world alive with noise” / Alice Oswald
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep To scatter new potatoes that we picked, Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day Than any other man on Toner’s bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up To drink it, then fell to right away Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods Over his shoulder, going down and down For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it.
4 — listening work
People often ask me what I like best about gardening. . . . The truth is it’s the sound. I don’t know anything lovelier than those free shocks of sound happening against the backsound of your heartbeat. Machinery, spade-scrapes, birdsong, gravel, rain on polythene, macks moving, aeroplanes, seeds kept in paper, potatoes coming out of boxes, high small leaves or large head-height leaves being shaken, frost on grass, strimmers, hoses . . .
“The Universe in time of rain makes the world alive with noise”/ Alice Oswald
Poems are written in the sound house of a whole body, not just with the hands. So before writing, I always spend a certain amount of time pre- paring my listening. I might take a day or sometimes as much as a month picking up the rhythms I find, either in other poems or in the world around me. I map them into myself by tapping my feet or punch- ing the air and when my whole being feels like a musical score, I see what glimpses, noises, smells, I see if any creature or feeling comes to live there. Then, before putting pen to paper, I ask myself, “Am I lis- tening? Am I listening with a soft, slow listening that will not obliter- ate the speaker?” And if, for example, I want to write a poem about water, I try to listen so hard that my voice disappears and I speak water.
“Poetry for Beginners” for the BBC’s Get Writing/ Alice Oswald
5 — In Search of our Mother’s Gardens*
*a reference to the powerful essay by Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens,” that I often taught in my Fem Theory classes.
things to think about while running:
How can I “tune my body and brain to the music of the land”?
What is digging work? Where can/do we do digging work?
What are the sounds of my backyard garden?
What can I plant in my garden this year?
Why do I love doing physical, outdoor work? How is digging/gardening/weeding work different from listening/noticing/caring/writing work? How is it similar?
during the run
Ran with Scott, and we didn’t talk about gardens or digging until the end, when I mentioned gardening, digging, and the digital story about my mom. He suggested that I look up the lyrics for Peter Gabriel’s “Digging in the Dirt.”
after the run
Here are a few lyrics from Gabriel’s “Digging in the Dirt”:
Digging in the dirt Stay with me, I need support I’m digging in the dirt To find the places I got hurt Open up the places I got hurt
The more I look, the more I find As I close on in, I get so blind I feel it in my head, I feel it in my toes I feel it in my sex, that’s the place it goes
This time you’ve gone too far This time you’ve gone too far This time you’ve gone too far I told you, I told you, I told you, I told you This time you’ve gone too far This time you’ve gone too far This time you’ve gone too far I told you, I told you, I told you, I told you
And the refrain at the end, repeated several times:
Digging in the dirt To find the places we got hurt
And here’s the video, which I can’t embed). Wow, the imagery in this fits with so many things I’ve been discussing! Worms, digging as excavating deeper truths (I think I’ve mentioned this before), death, dust, grass, pebbles, sand, rocks, mushrooms speaking! (in the video they spell out “help”).
addendum, 18 april 2022: almost forgot to add this image from my notes for my memoir (still in progress) about my student and teaching life”
planting a seed, lower right
Instead of cropping out the key part — the picture of a plant growing inside a head in the lower right with the text, “planting a seed” — I decided to post the entire image. When I taught feminist and queer classes a decade ago, my aim was to plant seeds. Not to force ideas on students or to expect instant results — where they could immediately “get” something or be transformed, but to introduce ideas and offer up invitations that might, in the future, lead to transformation and deeper understandings.
Still winter. Still wearing running tights, vest, a thick orange sweatshirt. I wish it were warmer but, with the sun, I didn’t mind the cold. Soon, it will be too warm — at least, for me. The most memorable thing that happened on my run, beside what I write about below, in my “during the run” section, was seeing a big bald eagle soaring in the sky. I was running down the hill towards the lake street steps on the st. paul side, and there it was. I stopped for a minute to marvel, both at it, and my ability to still see and identify a bird flying above me. After I continued running, I thought about the bird flu that’s happening in Minnesota — a few days ago, I read a tweet about an owl family at Lake Nokomis that is suspected to have died from it. So sad to think about all of these beautiful birds dying. How big of an impact will this have on birds here? Looked it up and found an article. The picture of the owl, and the words about the young owls in the article — “extreme neurological distress”, is haunting.
before the run
Just as I was about to write that today’s “before the run” would offer a brief break from dirt, I realized that what Ocean Vuong is talking about so beautifully here in the video below, is what their mother planted for them: the ability to look patiently at the world in wonder and awe and with joy.
transcript:
“Brief But Spectacular Take on Reclaiming Language for Joy” on PBS News Hour
When my mother passed in 2019, my whole life kind of contracted into 2 days. And what I mean by that is that when a loved one dies, you experience your life in just 2 days: today, when they are no longer here, and yesterday, the immense, vast yesterday, when they were here. And so my life, as I see it now, is demarcated, by one line: the yesterday, when my mother was with me, and now, when she is not.
I think you realize that when you lose your mother, no matter how old you are, you’re suddenly a child; you feel like an orphan. And so I went back to the blank page, which is the only safe space for me, the only space I have control over. And I guess I learned that by putting one word after another. The beauty is that we’re all going to lose our parents, and in this sense, death is the truest thing that we have, because it’s the one thing we are all heading towards. And when language can lift the veil, we can see each other.
My mother never really understood my vocation and my work. She couldn’t read. It perplexed her, you know. Why would all these folks come to hear your sad poems? But, when she came to my reading, she started to see how my language landed in other people’s bodies. And after a while she started to position her seat to look at the audience and she came to me one day and said, “I get it. People’s faces change when they’re listening to your lectures, to your words.” My mother taught me something, that you can look at something, at people and scenarios endlessly and still find something new. Just because you have seen it, does not mean you have known it. And so, the vocation of the artist, is to look at something with the faith that whatever you’re seeing, will keep giving meaning to you. And I think that patient looking was what she gifted me and it has to do with her sense of wonder. We think of terms like refuge, immigrant, war, survivor and we rarely think of wonder and awe. But I think when it comes to families and being raised by folks who are survivors, they keep wonder and awe closely to their chest. I learned so much from my mother’s joy in response to the world and the life she lived and that informs my artistic practice.
thoughts to ponder while running: what seeds did my mother plant for me? how does language land in our bodies? how do we grow the seeds from our ancestors in our bodies? what does it mean to look with patience? how do we find new meanings? if what we look at gives meaning to us, what do/can we give to it? what can look mean beyond literal vision/sight?
during the run
Without really intending it, the last question, “What can look mean beyond literal vision/sight?,” was the one that I remember thinking about. Here’s how it happened: Running above the floodplain forest, through the tunnel of trees, I started hearing the gentle whooshing of car wheels above me. Whoossshhh whoossshhh whoossshhh in a steady rhythm. Then I heard something creaking just below me — the wind passing through the trees, making the bare branches creak or groan. Is it only the wind pushing a branch, or is this squeak from branches rubbing against each other? Or both? Or, am I hearing a squirrel or a bird or something completely different? Anyway, I thought about that creaking sound and how its cause is invisible and unknown/uncertain. Then I thought about something I read this morning in Elisa Gabbert’s excellent essay, “The Shape of a Void: Toward a Definition of Poetry”:
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.
Poetry writes around what’s unknown or missing or can’t be seen. So, maybe the creaking noise of the wind or a tree or something else is a poem–a noise being made around an absent tree or the invisible wind? That was a lot of words for me to try to translate my sudden flash of understanding, which only lasted from the lowest point of the trail, where the four fences meet, to the top, past the old stone steps!
I remember also thinking that it’s difficult to set out on a run with a specific task — think about this! — and stick to it. Sometimes it works, often it doesn’t. Instead of stubbornly trying to make the ideas come, I try to let go and let whatever happens happen. For me, running helps with this; I’m putting enough effort into running that I usually can’t give too much energy to thinking about this or that thing. Right after having this thought (if I’m remembering correctly), I stopped thinking and started listening, then whoossshhh whoossshhh
after the run
As I started writing about the creaking noise, which might have been a tree, I was reminded of a beautiful poem I posted last summer:
When a dead tree falls in a forest it often falls into the arms of a living tree. The dead, thus embraced, rasp in wind, slowly carving a niche in the living branch, shearing away the rough outer flesh, revealing the pinkish, yellowish, feverish inner bark. For years the dead tree rubs its fallen body against the living, building its dead music, making its raw mark, wearing the tough bough down as it moans and bends, the deep rosined bow sound of the living shouldering the dead.
Getting back to Ocean Vuong and their words about grief, I want to think more about what we might plant in the ground for future selves, or future generations, and what understanding of time that requires. Maybe tomorrow my focus will be on planting seeds and gardens and gardening time?
addendum: found the whole poem about the monarchs’ missing mountain migration:
At forty most often neighbor even as / We walk together
Want everywhere we go to go home everywhere
but oh / Oh did you see the story
About 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 southlllllagain and now / Biologists believe they
turn to avoid a mountain
That disappeared millennia ago / And did you
know I didn’t no one butterfly
lives long enough to fly the whole
migration / From the beginning to the end they
Lay eggs along the way
just / As you and I most often neighbor / Migrate together in our daughter
over a dark lake
We make with joy the child we make
And mountains are reborn in her
I love this poem. I’ve done some research (google + google scholar) trying to find the scientific study that claims that monarch migrate around a missing mountain, but can’t find anything. Why does it matter? It doesn’t have to be scientifically true (as in, proven through a close study/set of experiments), to be a wonderful bit of information — whether there’s evidence or not, I like imagining that’s what they’re doing, but when scientists are invoked (in the popular headlines about this topic), I’d like to read more about what scientists actually said and how they came to this conclusion.
