Tag: remember/forget - Page 2

march 1/WALKSWIM

walk: 35 minutes
neighborhood with Delia
36 degrees / wintry mix

Took Delia on a walk on a gray, wet day. Puddles everywhere. No ice, just water. Dripping, pooling, seeping. With my boots on, I didn’t mind it, but Delia did. I could tell by the end of the walk, she was over it. Instead of wagging vigorously when I called her name, her tail was stiff and bent at the end.

I’m working on a series of cento poems using Linda Pastan’s poetry. Before I went out, I was playing with a line from “The Ordinary:” “it is the ordinary that comes to save you.” I was thinking about the ordinary as I walked — the sharp, staccato drips of the water through one gutter, the gurgling of some other drops as they missed a different gutter. Someone’s shuffling footsteps. The feel of the cold, but not too cold, air in my nose. The reflection of trees, then the flutter of wings, in a puddle on the sidewalk. The singing birds.

Inspired by the beauty of the ordinary all around me, I stopped to record some sound and a thought:

ordinary birdsong / 1 march

it is the ordinary things that save us
the reprieve of birdsong
the flip side of sadness

A little later in the walk, I encountered yet another lone black glove. I walked by, then double-checked to make sure it was, in fact, black. Yes. It’s always black. This made me wonder which is more ~~satisfying~~ ~~exciting~~ desired:

seeing a lone black glove and having my view of the world — that it will always be a black glove — affirmed/confirmed, or

seeing a glove of another color and having my view of the world ~~interrupted~~ ~~disrupted~~ changed?

I want to say, a glove of another color, and I think it is, but not every time. Sometimes I want it to always be black.

swim: 1.8 miles
ywca pool

Finally, another swim! My last swim was on February 19th. It felt good to be back in the water, and a little strange. After watching a video last week on flip turns, I tried to focus on them more. Maybe it was a bad idea, or maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, but my knees started to feel sore about a mile into the swim.

The coolest thing about the swim was watching the shadows from the trees outside the window shift and shimmer on the pool floor. I was in the lane closest to the windows, which made the shadows more vivid. Swimming in the shallow end, I wondered if I’d still see them as vividly when I reached the deep end. I did! Very cool.

Not so cool: I noticed a little brown speck (very small) of something floating in the water near my face. What was it? No idea, and I didn’t see it again. I hope I didn’t accidentally swallow it. Gross.

I know February is over which means my month with Linda Pastan is over, but last night I read more of her poems while I listened the South High Community Jazz band rehearse, and I feel compelled to post this delightful one. Besides, it mentions Emily Dickinson who is my topic for March.

Q and A/Linda Pastan

I thought I couldn’t be surprised:
“Do you write on a computer?” someone
asks, and “Who are your favorite poets?”
and “How much do you revise?”

But when the very young woman
in the fourth row lifted her hand
and without irony inquired:
“Did you write

your Emily Dickinson poem
because you like her work,
or did you know her personally?”
I entered another territory.

“Do I really look that old?”
I wanted to reply, or “Don’t
they teach you anything?”
or “What did you just say?

The laughter that engulfed
the room was partly nervous,
partly simple hilarity.
I won’t forget

that little school, tucked
in a lovely pocket of the South,
or that girl whose face
was slowly reddening.

Surprise, like love, can catch
our better selves unawares.
“I’ve visited her house,” I said.
“I may have met her in my dreams.”

feb 24/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
5 degrees
95% snow-covered

First run after the big snowstorm. 16 or 17 inches total. All plowed then pressed down to about an inch of solid, crunchy, fun-to-run-on snow. Cold. No wind. Blue sky. Blue snow. Frozen river. Heard at least one or two birds. Quiet at the falls. Encountered a few runners, a few walkers, no cross-country skiers or dogs or shadows. About a mile and a half in, there was a flash of sharp pain in my left knee.

I wasn’t trying to notice anything. Just swinging my arms, striking my feet, and thinking about this blog and how I use it. Did I notice at least 10 things without noticing?

10 Things I Noticed

the single chirp of a bird near the ford bridge. Not sure what kind of bird, but it was very “bird” (as in, what you might imagine when you think about hearing a bird call)
the path was almost completely covered. Only at Minnehaha Regional Park near the falls on the path closest to the parkway were there a few strips of bare pavement
I think I remember hearing some people talking as I neared the falls, or did I imagine that?
a person in the park with a dog appearing from a path that I thought wasn’t plowed. Were they trudging through the snow on an unplowed path, or was I wrong about it not being plowed?
kids yelling and laughing on the playground at minnehaha academy
2 people dressed in dark clothing, walking fast through the park parking lot — in this sort of light my color sense with my lack of cone cells is reduced to 2 colors: light and dark
sharp, quick crunches on the snow as my feet struck the ground
a car pulling over on the river road to let a faster car go by
the pedestrian side of the double-bridge was almost a perfect sheet of white — just a few footsteps on the edge
the big sledding hill on the edge of the falls was white and empty

unlayering

Felt very cold at the beginning. Started with a buff covering my mouth and over my ears, top of my head, a hood, and a cap, a pair of gloves and a pair of mittens, my jacket zipped up all the way. Pulled the hood down 3/4 of a mile in. Then unzipped the jacket slightly near the double bridge. Pulled my buff down next. At the falls, removed the mittens and stuffed them in my pockets. Near the end, flipped up the ear flaps on my cap.

Before I went out for my run, I was thinking about the final week of my class and possibly applying to teach something in the summer about how I use this blog. Often, one of the primary ways people use a blog is for sharing their work with others and for developing an audience. As I was running, I remembered how my blog is about practicing care — care of the self (a little Foucault), care as curiosity, attention, beholding. On the run, the word “care” popped into my head and it all made sense. Now, sitting at my desk and typing it here, it makes less sense. O, to live forever in that magical moment of clarity before you have to force an idea into meaning and words!

My Emily Dickinson, day one

In the spring of 2019, I discovered that Susan Howe had written a book about Emily Dickinson called, My Emily Dickinson. My first encounter with Howe had been when she wrote about Jonathan Edwards and how he would remember ideas while horseback riding by pinning notes to his clothes in Souls of the Labadie Tract. When I discovered My Emily Dickinson, I talked about buying it, which I did 2 years later. Now finally, 2 years after that, I am reading it. I decided that I better do it before I can’t — I’m not sure when my final cone cells will die, but it could be any day now. When that happens, I won’t be able to read, or I might be able to read a little, but it will be even harder than it is now. And it will take so much time — only a page (or less) a day?

I’m taking notes in a pages document titled “My Emily Dickinson,” so I won’t post it all here. I’m contemplating creating a page on my UN DISCIPLINED site for all my ED stuff. A few things to note:

Lorine Niedecker (another of my favorites — she loved condensing, wrote beautifully about water and place and Lake Superior, and she had serious vision problems that she incorporated into her writing) considered ED one of ten writers in her “immortal cupboard.”

William Carlos Williams, who thought ED wasn’t a poet but got closer than any other woman had, had a maternal grandmother named Emily Dickenson.

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

I feel like I’m just on the edge of understanding what Howe says here. I need some more time, and I’ll take it because I like this idea of haunting a house. One thing I can tell already from Howe’s first 10 or so pages, is that her Emily Dickinson is not exactly my Emily Dickinson. Howe seems to be arguing strongly that ED should be taken seriously as a real poet who was smart and learned but had different aims (that most critics have ignored or not “got”). And, to take her seriously is to acknowledge that she should be included in the canon — and that, contrary to what all the other critics think, women can be poets, have been poets. I’m all for taking ED seriously and recognizing that she did some amazing things with her dashes, but I don’t care about the canon. In fact, I’m trying to stay away from those sorts of academic discussions. Of course, part of the reason I/we already take ED seriously in 2023 is Howe’s 1985 book. Am I making sense? I’m not sure.

I was just about to write another paragraph, citing a few passages from Howe to clarify what I mean, but I won’t. I could spend the rest of the afternoon doing that, but why, and for what aim? I used to spend all of my time summarizing and offering a critical analysis as an academic, never reaching the point where I got to do what I wanted with the ideas, constructing something new out of them. Most of my papers or presentations would conclude: “Having almost run out of time, I’ll offer some brief suggestions…”

The challenge: to read and enjoy Howe’s book without getting sucked into engaging with it as an academic. I find this to be the challenge with poetry too as I continue to study it more. Referencing Wallace Stevens and his idea that poetry is “the scholar’s art,” Howe is arguing that (maybe?) above all else, ED is a scholar and that’s why you should respect her and take her seriously. I’m not interested in that, and don’t believe that being a scholar makes you more serious. As I write these lines, I’m realizing that I should call this My Susan Howe. I’m reading her arguments from my particular perspective, and I’m bringing lots of baggage!

Does it sound like I dislike Howe’s book? I hope not.

feb 11/RUN

5 miles
bottom of franklin hill turn around
35 degrees
5% snow-covered / 40% puddles

Above freezing with a mostly clear path. Lots of puddles. Lots of sun. Several shadows. Right before I started my run the shadow of a big bird passed over me. Later, running on the trail, I saw my shadow running in front of me. The view of the river and the gorge was bright and open and brown. Smelled breakfast at the Longfellow Grill, some pot from one passing car, cigar smoke from another. Felt the grit under my feet. Noticed the curve of a pine tree, with branches only on one side. I thought: a curved spine, the branches vertebrae.

Here’s my Pastan poem for today:

Squint/ Linda Pastan

and that low line
of blue cloud
hovering
over the treetops

could be an ocean–the roar
of the highway
the clamorous waves
breaking.

And that dark shape menacing
your every footstep
could be no more
than your own obedient shadow.

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.

See whatever you want/to see. This makes me think of the video interview I watched with Kelli Russell Agodon yesterday, when she discusses being oriented towards beauty, only seeing the beauty, ignoring the ugliness. The title Squint makes me think of a lecture I saw online about how painters often squint to see how to paint the depth and texture of objects.

It’s interesting to juxtapose this poem and its turn away from the darkness of death with some of the passages below from Pastan’s interviews in which she talks about how she’s always looking for the danger beneath the surface.

some words from Linda Pastan

You open “The Poets” with the line “They are farmers, really.”

That was partly tongue in cheek, partly serious. For me, there are two distinct phases in the writing of a poem—first the inspiration phase, when language and metaphor come mysteriously into my head, then the planting, sowing, farming phase, otherwise known as revision. The first is a kind of gift, as in “gifted”—it can’t be taught. The second is a matter of learning and practicing one’s craft. But it’s also true that I couldn’t resist having poems planted in manure-filled rows and having poets eyeing each other over bushel baskets in the marketplace.

The last two lines of my poem “Vermilion” are “As if revision were / the purest form of love.” And I believe that for a poet it is. Many of my poems go through at least a hundred revisions—I can spend a whole morning putting in a comma and then taking it out and putting it back in. And I think that perhaps I am at my happiest sitting at my desk polishing a poem, trying to make every word the perfect word.

—

I am indeed interested, you might say obsessed, not with ordinary life per se but with the dangers lurking just beneath its seemingly placid surface, one of those dangers being loss itself. Death, of course, is the ultimate danger, the ultimate loss, and as I move closer to it, I write about it more frequently and perhaps more feelingly. Though I recently came upon some poems I wrote when I was twelve, and they, too, are about death.
The Looming Dark: An Interview with Linda Pastan

a popular story about her:

There’s a popular story about Linda Pastan: she won her first poetry prize as a senior at Radcliffe in the fifties, and the runner-up was one Sylvia Plath. It was an auspicious start for Pastan, even if she had never heard of Plath at the time.

a blogger’s explanation of why she likes Pastan:

What do I like about Pastan’s work? Her clarity in brevity, the conciseness of her description that makes each word she uses necessary, her way of writing about what surrounds her with the understanding that surfaces mask tensions and the darker things below; her down-to-earth voice that makes her writing so accessible; the images that stick with you; the intimacy she has with her subjects: relationships, domestic tableau, aging, dying—the things we all struggle with, for, and against.
Poet: Linda Pastan

and Pastan’s description of the dangers always lurking below the surface:

JEFFREY BROWN:We’re sitting here on a beautiful day in a beautiful place, but you feel dangers lurking?

LINDA PASTAN:Always, yes, yes. I feel the cells starting to multiply someplace inside me. I feel when the phone rings, is somebody calling to say something terrible has happened. I’ve just always been very conscious of the fragility of life and relationships.
Linda Pastan: PBS Newshour

feb 10/WALKBIKERUN

walk: 30 minutes with Delia
neighborhood
26 degrees

Sun! A bright blue sky! Birds! Fresh, cold air! Clearer sidewalks! Wind chimes! What a wonderful walk. I moved slowly, stopping every few steps for Delia to get another sniff. I inhaled deeply, feeling the cold air open up my sinuses. I mostly listened to the birds, but a few times I saw the blur of a tiny body traveling from one branch to another. I noticed the sprawling oaks, their gnarled limbs towering over the sidewalk. I stepped on the thin sheets of ice covering puddles and heard them crack and crunch and then the water squish. I remember thinking that I wasn’t interested in naming what I was noticing, just experiencing it. I felt relaxed and open to the world and happy for these moments.

Most of the sidewalks were clear. On a few corners it was still solid ice. The corner with the mailbox was especially bad. Yikes!

I almost forgot — how could I forget? A birch tree in the middle of the block, its branches blindingly white, illuminated by the sun. Sparkling. I could almost hear a chorus singing its alleluias!

bike: 22 minutes
run: 2.35 miles
basement
outside: an ice rink

After yesterday’s slippery run, I decided I should stay inside today. Biked in the basement with some Dickinson, ran with a running podcast. As I often mention with my basement workouts, it’s difficult to find much to wonder about in such a dark, cold, unfinished space.

Before I worked out downstairs, I started planning the fifth lecture for the class I’m teaching. It’s going to be about the connections between wonder and play. I was reminded of it as I ran and listened to a professional runner turned triathlete talk about how being a beginner and having no expectations or pressure can help you to have fun in your training and in life. I started thinking about having fun and being a kid and the idea that fun and play are usually dismissed as not taking something seriously. It’s all fun and games to you. Or it’s too easy — that’s child’s play. But trying to remember your kid-self, being a beginner, opening up to fun, is something many of us have to work at — to practice — as adults. (Also, being a kid isn’t always easy.) Kelli Russell Agodon has some great things to say about play and wonder in this interview, which I plan to use in my class: Beauty and Play with Kelli Russell Agodon.

In the video interview, Agodon reads her poem, “Grace”:

Grace/ Kelli Russell Agodon

Even those who are living well
are tired, even the rockstar
who swallowed the spotlight,
even the caterpillar asleep
in a unbalanced cocoon.
Who knows how
to be happy when a lamb
is birthed just to be slaughtered
at a later date?
It’s so tiring
how every day is also a miracle—
the drunk bees in the plum
blossoms, the sliver of sun
through the branches
and on an early morning
walk we find the farmer’s
granddaughter has fallen
in love with the lamb,
so it will be saved
and named Grace.
And we are spared
for a moment, from a new
loss and life frolics
across a field of wildflowers
never knowing all it has escaped.

Thinking about the idea of no pressure or expectations, Agodon says this in another interview:

I am quantity over quality, but a lot of the really bad poems will never come out of my laptop. I love writing a poem a day. And I have no problems writing bad poems, just writing something thinking, oh that was just practice. That was just a writing exercise. That poem is never going to go anywhere. I don’t want to revise it. Again, it’s just to enjoy the creation. But when I do choose a poem to revise, then I highly craft it.
Poetry Snaps! Kelli Russell Agodon: Grace

And here’s something else she writes about taking walks and finding images:

Rumpus: I think of your poems as being “dense,” and by dense I mean tight and even crowded at times as you fly from one image to another. The imagery is always surprising, line after line. I wonder how you do that?

Agodon: I wonder how I do that, too. Could this mean I’m a word/image hoarder? Maybe my poems are the rooms you go into where everything is stacked to the ceiling? Like those antique shops that have a fascinator balancing on a Mickey Mouse phone on a blue Fiestaware plate toppling above a purple suitcase with a sticker that reads: London. Maybe it’s that I’ve always been a very visual person who notices the small strange details, and they stick with me. Like yesterday when I went for a walk, I saw a toothpaste cap under a tulip and I kept thinking—why is that there? There was a robin there and I started thinking, “What if that toothpaste cap was actually the robin’s bandleader hat.” Kooky stuff, but maybe because while I have six sisters, they were all much older than me, so much of my life felt like being an only child so I was always looking for ways to entertain myself, and I still am.
Wired for Wordplay: Kelli Russell Agodon

Reading this interview, I found out about another book Agodon write: Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room. Very cool! I ordered the ebook.

jan 15/RUN

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
35 degrees
clear roads / 50% snow-covered trails / puddles

Another warmer day. The sidewalks on my block and on the way to the river are still covered in ice and slick snow. Hopefully the warm temperature today will melt more of it?! A wonderful run. Ran on the road until edmund ended, then on the trail to the falls. I don’t remember hearing the falls at all. Maybe it was because I was distracted by trying to avoid people. Didn’t look at the river again today. Why do I keep forgetting? I felt good and strong and relaxed, although my right kneecap was shifting around again.

At some point, I decided that I — my brain and my feet — find it more interesting to run on a trail with a little bit of grit or snow or something more than just flat, hard asphalt.

10 Things I Noticed

Near 42nd, right after I crossed over from edmund, I saw the blur of a runner moving fast down the Winchell Trail. I hope they had yaktrak on because I bet it was super slippery down there!
crossing over at 42nd involved scaling a wall of slippery snow — the crosswalk on the side I choose was blocked with snow and ice
Heard the scrape scrape scrape of a shovel on a driveway or a sidewalk — rough, loud. A stubborn stretch of ice?
A cross-country skier skiing on the snowy boulevard between edmund and the river road
Smelled smoke from a chimney, but not at the usual spot. The smoke I smelled today was farther south
the falls were crowded! A big bunch (10-15) of people were spread across the sidewalk
running above the giant sledding hill I heard a kid sledding down. I could tell the hill was bumpy because their yell, which they kept going the entire way, was jagged and cut in and out
a runner in black tights and a white jacket stopped near the double bridge in the middle of the trail
Passing a very tall runner in a blue jacket — me: good morning! them: morning
my shadow beside me and ahead of me — dark, well-defined on this bright blue day

My favorite things about the run were spotting the cross-country skier and hearing the kid yell as they sped down the hill. That yell — so joyful and comical to hear it break up, bump after bump. I started thinking about how you can use your other senses to get to know a place. In this case, hearing helped me to notice that the path was bumpy and steep (the kid’s yell went on for a while). I think I’ll mention this in my class. It also reminded me of a walk I took with Scott one fall. We were walking on the Winchell Trail under a lot of trees. Without even looking we could tell when the trees still had their leaves because the air suddenly became cooler.

dec 26/RUNSWIM

run: 2.5 miles
ywca track

Went to the Y with Scott and RJP this morning, so I ran there. First time running on the track in 4 or 5 years. Wasn’t too bad — not that crowded. Very quiet. I forgot to count laps so my distance is approximate — my watch never seems to be accurate indoors. Listened to “swim meet motivation” playlist and observed people as I passed them.

10 People I Noticed on the track

a man, sometimes running (slowly), sometimes walking, wearing black gloves — not boxing gloves but also not winter gloves
another guy, pulling a sled at the far corner
a woman running, the key to her locker jangling in her pocket with every step
an older white woman with white hair — was she wearing a pink sweatshirt, or was it blue? I can’t remember now. She walked pretty fast on the track, but was slow on the stairs when I was behind her earlier
RJP, walking — I waved at her every time I passed by. Was it annoying?
someone using rattle ropes, off to the side, furiously lifting them up and down
a woman on an eliptical machine in front of one of the windows
an older white guy with white hair in jeans and a maroon shirt walking around the track
Scott, running
another older white man wearing gray shorts, walking

I don’t remember thinking about much, or noticing anything that interesting, or overhearing some strange conversation.

swim: .25 miles
ywca pool

Only needed a quarter of mile to reach my year goal of 120 miles. Not a very ambitious goal for an entire year of swimming; this goal was mostly for the open swim season. I’m thinking this year, since I’m swimming in the pool, I need to make it a lot bigger. 200 or 300? Not sure. Split a lane with RJP. Crowded today because of the break. All I remember was swimming next to a bunch of swim team kids, feeling sluggish in my first lap underwater, and noticing how the water was clearer than it had been last week.

Found this hybrid journal online, Cutbow Quarterly review (2025: clicked on the link and it no longer exists). A call for submissions from jan 1-2. I want to submit something — either a mood ring or a colorblind plate, but which? One note: some of the site is almost unreadable for my bad vision. Not nearly enough contrast! Thankfully the journal pdf is easier to read.

I love lists, so I was excited to see this poem in the first issue:

List of Things to Make a List of/ Beth Mulcahy

Make a list of
things that sound like thunder but are not conversations to have
hard conversations to have
what makes conversations hard what makes conversations easy
things to do to get through a hard day
songs that helps with getting through a hard day
people to tell about it what to tell them
people not to tell
ways to prevent it
how to describe it
how to tell people the truth when to tell people the truth things you have said
things you should not have said things you should have said things you should say
to someone specific to anyone
to no one
how to let go of retroactive anxieties
things you used to care about that you don’t anymore things you wish you cared more about
things that used to be different
examples of passive aggressive statements examples of things that are too direct (harsh)
ways of beating around the bush
ways of cutting to the chase
how to calm yourself down
apologies you owe
things you can’t forgive
things you can’t forget
things you should forget
things that are your fault
things that are not your fault
the hardest things you’ve had to do
how to make things easier
for self
for others things you can explain
things that you cannot explain things you can’t describe things to write through
things that are private
people who love you
people who love you and also like you
things you have to offer
things to say to people you love things to say about the weather people you talk to every single day people you don’t know anymore people you loved who are dead ways to let things go
how to keep from having to let go ways to pay attention
things to pay attention to
things to ignore
places to fly away to
ways to be where you are

dec 17/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
18 degrees / feels like 8
100% slick snow

Another dusting of snow last night. Just a slow, steady accumulation. Everything a bright, blinding white — the sky, the path, the trees, even the river, at least in one spot where the sun hit it just right and made it burn or glare or whatever word you might use to describe a blinding white light. Wow.

Layers: 2 pairs of black running tights, green shirt, pink jacket, gray jacket, buff, black fleece-lined cap with brim, 2 pairs of glovers (black, pink and white striped)

No headphones on the way to the falls; an old playlist titled “swim meet motivation” on the way back — David Bowie, Beck, Todd Rundgren, Ozzy Osbourne, Pat Benetar

10 Things I Noticed

the creek was flowing and the falls were falling, making a delightful rushing sound
when I stopped just before my favorite spot (because a couple and a kid were already at my spot), I could hear the falls as they fell. When I looked, all I could see was one white tree after the next
the trail was not too slippery, but slippery enough to make my legs work harder
I think it was between locks and dam #1 and the double bridge — as a car passed me , I smelled hot chocolate. did it come from the car, or was that just a coincidence?
on the way back, stopped to walk on side of the double bridge that doesn’t get plowed in the winter. I looked down into the white ravine as I trudged through the snow
glancing at the river through the trees, something about all the white in the trees, the light, and my vision made the river look like it was sepia-toned
nearing the ford bridge, looking ahead, I noticed something that looked like an animal. I couldn’t see an owner and wondered if it was a coyote and not a dog. As I got a little closer I realized it was a person wearing a shirt so light — pale blue? gray? white? — that it blended into the sky. The dark I had seen was their pants. This is not the first time this has happened to me
running by some steps saw the briefest flash of orange — must be a sign warning people not to enter, I guessed
one car crawling along the river road, the line of cars growing behind it
a runner in a bright orange stocking cap and bright yellow jacket

Discovered Wendell Berry’s window poems. I like collecting window poems. This morning, I was thinking about them in relation to winter and windows as frame for the world, and layer between you and the world, and a place to be delighted when it’s too cold to be outside. I think I want to add something about windows to the section in my winter wonder class about layers.

As I was writing this last sentence, I started thinking about Emily Dickinson and how she wrote so many of her poems sitting in front of her windows, so I googled, “Emily Dickinson window” and this post was one of the top results: Emily Dickinson and the Poetics of Glass. Very cool!

Aside from working in the garden and walking the grounds of the property, looking through windows was her primary mode of relating to the landscape around her. Fortunately for Dickinson, she lived in a house abundantly punctuated by windows.

There were approximately seventy-five windows at the Dickinson Homestead.
Emily Dickinson and the Poetics of Glass/ Xiao Situ

Thinking about the literal windows in ED’s house, made me think of Berry’s Window Poem 3#:

from Windows/ Wendell Berry

The window has forty
panes, forty clarities
variously wrinkled, streaked
with dried rain, smudged,
dusted. The frame
is a black grid
beyond which the world
flings up the wild
graph of its growth,
tree branches, river,
slope of land,
the river passing
downward, the clouds blowing,
usually, from the west,
the opposite way.
The window is a form
of consciousness, pattern
of formed sense
through which to look
into the wild
that is a pattern too,
but dark and flowing,
bearing along the little
shapes of the mind
as the river bears
a sash of some blinded house.
This windy day
on one of the panes
a blown seed, caught
in cobweb, beats and beats.

To add to this wandering, I remembered listening to Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine (the album that I had listened to over and over while writing my dissertation back in 2004/5) earlier this week and noticing her song about breaking the window. Had I ever thought about these lyrics in all those dissertation writing listenings?

Window/ Fiona Apple

I was staring out the window
The whole time he was talking to me
It was a filthy pane of glass
I couldn’t get a clear view
And as he went on and on
It wasn’t the outside world I could see
Just the filthy pane that I was looking through

So I had to break the window
It just had to be
Better that I break the window
Than him or her or me

I was never focused on just one thing
My eyes got fixed when my mind got soft
It may look like I’m concentrated on
A very clear view
But I’m as good as asleep
I bet you didn’t know
It takes a lot of it away
If you do

I had to break the window
It just had to be
Better that I break the window
Than him or her or me

I had to break the window
It just had to be
It was in my way
Better that I break the window
Than forget what I had to say
Or miss what I should see

Because the fact being that
Whatever’s in front of me
Is covering my view
So I can’t see what I’m seeing in fact
I only see what I’m looking through

So again I done the right thing
I was never worried about that
The answer’s always been in clear view
But even when the window was cleaned
I still can’t see for the fact
That it’s so clear I can’t tell what I’m looking through

So I had to break the window
It just had to be
It was in my way
Better that I break the window
Than him or her or me

I had to break the window
It just had to be
Better that I break the window
Than miss what I should see

I had to break the window
It just had to be
It was in my way
Better that I break the window
Than forget what I had to say
Or miss what I should see
Or break him her or me
Especially me

october 28/SWIM!

1+ mile
ywca pool

The first swim back at the y pool in 4 years. I’m so happy to be swimming again this winter. I really wanted to make it happen, and I did. Hooray! It’s a very different experience swimming in the pool versus the lake. I still like the lake better, but it’s wonderful to be able to get back in the water. At the start of my swim, I was worried about my kneecap — would it slip out of the groove? It was fine. The rest of the time I counted strokes and noticed the people swimming in other lanes. On one side, an older woman with a strong stroke, alternating between breaststroke and freestyle. On the other side, a younger guy swimming backstroke, freestyle, and breaststroke. A few times he started just as I pushed off the wall and we might have raced. Not sure; I stayed my steady pace, but I was happy to be faster than him. In lanes 5 and 6 — I was in 3 — 2 guys were hanging out in the deep end, one at the surface, the other bobbing up from the bottom.

I swam a 200 yard warm-up, then 1600 yards without stopping, then a 50 yard warm down. 8 sets of continuous 200s, breathing every 3 strokes for 50 yards, 4 strokes for 50, 5 strokes, and 6 strokes (3/4/5/6 x 8). Breaking up 50s with different breathing helps the time to pass more quickly, and also helps me to keep track of my laps. If I breathed every 5 strokes the entire time, I would quickly forget how many 200s I had already done. I’m terrible at keeping track of them. Why is it so hard? Not sure.

I thought about how the kids used to swim here for swim lessons, then on the Otters swim team. I counted how many blue tiles were on the bottom: 6, I think. And I did my start of the swim ritual: pushing off the wall and staying underwater until I reached the end of the blue tiles, which is about 2/3 of the way across.

Scott and I soaked in the hot tub after I was done. Excellent! I’m looking forward to working out here this winter, for the exercise and all the rituals on the track, in the pool, in the locker room.

Found this poem — I think on twitter? — and it made me think of many things, including my question up above about why I always have trouble keeping track of what lap I am on while swimming in a pool — I have this problem with loops in the lake too:

Lost in Plain Sight/ Peter Schneider

Somewhere recently
I lost my short-term memory.
It was there and then it moved
like the flash of a red fox
along a line fence.

My short-term memory
has no address but here
no time but now.
It is a straight-man, waiting to speak
to fill in empty space
with name, date, trivia, punch line.
And then it fails to show.

It is lost, hiding somewhere out back
a dried ragweed stalk on the Kansas Prairie
holding the shadow of its life
against a January wind.

How am I to go on?
I wake up a hundred times a day.
Who am I waiting for
what am I looking for
why do I have this empty cup
on the porch or in the yard?
I greet my neighbor, who smiles.
I turn a slow, lazy Susan
in my mind, looking for
some clue, anything to break the spell
of being lost in plain sight.

oct 17/BIKE

bike: 30 minutes
basement, bike stand

I’d like to run this morning, but I won’t. I’m trying to give my right knee a break. So instead, I did a short bike ride in the basement. Hopefully, later this week, I’ll swim at the Y. No deep thoughts while biking, just the chance to move and get my heart rate above 120 bpms. Thought about starting the second season of Cheer! — I watched the first during the winter of 2020 — but ended up watching another track race. Maybe next time I’ll start re-watching Dickinson? I’ve started listening to the awesome poetry podcast about the show, The Slave is Gone, and I’ve been wanting to return to ED’s poems, and read the book I bought earlier this year, My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe. Too many projects, not enough time or energy. Oh well.

Marie Howe and the Moment

Yesterday, I posted 2 poems from Marie Howe, Part of Eve’s Discussion and The Meadow, and I mentioned a third that I had posted earlier in this year on July 19, “The Moment.” Here it is:

The Moment/ Marie Howe

Oh, the coming-out-of-nowhere moment

when, nothing

happens

no what-have-I-to-do-today-list

maybe half a moment

the rush of traffic stops.

The whir of I should be, I should be, I should be

slows to silence,

the white cotton curtains hanging still.

This last line about the white curtains hanging still reminds me of an interview with Howe that I posted an excerpt from 3 days later. When asked about caring for her dying brother, she mentions a green, flapping shade:

being with John when he was alive in those hours and days in his room with the green, flapping shade. Sitting by Johnny and just talking in those ways for those hours and all the particulars: the glass, the sandwich, the shade, the bedclothes, the cat, the summer heat outside pressing against the windows, the coolness in the air, the dim room. The peacefulness. The sounds of kids on bikes outside. For once there was nothing else going on but that. That’s the freedom of it, right? What’s more important? Nothing. So you’re actually living in time again.

and also this:

That was really a big deal. I was given this place to be without any expectations really. And everything changed so that the particulars of life—this white dish, the shadow of the bottle on it—everything mattered so much more to me. And I saw what happened in these spaces. You can never even say what happened, because what happened is rarely said, but it occurs among the glasses with water and lemon in them. And so you can’t say what happened but you can talk about the glasses or the lemon. And that something is in between all that.

Reading her words here, and thinking about the death of her brother, has helped me to enhance/shift my understanding of a few lines from “The Meadow”:

But in this world, where something is always listening, even
murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan

in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be
all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget

what you are.

I first wrote about these lines on july 13 and 14, 2020. In those entries, I talked a lot about the value of forgetting. To forget what you are and just be, without judgment, giving attention to the light and the breeze and a flapping, green shade.

a few more thoughts about moments:

In “Logic” Richard Siken writes the moment before something happening and sleeping and possibility. I don’t completely understand his words, but they reminded me of Howe’s words:

A hammer is a hammer when it hits the nail.
A hammer is not a hammer when it is sleeping. I woke
up tired of being the hammer. There’s a dream in the
space between the hammer and the nail: the dream of
about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream, but the nail will
take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever.

Also, I keep thinking about a moment as not being a unit of time, but a location, that in-between space. And I’m also thinking of time outside the clock, which is a theme I’ve return to a lot, and that comes up in the bit of the poem I re-memorized yesterday:

Our clock is blind, our clock is dumb.
Its hands are broken, its fingers numb.
No time for the martyr of our fair town
Who wasn’t a witch because she could drown.

It’s also in the a few lines I wrote in my long poem, which I was calling “Haunts,” but am now thinking of it as “Girl Ghost Gorge”:

I slip through time’s tight
ticks to moments so
brief they’re like shudders,
but so generous
they might fit every-
thing left behind by
progress.

oct 16/RUN

3.25 miles
marshall loop
42 degrees / 16 mph

Overcast, a heavy white sky. No snow coming, just thick clouds. A nice contrast for the bright yellows and reds and oranges lining the gorge and neighborhood sidewalks. The best view: running back across the lake street bridge, from Minneapolis to St. Paul. Such vivid colors!

About 1/2 mile in, my kneecap seemed a little shifty. Do I need to turn back? I decided to walk for a minute and regroup. Started running again, still uncertain whether I would keep going or not. For the rest of the run, it sometimes felt strange. Or was it just that I was worried about it? I can’t decide if it — my knee, my leg, my calf — feels strange because I’m worried, or because it’s warning me? Should I take several days off to be safe? Probably.

image of the day

Running over the bridge, I noticed these foamy streaks on the east side of the river — not continuous lines, but dashes or slashes in the water. I wondered what caused them. Later, walking for a short stretch back across the bridge I decided it was the strong wind pushing the water, making little ripples. Now I’m wondering again: was it just wind, or wind and small sandbars below the surface?

Last night, I recall reading something about how low the Mississippi River is this year and about some rock formation near St. Louis (I think?) that you normally can only access by boat, but now you can walk to. Okay, I looked it up. It’s Tower Rock and it is near St. Louis and here’s an article about it.

Before I went out for my run, I re-memorized my favorite part of one of my favorite Halloween poems. It’s from “A Rhyme for Halloween” by Maurice Kilwein Guevara:

Our clock is blind, our clock is dumb.
Its hands are broken, its fingers numb.
No time for the martyr of our fair town
Who wasn’t a witch because she could drown.

Now the dogs of the cemetery are starting to bark
At the vision of her bobbing up in the dark.
When she opens her mouth to gasp for air,
A moth flies out and lands in her hair.

The apples are thumping, winter is coming.
The lips of the pumpkin soon will be humming.
By the caw of the crow on the first of the year,
Something will die, something appear.

Oh, the mood this poem creates! I love it. I intended to recite this in my head as I ran, but I forgot. I think I was too distracted by worries about my knee.

Found this poem on twitter yesterday. It’s from Marie Howe, one of my favorite poets:

Part of Eve’s Discussion/ Marie Howe

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand, and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop, very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, 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.

I want to return to this poem and think about this moment some more, and the last line. And I want to compare it to some of her ideas about moments, like in The Moment or The Meadow:

The Meadow/ Marie Howe

As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so
the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together

and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.
Imperceptibly heaving with the old impatience, it knows

for certain that two horses walk upon it, weary of hay.
The horses, sway-backed and self important, cannot design

how the small white pony mysteriously escapes the fence every day.
This is the miracle just beyond their heavy-headed grasp,

and they turn from his nuzzling with irritation. Everything
is crying out. Two crows, rising from the hill, fight

and caw-cry in mid-flight, then fall and light on the meadow grass
bewildered by their weight. A dozen wasps drone, tiny prop planes,

sputtering into a field the farmer has not yet plowed,
and what I thought was a phone, turned down and ringing,

is the knock of a woodpecker for food or warning, I can’t say.
I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.

But in this world, where something is always listening, even
murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan

in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be
all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget

what you are. There will come a day when the meadow will think
suddenly, water, root, blossom, through no fault of its own,

and the horses will lie down in daisies and clover. Bedeviled,
human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words

that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled
among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.

oct 14/BIKERUN

indoor bike: 15 minutes
bike stand
treadmill run: 1 mile
outdoor run: 2 miles
34 degrees / icy drizzle

Woke up this morning before 6, opened the door to snow. What? Less than an inch, but all the trees were covered in white, the deck too. I had no idea. Oh well, I knew it would melt and that it wouldn’t be difficult to run in. A few hours later, having put on my early winter running attire — black running tights, black shorts, pink jacket with hood, black running vest, cap, headband, gloves — I opened the door to icy rain. Wtf? Again, I had no idea.

I will run in cold. I will run in snow. I will run in rain. I will not run in icy rain.

Decided to do a quick bike warm-up in the basement, then do a short run on the treadmill. Felt so good when I was done that I decided to believe that it wasn’t raining anymore. It was, but barely. Ran through the neighborhood, trying to avoid all the closed sidewalks and roads, and onto the river road trail at 32nd. Everything was dripping, but nothing was slippery. The main things I remember from the run are: puddles, the soft sounds of falling water — not sure how much of it was rain, and how much of it was just dripping trees, beeping trucks, and deep dark brown trunks.

As I write this entry, only minutes after I finished my run, the sun has come out and the sky is bright. I suppose if I had just been patient and waited a few more minutes, I could have avoided all the drips, but why would I have wanted to do that?

Something I learned this morning: I should do a 5-10 minute warm-up on the bike, or the treadmill, before I go out for a run, especially when it’s very cold outside. Why have I never thought of this before?

It’s October, so of course I’m thinking about ghosts. I also happen to be editing some poems about ghosts/haunts that I did last year. Here’s a poem I found yesterday:

Circle/Dana Knott

There are ghosts
and there are humans
in this house
ghosts who were once
humans, humans
who will become ghosts

The ghosts pace
from room to room
open cupboards
and tap tap messages
looking, looking

Ghosts and humans
live together apart
each a movement
a curtain, a drift
of snow, a whiteness
each his own fragment
trying to connect

to remember, to forget
lost loves, found keys
human obits in the process
of being written
ghostly obits in the process
of being read

oct 13/BIKE

indoor bike: 30 minutes
basement, bike stand
43 degrees

Decided to give my slippy and slide-y kneecap another day to recover from yesterday’s run. It seems fine, but I’m being extra cautious. I want to reach my 1000 miles again this year. I biked and watched an old 10,000 meter race — Worlds, Beijing, 2015. Why does 2015 seem so long ago?

Next week (hopefully), we’re re-joining the YWCA so I can swim this winter and Scott can run. Hooray for less basements, more pools and pool poems, and a new batch of regulars! Don’t worry, I’m still planning to run outside. Winter running is my favorite.

Yesterday, I discovered a new journal on twitter: Tiny Wren Lit. They publish very small poems — up to 15 lines, with a max of 25 characters (including spaces) per line. On the 15th, they’re open for submissions for an issue with the theme, Self-Portrait As. I’ve started working on reshaping a few of my poems to fit this theme. Very cool. In the process of thinking about this, I have (I hope!) come up with my fall project: a series of small poems playing with the themes of water and stone. I’ve been thinking about water and stone for a long time; they are 2 of the constants in my writing/moving/life. Sometimes I feel like water, sometimes stone. I’m excited!

And, here’s a beautiful poem I found, also on twitter:

Forest of Beginnings/ Mai Der Vang

Even the sky knows not
to make promises of water,
 
and the air knows not to dream
the onset of rain.
 
Even the animal
who forgets the touch
 
of a distant liquid cold
waits without knowing.
 
Earth is picking up her bones.
 
Earth is tucking in her babies.
 
          Sleep well, little loves,
                 sleep as you’ve never slept
 
       so you may wake
                    as you’ve never woke.
 
This is the earth that chants.
 
This is the earth that grows
teeth in the storm.
 
               This is the earth voicing
  each twig and leaf,
 
every stem
and stone.
 
This is the earth that opens like a room.
 
The ground sleeps through another
season of drought.
 
The land burrows further into exile,
sinking upward,
                        heaven to the ground,
 
where bodies of hemlock and pine,
cedar and fir,
 
no longer cast old roots but
tiptoe their arms
 
around shrubs and metal stakes.
 
Still, the land gives, the field grows,
and the harvest enters
          when it is called.
 
Flora of these hills and meadows
 
are all but springing their desires
under the rising moon.
 
               Leaves tended
by hands that tended leaves
from another mountain
 
on another shore
                        in another war.
 
War made by hands of another
for ownership of
 
                     the mountain before
leaving to new shores.
 
I did not know when I birthed you
that flight had been etched
on our tongues.
 
I did not know the jungle would
take us
far from our home,
 
                           bring us to California with
visions of new dirt and
 
the brightest green in our blood.

oct 10/RUN

6.05 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
51 degrees

A beautiful morning, a good run. Now, minutes after it, I’m wiped out. Ran down the franklin hill, past annie young meadows, to the top of the south fourth st overlook. Stopped to admire the river: blue, with 2 rowers, one in a bright orange top (shirt? vest? jacket?). Started running again, walked up the franklin hill, then ran again, this time with a Taylor Swift playlist.

For the first few miles, I recited lines from May Swenson’s “October”:

Now and then, a red leaf riding
the slow flow of gray water.
From the bridge, see far into
the woods, now that limbs are bare,
ground thick-littered. See,
along the scarcely gliding stream,
the blanched, diminished, ragged
swamp and woods the sun still
spills into. Stand still, stare
hard into bramble and tangle,
past leaning, broken trunks,
sprawled roots exposed.

As I recited it, I wondered about the repetition of now (now and then; now that limbs are bare) and into (see far into; the sun still spills into). Why does she repeat these words?

10 People I Encountered

Was mornied! by Mr. Morning! I had run past him — only seeing him from behind and not noticing it was him — and he called out. I turned back and called out good morning!
Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker.
Ran past Daddy Long Legs.
a woman walking briskly, wearing a turquoise fleece, talking with
another woman, together they approached me from behind as I walked up the franklin hill. Their voices hovered, growing louder as they neared
a runner dressed in black — first far behind me, then closer, then past me, then far ahead
a person sitting on a bench perched on the rim of the bluff
an older man and woman walking — I think I regularly encounter them? Can’t remember what the woman looks like, but the man is tall, thin, and white with white hair
a roller skier, roller skiing in the flats
a biker blasting music — I couldn’t hear it because I had my headphones in

word of the day: bombinate

I follow Merriam-Webster on twitter. Had to make note of today’s word of the day. “To bombinate is to make a sustained, murmuring sound similar to a buzz or drone.” I strongly dislike anything that bombinates. That low-lying, ever-present rumble that unsettles. I do like saying the word, though.

Taylor Swift’s “Red” came on near the end of my fifth mile. As I listened to the lyrics, I was struck by the chorus:

Losing him was blue, like I’d never known
Missing him was dark gray, all alone
Forgetting him was like trying to know
Somebody you never met
But loving him was red
Oh, red
Burning red

Perhaps this isn’t fair, but I kept thinking about how predictable and unimaginative her color descriptions are. And then I started thinking about synesthesia, which I don’t have, and wondering if people with it see emotions as colors, and what colors they might see. And now, after quickly researching the link between blue and gray and depression, I’m thinking about color psychology and feeling skeptical.

august 18/SWIM

3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
75 degrees
5:30 pm

Hooray for thunderstorms holding off until I was done! At the end of my third loop, I reached the beach, stood up, then heard thunder and the lifeguard telling everyone to exit the water. Great timing!

I had been tracking the storm all day. I knew it was coming after 6. I figured I would be able to do one loop, maybe two.

At the start of the swim, the sky was blue and I thought, there’s no way it’s raining during open swim. But within a few minutes, I started to notice the sky was darkening to my left. 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right, clear blue sky. 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left, dark blue. Then darker blue.

I swam faster, trying to outrun the storm. You could tell it was coming because the swells were getting bigger. No whitecaps, but biggish waves crashing into me. I was working hard — and getting to punch the water a lot, which I enjoy.

At the end of two loops, I stood in the shallow water and thought about stopping. Then I heard someone say, I’m going to do one more loop and I thought, yes, another loop sounds good. And it was, but also very hard. My legs were ready to be done way out in the middle of the lake. I’m very glad I made it back without any cramps.

I stayed on course the whole time, swimming right to the buoys even when I didn’t think I was seeing them. My legs, like rudders, correcting for when the wind blew me off course.

Saw at least one military plane, flying lower in the sky. Lots of seagulls swooping down. Some silver flashes of fish below. One prickly vine that grazed my leg, making it briefly sting.

Found this great essay about one of my favorite poem forms, the Abecedarius (which I’ve been calling the Abecedarian): Don Dada on the Down Low Getting Godly in His Game: Between and Beyond Play and Prayer in the Abecedarius (This article was mentioned in an excerpt of an interview with Matthew Harvey that I read).

I love playing with words, sometimes in the hopes of opening doors to new poems, and sometimes for distraction and escape. Yesterday, I was stuck in the waiting room of a medical clinic, which was both a “regular” doctors’ office and urgent care. I forgot my phone — what a bad time to forget my phone! — and couldn’t block out the sounds — the menancing coughs, the grunts and sighs, one angry man demanding a COVID test. I tried to read The Odyssey, but I was too distracted. So I got out my Plague Notebook, and decided to rethink the acronym, ER (I was not in an ER, but Urgent Care…close enough). Instead of Emergency Room, ER might mean:

End Racism
Endure Rain
Eat Radishes
Emit Radon
Erase Rust
Engulf Red
Enough Ruffage!
Early Run
Easter Roast
Ether Residue
Eggplant Ratatouille
Exam Review
Everything Ruined
Escape Room
Edible Road
Elephant Rug
Evergreen Rhyme
Escalating Risk
Expanding Rip
Elevator Rot
Empty Repair
Evasive Rock
Engineered Roof
Ecological Rap
Envelope Ripped
Epileptic Rooster
Enormous Racoon
Eleven Rainbows
Enchilada Recon
Elegant Rhinos
Electric Rump
Emerging Rest
Energy Rental
Eek! a Rat!

My favorites: Enchilada Recon, Electric Rump, Elevator Rot, Ecological Rap
Will any poems/lyric essays emerge from this? Probably not, but it sure helped me endure an uncomfortable hour in a crowded, coughing waiting room!

july 28/RUNBIKESWIMBIKE

3.35 miles
trestle turn around
62 degrees / humidity: 71%
8:00 am

Another beautiful, cool morning! All in the shade with only a few dancing dots of sun. I looked for the tree that resembles a tuning fork amongst the Welcoming Oaks but couldn’t find it today. Wondered if I’d feel out of tune during this run. Nope. It was great. Maybe it’s because of the new shoes? From the beginning, I’ve worn Saucony Grid Cohesions. But the latest re-design (I think I’ve been through 10 re-designs) does not work for my wide feet, so I upgraded to the Rides. Excellent, especially since I got them for 1/2 price!

10 Things I Noticed

a roller skier, their poles clicking once, then sliding across the asphalt, or skittering across — no, maybe scraping
the shimmering water peeking through a gap in the leaves
a biker listening to something on the radio — a bike race? but not the Tour; that’s over
a newspaper, rolled up and in the bag, on the stones just under the lake street bridge. What was it doing there?
rowers, down below
the wind — shimmering or simmering or sizzling
someone pushing a stroller slowly, someone else pushing a stroller quickly
a tall man with carrying a bag of newspapers on the path, a few blocks from the lake street bridge. Did he deliver the newspaper to the bridge? Why? (see #4)
in the tunnel of trees: a bright orange construction sign, sometimes tipped over, sometimes upright. Placed there about a month ago when they were doing road work above and needed to re-route bikers below. Did they forget about it, or are they leaving it for later, when they’ll need it again?
a biker with their front bike light on, approaching

As I listened to the wind in the trees, I wondered about one of my favorite sounds: the creaking of branches rubbing together, sounding like a door opening. I wondered: does this only happen when the trees are bare, or less covered with leaves? Do I ever hear this creaking in the summer? I can’t remember; I’ll have to start listening more deliberately for it.

Found on twitter this morning:

I think that in the process of writing, all kinds of unexpected things happen that shift the poet away from his plan and that these accidents are really what we mean when we talk about poetry.
John Ashbery

I really like this idea of the accidents. Often it feels like poetry is what happens when you’re trying to do something else. The something else = off to the side, on the side, not in the center but the periphery, not a matter of strong will but of surrender. A goal: get yourself in a space where you’re open to the accidents.

Also, this bit from a poem by Diane Seuss

What can memory be in these terrible times?
Only instruction. Not a dwelling.
Weeds/ Diane Seuss

Here are some cool facts about crickets that I just discovered from the mnstateparksandtrails instagram account:

Crickets are cold-blooded — their body temp changes along with the air temp. As the temp rises, their metabolism increases and they can contract their chirp-creating muscles faster. Heatwaves? More chirps! Temp dipping? Fewer chirps.

You need to be listening to a single cricket – this doesn’t work very well if you’re hearing a whole orchestra. (Officially a group of crickets is called a “crackle.”) Count the number of chirps for 14 seconds and add 40 to get the temp in Fahrenheit. It’s surprisingly accurate.

“Better grab a sweater for the campfire, it’s only 22 crickets out tonight. Brr!”

I want to measure the temperature in cricket chirps! Ok, in theory I want to. I’m not sure I could actually count the chirps. Also in this delightful description:

a group of crickets is called a crackle!

bike: 8.5 miles
swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
73 degrees / 5:30 pm

A little windy, but still a nice night for a bike and a swim.

10 Things I Noticed

a black plane
a white plane
a few menacing white sailboats, looking too close to the swimming area
a flash of yellow ahead of me: someone’s safety buoy
hardly any people at the beach — too cold? the green blue algae advisory?
clear goggles, a noseplug that didn’t want to stay on (had to stop twice in the middle of the lake to adjust it)
a little choppy on the way back from the little beach to the big beach
spray as my arms entered the water. I noticed it as I turned to breathe
clang clang clang a loud banging over by the menancing swan peddle boats — what were they doing?
breathed every 5, except for when I breathed every 3 or 4

july 15/RUN

2.6 miles
2 trails
80 degrees / dew point: 69
noon

Decided to take a break from swimming this morning; went for a run instead. Trying to think about the topic for next week for my class: breathing, rhythm, and pace. Did some triple berry chants, then some rhythmic breathing chants.

triples:

mystery
magical
serenade
history
remember
remember
remember
forget this
forget that
remember

rhythmic breathing: 3/2

everything’s/open
listen up/closely
everyone’s/looking
Can’t you be/quiet?

I know I did more, but I can’t remember them. I heard a black-capped chickadee doing their 2 note call. I tried to match up my feet and my words to the bird’s 2 syllables. I thought about the idea of trying to match my breathing and foot strikes to the rhythms of the gorge. Then I heard the electric buzz of cicadas, and I imagined the buzz as a shimmering shower of rapid beats. I don’t think it’s easily achievable, but the idea of listening to the gorge and then trying to breathe in time with it, is pretty cool — or trying to sync up breathing and foot strikes and heartbeats.

Here’s a great quote that I found (the quote on twitter, the original source from an interview of poets.org):

There is something very important and vital in poetic expression. The way that language is used to just connect us to parts of our experience, that can’t be captured in the linear, prosaic sense, and the instructional register, the command register. Poetry doesn’t do that. Poetry invites us to question, to discover, to delight, to be odd, to be frightened—all of these wonderful emotions that actually open doors inside us and to the world.

One more thing: Scott sent me a very interesting article about new research on woodpeckers and how they’re able to withstand the force of their constant drumming. A couple years ago, when I was researching woodpeckers and writing poems about their drumming, I mentioned learning (I can’t seem to find the entry right now) about how woodpeckers’s heads offer good shock absorption. According to this article about a recent study, that’s not true. Their heads act like hammers and the reason they’re able to endure so much pecking is because their brains are so small. Fascinating.

june 7/RUN

3.25 miles
2 trails + extra
66 degrees

The rain that looked like it was coming never did, so I went out for a run. It’s overcast. Not cloudy, but CLOUD — one big cloud covering everything, making the sky gray and the greens more green. It seemed humid to me and I sweat a lot, so I thought the humidity would be high. Nope, only 47%. The run felt good, relaxed.

On the surface, all I remember is trying to lift my knees and my left hip and looking out for other walkers or runners or bikers. Can I remember more if I try? Yes!

10 Things I Noticed

lots of bikers, mostly single bikers or groups of 2, one large, spread out group, several of them wearing bright yellow jackets
no blue jays or chickadees, but lots of little chirping birds — I wondered if they were warblers
the faint voices of kids playing on the Dowling Elementary playground
exchanging deep head nods with a man using a walker
Minneapolis parks is mowing today — saw and heard a big lawn mower speeding by on the path. More evidence of the lawn mowing: the smell of freshly cut grass
encountering another runner down below on the winchell trail, near its southern start, where all the asphalt has reverted to dirt. They were wearing sweatpants and maybe (I can’t quite remember) a sweatshirt too?
voices below, in the gorge — rowers?
mud on the trail from yesterday’s rain, but not enough to slip in or on or through
trickling water in several different spots in the ravine, just north of the oak savanna
the dirt trail below the mesa that the parks dept cleared out last year is showing signs of being reclaimed: weeds popping up in the middle of the path

Today I got lost in the run, in some sort of reverie or just my mind shutting down for a while. I can’t remember what the river looked like, though I know I looked at it. I can’t remember anything about running through the tunnel of trees, not even a hint of a memory of the dark green or the sound of cars above, or whether I encountered someone as I ran past the old stone steps. Strange and wonderful. I like getting lost.

Found a beautiful poem through this tweet:

Back when I wrote this, the question was real — I couldn’t answer it. Now I can: Yes, it’s okay… https://t.co/NOn1Xn6810
— Carl Phillips (@CPhillipsPoet) June 7, 2022

As from a Quiver of Arrows/ CARL PHILLIPS

What do we do with the body, do we
burn it, do we set it in dirt or in
stone, do we wrap it in balm, honey,
oil, and then gauze and tip it onto
and trust it to a raft and to water?

What will happen to the memory of his
body, if one of us doesn’t hurry now
and write it down fast? Will it be
salt or late light that it melts like?
Floss, rubber gloves, and a chewed cap

to a pen elsewhere —how are we to
regard his effects, do we throw them
or use them away, do we say they are
relics and so treat them like relics?
Does his soiled linen count? If so,

would we be wrong then, to wash it?
There are no instructions whether it
should go to where are those with no
linen, or whether by night we should
memorially wear it ourselves, by day

reflect upon it folded, shelved, empty.
Here, on the floor behind his bed is
a bent photo—why? Were the two of
them lovers? Does it mean, where we
found it, that he forgot it or lost it

or intended a safekeeping? Should we
attempt to make contact? What if this
other man too is dead? Or alive, but
doesn’t want to remember, is human?
Is it okay to be human, and fall away

from oblation and memory, if we forget,
and can’t sometimes help it and sometimes
it is all that we want? How long, in
dawns or new cocks, does that take?
What if it is rest and nothing else that

we want? Is it a findable thing, small?
In what hole is it hidden? Is it, maybe,
a country? Will a guide be required who
will say to us how? Do we fly? Do we
swim? What will I do now, with my hands?

For reasons I can’t totally express, this poem seems fitting to post this late morning, after spending time working on an introductory lecture for a class I’m teaching on noticing the world, then documenting that noticing in a log, and after writing in this log entry that I got lost in the run.

Also, it’s always a good time to post a Carl Phillips poem. His work is wonderful.

may 29/RUN

2.5 miles
river road trail, south/north
68 degrees
drizzle

Got up at 6 am again. Why won’t my body ever let me sleep in? Did my morning ritual of coffee, poems-of-the-day, and slowly waking up. Decided to head out for a run before the thunderstorms arrived at 7:30. It was dark-ish — dark enough for the street lamps to be on — and thick and heavy with humidity, green, and birdsong. I liked it. I encountered a few people on the trail, including a runner who “mornied” me. Heard some trickling from the sewer pipe, wind moving through the trees. It wasn’t drizzling all the time, although it was difficult to tell what was rain and what was sweat.

Running back north on the dirt trail between edmund and the river road I heard some more screeching blue jays. I thought about how I’ve been identifying them as crows for years. Why? I guess when I hear an annoying bird cry I think, crow. Sorry crows. The cry of a blue jay is way more annoying.

No river, but I managed to look down at the oak savanna: dark and mysterious. No roller skiers, a few bikers, no laughing kids or chattering walkers. Not too many cars this early on a Sunday morning. No rowers on the river.

Here’s some wisdom from @chenchenwrites that I found on twitter the other day:

as i’m always telling my students—why start from scratch? look at some paintings. look at photography. take a long walk. smell some basil. flip through an old notebook. tweak a favorite song lyric. follow what you already love into its forest. deepen that love. step into it more

and @hechizante777’s reply:

I worry that so many of my students (potentially pressured into nursing or other healthcare majors) simply haven’t had opportunities to figure out what they love… how to make space for that in an era of violence and scarcity?

Making space for figuring out what we love and then loving it in an era of violence and scarcity. So difficult. This discussion reminds me of Teju Cole and his interview with David Naimon for Between the Covers, especially this part:

This frenzied capitalism that we live in—what I’ve been calling market totalitarianism—produces loneliness, existential isolation that deprives people of the tools with which to navigate their place in the universe. This might be genuinely new in the history of the world, cultures have always provided people with those tools, and now we’re all just screaming into the void. Because we’ve been robbed of many, many of the tools that help anchor human experience in the world. I remember what Sun Ra said, he said “Everything comes from outer space.” Everything, it’s all meteors, it’s all from the sun. “The only thing Earth produces is the dead bodies of humans,” he said. I feel in a very vital way that the only thing market totalitarianism really produces is human alienation, depriving us of the tools with which enfold ourselves in the fabric of time. So when I encounter a quintet by Brahms, or traditional Papuan flute music, these are things that give me a chance to re-enfold myself in those sustaining human networks; to the mystery of being alive.
Teju Cole interview

And I’m also thinking of Haniq Abdurraqib’s “On Joy” (which I found very early this morning via twitter):

I don’t know what to do with all of the world’s burning anymore. Sometimes we start the fire directly, other times we’re unwitting accomplices to it, and then there are times when the smoke rises and dances above our own doorsteps, and we’re just too tired to keep the flames under control. I turn on the TV and people of color are still dying. I read the news and people in Trans communities remain dismissed, remain punchlines until they are dead, and people are still laughing at the bad joke. I talk to the women in my life and hear how they’re treated as a different class of person entirely. I don’t have the luxury to not dismantle the systems that allow for those things, and more. I am impacted by it, in some ways, I’m complicit in it, and it’s hard to sit idle while knowing those things. While being afforded a platform, artistic and otherwise.
When we talk about “the work”, as writers, so many of us mean the actual work of writing. The work on the page, of course. After a year of wrestling with the fragility of my own life, and the life of my closest human love, I realized that “the work” is also the work of living. It is the work of loving others when we can, taking care of ourselves when we can, and knowing not to let the former overwhelm us into forgetting the latter. Those two different types of work are two rivers flowing into the same body of water, for me. I don’t know how to write healthy and productive poems if I’m only doing one side of the work.
The only promise here is that I will wake up tomorrow and be as exhausted by the world as I was today. Sure, I may find a brief reprieve in a panda video (or, in the case of the particular tomorrow at the time of this writing, the new Terrance Hayes book!), but I will still find myself going outside to throw water on whatever flames I can, my arms weakening. I know that they will be there, every day. But even through all of it, something happened at around the end of last year. I started writing poems about being married. About my father, still healthy and living. About the friends I love and miss dearly. About my dog. I realized this urgency to archive the things that are not promised. I need the joy in my life to live outside of my body. I need to see it, to touch it. I need that outside of my body even more than I need the rage, confusion, and sadness on the outside. I know the sadness will always replenish itself. There is no certainty in almost anything else. I don’t know how long I’ll get to hear my wife sing along to pop songs in the car during road trips. I don’t know how much longer I’ll get to talk to my father with him remembering who I am. I don’t know when my dog will be too old to rush towards me with a wagging tail whenever I come back from an especially long trip. I need those things to live in other places. I need to have them outside of me so that I can run into them on the days where I will need to. Surely, each small joy has an expiration date. I have touched the edges of them. I don’t know how to fight against this reality except for to write into these moments with urgency. With fearlessness and hunger.

may 24/RUN

5.45 miles
franklin loop
60 degrees

Another beautiful morning by the gorge! Sunny, calm, not too warm, clear, low humidity. I felt mostly good, although my IT band — the left one — was sore off and on.

10 Things I Noticed

a cardinal on the path, near the edge. The light and my bad color vision made the red glow in strange ways. It almost looked purple. I wondered if it might be a scarlet tanager, which is found in the gorge, but they have deep black wings, and the one I saw did not
an off, so sweet it was sour smell near the ravine — the sewer
a blue river with some white foam
black capped chickadees singing their fee bee song
no tarp under the lake street bridge on the minneapolis side, but some sort of tarp hanging off a piling on the st. paul side
a empty bench on the east side, its back to the river, facing the road
another empty bench on the east side facing the river with a clear view to the other side
shshshshsh of my feet stepping down on the winter grit that’s settled at the edges of the path on the franklin bridge
closed: Meeker Island Dam dog park (flooding); the road down to the east river flats (flooding); the walking path under the lake street bridge on the east side (erosion — the asphalt has caved in or fallen off into the river)
a runner in shorts and a tank top who I first noticed as walker, walking up the lake street hill. She was talking with someone on the phone — speaker phone? or bluetooth headset? — and running slowly on the dirt trail next to the paved path

more fun with the IT band

Every so often, when my IT band starts to hurt, I like to play with the acronym IT, which stands for Iliotibial, by re-imagining what it/IT stands for. In November of 2018, I re-imagined IT Band, as a rock band, then composed a list of free band names. I’m pretty sure I played with IT again in this log, but I can’t seem to find it. Found it! In addition to re-imagining illiotibial, I also have turned it, as it is used in the common= phrase, “Let it Be,” into an acronym. I made a list of things IT stands for, then turned that into a poem.

Today, I’d like to play with another “it” that I’m encountering a lot as I think about my fall course proposal. It’s from Mary Oliver’s poem, “Invitation”:

It could mean something.
It would mean everything.
It could be what Rilke mean, when he wrote:
You must change your life.

In a poem I wrote in 2018, I speculated on what Mary Oliver might be referring to with her use of it. Today I’d like to expand that speculation beyond her poem.

I.T. could mean something.

iced trees
important turns
invisible tethers
irksome temptations
indigo territory
invalid treaties
inevitable treachery
imploding tasks
injured teeth
italic tymphanies
iridescent trestles
impending trash
invalid tramping
ignorant tests
immediately trampled
itchy traps

Not sure if anything will come out of that, but I love playing with words, and it made me forget about my IT band. I do think there’s something interesting about the invalid treaties.

Here’s a poem that I discovered today via twitter. Paul Tran’s poems are wonderful, especially when they read them (click on the poem link to check out their recording of it)!

Hypothesis / Paul Tran

Whether it’s true
that the moth mistakes the candle’s flame
for the moon or the bioluminescent
pheromones of another moth,

I can’t say.
I was the candle.
I was the flame

conceived in and by reason of
darkness, nibbling on a darkening wick.
When moth after moth after moth
swarmed me with their powdery wings,

I asked why.
I asked how.
I asked if

I could survive knowing
that not everything has a reason,
that not everything is capable
of or interested in reason.

Nothing answered.
Nothing spoke
my language of smoke.

april 19/RUN

4.75 miles
veterans’ home loop
33 degrees

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.

after the run

Here’s a sad, scary headline: Report lists Mississippi as one of ‘most endangered’ U.S. rivers

And here’s a hopeful story about activists making a difference and changing the future of the river: The untold story of our national park’s founding

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/ Rumi

Translated from the Farsi by Haleh Liza Gafori

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.
Running as prayer

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?

april 10/RUN

3.25 miles
trestle turn around
51 degrees

Spring! Spring! Spring! Sunny and warm. Shorts with no running tights. Lots of birds singing and drumming and casting big shadows across the path. Near the end of my run, I saw the shadows and stopped briefly to catch a flash of a soaring bird. An eagle or a kestrel or a hawk? It couldn’t be an owl, could it? Do they fly that high? Didn’t hear any rowers and barely noticed the river — even when I stopped at the overlook at the end of my run and was looking straight at it. I think I noticed the dirt trails leading down to the gorge the most. Heard some dogs barking down in the gorge. Ran past a peloton on the road. Saw some graffiti on the door of the porta-potty under the lake street bridge. Overheard a conversation, or one brief bit of a conversation:

walker 1: “I’ll just have to get up tomorrow and go to work, and forget about it.”
walker 2: “uh huh”

This reminds of something I heard yesterday from one biker to an other: “They don’t have a leg to stand on to fire him.” A leg to stand on? I don’t hear that expression that often anymore. Also, why was “he” being fired, and from where?

before the run

This popped up on my twitter feed:

https://twitter.com/shaetlan_rose/status/1512848196682366979

Very cool. Read the article in The Guardian, then the study it linked to: Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity. Here’s a summary:

Mathematical analysis of the electrical signals fungi seemingly send to one another has identified patterns that bear a striking structural similarity to human speech.

and

The research, published in Royal Society Open Science, found that these spikes often clustered into trains of activity, resembling vocabularies of up to 50 words, and that the distribution of these “fungal word lengths” closely matched those of human languages.
Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’, scientists claim

I find this interesting — how they did it, by placing iridium coated spikes in their nerve centers and measuring electrical impulses, then analyzing the impulse clusters and comparing their length to human languages — but I’m particularly struck by the researches explanation of why this matters:

a modified conception of language of plants is considered to be a pathway towards ‘the de-objectification of plants and the recognition of their subjectivity and inherent worth and dignity’ [28].
Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity

So, to care for and grant dignity and worth to fungi we need to understand them to be as “smart as us” — that is, able to use language? Why? Even as I enjoyed reading this experiment and thinking about fungi communication as language, I wonder about its purpose and why we need fungi to speak in ways we can understand in order for them to have value. And, why do we assume that, 1. human language is the most valuable (or complex/sophisticated) and/or 2. to value something it needs to be like us? Perhaps I’m reading too much into their claim?

I found a comment at the end of the article that offers a useful critique from a slightly different perspective than mine:

This kind of anthropomorphic work would do well to define terms including words, language, information, and communication. These are technical terms in communicology and in linguistics but are indiscriminately used in this research. Plants do not produce meaning but merely exchange information. They do not, therefore, communicate in any human way. Language is not merely a syntactical system, as implied here. Language consists of the necessary components syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. In short, the image of the human cast over the findings is inappropriate. It is also not needed to make the research interesting.
comment on article from I Catt

I also found this poem about a type of mushroom (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis) that invades carpenter ants:

The Ants/ Matthew Rorher

Nothing is more important to the ant
whose exoskeleton has been breached
by mushroom spores that are now
controlling his nervous system
and compelling him to climb to a high leaf
only to die and release the spores
over the whole forest
than this poem about his sad plight.

Otherwise his life is meaningless.
Forage. Chew. Recognize by scent.
Abdication of the will. A huge wind
that comes and sweeps his fellows
off the grass. When he dies up there
in the treetops the mushroom grows
right out of his head and breaks open
lightly dusting the afternoon.

Everything he thought he was here
on Earth to do has been left undone.
Through the trees
the spores move on their sinister ways.
I put down the science magazine written
for elementary school kids
in which I have briefly disappeared.

during the run

Stopped at the end of my run to record some of my scattered thoughts during the run:

Remembering the poem about the parasitic mushrooms and the carpenter ants that a poet found in a kids’ science magazine. Why and how do we lose the wonder we had as kids?
Then I was thinking about care, and why and how we care about things. What do we need to care? Do we care about things we can understand? That we know? That have use value for us? What about things that make us wonder and delight in their strangeness? Why can’t that be a reason to care?
Finally, I was thinking about Alice Oswald and something she said in an interview about otherness and how our encounters with the land and nature are ones of encountering that which is alien and other to us. So, we don’t recognize nature in how it’s like us, or we’re like it, but in how it is strange to us.

after the run

Found Oswald’s words, or my rough transcription of them, from a podcast:

I exert incredible amounts of energy trying to see things from their own points of view rather than the human point of view.
It’s a day long effort to get your mind into the right position to live and speak well.
citing Zizek: we can’t connect, be one with nature. It’s extraordinary, alien. It’s this terrifying otherness of nature that we need to grasp hold of and be more courageous in our ways of living with it and seeing it.
Landscape and Literature Podcast: Alice Oswald on the Dart River

Does it always have to be terrifying? Can we access this strangeness through wonder and curiosity, and marvel that there is so much that is different, and more, than us?

Thinking about this idea of connecting to “things” and nature through making them like us, anthropomorphizing them, I just remembered a delightful poem I posted by Lisel Mueller this last fall:

Things/ LISEL MUELLER

What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.

april 3/RUN

4.05* miles
minnehaha creek path, between lake nokomis and lake harriet
40 degrees

*Scott’s watch said 4 miles, mine 4.1, so I’m splitting the difference here. Also did the .05 because my total miles was at a .45 and needed the .05 to round it out.

Ran with Scott along the Minnehaha Creek trail between lake nokomis and lake harriet. Nice. Not too cold or windy, relaxed. An easy pace with several walk breaks. I haven’t run this route in many years. Crossed over the creek several times, noticing the water: blueish gray, gently flowing, almost whispering its splashes.

before the run

At the end of my post from 2 days ago I decided on my project and, of course, I am already abandoning it, or maybe just wandering with it a little? This wandering is one joy of my undisciplined approach to writing/engaging/being in the world. The project/challenge: do a different B Mayer “Please Add to this List” experiment each day. Yesterday, I picked my first one: “Compose a list of familiar phrases, or phrases that have stayed in your mind for a long time–from songs, from poems, from conversation.”

I began a list:

You’ll get no commercials
There’s a new girl in town
As long as it’s gum and that’s for me
Life is life, and death but death, Bliss but bliss, and breath but breath
I am the wind and the wind is invisible
Think of a sheep knitting a sweater, think of your life getting better and better
Like sands through the hourglass, these are the days of our lives
Wake up in the morning, feeling sad and lonely. Gee, I got to go to school
What a world, what a world!
Heaven, I’m in heaven, and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
What do you do when your kid is a brat?
Pious glory
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
I’m a wheel watcher
Remember I love you, I won’t be far away. I’ll just close my eyes and think of yesterday
I’ll be yours in springtime when the flowers are in bloom. We’ll wander through the meadows in all their sweet perfume
Of course you do
Eastbound and down, loaded up and trucking’
Hey y’all
trouble is inevitable, and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it
You were not there
All will be revealed
And you never will be
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Try to remember the days of september
the boobie hatch
the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinnacle on your snout
Miss Suzy had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell. Miss Suzy went to heaven, the steamboat went to…

Then I stopped. I started thinking about “the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out” and remembered my sister Marji singing that to me when we were kids, then us gleefully singing it together. Something clicked. I thought about worms and dirt and death and graves and really gross things about bodies and being delighted in singing about those gross things and Diane Seuss’s commencement address and her invoking of these lines by Walt Whitman:

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

I decided what I really want to do this month is study dirt. It’s fitting for April as I begin to notice dirt again as it emerges from under the snow. It also follows nicely from Oswald and her emphasis on physical labor — working in the dirt and gardening, getting your hands dirty — and minerals all the way down. And, it returns me to my extended exploration of both ghosts and haunting and earth/rock/stone/erosion. So many different ways to wander and wonder with this word!

I’ll start today with a little more on “the worms crawl in” song. Here’s how I remember singing it when I was a kid:

Did you ever think when the hearse went by
that you would be the next to die?
They wrap you up in thick white sheets
bury you down 6 feet deep.

All goes well for about a week
then your coffin begins to leak.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out
the worms play pinnacle on your snout.

Your stomach turns a slimy green.
Pus runs out like thick whipped cream.

It starts getting fuzzy at this point in the song. It would end with something like, “And that’s where you go when you die.” I can’t quite remember. I decided to look it up. Found some interesting things about it. Here’s a brief summary from Wikipedia:

“The Hearse Song” is a song about burial and human decomposition, of unknown origin. It was popular as a World War I song, and was popular in the 20th century as an American and British children’s song, continuing to the present. It has many variant titles, lyrics, and melodies, but generally features the line “the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out”, and thus is also known as “The Worms Crawl In“.

And here’s a cover that adds many more lyrics than I remember and sounds like the Violent Femmes:

There are LOTS of variations of this song. Check out the comments on this post for some of them. I’m fascinated by this song as part of an oral tradition of poetry — the poem/words aren’t owned by any one poet, they travel and transform. The best (most compelling, memorable) are kept as people recite/sing it, the others discarded. What holds it all together is: “the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out.” If I’m getting it right, those lines are iambic dimeter — 2 feet of unstressed/unstressed.

This focus on the worms reminds me of Cornel West and how, in lectures and the film, The Examined Life, he liked to say:

For me, philosophy is fundamentally about our finite situation. You can define that in terms of being towards death, featherless two legged linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and faeces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. That’s us. Beings towards death. At the same time we have desire, why we are organisms in space and time, and so desire in the face of death.

When I was a kid, I loved singing this song, took delight in the grossness. It didn’t scare or haunt me with its reminder that I would die one day. Now, as a middle-aged adult, it doesn’t either, even as I encounter more death and reminders of death. I actually find it comforting (is that the right word?) or helpful to think about the relationship between bodies and dirt and worm food.

during the run

Because Scott and I were talking about many different things (most of which I can’t remember now), we didn’t talk about “the worms crawl in…”. Possibly we didn’t talk about it because he never sang the song as a kid and doesn’t find it fun now. Boo. I do remember remarking on all the brown and noticing the mulched leaves on the ground. Thinking about things that decompose or have decomposed.

after the run

Not much to add here, except this poem I found when searching, “worms and poetry”:

Feeding the Worms/ Danish Lameris

Ever since I found out that earth worms have taste buds
all over the delicate pink strings of their bodies,
I pause dropping apple peels into the compost bin, imagine
the dark, writhing ecstasy, the sweetness of apples
permeating their pores. I offer beets and parsley,
avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots.

I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden,
almost vulgar—though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure
so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can,
forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.

march 31/BIKERUN

bike: 10 minute warm-up
run: 3.25 miles
outside: wind + thin sheet of ice

Wanted to run outside today, but it snowed and sleeted yesterday and it hasn’t warmed enough to melt yet. I don’t want to fall and get an injury. Speaking of injuries, just watched a YouTube video with one of my favorite triathletes, Lucy Charles-Barclay. She has a small fracture on the inside of her femoral-something-or-other (I remember the femoral part, but forgot the rest). She doesn’t know yet how long it will take to heal or if she can do any exercise. She mentioned how she’s always used exercise as a way to cope with any stress/anxiety she is feeling. Now, she can’t and she’s unsure of how how to handle it. I remember feeling this way with my first “big” injury. It sucked, but then I started memorizing poems and I felt better. That injury was when I really discovered how much I love poetry.

I haven’t figured out what to watch now that I’m done with Dickinson, so I watched a random running race while I biked. Then I listened to an old playlist while I ran. Felt pretty good. Didn’t think about anything except how much time I had left. 30 minutes on the treadmill is a long time for me. Very tedious.

I guess I thought about at least one other thing: how much I was feeling the lyrics of Closer to Fine by the Indigo Girls, which was on my playlist. I remember liking that song at the end of high school, then driving with a future roommate to see them perform at Luther College my freshman year of college. I always appreciated the lyrics, but they didn’t really mean anything to me, more like empty clichés or slogans or something someone else would do. Now I find myself living (or trying to live those) words in my work and my daily practices:

There’s more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
Closer I am to fine

I like the idea of more (possible) answers + crooked lines + not trying to KNOW or find the answers + the idea of getting closer (but never quite getting) to fine + fine (not success or achievement or even happiness) as the goal.

Found this poem on twitter this morning. Wow!

I Wonder If I Need the Rapture or If I Could Just
Swallow A Catastrophe and Call It Good / Kelli Russell Agodon

Find me at a party socializing with someone’s cat.
Pull a decade from my dress and find what’s left
of the bliss sewn in the hem.

In a perfect world, we would slow dance
with someone we love, we would hold childhood
in our palm and call it a foal.

What we love frolics with its mother, while we ache
for our sins. Walk through a field without disturbing
a spider’s web. Turn off the news

when a javelin is thrown through the screen
into our heart. Yes, you are worried–fear
has been our blanket for years.

Yes, you are home alone so your mind
is cashing in every anxiety chip. Bet on less.
Forget the radishes at the store and be joyful

that you did. There are too many false fangs
at the necks of the ones we love. Bite lighter.
Use your lips. Know the lightening

you believed would kill you didn’t. Not every wolf
harms, many just want to find their way
back into the forests we keep cutting down.

march 29/RUN

3.5 miles
river road, south/winchell trail/river road, north/edmund
39 degrees / feels like 30
wind: 20 mph

Overcast, windy, cold. Not too many people out on the trails. Ran south on the paved path, then a little on the Winchell trail — dirt, then rubbled asphalt, then paved, back up on the river road trail, through the tunnel of trees, then over to Edmund. Everything bare and brown and looking like November. Very pleasing to my eyes. Soft and dull, not sharp or crisp. Down on the Winchell Trail, I was closer to the river, but forgot to look. Maybe it was because I was too focused on the wind and reciting the poem by Christine Rossetti that I memorized this morning. I was reminded of it when I found it on my entry for March 29, 2020.

Who Has Seen the Wind?/ CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.

It was really fun to recite (just in my head) as I ran. It’s iambic, mostly trimeter (I think?). I also recited the opening to Richard Siken’s “Lovesong of the Square Root of Negative One:

“I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble but I am invisible.”

Before I went for my run, I spent more time with Alice Oswald. Here are a few bits from an interview she did in 2016 for Falling Awake:

I frequently get told I’m a nature poet living in a rural idyll, but just like the city, the country is full of anxious, savage people. The hedges seem so much stronger than the humans that you feel slightly imperilled and exposed, as if, if you stopped moving for a minute the nettles would just move in.

I think about this idea of the vegetation taking over when humans (by the gorge, Minneapolis Parks’ workers) stop managing and maintaining it. Creeping vines, tall grass, wandering branches, crumbling asphalt. I see these things all the time and often imagine how the green things might consume us when we stop paying attention.

I’m mostly interested in life and vitality, but you can only see that by seeing its opposite. I love erosion: I like the way that the death of one thing is the beginning of something else.

Erosion, things decomposing, returning, recycling. I’m drawn to noticing these things as I loop around the gorge.

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.

I like the idea of finding a balance, where I remember some things and forget others, or I forget some things so I can remember other things.

Poetry is not about language but about what happens when language gets impossible.

I like the idea of things being impossible to ever fully achieve, where no words can ever fully capture/describe what something it. When language is impossible, it’s possible to keep imagining/dreaming up new meanings.

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

This line about getting down to the mineral, reminded me of some of Oswald’s words in Dart and Lorine Niedecker’s words in “Lake Superior”:

from Dart / Alice Oswald

where’s Ernie? Under the ground

where’s Redver’s Webb? Likewise.

Tom, John and Solomon Warne, Dick Jorey, Lewis
Evely?

Some are photos, others dust.
Heading East to West along the tin lodes,
80 foot under Hepworthy, each with a tallow candle in
his hat.

Till rain gets into the stone,
which washes them down to the valley bottoms
and iron, lead, zinc, copper calcite
and gold, a few flakes of it
getting pounded between the pebbles in the river.

from “Lake Superior” / Lorine Niedecker

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

And the idea of moving through layers, reminds me of Julian Spahr and their poem that moves through layers, first out, then in:

poemwrittenafterseptember 11, 2001 / Julian Spahr

as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space around the hands and the space of the room and the space of the building that surrounds the room and the space of the neighborhoods nearby and the space of the cities and the space of the regions and the space of the nations and the space of the continents and islands and the space of the oceans and the space of the troposphere and the space of the stratosphere and the space of the mesosphere in and out.

In this everything turning and small being breathed in and out by everyone with lungs during all the moments.

Then all of it entering in and out.

The entering in and out of the space of the mesosphere in the entering in and out of the space of the stratosphere in the entering in and out of the space of the troposphere in the entering in and out of the space of the oceans in the entering in and out of the space of the continents and islands in the entering in and out of the space of the nations in the entering in and out of the space of the regions in the entering in and out of the space of the cities in the entering in and out of the space of the neighborhoods nearby in the entering in and out of the space of the building in the entering in and out of the space of the room in the entering in and out of the space around the hands in the entering in and out of the space between the hands.

How connected we are with everyone.

The space of everyone that has just been inside of everyone mixing inside of everyone with nitrogen and oxygen and water vapor and argon and carbon dioxide and suspended dust spores and bacteria mixing inside of everyone with sulfur and sulfuric acid and titanium and nickel and minute silicon particles from pulverized glass and concrete.

How lovely and how doomed this connection of everyone with lungs.

—

I’ve been wanting to do something with layers and the gorge. What form might it take?

march 21/RUN

6 miles
franklin loop
52 degrees

A very spring day today. Tomorrow, colder again. Rain and 40s. I overdressed — I didn’t need to the running tights. It was mostly overcast, but every so often I saw my shadow. Faint, but leading me. Ran the Franklin loop. My watch crashed less than 3 miles in. Either I get a new watch soon, or stop wearing a watch. I’m leaning towards not wearing a watch.

I got a “morning!” from Mr. Morning! and Dave the Daily Walker. An excellent start to my run. Encountered a few other runners, some walkers. Any bikes? I can’t remember. No roller skiers yet. The birds were LOUD! Heard some honking geese, then saw them flying low in a line. Heard at least one woodpecker, drumming.

note: re-reading the entry and the part about the LOUD birds, I’m struck by how quiet everything is now, at 1 pm. Where is all the birdsong that was here just minutes ago? Strange.

workers of the day

Nearing the marshall/lake street bridge from the northeast, I started to smell tar. Then I heard some deep voices on the hill at St. Thomas: “Go go go go!” then “woah” or “wow” or “alright” but not “stop” or “that’s enough.” I imagined someone was pouring the tar and someone else was telling them when to stop. Was that what was happening? It was too far away and hidden behind trees for me to see. What was the tar for? What exactly were they doing? Tarring a roof? Repaving a road? Were the workers wearing masks to protect them from the fumes?

Right before I started my run, I typed this here: A few lines from the poem to remember as I run:

have you forgotten the force that orders the world’s
fields
and sets all cities in their sites, this nomad
pulling the sun and moon, placeless in all places,
born with her stones, with her circular bird-voice,
carrying everywhere her quarters?

I decided to try and keep remembering (and noticing and studying) the river as I ran. Often, even as I know it’s there, I forget to notice it. Today, it was pale blue and mostly calm. I saw a reflection of the lake street bridge as I ran on the east side, but it wasn’t completely smooth — not the perfect, inverted bridge from another world I sometimes see. The banks were mostly brown, although there were a few white spots. Just past Meeker Island Dam, I heard a small waterfall. No boats or rowers. No ducks. Running above the river, I never got close enough to hear it. All I could hear were the cars driving by — on the river road, a bridge, the distant freeway. To me, it seemed as if they were trying to sound like a rushing river. I thought about how important the river is to Minneapolis and St. Paul, how roads, buildings, neighborhoods, industry are arranged around it and because of it (ordering the world, setting cities in its sites). I love how Oswald offered this wonderful description of the organizing/ordering force of the river, wedged between these two passages from the dairy worker.

Before:

I’m in a rationalised set-up, a Superplant. Everything’s stainless
and risk can be spun off by centrifugal motion: blood, excre-
ment, faecal matter from the farms

and after:

I’m in milk, 600,000,000 gallons a week.

On March 17th, I wrote a little about Oswald and work/working. I posted two passages by her that discuss the value of labor as a way to know the land: raking and gardening. She writes: “Instead of looking at landscape in a baffled, longing way, it was a release when I worked outside to feel that I was using it, part of it. I became critical of any account that was not a working account.”

This idea of not looking at the landscape in a baffled, longing way fits with some more of her words, in an interview: Landscape and Literature Podcast: Alice Oswald on the Dart River. In this podcast she discusses her resistance to the romanticizing of landscapes:

I’m just continually smashing down the nostalgia in my head. And trying to inquire of the landscape itself what it feels about itself. Rather than bringing my advertising skills — getting rid of words like picturesque…there’s a whole range of words that people like to use about landscape, like pastoral, idyll. I quite like taking the names away from things and seeing what they are behind their names. I exert incredible amounts of energy trying to see things from their own points of view rather than the human point of view.
…more interested in the democratic stories…the hardship of laboring, looking for food…the struggle of a tree trying to grow out of stone…always looking for that struggle. I’m allergic to peace. I like this restless landscape. I like that it won’t let you sit back and say, “what a beautiful place I’ve arrived to.” You’ve never arrived. It’s moving past you all the time.
It’s a day long effort to get your mind into the right position to live and speak well.
Landscape and Literature Podcast: Alice Oswald on the Dart River

I’m thinking about this effort as a form of labor, done in tandem with other forms of labor, like using the land, walking through the land, working on the land. Oswald doesn’t foreground this type of work — the smashing of nostalgia and trying to find better, less romantic, words — in Dart. Is that because that’s her work, as a poet, and she’s trying to keep herself out of the poem? In contrast to Oswald, Mary Oliver frequently discusses her labor of noticing and telling about it. I appreciate Oliver’s emphasis on that difficult labor, but as I read Oswald, I also like the idea of trying to move outside of, or beside, ourselves to imagine things from the point of view of the flower and its struggles, instead of from our point of view as we admire/praise that flower. She gives the example of the flower in this interview, ending with, “It’s a fascinating, hard world for a weed.”

I wonder, is there room in Oswald’s democratic stories for her own efforts at smashing nostalgia and noticing from different perspectives? How would that alter the poem to include the voice of the observer-participant or participant-observer? How might it look if the author’s voice wasn’t absent, but made only one among many, all having value?

my whole style’s a stone wall

In a section on the stonewaller, Oswald offers this great line:

…which is how everything goes
with me, because you see I’m a gatherer, an amateur, a
scavenger, a comber, my whole style’s a stone wall, just
wedging together what happens to be lying about at the time.
page 33

There are so many great lines in this poem!

march 13/RUN

4.45 miles
Veterans’ Home Loop
32 degrees

Ran with Scott this morning. Sunny, spring-like. Lots of black-capped chickadees. I mentioned to Scott that lately I’ve only heard the fee bee call, but not the response. Notes that ascend, but never descend. Today, we also heard woodpeckers and cardinals. Yesterday, the river was covered with a thin sheet of ice; today it’s open again. We stopped at the falls and leaned over the stone wall. I could hear the creek water moving. Scott said he could see it; I hardly ever rely on my vision for things like that anymore.

As we were heading over the tall bridge, above the creek, that leads to the Veterans’ Home, Scott told me about a Sesame Street video with Luis he watched the other day. Scott watched a lot of Sesame Street as a kid; me, not so much. Was it because I had HBO and sisters older than me? Not sure. Anyway, in this Sesame Street clip Luis is helping Telly deal with his worries about forgetting a friend’s name. In giving advice, Luis is super chill and talks to Telly like he’s an equal person, not a freaked out little kid. Wow, I would love to be that chill.

The friend’s name is Alexander Cheesefloss Hollingsworth Cantaloupe the IV. Wow.

Our run was a combination of running and walking. I like running and walking, sometimes stopping to study things more closely. I should try to do more of these in the spring and summer. It’s especially fun doing them with Scott.

So, a few days ago I was reviewing a thread I had saved about meter and how you learn it. In addition to advice (memorize and speak it, move with it, think of it as swing notes in jazz, spend a lot of time breaking it down, focus on poems with very strong meter), many people discussed their struggle with hearing meter because of dialects and english not being their first language. One person mentioned a great essay by Nate Marshall about this, and I found it: A Code Switch Memoir. Nate Marshall describes how, as a young elementary school student, he would struggle with the set of questions on his vocabulary test that asked for the stressed syllable:

This absolutely stumped me. My grandmother, the librarian, was from Montgomery, Alabama and I often heard her pronounce words in ways unlike many of my white friends at school. Her friend, the Arab dude who ran Fame Food & Liquor a few streets from our house, had his own wild pronunciation. Even my mother, her daughter, would shift her vocal patterning on words and phrases depending on if she was talking to us kids after a long day at work or calling the police to report men drinking and shooting dice in the park across the street. The idea that words had specific patterns to be followed did not make sense to me, though I did not know how to articulate why.
A Code Switch Memoir

I struggle with meter. Before reading this essay or the tweets on the meter thread, I hadn’t thought about my own experience with accents and dialects. I was born in the remote Upper Peninsula of Michigan, with its thick Yooper accent until I was almost 5. Then I moved to Hickory, North Carolina, a small southern town with thick southern accents until I was 9. Then southern Virginia (more of the south), and norther Virginia (more East Coast), and Des Moines, Iowa for high school (midwest twang). I went to college in southern Minnesota (lots of Canadian long os), and grad school in the LA area and Atlanta, Georgia. My dad grew up in the UP, my mom in St. Paul. Both of them spent a lot of their early adult life in Illinois (Rock Island, then Chicago). All of these locations and their distinctive dialects have crept into how I speak and how I hear words. Could this be one of the reasons meter is difficult for me? Maybe.

Speaking of accents, as Scott and I were running back from the falls, we talked about cycling and the amazing and unstoppable Tadej Pogačar. In one sentence, Scott said Pogačar’s name in 2 different ways: 1. sounds like Po GA cha and 2. sounds like: PO ga char. The tv announcers often use both of these pronunciations interchangeably. When I pointed it out to Scott, we talked about which one might be right. I mentioned my own name, Puotinen and how there’s the “right” way to pronounce it (as in, how it’s supposed to sound in Finnish), and then there’s the way I pronounce it. My version has much more of a puWAtinen sound, as opposed to the “right” way, which is more PUwotinen. Anyway, I thought I’d find a video of Tadej Pogačar saying his own name:

What do you hear?

I’m fairly new to studying poetry (only seriously since 2017), but my sense is that poetry people have lots of different feelings about meter and whether or not it’s still important. Here’s what Nate Marshall writes about it:

I’ve grown to have a great fondness for formal poetry. I still don’t understand metrical prosody very well but I understand its importance in the tradition. I was asked the question recently whether or not meter was still a useful tool in poetry. I think meter, like anything else, is at play when building the small geniuses of a poem. I think form and verse are important ways to give artistic challenges that can lead to great results. With that said, I believe that every poet and generation of poets has to define and redefine their relationship to form and the role it will play. Whether it’s the fourteen-line sonnet, the sixteen-line rap verse, the six-line stanza of a sestina, or the tercet of a blues poem each poet has to figure how to find and employ the weapons that offer each poem its truest voice.
A Code Switch Memoir

feb 28/RUN

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
35 degrees
30% puddle-covered

Another wonderful, spring-like day, if you consider 35 degrees and white ground everywhere spring-like, which I do. When the sun is this warm, the sky this blue, the birds this chatty, how can you not think of spring? Everywhere, wet: drips, drops, wide puddles stretched across the trail soaking my socks.

10 Things I Noticed

that same bird call that I’ve been hearing and wondering about happened again, right before I reached the river. I heard it, then hoped it would be followed by some drumming. It was! I’m calling it; this sound is a pileated woodpecker
a distant goose, or geese?
cawing crows
cardinals, doing at least 3 or 4 of their 16 (is it 16?) songs
black-capped chickadees
my shadow: off to the side, then behind, then finally in front of me
the shadow of the old-fashioned lamp posts on the trail. So big, they almost looked ,\like giant potholes to me
the river slowly opening. Still white, but darkening and thinning
a kid yelling at the playground. At first, I thought they were a siren — so high-pitched and insistent!
a mixing of sounds: an airplane, a bobcat, a crow, a kid, all crying out

As I left for my run, I remembered something I didn’t want to forget. I’m pleased that I still remember what it was after my run. Scott and I watched the first episode of After Party last night. Very good. Anyway, this episode focused on Aniq. For much of the episode he looked ridiculous: someone/s had drawn cat whiskers and ears on his face, along with the word “nerd” in big letters. It’s very obvious and a crucial element in understanding who he is as a character. Because of my vision problems — my lack of cone cells, limited central vision — I did not see any of this on his face until someone, the detective, finally referenced it. Up to that point, about 40 minutes, it was all invisible to me. I could see his face (well, roughly, I guess) and mostly follow what was going on, but I had no idea anyone had drawn on him. He looked “normal” to me. I wanted to remember this as an example of how my vision works, or doesn’t work, how much I miss that I’m not aware of. It doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but you miss out on a lot of what’s happening and how it’s being communicated when you can’t see certain things and don’t even realize you’re not seeing them (and no one else realizes you’re not seeing them either; they just think you’re not paying attention or being stupid, or that you don’t care).

Here are two poems featuring birds that I encountered today. Both wonderful, both about much more than birds.

Egrets/ Kevin Young

Some say beauty
may be the egret
in the field

who follows after
the cows
sensing slaughter—

but I believe
the soul is neither
air nor water, not

this winged thing
nor the cattle
who moan

to make themselves
known.
Instead, the horses

standing almost fifteen
hands high—
like regret they come

most the time
when called.
Hungry, the greys eat

from your palm,
tender-toothed—
their surprising

plum-dark tongues
flashing quick
& rough as a match—

striking your hand,
your arm, startled
into flame.

In her discussion of the poem for The Slowdown Show, Ada Limón discusses the soul:

The Portuguese writer José Saramago wrote: “Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.” This seems clear enough. The soul is the part of you that you cannot name. One of the reasons I love the obsession that writers have with the soul is that their interest is not confined to what happens to the soul after you die. Rather, writers seem to be interested in what the soul is doing right now. Can the soul have likes or dislikes, coffee or tea, can one soul connect to another in what is called a soul mate? Is our soul only alive in relation to others, in community with nature, with something larger?

And here’s the other poem. It’s about cardinals. I heard, but never saw, many cardinals this morning on my run.

Statement of Teaching Philosophy/ Keith Leonard

In February’s stillness, under fresh snow,
two bright red cardinals leaping
inside a honeysuckle bush.
All day I’ve thought that would make
for a good image in a poem.
Washing the dishes, I thought of cardinals.
Folding the laundry, cardinals.
Bright red cardinals while I drank hot cocoa.
But the poem would want something else.
Something unfortunate to balance it,
to make it honest. A recognition of death
maybe. Or hunger. Poems are hungry things.
It can’t just be dessert, says the adult in me.
It can’t just be joy. But the schools are closed
and despite the cold, the children are sledding.
The sound of boots tamping snow are the hinges
of many doors being opened. The small flames
of cardinals and their good talk in the honeysuckle.

Wow, do I love this line: “The sound of boots tamping snow are the hinges/of many doors being opened.”

One more thing. After my run was done, and I was home, I went outside on my back deck and sat in the sun. Then I recorded this moment of sound. I’m calling it, Spring coming, drip by drip. As I listen back to it, I’m disappointed that trucks are so much louder than the drips.

spring coming, drip by drip / 28 feb 2022

feb 25/RUN

3.5 miles
trestle turn around
17 degrees / feels like 9
100% snow-covered

I was planning to do a short run on the treadmill today, but when I went out to shovel the 2 or 3 inches we got yesterday afternoon and felt the warm sun on my face, I knew I needed to run outside by the gorge. What a beautiful day! Clear sky, bright sun, chatty birds. No wind or frozen fingers. I ran north towards the trestle today, first listening to the gorge, then to an old playlist (songs I remember hearing: “Eye of the Tiger”, “I Knew You Were Trouble”).

10 Things I Noticed

running above the tunnel of trees, on the plowed biking trail instead of unplowed walking path, there were big chunks, almost balls, of snow on the edge of the path. Some were bright white, others with a tinge of gray. I made sure to avoid them but wondered, are these chunks of snow soft or hard? If I hit one with my foot, would it crumble or would my toe?
lots of birds singing, sounding like spring, mostly cardinals, I think. At least one black-capped chickadee doing their fee bee song
ran by the porta-potty below the lake street bridge. The door was closed so I steered clear of it, imagining someone might quickly open it on me, if I was too close. Last week, I ran by it and it was wide open. Why?
the path was completely covered in snow. Some of it was soft, like sand, and difficult to run on. Some of it, was packed down or scraped away by a plow. Will most of this melt in the sun?
the smell of the sewer, near 28th street as I passed a crosswalk. Stinky and fishy and foul
a car doing a 3 point road turn at the top of hill, just past lake street, near longfellow grill
a man and his dog, hanging out near the trestle, just above the steps down to the winchell trail, which are closed for the winter
2 runners, one of them wearing a red coat, shuffling her feet
looking back to check if a biker was coming, see my shadow following me
running down the hill to under the bridge, feeling like I was flying, my arms and feet in sync, my breathing easy

No geese or woodpeckers or kids laughing or crying. No overheard conversations about war or winter. No smells of burnt toast or breakfast sausages. No good mornings to anyone. No run-ins with squirrels or lunging dogs. A great run in which I forgot about a lot of things, and synced up with time in such a way that we both seemed to get lost or disappear or dissolve into the clean, blue air.

While doing some research for a course proposal I’m working on, I found a great article, “Running, Thinking, and Writing.” Here’s a question that was asked to some writers who run, and their answers:

Do you have trouble remembering your creative ideas after you have finished your workout? If so, any strategies?

Aschwanden: “I don’t use a special trick to remember. If the ideas are any good, I’ll remember them. At times I’ll repeat the thing to myself a few times as I run to make sure I’ve instilled it.”

Epstein: “I have a ton of trouble remembering the ideas I come up with while running. Sometimes I’ll tell myself, ‘I must remember this,’ and then five minutes later it’s totally gone. So I’ve taken to doing my own modified version of a memory palace where I make a little story that contains the cues that will remind me. Occasionally I’ve made notes in my phone’s memo app.”

Magness: “Yes, I forget them. This is the biggest problem I have with running as a path to insight. I don’t carry a phone or pen with me, and I don’t have a perfect solution. I often forget my big ‘breakthrough’ and spend hours trying to remember the insight. I try to retain thoughts by repeating them over and over in my head, and tying them to a landmark on the run. For example, if I get an idea while crossing a bridge at mile 4, I’ll incorporate that fact into what I’m trying to remember.”

McDougall: “I don’t want to screw things up by stopping to write notes. I just let it flow and try to visualize the big ideas as movie scenes in my mind. It’s not the words or phrases that matter. You just need to retain the Big Picture, and that’s easier to retain as an image rather than some syntactical word sequence.”

Miller: “Sometimes, I’ll forget. I try to remember by repeating the thought over and over in my head. Or I’ll type a note into my phone.”

Pappas: “I will stop and type in my phone if I have an idea that needs to be actually remembered.”

Switzer: “They are absolutely very difficult to remember. I choose three of the most important ideas, and repeat them like a mantra. I’ll forget others, but can generally hold onto three. I do have to write them down as soon as I get home. If I shower or even stretch first, they’re gone.”

Thompson: “Yes! I do forget. But if I remember something genuinely useful, I will jot it down in Evernote at my desk after the run.”

Here’s a poem I bookmarked last spring. It seems fitting as I think about how running (or just being) by the gorge and noticing more things, then making note of those things, and turning some of them into poems, helped me to endure the 2 years of the pandemic.

Every day as a wide field, every page/ NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

Standing outside
staring at a tree
gentles our eyes

We cheer
to see fireflies
winking again

Where have our friends been
all the long hours?
Minds stretching

beyond the field
become
their own skies

Windows doors
grow more
important

Look through a word
swing that sentence
wide open

Kneeling outside
to find
sturdy green

glistening blossoms
under the breeze
that carries us silently

And there were so many more poems to read!
Countless friends to listen to.
We didn’t have to be in the same room—
the great modern magic.
Everywhere together now.
Even scared together now
from all points of the globe
which lessened it somehow.
Hopeful together too, exchanging
winks in the dark, the little lights blinking.
When your hope shrinks
you might feel the hope of
someone far away lifting you up.
Hope is the thing …
Hope was always the thing!
What else did we give each other
from such distances?
Breath of syllables,
sing to me from your balcony
please! Befriend me
in the deep space.
When you paused for a poem
it could reshape the day
you had just been living.

feb 10/RUN

4.4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
18 degrees / feels like 8
less than 5% snow-covered!

Over the past couple of years, I’ve listened to several running podcasts. On one of them, the host ends the show by asking the guest to give listeners one reason to go out for a run today. More than half of the time, the answer they give is: because you’ll feel better and never regret it. For me, this is true. I’m better after every run and I’m glad I made it outside (or to the basement). Today included. It was colder than I expected, and I felt more sluggish than I’d like, but running for 40 minutes above the gorge and around the falls was an excellent way to occupy the late morning.

10 Things I Noticed

the drumming of a woodpecker on a tree just above the oak savanna
the river, white and flat and quiet
2 or 3 park vehicles in turkey hollow — are they trimming some trees, or what?
the falls, frozen and still
clearest view of the river: between folwell and 38th, beside a split rail fence
best view of the falls: on the opposite end, near Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha” etched on top of a low stone wall. I stopped and stood on some packed down snow — a clear, straight shot of the falls, the creek, and the bluffs around it
the paths were almost completely clear except for a few spots where ice spread across one side (the result of snow that melted in the warm temps on Monday refroze)
kids yelling and laughing at the playground at Minnehaha Academy
a car pulling into one of the parking lots at the falls, then looping around quickly and leaving
About 10 people at the falls, walking above, admiring the view

I’m still working on thinking about “what you see is what you get” and the state fair mannequins, but I’m struggling. Is it possible for me to write about them in a meaningful way? Not sure. This morning, I was thinking more about form. I thought about how I imagine my poem as one of praise for the mannequins, and the improbability that they continue to exist. Then I thought about hymns and how Emily Dickinson wrote in common meter/hymn form. Quatrains: 8/6/8/6, mostly iambic tetrameter/iambic trimeter ABAB rhyme scheme (with lots of slant rhymes) (Common Questions on Emily Dickinson). This sounds exciting and promising, but do I have words to fit this form? Unsure. I also thought about one structure Mary Oliver uses in her poems of praise: First, a detailed description of the delightful thing; then a display of wonder/astonishment, possibly the posing of a question; and, finally, a revelation. I want to try these different approaches with some sort of praise poems, but I’m not sure they work for the mannequins.

One approach to the poem could be to provide more detail and development of the “as-is” mannequins’ location in the creative activities building at the Minnesota State Fair: encased in glass, jammed with sweaters and ponchos, dresses, hats, mittens, aprons. Close to the quilts, the rugs, the weavings. Across from the jars of jellies and jams and pickled beans, pickled peppers, pickled cucumbers. Cookies, breads, cakes, honey. And, for a few years, melted crayon art. The domestic arts. The enemy of convenience, the ready-made, the instant, the quick. Homemade, not store-bought, requiring slow, patient effort, “traditional” techniques. The point of this effort is not to sell (or buy) more of anything, but to pass on these practices, different forms of knowledge (and to win a ribbon). Things in this building are not typically recognized as artistic or possessing Beauty (as a form), but as functional, useful, necessary for survival. Women’s work. How much of this to put in this poem? And, how do I connect that with another important aspect of the mannequins: my kinship with them as strange not quite human aliens who almost look real — almost — but lack that extra something, like the spark in the eye, the direct eye contact. Not sure how (or if) I’ll do this yet.

Here are 2 praise poem that offer some good inspiration as I continue to push through how to write my poem:

Praise the Rain/ JOY HARJO

Praise the rain; the seagull dive
The curl of plant, the raven talk—
Praise the hurt, the house slack
The stand of trees, the dignity—
Praise the dark, the moon cradle
The sky fall, the bear sleep—
Praise the mist, the warrior name
The earth eclipse, the fired leap—
Praise the backwards, upward sky
The baby cry, the spirit food—
Praise canoe, the fish rush
The hole for frog, the upside-down—
Praise the day, the cloud cup
The mind flat, forget it all—

Praise crazy. Praise sad.
Praise the path on which we’re led.
Praise the roads on earth and water.
Praise the eater and the eaten.
Praise beginnings; praise the end.
Praise the song and praise the singer.

Praise the rain; it brings more rain.
Praise the rain; it brings more rain.

I especially like the repetition and the detail of this poem.

This next one, offers a much pithier approach:

All Praises / Lucille Clifton

Praise impossible things
Praise to hot ice
Praise flying fish
Whole numbers
Praise impossible things.
Praise all creation
Praise the presence among us
of the unfenced is.

Wow. Talk about effective condensing! I love the repetition in this one as well. And, that unfenced is? the best!

jan 23/RUN

3.4 miles
river road trail, south/north
2 degrees / feels like 2
100% snow-covered

Cold, but only 2 mph wind and sun, so the feels like temperature was the same as the actual temperature. Nice! A great morning for a run, even if it was too bright, with the sun reflecting off the new snow. For the last two runs, I was inside, and I could have decided it was too cold and too snow-covered again today and ran on the treadmill, but I remembered how much I love running outside in the winter and went for it. Very glad I did. Saw Santa Claus, several fat tires, half a dozen walkers, and a cross-country skier, skiing in the wide boulevard between edmund and the river road. It’s always a great run when I encounter a cross-country skier! The river was pure white and quiet. Two people were shoveling the WPA stone steps at the 44th street parking lot –were they “official” volunteers, or had they just decided to shovel the step because they needed to be cleared? Heard a black-capped chickadee, but not any geese, or cardinals, or crows.

My Glasses/ Jane Hirshfield

Glasses can be taken off.
The world instantly soften, blurs.
The pattern of carpet
or leaves out a window,
words on a page,
the face in a mirror.
Blurs,
even the war that is coming,
pushing its iron boat-shape
onto the sand of a beach not far
but not seen;
even the silences coming,
following the boat
as a swimming dog follows its master.
Lu Chi, poet and scholar,
born into a family of generals,
was executed
in the thirty-fifty year of the Xi Jin dynasty,
after his soldiers’ bodies
blocked the Great Yangtze.
The Yangtze went elsewhere,
blurring the nearby fields.
Merciful blurring, merciful forgetting.
Meeting Lu Chi’s name.
I think of his image of culture
as one axe handle shaping another,
I think of his thoughts about unpainted silk.
Each of the Yangtze dead
had a mother, a father, wife, children,
a well, some chickens.
No, the largesses of glasses is not seeing.

For more on Lu Chi, see Wen fu/Essay on Literature.

jan 9/BIKERUN

bike: 15 minutes
bike stand, basement
run: 2.4 miles
treadmill
2 degrees / feels like -11

For most of the day, the feels like temp was hovering around -20. I have decided that that is too cold for me. So, I stayed inside. Watched a race while I biked, listened to a playlist and part of the Aack Cast by Jamie Loftus while I ran. It’s about the comic strip Cathy and it’s really good.

Some Things I Noticed*

my shadow, flashing, off to my left side, as I ran
in addition to my shadow, some sort of silvery something flashing or streaking or appearing in my left peripheral
the loud whir of the treadmill when I stepped off it to change my playlist (maybe it’s because of my vision, but I cannot pick new music on spotify when I’m in motion). The whirr almost sounded like a plane revving its engine before take off
my fine hair, falling out of my ponytail, felt like a spider web
before I warmed up, it was very cold in the basement
the soft space between beats felt continuous
sometimes my foot strikes were quiet, sometimes they were loud

*It’s difficult to notice things in a boring, dark, unfinished basement, especially when I’m listening to music. Maybe I should try to use my treadmill time for remembering thoughts or ideas?

Found this poem yesterday. Paige Lewis is wonderful, especially how they find delight in small things, and do such strange things with words!

THE MOMENT I SAW A PELICAN DEVOUR/ PAIGE LEWIS

a seagull—wings swallowing wings—I learned
that a miracle is anything that God forgot
to forbid. So when you tell me that saints

are splintered into bone bits smaller than
the freckles on your wrist and that each speck
is sold to the rich, I know to marvel at this

and not the fact that these same saints are still
wholly intact and fresh-faced in their Plexiglas
tomb displays. We holy our own fragments

when we can—trepanation patients wear their
skull spirals as amulets, mothers frame the dried
foreskin of their firstborn, and I’ve seen you

swirl my name on your tongue like a thirst pebble.
Still, I try to hold on to nothing for fear of being
crushed by what can be taken because sometimes

not even our mouths belong to us. Listen, in
the early 1920s, women were paid to paint radium
onto watch dials so that men wouldn’t have to ask

the time in dark alleys. They were told it was safe,
told to lick their brushes into sharp points. These
women painted their nails, their faces, and judged

whose skin shined brightest. They coated their
teeth so their boyfriends could see their bites
with the lights turned down. The miracle here

is not that these women swallowed light. It’s that,
when their skin dissolved and their jaws fell off,
the Radium Corporation claimed they all died

from syphilis. It’s that you’re telling me about
the dull slivers of dead saints, while these
women are glowing beneath our feet.

jan 3/RUN

5 miles
franklin bridge turn around
16 degrees / feels like 9
100% snow-covered

Cold, but much warmer than the last time I ran. 21 degrees warmer. Was planning to wear my Yak trax, which make the soft, slippery snow much easier to run on, but one of them was broken — some of the rubber had ripped. Bummer. Technically, my Yak trax are only for walking, so maybe running is too much for them. Should I find some intended for running? Is it worth the investment? Probably.

Greeted Dave the Daily Walker. He wished me a happy new year. My dorky, overly formal, response: “happy new year to you too.”

It was a little more difficult than usual, running in soft snow. Less traction, more effort from the leg muscles. I was so focused on watching the path, and making sure I didn’t run over a mound of snow, or on ice, that I forgot to look at the river. Well, maybe I glanced at it, but I have no memory of what it looked like. Was it all covered with snow (probably)? Were there any splits in the ice (probably not)? It always amazes me when I forget to look at the river. It’s so big, it’s so there, just below me, how can I forget to look at it?

10 Things I Noticed

4 or 5 geese, flying in a loose formation, honking. Just above the lake street bridge
Daddy Long Legs, walking, in a bright orange vest, with black pants
Graffiti on a piling under the franklin bridge — just the outline of letters, no color. I wasn’t able to read the letters or the word they might have been spelling
The closed gate with an orange sign attached to it, blocking off the entrance to the minneapolis rowing club
voices below the lake street bridge
a man standing in the middle of the walking path, talking to someone sitting on a bench overlooking the white sands beach
the trail covered in loosely packed snow, except for a few narrow trails where feet or bike wheels or both had worn it down almost, but not quite, to bare asphalt
passing a runner, both of us raising our hands in greeting
no stones stacked on the ancient boulder
breakfast smells from longfellow grill — no burnt toast this time, just a subtle, gentle, general/generic smell of savory breakfast

Love Letter/ Diane Seuss

But what can it be if love is a past
tense event? And what
was love then
according to my brain
and what
is love now and how do I direct it
like a beam with the power
to excise all that is not love? For a time
I believed getting and keeping
love required lace. Procuring lace
and arranging it
on my body in a certain way.
Isn’t that funny and/or strange?
I modulated my voice to the northern
region of its register. Reddened
my lips. This was love’s drapery
and music and face.
If you’ve read Madame Bovary, if you’ve read
gothic romance, you know
the denouement of that arc.
When I first read the word denouement
out loud my ex-husband laughed
at my mispronunciation.
I include it here as an illustration
of the fact that love does not conquer
all. Now when I think
of love it’s like focusing too hard
on the mechanisms of blinking or breathing.
You can be blinded or suffocated
by that degree of self-consciousness.
Like a love letter, love seems to me to exist
on a thin plane, a disintegrating page
covered in words scratched
onto the surface with purple disappearing ink
cooked up in a chemistry lab.
I’m sure I’ve written a love letter here
and there. Something gauche,
a performance designed toward
the specific outcome of eternity.
I read of a feral dog who could only be captured
by putting the soiled blankets of her puppies
in a live trap. This is my metaphor for a love letter.
I own a letter my father wrote my mother
when they were newly in love.
The stationery is smallish and decorated
with a garish deep red rose in aching
bloom. He spends most
of his language’s currency bemoaning
his bad spelling. No wonder
she found him charming. For my people
it is the flaw that counts, but not for all
people. Our narrative is an object
lesson in the fact that flawed people
deserve to be loved, at least for a while.
That’s the ephemeral part.
I’m much too sturdy now to invest
in the ephemeral. No, I do not own lace
curtains. It’s clear we die a hundred times
before we die. The selves
that were gauzy, soft, sweet, capable
of throwing themselves away
on love, died young. They sacrificed
themselves to the long haul.
Picture girls in white nighties jumping
off a cliff into the sea. I want to say
don’t mistake this for cynicism
but of course, it is cynicism.
Cynicism is a go-to I no longer have
the energy to resist. It’s like living
with a vampire. Finally, just get it
over with, bite me. I find it almost
offensive to use the word love
in relation to people I actually love.
The word has jumped off
so many cliffs into so many seas.
What can it now signify?
Shall I use the word affinity
like J.D. Salinger, not a good
man, put into the mouths
of his child genius characters? I have
an affinity for my parents. An affinity
for you. I will make sure you are fed
and clothed. I will listen to you
endlessly. I will protect your privacy
even if it means removing myself
from the equation. Do those sound
like wedding vows? Are they indiscriminate?
Well then, I am indiscriminate.
I am married to the world.
I have worked it all out in front of you.
Isn’t that a kind of nakedness?
You have called for a love letter.
This is a love letter.

Wow. Things I love about this: affinity instead of love, sturdy instead of ephemeral, “its like living/with a vampire. Finally, just get it/over with, bite me.”, being married to the world, flawed people as charming, and the final line and how the poem leads you to it.

dec 8/RUN

4.1 miles
river road, north/south
14 degrees
99% snow-covered

Fully boosted! Scott, FWA, and I got our booster shots 2 weeks ago today. Very relieved. I wish RJP could get hers too.

A little warmer today with lots of sun and hardly any wind. The only part of me that was cold this morning were my fingers and only for the first mile. The path was covered mostly in smooth packed snow. Not slippery but still requiring more effort than on dry pavement to lift my feet off the ground. Was able to greet Dave the Daily Walker and a few other walkers that I might have seen before but I can’t remember. The floodplain forest below the tunnel of trees was quiet and wintery and beautiful. Running north, I was distracted by a runner ahead of me, traveling at my same pace. He was far enough ahead that he probably didn’t notice I was there. He was wearing black running tights, black shorts, and a bright blue jacket with some writing or images on the back that I couldn’t identify. The only time I remember noticing the river was when I was high up on edmund at my favorite viewing spot where the sun, when it’s out, makes the small sliver of river peeking through the trees glow white hot. Today, the river was covered with snow and looked flat and dull. No sparkle or glow.

A few words related to my restless poem popped into my head: unsatisfied/not or never satisfied, unsettled, collecting, gathering, assembling

Ilya Kaminsky is in charge of the poem-a-day at poets.org this month and he’s doing a great job. Here’s the one for today from another poet I admire:

Big Clock/ Li-Young Lee – 1957-

When the big clock at the train station stopped,
the leaves kept falling,
the trains kept running,
my mother’s hair kept growing longer and blacker,
and my father’s body kept filling up with time.

I can’t see the year on the station’s calendar.
We slept under the stopped hands of the clock
until morning, when a man entered carrying a ladder.
He climbed up to the clock’s face and opened it with a key.
No one but he knew what he saw.

Below him, the mortal faces went on passing
toward all compass points.
People went on crossing borders,
buying tickets in one time zone and setting foot in another.
Crossing thresholds: sleep to waking and back,
waiting room to moving train and back,
war zone to safe zone and back.

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.

And only the man at the top of the ladder
understood what he saw behind the face
which was neither smiling nor frowning.

And my father’s body went on filling up with death
until it reached the highest etched mark
of his eyes and spilled into mine.
And my mother’s hair goes on
never reaching the earth.

There is so much I love about this poem, for right now I’ll pick: “And collecting words in a different language/for those three primary colors:/staying, leaving, and returning.”

dec 3/RUN

6 miles
franklin loop
37 degrees

Writing this entry almost an hour after my run, it’s sunny, but when I was out by the gorge it was overcast, with some mist or fog or some kind of moisture hanging in the air. Barely any wind. Calm, quiet, peaceful. I thought about the haunting poems I’m working on, and tried to forget Omicron. Just a few days ago, I wasn’t too concerned about this new variant. Without enough data, it’s too early for that. But, even though intellectually and emotionally (at least, I thought) I wasn’t stressed about it, my body has decided to have a mild sinus flair-up. Some pressure in my face/cheeks, a ticklish, scratchy throat. It’s not debilitating, just uncomfortable and distracting. Is this caused by anxiety over this new variant? Possibly. I’m trying to avoid twitter, facebook, and any online news in the hopes that it will calm me down.

Back to the poems I’m working on. Before heading out the door, I gave myself 2 questions to ponder: Who are the ghosts, the dead or the living? Does it depend on how you see (understand, think about, imagine) it? These questions were partly inspired by some lines from Ed Bok Lee in “Halos” that I’m using as an epigraph:

How else, when blinded by life,
would I remember:

to the dead, we’re the ghosts.

When I first read these lines, I was confused by them. I still am, but they seem to fit with how my sequence of poems on haunts/haunting/haunted play around with who is being haunted and who is doing the haunting. I like the idea of not resolving this question and letting both answers be possible at any given time, or at specific times. Sometimes the living are the ghosts, sometimes it’s the dead. I also like the idea of not spelling out what that means, but presenting images that complicate it. Running on the east side of the river, with a gray, mostly sunless sky, I encountered such an image: a pale, still river reflecting a fully formed, clear inverted trestle bridge in the water. Marveling at it, I wondered, which bridge is real, the one that’s right side up or the one upside down? As I continued to look at the water, I noticed fully formed trees, the lake street bridge, and clouds also reflected in the water. Very cool.

This images reminds me of May Swenson’s wonderful poem, Water Picture. Here’s an excerpt:

In the pond in the park
all things are doubled:
Long buildings hang and
wriggle gently. Chimneys
are bent legs bouncing
on clouds below. A flag
wags like a fishhook
down there in the sky.

The arched stone bridge
is an eye, with underlid
in the water. In its lens
dip crinkled heads with hats
that don’t fall off. Dogs go by,
barking on their backs.

10 Things I Noticed

4 stones stacked on the ancient boulder
the clicking and clacking of ski poles as a roller skier approached from somewhere I couldn’t see
running past the old stone steps: a clear, beautiful view of the forest floor and the trail that winds through bare tree trunks to reach the river
the dark brown dirt of the Winchell Trail below me as I neared Franklin
the folding table set up at the White Sands Beach far below me
puddles on the franklin bridge — no ice, only standing water
the ancient boulder on the east side of the river never has any stones stacked on it. Is that because its top isn’t flat enough?
the fence panel that was removed a month or so ago, has been replaced and now, it’s hard to remember (or easy to forget) that it was ever missing
looking down at the the part of the winchell trail that goes under the lake street bridge: the dirt is not a dark brown, but lighter, more yellow, almost like spicy brown mustard
running north on the west side of the river road: car headlights approaching me through the trees

One more thing: I was able to greet both Dave, the Daily Walker and Mr. Morning! — that’s the name I came up with right now for the walker I’ve been seeing lately who likes to greet me with an enthusiastic, “morning!” I think he wears a darker blue coat, a stocking cap, and sunglasses. Mr. Morning! I love it.

I love how poets.org has an “about this poem” for each poem of the day. The one for today’s poem (from “The Book of Absence”) is very fitting for what I’m working on with my haunting poems:

About this Poem:
This is not poetry. This is a reading of the moment. Read it in the moment and pass on. Do not linger. Go. We don’t go to places. We go from places. We are dedicated to going, not staying. In going, we fade away. Consider my poetry as if you are walking down a road. Someone calls your name. You turn your head. There is nobody around. The road is deserted. Empty. You tell yourself somebody must have been there. But there is no one. Consider my poetry like that moment.”
—Alireza Roshan, translated by Erfan Mojib and Gary Gach
source

nov 29/RUN

4 miles
river road, north/south
50! degrees

Wow! Warm this afternoon. Ran at 3, about an hour and a half before sunset. The light was very cool. I might want to run again at this time. The best part: running above the gorge, over the river and the Winchell Trail, I was positioned just right so that I cast a shadow onto the water far below. Today my shadow got to swim. At least one of us could. Encountered some high schoolers running with sticks or ski poles or something. I couldn’t tell what they were. After I was done, I took off my visor, forgetting that I also had my bright pink headband on. A few minutes later I remembered and noticed it was gone. I retraced my steps and amazingly, was able to find it in the grass. I can’t believe I realized I had lost it, and I can’t believe I could see it in the grass.

Here’s something I read earlier today, which I love:

from Among the Trees/ Carl Phillips

SOME TREES ARE compasses, and some are flags. If a flag tells you where you are, a compass can potentially tell you how to get there or how to find someplace else. A flag, in marking a spot, seems more definitive, a form of punctuation; a compass implies movement, navigation. I know a man who, whenever he needs to write, or cry, or think—really think—goes to a willow in his local park and hides beneath its draped branches. He goes there so often, you could almost say he’s become part of the willow; he seems a willow himself; he marks a place in my life where I stopped to rest, once, but I couldn’t stay. Then there’s another man, long ago now. His body a forest when seen from the air in a small plane, so that it’s possible to get close enough to see where the oaks give way to poplar trees, or where, if you follow the pines far enough, they’ll open out to a field across which you can see the ocean. I couldn’t have found my way here without him.

I love the idea of trees as flags and compasses, and I love his description of the man who retreats to the willow. One of my favorite poems by Phillips features a willow, “And Swept All Visible Signs Away.” In it, could Phillips be referencing the willow man?

Here’s something else I read yesterday on twitter. I want to think some more about the differences between an eruption and a scattering:

when most people say their mind has been blown I think they mean like a volcano erupting but when I say it I mean my brain is a plucked dandelion someone’s scattered with their breath
@toddedilliard

nov 7/RUN

3.15 miles
turkey hollow
50 degrees
humidity: 81%

Shorts weather. Overcast, everything a brassy yellow with brown and gray. A nice run in my new shoes. Cold update: almost gone. Just a thin layer of crud lining the throat, lungs, in the nose. Slighter harder to breathe when running.

Went to Gustavus Adolphus College for FWA’s first fall band concert yesterday. Very cool. I love that he’s attending the same school Scott and I did. It’s so great to go back and remember where my life began. Before the concert we walked around the arboretum/prairie, to a big sculpture of a bison on a small hill. As we walked the mowed grass trail, we saw a “river of birds” above our heads (love this phrase, river of birds, which is how a friend from band that we saw at the concert described it). Thousands of birds flying above us, their wings flapping like thunder. I think they might be starlings or swallows? An amazing thing to witness — the whole sky filled, looking like static. A few times, right above our heads, the birds would split up, with a mass of them flying left of us, another mass flying right.

At some point during my run, I began counting in 3s and doing triple berry chants: strawberry/blueberry/raspberry — raspberry/blackberry/gooseberry. I added in mystery and later: ri/ver/road ri/ver/gorge run/ning/path thir/ty/eighth (for 38th street steps) tres/tle/bridge. I stuck mostly with the meter: stressed/unstressed/unstressed. I should remember what meter this is, but I always forget: is it iambic or anapest. I started chanting those two: an/a/pest — i/am/bic Sometimes An/a/pest, sometimes an/a/Pest I/am/bic i/am/Bic

Just looked it up:

anapest = unstressed unstressed stressed
iambic = stressed unstressed
dactyl = stressed unstressed unstressed

So, it was dactyls, not iambic or anapest. I KNOW I’ve written about this a few years ago, and I’ve reviewed it many times. Will I ever remember? I think I should print it out and put it under the glass on my desk, so I can look at it all the time.

Anyway, as I was thinking about meter and form, I decided that I’d like to use triples — with dactyls and anapests — as the meter (or form?) for another poem about haunting, with the theme of a faint trail, the trace, the worn dirt as path and evidence of others, the residue/remains as offering (poem, an alleluia on the page, Mary Oliver).

Here’s a poem that fits with this idea of what remains (or refuses to die/leave?, that persists, offers up something unexpected or not quite locatable):

Perennials/ Maggie Smith

Let us praise the ghost gardens
of Gary, Detroit, Toledo—abandoned
lots where perennials wake
in competent dirt & frame the absence
of a house. You can hear
the sound of wind, which isn’t
wind at all, but leaves touching.
Wind itself can’t speak. It needs another
to chime against, knock around.
Again & again the wind finds its tongue,
but its tongue lives outside
of its rusted mouth. Forget the wind.
Let us instead praise meadow & ruin,
weeds & wildflowers seeding
years later. Let us praise the girl
who lives in what they call
a transitional neighborhood—
another way of saying not dead?
Or risen from it? Before running
full-speed through the sprinkler’s arc,
she tells her mother, who kneels
in the garden: Pretend I’m racing
someone else. Pretend I’m winning.

nov 1/RUN

4.25 miles
marshal loop + extra*
36 degrees/ feels like 30

*the extra was running back from st. paul over the other side of the bridge, which dumps out on the west river road at the top of a hill, instead of its bottom

Last week when FWA was home from college, he had a cold. Not covid, but a cold. He gave it to RJP, who had it late last week, who then gave it to me this weekend. The cycle for all of us seems to be the same: 1. a scratchy throat which blooms into a sore throat over night; 2. sore throat, some fatigue, then feeling fine except for the sore throat; 3. a little more fatigue and lots of mucous (sniffing, clearing throat, coughing); and 4. losing your voice. Today, I’m in stage 3. Felt tired and unmotivated this morning, but decided that is was too nice of a morning not to go run. Besides, I always feel better when I’m running, especially when I’m sick. Strange as it seems to me, when I’m sick, which isn’t that often, I always forget about it when I’m running. I’m surprised that having a cold isn’t stressing me out. It feels very different than my usual stuffed up/sinus infections, and makes me wonder how much those are triggered by anxiety. The body is a freaky, strange thing.

I ran north on the river road to the lake street bridge. Then over it and up the marshall hill. Right on Cretin, back over to the river, down the hill above shadow falls, under the lake street bridge, up the stairs on the far side, over the bridge and back to minneapolis. Down the hill, up the other side, beside the old stone steps, through the tunnel of tree, past the ravine.

10 Things I Noticed

The Welcoming Oaks were bare
3 stones stacked on the ancient boulder
More leaves have fallen in the floodplain forest. Almost a view to the river
The river looked cold and slate blue, clear, from the bridge
The sky was overcast and gray, which makes everything even fuzzier with my vision
Between 32nd and lake street, the Winchell Trail, far below the river road trail, was visible. No more leaves concealing it and generating more mystery
Running above shadow falls, I saw a truck on the other side of the ravine now that limbs are bare, which enabled me to see how the trail and road curve sharply around the wide gulch made by the river jutting in
The railroad trestle, from the other side of lake street bridge
A runner in an orange sweatshirt and orange stocking cap, running smoothly with a steady, high cadence, looking relaxed
The wind rushing by my covered ears on the bridge

I love October, and I love November almost as much. I am not sad about the falling leaves and the coming snow. I’m excited about what it brings: winter running, better views, bare branches, mysteries solved, fresher air. Here’s a poem I post almost every year. This year, I want to take 5 minutes to memorize it (finally):

Fall, leaves, fall/ EMILY BRONTË

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night’s decay
Ushers in a drearier day.

This poem is the first for my November theme: lifting the veil. I plan to explore poems and ideas about this liminal time when the leaves are gone, and the snow has not yet arrived.

oct 9/RUN

4 miles
wabun park + turkey hollow
65 degrees
humidity: 86% / dewpoint: 61

A little too sticky, but what a beautiful morning for a run! Sunny, calm, quiet. Before running felt uneasy about something I couldn’t name; running helped. I’m thinking about ghosts and haunting the path (frequenting it, floating above it, flashing through it) and trying to find a way into my next big project — my annual fall project. Something about the periphery and the approximate as not quite (human, able to see or connect, in this world, real). I need a door, or at least a window — anything that might let me enter this project.

10 Things I Noticed

The trail, covered in leaves, a lot of them red — not bright red, but faded, almost pink
A processional of walkers, bikers, big groups of runners on the trail between 36th and 42nd
A clanging collar on the other side of the boulevard, following me as I ran south
Someone playing frisbee golf at Wabun, throwing a frisbee from the path. Were they playing or working, picking up frisbees others had left behind? Why were they throwing from the path? Why did it look — in my quick, unreliable, glance — that they had a golf bag?
For over a year and a half, every time I run up 47th, as part of the turkey hollow loop, there is a dumpster parked on the street, in front of a house. It was still there today. Have they been remodeling their house for that long?
The ford bridge, from the top of the hill at wabun, then from below, at the bottom of the path
My shadow in the grass as I walked across turkey hollow
The too white, newly redone road between 42nd and folwell, one side of it covered in leaves
Feeling someone running at my same pace–me on edmund, them on the river road. Not wanting to look over to check too closely, trying not to race them
The dirt trail between Becketwood and Minneahaha Academy Lower Campus, dry, covered with leaves, much more worn and well-traveled (haunted) than the barely there mostly tamped down grass, partly dirt path in front of Minnehaha Academy Upper Campus

Haunt/ Maya Phillips

Because there are so few hobbies left
to the dead, my father gives himself this:
his usual route, the Queens-bound F
to Continental, where he walks with the living
to work. Every day he finds a new occupation—
picks trash off the tracks, changes a dirty lightbulb,
makes rounds on the platforms,
tries to make some small use of his hands,
though no one notices
or acknowledges. Yet still he returns
every day, in his tan shirt and brown slacks
ironed with the impatience
of the perpetually late,
his keys jingling carelessly
in his left front pocket.

Twenty-plus years with the MTA
but some other guy’s got the job now,
someone younger, maybe someone
my father knows, standing in the operating booth
at the end of the platform, watching
the miniature trains on the board
carry lights through a digital New York.
And maybe the young man knows nothing
of the dead man, has no words
for a ghost who builds a home
of his absence. 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, counting
the 10, 20, 30 more years till retirement,
cuz he’s close, he’s in the final stretch—any day
now and he’ll finally go on that vacation.

sept 12/RUN

2.25 miles
dogwood loop
58 degrees

Ran with Scott north on the river road trail to the trestle, through Bracket Park, then over to Dogwood Coffee. Great weather for a run. Not too hot or humid, hardly any wind, overcast. Saw Dave, the Daily Walker and after I called out to him, he greeted both us, remembering Scott’s name. Impressive, considering he’s only met Scott once, and it was when I introduced them while running by quickly about 2 years ago! Noticed a few red leaves. Heard the rowers below us. No geese (yet) or wild turkeys or large groups of runners. Some bikers and walkers and signs for an event by the river yesterday: “free rowing” and “free canoe rides.” It would have been fun to try the rowing. Oh well.

Here’s an updated version of the poem I posted yesterday. I’ve fit it into my five beat form. Not sure if it works yet, and I’d like to add more.

At the lake the fish in me escapes

All winter she waits
barely alive iced
under skin. By june
restless. Together
we enter the cold
water but before
the first stroke she’s gone
reborn in endless
blue remembering
fins forgetting lungs
legs january.

sept 11/SWIM

1 mile
lake nokomis main beach
70 degrees

Another chance to swim in the lake this morning! Every swim now is a bonus. Much less choppy today but still not smooth. Overcast. I kept seeing silver streaks below me, most likely fish. I’ve been writing/revising some poetry lately about being in and one with the lake and the fish, but it takes me a few minutes to get over my fear of fish below. Most of them are small, probably all of them are harmless, but there are a few bigger fish that could bump into me. It’s a bit ridiculous, I suppose. It didn’t stop me from swimming, although it might have been the reason I only swam 1 mile and not 2. As I felt a little panic in the first loop I thought, how could I ever swim in the ocean or across a bigger lake, if these silver streaks are freaking me out? Then I remember an essay I read by Lauren Groff about swimming in the ocean and how the fear of the unknown below you and learning how to manage it or embrace it is part of the point. I was unsettled, but I still swam, so maybe I could swim in the ocean…

10 Things I Noticed

A seagull perched on a white buoy, flying away only seconds before I reached it
Small undulations in the water, sometimes looking like waves, sometimes something else (a fish?a stick? another swimmer?)
A few small vines brushing my shoulder, a leaf touching my finger
A family of 3 on a kayak or a canoe or a paddle board — I couldn’t tell with my eyes half in, half out of the water
Drums beating across the lake from the Monarch Butterfly Festival
A little girl repeatedly singing while in the water, “Swim with me in the sea!” as I waded out from the beach
Fluffy, shredded clouds covering the mostly blue sky
A plane flying fast overhead
The bubbles from my hand as it entered the water and pushed down below my torso
The dude standing on some motorized paddle board/hoverboard, speeding across the lake after my swim — a strange, unreal sight

Getting back to the fish below me, before I went swimming, I was working with one of my favorite lines from Anne Sexton’s wonderful poem, “The Nude Swim:”

All the fish in us
had escaped for a minute.
The real fish did not mind.
We did not disturb their personal life.
We calmly trailed over them
and under them

As I was swimming, pretending to be a fish for 30 minutes, I wondered what the real fish below me thought. Were there any real fish there? If so, what did I look like to them, up above on the surface? Did my form cast a shadow below? In the turgid water, could they even sense me above?

In a document named “fragmentsforswimminglatefall,” I found the start of a poem based on the first bit from Sexton’s poem: All the fish in us/ had escaped for a minute.”

At the lake
I let loose the fish in me
all winter she has waited
barely alive
under the surface
of my icy skin
now in june
she is restless
together we enter
the cold water
before I take
my first stroke
she is gone
reborn in endless blue
remembering her fins
forgetting january

This poem needs some work, but I like the idea of letting loose the fish in me.

sept 1/BIKESWIMBIKE

bike: 8.5 miles
lake nokomis and back
71 degrees

A great day for a bike ride. I haven’t rode my bike since August 3rd (wow), and it took a few minutes for my brain to get used to it again. Much harder to see at the beginning. No panic. Pretty soon, it was a little easier. I’m hoping to bike more during September and October before it gets too cold and I have to bring the bike inside to the basement. I never know if this will be the last season I can see well enough to bike.

swim: 2 miles / 10 loops
main beach
73 degrees

Windier and choppier today. Still a wonderful swim. Sunny, sparkling water, some sailboats, blue sky, fuzzy green trees. The first loop was harder than the rest. Difficult to get into a rhythm. Once I did, I was able to stop thinking about sighting or stroking and let my mind wander.

An idea occurred to me: when I think about how much I love swimming in the lake, it’s rarely (if ever) about being fully and completely immersed, deep under the water. It’s about being just below the surface, or at the surface but under the water, with an occasional raising of my eyes to see the air or a boat or the world beyond the water. I was thinking about this partly because I’ve become increasingly interested in surfaces and depths (sinking and floating), but mostly because I’m editing a poem I wrote a few years ago titled, “submerged.” Here’s my latest version of it:

submerged

Every 5 strokes a breath
twist left lift up mouth opens
twist right lift up air enters
quick intake above then
5 full beats below this
exhale a chance to dream
a little longer a
way to forget one thing
remember something else
a thought: could above be
the dream below what’s real?
Are hard surfaces the
Illusion fluid edges
the truth? Is belief in
a separate self false? Yes.
My body is not mine
but ours together — fish
water swimmers — all lake
all longing to stay submerged
5 strokes at a time I
am not I but we joined
freed from gravity’s pull
hungry lungs’ demands. Home.

After I finished my swim and was sitting on the sand, I recorded a voice memo with some thoughts:

after swim sept 1

According to the dictionary, submerged means under water–not necessarily deep under water or at the bottom, just fully under water. I want to think more about this word and if it is the right title for my poem. Do I want to be submerged, or something else?

Today is the first day of September. Time for a new theme. Approximate. I wrote about it on August 20:

not quite knowing or roughly/approximately knowing. Not exactly but mostly, almost but never completely. Part of the picture, but never the whole thing. I’ve been writing a lot about bewilderment and unknowingness. This not quite knowing is not bewilderment but something else. Not wild, not lost, but not found either.

Here’s today poem on the theme:

Approximate Poem/ Paul Hall (1977)

The things that I habitually say
are obvious. Why repeat them? Besides,
they are never what I meant to say.
The things that I want to say are like the book
next to the book that you took from the library
shelf. Now you’re disappointed, aren’t you. Now you’re
dozing with that book sunk into your chest
like a gravemarker, and from now on, that book
keeps your place in death, wherever it is.
But that has nothing to do with what I
want say in this poem. And even if
you had picked the right book, what I would like to say
would be beneath your thumb as you turn the page,
(In the margin, actually, and would
that make me a marginal type? marginally
human?) What I want to say is always
peripheral. What I really have to say
limps. What I want to say causes people
to dial our number by mistake. Your
abruptness with them gags me. The man
across the street is idly swinging
a golf club. What I would really like to say
is disintegrating from wind divots.
What I’d like to say loses traction
along my larynx and comes out “uh.”

However, clearing my throat accordions
what I intend to say into an
unintelligible grunt. An important
oration that I had in mind was
sky written in sparrow farts. I suppose
you missed it. I have a sore throat. It is
the pass over of intended statements.
My dentist says that I eat too much sugar.
I say that my cavities are the
terrorist bombings of a frustrated
authority. Consequently, important
clues to what I have always wanted to say
are buried under my fillings. Much of
what I’d still like to say gets in the way
of breathing. I had to quit smoking. What I
meant to say was escaping under
a smoke screen. What I would like to say is
every word that you have ever regretted
saying. So the next time you think you’re about
to make a fool of yourself, don’t stop.
Say it. You can always defend yourself
by saying that you didn’t mean to say
that. You can even blame it on me.
And I will know what I had in mind
and everybody will be satisfied.
That is to say. . .

august 23/RUNSWIM

run: 7 miles
lake nokomis and back
70 degrees / dew point: 66

My longest run in a few years. I’m tired. Ran to the lake then stopped for a few minutes by the little beach. Walked for a few minutes, then ran next to the parkway until I reached minnehaha falls. On the way to the lake, I ran by the creek. It’s not completely dried up, but there’s hardly any water. I didn’t run through it, just by it, but I’ve seen pictures of minnehaha park–no falls. The entire state of Minnesota is in a drought, with a few parts in severe drought. The creek is almost dry because it gets its water from Lake Harriet and Lake Harriet is too low. I haven’t noticed Lake Nokomis being any lower–is it?

It is 4 miles to lake nokomis. Sometimes it seems longer than that because of all the different areas you run through:

river road
minnehaha falls
mustache bridge on the parkway over hiawatha avenue — which years ago had a handlebar mustache spray-painted on the side, but now (just noticed it yesterday) has a mushroom spray-painted near but not on it
near the duck bridge by my old neighborhood
the echo bridge
my favorite part of the path, right before nokomis avenue
the new part of the trail that travels under 28th avenue
near lake hiawatha
up the hill between hiawatha and nokomis lakes
beside lake nokomis rec center on the hill
down to the lake

I ran this route partly to check out how dry the creek is. I almost forgot to look, too distracted by the effort of running. Didn’t see any herons or cranes. Heard a few black-capped chickadees. No geese or ducks or turkeys. Encountered bikers, walkers, runners, 2 swimmers.

Yesterday I posted a poem by Rita Dove and wondered about the connection between love and mercy. Here’s a poem by another favorite poet, Carl Phillips, in which this connection is questioned:

Sky Coming Forward/ Carl Phillips

How the birches sway, for example. How they
tilt, on occasion, their made-to-tilt-by-the-wind
crowns. How by then he had turned his head
away, as if a little in fear; or shy, maybe . . . Also
the leaves having stopped their falling. Or there
were no leaves left — left to fall. Which to call
more true? Love
or mercy? Both of his hands
upraised, but the better of the two tipped more
groundward, the other a lone bird lifting, as if from
a wood gone steep with twilight. Sometimes, an
abrupt yet gentle breaking of the storm
inside me:
for a moment, 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?

mercy = compassion, forgiveness
love = deep affection, intense interest in something, attachment, devotion

I need to spend a lot more time with this poem in order to begin to understand it, but here are a few thoughts:

“Which to call/ more true? Love/ or mercy?” Just a few days, I was revisiting another Phillip’s poem I memorized last year, “And Swept All Visible Signs Away.” As I read this question about love and mercy, I was reminded of these lines from “And Swept…”: “And what is a willow doing in the darkness?/ I say it wants less for company than compassion,/ which can come from afar and faceless.” Compassion = mercy, connection = love? I’m fascinated by this distinction between mercy/compassion and love/connection, and Phillip’s almost, but maybe not quite, preference for compassion. What if, as we try to live with/are dependent on and vulnerable to a wide range of people, we thought more about compassion, less about love? Or, could compassion (a form of generosity?) be a different type of love?

“the rings that form then disappear/ around where some latest desire — lost, or abandoned — dropped once, and disturbed the water. To forget –/ then remember . . .” Rings and ripples disturbing the water. Not sure what to do with this yet, but I like the image and the idea (which I’ve explored before) of ripples–traces of something that moved, disrupted, transformed. How long do those ripples last? What does it mean to forget then remember? And then, the idea of rings as loops or orbiting and encircling? Very cool.

“there’s a third life” This reminds me of a quote from a D.H. Lawrence poem that was mentioned in a book I was reading about water:

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one,
but there is also a third thing, that makes it water

Water as another way to be, another life, another possibility beyond what is and what we want/imagine and hope for? I love this idea and want to spend more time with it.

swim: 2 miles
cedar lake open swim
90 degrees

What a great night for a swim! Warm, sunny, calm. The water was mostly smooth and buoyant, easy to swim in. Felt strong and confident and happy. As I started, someone swimming about my pace was just ahead of me. I followed them for a few laps, occasionally wondering if they noticed me and if they cared I was there. Part of me was enjoying following them, and part of me considered pausing to let them go ahead. Usually I like to swim alone. After two laps, they were gone.

Other Swimmers

Someone swimming almost right down the center from buoy to buoy, at times looking like they were way over on the wrong side of the buoy. They probably weren’t that close; it was just my vision and my inability to judge how close or far away someone is — usually, everyone looks closer, too close, which is especially difficult for me because I like/need to have space, room. This swimmer splashed a lot and when they reached the buoy they started to do a tight turn, which I was following, but then abruptly stopped. Narrowly avoided running into them
Someone ahead of me, swimming breaststroke. I was swimming into the bright sun, unable to see much of anything but the break in the trees I use for sighting. I began to feel something in the water, some churning. I knew it was another swimmer but I couldn’t see them at all. Finally, a bright pink head appeared. A breaststroker. As I swerved around them I thought about the different ways other than sight that I use to become aware of other people
Someone swimming even farther away from the orange buoy than me. I could see their elbows and splash out of the corner of my eye. As we neared the beach, swimming at about the same pace, I wondered when they could cut in closer to round the buoy and whether or not I might have to watch out for them so we wouldn’t collide
Another swimmer swimming breaststroke. As usual, it seemed like it took too long to pass them. Once I had, I glanced back over my shoulder as I breathed to see their jerkily bobbing head

Because the water was calm, I was able to breath on both sides (it’s called bilateral breathing). Every five. Sometimes, every 3 then 4. No neck or hip or thigh pain, but a slight twinge under my right shoulder blade. Now, out of the water, writing this the morning after, my upper back on the right side is sore.

Anything else? I swam 4 loops without stopping. Stopped for a minute or two, then did one more loop. Oh–felt some extreme temperature changes in the water right near the shores. Much warmer then much colder. I like the extra cool pockets better than the warm ones. Why was it so warm?

Learned that one popular motto for open water swimming is: No lanes, no lines, no walls (sometimes with the addition: no limits — also found one instance of no mercy). Maybe this could be the title of a poem?

random thought: For several years now, I’ve been reading/listening to Agatha Christie books. Yesterday I finished, Destination Unknown, which is about spies and money as power and hidden labs, and not quaint village murders. The ending of it, which I won’t reveal, reminded me yet again of Christie’s anti-capitalist streak. She writes a lot about the decay of moneyed families, lost wealth (through mismanagement, especially being swindled into investing in worthless Argentinian mines), the nihilism of those trying to hang onto their wealth–their willingness to murder to retain just a bit of it, the decline of the servant class, and how terrible suburbs are. I came up with a title for something — a blog? a poem? a band?: Agatha Christie Hates Suburbs. When I searched “Agatha Christie anti-capitalism,” I found an intriguing article by the postmodern cultural critic (someone I read a lot in grad school) Slavoj Žižek: On Agatha Christie and the Dawn of a Postcapitalist Era. It’s a close reading of her 80th book, Passenger to Frankfurt, which I just started listening to. When I’m finished, I’ll read the article. Nice.

august 18/RUNSWIM

run: 3.15 miles
2 trails
78 degrees / dew point 67
sunny

Started and ended with Queen (Another One Bites the Dust) and a running playlist, in the middle, sounds from the gorge — laughing kids at a playground, scurrying animals in the dry brush, crunching gravel, trickling sewer pipes.

Now, sitting at my desk, I’m hearing the electric buzz of the cicadas. …and now, one or two minutes later, they’ve stopped. Now I hear birds–pretty sure it’s cardinals–and a kid repeatedly saying, “Uh oh uh oh uh oh!” An adult in a cooing voice: “Do you need help?” and “You’re not a baby, you’re a BIG girl!”

When I was running on the Winchell Trail, at the steepest part without a railing, I tried looking quickly at the river. Blue. Decided it was better to absorb it through my peripheral. Safer. I thought about how I like these bodily experiments (tracking my thoughts, what I notice) I’m doing as I run and swim. How they enable me to apply theories I’ve been playing around with for decades about epistemology and ontology and ethics.

I’ve been listening to an interview with Kaveh Akbar on Between the Covers, and I was struck by his definition of work in terms of revolutionary poetics:

One thing that I think about a lot is that a revolution comes in two parts; there’s the overthrow and the rebuild. Without either of those parts, it’s not a revolution. There has to be something being turned over and then there has to be something being set up in its place. It’s very easy to inhabit the carapace of revolutionary rhetoric without advancing something new. That, in and of itself by definition, isn’t revolutionary because there’s no rebuild. There’s no gesture towards a rebuild. I’ve talked to my students and my friends and the people with whom I’ve had this conversation in these discussions. I think a lot about the physics definition of work which is the force applied to an object in order to move it. If there’s force applied to an object and nothing moves, that’s not work. Similarly, if an object moves but you haven’t applied force to it, then you haven’t done work. If I say to a room full of people who agree with me, “F*ck Trump,” and I say that in a room full of poetry people, probably the majority of them will be like, “Yeah, f*ck Trump.” I haven’t really caused anything to move. I’ve inhabited the form of revolutionary rhetoric but I haven’t actually moved anything. By the physics definition of work, probably that’s not doing much or any work.
Kaveh Akbar Interview

I think I’ll add this definition to my work page on undisciplined.

swim: 2 miles / 2 loops
cedar lake open swim
88 degrees / windy

Another windy day, another wave-filled lake. I’d like to be able to compare this to the sea or ocean. I know cedar lake waves are gentle swells, but how much more gentle, how much less choppy than a normal swim in the sea? Tonight, I did a better job of staying on my side of the lake as I swam towards the far beach. For the first few minutes of the swim, I felt weightless, light, but it didn’t take long for the water to drag my body down into the water. I didn’t want to, but I felt like I was having a fight with the water. Every stroke felt slightly off, not smooth, not easy.

Even struggling, it was a great swim. What a wonderful thing to be able to swim so much this summer! Already this week, 4 days in a row. I enjoyed glancing up at the sky sometimes when I breathed. It was mostly sunny, with some hulking clouds. One big cloud hovered behind me as I swam across. It loomed, almost menacingly, but I didn’t mind. I noticed the soft forms of the tree tops to my left and imagined fall coming (too?) soon. To my right, as I headed back, I could see something, not quite shining–I determined it was a small gap in the trees with the sun barely peeking through. Because of the bright sun and my vision, the orange buoy was completely invisible–was it to everyone else? Probably a little, but not as much as it was to me. I knew it was there, so I kept swimming, but I couldn’t see it until I was almost to it. This not-seeing is happening more this summer. It barely bothers me. It’s tiring, but I know I’m swimming the right way–using other landmarks and my established map of the route–so I don’t worry.

I do not like breaststroke. I recognize its value, especially in choppy water, and how it makes some swimmers feel more comfortable in the water, but I dislike being around breaststrokers. The irritating bobbing, which is hardly ever smooth, but jerky. The wide, strong kick. And the way that as I approach someone swimming breaststroke, it always seems very hard to pass them. They seem to be racing me for a bit, then they disappear. I know this is just how I see them–and perhaps it’s distorted by bad vision–and I know that it is ridiculous to dislike breaststroke for these reasons, but I do.

how could I forget this moment?

Had to revisit this log entry to add something that I almost forgot: after I finished swimming, as I was drying off, there was a young kid–less than 5, I think?–who kept repeating, “nanana boo boo.” At least 50 times. In the best (as in most effectively embodying) version of a bratty voice I’ve ever heard. Wow. STA walked by the kid and said he looked and sounded like a cartoon character of a bratty kid. He was not saying this to us, but to another kid, or to himself. Over and over and over again. It was both annoying and delightful. I’m glad I witnessed it and I’m glad it’s over.

The Swimmer/ Mary Oliver

All winter the water
has crashed over
the cold the cold sand. Now
it breaks over the thin

branch of your body.
You plunge down, you swim
two or three strokes, you dream
of lingering

in the luminous undertow
but can’t; you splash
through the bursting
white blossoms,

the silk sheets—gasping,
you rise and struggle
lightward, finding your way
through the blue ribs back

to the sun, and emerge
as though for the first time.
Poor fish,
poor flesh

you can never forget.
Once every wall was water,
the soft strings filled
with a perfect nourishment,

pumping your body full
of appetite, elaborating
your stubby bones, tucking in,
like stars,

the seeds of restlessness
that made you, finally,
swim toward the world,
kicking and shouting

but trailing a mossy darkness—
a dream that would never breathe air
and was hinged to your wildest joy
like a shadow.

Not sure how I feel about this water-as-womb idea. I like the idea of imaging a time before I/we were so separated from everything else, but not sure about the womb imagery. I like the line, “Poor fish,/ poor flesh./ You can never forget.”

july 30/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back (on the winchell trail)
72 degrees

They canceled open swim today; the air quality is dangerous (176, which is unhealthy). The smoke from the fires up north is still here. I’m disappointed but also relieved. I can still feel the effects from the smoke of last night’s swim. I went out for a run instead, which made me feel better. I didn’t have any trouble breathing. Ran to the falls and back. The falls were low; no roaring, rushing water. I saw a large bird–a turkey vulture? hawk?–high up in the sky. I don’t remember hearing any black capped chickadees or cardinals or woodpeckers. Running at the start of the Winchell Trail, I (too?) quietly warned the walker ahead of me that I was coming. He had headphones on and didn’t hear me. Then he turned, saw me, and uttered, in surprise, “Oh God!” I wasn’t running fast, so it was no big deal. Just funny. Heard some water trickling out of the sewer pipe at 42nd. Don’t remember what I thought about, but I do remember trying to forget the increased anxiety I have over wildfires and Delta variants. Some days it’s a struggle hanging onto joy and delight in the midst of so much evidence that everything is falling apart.

Water: a smoky river, not glittering in the hazy sun; a subdued waterfall; a receding creek; dripping ponytail, forehead, back; trickling pipes; thirst and the desire for some sips from a water fountain; an empty, swimmer-less lake

july 21/RUNSWIM

run: 3.55 miles
2 trails
68 degrees
air quality warning, smoke from fires in canada

The air didn’t feel too smoky this morning, not hard to breathe. Overcast. A dark green. For a few minutes, heard a roller skier approaching from behind, their ski poles click click click clicking. Encountered more runners than walkers, a few bikers. Turned down at 44th to the start of the Winchell Trail. A wonderful dark, mysterious green. Heard the steady dripping of the sewer pipe. Also heard the rowers on the river. 2 coxswains, 1 male and 1 female, instructing the rowers: “Make sure you use your legs in the first half of your stroke. It should be mostly legs.”

Last week I mentioned to STA that there was some asphalt on the part of the dirt trail between 38th and the savanna. He didn’t think so. Today, running, I noticed that it was almost all dirt, but that there were a few chunks of asphalt–at least it looked like asphalt to me as I ran by it. Was it? I think so. How long ago was this trail abandoned to the dirt–the glacial till? The chain link fence beside it is in rough shape–this is the spot where there’s a tree trunk growing through the fence and a fence growing out of the tree limbs. Was it in the last century–the 1980s or 90s–that they repaired the fence or repaved the trail here?

Ran by the ravine up the steep gravel hill. Past the overlook and the ancient boulder–no stacked stones today. Down through the tunnel of trees, voices floating up from below. Rowers on the river, or hikers on the trail?

Speaking of trees growing through things, which I was just a minute ago, I found this wonderful twitter thread a few days ago about things to google when you feel bad (to make you feel better). Excellent.

And here’s a poem I discovered by W.S. Merwin that is wonderful:

Exercise/ W.S. Merwin (may 1972)

First forget what time it is
for an hour
do it regularly every day

then forget what day of the week it is
do this regularly for a week
then forget what country you are in
and practise doing it in company
for a week
then do them together
for a week
with as few breaks as possible

follow these by forgetting how to add
or to subtract
it makes no difference
you can change them around
after a week
both will help you later
to forget how to count

forget how to count
starting with your own age
starting with how to count backward
starting with even numbers
starting with Roman numerals
starting with the old calendar
going on to the old alphabet
going on to the alphabet
until everything is continuous again
go on to forgetting elements
starting with water
proceeding to earth
rising in fire

forget fire

swim: 2.25 miles / 6 loops
cedar lake open swim
85 degrees

Another wonderful swim! Windy. The water wasn’t choppy, but it was moving. Pushing everything off course, including the buoy. I didn’t notice it in my first loop until I realized I was way off course–far into the other side, almost swimming parallel to the shore instead of towards it. In other years, this would have bothered me. Not today. No panic or fear or frustration. Just getting back on course. This year, I am enjoying the challenge of figuring out how to adjust. Tonight the solution: swim hard at an angle into the current. At times, it felt like I was swimming in place. I wonder how many others swimmers enjoy this like I do?

The milfoil or whatever aquatic vegetation it is (I couldn’t find any more information), felt feathery today as it brushed past my arm and shoulder. The vegetation is thicker, growing up from below, at Hidden/East Beach, but in the middle of the lake, there were only a few stray plants being carried by the current.

Anything else I can remember? My left (OG) knee felt a little sore, so did my back. I don’t recall hear any strange sounds. No music or snippets of conversation. At one point, I thought I saw some big and dark hulk off to the side. Was something there? I never checked. In my first loop, I thought I saw the lifeguard on a kayak marking the edge of the course so I swam slightly away from them. Realized it was the buoy. Later, thought I was swimming towards the far buoy, realized it was a lifeguard. My skin felt itchy after I exited the water, on the drive home.

june 24/SWIM

3 miles/ 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
83 degrees

The third day in a row of open swim. It was overcast, which I thought would make it easier for me to see all the buoys, but the lack of light drained their color. Hardly any smudges of orange, and only when I twisted my neck so I could see the buoy through my peripheral. Strangely, I saw the green buoys more often, which was not a lot. Will it ever stop being amazing to me that I can swim across the lake without panicking when all I can see is endless water? Heading back from the little beach, where the path between buoys is wider and less direct, I had a moment of feeling like I was swimming off the edge of the earth. Alone, off course. Then I saw an elbow and knew I was fine, heading toward the big beach. As I swam, I remembered a poem I wrote for my chapbook on swimming about my feelings of love and annoyance for other swimmers as we swim in the lake. I tried to love the other swimmers more than be irritated by them as they unintentionally routed me. I really tried; sometimes it worked.

i feel
a deep love
for these other half fish half humans
who seem to love deeply what i love
all of us sharing a lake a moment
a joy for the generosity of water

and i feel
continued annoyance
at their cluelessness
on how to swim straight
and their inability to wrangle
jutting elbows and flailing frog-like legs

i try to remember my love and forget my irritation
but when the lake water sloshes over my head gently
it washes away everything

I like the idea of this poem, and many of the lines, but I think I can make it much better. I’d like to work on it, and some others from the collection, and maybe try to get them published. What if I turned by various verses about the lake and swimming into one long poem? How would that work? How does a long poem work?

Other Things I Remember

Choppy water, none of it washing over my head, but tugging at the safety buoy I have tethered to my waist. Makes swimming more difficult–the buoy around my waist, acting like Coleridge’s albatross around the Ancient Mariner’s neck
Once I mistook a fish for a wave and when I stopped suddenly my buoy bumped into me, which felt like a fish, and for a flash, I freaked out
I noticed several swimmers stopping briefly to try and find the buoy. One guy stopped several times. He was slightly faster than me, but was working much harder, churning up water with his big kicks
I didn’t think a sailboat was the buoy tonight
I was swimming faster than 2 breaststrokers ahead of me, but as I approached they sped up–on purpose or without realizing it, I’m not sure–and wouldn’t let me pass
It is harder to see through my central vision, I think, and I feel even more cut off from the world when I swim than I used to. Mostly, this does not bother me; I like the dream world that lake swimming creates
Right before starting, a woman called out, “Wow, the number on your cap is over 1000!” And I said, “Is that how many swimmers there are in open swim club?” And, she said, “Well, my cap is 13!” If there are over 1000 swimmers signed up for open swim, they are not all in the water with me tonight. Maybe 100 are here

june 23/RUNSWIM

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back + winchell trail
64 degrees
dew point: 60

I feel better at the end of this run than I did during it. A beautiful morning, not too windy or hot, sun that gently dazzled but didn’t beat down. Even so, I sweat a lot and felt hot. Thought about the dew point, trying to remember exactly how it worked. I researched it and wrote about it a few years ago, but when someone asked me what it was a few days ago, I couldn’t remember. How do I forget these things so quickly? Here’s my explanation I wrote in 2017:

It’s not the heat or the humidity it’s the dew point, which is the temperature at which water condenses. The closer the dew point is to the temp in the air, the longer the sweat will stay in your hair because the air is too saturated and your sweat can’t evaporate, which is how your body cools you down.

Saw a flash of white, churning water as I ran past the falls. Noticed an opening in the thick trees with a dark winding trail just below the ford bridge–it seemed inviting until I imagined all the bugs that would be waiting for me in there. Heard some voices down in the gorge, on the river. Rowers. Also heard the clicking of a gear change as one bike passed, the clunking of a chain that needed to be greased as another approached.

As I ran on the Winchell Trail through the thick green, I thought that when I’m running by the gorge, I think of in broad, basic ways: tree, rock, bluff, bird, water. Then my mind wandered, and I wondered: (Why) do we need more specific, “technical” names in order to connect with the land? I thought about the importance of names and the violence of occupying and renaming, the value of knowing the history of a place, understanding how it works scientifically, and placing it in a larger context (space, time). Then, as I ran up the short, steep hill by Folwell, I thought about how important it is to learn to think on all of these levels at once, or at least be able to switch back and forth between them. I can experience the gorge as water, rock, tree, bird, wind, or as stolen land occupied and used, abused, restored, protected, ignored, exploited. As a geological wonder, slowly–but not really slowly in geological time, 4 feet per year–carved out by the river eroding the soft St. Peter sandstone. As both wild/natural and cultivated/managed–the site of erosion due to water, and erosion due to the introduction of invasive species, industry, too many hikers, bikers, houses nearby. There isn’t an easy way to reconcile these different understandings and their impacts.

After I finished my run and started walking home, I thought about how these levels/layers could be represented or expressed in a poem. What forms would work best and how to translate all of it into a form? I imagined a mostly blank page with the elemental word in the center (rock or water or tree), then additional pages with other related meanings–you could flip through and somehow add meanings or see all of the meanings at once. Does this make sense? Then I thought about a poem that somehow mimics the form of a fossil, what would that look like? Or the different layers of rock representing different eras of geological time. Not sure if this will go anywhere, but I’ll spend some more time thinking about it.

To chlorophyll, refineries, coal, furnaces beneath early skyscrapers, fossils/ Caroline Kenworthy

after Jane Hirshfield

Back then, what did I know?
The distance between moving cars I could turn into.
How far past EMPTY the engine would run.

I moved daily, rolling over poured rock,
traveling to learn. I was propelled by bodies

of organic matter. First, they were found.
Well, no. First, they were blue flowers carpeting a forest floor,
or the brown and hungry animal moving through them.

Then, they were found, pumped, sifted, melted, strained,
boiled, strained again, divided. Then burned.

Funny to think that we didn’t know what coal was,
and then we did. From there— efficient refinement attracts
our kind— we made these bodies pourable.
The dark rainbow and sharp whiff of petroleum.

I want to explain what I mean by bodies—
at first, I meant sentient movers. As if movement springs only from brains.
Then I thought, an organized, silent burning of sugars. I think,
a system to translate the world into the self.

Life’s long inhale of nutrients, and longer, hotter exhalation in decay. Packed, still, silent.

Hard to remember that matter hums constantly.
These cars and highways— how much of moving is death rearranged.

swim: 1.2 miles/ 4 loops
cedar lake open swim

Cedar Lake! Cedar Lake! Hooray for open swim at both lake nokomis and cedar lake. Very different experiences. Nokomis is 600 yards across, Cedar Lake is 300. Nokomis is about 15-20 feet deep, Cedar is 30-40 feet deep. Nokomis has a big beach with a boathouse and restaurant, Cedar has porta potties. I like both. Today, it was windy and bright. Choppy on the way back and hard to see the shore. My sighting trick: there’s a break in the towering trees where the small beach is.

june 16/RUN

4.3 miles
the falls + winchell trail
65 degrees

A beautiful yet difficult run. Not sure why it was so hard. Maybe because I swam last night and didn’t eat enough breakfast before I ran this morning? Or maybe because of allergies from lake water? Still, it was great to be outside early (but not that early, already 7:20) in the morning. The sun was warm, the river was sparkling, the falls were flowing. I don’t remember hearing them gushing. Must be all the heat and the lack of rain. I wonder how full the creek is right now?

Heading back from the falls, I turned down by the overlook at 44th and entered the Winchell Trail. I walked for the first stretch, where the asphalt has surrendered to the dirt and the trail sits steeply above the river. Not even a dribble of water at the 44th street sewer pipe by the curved retaining wall. Encountered a few more people than I normally do on the trail, but I didn’t care or worry about how close I was to them. It’s fascinating (and a little unsettling) how quickly and easily you forget hyper-vigilance.

As I write this, someone is weed-whacking their lawn with an old, barely working weed-whacker. Sometimes its whine sounds like a person, weakened by age or pain or both, moaning. “Ooooooooooooooo.” Sometimes it sounds like a tiny mosquito buzzing around my ear, hovering too close. This is to say, it’s annoying!

Thought about stopping at the falls and checking out the different signs–with brief history blurbs or poems or names–but I didn’t. I think I’ll bike over there one day for a field trip. Maybe I can convince Scott and then we’ll get a beer at Sea Salt?! Speaking of signs, I just re-read this in Waterlog by Roger Deakin:

Most of us live in a world where more and more places and things are signposted, labelled, and officially ‘interpreted’. There is something about all this is that is turning the reality of things into virtual reality. It is the reason why walking, cycling and swimming [and running] will always be subversive activities. They allow us to regain a sense of what is old and wild in these islands, by getting off the beaten track and breaking free of the official version of things (4).
Waterlog: A Swimming Journey Through Britain/ Roger Deakin

As much as I agree with this idea of wandering away from official versions and ready-made interpretations, I also see the value of some of the historic signs that help us to get a deeper sense of the history of the land, how it has been shaped, and how we are connected to it. These signs need to be read critically and put in the larger context of who is telling the story and how. Sometimes these signs need to be updated or rewritten.

Found this poem via Maggie Smith (the poet, not the actor) on twitter. Like most great poems, after reading it a few times, there’s a lot I still don’t get.

edit, 16 june 2024: I’m not sure what happened here and what Maggie Smith poem I was intending to post here.

The Blind Leading The Blind/ Lisel Mueller

Take my hand. There are two of us in this cave.
The sound you hear is water; you will hear it forever.
The ground you walk on is rock. I have been here before.
People come here to be born, to discover, to kiss,
to dream, and to dig and to kill. Watch for the mud.
Summer blows in with scent of horses and roses;
fall with the sound of sound breaking; winter shoves
its empty sleeve down the dark of our throat.
You will learn toads from diamonds, the fist from the palm,
love from the sweat of love, falling from flying.
There are a thousand turnoffs. I have been here before.
once I fell off a precipice. Once I found gold.
Once I stumbled on murder, the thin parts of a girl.
Walk on, keep walking, there are axes above us.
Watch for occasional bits and bubbles of light—
birthdays for you, recognitions: yourself, another.
Watch for the mud. Listen for bells, for beggars.
Something with wings went crazy against my chest once.
There are two of us here. Touch me.

I love the lines about water and rock: “The sound you hear is water” and “The ground you walk on is rock.” I also like the double meaning of turnoffs, both things you don’t like, and alternate paths and ways to travel.

Thinking about the title, The Blind Leading The Blind. According to Merriam-Webster it is “used informally to describe a situation in which someone who is not sure about how to do something is helping another person who also is not sure about how to do it.” Often this is interpreted as a useless, pointless, clueless thing. But, in a dark cave, where seeing is impossible, a blind person would be better equipped to lead than a normally sighted person. Also, why should being unsure about something mean that you can’t do it, or that you’ll bad at it? How can we ever really be sure about anything? I imagine Mueller’s two “blind” people (you and I) as not helpless from lack of sight, but connected and hopeful through touch.

may 28/RUN

may 27/REST

This morning, as I listened to the rain and absorbed the green gloom, I read more about birds. Today I learned about birds’ unique and highly efficient respiratory systems. Small lungs and a series of air sacs around their bodies that store extra air and act as bellows–typically they have 9 sacs. Birds that fly higher might have more sacs, birds that do a lot of deep diving, less–birds who dive in the water need to be less buoyant. I love thinking about how birds are made up of so much air. I was wondering how much air–what percentage of their bodies is air–but I couldn’t find anything. Instead I found an article about the new record holder for the longest continuous flight: the common swift can stay in the air for 10 months straight! Common swifts raise their chicks for 2 months in Scandinavia, then migrate to sub-Saharan Africa. Wow. I also read that they are lost and “pathetic-looking” when on the ground. Awkward, clumsy, and easy prey.

It’s fun (and maybe a little dangerous because I could wander forever through bird facts) to learn more about birds–to devote attention to these “little dinosaurs” that I have often ignored in the past. And it’s satisfying to move past the generic concept of “birds”, to explore more involved, specific understandings of swifts or cardinals or two birds I read more about today:

guillemot: a deep diving bird that lives on the Arctic coast + rocky shores of Canada and Maine and looks almost like a duck except it’s black with some white and has bright red legs

albatross: a high soaring bird with the largest wing span of birds–11 to 12 feet–who flies long distances, often without even flapping their wings, through the fiercest storms, and that has tubes–called “tubenose”–in and just above their bills that remove salt so they can drink seawater

Speaking of the albatross, I came across the name while searching for “poems about birds” and “bird metaphors in poems”: Bird Metaphors in Writing. The albatross is often used as a symbol of burden or curse. This meaning comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

I’ve always thought of the albatross as the burden, as an annoying, pesky bird. But it’s not. It was thought to be good luck for sailors and it’s beautiful and graceful and impressive to see with its long wingspan. The burden is not the albatross, but the sailor’s reckless, immoral act of shooting it. It’s almost as if the albatross is killed twice, first by the sailor/ancient mariner and second by the harmful, negative metaphor it must bear!

Wow, this is a long poem. At some point while reading it I had the idea of challenging myself to memorize it–that was when I thought I was close to being done, but wasn’t. 143 verses. Could I do it? Not sure, but maybe I’ll try to start it and see if it’s possible?I like the challenge because ever since I started memorizing poems, I’ve read about how it used to be required in school, sometimes even this ridiculously long poem. Memorizing this poem could serve as the “final exam” for my memorizing exercises?!

update, 1/2 a day later: Today I memorized the first 10 verses (40 lines), which is 1/2 of the first part of 4. I will experiment with practicing while I’m running tomorrow (may 28).

From the article, “Why We Should Memorize”:

Much of our daily lives would be dizzyingly unrecognizable to people living a hundred years ago: what we wear and what we eat, how we travel, how we communicate, how we while away our leisure time. But, surely, our occasional attempts to memorize a poem would feel familiar to them—those inhabitants of a heyday of verse memorization. Little has changed. They, too, in committing a poem to memory, underwent a predictable gamut of frustrations: the pursuit of stubbornly elusive phrases, the inner hammering of rote repetition, tantalizing tip-of-the-tongue stammerings, confident forward marches that finish in an abrupt amnesiac’s cul-de-sac.
Why We Should Memorize

The author mentions the frustrations, but I also think of the joy that happens when you suddenly remember the word or the phrase you’d forgotten. I’ve found many more discussions of forgetting/losing words than of remembering them. Why is that?

may 28/RUN
3.25 miles
trestle turn around
49 degrees

Sunny, bright, and cold. Brr. I wore shorts, and warmed up by the end, but at the beginning my hands and feet were cold. Was distracted by an approaching runner that turned around in front of me. She was going about the same speed so I just had to follow her. And I did until we reached the hill from under the lake street bridge and I powered up it faster. I ran faster partly because I sometimes do that when climbing hills and partly because there was a group of elementary school kids biking up the hill and, without realizing it, I decided to race them. Of course, once I passed her, I had to keep going faster so she didn’t catch up, which messed up my plan for an easy run.

All of these encounters distracted me as I tried to recite “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in my head. Earlier today, while looking for an audio version of the poem, I found Ian McKellen’s wonderful recitation of it and discovered that there is an earlier, and in my opinion better, version of the poem. It’s from 1797, while the one I had been memorizing is from 1817. Most of the lines are the same, but there are a few different verses, with different lines that I think are helpful for me as I try to not just memorize the poem but convincingly try to tell the story of it from memory. Even though the popularly accepted/known version is from 1817, I’m memorizing the 1797 version.

Anyway, I attempted to recite this version as I ran. Difficult with all of the distractions. I can’t remember if I made it through all of the lines or what I thought about any of them. I struggled with this stanza, one of the few that is different in the 2 versions: “He holds him with his skinny hand/He quoth—There was a ship /Now get thee hence, thou gray beard loon!/Or my staff shall make thee skip!” In looking at it, I realized the problem: I had memorized it wrong and had quoth he at the end instead of ship; everytime I got to the line that ends skip it sounded wrong. Of course it did; it’s supposed to rhyme with ship!

Here’s the version I’m using: The Original Lyric Ballads Version of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
And here’s a link to Ian McKellen reciting the poem (the video is 30 minutes long! Yikes): Ian McKellen reads “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

may 24/RUN!

3 miles
river road trail, south/winchell trail, north/river road trail, north
71 degrees/ 90% humidity
dew point: 69

For the past few weeks, my left knee + left quad has been sore. After my run on the 17th, when my knee hurt enough to make it difficult to walk, I decided to take more of a break. Today is my first day back since then. Sunny, still (at least it seemed still), humid. Wow–90% humidity. Summer running. Ran at 8:30, which is not my favorite time to run. Too warm already + too many cars on the road, making crosswalks difficult and drowning out bird sounds with their whooshing wheels.

I felt a little stiff and over-heated, but it was a good run. Very happy to be back out by the gorge, admiring the river and assessing the progress of the leaves and the wildflowers. No mosquitos…yet…or sex-crazed gnats. I remember hearing a loud cardinal in some tree on the edge of trail, rapidly trilling and calling out, “what cheer what cheer.”

Things I Remember

almost slipping on the muddy, wet leaves at the edge of the concrete steps leading down to the Winchell Trail
not hearing the sewer pipe near 44th and my favorite retaining wall curve, but hearing it gushing at 42nd
feeling the glow of the water below out of the corner of eye as I ran on the part of the winchell trail without railing that seems too close to the edge of the steep bluff–I turned briefly to glance down at the bright water
noticing more bikers than runners and walkers on the trail
wondering when the bugs and the cottonwood fuzz will be arriving
breathing in through my nose for 3 beats, out through my mouth for 2
feeling a little anxious about my knee and my left IT band, hoping that I took enough time off

Here’s my bird poem for the day:

Of Being is a Bird/ Emily Dickinson

Of Being is a Bird
The likest to the Down
An Easy Breeze do put afloat
The General Heavens — upon —

It soars — and shifts — and whirls —
And measures with the Clouds
In easy — even — dazzling pace —
No different the Birds —

Except a Wake of Music
Accompany their feet —
As did the Down emit a Tune —
For Ecstasy — of it

It’s helpful for me to read through The Prowling Bees’s analysis of this poem (linked in poem title), although I still don’t totally understand ED’s words. I’m struck by her use of easy twice. Ever since I encountered Mary Oliver’s use of easy in her poems (first mentioned on April 14, 2021), I’ve been thinking about the differences between easy and difficult and about how easy is dismissed as immoral or not noble and not nearly as good as difficult. If it’s too easy, you’re not working hard enough, or you’re taking the easy way out, or you’re lazy. I’ve been thinking about it even more after reading Richard Siken’s “The Language of Birds”–see below–and his line about it being easy to ask how, much harder to ask why:

Why paint a bird? Why do anything at all? Not how, because hows are easy—series or sequence, one foot after the other—but existentially why bother, what does it solve?

Why does everything have to hard to be good? Can easy ever be better? Can we fetishize the difficult–making things more difficult for ourselves than we should?

may 18/STIFF RIGHT KNEE, HARD TO WALK

Yesterday, after taking 2 days off from running, I ran again. Not too long after I finished, my left knee felt stiff and sore. Not a good sign, but, surprisingly, I’m chill about it. Just need to take more of a break I guess. Maybe the whole week? If my knee feels a little better tomorrow, and I can walk without limping or tensing up, I’ll try out my bike. After 2 years in the basement, it’s time bring it outside to test it out. Will I be able to see? Eventually, I’m sure, my brain will adjust enough.

Spending a lot of time sitting today. Started early-ish (7:30) this morning by sitting cross-legged on a cushion on the deck, trying to not move much. I was inspired by the wonderful essay I read about “just sitting” yesterday: Private Practice: Toward a Philosophy of Just Sitting/ Antonia Pont

Then I sat at a chair and listened to the daycare kids next door playing outside. I’m not sure how long they were outside, but I took notes about their interactions with the unprepared, harried daycare worker. A lot of fun (not for the daycare worker) and a great exercise in paying attention and taking notes about it. At one point, they played “Ring Around the Rosie.” I wrote in my notes: plague rhyme. I wondered, what other cautionary, plague-related rhymes do children still chant? Googled it and became increasingly skeptical about any nursery rhymes that claim to be about plagues. Then I found this very helpful source–Ring Around the Rosie: Metafolklore, Rhyme and Reason from the Library of Congress. Lots of interesting information about why it’s doubtful that the ring around the rosie is about the plague.

Refreshed my memory of a poem I memorized last summer–Love Song of the Square Root of Negative One by Richard Siken. Love this poem and love Siken. Found another great poem in the same collection (War of the Foxes): The Language of the Birds

The Language of the Birds/ Richard Siken

A man saw a bird and found him beautiful. The bird had a song inside him, and feathers. Sometimes the man felt like the bird and sometimes the man felt like a stone—solid, inevitable—but mostly he felt like a bird, or that there was a bird inside him, or that something inside him was like a bird fluttering. This went on for a long time.

A man saw a bird and wanted to paint it. The problem, if there was one, was simply a problem with the question. Why paint a bird? Why do anything at all? Not how, because hows are easy—series or sequence, one foot after the other—but existentially why bother, what does it solve?

And just because you want to paint a bird, do actually paint a bird, it doesn’t mean you’ve accomplished anything. Who gets to measure the distance between experience and its representation? Who controls the lines of inquiry? We do. Anyone can.

Blackbird, he says. So be it, indexed and normative. But it isn’t a bird, it’s a man in a bird suit, blue shoulders instead of feathers, because he isn’t looking at a bird, real bird, as he paints, he is looking at his heart, which is impossible.

Unless his heart is a metaphor for his heart, as everything is a metaphor for itself, so that looking at the paint is like looking at a bird that isn’t there, with a song in its throat that you don’t want to hear but you paint anyway.

The hand is a voice that can sing what the voice will not, and the hand wants to do something useful. Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I fall asleep, I think about a poem I might write, someday, about my heart, says the heart.

They looked at the animals. They looked at the walls of the cave. This is earlier, these are different men. They painted in torchlight: red mostly, sometimes black—mammoth, lion, horse, bear—things on a wall, in profile or superimposed, dynamic and alert.

They weren’t animals but they looked like animals, enough like animals to make it confusing, meant something but the meaning was slippery: it wasn’t there but it remained, looked like the thing but wasn’t the thing—was a second thing, following a second set of rules—and it was too late: their power over it was no longer absolute.

What is alive and what isn’t and what should we do about it? Theories: about the nature of the thing. And of the soul. Because people die. The fear: that nothing survives. The greater fear: that something does.

The night sky is vast and wide.

They huddled closer, shoulder to shoulder, painted themselves in herds, all together and apart from the rest. They looked at the sky, and at the mud, and at their hands in the mud, and their dead friends in the mud. This went on for a long time.

To be a bird, or a flock of birds doing something together, one or many, starling or murmuration. To be a man on a hill, or all the men on all the hills, or half a man shivering in the flock of himself. These are some choices.

The night sky is vast and wide.

A man had two birds in his head—not in his throat, not in his chest—and the birds would sing all day never stopping. The man thought to himself, One of these birds is not my bird. The birds agreed.

may 20/ABLE TO WALK, CLICKING KNEECAP

Feeling much better today. I can walk almost normally, even if I have to remind myself how to do it when I start: bend the knee! I was planning to get out my bike and try it on the trail, but it’s raining, so maybe I’ll bike inside and watch another Dickinson? I want to take a break from running until next Monday, I think, just to be safe. Hopefully that is enough time to recover from whatever happened to my knee. Sitting in the front room, with the windows wide open, I’m enjoying listening to the rain hitting the pavement. It’s a soft, steady, gentle rain. I also hear a siren a few streets over.

Returning to this post, a few hours after I wrote the previous paragraph: Took Delia for a walk around the block and did 30 minutes on the bike in the basement while watching the ITU Yokohama Men’s Triathlon. Most memorable moment: It was a tough, hot race–30 degrees celsius (86 F)–and racers were exhausted at the finishing line. As the commentary continued, I could hear several racers puking in the background. No mention of it by the commentators. Gross, yet a good reminder of how ridiculously hard these races are and how much these racers have learned to push their bodies. I’m troubled by and in awe of that ability.

Thinking about Richard Siken’s “The Language of the Birds”:

1.
A man saw a bird and found him beautiful. The bird had a song inside him, and feathers. Sometimes the man felt like the bird and sometimes the man felt like a stone—solid, inevitable—but mostly he felt like a bird, or that there was a bird inside him, or that something inside him was like a bird fluttering. This went on for a long time.

I love this first stanza. Thinking about ED and “Hope” is thing with feathers. Also thinking about MO and some great lines from The Leaf and the Cloud, which, when I found them again, I realized were even more fitting with this poem or at least my reading of it right now:

from “Gravel” in The Leaf and the Cloud/ Mary Oliver

6.
It is the nature of stone
to be satisfied.
It is the nature of water
to want to be somewhere else.

Everywhere we look: the sweet guttural swill of the water
tumbling.
Everywhere we look:
the stone, basking in the sun,

or offering itself
to the golden lichen.

It is our nature not only to see
that the world is beautiful

but to stand in the dark, under the stars,
or at noon, in the rainfall of light,

frenzied,
writing our hands,

half-mad, saying over and over:

what does it mean, that the world is beautiful–
what does it mean?

What is alive and what isn’t and what should we do about it? Theories: about the nature of the thing. And of the soul. Because people die. The fear: that nothing survives. The greater fear: that something does.

Siken’s poem isn’t really about a bird; it’s about metaphor and representation and the work of doing something useful (meaningful?) with the noticing of a beautiful bird. And it’s about the doubt an artist/writer feels when they try to create something in response to that bird, and about what language does to the artist’s connection to the bird, the distance it creates between “experience and representation.” And, it’s about asking the question: why do anything at all? “existentially why bother, what does it solve?”

And maybe it’s also about not answering this question, not trying to find ultimate meaning, not trying to solve “it”–where it = the problem of death/that everyone dies, or it = the overwhelming “vast and wide” night sky,” or it = our inability to capture/own a bird in our representation (painting, poem) of them.

Yesterday, when I looked up “The Language of the Birds” I discovered this: The Mantiq al-tair(Language of the Birds) of 1487. I had discovered this Sufi poem earlier in the month when I looked up conference of birds, which is it’s more known title. Very cool. Here’s some more information:

Attar (ca. 1142–1220), the author of the Mantiq al-tair, is one of the most celebrated poets of Sufi literature and inspired the work of many later mystical poets. The story is as follows: The birds assemble to select a king so that they can live more harmoniously. Among them, the hoopoe, who was the ambassador sent by Sulaiman to the Queen of Sheba, considers the Simurgh, or a Persian mythical bird, which lives behind Mount Qaf, to be the most worthy of this title. When the other birds make excuses to avoid making a decision, the hoopoe answers each bird satisfactorily by telling anecdotes, and when they complain about the severity and harshness of the journey to Mount Qaf, the hoopoe tries to persuade them. Finally, the hoopoe succeeds in convincing the birds to undertake the journey to meet the Simurgh. The birds strive to traverse seven valleys: quest, love, gnosis, contentment, unity, wonder, and poverty. Finally, only thirty birds reach the abode of the Simurgh, and there each one sees his/her reflection in the celestial bird. Thus, thirty birds see the Simurgh as none other than themselves. In this way, they finally achieve self-annihilation. This story is an allegorical work illustrating the quest of Sufism; the birds are a metaphor for men who pursue the Sufi path of God, the hoopoe for the pir (Sufi master), the Simurgh for the Divine, and the birds’ journey the Sufi path.

One of the valleys the birds have to travel through is the valley of wonder/astonishment/bewilderment. This makes me think of the Sufi poet Rumi and their focus on bewilderment, which I discovered through Fanny Howe. Here’s “Bewilderment” by Rumi:

Bewilderment/ Rumi

There are many guises for intelligence.
One part of you is gliding in a high windstream,
while your more ordinary notionstake little steps and peck at the ground.

Conventional knowledge is death to our souls,
and it is not really ours. It is laid on.
Yet we keep saying we find “rest” in these “beliefs.”

We must become ignorant of what we have been taught
and be instead bewildered.

Run from what is profitable and comfortable.
Distrust anyone who praises you.
Give your investment money, and the interest
on the capital, to those who are actually destitute.

Forget safety. Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.
I have tried prudent planning long enough.
From now on, I’ll be mad.

Since I keep wanting to put these bird poems in conversation with Mary Oliver and Emily Dickinson, I’ll add that Mary Oliver loved the poetry of Rumi. In her interview with Krista Tippett, she describes how she reads a different Rumi poem each day. And, the last line of “Bewildernment” reminds me of this ED poem:

Much Madness is divinest Sense – (620)/ EMILY DICKINSON

Much Madness is divinest Sense –
To a discerning Eye –
Much Sense – the starkest Madness –
’Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail –
Assent – and you are sane –
Demur – you’re straightway dangerous –
And handled with a Chain –

may 21/WALKED 2 BLOCK ON A SLIGHTLY STIFF KNEE

My left knee continues to improve. The kneecap still shifts and clicks, but I can bend and move my knee without pain. I continue to remind my knee how to walk. Rain on and off all day. Showers then sun then showers with sun. Will it ever end? Pumped up the tires in my bike. It’s still in the basement, but soon I’ll bring it upstairs. Heard so many birds this morning: cardinals and woodpeckers and black-capped chickadees and robins. Heard a metallic 2 note song in a neighbor’s tree as I walked around the block with Delia the dog. Was that robin too? Also heard a rapid trilling that sounded like a car alarm. I’m pretty sure it’s a cardinal.

Finishing up a great book, Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl. Here’s one of her essays? prose poems? that uses one of my favorite words: still, which can be used as an adjective (not moving, calm), a verb (to calm down, to quiet), a noun (a period of calm or silence), and an adverb (up to a time, to an even greater degree, nevertheless).

Still/ Margaret Renkl

I pause to check the milkweed, and a caterpillar halts midbite, its face still lowered to the leaf.

I walk down my driveway at dusk, and the cottontail under the pine tree freezes, not a single twitch of ear or nose.

On the roadside, the doe stands immobile, as still as the trees that rise above her. My car passes; her soft nose doesn’t quiver. Her soft flanks don’t rise or fall. A current of air stirs only the hairs at the very tip of her tail.

I peek between the branches of the holly bush, and the redbird nestling looks straight at me, motionless, unblinking.

Every day the world is teaching me what I need to know to be in the world.

In the stir of too much motion:
Hold still.
Be quiet.
Listen.

walk: 35 minutesneighborhood with Delia36 degrees / wintry mix

swim: 1.8 milesywca pool

Q and A/Linda Pastan

4.5 milesminnehaha falls and back5 degrees 95% snow-covered

10 Things I Noticed

unlayering

My Emily Dickinson, day one

5 milesbottom of franklin hill turn around35 degrees5% snow-covered / 40% puddles

Squint/ Linda Pastan

some words from Linda Pastan

a popular story about her:

a blogger’s explanation of why she likes Pastan:

and Pastan’s description of the dangers always lurking below the surface:

walk: 30 minutes with Delianeighborhood26 degrees

bike: 22 minutesrun: 2.35 milesbasementoutside: an ice rink

Grace/ Kelli Russell Agodon

4.25 milesminnehaha falls and back35 degreesclear roads / 50% snow-covered trails / puddles

10 Things I Noticed

run: 2.5 milesywca track

10 People I Noticed on the track

swim: .25 milesywca pool

List of Things to Make a List of/ Beth Mulcahy

4.5 milesminnehaha falls and back18 degrees / feels like 8100% slick snow

10 Things I Noticed

from Windows/ Wendell Berry

Window/ Fiona Apple

1+ mileywca pool

Lost in Plain Sight/ Peter Schneider

bike: 30 minutesbasement, bike stand

Marie Howe and the Moment

The Moment/ Marie Howe

3.25 milesmarshall loop42 degrees / 16 mph

image of the day

Part of Eve’s Discussion/ Marie Howe

The Meadow/ Marie Howe

indoor bike: 15 minutesbike standtreadmill run: 1 mileoutdoor run: 2 miles34 degrees / icy drizzle

Circle/Dana Knott

indoor bike: 30 minutesbasement, bike stand43 degrees

Forest of Beginnings/ Mai Der Vang

6.05 milesbottom of franklin hill and back51 degrees

10 People I Encountered

word of the day: bombinate

3 loopslake nokomis open swim75 degrees5:30 pm

3.35 milestrestle turn around62 degrees / humidity: 71%8:00 am

10 Things I Noticed

bike: 8.5 milesswim: 2 loopslake nokomis open swim73 degrees / 5:30 pm

10 Things I Noticed

2.6 miles2 trails80 degrees / dew point: 69noon

3.25 miles2 trails + extra66 degrees

10 Things I Noticed

As from a Quiver of Arrows/ CARL PHILLIPS

2.5 milesriver road trail, south/north68 degreesdrizzle

5.45 milesfranklin loop60 degrees

10 Things I Noticed

more fun with the IT band

I.T. could mean something.

Hypothesis / Paul Tran

4.75 milesveterans’ home loop33 degrees

before the run

during the run

after the run

Full of yourself/ Rumi

3.25 milestrestle turn around51 degrees

before the run

The Ants/ Matthew Rorher

during the run

after the run

Things/ LISEL MUELLER

4.05* milesminnehaha creek path, between lake nokomis and lake harriet40 degrees

before the run

during the run

after the run

Feeding the Worms/ Danish Lameris

bike: 10 minute warm-uprun: 3.25 milesoutside: wind + thin sheet of ice

I Wonder If I Need the Rapture or If I Could JustSwallow A Catastrophe and Call It Good / Kelli Russell Agodon

3.5 milesriver road, south/winchell trail/river road, north/edmund39 degrees / feels like 30wind: 20 mph

Who Has Seen the Wind?/ CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

from Dart / Alice Oswald

from “Lake Superior” / Lorine Niedecker

poemwrittenafterseptember 11, 2001 / Julian Spahr

walk: 35 minutes
neighborhood with Delia
36 degrees / wintry mix

swim: 1.8 miles
ywca pool

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
5 degrees
95% snow-covered

5 miles
bottom of franklin hill turn around
35 degrees
5% snow-covered / 40% puddles

walk: 30 minutes with Delia
neighborhood
26 degrees

bike: 22 minutes
run: 2.35 miles
basement
outside: an ice rink

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
35 degrees
clear roads / 50% snow-covered trails / puddles

run: 2.5 miles
ywca track

swim: .25 miles
ywca pool

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
18 degrees / feels like 8
100% slick snow

1+ mile
ywca pool

bike: 30 minutes
basement, bike stand

3.25 miles
marshall loop
42 degrees / 16 mph

indoor bike: 15 minutes
bike stand
treadmill run: 1 mile
outdoor run: 2 miles
34 degrees / icy drizzle

indoor bike: 30 minutes
basement, bike stand
43 degrees

6.05 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
51 degrees

3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
75 degrees
5:30 pm

3.35 miles
trestle turn around
62 degrees / humidity: 71%
8:00 am

bike: 8.5 miles
swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
73 degrees / 5:30 pm

2.6 miles
2 trails
80 degrees / dew point: 69
noon

3.25 miles
2 trails + extra
66 degrees

2.5 miles
river road trail, south/north
68 degrees
drizzle

5.45 miles
franklin loop
60 degrees

4.75 miles
veterans’ home loop
33 degrees

3.25 miles
trestle turn around
51 degrees

4.05* miles
minnehaha creek path, between lake nokomis and lake harriet
40 degrees

bike: 10 minute warm-up
run: 3.25 miles
outside: wind + thin sheet of ice

I Wonder If I Need the Rapture or If I Could Just
Swallow A Catastrophe and Call It Good / Kelli Russell Agodon

3.5 miles
river road, south/winchell trail/river road, north/edmund
39 degrees / feels like 30
wind: 20 mph

6 miles
franklin loop
52 degrees

4.45 miles
Veterans’ Home Loop
32 degrees

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
35 degrees
30% puddle-covered

3.5 miles
trestle turn around
17 degrees / feels like 9
100% snow-covered

4.4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
18 degrees / feels like 8
less than 5% snow-covered!

3.4 miles
river road trail, south/north
2 degrees / feels like 2
100% snow-covered

bike: 15 minutes
bike stand, basement
run: 2.4 miles
treadmill
2 degrees / feels like -11

5 miles
franklin bridge turn around
16 degrees / feels like 9
100% snow-covered

4.1 miles
river road, north/south
14 degrees
99% snow-covered

6 miles
franklin loop
37 degrees

4 miles
river road, north/south
50! degrees

3.15 miles
turkey hollow
50 degrees
humidity: 81%