4.1 miles minnehaha falls and back 20 degrees 85% snow-covered
Yes! More amazing winter running! Not only wonderful physically, but creatively and mentally too. Near the end of the run, I had some great ideas for my manuscript (see below)! And I had some mental victories: I kept running without stopping to walk until I reached the halfway point; I not only kept running past the yellow crosswalk sign at 38th — a spot that always seems to loom too far in the distance — but I kept going past it until I reached the parking lot at 35th.
I’m glad I wore my yaktrax today. The path conditions were not the greatest — soft, uneven snow, some ice, not too many bare spots. I could tell my legs were having to work harder, which I think is a good thing for building strength.
I’m pretty sure I heard the falls falling, but I was distracted by people. I reached my favorite observation spot alone, but within 15 seconds, a group of 20 somethings were hovering around it, so I left without studying the falls.
The river was white with a few dark streaks. I never got close enough to it to see anything more about it than that. I need to run to the flats so I can study its surface.
overheard: one woman to another as they walked: but what does it mean?
Sometimes the sky was gray, sometimes white, and a few times the palest blue.
After I finished my run, walking past a favorite house (where Matt the Cat lives and whose owner gave me beautiful flowers from her boulevard garden this past summer), something delightful happened: As I walked under a pine tree, the wind picked up and a dust of snow fell on my head. Immediately I thought of Robert Frost’s poem, “A Dust of Snow,” which I memorized a few years ago. Unlike Frost, I was already in a good mood when I felt the snow, so I didn’t need to have it changed, but it was delightful nonetheless. Later at home I realized something else delightful. In Frost’s poem, it is a hemlock tree. I think the tree that gifted me snow is a hemlock, too!
manuscript ideas
change title of poem, “Better here, in the familiar, to fade” to “Vision Lost” — turn better here into a “breathing with: may swenson” poem
turn my, “a gash, a gap, a space of possibility” into 3 poems: m//other (gash) into the story of my mom — her death from cancer her severing of ties from this childhood home / g||host into a poem about my estrangement from my body and the mind/body split — or, my vision loss? / turn t here (possibility) into a poem about the in-between and Nothing space
add in a section in which I offer up, in a list, all of 1, 2, and 3 syllable words in the collection, where 1 syllable = rock, 2 syllable = river, and 3 syllable = air
(before the run I was revising Rush and erosion and JJJJJerome Ellis’ stutter as clearing — see 3 oct 2025 entry for more) do a poem that invokes ED’s elemental rust and is plays with ideas of decay as erosion and bells with rusted tongues — am I remembering that right?
More excellent running weather. Sunny and calm and warm(er). Birds singing and swooping and perching on tree branches right in front of me. I felt relaxed and strong and my back only hurt once, when I stood up after re-tying my shoe. I ran without stopping to walk to the bottom of the hill and right next to the river. It was swirling foam on the edges. Ran back up to under the franklin bridge then stopped to walk the rest of the hill. I noticed a sign — Trail closed starting March 31st — uh oh. Just looked it up; it’s only for 2 weeks:
Bike and walk trails along West River Parkway will close between the I-94 Bridge and Franklin Avenue for up to two weeks beginning Monday, March 31, 2025.
The closure is necessary for contractors hired by the Minnesota Department of Transportation to install a safe span system that will protect trail users during repairs to the bridge this year.
Trail users will be detoured to the upper West River Parkway roadway between the I-94 Bridge and Franklin Avenue. This same closure will be repeated in August so that workers can remove the safe span system after repairs are complete.
Listened to a mood playlist: energy for the rest of the run. The best (or worst?) song on the playlist was “Hocus Pocus” by Focus. I love the song, but it was too fast to try and run to!I had to increase my cadence to 200 bpm to match it! The song also does not have a steady rhythm; it just keeps getting faster and faster, probably because they were on cocaine while they recorded it.
10 Things
the water was a brownish greenish blue
in the flats I leaned over the ledge and watched the swirling foam slowly travel down stream
workers on the road above the tunnel of trees, doing something to sewer which released a sour smell
the workers were wearing bright yellow vests
passed a walker who refused to move over — they were walking right next to the line. I suddenly wondered, are they neuro-divergent? then, maybe I should chill out about people needing to follow the accepted rules about where and how to walk on the trail
stopped at the sliding bench, 1: heard a cardinal — it was somewhere nearby — looked up and saw that it was on a branch close to me. Was it red? I couldn’t tell, but I did noticed how its tail quivered slightly all the time — I’m assuming it was keeping its balance. Do birds have to constantly adjust while perched?
stopped by the sliding bench, 2: looking down at the white sands beach, hoping for movement. Yes, there, deep in — a walker moving through the trees
the small shadow of a bird crossing my path, flying fast!
my sharp shadow in front of me, crossing over the softer shadows of tree branches
the shadow of a tree with dead leaves on it — looking almost like a messed-up pom pom
At the end of the run, as I was walking home, I had a thought about CA Conrad’s and their idea of the “extreme present,” which I wrote about on here earlier this month on march 5th:
“extreme present” where the many facets of what is around me wherever I am can come together through a sharper lens.
Conrad creates their soma(tic) rituals to make being anything but present is nearly impossible. Running by the gorge can put/force me into the extreme present. This sense of the extreme present doesn’t happen for the entire run, but I can achieve it in moments. In their lengthy, day-long rituals — wear a red wig, eat only red food — is Conrad able to achieve this extreme present for longer?
birdsong!
This morning Scott heard the cardinals outside his window and because he wanted to use some birdsong in his latest music project, he placed his phone on a chair on the deck and recorded some. I liked how he described it: I left the phone out on the deck then returned inside and went quietly about my business. When he told me about how similar each wave of sound looked, I asked if he could screen shot it and send me the sound file so I could post it here:
cardinal song, an image of sound wavescardinal song / 26 march 2025
Wow! So uniform.
Happy 151st Birthday Robert Frost!
When the poem of the day on poetry foundation was a Robert Frost one, I figured it must be his birthday. Yep — 26 march 1874.
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing Deeper down in the well than where the water Gives me back in a shining surface picture Me myself in the summer heaven godlike Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs. Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb, I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, Through the picture, a something white, uncertain, Something more of the depths—and then I lost it. Water came to rebuke the too clear water. One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom, Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness? Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
A beautiful sonnet — 14 lines, 11 beats per line, almost iambic pentameter. Is that right? I always struggle to hear meter properly.
Love the description of a reflection: Me myself in the summer heaven godlike/Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs
And that something white, uncertain, seen briefly then lost to a ripple. Yesterday I posted some lyrics from “The Windmills of Your Mind” about the ripples from a pebble. Ripple is a great word.
Seeing this sonnet is making me think I should try that form for my color poems. I could study a few different ways of doing the sonnet — Diane Seuss, Terence Hayes, William Shakespeare. Any others?
oh orchid o’clock
A good morning on the poetry sites. Not only did I find Robert Frost’s poem, but I found a cool collection that fits in with my study of time: Oh Orchid O’Clock by Endi Bogue Hartigan. (note: I just emailed Moon Palace Books about ordering it! update: I ordered it!)
/it is the president’s turned up o’clock it is America’s deadliness and dailiness
o’clock / it is glued to the headline o’clock
it is lunchhour-beeline o’clock / it is it’s only Tuesday o’clock another
curbside memorial o’clock another caterpillar miracle o’clock another
people emptying from their lives o’clock or into
their lives o’clock the Nile floods the Nile floods every hotspell in this week
I discovered this book through poems.com, which had one of its poems posted today:
I fall asleep with the rain sound app of my cellphone, the app includes distant thunderclap sounds and there are people who recorded or simulated these sounds, and it is time to disagree and thank the dawn. I disagree with this rain, I feel absurd for thesimulation of it and yet my brain waves have come to depend on it, depend onsimulated porous points between the raindrops. Always the porous dream, always theneural authority, the reaction meme, always the authority of always, the puncture ofalways, time spent saying always, the spider legs of always, the sleep command, thewake spindles, the spider leg threatening to break from the spider.
So cool! Encountering Hartigan’s work, I was inspired to think about time in relation to my blind spot and the practice of running beside the gorge that has happened beside (and because of?) my vision loss. I wrote the following in my Plague Notebook:
my blind spot breaks open seconds pries apart the hard edges of a beat invites me to dwell inside
I am suspended between beats as time slows but never stops with moves so slight it takes a practiced eye to see their soft shimmering embrace what is not seen but felt — wind the rotation of the earth a bench sliding into the gorge rock crumbling cone cells collapsing a blind spot expanding
What a great afternoon walk with Delia the dog! No coat. No mud. Walked to the Winchell Trail then down beside the chain link fence. Drip Drip Drip — the sewer pipe in the ravine. Everything washed out — light brown, tan, yellowed. Up on the mesa in the savanna, a great view of the river. Was able to walk on the dirt path between the savanna and the 38th street stairs. They’ve put down some mulch, so it’s not as muddy. As I neared the entrance to the Winchell Trail, I passed the spot where I fell in the mud, straight on my tailbone. No mud now, only memories and a still-sore back.
On the way to the river, I noticed something interesting hidden on the tree trunk while Delia sniffed around. I took a picture of it:
= > ÷
When I was looking at it in person, I thought someone had carved the message in the tree, but studying it now, it looks like it’s a rock wedged in a crack. I probably should have taken another picture that wasn’t quite as close-up for scale. That is one tiny rock.
I had to look up how to type the division sign on a mac. Hold down option and /
bike: 8.5 miles lake nokomis and back degrees: 71/75
Gloomy this morning, not gray but white. White skies are the worst. Gray, blue, even green skies are interesting, but white skies are flat and empty and no fun. They’re strange, but in a way that feels oppressive instead of mysterious. One good thing about this overly white light: unlike gray skies, the white doesn’t make it a lot harder to see and make sense of things.
A good bike ride. Didn’t need to pass anyone. No asshole bikers yelled at me. I’ve memorized all the cracks and curves on the path, so I knew where I was going.
The bike ride to Nokomis is only 20 minutes, but it feels longer because you bike through so many different areas — the tight, winding river road, the edge of the crowded and hectic minnehaha park, beside minnehaha parkway then near minnehaha creek, past lake hiawatha and up a big hill, over minnehaha parkway, around a stretch of lake nokomis. As I biked, I tried to remember how grateful I am to still be able to bike — to have this independence — and tried to forget all the places I had to bike through before I reached the beach.
swim: 2 loops (9 little loops) lake nokomis main beach 71 degrees
Because it’s the last week of open swim and because of sore IT bands, I’m doing more swimming and less running this week. Today’s swim was wonderful. Even though it was windy, the water wasn’t too choppy. No other swimmers or ducks or geese, one seagull, 2 or 3 kids, a boat. Every so often the arm that was that pulling through the water would touch a vine reaching up from the bottom of the lake. I had a brief flash of imagining the vine was evil and wanted to wrap itself around my wrist to drag me under. I didn’t feel freaked out by this thought, just curious.
10 Things
watching my air bubbles underwater — We calmly trailed over them/and under them, shedding/air bubbles, little white/ balloons
pinkish orangish buoys, faded from years of use, bobbing in the water — lining up my path to swim-while-barely-seeing through the small gap between them
looking at the white buoy under water — its lower end covered in greenish brownish muck, the rope tethering it to the bottom of the lake barely there in the cloudy water
one seagull standing in the sand at the edge of the water
hearing only a steady slosh as I swam, then stopping to hear the almost of the world above the water
that quiet being occasionally disrupted by a kid’s voice
buzzzz — someone’s constructing/reparing? something at painted turtle, I think. Are they building the structure they need to be able to serve beer?!
the water is shallow almost all the way to the edge of the swimming area
my yellow backpack, sitting alone, propped against the lifeguard stand
opaque water out by the white buoys, clear water near the shore
Came across this poem by Robert Frost this morning. I’d like to put it beside May Swenson’s bird deep in the woods in “October” and Emily Dickinson’s purple woods in “A lane of yellow led the eye” and darkness in “A murmur in the trees to note”:
Come In/ Robert Frost
As I came to the edge of the woods, Thrush music — hark! Now if it was dusk outside, Inside it was dark.
Too dark in the woods for a bird By sleight of wing To better its perch for the night, Though it still could sing.
The last of the light of the sun That had died in the west Still lived for one song more In a thrush’s breast.
Far in the pillared dark Thrush music went — Almost like a call to come in To the dark and lament.
But no, I was out for stars; I would not come in. I meant not even if asked; And I hadn’t been.
a few more things I forgot (added hours later)
First, I forgot to mention how I recited 2 poems in my head as I swam loops 5-7. During lap 5, I recited “I measure every grief I meet.” It was a little awkward trying to match the rhythms of Dickinson’s words with my breathing every 5 strokes. In loops 6 and 7, I recited, “The Social Life of Water.” I get hung up a little on the line, Thunder throws itself on estuary. At first I forgot it altogether, jumping straight to Waterspout laughs at joke of frog pond. Then I couldn’t remember what thunder did to the estuary. Finally I got it sorted out and made it to the end — not able even to guess from what you are excluded — by the end of loop 7.
Second, on Sunday I decided I was too tired and sore to swim. Instead, Scott and I took Delia on a walk. We let her off her leash in the field at Howe School and as she ran I noticed wings all around. Monarchs? No, Scott said, dragonflies. A dozen dragonflies! I’ve never seen so many at once. Whenever I see a dragonfly, I think of my mom, who loved them. What a gift to be reminded of her so much! And how cool to see so many wings zooming about!
