Tag: poem

feb 12/RUN

5.5 miles
bottom of franklin hill
6 degrees
100% snow-covered

A fine mist of snow. A few patches of ice, some slight slips. Cold. Fresh air. Sun behind clouds. For the first mile I didn’t see anyone else on the trails. Then, a few runners and walkers. No bikers or skiers. Sometimes I felt strong, sometimes I felt sore, all the time I was happy to be out there by the gorge.

today’s small victories: wasn’t sure how far I’d run but made it to the bottom of the hill. Almost stopped to walk near the top for a minute, but didn’t, kept going until the bottom. Ran from the bottom to under franklin — 3/4 of the hill — instead of walking like I planned

10 Wintery Things

  1. patches of ice on sidewalk that wasn’t shoveled
  2. cold air on my face — not quite cold enough to give me a brain freeze or to freeze the snot in my nose
  3. small, soft flakes or freezing rain freezing on my eyelashes
  4. the sharp thrust, grinding noise combo of feet walking on snow
  5. the river: a mix of white ice and dark (purple?) open water
  6. white, heavy sky
  7. bird song: cheese burger cheese burger
  8. the bluff on the other side of the river: a mix of white with bare brown branches
  9. all of the walking trails were covered in a few inches of snow, some of it untouched, some marked by tracks — feet and skis
  10. leaned over the wall in the flats and listened — a soft, sharp tinkling of snow hitting the ice on the surface of the river

Discovered Lee Ann Roripaugh’s awesome collection #string of pearls yesterday through her poem, #meteorology on poems.com. I’m thinking of buying the collection. Here are a few bits of it — it’s all tankas — that I thought of during my winter run:

from #meteorology/ Lee Ann Roripaugh

yesterday’s snow sleeps :: late this morning in quiet :: white sheets / while rickety
trees comb out fog’s heavy shanks :: of tangled, unruly hair

*

as gusted leaves buzz :: and whorl over snow-sugared :: roofs / but oh! this blown
fluttering’s not a swirling :: of leaves, but winter sparrows

~

ugh! snotted hoody :: pinkened tinge faint litmus stain :: (yes or no / minus
or plus) watercoloring :: blown-through tissues / torn storm blooms

*

wet-dark tree beaded :: in pearled bits of wintry mix :: excited finch swoops
in manic parabolas :: to sip from the leaky eaves’

icicle /

the purple hour

2:40 am — dining room

too restless to notice or think about anything . . . purple mauve lavender orchid magenta is this restlessness a light or dark purple? whatever it is, it’s thick

3:15 am — bedroom floor

shadows slats moon carpet
the slats are soft, barely visible
the shadow of the lamp, its long neck, and something else. the cup? tin of nuts? nope the arm of the sofa
the moon — so bright! how many more days of this moon? this clear sky?

*

  • grape jelly
  • eggplant, japanese
  • eggplant, italian
  • plum
  • pansy
  • Daphne’s dress (Scooby Doo)
  • Violet’s turning violet!
  • purple banana
  • hubba bubba (grape)
  • grape juice
  • raisins
  • easter dress
  • FWA’s favorite color
  • purple toe
  • vikings
  • Barney
  • Dino (Flintstones)
  • Professor Plum

feb 7/RUN

5.3 miles
bottom franklin hill
16 degrees
10% snow and ice covered trail

Less wind today. Cold, but not as cold as yesterday and still. Ran north on the bike trail. My lower back was still a bit tight and sore, my neck too, at least for the first mile. Then things loosened up. Mostly I felt relaxed and strong and glad to be outside on a clear path. I tried running on the snow-covered walking trail for a minute, but it was too uneven. Greeted Dave the Daily Walker, although it took me a little too long to say Hi Dave because I didn’t quite recognize him. Has his arm swing become less pronounced, or has my vision become worse? Chanted triples, first berries, then the world around me: big old tree/big pine tree/red stop sign/motorbike/rumblin’ truck/passing car

10 Things

  1. a strong smell of weed when I stopped at a bench above franklin
  2. orange — or was it pink or red? — bubble lettered graffiti under the 1-94 bridge
  3. the river was mostly covered, but the surface ice was uneven — some thick, some thin, some white, some gray — I thought I saw a few footprints on it — is that what they were?
  4. chickadeedeedee
  5. empty benches
  6. the faint jangle of a dog collar somewhere below me
  7. for a few stretches, the trail had strips of snow or ice or both — none of it slick or wet or a problem
  8. thought about how long the hill was from the bottom of lake street to the top — is it as long as franklin? how much less steep is it?
  9. mostly solitary male runners, one trio of women
  10. the air was cold and crisp and felt clean as I inhaled it through my nose, exhaled it through my mouth

purple hour

Before writing about last night’s purple hour, a thought: At some point early in the run I realized I was wearing a purple jacket. Of course I know it’s purple and I’ve noted that on this log lots of times, but today it clicked that it was purple. I started imagining my time by the gorge in the winter as another purple hour. Then a George Sheehan passage echoed in my head:

I must listen and discover forgotten knowledge. Must respond to everything around me and inside me as well….The best most of us can do is to be a poet an hour a day. Take the hour when we run or tennis or golf or garden; take that hour away from being a serious adult and become serious beginners. 

Running / George Sheehan, 1978

There’s something cool about how I (unintentionally) wear purple during these purple hours — a purple jacket during winter running, a purple robe during winter nights. It’s also interesting to me that I didn’t choose this color, both of them were chosen by my mother-in-law. When she died, I inherited her purple jacket; the purple robe was a christmas present from her years ago.

I like this idea of multiple meanings of the purple hour and how I can call these purple hours just because they involve me wearing purple — my purple habit (get what I did there? habit = a regular practice and clothing worn, like a nun’s habit).

Later in my run, I thought about dark purple and how closely it resembles, at least to me, dark brown tree trunks or dark water. Purple as another name for dark.

And now onto last night’s purple hours: two of the times I woke up in the middle of the night (how many times did I wake up and get out of bed?), I wrote about purple. Once on the ball in my bedroom (1:49 am), one at the dining room table (3:06).

1:49 am

  • Dark purple door (open closet)
  • Rustling dog
  • Droning fan layers of noise

3:08 am

  • midnights (tswift) lavender haze
  • violet purple lilac lavender
  • tints/shades of purple = mauve, orchid, eggplant, heather, iris
  • purple noise inside my ear — when the heat turns off
  • the house settling, unsettling
  • the other room, not illuminated by the light of my computer screen: deep ,dark purple
  • rhw (note: what is rhw? what word was trying to write?) hum, buzz from inside me stirring up the air
  • purple robe/comfy

Reviewing this list this morning, a thought: does anything rhyme with purple? Looked it up: hirple, to walk with a limp. I can envision purple as the color of limping. Now I’m thinking of having a hitch in your step which reminds me of un-hitching and Mary Ruefle and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

unhitching: to crudely paraphrase Lévi-Strauss, unhitching happens in brief moments when we can step outside of or beside or just beyond — below the threshold of thought, over and above society — to contemplate/experience/behold the this, the what it is, the essence of everything, Mary Oliver’s eternity. In your run above the gorge, near the river, below the trees, can you unhitch? (from log entry on 31 may 2023)

unhitching

The possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists … in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society; in the contemplating of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.

Lévi-Strauss quoted MRH page 52

Purple/ Margaret Steele Anderson

A pigeon walking dainty in the street;
The morning mist where backyard fences meet;
An old Victoria—and in it, proud,
An old, old woman, ready for her shroud:
These are the purple sights for me,
Not palaces nor pageantry.

purple prose

I just learned about purple prose: excessive, overly verbose, wordy, too many metaphors, similes, adverbs, adjectives, language that calls attention to itself and lacks substance, a drama bomb. Just realized that Lumpy Space Princess, who coined “drama bomb” is lavender. Also, remembering Lumpy Space Princess inspired me to find and order a Drama Bomb t-shirt.

According to wikipedia, purple prose originates with the Roman poet Horace in his “Ars Poetica”:

Weighty openings and grand declarations often
Have one or two purple patches tacked on, that gleam
Far and wide, when Diana’s grove and her altar,
The winding stream hastening through lovely fields,
Or the river Rhine, or the rainbow’s being described.
There’s no place for them here. Perhaps you know how
To draw a cypress tree: so what, if you’ve been given
Money to paint a sailor plunging from a shipwreck
In despair?

jan 24/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls
20 degrees / feels like 8

Above 0, but still felt cold. It was the wind, swirling softly in all directions, that did it. Ran south to the falls. Wasn’t sure if I’d make it all the way there — it felt difficult — but I did! The creek and the falls were almost all frozen, only a small stream buried under the ice. Looking at the falls from my favorite spot, across the way, it looked like a giant column of ice, which it was.

10 Things

  1. a strong smell of cigarette smoke near the parking lot
  2. thin patches of ice on the cobblestone at the park
  3. kids’ laughter coming from across the road, at the school playground
  4. my favorite bench, above the edge of the world, was not empty today
  5. near the bench, the snow where someone had written “DAVIDSON” had melted
  6. the mottled walking trail at the park — mostly white snow, with grayish asphalt splotching through
  7. a lone black glove, dropped on the trail
  8. a dark gray chunk of snow, upright, looking like a squirrel waiting to cross the road
  9. a few runners, a few walkers, no bikers
  10. glanced down at the big sledding hill at the park — not much snow and no one sledding down it

I had wanted to thinking about stillness (inspired by an entry from 21 aug 2024) or to chant triple berries but mostly I forgot. I put in a mood playlist: energy at the halfway point and focused on the music, including Britney Spears’ “Work Bitch.” Wow.

before the run

This month, I’ve been reviewing all my entries from 2024 and giving attention to remembering and forgetting and then getting in too deep with thinking and theorizing and organizing ideas around themes. Past Sara — Dr. Sara who is too enamored with theories and ideas and being clever — wants to return. Present Sara needs to figure out some ways to prevent that from happening! Yesterday I decided to take out my scrabble tiles and make anagrams out “remember forget” and “I remember to forget.”

remember forget
bee or germ fret [m]
more bereft germ
beet form merger
forge meter [brm]
frog meter berm
beef rot merger [m]

I Remember to Forget
Got more meter fiber
Orbit form tree gem
bee form griot meter

What anti-theorizing thing can I do today?

A line remembered during my “on this day” practice:

Tell me, how do I steady my gaze
when everything I want is motion?
(Saccadic Masking/ Paige Lewis)

Everything I see is motion or in motion or never not in motion.

Last night we watched a Voyager’s episode in which the crew was experiencing strange symptoms — Captain Janeway had terrible headaches and couldn’t sleep; Chakotay was aging way too fast; Nelix was transforming into another species; and another red shirt went into shock then died. After 7 of 9 shifts into a different phase, she is able to witness what is happening: there are tons of people (human looking) on the ship hovering around the crew members and injecting them with needles. They are experimenting on them in the name of “medical research.” Yikes. Janeway’s headaches are not due to working too hard and not getting enough sleep or exercise, but because they are injecting her with dopamine. They keep increasing the dose to see how much she can take. I said to Scott, can you imagine if our headaches were caused by imaginary creatures messing with us? Then I started to imagine that this was the case. I also started to think about all the things we can’t see that live with us, like mites and bacteria and more. Surprisingly this didn’t freak me out.

Here is a poem I discovered yesterday. I love that first line and what it does as it follows from the title! I found it before I watched the Star Trek Voyager episode, but it is interesting to put them together to think about who/what we live with that we don’t see, or refuse to see:

The Houseguest / Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

Forgiveness was sitting in your kitchen when you got home, and now rests elbows on the table to watch you reach for a knife. You scrape the papery skin from a ginger root and slice it into thin coins. You think too hard about which mugs to pull from your cupboard: you might reveal too much; should you offer the one with the uncomfortable handle? Water boils. You divide the ginger evenly into both cups and pour. Spoonful of honey. You stir slowly, eyes down as though you might be able to forget. You stir too long. Forgiveness coughs politely, so you turn, place both mugs on the table, sit. Forgiveness leans forward. You lean back. You have forgotten what it is like to live with someone who eats all your cut watermelon, picks clean the skeletal vine of red grapes, shakes water spots onto your bathroom mirror without wiping them away. What thresholds of welcome have you crossed and recrossed? Most mornings, you listen for the body to move through your house and out the door before leaving your bedroom. Most nights, you ghost around each other without speaking. But now, as the rain drizzles into gloaming, you settle into your chairs, inevitable, a cupful of hesitation finally beginning to loosen your tongues.

And here’s part of a poem I encountered this morning that seems to fit or could be interesting to put beside “The Houseguest” and the Voyager episode:

If/ Imtiaz Dharker

If we could pray. If
we could say we have come here
together, to grow into a tree,
if we could see our blue hands
holding up the moon, and hear
how small the sound is
when it slips through
our fingers into water,
when the meaning of words melts
away and sugarcane speaks
in fields more clearly
than our tongues

That small sound, those blue hands, when words melt away! To give attention, to pray!

Continuing to review past august entries, past Sara wrote this for me, January 2025 Sara:

In January and February, I’ll remember the first orange buoy looking like the moon in an afternoon sky or the glow of orange when the light hits the buoy just right or the gentle rocking of the waves or that satisfied feeling after 90 minutes in the water.

log entry 22 aug 2024

I remember the faintness of that buoy, like the moon in the afternoon visible mostly by my belief that it was there. I also remember swimming that stretch, trying to avoid other swimmers and the ghost vines growing up from the bottom of the lake, seeming extra tall this summer. I’ll remember finally reaching that buoy and rounding it for the start of another loop, unable to see the far shore of a lifeguard or the other 2 orange buoys.

I remember the way the water glowed orange from the reflection of the buoy, or the quick flash of the smallest whisper of an orange dot, or the orange appearing only as a feeling of some disruption in the shoreline scenery — not really seen with my eyes, but registered by my brain — the idea that something was looming ahead.

I don’t remember gentle rocking, but I remember the wild ride of rounding the far green buoy and being pushed around by the water, or how the water seemed so hard to stroke in sometimes.

jan 18/RUN

2.6 miles
river road, south/north
8 degrees / feels like -1
25% snow-covered

I didn’t feel exceptionally cold, but it felt hard, my legs thick. I stopped at the bench above the “edge of the world” and looked out at the covered river. Someone wrote the name “Davidson” in the snow earlier this week and it’s still there. As I ran, I started chanting in triples:

strawberry/raspberry/blueberry
winter cold/winter snow/winter ice
arctic air/sizzling leaves/crusty snow

10 Things

  1. BLUE! sky
  2. crunch crunch crunch
  3. the river was white and closed except for a few spots that were dark and open
  4. a (non-fat tire) bike
  5. a runner’s raspy, hello
  6. running into the wind, being exhausted by it, wondering how the runners at Boston 2017, when it was cold and windy and raining, managed to run the whole marathon
  7. bright, blinding sun heading south
  8. some of the ice on the path was smooth, more of it was jagged and rough
  9. empty benches
  10. a truck driving by, then the strong smell of weed

My Heart Has Known Its Winter/ Arna Bontemps

A little while spring will claim its own, 
In all the land around for mile on mile 
Tender grass will hide the rugged stone. 
My still heart will sing a little while. 

And men will never think this wilderness 
Was barren once when grass is over all, 
Hearing laughter they may never guess 
My heart has known its winter and carried gall.

gall? I looked this word up and dismissed the definition I knew — gall as bold, impudent, he had the gall (read: nerve) to — because it didn’t make sense to me. Instead, I decided the poet meant

abnormal growths that occur on leaves, twigs, roots, or flowers of many plants. Most galls are caused by irritation and/or stimulation of plant cells due to feeding or egg-laying by insects such as aphids, midges, wasps, or mites. Some galls are the result of infections by bacteria, fungi, or nematodes and are difficult to tell apart from insect-caused gall

Plant Galls

I wasn’t satisfied with Merriam-Webster’s online definitions, so I logged into my library and accessed the OED (very cool that I can do this!) for more definitions. This one sort of works:

Something galling or exasperating; a state of mental soreness or irritation.

this one, too:

A place rubbed bare; an unsound spot, fault or flaw; in early use also a breach. Now only technical.

and this:

A bare spot in a field or coppice (see gall v.1 3). In the southern U.S. a spot where the soil has been washed away or exhausted.

Erosion, exhaustion.

I love the way the word gall with its plant/ field meanings and its human meanings reinforces the association being made between human’s exposed than covered grief and the ground’s exposed winter stone covered in spring’s grass.

I wanted to remember this poem because of the grass and the stone and the forgetting of winter when spring arrives. I don’t totally agree with its use of winter as metaphor for misery.

I like winter. I like breathing in the cold, the sound of snow falling, smelling the air. The silence and the sharp sounds. The view of the river — vast and bare. The subdued colors — pale blues and grays and dark browns. The less crowded trails. The bare-branched silhouettes. Movement slowed, stilled, suspended. Layers. The bright, cold sun.

jan 10/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
21 degrees
100% snow-covered

Today the winter I want: big flurries, everything covered in a thin layer of snow, not too much wind, warmer, not slick — especially with my with Yaktrax on. Nothing was quite easy, but everything wasn’t as hard as my last run on Wednesday.

10 Things

  1. a white sky
  2. the contrast between shoveled and un-shoveled sidewalks — both still white, but the shovelled ones had a tint of gray or brown peeking through
  3. the clacking jawbone of a bird’s beak — a blue jay?
  4. the river was all white — if you didn’t know better, you could believe it was a field or a meadow
  5. approaching from above, hearing the falls rushing over the limestone
  6. kids yelling and laughing at the playground, one loud, high-pitched sound — was it a kid screaming or a whistle?
  7. amongst the kid voices, a deeper, more knowing laugh — was that from a teacher?
  8. the contrast on the creek surface: white snow with blackish-gray water
  9. every so often, a flash of orange — not always sure what it was, just a voice whispering, orange — a snow fence? a construction cone? a sign?
  10. bright headlights cutting through the sky, which was both bright — everything white! — and heavy

Listened to my “Remember to Forget” playlist on the way back. The first song up, Do You Remember Walter? by The Kinks. Two different bits stuck with me:

one: Walter, you are just an echo of a world I knew so long ago.
two: Yes, people often change./ But memories of people can remain.

This second bit got me thinking about how I can’t always (can I ever?) see faces clearly. When the face is too dark and shadowed, I just ignore it altogether. But when there’s some light and I can sort of see them, I often re-construct the features I can’t see with memories of their face from before I lost most of my cone cells. I’m not remembering their face, but creating it. After thinking that the idea of remembering as re-memembering — putting a body back together — popped into my head. Yes! I take my image of face, only as fragments — the curve of a nose or a chin, a bit of eye — and turn it into something whole.

As I kept running, I thought more about remembering and memories and my vision and how I rely on past experience and habits to navigate. And now as I write this, I’m thinking about how everyone’s vision — not just mine — relies on a building up of past experiences (memories?) with things to be able to see them. Here I’m remembering something that I read in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss:

the sensation of sudden visual awareness is produced in part by the formation of a “search image” in the brain. In a complex visual landscape, the brain initially registers all the incoming data, without critical evaluation. Five orange arms in a starlike pattern, smooth black rock, light and shadow. All this is input, but the brain does not immediately interpret the data and convey their meaning to the conscious mind. Not until the pattern is repeated, with feedback from the conscious mind, do we know what we are seeing.

Learning to See in Gathering Moss/ Robin Wall Kimmerer

I’m continuing to read JJJJJerome Ellis’ Aster of Ceremonies. Wow!

Prayer to My Stutter #2/ JJJJJerome Ellis

You restore
a living
shoreline
between word
and silence

This beautiful prayer moves right into the next offering, Octagon of Water, Movement 3, which was titled by its first line when it was published in Poetry:

excerpts from The name of that Silence is These Grasses in the Wind/ JJJJJerome Ellis

1

The name of that silence is these grasses in this wind, and the name of these grasses in this wind is that other place on the other side of this instant. This instant is divided by curtains of water and the sound of shuddering time. A sunflower reeling with sun, six hands stretched in offering. This unsearchable, uncancellable instant wraps the shoulders of the grasses like a shawl stilled by the stoppage. 

How is/isn’t the instant similar to Marie Howe’s moment? If you listen to the recording on Poetry, you can hear the stretched silence as Ellis’ voice stops before pronouncing certain words.

2

This morning come shyly or boldly into the fertile field, however you are, come, come and stay in the rearrangement, the pressure of thumb on fescue blade, a year wheeling within a day, two round moments of warm mouth, finally at peace. The psalm is a key if only we can find the door. Do not swallow your dysfluent voice. Let it erupt in its volcanic flowering. Stoppage thence passage, aporia, poppy bursting with fragrant seed. 

What a beautiful description and reclaiming of a stuttering voice on the other side of the stoppage! The erupting bursting flowering dysfluent voice.

I’m inspired by how Ellis takes his stutter and turns it into this beautiful instant between silence and word. For them, the stoppage is a/the key aspect of the stuttering. What are the most important elements of my strange vision?

jan 6/RUN

5.5 miles
bottom of franklin hill
11 degrees / feels like 5

Another sunny, snowless day. A little wind, some cold air. Wasn’t planning to run 5 miles, but I wanted to get to the bottom of the hill so I could see the surface up close. Iced over — not smooth, but with seams and cracks.

The Mississippi river at the bottom of the franklin hill. White ice, cracks, and shadows on its surface. Beyond it, the east bank with barre branches and blue sky.
ice on mississippi river / 6 jan 2025

I’m glad I took a picture because I did not remember it looking like this! I was visually a surface that was more gray and uniform with cracks creating big and flat sheets of ice. I didn’t remember the shadows or the blue or how uneven it all looked.

As I ran, I listened to my “Remember to Forget” playlist. It started with “I Remember it Well,” from Gigi. I heard the opening lines:

We met at 9
We met at 8
I was on time
No, you were late
Ah yes
I remember it well

I thought — wait, if he thought they were meeting at 9, he wouldn’t have thought he was late if he got there after 8 — yes, these are they thoughts I have as I run. I thought about how subjective memory can be and wondered how certain we could be that she remembered correctly. Then I heard these lyrics:

Ah yes
I remember it well
You wore a gown of gold
I was all in blue

I remembered that meme 4 or 5 years ago with the dress — is it gold or blue? — and thought again about how we can remember things differently. When is it lack of memory, and when did we always just remember it wrong, or unusually, or with a focus on different details, or in a different light?

10 Things

  1. the hollow knocking of a woodpecker
  2. the thumping of wheels over something on the road on the bridge above
  3. 4 stones tightly stacked on the ancient boulder
  4. a section of the fence above a steep part of the bluff, missing, marked off with an orange barricade
  5. the icy river through the trees — blue and white and lonely
  6. daddy long legs at his favorite bench
  7. shadows, 1: mine, off to the side, in the brush next to the trail
  8. shadows, 2: a tree trunk, tall, stretched, looking like a dinosaur
  9. stopping at the edge to put in my headphones, seeing a flare of movement below: someone walking on the winchell trail
  10. the limestones still stacked under the bridge, still looking like a person sitting up and leaning against the bridge

A poem about forgetting:

Said a Blade of Grass/ Kahlil Gibran

Said a blade of grass to an autumn leaf, “You make such a noise falling!  You scatter all my winter dreams.”
 
Said the leaf indignant, “Low-born and low-dwelling!  Songless, peevish thing!  You live not in the upper air and you cannot tell the sound of singing.”
 
Then the autumn leaf lay down upon the earth and slept.  And when spring came she waked again—and she was a blade of grass.
 
And when it was autumn and her winter sleep was upon her, and above her through all the air the leaves were falling, she muttered to herself, “O these autumn leaves!  They make such noise!  They scatter all my winter dreams.”

more forget lines

1

like the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say, it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only all the time.
(Part of Eve’s Discussion/Marie Howe)

2

It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.

And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too
(Dead Stars/Ada Limón)

3

See whatever you want
to see. Even
at the moment of death
forget the door

opening on darkness.
See instead the familiar faces
you thought were lost.
(Squint/Linda Pastan)

4

According to Howe, most (all?) of the critical studies of ED as a poet (up to 1985, when this book was written), read ED’s decision to stay isolated in her bedroom for the rest of her life as tragedy and a failure to celebrate herself as a poet (Whitman) or declare herself confidently as the Poet, the Sayer, the Namer (Emerson). Howe argues that she made another choice and writes the following:

She said something subtler. ‘Nature is a Haunted House–but Art–a House that tries to be haunted.’ (L459a)

Yes, gender difference does affect our use of language, and we constantly confront issues of difference, distance, and absence when we write. That doesn’t mean I can relegate women to what we ‘should’ or ‘must’ be doing. Orders suggest hierarchy and category. Categories and hierarchies suggest property. My voice formed from my life belongs to no one else. What I put into words is no longer my possession. Possibility has opened. The future will forget, erase, or recollect and deconstruct every poem. There is a mystic separation between poetic vision and ordinary living. The conditions for poetry rest outside each life at a miraculous reach indifferent to worldly chronology.

My Emily Dickinson/ Susan Howe

jan 5/RUN

5.3 miles
va bridge and back
9 degrees / feels like -3

A little colder today, so more layers: 2 pairs of running tights; one long-sleeved shirt, two sweatshirts, one with a hood; a jacket; gloves; mittens; buff; 2 pairs of socks; sunglasses; cap.

My IT band was sore again. Time to play around with i and t! — in too deep; into gorge; intonation; in today’s economy?; intoxicating; intolerable; in top form; into the woods

10 Things

  1. bright blue sky
  2. sharp, solid shadows, 1: mine, running right in front of me
  3. shadows, 2: slender, twisted branches on the asphalt
  4. birds!, 1: rooting around in the dry brush, making a loud noise
  5. birds!, 2: fluttering, flickering, flashing in and out of the bare branches on the edge of the trail
  6. the falls!, 1: nearing them from above I could hear that they were more frozen as water fell over ice columns and made a sharp, tinkling sound
  7. the falls!, 2: from my favorite spot, thick ice columns with water gushing through
  8. the river! — everywhere I looked, swaths of white placed over the surface — not everything was white, but what was looked extra white, almost like frosting
  9. the faint and fleeting scent of smoke
  10. the view from the bench above the edge of the world was enormous and open and bright desolation

After turning around at the entrance of the VA bridge, I thought about the veterans across the bridge and I wondered who lived there and for long and whether or not they get the resources they needed. With all of the other layers of life — past and present — here, I don’t often think of them, and I don’t know much about the history of this place. Not too far down the river is Fort Snelling and the big cemetery. My Uncle Tim who died in Vietnam before I was born is buried there, and my grandfather’s ashes, too. My mother was devastated by her brother’s death, and she rarely ever talked about him to me. Too painful for her to remember? Strange to think about how close I am in proximity to my family on my mom’s side and how little I know about them.

1

As I continue to tag past entries with “remember/forget,” I came across these lovely lines from Carl Phillips:

just the rings that form then disappear
around where some latest desire — lost, or abandoned —
dropped once, and disturbed the water. To forget —
then remember . . . What if, between this one and the one
we hoped for, there’s a third life, taking its own
slow, dreamlike hold, even now — blooming in spite of us?
(Sky Coming Forward/Carl Phillips)

2

And if my father says haunt

he doesn’t mean the way rooms forget him
once he’s gone; he’s saying his leather chair
now in his coworker’s office, his locker
in the back room newly purged
of its clutter, or his usual table
in the break room where he sits
at 10:30 each night eating
the same steak club and chips
(Haunt/Maya Phillips)

3

Crossing between gain and loss:
learning new words for the world and the things in it.
Forgetting old words for the heart and the things in it.
And collecting words in a different language
for those three primary colors:
staying, leaving, and returning.
(Big Clock/Li-Young Lee)

4

And here’s a quotation from Alice Oswald in an interview for Falling Awake:

It’s good to remember how to forget. I’m interested in the oral tradition: what keeps the poems alive is a little forgetting. In Homer you get the sense that anything could happen because the poet might not remember.

Re-reading this idea, I’m reminded of AO’s discussion of her method for her book-length poem, Dart:

I decided to take along a tape-recorder. At the moment, my method is to tape a conversation with someone who works on the Dart, then go home and write it down from memory. I then work with these two kinds of record – one precise, one distorted by the mind – to generate the poem’s language. It’s experimental and very against my grain, this mixture of journalism and imagination, but the results are exciting. Above all, it preserves the idea of the poem’s voice being everyone’s, not just the poet’s.source

I’d like to try doing this with the documenting of my runs: experimenting with combining recordings with my memory/imagination of what happened (from log entry 14 march 2022).

I’m not interested, at least at this point, in interviewing people by the river, but I wonder if I could play around with recordings and memory — how what I remember strays from what actually happened? Maybe not with words but images? Or, I could play around with recordings of sounds, using this Steve Healey poem which I reread this morning during my “on this day” practice:

2 Mississippi/ Steve Healey

a map?

The other day, as I mentioned the “edge of the world” in a post, I thought about how I’d like to add a map to this log. This map would include all of my landmarks, with the names I use for them in my entries: the old stone steps, the double bridge, the edge of the world, the tunnel of trees, the ancient boulder with the stacked stones, the sliding bench. Ideally, this map would be hand-drawn, but I don’t think that’s possible with my bad vision. Maybe Scott could help me and we could get it printed and framed for the wall?

dec 21/RUN

3.3 miles
trestle turn around
11 degrees
75% snow-covered

Okay winter! Enough layers to keep me warm, a path that wasn’t crowded or icy, Yak trax to help me stay upright. The run wasn’t the easiest, but it might be the slowest. I’m stopped to walk more than I used to. Partly to admire the view, but also because I’m tired after a 1000+ miles of running this year. Time for a break, I think.

10 Things

  1. fee bee fee bee — a black-capped chickadee!
  2. the tight crunch of my feet striking and lifting off of the ground
  3. in several places, big mounds of snow off to the side, pushed their by a parks’ plow
  4. open water
  5. where the path is plowed, only on the bike trail, the snow is packed down or gone. Narrow strips of almost bare pavement have appeared on the edges
  6. where the path is not plowed, on the walking trail. the snow is loose and high enough to be difficult to run through
  7. 2 city plows on the street, rumbling down edmund
  8. I stopped slightly short of the trestle because someone was there fiddling with a bike, standing just where I wanted to stop to admire the view
  9. the sky was a bright white, not from sun, but from snow
  10. stopped at my new favorite bench — the view below was all white with thin brown lines and looked cold and alone

I made some progress on my latest section of Haunts this morning! Slowly, it’s turning into something. As I ran, I wanted to think about feral forms and forms that resist complete domestication and nets as forms. Did I? I’m not sure. Now that I’m back home, I plan to read a chapter in Lydia Davis’ collection, Essays One, about the unusual forms she uses in her writing. I happened upon this chapter by accident. Taking a brief break to think through what I was writing, I looked over at my bookshelf and noticed its awesomely green cover. So I picked it up and found “Forms and Influences.” Nice!

The poem of the day at Poetry Foundation was from Jenny Xie’s Eye Level. I’m pretty sure I checked this collection out several years ago, but I don’t remember this poem. One short section from it helped open a door for me into my poem:

If there is a partition between
the outer and inner worlds,
how is it that some water in me churns
between the mountain ranges?

How is it we are absorbed so easily
by the ground—
(from Long Nights/Jenny Xie)

dec 18/RUN

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
26 degrees

Ran in the afternoon. Sometimes sunny, sometimes cloudy, streaks of a brilliant blue mixed with fluffy clouds. The river was mostly open with a few stretches of ice. The shore glowed white. The gorge slopes were different versions of brown. The creek was flowing fast and the falls were rushing over the edge. When I looked at them from my favorite spot all I could see was movement — the fast falling water looked like wavy vertical lines on an old tv. For the first mile, I was the only one out on the trail, then I passed a walker. Far ahead I could see lights flickering — headlights passing by trees on the other side of the ravine. Just past the double bridge, I heard a hammer hitting some wood then some other construction noises — men talking, some song coming out of the radio, a saw buzzing.

Yesterday, one version of my Girl Ghost Gorge poem was published in Last Syllable Literary Journal!

Ah, this poem, featuring windows and shadows and birds!

Some Things Last/ Ahmad Almallah

These windows, these panes, at the beginning of light
looking where they look, eyeing the east and the rust
and here they are, protected by shade and shadows:
branches and birds strike them, fly into them and out.
You can see nothing through them, you can only see what
bounces off: back at the world and then you return,
to the lemon, that is the self, squeezing drop after drop—
there’s nothing left of you now, no juice! Can you go on
lubricating the mind, musing on you as disaster,
and the rest of you as the elements?
Here, they go one by one
into a flame set down, beneath all the steps, at the very
bottom of it all … and God! The eyes wish you didn’t!
They look away from the blank space remaining—oh these
birds in the mornings are funny and the little tricks they
repeat and repeat, like these sounds they make, in order:
they fly off together or one by one, puffing up their small
bodies, extending a peak that opens up a view, that finds
space in whatever looks shut and closed—a wall has
some hole, a tree trunk can manage a crack, and under
the ledge, a window knows something
of the hidden world.

dec 16/RUN

6 miles
bohemian flats and back
37 degrees

Warmer today! And clear, ice-free paths! Not looking like December at all. I decided to run to the flats so I could see if the water seeping out of the rock wall was still frozen now that it had warmed up. It looked like it was, at least to me, but I could hear some trickling water too. What will it look like this afternoon? I heard a few geese, admired the form of a few other runners after they passed me, noticed my shadow and a few streaks of blue sky when the sun came out from behind the clouds briefly. It wasn’t the easiest run, but it wasn’t the hardest either.

Heading north, I listened to a train — or was it a light rail? — horn honking repeatedly. Not sure what was happening; too many honks, and too insistent, for business as usual. Was there an accident? Returning south, I put in my “It’s Windy” playlist, but then switched to “Slappin’ Shadows.”

Here’s a wonderful poem I discovered this morning. That last line!

Sign/ Sahar Romani

After Rumi, After Terrance Hayes

What aren’t you willing to believe. A heart  
graffitied fuchsia on the street, a missive from another life.  
Remember the stem of lavender you found 
in a used copy of Bishop’s poems, a verse underlined:  
The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. Suddenly, across the aisle  
a woman with your mother’s bracelets, her left wrist  
all shimmer and gold, you almost winced.  
Coincidence is the great mystery of the human mind 
but so is the trans-oceanic reach of Shah Rukh Khan’s  
slow blink. Each of us wants a hint, a song 
that dares us to look inside. True, it takes whimsy  
and ego to believe the universe will tap your shoulder  
in the middle of a random afternoon. That t-shirt  
on a stranger’s chest, a bumper sticker on the highway upstate.  
Truth isn’t going anywhere. It’s your eyes passing by.

Today I’m working on a section of Haunts about forms and shadows and seeing things slant, off to the side, in order to grasp (some of) their truth. I’m thinking I will mention how the mississippi is one of the more trained/shaped/managed rivers — with locks, dams, dredging.

a lone black glove

Almost always, when I see a discarded glove on the ground on my run it is black. Okay, today, I saw a gray one draped on a branch. As I walked home after my run, I encountered a lone black glove on the ground and decided to take a picture of it.

a black glove in the center of dirt and brown grass
a lone black glove

added, 17 dec 2024: As I was working on a section of Haunts about form, I remembered something else I witnessed yesterday during my run. Somewhere between the trestle and lake street bridge, I noticed a form on the ground, just through the trees. I think it was a sleeping bag with someone (possibly) in it. I’ve seen it here before, but only as a quick flash while I run by. Am I seeing it correctly, or is it like the stacked limestone under the franklin bridge that I always think is a person sitting up against one of the pilings?