Tag: running rhythms

nov 22/RUN

6 miles
hidden falls overlook
40 degrees

Sun! Warmer (but not too warm) air! An open view! And 6 miles! A good run. I’m tired now and my legs are sore, but I felt strong and light and full of energy at the end.

10 Things

click scrape scrape click — a roller skier’s poles approaching from behind
one roller skier bundled up, another in shorts
running beside 2 roller skiers, one of them listening to the other express concern/frustration about some part of his ski not locking in right
a mini peloton on the road — 10 bikes?
small scales on the surface of the gray water
a serpentine of big cracks and asphalt erupting on the st. paul path
the small building above the hydroelectric plant on the st. paul side is spray-painted bright pink
the gentle trickle of water over the rocks at hidden falls
a bad heavy metal hair band anthem blasting out of the window of a white car
not a wide open view — too many thin branches — but the feeling of openness and air on the st. paul side

Thought about my rock, river, and air chants as I ran. Recited (in my head) as much of the rock one as I could remember. Liked the groove I fell into as I chanted

poet’s clock
poet’s clock
poet’s clock
this big rock

Finishing up the run, I felt strong and fast and proud as I thought about all the work I’ve put in over more than a decade of coming to the gorge at least 3 or 4 times a week, sometimes more, and running and noticing and writing.

nov 17/RUN

4.5 miles
veterans home (reverse)
36 degrees

After 4 days in Chicago visiting my sister, a great run. A wonderful trip and a wonderful return. I felt relaxed and strong and steady. Ran for 45 minutes without stopping. A big mental victory. And I didn’t feel wiped out at the end — a big physical victory. I kept my splits steady instead of speeding up too much in the second and third mile. I think that helped. I should be mindful of the second and third mile in future runs.

I ran south and then, instead of continuing on to the falls, I ran up the wabun hill and by the veterans’ home first. Then over the bridge, through the park, past the falls and up and out of the park. I almost always stop at my favorite viewing spot, but didn’t today. Hooray for mental strength!

10 Things

click clack — roller skiers behind me as I neared the locks and dam no 1
overheard — one roller skier to the other: hey — do you want to go to the falls and then turn around? another skier: sure!
open view: above the oak savanna, near the spot where the hills split and you can see the river
empty benches
the rumble of a jack hammer
a cacophony of chirping birds in the trees between the veterans’ bridge and the falls — such a convention!
the creek was brown and subdued
the falls were flowing, but thinner
on the cobblestones beside the falls: a small stretch of ice
waved to a regular: Santa Claus!

before and after the run

Before the run, I was thinking about chants and remembered the performance of a poem I had seen in the movie, Poetry in Motion. I looked it up: The Cutting Prow: For Henri Matisse/ Ed Sanders. What I had remembered, and wanted to hear again as inspiration was the chanting,

Scissor scepter cutting prow
Scissor scepter cutting prow
Scissor scepter cutting prow
Scissor scepter cutting prow

I’ve been thinking that my rock, river, and air chants should do something like this: repeating the essence/the form of something through the chanting of a few significant words. As I ran, I might have briefly thought about this chant/these ideas/this poem, but not in ways that I can recall now.

After the run, I watched Sanders’ full performance of the poem again and found it online:

THE CUTTING PROW: FOR HENRI MATISSE/ Ed Sanders

“The genius was 81
Fearful of blindness
Caught in a wheelchair
Staring at death

But the Angel of mercy
Gave him a year
To scissor some shapes
To soothe the scythe

And shriek! shriek!
Became
swawk! swawk!
The peace of
Scissors.

There was something besides
The inexpressible

Thrill

Of cutting a beautiful shape—-
For

Each thing had a ‘sign’
Each thing had a ‘symbol’
Each thing had a cutting form

-swawk swawkk___
to scissor seize.

‘One must study an object a long time,’
the genius said,
‘to know what its sign is.’

The scissors were his scepter
The cutting
Was as the prow of a barque
To sail him away.
There’s a photograph
which shows him sitting in his wheelchair
bare foot touching the floor
drawing the crisscross steel
a shape in the gouache

His helper sits near him
Till he hands her the form
To pin to the wall

He points with a stick
How he wants it adjusted
This way and that,
Minutitudinous

The last blue iris blooms at
The top of its stalk
Scissors/scepter
Cutting prow

(sung)

Ah, keep those scissors flashing in the
World of Forms, Henri Matisse

The cutting of the scissors
Was the prow of a boat
To take him away
The last blue iris
Blooms at the top
On a warm spring day

Ah, keep those scissors flashing
In the World of Forms, Henri Matisse

Sitting in a wheelchair
Bare feet touching the floor
Angel of Mercy
Pushed him over Next to Plato’s door

Scissor scepter cutting prow
Scissor scepter cutting prow
Scissor scepter cutting prow
Scissor scepter cutting prow

ahh
swawk swawk

ahh swawk swawk

ahh swawk swawk.”

When I first heard/saw this a few years ago, I was drawn to the sound of the scissors and the words he repeated, but now I’m also thinking about Matisse and the cutting forms. Very cool. I might have to return to shadows, silhouettes, and forms and look into Matisse some more!

an hour, or so, later: Watching Poetry in Motion from the beginning, I encountered this great bit during the opening credits:

You don’t want to lead anyone in any subjective sense, to push anything onto them, you know. I mean, you could say teach in a certain way but it’s like putting light in people’s eyes, you know. Just opening the door but not showing them around and telling them, this is the chair, this is table, but saying, here’s the room and turning on the light.
Poetry in Motion

oct 21/RUN

3.1 miles
trestle turn around
44 degrees / rain

Brrr. Rainy and chilly today. Time to find my gloves — my hands were going a little numb by the end. Ran north to the trestle. A few other walkers and runners joined me — we didn’t move together, just in the same place (above the gorge), at the same time (early afternoon). Tried to run relaxed and not too fast. The relaxed part happened, but not the not too fast part. The path was wet and leaf-covered and slightly slippery. The sprawling oak by the ancient boulder and at the entrance to the tunnel of trees was a metallic — frosted gold and silver. Wow! The floodplain forest below the tunnel of trees was glowing pear and butter. Double wow! I never looked at the river or heard a bird, but I did smell hot chocolate, burnt coffee, and pipe smoke.

Thought about revisions to my latest poem and the refrain I put at the end of it, created to chant while running. I played around with different rhythms. First, the words:

no after / only here / Remember / Remember / reMember /

Actually, the original, un-tested-out-by-the-gorge-version was: there is no after/there is only here / remember / remember / remember. But as soon as I tried to chant it, I could tell it wouldn’t work — too many words for my running rhythms.

no After
no After
no After
only here

only here
only here
here here here
here here here

Remember
Remember
reMember

Remember
here
reMember
here
here here here

Re Mem Ber
here here here

The lines inspiring these chants are: There is no after. There is only here and a moving away from and returning to it.

Also thinking about my What time is it? (2020) poem that involves a list of o’clocks. I’m thinking maybe I should be brave (a word RJP and I are using a lot these days), and include something about George Floyd. It’s an important part of what I wrote about in May/June of 2020 in this log. What do I mean by brave here? I’m going to think about that some more.

oct 7/RUN

3 miles
trestle turn around
51 degrees

Fall, finally! Wore my bright orange sweatshirt and black shorts with gray compression socks. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker. Hi Dave! It’s a beautiful morning! Not too long after that I spotted an albino squirrel by the edge of the bluff. I didn’t stop, but I slowed down and took an extra glance to check that I was seeing what I thought I was. I think so, but how would I know? I saw some rowers emerging from the hill that leads down to the rowing club, but didn’t hear any of them on the river. Since I went north, I didn’t hear any kids on a school playground. Noticed lots of trash bags beside the already full trash cans. Marathon clean-up or a clearing out of camps in the gorge? Also noticed some flowers at the trestle in a makeshift vase — an open cylinder where a railing used to be attached. Orange cones were still next to the crack, warning runners and walkers — stay away. The crack looks like it hasn’t gotten any bigger or longer.

In mile 2, I started chanting a part of my poem, You Are Here: Tunnel of Trees:

Oh, where is the sky?
And where is the ground?
Neither can be seen.

Moving feet strike
only air,
and eyes see
only green.

To fly, to float,
to pass through with ease.

held up
by openness,
not hemmed in
by trees.

The last lines didn’t quite work with my movement, so I changed them slightly:

held Up by
the openness,
not hemmed In
by the trees.

Then I began repeating certain verses instead of reciting them straight through. To float, to fly/to pass through with ease//to float, to fly/to pass through with ease//to float, to fly/to pass through with ease and Held up by/the openness/not hemmed in/by the trees//Held up by/the openness/not hemmed in/by the trees.

I noticed a difference in how it felt as I switched up the lines. To float, to fly had a lot more open space around it. This is how my foot strikes matched up with the words: (x = foot strike without word)

To float x
To fly x
To pass through with ease

The silent extra beat created space and felt slower, maybe a little more labored? In contrast, the last verse was faster and easier for me to sync up my feet with lungs and brain and heart and the gorge.

Held up by
the openness
Not hemmed in
by the trees

No silent foot strikes, just one word per strike.

This experiment was fun and made the run easier, and, as a bonus, it helped me with my poem!

Air

I am little late with picking a theme for this month. I’ve been too haunted by my Girl Ghost Gorge project. Editing and adding new poems every day. Finally, a week in, it has come to me: AIR. Air is the section I am working on right now. It’s the third (love those 3s!) element of the collection: rock, river, Air.

Air as: air quality, good air, bad air, lungs, breathing, syncing up lungs with my feet and the feet and the lungs of others (human and non-human), open space, Nothingness/void, emptiness, a clear view, secrets revealed, thresholds, late October to mid-November before the snow flies, when the veil lifts or thins, boulevards and parkways, ventilation and purification, things not seen but sensed, a stillness within the flux of happenings, fleeting/ephemeral/weightless, smells, plagues, rust, erosion, fire, uncluttered and calm

Walked over to the split rail fence above the ravine and the sewer pipe that freezes in the winter and creates an icy tunnel, then drips blueish greenish water as it melts. The Winchell Trail winds around this ravine, over a steel grate and beside a wrought iron fence that once displayed dozen of keys with social justice-y messages until they were ripped out–by who and why? I wish I could remember the messages. A few: Be nice. We are One. Resist Fear. From up above, at the end of my run, I cannot see the ravine or the sewer or the keys. Sometimes I smell the sewer or hear someone talking below me, but I can’t see anything but green until the leaves fall in late October, early November. This is my favorite time at the gorge. I love being able to see deep into the gorge when its bare bones are exposed, its secrets revealed. I love the color palate of rich browns, pale blues, dull grays, rusted reds. I love the smell of mulching leaves, the sharp, crisp air, the paths that aren’t yet covered with snow but with crunching, crackling leaves.
log entry 7 oct 2019

flame and rust, flame and rust — another October poem (along with Louise Glück’s and May Swenson’s Octobers): Leaves

Today, while I ran, I thought about how chanting in the lines, held up by/the openness/not hemmed in/by the trees, made me feel how I was floating through the air. I noticed the space between foot strikes, that small instant when both of my feet are off of the ground, instead of when they’re striking it. My Apple watch measures my ground contact time while running, the time each foot is on the ground per stride (in ms), but it doesn’t measure the time you’re not on the ground. I guess I could figure it out, but couldn’t the watch do it for me? What percentage of my running is in the air versus touching ground?

With some help from Scott and AI, I determined that my stride time (60/170 — cadence) is 353 ms. Then subtracting my ground contact time from my stride time: 353 – 230 = 123 ms. To find the percentage, it’s ground contact time / total time. For me, I’m on the ground roughly 65% of the stride, and in the air 35% of the stride. It might be fun to work on increasing my cadence (time for the metronome!) and see if that makes any difference in my floating/flying time. Sounds fun!

sept 24/RUN

2.5 miles
2 trails
70 degrees
humidity: 67%

Tried an experiment today. Instead of running early when it was much cooler, but very high humidity (97%), I waited and ran when it was much warmer, but with lower humidity. The hypothesis: the humidity is more of a problem than the temperature. Observations: fatigue, abundant sweat, slow legs, needing to walk sooner and for longer, not much fun. Tentative conclusion: heat affects me more than humidity. Of course, other factors to consider include: a different time of day, direct sun. My scientific method here might be half-baked, but I’m accepting the conclusion. No waiting until later to run! When in doubt, go earlier.

As (almost) always, I’m glad I went for a run by the gorge. A beautiful fall afternoon! A bright blue sky, rusting leaves, clear paths.

At the beginning of my run, I chanted the opening section of my Running Chant: River — flow flow flow / slow slow slow / flow flow flow / slow slow slow. The goal was to quiet my mind and fall into the rhythm of my feet. An idea: why not have a page filled with these opening words as part of my Girl Ghost Gorge collection?

3 visual options:

a page with a line of flow then a line of the word slow
2 or 4 columns, one with flow, one with slow — you can read it vertically, down the lines, or horizontally, across the columns
a page of flow flow flow / slow slow slow in very faint print, with only a few of the words in regular (or bold?) print

10 Things

empty bench at the Horace Cleveland Overlook
trickling water at the 44th street ravine
the steady falling of water at the 42nd street ravine
a friendly biker on the walking path below — hello! / hello
2 people at the folwell bench, one of them leaning over looking at their lap — were they holding a phone?
graffiti — can’t remember color or what it said — on the limestone retaining wall
a squeaking sound from across the river — a bike?
someone squatting at the edge of the 38th street steps, talking on the phone
a trace of color — yellow, pink — on the 38th street steps
kids’ voices drifting over from across the road — recess

sept 23/RUN

4.1 miles
river road, north/south
61 degrees
humidity: 90% / dew point: 60

Yes, it was uncomfortably humid, and that’s all I’ll write about that. I memorized my rock chants before I left, then recited them as I ran. Here’s a snippet:

soft stone
shifts

hard stone
waits

sandstone
rubs

limestone
breaks

They worked pretty well, although it was hard to think of the words fast enough for my feet. Near the end of the run, I switched to some river words (3 1-syllable words):

drip drip drip
drop drop drop
stone stone stone

I was able to greet Dave, the Daily Walker — Morning Dave!, but forgot to greet the Welcoming Oaks. Saw some rowers climbing up the hill and leaving the rowing club. Noticed big bunches of purple wildflowers. Ran by the persistent crack that continues to settle and spread. Will they be able to fix it before the ground freezes? Wondered if the road closed ahead sign was because they were removing the safety fence they put in during their I-94 construction. Stopped at the top of some wooden steps leading down into the dark green of the Winchell Trail. Also stopped at the sliding bench to take a picture. A thought: what if I took a picture every week at this bench to track the slow and subtle changes?

from behind the sliding bench / 23 sept 2025

For future Sara, a brief recap: Jimmy Kimmel returns to his show tonight after being suspended/censored; Trump is claiming aspirin causes autism and that they’ve found a “cure” for it; and more leaves are turning yellow and red at the gorge.

sept 22/RUN

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
61 degrees
humidity: 91% / dew point: 64

It rained last night, so everything was wet, even the air. Puddles, mud, slick leaves. Gushing sewer pipes, a roaring creek, fast-falling water.

I’m working on a series of chants for Girl Ghost Gorge. All triples. One for rock (a 2-syllable word/1 syllable word). One for river (3 1-syllable words). And one for air (1 3-syllable word).

During the first mile, I chanted for air:

industry
convenience
resilience
persistence
underground
neighborhood

During the second mile, I chanted for rock:

paddle/wheel
roaring/creek
paving/stone

During the third mile, I chanted for water:

drip drip drip
drop drop drop
drip drop drip
drip drip drop

My plan for the chants is to use 1, 2, and 3 syllable words from my long poems for the chants. Right now I’m sorting them out.

10 Things

wet red leaves scattered near the trail
the smell of tar as I passed a park worker patching the trail (yay! they’re fixing the terrible spot on the bike path finally!)
one woman to another: my ex-husband makes over a million dollars in his new job
the yellow-vested park working, leaning and looking at his phone while he waited for the tar to be ready to smooth
the squeak of a bike’s brakes
bare branches poking out of the top of a tree
the white froth from the falls
2 people sitting on the ledge of the bridge, their feet dangling over the falls
a circle of bright water and sky, made by a break in the trees
the smell of almost-cilantro from the tall grass surrounding the stone etched with Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha”

sept 14/RUN

4.1 miles
river road north/south
70 degrees
humidity: 88% / dew point: 68

Ugh! Uncomfortably warm again today. A flushed face and dripping ponytail. Was able to greet 2 regulars: Dave, the Daily Walker and Mr. Morning! Admired sparkles on the water, heard the coxswain from below, smelled the sourness of the sewer. I tried to do my “beat” experiment:

mile 1: triple berry chants strawberry/raspberry/blueberry
mile 2: listen to metronome at 175
mile 3: listen to music

I went too fast with the triple berries, then didn’t have the metronome turned up enough to feel the beat. By the time I got to mile 3, I was overheating. After that, it was difficult to run for that long. Lots of walking. I’ll have to try this experiment again when it is much cooler.

For the Girl Ghost Gorge collection I’m working on, I’ve decided to add some You Are Here poems: poems that locate me/the reader in one particular (and meaningful to me) location above or with or among the gorge.

possible you are here locations

the trestle
folwell bench
sliding bench
the edge of the world
double bridge
ancient boulder with stacked stones
franklin hill
turkey hollow
44th street ravine
42nd street ravine
35th street ravine
welcoming oaks

sept 8/RUNSWIM

4.3 miles
veterans home and back
61 degrees

Fall! Noticed a few more slashes of orange and yellow and some red leaves on the ground. More acorn shells on the trail. At the beginning my knee — I can’t remember if it was the left or the right one — hurt, a dull not sharp pain. I can’t remember when it stopped. Maybe it was when I started feeling the rumbling of unfinished business. When I reached the falls, I went to the bathroom. I’m ready to be done with perimenopause.

Running south, I listened to chickadees and music blasting from a bike radio — I recognized the 70s or 80s rock song, but now I’ve forgotten what it was. Just past the Veterans home, I put in my “the Wheeling Life” playlist.

10 Things

the sound of the rushing creek, 1: just before it falls over the limestone ledge
the sound of the rushing creek, 2: far below, as I ran over the bridge to the Veterans Home
a soft mist rising from the falling water
a half-filled parking lot at the falls
a full parking lot at the Veterans Home
an empty parking lot at Locks and Dam no 1
above on the bluff at Waban Park, a view of the river, the water rushing over the concrete, one white buoy, several redorangepink buoys
an American flag waving near the Veterans Home
strange flashes and a distorted view out of my central vision as I ran across the bridge — a result of facing the sun, I think
soft shadows from the chain link fence on the bridge

While I ran, I chanted in triples. I was hoping to center or ground or locate myself in the time and place. First, berries, then:

I am here/I am here/I am here
I am now/I am now/I am now
I am here/I am here/I am here
It is now/It is now/It is now
here here here/ now now now/ here here here/ now now now

Then, I added a condensed version of some Emily Dickinson:

Life life life/death death death/bliss bliss bliss/breath breath breath

Then:

I am here/I am here/I am here/Here I am
123/123/123/123

Throughout the run, I thought about locating myself and how I might translate that for my project. A list of surfaces? my landmarks? a topographical map?

Reviewing old notes and entries, including 19 may 2025, which includes a bit on context, I encountered the phrase, there or there abouts. I had written it in my notebook after hearing it several times on the TNT coverage of the giro d’italia (the tour of italy cycling race). Yes. When I locate myself, it’s not here! or there. but there or thereabouts. Maybe that could be the title of a poem for the collection?

there or thereabouts

double bridge
old stone steps
ancient rock / stacked with stones
sliding bench
near the fence
under tree
on the edge (of the world)
high above
down below
in the flats
past the creek
wrapped in green
off the ground / in the air
deep in oak
riverside
locks and dam
sewer pipe
steep ravine
brand new trail
snowy path
in the groove
seeping hill
leaking ledge
eagle’s perch
spreading crack

Do I want to do this poem in triples? Not sure. It is how I locate myself sometimes — by chanting in triples about what’s around me. This syncs up my feet with my breath and my surroundings. But, how does it sound? And does it work as a poem?

A new poet to read and podcast episode to listen to!
Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists/ Laynie Brown
Laynie Brown: Apprentice to a Breathing Hand (tinhouse podcast)

swim: .75 loop
lake nokomis main beach
76 degrees
wind: 29 mph gusts

Another swim! When RJP told me the buoys were still up I knew I needed to swim again. Wow, it was choppy, and wow, that water was cold, but it wasn’t too cold and the choppy water was fun. I think there were whitecaps. In one direction, I could mostly ride the waves, the other direction, I punched water. Both fun, but in different ways. Speed from one, power the other. Got tangled in some vines, but nothing I couldn’t get out of. Noticed: soaring and hovering seagulls, held up by wind; planes, bobby buoys, voices, and water rushing over me, water crashing into me, water dragging me forward and sideways. I wouldn’t want to swim in water like that every time, but it was fun today.

aug 24/RUN

5.25 miles
bottom of franklin hill
58 degrees

Cooler! It makes such a difference for my running when it’s cooler outside. Easier, more relaxed. I’m looking forward to more fall and winter running! Running north I listened to the wind, the birds, a strange sound — a kid crying out? a dog barking? — coming out of a neighbor’s house. Running south I put in my “It’s Windy” playlist. Windy has stormy eyes/that flash at the sound of lies.

2 strange ensembles:

a biker stopped on the edge of the path, his back turned to me. I almost didn’t see him because he blended into the trees. I think he was wearing a camo jacket and shorts. Why would you do that?
a runner approaching me in a half-zipped shirt — or was it a bike kit? — and no socks or shoes. They were running barefoot. I’ve seen that before, but rarely. I thought that trend went away 7 or 8 years ago?

Early on, I chanted in triple berries: strawberry/raspberry/blueberry. Then, other triples: intellect/mystery/passing through/persistent/enduring. Persistent and enduring came as I passed by the big crack that they’ve tried to repair several times but just keeps coming back. I started thinking about my persistence and then stillness and deepening as steadiness, which led to thoughts of my core. I imagined my belly button was leading me. I thought in a triple: who needs eyes? Then I imagined seeing with my stomach or my shoulders or my feet. I focused on my center as balanced and stabilized and still as it moved through the windy bluff above the gorge. Finally, I thought about my belly button as the place that once tethered me directly to my mom. How long did these thoughts last? I’m not sure.

10 Things

roller skiers
someone wearing all black sitting at a bench
river surface, 1: rough, empty
river surface, 2: looking north it was flat, south a glitter path
a shorter runner passing me, holding a sweatshirt awkwardly
the big crack in the path, still blocked off
no more limestone slabs stacked and looking like a lounging person under the franklin bridge
a damaged fence: the top slat missing
returning south, the wind was at my back, enabling me to go faster
no stones stacked on the ancient boulder — too windy?

I thought about the wind and how I noticed it only as it encountered objects — trees, fences, rocks, me. Then I thought about what happens when it doesn’t encounter anything, which led me to wind tunnels and aerodynamic testing and then a line from Rita Dove’s poem, “Voice-over”:

because now you’re all throat,
a tunnel skewered by air.

june 30/RUNSWIM

2.5 miles
2 trails
73 degrees
dew point: 64

A late start, almost 10 am. Hot! A beautiful summer morning. Sun, soft shadows, sprinkling water, green, blue. I didn’t hear it, but it rained last night. Puddles and mud on the winchell trail. The river was brown and still.

overheard: a counselor to a group of camp kids taking a nature walk — be careful not to brush up and against anything! if you see poison ivy, don’t touch it!

Walkers, runners, bikers. No rowers or roller skiers. A strange sight near the crosswalk to the river trail: a stuck semi at a strange angle — the cab going one way, the trailer the other. What happened?

Above the trail was hot and dry, below slick, slippery, shaded. Voices drifting down. Shadows shifting. Dripping, rustling.

I chanted in triple berries, trying to keep my left and right foot strikes even. Soon, I’d like to pull out my phone and record my running — is it steady, or could I have some strange hitch I’m not aware of?

Was thinking about my colorblind plates again and what feelings taking and failing that test evoked. The snellen chart feeling is anxiety, uncertainty. The amsler grid, more curiosity and wonder and validation/recognition. The Ishihara Colorblind plates? A door opening — not only sudden awareness but a shifting and passing through something that, before, had only lived inside my head. A new understanding.

I was thinking about the dots in the plate. Dots. Circles. Loops. Os.

opening
outsider
outline
Ordovician onlooker
outset
oncology
offering
other
opinion
oath
ornithology
Ooo
ooze
odd
old
obstinate
outsized
ovulation
owl
osprey
oblivion
octogon

opened
occupy
orbit
organic
outcast
official
obvious
oracle
occipital
oak
overt
O!
oof
ointment
oddity
omen
or
outfield
outrage/ous
ostrich
ossify
outage
outstanding

open
online
orifice
onset
organs
outer limits
ophthalmology
olfactory
organization
orange
orchard
Oh!
oaf
ornamental
odor
obscure/d
orphaned
occult
opt/ion
octopus
out of control
outlet
outdoors

For more O inspiration, I’m looking to O/ Claire Wahmanholm. I posted it on here back on 12 june 2020. Here are some of her Os:

once
oil
overgrown
ore
only
oblivion
outdated

operation
opus
olive
obelisk
origin
overrun
oxygen

oared
octave
oval
observation
oculus
oven
ochre

The O lines from The Manic Depressive’s Alphabet / Anahita Monfared:

O is overprescribed! Four years on 250 mg of lithium and four on 250 mg of seroquel, all before you can legally drink

And Rita Dove’s Os that open Ode to My Right Knee:

Oh, obstreperous one. Ornery, outside of ordinary. . .

Does this help me to get any closer to figuring out what to do with my colorblind test? Maybe. Regardless, it was fun!

before the run

Today’s morning reading-while-drinking-coffee was wonderful. Here are some things I encountered:

one

hey, I get it. But look! how much pleasure is on the other side of that which only momentarily torments you! Think about the miracle of the other side, if you can get there, and you can! I get it! There is much we have to do to keep ourselves alive! Much of it mundane and some of it displeasing, but sunsets are cool and if you do enough of the mundane you get to see one of those from time to time! . . . Imagine the other side, the next moment, the thing that awaits beyond what exhausts you!
@nifmuhammad / Hanif Abduraqib

What luck to be alive at the same time as Hanif Abduraqib. So wise and loving. For years, I have been monitoring, imagining, writing about the other side in this log. It’s a real place: the opposite side of the gorge, usually the east side because I run on the west side more. My mother was born and raised on that other side. And, it’s an imagined place — a view, a vista, open space for breathing and being otherwise; the moments when, I don’t want to stop running.

two

Erin Dorney’s project, Question the Body. Very cool!

three

The Manic Depressive’s Alphabet / Anahita Monfared

About this Poem

“In concussion recovery therapy, there is an exercise where you must go through the alphabet, and list words that correspond with the letters as you go. Each round, you are given a theme. These themes can include names of people, cities, countries, foods, colors, and more. Doing this week after week, as I rewired my brain, I couldn’t help but think of the learned alphabets unique to every individual—the ones we inherit, the ones we claim, [and] the ones we try and run away from. From there, I wrote into one of my loudest alphabets: manic depression.”

The alphabets we inherit, we claim, we try and run away from. Wow!

swim: 2.5 loops (5 cedar lake loops)
cedar lake open swim
74 degrees

A little windier and choppier today. A current in the lake was pushing everyone swimming west to the wrong side of the buoy. By the fourth and fifth laps, I had finally figured out how to stay on course. I kept noticing the sky. First it was blue with only a few clouds. Then half of it was blue, the other half darker. By the last lap: gray. When I reached the shore I realized that it was raining. I had no idea!

No scratchy vines or clear bubbles. No flashes of fish or crazy kayaks. No planes or birds or dragonflies. All I remember is opaque water and occasionally sighting the orange dots and yellow and pink safety buoys tethered to torsos. Oh — and someone/something touching my calf. Most likely another swimmer.

I didn’t think about much as I swam except 1 2 3 4 5 breathe 1 2 3 4 5 breathe. I felt how my right arm has been getting stronger as I swim more and that I could use my tricep to move higher and faster through the water. I was irritated by some swimmers. Raced a few others, most likely without them knowing I was.

june 17/RUNBIKESWIMBIKE

4 miles
river road, north/river road, south
67 degrees / dew point: 63

Started my run at 8:30, which was too late for how warm and humid it is. Even so, I felt strong and relaxed and confident that I could stick to my 9/1 plan and I did. As the runs get longer, I’m going to need to get up earlier. Chanted in triple berries — strawberry/blueberry/raspberry — then in other favorite triples — mystery history — then in triples that describe the world around me — worn dirt trail / old oak tree / cloaked green view / rushing cars

10 Things

at least 2 roller skiers standing at the top of the franklin hill
voices below — rowers!
2 minneapolis park trucks on the path, both hauling riding lawn mowers
Mr. Morning!
a big branch loaded with green leaves on the ground near the welcoming oaks, blocking a small section of the path
2 or 3 stones stacked on the ancient boulder
the sliding bench was empty
encountering Max, a big and gentle German Shepherd
a mini-peloton on the road — a dozen or so bikes
an older runner in bright orange compression socks standing in the middle of the walking path, gathering himself

I don’t remember thinking about much as I ran, other than that it was hot and that I knew I could keep going.

Yesterday, during my vision assessment, I mentioned reading about a way of training the eyes so that they could see outside of your blind spots. It was in a book by a famous author, but I couldn’t recall who. I knew they were from the 1900s and that they were male and I thought they were a philosopher, but I was drawing a blank on the name. At some point during the appointment, I was convinced it was Henry James. I was wrong. I looked it up today: Aldous Huxley and his book, The Art of Seeing. I wrote about it in this long on 13 sept 2020, including this quote from Huxley in the introduction:

Ever since ophthalmology became a science, its practitioners have been obsessively preoccupied with only one aspect of the total, complex process of seeing—the physiological. They have paid attention exclusively to eyes, not at all to the mind which makes use of the eyes to see with.
The Art of Seeing/ Aldous Huxley

How true is this assessment in 2025? Well, the study I am hopefully participating in is a collaboration between Ophthalmology and psychology at the U of M.

In the process of searching for the Huxley reference, I came across an article about low vision and reading. The specific ways that reading is difficult for me are different than this author, but the strange, and sometimes frustrating, sometimes delightful ways it (doesn’t) work resonate:

I try to figure out how apples connect to the topic, and how a noun just there might fit into the sentence, then give up and go back, to see the “i” that I missed when I first read “applies.” All those mistakes don’t happen at once. When my splotchy vision is not making me fail to grasp the point of an essay or fail to see the word “salt” in a recipe, it keeps me amused, keeps me aware of language itself. Who knew that “apples” is only one letter different from “applies”? Who could regret noticing that?
As My Vision Deteriorates, Every Word Counts/ Alice Mattison

Reading more of the article, I find that her perspective on audiobooks resonates less:

Listening to an audiobook, I wouldn’t hear punctuation. True, an actor could produce the pauses, hesitations, and buildup that punctuation merely signals. But I like punctuation. I wouldn’t know whether the author had chosen a period or a semi-colon for the end of that main clause, wouldn’t know about em dashes, colons, parentheses, ellipses. Audiobooks are mediated. Another person would be present as I read. Worse, that person would have interpretive power, power over speed. Audiobooks happen in time, not space, like music or dance. Performance is indispensable but it isn’t the same as reading.

My first reaction was to disagree with this assessment, but it has me thinking more about the idea of an audiobook as performance. I like listening to a good audiobook actor. And I love listening to an author who can read their own book well, like Zadie Smith. So what? Does that mean I’m not reading, and do we need to gatekeep what reading is? Now I’m wondering: what is reading?

Some thoughts about punctuation:

As I memorize poetry, I often struggle to write it down again later; I often mess up the punctuation. I memorize words, but rarely semi-colons or em dashes.
In Lucille Clifton’s rules for writing poetry, she suggests that a poet should write their lines in such a way that punctuation is never necessary — not sure where I stand on this
Isn’t the writer’s choice of punctuation a sort of mediation between reader and word?

bike: 8.7 miles
lake nokomis and back
78 degrees

Hooray for no problems on the bike! I could see well enough and I didn’t have to do any awkward passing. My left knee was a little stiff at the end, like it was 2 summers ago, but otherwise it was good. I liked biking to the lake before my swim, and biking back home after. Some things I remember: a line-up of traffic near the falls; kids playing in the creek; the pleasing curve of the new bike trail at lake hiawatha; the rush of water gushing out of the sewer pipe and into the ravine at 42nd; a surrey slightly off course; the bouncy stride of a runner.

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
79 degrees

Open swim! A wonderful night for a swim. Not much wind, hardly any waves. I would have liked to do more than 2 loops but I didn’t want to push it and have a sore shoulder again. No problems going off course even though I could barely see the buoys. So little data, so much trust and belief in my ability to swim straight!

10 Things

put my bag down under the lifeguard stand, next to some kid’s swim trunks that were swarming with gnats (gross!)
milfoil reaching up from the bottom, thick and pale orange until it faded into the dark blue-green water
cold water with pockets of warmer water
baby bros (15 or 16? year-olds) playing football in the shallow water, cheering every time someone caught a pass or missed a pass
the legs of another swimmer doing breaststroke, looking pale underwater
bubbles! the translucent, almost white ones, that remind me of the bubbles in scooby doo
my sparkle friends! the small glittering particles floating in the water
open swim was set up a full 15 minutes early! the lifeguards have their shit together again this year
the familiar form of the beach house dome, viewed mid-lake
calling out to another swimmer — have fun! / you too!

A great swim. No deep thoughts or reciting water poems or noticing sounds or clouds or planes. As I get more fit, and spend more time in the water, these things will happen.

june 11/RUN

5.3 miles
ford loop
65 degrees / steady drizzle

Thought the rain wasn’t coming until later today so I got ready for my run — changed into my running clothes, stretched, put on my running shoes — then opened the door to drizzle. Decided to go anyway. At first, it was intermittent drizzle, but halfway through it became a steady, soft rain. Not enough to soak my shorts but enough to cool me off and to inspire a chant:

drip drip drop
drop
drip drip drip
drop

drop drip
drop drip
drop drip
drip drop

drip drip drip
drop drop drop

drop drop drip
drop drop drip
drop drop drip
drip

I continued my 9 minutes of running, 1 minute of walking plan and was successful. In the last mile, my left started to hurt a little, then my left calf, and my foot. It’s fine, but to be safe, I stopped at 5.3 miles. The run was never easy, but it also wasn’t hard to keep going, knowing that I had a walk break coming.

10 Things

a soft green everywhere
an empty river
new trees wrapped in plastic looking like wild turkeys
a dark tunnel of green with a bright circle of white at the end
on your left / thank you!
front yard tree with a giant boulder just in front of it
empty benches except for the one near folwell: 2 people not sitting, but standing behind it
the rumble of planes sounding like thunder
the sharp clang of a mailbox lid falling shut
chains from a trailer rattling and scraping on the rough road

green haze: Running on the east river road, quick glances over to the gorge — a soft green and silver view of trees and sky

I was delighted to discover halfway in that the poem-of-the-day on the Poetry Foundation is about rust! The entire poem is wonderful, but it’s long, so I’ll only post most of the rust part:

excerpt from “Que Sera Sera”/ A. Van Jordan

Like when a song gets so far out
on a solo you almost don’t recognize it,
but then you get back to the hook, you suddenly

recognize the tune and before you know it,
you’re putting your hands together; you’re on your feet—
because you recognize a sound, like a light,
leading you back home to a color:

rust. You must remember
rust—not too red, not too orange—not fire or overnight
change, but a simmering-summer
change in which children play till they tire

and grown folks sit till they grow edgy
or neighborhood dogs bite those not from your neigborhood
and someone with some sense says Down, Boy,
or you hope someone has some sense

who’s outside or who owns the dog and then the sky
turns rust and the streetlights buzz on
and someone’s mother, must be yours, says
You see those streetlights on don’t you,

and then everybody else’s mother comes out and says
the same thing and the sky is rust so you know
you got about ten minutes before she comes back out
and embarrasses you in front of your friends;

ten minutes to get home before you eat and watch
the Flip Wilson Show or Sanford and Son and it’s time for bed.
And it’s rust you need to remember
when the cop asks, What kind of work you do?

It’s rust you need to remember: the smell
of summer rain on the sidewalk
and the patina on wrought-iron railings on your front porch
with rust patches on them, and the smell

of fresh mowed grass and gasoline and sweat
of your childhood as he takes a step back
when you tell him you’re a poet teaching
English down the road at the college,

when he takes a step back—
to assure you, know, that this has nothing to do with race,
but the rust of a community he believes
he keeps safe, and he says Have a Good One,

meaning day as he swaggers back to his car,
and the color of the day and the face behind sunglasses
and the hands on his hips you’ll always remember
come back gunmetal gray

for the rest of this rusty afternoon.

Rust — I’ve been wanting to write a poem about rust for some time. Is this a sign that I should try today?

may 21/RUN

5.5 miles
ford loop
44 degrees
drizzle

Wasn’t planning to run the ford loop, but I started it and then just kept going. It felt good, relaxed, not hard to keep my heart rate a little lower. My pace was slow, but it didn’t feel slow, or fast, or any speed really.

10 Things

mist
dripping
spray
mirrors
puddles
graffiti
traffic
bridge
debris
slick

It rained all day yesterday, and some early in the morning. Started again during my run. Everything dripping wet, including me, although I didn’t really feel it, or couldn’t distinguish it from my sweat. Before I started running, as I walked through the neighborhood, I looked into the puddles on the sidewalk and admired how they had become mirrors, reflecting the sky and the trees. Running over the river, I looked down at the east bank and saw colorful graffiti all over the rocks at the base of the lake street bridge. In spots, the trail was slick with mud or covered in debris — fallen leaves, broken branches, grit. Crossing the ford bridge, I looked north and was delighted by the mist, making everything seem fuzzy and unformed. The traffic on the bridge was thick — I couldn’t see or feel any spray coming off of their wheels, but I could hear it.

overheard: one runner to another — you can bank the time.
Another use of time as a commodity.

Listened to the water, in its various forms, for the first half of my run. Put in my “moment” playlist for the second half. The most memorable song today: One Moment in Time/ Whitney Houston

A line that stood out to me:

And in that one moment of time
I will feel
I will feel eternity

I thought about Mary Oliver’s definition of eternity and how Whitney Houston’s doesn’t fit with it. MO understands eternity as creative time that’s outside of the ordinary and beyond the self. Houston’s eternity seems more like eternal glory.

As I listened to all of the lyrics, I thought about Whitney Houston’s tragic life and terrible death — an overdose. I also thought about the idea of one moment and what happens after that moment is over. And this made me think about post-Olympic blues, or post-marathon blues, or post-publishing a poem blues.

To keep myself distracted and steady, I chanted in triple berries —– strawberry blueberry raspberry. Then I chanted my poem — I go to the gorge/to find the soft space/between beats.

more on the moment as between

Read a very brief interview with Marie Howe the other day. She mentioned a poem that inspired her and that she wished everyone would read: The Season of Phantasmal Peace/ Derek Walcott. Beautiful! Here’s a line to remember that describes the moment:

and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace

Before my run, I began listening to a talk by Jennifer Chang, “Other Pastorals: Writing Race and Place“. She mentions one between in the presentation of her thesis statement: how poets of color use pastoral to grapple with the complex composition of place as a tension between lived and learned experience. She recites another between from Rick Barot’s “On Gardens”: somewhere between/what the eye sees and what the mind thinks/is the world, landscapes mangled/into sentences, one color read into rage.

Chang also mentions context: If you look at the word “garden” deep enough you see it blossoming in an enclosure meant to keep out history and disorder.

Chang’s lecture is part of the Bread Loaf conference in 2019. This page has many great links for future Sara to explore.

And here is a helpful essay with some ideas for thinking about the pastoral, and links to poems, like Rita Dove’s Reverie in Open Air, which I’ve already posted on this log. The second half of Dove’s poems fits with early May’s theme of grass:

But this lawn has been leveled for looking,
So I kick off my sandals and walk its cool green.
Who claims we’re mere muscle and fluids?
My feet are the primitives here.
As for the rest—ah, the air now
Is a tonic of absence, bearing nothing
But news of a breeze.

And a few more grass lines from Jennifer Chang:

Stalk of wither. Grass-
noise fighting weed-noise. Dirt
and chant. Something in the
field.
(Pastoral/ Jennifer Chang)

What sound does grass make? Wind through the grass, crunching over dry, brittle grass, feet on grass — bunny’s feet:

I think my favorite sound was the soft footsteps of the bunny hurrying across the lawn. A silvery whisper only possible to hear on a calm summer morning like today. I love the sound of animal feet moving — running or hopping through the grass
log entry on 16 july 2024

march 31/RUN

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
36 degrees

Yesterday afternoon we got 2 or 3 inches of snow. By the time I went out for my run in the late morning, much of it had melted, even on the grass. Excellent. It’s the warmer ground and the bright sun that did it. I was over-dressed in my purple jacket with a stocking cap. Halfway through the run, I took off the cap and held it in my hands.

As I ran south to the falls I chanted in triples. Lots of berries and sweet things (hot fudge sauce, fresh whipped cream), histories and mysteries and possibles, both muddy trail and mud on trail, and metronomes. On the way back, I put in my “doin’ time” playlist for the last day of my time month. I was planning to not stop to walk for the second half, but when a runner who was running the same speed or just a little slower than me joined the path in front of me, I decided to stop a few times to get some distance from them. One of the places I stopped was the bench above the edge of the world. I don’t remember what the river looked liked, all I remember was that looking at it made me feel calm and content and vast.

overheard while running by the falls: one person to a group of others, he should do it, his arms are the longest. Were they taking a group selfie?

10 Things

water falling, 1: a steady gush out of a gutter
water falling, 2: trickling from the sewer pipe at the ravine
water falling, 3: gushing at the falls — mostly white foam
shadow, 1: the small shadow of a bird crossing my path
shadow, 2: the sprawled, gnarled, twisted, softened shadows of oak trees on the road
shadow, 3: the sharp circle of the lamp part of the lamp post
missing: the top railing of a wood fence on the edge of the trail
several people in the falls parking lot, waiting to pay for parking
empty benches
a thin layer of snow on a leaning branch in the ravine

Found this poem the other day:

Color Keeps Time / Patrycja Humienik

or it rides us
like a torrent. Blurs
and fastens, flesh

to seconds. Just look
at your veins.
In vespertine woods,
I tried to read moss
by hand. There’s
something laconic
about green that I need.

Lover, let the morning slow
time through the branches.

vespertine: relating to, occurring, or active in the evening
laconic: using few words, concise to the point of seeming rude or mysterious

What kind of time are different colors? What sort of time is orange, for example? If purple is twilight, orange is late afternoon or early summer evenings.

I tried to read moss/by hand. This line reminds me of Robin Wall Kimmerer and her suggestion that “Mosses, I think, are like time made visible. They create a kind of botanical forgetting. Shoot by tiny shoot, the past is obscured in green. That’s why we have stories, so we can remember” (Ancient Green/RWK).

“Color Keeps Time” is from the collection, We Contain Landscapes.

march 24/RUN

4 miles
river road, north/south
32 degrees

A beautiful morning for a run! Wind in my face as I ran north, at my back heading south. Bright sun, sharp shadows, deep blue almost purple river. Raced a wind whirled leaf and won. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker. Heard voices down in the gorge. Noticed ice on the edges of white sands beach. Thanked a man for stopping to let me run past and he kindly replied, you’re welcome miss. He was listening to music without headphones and carrying a bag of something — groceries? More than one of the benches was occupied. Encountered runners and walkers, a biker and a roller skier. In the last mile, I zoomed past someone running down the hill and under the lake street bridge.

I did my beats experiment again today.

mile 1: triples — open door / open door/ go inside / go inside / go outside / go outside / hello friend / hello friend / old oak tree / strawberry / opening / up the hill / on my toes / forest floor

mile 2: started with the metronome set to 180 bpm, but that was too fast. Locked in with 175. By the end of the mile I barely felt my feet strike the ground, only heard the beat — I had made it inside of the beat!

mile 3-4: doin’ time playlist. The first song was “Time Stand Still“/ Rush. The first line: “I turn my back to the wind” I heard this as I was running with the wind at my back.

Freeze this moment
A little bit longer
Make each sensation
A little bit stronger

I thought about freezing the moment and the difference between stopping time and suspending (or being suspend in) it.

a few hours later: I’m reading the book, American Spy, and I just came across this bit about looking people in the eyes:

At Quantico they’d taught us the so-called classic signals that some one was lying: if they glanced up to the right before they speak, or if they won’t look you in the eye.
American Spy/ Lauren Wilkinson

My immediate reaction: that’s how I look at a person’s face. I try to find the approximate location of their eyes by looking off to the side, near their shoulder — this is me looking at them through my good, peripheral vision. Then I stare into the spot, which is usually fuzzy nothingness to me. Does that mean I’m always lying? Of course not.

I was pleased that this discussion continued:

None of what I’d learned worked as well as listening to my instincts. I’ve always been good at ferreting out decption. I’m not entirely sure what my ability to detect a liar is based on–subtle cues maybe, suconscious awarenss, an intuitive talent for reading microexpressions. I don’t know and I’ve found that the more I try to understand it the less effective I am.

Right. As Georgina Kleege suggests in Sight Unseen, looking someone in the eye doesn’t have this magic power that many (most?) people seem to think it does.

march 21/RUN

3.35 miles
trestle turn around
43 degrees

Wow, what a morning! Birds! Sun! Calm air! Everything quiet, relaxed. I felt fast and free. less tightness in my neck and hip. Greeted the Welcoming Oaks and Dave, the Daily Walker.

10 Things

a runner with BRIGHT orange shoes
a shining white form in the distance, through the trees: the river
the strong smell of weed somewhere below me
stopping at the sliding bench — movement below, in the trees just before white sands beach: a runner on the winchell trail — should I try that?
the soft knocking of a woodpecker in a nearby tree
stepping off onto the dirt trail for a brief stretch: soft and springy
someone sitting on a bench near the trestle
the river: open and blue
a big branch sticking out of the trashcan — a discarded walking stick?
3? stones stacked on the ancient boulder

I decided to try an experiment with beats.

First mile: chanting in triples
Second mile: metronome at 170 bpm
Third mile: “Doin’ Time” playlist

mile 1: strawberry/blueberry/raspberry — (to the welcoming oaks) Hello friend! Hello friend! Hello friend!/ old oak tree / stacking stones / stack the stones / intellect / mystery / (noticing a crack in the asphalt) breaking up / cracking up / bright yellow / woodpecker

I found that bright yellow was especially good for locking into a rhythm — BRIGHT yellow

mile 2: 170 was hard. I think it was too slow. I probably should have tried 175 or 180. I think I’ve done 175 before. I only locked into this beat a few times. Was my inability to lock in also because I started with triples?

mile 3: I put in my playlist. The first song was “About Damn Time” by Lizzo. It was great for getting into a groove. Next up, “9 to 5.” As I started to listen to it, I realized the metronome was still on and the beats of the song and it didn’t match up. I decided to leave it going and see what happens when I’m dealing with competing rhythms. I can’t quite remember, but I feel like I didn’t lock into either rhythm; I just created my own, and it didn’t bother/unsettle me.

Later I thought about how the “9 to 5” rhythm represents the relentless drudgery of working within capitalism. Resisting that rhythm, and what it does to you, is important. The final song I heard was “Too Much Time on My Hands” by Styx. I listened to the lyrics and was reminded that it was about a guy who wants a job, a way to feel useful, something to do, but he can’t get one. While he doesn’t mention in the lyrics why he can’t get a job, I thought of the larger context and the conditions (economic, political, social/cultural) that make it difficult for people/communities to find work.

Reading the lyrics — without hearing the music or singing — I was struck by this line:

And I don’t know what to do with myself

So dark. Heard with the music it just seems like a light lyric from a pop song.

This was a fun experiment that yielded some surprising results. I liked the accident of the competing rhythms and the juxtaposition of 9 to 5 with Too Much Time on My Hands. For future attempts, I’ll increase the metronome speed and mix up the order. Maybe I should try to write something, too, at the end of each segment? Speak a poem into my phone?

jan 22/RUN

6.1 miles
flats and back
24 degrees / flurries

Warmer today! Still wore lots of layers, but it wasn’t close-school cold like yesterday. After reading my post from a year ago when I wrote about running to the frozen springs in the flats, I decided to do it again this year. On my way north, I started chanting triple berries:

strawberry/blueberry/raspberry

then: mystery/history/magical . . .illusion/confusion/contusion

Then I was inspired by what I noticed:

bright orange coat
speeding cars
little dog
blue trash can
yellow shirt
gray-white sky
falling flakes
empty bench

When I reached the spring, I could hear it falling from the rock, but couldn’t see it, hidden behind the thick ice. Also heard but didn’t see the water it left on the road as cars whooshed over it.

Stopped at the river to check out the surface. Very cool. I took some pictures but I’m not sure they can capture the opaque greenish ice. It was a grayish-green, drab and looked slushy and cold and thick.

And I stopped at my favorite sliding bench and looked down at the white sands beach. Quiet, empty, white with snow, not sand.

Early on in the run, I greeted Dave, the Daily Walker. Hi Dave! Hi Sara! How are you doing? I’m good. How are you doing? I’m out here.

added a few hours later: I almost forgot something I was thinking about. As I listened to the song, Remember (lullaby) from Coco, I thought about people I miss and remembering them and then I thought about how sometimes it’s more than memory that helps me stay connected, like the time I opened my mom’s old book and saw her signature in the front. It was a physical trace of her reaching out to me. As I thought about this trace and the reaching out I remembered Diane Seuss commencement address and her discussion of Keats and his invisible hand reaching up from the grave. I’m glad I remembered the Keats bit because I remember having that thought then forgetting it almost immediately as I kept running.

an emptied mind — emptied of memories, emptied of everything

During my “on this day” practice, I encountered this phrase in Occasional Poem/ Jacqueline Woodson: zapped all the ideas from my head. I started thinking about this feeling of going blank or losing words or a sudden rush of nothing but space between your ears. What are some different ways that words describe being emptied of thought — the moment it happens and/or the feeling of emptiness?

the fish in us escaping, dandelion seed scattering, bees leaving the hive,

more than memory

I started a post yesterday (21 jan) and added this, intending, but failing, to finish it.

The wall is, for me and maybe me alone, a holy place. A place of pilgrimage, both full of meaning and void of meaning. I take photos, and the photos hold the memories still. The photos make the wall mean more than memory can, but with meaning, like a fact. No longer in motion, no longer something to which one can return and brush your fingers against (and feel the peeling paint).

*

Maybe a place like this pursues its meaning. Like when you say love and what you say means less than the actual word means. We love a place or a person, or we say a word, trying to stop time, hold something still. Maybe a place makes meaning how a dream might, in opposition to logic, inventing its own sense with presence.

*

Maybe we borrow meaning with a word, like how a photograph borrows a place, hoping meaning might remain recognizable if we say the word with the right angle of light, seeking something definite in a breath. How the impossible blue of a blue wall couldn’t be the blue of memory, a blue no photograph can contain.

Maybe to make a place holy, you must remember it more than real life allows, with all the truth of a squint, all the grace of peeling paint.

*

I’d like to look into one of those photographs, past the image, past what the image contains, past memory and regret and all the salt that sticks to the skin, into experience, into a love known true in one moment, undeniable, un-understandable, the kind of thing that splits everything in half. If I could find that photo of Cassie at the blue wall and step inside it and ask her to stay alive in a world where she was loved, maybe then I could finally know what a word means.

I could almost believe holiness is a process of remembering, but then I see the wall again, in all that sunlight, paint peeling, the blue not only the remembered blue, but more blue in the now of being seen, so I can barely stand to stand beside it, holy as it is with the fact of its own meaning.
This is the Place: A Blue wall in Leadville / Mathias Svalina

Words I’ve been studying: dream, memories, photograph, motion, still, light, breath, remember, squint, blue, real, love, now

jan 18/RUN

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

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

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

10 Things

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

My Heart Has Known Its Winter/ Arna Bontemps

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

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

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

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

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

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

this one, too:

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

and this:

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

Erosion, exhaustion.

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

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

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

jan 17/RUN

5.4 miles
bottom franklin hill and back
37 degrees
20% snow-covered

37 degrees and a mostly clear path! A great run. I felt relaxed and strong and able to shift gears and keep going. I greeted almost every walker, runner, or biker I encountered by raising my right hand. At the bottom of the hill I stopped to check out the water — open, moving thickly, a few flat and wide sheets of ice floating by. Smelled weed. Heard birds — laughing and chirping. Slipped (only a little) on a few bits of ice. Stopped at the sliding bench to admire the view — so bare and quiet and alone. Put in my headphones at the top of the hill and listened to my “Remember to Forget” playlist. Some of today’s lyrics made me think about regret and longing for the past, some of them about the joy of forgetting, and some of them commanded, remember! or don’t you forget it!

added a few hours later: I almost forgot to post the picture I took. It’s of the pile of rocks under the franklin bridge that I keep thinking is a person sitting up against the wall. I know these are rocks, but I always first think: person

Inspired by my triple berry chant exercise (see below), I chanted in triples. Can I remember 10 of them?

10 Triple Berry Chants

empty bench
grayish sky
ritual
down the hill
ice and snow
soaring bird
sloppy trail
lake street bridge
noisy wheel
3 stacked stones

confession: I did chant a few of these, but the rest I created as I wrote this list. I just can’t remember what I chanted.

early morning coffee

1 — strange sleeping habits

A morning ritual: coffee, Facebook, poets.org, poetryfoundation.org, poems.com, “on this day.” While scrolling through Facebook I found an interesting article about sleep: The forgotten medieval habit of two sleeps. The concept isn’t new to me; I read the book that it’s based on, At Day’s Close, more than a decade ago. One new thing, or thing that I had read in the book but forgot, was about the author’s initial research and how he looked to court transcripts for information about daily life:

he had found court depositions particularly illuminating. “They’re a wonderful source for social historians,” says Ekirch, a professor at Virginia Tech, US. “They comment upon activity that’s oftentimes unrelated to the crime itself.”

I started thinking more about sleep. Last night was not very good: restless legs, sore hip, getting up 3 or 4 times, walking up earlier than I’d like because of my restlessness. At one point, the author, Roger Ekirch, mentioned how recognizing the long history of getting up in the middle of the night as normal and natural could relieve some anxiety for those of us who can’t sleep straight through the night. I suddenly thought, and not for the first time: I need to accept my crazy sleep instead of fighting or worrying about it, and I should turn it into something creative. Track it, or write into it, or . . . . I wonder if there are “insomnia writing experiments?

a list-writing experiment

The first thing that came up in my google search was a scientific study about writing and falling asleep faster. Perhaps if I had searched, “insomnia writing exercises” or “insomnia poetry prompts” I would have gotten different results.

Bedtime worry, including worrying about incomplete future tasks, is a significant contributor to difficulty falling asleep. Previous research showed that writing about one’s worries can help individuals fall asleep. We investigated whether the temporal focus of bedtime writing—writing a to-do list versus journaling about completed activities—affected sleep onset latency. Fifty-seven healthy young adults (18–30) completed a writing assignment for five minutes prior to overnight polysomnography recording in a controlled sleep laboratory. They were randomly assigned to write about tasks that they needed to remember to complete the next few days (to-do list) or about tasks they had completed the previous few days (completed list). Participants in the to-do list condition fell asleep significantly faster than those in the completed-list condition. The more specifically participants wrote their to-do list, the faster they subsequently fell asleep, whereas the opposite trend was observed when participants wrote about completed activities. Therefore, to facilitate falling asleep, individuals may derive benefit from writing a very specific to-do list for five minutes at bedtime rather than journaling about completed activities.
The Effects of Bedtime Writing on Difficulty Falling Asleep

Lists? I love lists! I think I’ll try this, or my own version of it. Maybe I’ll start with a to-do list, another night a completed list, then a things I love list, or a things that bother me list, my favorite poets list, things I notice in the dark, reasons I can’t sleep list, and on and on. Eventually, maybe I can turn this into a series of list poems?

2 — idea/poem starters, an inspiration

The visual poem on poems.com for today, Good Riddance, reminded me of something I started thinking about in march 2024. The poem is a grid with a fragment of thought in each box. There are arrows directing you across or down, or across then down then across again. However your eyes choose to read the boxes creates a slightly different poem. Anyway, I started thinking about the different boxes and mixing and matching the phrases and I remembered this idea from my “to do list for 2022, 23, and 24”:

a 3/2 idea: create fragments of 2-4 lines with a “complete” thought that can be the start of a new poem, or be put together in new ways to create new poems — almost like prompts:

a shadow 
crosses

And now I’m remembering an even earlier experiment from 3 may 2019 with triple (3 beat) chants:

Speaking of chanting, I have a new exercise I want to try. First, I want to think up a bunch of 3 syllable phrases (down the hill, walk to work, eat down town, out the door, sunday best, monday worst, turnip greens, climate change, just say please, in and out…). Then I’ll write these on small slips of paper and put them in a hat or a bowl or a bag. I’ll randomly pick out 8-10 and turn them into a poem (either in the order I select them or in an order of my choosing). Maybe the phrases should be a mixture of things from the run and popular or whimsical expressions? So much fun!

added an hour later: While reviewing old entries from June of 2024, I came across a delightful typo. Instead of writing “the tunnel of trees” I wrote, “the tunnel of threes.” I love it! Maybe the title of a poem that uses triple berry chants?

june 1/RUN

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

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

10 Things

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

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

raspberry strawberry blueberry
strawberry blueberry raspberry

Then added in some other 3 beat words:

intellect mystery history
remember remember remember

Then played with remember:

remember
try to re

member try
to remem

ber try to
remember

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legacy/ Diane Seuss

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

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

from The Man with the Blue Guitar/ Wallace Stevens

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

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

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

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

march 6/RUN

3.45 miles
trestle turn around
48 degrees

Another run with no calf pain! Wore my compression sleeves again. My left IT band hurt a little and my legs felt heavy and tired, but no calf pain — victory!

IT fun: I think, I theorize, I twist, I triumph, is tall, is taught, is taut, is temerous*, is tiny, itchy tetherballs, iffy tire-swings, impossible teeter-totters

*temerous: this word appears several times in the great book I’m listening to right now: The Ten Thousand Doors of January

Today the river was brown. Is that all I remember about the run? There were a few moments it was easy, effortless, but mostly it felt difficult.

Heard lots of birds — lots of irregular, out-of-sync rhythms. A few drumming woodpeckers. My nose kept almost running. Thought I heard some voices down in the floodplain forest.

Ended at 7 Oaks. Recited “I felt a Funeral in my Mind” and thought about rhythms and interruptions and sense breaking through.

Before the run, I wrote about clocks, priming myself for noticing rhythms while I ran:

That 12-figured Moon Skull!

Today, I’m inspired by my march 6 entry from last year. Here’s what I wrote in that entry:

During the run I listened to the latest “Nobody Asked Us with Des and Kara.” They were talking about recent races, super shoes, fast times, and the future of track. Reflecting on how world records keep being broken Kara asked Des: “What do you think would happen if they took away the clock? Would the race still be exciting?” Des thought it could be, while my mind started wandering. First thinking about how I’ve been trying to forget the clock/watch and not care about pace — mostly, I’ve been successful. Second thinking about Clocks and how I’ve collected some lines (from poems and essays) about the clock, or what Mary Oliver calls it:

The clock! That twelve-figured moon skull, that white spider belly! How serenely the hands move with their filigree pointers, and how steadily! Twelve hours, and twelve hours, and begin again! Eat, speak, sleep, cross a street, wash a dish! The clock is still ticking. All its vistas are just so broad–are regular. (Notice that word.) Every day, twelve little bins in which to order disorderly life, and even more disorderly though. The town’s clock cries out, and the face on every wrist hums or shines; the world keeps pace with itself. Another day is passing, a regular and ordinary day. (Notice that word also.)
Upstream/ Mary Oliver

So many places to go with the idea of the Clock. Mary Oliver’s ordinary versus extraordinary time. Routines, habits, delight in the daily, repeated events. The Moment between time and its tight ticks, or right before something has happened, or when time (and sense) are disrupted. The time of the day dream. Outside of time and its relentless march forward, towards Death, motivated by progress. Losing time, syncing up with time. What other ways to we have for measuring meaning that don’t involve time passing?

Yes, so many ways to think about the idea of time and clocks!

interjection: Listening to an Apple playlist, ’70s Movie Essentials, and the song, “Time Warp” just came on.

pace definitions (from Merriam Webster)

rate of movement, the runner’s pace, especially : an established rate of locomotionrate of progress
specifically : parallel rate of growth or development, supplies kept pace with demand
rate of performance or delivery : TEMPO, a steady pace, on pace to set a record, especially : SPEED
rhythmic animation : FLUENCY
a manner of walking : TREAD
any of various units of distance based on the length of a human step
GAIT, especially : a fast 2-beat gait (as of the horse) in which the legs move in lateral pairs and support the animal alternately on the right and left legs
verb: paced; pacing — to walk with often slow or measured tread, to move along : PROCEED, to go at a pace —used especially of a horse
to measure by pacing —often used with off: paced off a 10-yard penalty
to cover at a walk — could hear him pacing the floor
to establish a moderate or steady pace for (oneself)
to keep pace with

my new pace: rhythm

I sink in
to a

rhythm: 3
then 2

First counting
foot strikes

then chanting
small prayers.

I beat out
meaning

until what’s
left are

syllables,
then sounds,

then something
new, or

old returned.

My rhythm for breathing, running, and writing. . .and for possessing favorite lines:

from “Practice”/ Ellen Bryant Voight

original:
at night in order to weep, to wait
for the whisker on the face of the clock
to twitch again, moving
the dumb day forward—

mine, in 3/2 rhythm:
wait for the
whisker

on the clock’s
face to

twitch again
to move

the dumb day
forward.

original:
if I came back as a bird
I’d remember that—

mine: 3/2
You — when I
come back

as a bird
will I

remember?

my new pace: a ghost, haunting the trails, inhabiting and possessing words and worlds

Was talking with two of the other clarinet players in band last night about the Calgon, take me away! commercial. Neither of them had heard of it; they’re Millennials. Does a Calgon, take me away, moment disrupt or resist or challenge capitalist time or reinforce it, or both?

Ross Gay and stopping capitalist time: from 29 march 2023

you, too, might’ve been praying for a way to stop the march of so-called time, and poems, sometimes, might do that. Poems are made of lines, which are actually breaths, and so the poem’s rhythms, its time, is at the scale and pace and tempo of the body, the tempo of our bodies lit with our dying. And poems are communicated, ultimately, body to body, voice to ear, heart to heart.⁹ Even if those hearts are not next to one another, in space or time. It makes them so. All of which is to say a poem might bring time back to its bodily, its earthly proportions. Poetry might make nothing happen. Inside of which anything can happen, maybe most dangerously, our actual fealties, our actual devotions and obligations, which is to the most rambunctious, mongrel, inconceivable assemblage of each other we could imagine.

Gay’s explicit connection to time and against capitalism resonates deeply for me. Stop those clocks, those planes, that machinery we’re using to destroy the planet, the future.

ED’s new grammar of humility and hesitation

Emily Dickinson took the scraps from the separate “higher” female education many bright women of her time were increasingly resenting, combined them with voracious and “unladylike” outside reading, and used the combination. She built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on inteIlectual borders, where confident masculine voices buzzed an alluring and inaccessible discourse, backward through history into aboriginal anagogy. Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philology from alien territory, a “sheltered” woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation. HESITATE from the Latin, meaning to stick. Stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty speaking. “He may pause but he must not hesitate”-Ruskin. Hesitation circled back and surrounded everyone in that confident age of aggressive industrial expansion and brutal Empire building. Hesitation and Separation. The Civil War had split American in two. He might pause, She hesitated. Sexual, racial, and geographical separation are at the heart of Definition.My Emily Dickinson

I really like this idea of hesitation and humility and aboriginal anagogy as a sharp contrast to progress, aggression, confidence/hubris, and time as always moving forwards (teleology). I tried to find a source that could explain exactly what Howe means by aboriginal anagogy but I couldn’t. I discovered that anagogy means mystical or a deeper religious sense and so, when I connect it to aboriginal, I’m thinking that she means that ED imbues pre-Industrial times (pre Progress!, where progress means trains and machines and cities and Empires and factories and plantations and the enslavement of groups of people and the increased mechanization of time and bodies and meaning and, importantly, grammar) with the sacred.

Hesitant
humble —

Okay, now I should go out for a fun. Should I pay attention to rhythms? Chant in triple berries? Look for disruptions? Focus on my breaths?

On my run, I listened to many different rhythms not quite in sync with my own and thought about interruptions and disruptions and how my breathing rhythm is sometimes how I breathe when I run and sometimes my imagined rhythm — real, embodied and also not real, the rhythm I’d like to have.

Concluded the run with an idea that I spoke into my phone: “Regular” time is necessary — I want the conveniences it allows for! — but we need to safeguard that space outside of that time. Poets do that. I try to do that, to keep the door open to that time/space for others.

I’ll end with a wonderful time poem:

[My favorite time is in time’s other side]/ Etel Adnan

My favorite time is in time’s other side, its other identity, the kind that collapses and sometimes reappears, and sometimes doesn’t. The one that looks like marshmallows, pomegranates, and stranger things, before returning to its kind of abstraction. I used to be fond of time as it was a matter that helped us feel intelligent. Those days have gone to where days go, in their own cemeteries. Today I see eternity everywhere. I had yesterday an empty glass of champagne on the table, and it looked both infinite and eternal, though it left me indifferent. At least, I was in good company, and a day closer to all sorts of annihilations.

cemeteries for gone days — to see eternities everywhere — time that looks like pomegranates and marshmallows

feb 18/RUN

5.8 miles
down the franklin and back
31 degrees

A little icy, a little windy, a little crowded. Difficult to run together in these conditions, so Scott and I split up. The sun was bright and I saw some wonderful shadows of trees — gnarled and sprawling across the sky. Heard some geese, smelled some bacon.

When we ran together, Scott and I talked about the half frozen river and how it looked like a gray slushy. What flavor is gray slushy, I wondered. Scott suggested, all the flavors then added, I bet that would taste good. I wondered if this “everything” slushy would include blueberry. No, Scott said, blue raspberry. I mentioned how there is no consensus on the origins of the rasp in raspberry, which I had come across while reading a past entry a few days ago.

How I See

As I continue to work on this project, I want to return to ekphrastic poems. In an article for Lithub — Back to School for Everyone: Ekphrastic Poetry with Victoria Chang — Chang offers some helpful thoughts about the form:

how poets engage with visual art:

write about the scene or subject being depicted in the artwork
write in the voice of the person or object represented
write about their personal experiences
fictionalizing a scene within the art
write about the work in the context of its socio-political history

In essence, ekphrastic poems are a way to interact with the world and a way to respond to the world. The process of writing ekphrastic poetry also brings into question aspects of viewing, the culture of viewing, and the gaze, always asking the questions of who is looking at what, when, and why?

3 thoughts about Ekphrasis

1: I’m as interested in how someone is looking as who, what, when, or why they are looking.

2: Maybe part of the ekphrasis angle is the idea that sometimes the world looks like a painting to me — pointillism or abstract expressionism or?

3: the contrast between how a photo captures/stills the image in a way that my eyes never can

A view from the ford bridge, poorly framed. Not sure what color other people might see here, but to me it's all gray: light gray sky and river, broken up by chunks of dark gray trees. I like how the sky and the river look almost the same color to me. — 8 nov 2023

original description: A view from the ford bridge, poorly framed. Not sure what color other people might see here, but to me it’s all gray: light gray sky and river, broken up by chunks of dark gray trees. I like how the sky and the river look almost the same color to me.

5 nouns/ 5 adjectives/ 5 verbs

nouns: river, water, shore, trees, sky, branches, a bend, surface
adjectives: winding, scraggly, soft, fuzzy, drab, dark, light, gray, wide, flat, contrast, wide
verb: stretching, reaching, standing, stilled, separated, cutting through,\

one sentence about the most important thing in image: The sky and the river are the same color; only the disruption of trees enables me to distinguish between them.

a second sentence about the second most important thing: Everything gray: light gray sky and river, broken up by chunks of dark gray trees.

a third sentence about the third most important thing: In this soft, wide open view, when everything is stilled, silent, nothing is happening.

The nothing that’s happening in this image is full of meaning. Here nothing = no things are doing anything/ nothing to see; nothing = a void, absence, unknowingness; nothing = a rest for my eyes, no movement, everything still, satisfied, stable.

The idea of no separation, no edges or divisions between forms, reminds me of a wonderful poem that I thought I’d posted already, but hadn’t. I think when I first encountered it a few years ago, it didn’t resonate for me. Now, I want to call out, yes!, with almost every line.

Monet Refuses the Operation/ Lisel Muller

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

sept 19/RUN

3.6 miles
trestle turn around (+ extra)
65 degrees / 72% humidity

Out near the gorge, everything is busy today — wheels whooshing, hammers pounding, bobcats speeding by. All the sounds felt electric. I’ve wondered this before (and looked it up, but forgot the answer): is the moisture in the air causing everything to sound different — louder, more intense?

Having just written something about triple berry chants for my class, I decided to do them today. Strawberry / raspberry / blueberry. I think I chanted them for at least a mile. They helped keep my cadence up. Did they do anything else?

10 Things I Noticed While Chanting Triple Berries

Dave the Daily Walker had on bright blue running shoes — nice!
a rollerblader passed me from behind — no clicking and clacking ski poles to alert me to their approach
minneapolis parks has trimmed back the bushes and wildflowers that were blocking part of the already narrow path that splits from the biking path and dips below the road
a runner, only a little faster than me, entered the path in front of me at 32nd. Very gradually, he inched away, then turned off the trail again
more yellow leaves, a few slashes of red, no orange
human voices and the clanging of a dog collar down below on the Winchell Trail
several openings in the otherwise thick trees — dirt trails descending to the Winchell Trail
a noisy runner with an awkward gait — did he swing his arms awkwardly too?
another runner, speeding fast. Almost a blur with feet thumping the ground
at least one loud thud as an acorn fell

Running north, I listened to feet striking the ground, an acorn falling, runners joking. I stopped at the turn around put it Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS then ran south.

At the halfway point, I took this picture. The river and the gorge are behind those leaves. In a month, I’ll get to see them again!

fall leaves, mostly yellow, several straight brown trunks, no view of the river — no view of the river, near franklin

march 21/RUN

3.25 miles
trestle turn around
32 degrees

Right before I started I saw some snow flurries but by the time I was running, they had stopped. Windy, humid. A cold 32 degrees. Began the run needing to lose my anxiousness. I did. Some parts of the run were hard; I’m not sure I’m completely over my sickness. But some parts of it were great. For a few minutes I felt like I was flying and free. I did a lot of triple berry chants on the way north. Stopped at the trestle to look down at the brown flat river. Then I put in the Fame (1980 version) soundtrack and ran back south. Timed it so “I Sing the Body Electric” was on as I ran up the last hill. As I sped up, I could hear some geese honking over the gorge, almost like they were racing me. Yes!

10 Things I Noticed

mud — thick, gooey, dark brown — on the edge of the path and alongside the lingering snow
sporadic geese honks throughout the run
the path was almost completely clear, only a few puddles and strips of ice
the wind was strong and in my face as I climbed out from under the lake street bridge
under the bridge, a parked suburu was facing the wrong way
some of the walking path was clear
the river was open and brown. It looked less like water and more like a flat wall
near the end of the run, I stopped for a minute to admire the view between the trees of the lake street bridge and the cars traveling over it
faintly recall hearing some birds chirping in a distinctive way — was it cheer up cheer up?
can’t remember if I heard the sound of my feet striking and sliding on the grit, but I felt it

James Schuyler, Hymn to Life, Page 9

Begins with Have much to thank you for, ends with the evening star seems set.

This page — wow.

And someone
You know well is suffering, sees it all but not the way before
Him, hating his job and not knowing what to change it for. Have
You any advice to give? Have you learned nothing in all these
Years? “Take it as it comes.” Sit still and listen: each so alone.

How often do people, when they’re suffering and tell others about it, want advice? How often do I? Sometimes. Mostly I want acknowledgment. Someone to witness what I’m feeling and to honor that it is real, true. Rarely do I want someone to tell me it will be okay or that I’m making a bigger deal out of it (whatever it is) than I should. I try not to give advice, often falling back on the classic, that sucks. More often than I should — should I ever do this? — I try to relate to the other’s pain, share a story of what I think is a similar experience. My daughter hates when I do this, it makes her feel worse. Often I can’t help myself. Slowly, I’ve been getting better at just listening, sitting still.

“Time heals
All wounds”: now what’s that supposed to mean? Wounds can
Kill, like that horse chestnut tree with the rotting place will surely
Die unless the tree doctor comes. Cut out the rot, fill with tree
Cement, score and leave to heal.

I think about this one in terms of grief, especially my grief over my mom’s death. It’s true that it isn’t as hard, and I’m not as undone as I was right after she died. But, what does it mean to heal? And, how often do things heal on their own, without any effort or attention? Maybe time doesn’t heal but…gives you more practice living with it? I’m sure this doesn’t totally apply, but I always think about what I’ve heard long-time and/or pro runners say about running long distances: it never gets easier, you just get better at enduring it.

And there
Is the fog off the cold Atlantic. No one is at his best with
A sinus headache. It will pass. Stopped passages unblock

I appreciate that he put this detail in. Just before reading this page, I was having what I call, a sinus episode. Not quite a headache, but a strange ache and heaviness that descends. No sharp pain, but discomfort, a queasy uneasiness. Pressure. Sometimes feeling like a thick iron plate is pressing down on my face. I’ve been getting these ever since the pandemic started — are they anxiety? Maybe partly? They used to last all day, but now that I’ve learned to put on a breathe right strip, they usually go away pretty quickly.

why
Let the lovely spring, its muck and scarlet emperors, get you
Down. Unhibernate. Let the rain soak your hair, run down your
Face, hang in drops from facial protuberances. Face into
It, then towel dry. Then another day brings back the sun and
Violets in the grass.

Unhibernate. Face into it, then towel dry. I like this idea better than time heals all wounds.

Far away
In Washington, at the Reflecting Pool, the Japanese cherries
Bust out into their dog mouth pink. Visitors gasp. The sun
Drips, coats and smears, all that spring yellow under unending
Blue.

Why does this poem keep returning to DC? I’ll have to look that up. I did (hours later). Not sure if this is the only answer, but he grew up in D.C.

I love his description of the intense, over-the-top ripeness and showiness of spring. I’m reminded of Ada Limón and her line, “the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton-candied color blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains” (almost remembered it word for word!). The difference is Schuyler’s sun and how it drips, coats and smears, all that spring yellow. This reminds me of living in Atlanta and the yellow pollen, coating every surface. Yuck! For me it just looked gross and stained everything, for others it made it very hard to breathe.

Only the oaks hold back their leaf buds, reticent.
Reticence is not a bad quality, though it may lead to misunderstandings.
I misunderstood silence for disapproval, see now it was
Sympathy.

Are the oaks the last to bud here in Minnesota. I’ll have to watch in the next month. Is it reticence or patience, or maybe a desire to hang back and stay out of the fray of frantic growing and greening? I might be asking this of myself and not the oaks.

Reticent = reserved, holding back, restrained
Patience = not hasty or impetuous, measured

I’m not sure whether or not oaks are the last to bud here in Minnesota, but when they do, they aren’t reticent, and their leaves don’t hold back. Within weeks they have consumed the trees, then my view of the gorge. Never in pleasing, controlled shapes like maples, but a hungry, sprawling green everywhere.

Thank you, May, for these warm stirrings. Life
Goes on, it seems, though in all sorts of places—nursing
Homes—it is drawing to a close. Abstractions and generalities:
Grass and blue depths into which the evening star seems set.

Not sure what to say about this bit, but I wanted to leave it in.
note, 29 march 2023: Looking back at these lines I started thinking about vision — my vision as an old person’s vision — and how details are lost, things appear mostly in the abstract and as forms — outside, blue sky and grass.

march 20/RUN

3.1 miles
ford bridge turn around
29 degrees

First day back after getting slammed with a 24 hour bug (a test for COVID was negative). For the first time in a decade?, I slept all day Saturday after being up all night sick on Friday. Yuck! The run was hard. I felt sore. But I was able to get outside, breathe in fresh air, hear a woodpecker drumming, see the river shimmering, move! Stopped to walk briefly after turning around under the ford bridge and encountering a stretch of slick ice. When I started again, I decided to chant triple berries to keep my rhythm steady. Strawberry Raspberry Blueberry Strawberry Raspberry Blueberry, over and over for at least a mile. Close to the end of the, nearing the oak savanna, I thought about a line from today’s Schuyler excerpt and the difference between contemplation and day dreams (below).

The line,

life in
Contemplation, which is hard to tell from day dreaming,

I started chanting contemplation — con tem pla tion con temp pla tion
Then:

con tem pla tion
con tem pla tion
won der ing
won der ing

When I was done and walking home, I took out my phone and spoke a little poem into it:

con
tem
pla
tion
con
tem
pla
tion
won
der
ing
wan
der
ing

Maybe the
difference
between con
templation
and wonder
ing is the
difference
between 4
syllables
versus 3
even not
odd method
ical not
haphazard
exactness
instead of
spilling o
ver?

Is anything there, in this fragment? Not sure, but it was fun to have it appear in my ears at the end of a run. I didn’t even realize I’d brought the Schuyler with me on my run! As I write this last bit, I’m thinking about the movement and associations in Schuyler’s poem, how he travels from idea to idea. I think 4 counts is a tidier, more exact, everything in it’s proper place kind of a beat. While 3 counts offers more movement, freedom, the ability to shift from thing to thing to thing without needing to pin anything down in one place.

James Schuyler, Hymn to Life, Page 8

Begins with Hoo” he calls, ends with So much, too much. Tried something new today; I listened to Schuyler’s recording as I read the page.

Another day, and still the sun shines down, warming

Ever since I read a line from Ada Limón’s poem “Privacy,” I’m still standing, as I’m standing still and not as I continue to stand, I always read still in both ways when I encounter it. So, still the sun, is not only even so the sun, but calm/quiet/peaceful sun

Life in action, life in repose, life in
Contemplation, which is hard to tell from day dreaming, on a day
When the sky woolgathers clouds and sets their semblance on a
Glassy ocean. At first I thought that Schuyler had made up woolgather, like Gerard Manley Hopkins did with his golden grove unleaving, but then I looked it up. It’s a word! “to indulge in wandering fancies or purposeless thinking; to be in a dreamy or absent-minded state: said esp. of ‘the wits’, etc.” (from the online OED, accessed through my public library).

What are the differences between contemplation and day dreaming? And, is it day dream or daydream — is that another instance of me turning a verb (the day dreams) into a noun (a daydream)?

Only its edge goes lisp.

I love how he uses lisp here. I anticipated limp. The idea of the day going soft, getting quieter instead of stale or stiff or injured is more interesting to me.

On no two days the same.
Is it the ocean’s mindlessness that troubles? At times it seems
Calculatedly malevolent, tearing the dunes asunder, tumbling
Summer houses into itself, a terror to see.

Here I’m thinking of nature’s indifference to humans. On the podcast You’re Wrong About, Sarah Marshall and her sometimes guest co-host, Blaire Braverman, explore survival stories and the comfort they find in recognizing that nature is not out to get us, but is indifferent to us. It might kill us, but not out of malevolence. I’m also thinking about Carl Phillip’s indifferent willow in his poem, In Swept All Visible Signs Away.

They say there are
Those who have never felt terror. A slight creeping of the scalp,
Merely. How fine. Finer than sand, that, on a day like this.
Trickles through my fingers, ensconced in a dune cleft, sun
Warmed and breeze cooled. This peace is full of sounds and
Movement. A couple passes, jogging. A dog passes, barking
And running. My nose runs, a little. Just a drip. Left over
From winter. How long ago it seems! All spring and summer stretch
Ahead, a roadway lined by roses and thunder.

So much movement — wandering — here! From the terror of nature to only feeling terror as a creeping of the scalp, which is fine like the sand and that trickles through my fingers at a beach filled with sounds and movement: a couple jogging, a dog running like my nose which now only drips from a winter ended. Wow!

“It will be here
Before you know it.” These twigs will then have leafed and
Shower down a harvest of yellow-brown. So far away, so
Near at hand. The sand runs through my fingers. The yellow
Daffodils have white corollas (sepals?). The crocuses are gone,
I didn’t see them go. They were here, now they’re not. Instead
The forsythia ensnarls its flames, cool fire, pendent above the smoke
Of its brown branches.

It will be here before you know it, and it will be gone too soon. Sand as time passing too quickly. The flower we wait to see all winter will bloom and die without us noticing. Somehow, we forgot to check that one week they were out. It all happens too quickly.

sepals = The outer parts of the flower (often green and leaf-like) that enclose a developing bud.

From the train, a stand of larch is greener than
Greenest grass. A funny tree, of many moods, gold in autumn, naked
In winter: an evergreen (it looks) that isn’t. What kind of a tree
Is that? I love to see it resurrect itself, the enfolded buttons
Of needles studding the branches, then opening into little bursts.

Have I ever seen a larch? Do they even grow in Minnesota. Looked it up. Yes:

the Tamarack (also known as Larch, or Tamarack Larch) is a deciduous conifer — a tree with needles that drop in the fall. There are around 10 species of Larch in the northern hemisphere; this one is native to Minnesota and doesn’t mind our cold winters and wetland soils.

When the needles begin to form in the spring, the trees are covered in cute, soft tufts that slowly lengthen. Our trees are relatively young (planted in 2012), but eventually they may grow up to 50 feet tall. You might catch a glimpse of these golden beauties in mass as you head north or east of the Twin Cities later in the fall.
Mississippi Watershed Management Organization

a little more (added an hour later): Just finished Rebecca Makkai’s latest book, I Have Some Questions for You. It was excellent — wonderfully complicated and messy and compelling. I finished it a few hours before it was due on a 3-week loan from the library. These days it is a huge accomplishment to actually finish a book before it is due. I can still see words (as opposed to hearing words) enough to read the pages, but it takes a very long time. I get too tired — I often fall asleep after a page — or distracted. The words rarely look blurry; I just can’t seem to read a lot of them. I am very happy to have finished today because this book is new and very popular and if I had put it on hold after it was returned (it’s an ebook that is automatically returned), I wouldn’t get to finish it for months. Hooray!

One other thing to note: I was struck by how Rebecca Makkai emphasized eye contact several times. I might have missed a few, but I tried to screen shot the instances I noticed. I’m collecting examples of the idea that to “look into someone’s eyes” is to truly see them, or to connect with their humanity, or to see the truth, or means you are telling the truth. Here are the examples I found in her book — because I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone, I won’t give any context for these):

I’d been waiting four years to see Omar, to look him in the eyes. I didn’t want or expect anything from him; I just wanted to see his face.

even if I couldn’t quite tell the color of his cheeks, I could see it in his eyes

I stood beside her, sweating, hands on hips, made eye contact with
her in the mirror.

meaningful eye contact across the dining hall, the kind that said We’d both do best to keep our mouths shut?

The few things I know: She was facing him when he slammed her head back, more than once; they were eye to eye.

sept 9/RUN

5.25 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
64 degrees / drizzle

Rain today. On and off. When I started, it wasn’t raining, but in the middle of my run, drizzle. It was hard to tell because I was sweating and wearing a baseball cap. A good run. I was overdressed, with my pink jacket on. When I got to the bottom of the Franklin hill, I took it off and wrapped it around my waist.

Running down the hill I chanted,

Here I go
down the hill
Here I go
down the hill
Here I go
down the hill
Watch me fly!

Listened to all the sounds in the gorge running north, a Bruno Mars Apple Essential playlist on the return trip south.

10 Things I Noticed

a stinky sewer smell — not near the ravine, but down in the tunnel of trees
a tower of stacked stones on the ancient boulder
the coxswain instructing the rowers
a rushing sound — either the wind through the leaves or water sprinkling out of the seeps and springs and sewer pipes
so much goldenrod this year! golden yellow flowers everywhere. I wonder if that’s what’s causing Delia the dog’s itchiness?
the leaves are starting to turn, mostly yellow, a few streaks of red
park workers in their orange vests, their truck parked on the path — trimming trees?
such an intense smell of pot as I ran by the lake street bridge porta potty
the smell of cigarette smoke below the franklin st bridge
I think the river was more brown than blue and it was gently moving

In the fall of 2018 (thanks past Sara for writing the date in the front of the book!), I bought Tanis Rideout’s book of poems, Arguments with the Lake. Working on my latest poem, about fighting with the lake, I decided to revisit it. Here’s one of the poems:

Shirley, Midlake/ Tanis Rideout

Hearts are bred to beat one billion times in an elephant
or in a mouse — mathematically simple difference of beats
per minute. Unlucky us with two billion more, slowed
by the hibernetic slumber of escape or blessedly sped by panic,
pain, a six a.m. jog around the block turning, always turning,
clockwise. By love, by sex. By want. So simple to be a fish.

I’m always giving it away. With each stroke, flutter, catch, kick
and the surging need to inhale, inhale, inhale, like I’ve never
taken a breath before.

The lake tries to soothe and slow, creeps cold into core, slips
into the sheltered bays of lungs, the hidden rivers around the heart.
It’s a fair exchange — beats per pleasure. For pain. Each of us is allotted
the strikes of the heart. I’m using mine, arguing with the Lake.

sept 7/RUN

5.9 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
70 degrees / humidity: 95%
8:45 am

Back to warmer, more humid, mornings. Did my new regular routine with this route: run just beyond the bottom of the franklin hill, turn around, walk up the hill, put on a playlist, begin running again, much faster, at the top.

I don’t remember what I thought about as I ran. I started noticing my breathing pattern: 1 2 3 4 breathe. Then near the top of Franklin, I started chanting, 54321/54321/54321/123. And then, I changed the rhythm slightly and came up with words:

Here I go down the hill
Here I go down the hill
Here I go down the hill
Watch me fly.

To remember it, I decided to pull out my phone and recite it mid-flight down the hill:

chant, 7 sept

10 Things I Remember From My Run

Reaching the bottom of the hill, the water was flat and still. No rowers or waves.
I startled a squirrel as I ran by their hiding place in the brush.
A group of women — I didn’t see them, only heard their voices — climbing the stone steps by the trestle.
A unicycle biking up the steep Franklin hill! I noticed them after the turn-off to go above, so they might have only started there, but I like to imagined this biker biked all the way from the bottom on a unicycle. What a feat!
That same unicycle encountering a skateboarder heading down the hill.
A sewer smell, coming up from the ravine.
Sweat dripping off of my face in big drops.
The buzz of cicadas, the hum of the traffic on the I-94 bridge and the river road
Saying Good morning! in my head to the Welcoming Oaks and out loud to an older jogger.
Noticing the goldenrod lining the path as I walked up the hill.

Speaking of goldenrod, as I noticed the golden flowers on the edge of the trail and wondered if they were goldenrod or something else, I remembered Maggie Smith’s poem “Goldenrod” and decided I should memorize it. I also thought about Robin Wall Kimmerer and her chapter on Asters and Goldenrod.

Goldenrod/ Maggie Smith

I’m no botanist. If you’re the color of sulfur
and growing at the roadside, you’re goldenrod.

You don’t care what I call you, whatever
you were born as. You don’t know your own name.

But driving near Peoria, the sky pink-orange,
the sun bobbing at the horizon, I see everything

is what it is, exactly, in spite of the words I use:
black cows, barns falling in on themselves, you.

Dear flowers born with a highway view,
forgive me if I’ve mistaken you. Goldenrod,

whatever your name is, you are with your own kind.
Look–the meadow is a mirror, full of you,

your reflection repeating. Whatever you are,
I see you, wild yellow, and I would let you name me.

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.

july 14/RUNSWIM

run: 3.6 miles
marshall loop
67 degrees
8:40 am

Another beautiful day! After all the biking yesterday, feeling tired today. The run felt good, but now I lack motivation to write or remember my run. Still, I’ll try. This week in my class, we’re shifting gears to talk about rhythm, breathing, and translating wonder into words. I decided I’d try to think in triples as I ran: strawberry/blueberry/raspberry/blackberry. Now I’ll try to summarize my run in triples:

singing birds
serenade
neighborhood
daycare kids
playground yells
lake street bridge
up the hill
one lane closed
passing cars
feeling tired
sweating lots
stop to walk
cross the road
avoid bikes
yellow vest
trimming trees
shadow falls
up the steps
down a hill
music on
Taylor Swift
Paper Rings
lifting knees
quick fast feet
ending strong
check my stones
wipe my face
breathe in deep

That was fun! Writing out, “singing birds,” reminded me of the birds I first heard as I walked out my door and up the block. Their 2 note song (not the black-capped chickadee “feebee”) sounded like they kept telling me to Wake up! Wake up! No rowers on the river, which was a pretty shade of blue. Admired how the trees along the shore cast a gentle shadow on the water.

Last night, or was it very early this morning?, I woke up and went downstairs to get some water. Something bright was behind the curtain. The moon? The moon! So big, so bright, so perfect hanging half way up the sky over my backyard. I went out on the deck and marveled at it for a moment. The moon, never not astonishing! Here’s an acrostic poem (I love acrostic poems!) about the moon.

Moon/ AMY E. SKLANSKY

Marvelous
Opaque
Orb.
Night-light
for the world.

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

Writing this the morning after. Arrived at the beach: so windy! The water was choppy, but not too bad. Tried to think about rhythms and breathing as I swam. I remember thinking about how chanting words can help in many different ways: connect you with your breathing, keep you focused and on pace, open you up and make words strange which could lead to new (and better?) words, and is a way to hold onto/remember ideas that come to you while you’re moving (try to remember the idea through a few words or a phrase). I thought about that for just a few minutes. The rest of the time, I was preoccupied with breathing, staying on course, avoiding other swimmers, and worrying that my calf and feet might be tightening up. Can I remember 10 things?

10 Things I Noticed

a silver flash below me — this has to be fish, right?
one dark plane hovering in the air, hanging in the sky for a long time
nearing an orange buoy, it shifted in the wind and the waves. Hard to get around it.
the green buoy was closer than it often is to the big beach, so was the first orange buoy
clouds, no sun
far off to my right: steady, speedy swimmers, approaching the buoy at a sharp angle
a lifeguard kayaking in just before the beginning of open swim, apologizing for the wait (even though it was just 5:30). My response, “no worries,” and I meant it. The lifeguards really have their shit together this year
wiped out after the 3rd loop, I thought I tucked my cap under the strap of my suit. Nope, it must have fallen in the water. Bummer
lots of muck and sand and a few little bits of vegetation under my suit when I got home and took a shower
feeling both so much love for the lake, the lifeguards, and the other swimmers AND also feeling irritated by and competitive with any swimmers near me.

No ducks, or seagulls, or dragonflies, or swans (peddle boats)…not too many people at the beach — are they on vacation this week?

july 6/RUNSWIM

5 miles
bottom of franklin hill
69 degrees
humidity: 79% / dew point: 64
8:30 am

Even though the dew point was high, it was a good run. I tried my new experiment for the franklin hill route (which I first tried on june 22): run 2.5 miles to the bottom of the hill, turn around and walk back up it while paying attention.

recording:

thoughts while walking up the franklin hill

transcript:

july 6, 2022. 8:54 am. Just ran about 2 and a half miles to the bottom of the franklin hill, and now I’m walking up it, and it’s so LOUD. Everything is loud: the rumbling of the rushing cars and trucks above me on the bridge, the cars whooshing by, the bikes, the air is buzzing. It was doing this last night too when I was at the lake swimming. So much energy in the air, made it seem more intense.
The noise of the traffic is almost drowning out all the birdsong. Occasionally it pierces through the heavy curtain of sound.
When I was running earlier, I started chanting in triple berries as a way to get in the mindset [of being open to noticing]. I did strawberry/blueberry/raspberry, then wondering/wondering/wandering, wondering/wandering/mystery, and then, wonder where/wonder why/wonder when/wonder what. I wonder how that would work if I kept chanting it as a way to get into this trance? If I did, wonder what/wonder what/wonder what until I found something that I wondered about.
Heading under the Franklin bridge, I hear some roller skiers behind me. I love the sound of the click [of their poles]. *the sound of roller skiers’ poles hitting the pavement.* click? maybe a click clack? click? yeah. click click. I can’t quite tell. *me, humming*

note: I find it fascinating to listen back to my transcripts — how I don’t finish my thoughts; speak using run-on sentences with and…and…and; and hum without realizing it!

One more thing: As I was running, I remembered something I’d like to add for my class today in terms of wonder as curiosity: I’m calling it, “fill in the blank.” With this activity, you listen for fragments of conversation and try to imagine what the next word would be. I often hear unfinished bits of conversation as I run near others and I wonder what they were talking about or how they finished the sentence that I only heard the first half of. It’s fun, entertaining, a good way to use your imagination, and might lead to a story or a poem.

Here are 2 things I want to archive from twitter: a poem by Wendell Berry and a quote from Mary Ruefle, and one thing I heard from Scott about creativity and dyslexia:

1

To Know the Dark/ Wendell Berry

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

2

John Ashbery, in an interview… : “I waste a lot of time. That’s part of the [creative process] ….The problem is, you can’t really use this wasted time. You have to have it wasted. Poetry disequips you for the requirements of life. You can’t use your time.” — Mary Ruefle in Madness, Rack, and Honey

note: I’m a little confused by this notation but I assume it means that Mary Ruefle is quoting John Ashbery in her quote?

3

An article to check out about how people with dyslexia might think more creatively: Dyslexia Helped Evolutionary Survival of Humans, Research suggest. As with most poplular reporting on scientific research, I want to find the original study that inspired this pop article for Newsweek. A few lines caught my eye, including:

Schools, academic institutes and workplaces are not designed to make the most of explorative learning.
But we urgently need to start nurturing this way of thinking to allow humanity to continue to adapt and solve key challenges.

Yes, we need to radically rethink what skills are taught/learned if we’re going to survive the 21st century!

swim: 1 small loop
cedar lake open swim
80 degrees
6:00 pm

Swam across the lake with my 19 year old son! We’ve been practicing and building up his endurance for the last couple of weeks. Today he didn’t seem to have any problem swimming across and back. Hooray! It was fun to swim with him.

addendum: returning to this post a day later — Besides swimming with FWA, one of the best things about swimming at Cedar Lake last night was how clear the water was. It wasn’t absolutely clear, where you could see all the way to bottom 50 feet below, but it was clear enough that I could my legs and hands under the water (they were glowing white) and FWA as he did the breast-stroke. Then, as we left the beach, we both noticed the vegetation below us, growing up from some bottom that stretched endlessly and invisibly beneath us.

june 21/RUNBIKESWIMBIKE

run: 2.25 miles
river road trail, north/south
73 degrees
humidity: 87% / dew point: 73!
7:45 am

I ran north on the river road to the top of the hill just past the lake street bridge. Stopped for a minute, then turned around and headed back. Sunny, but with lots of shade. Forgot to look at the river.

73 for the dew point? That’s bad, or “extremely uncomfortable,” according to Runner’s World. Yes, it was. Do I remember anything other than being uncomfortably warm?

10 Things I Noticed

rower’s voices from down below!
3 stones stacked on the boulder
a man fully covered in black sweatpants and a black jacket, with a white towel around his neck. Aren’t you hot, I thought as I passed him
dark in the tunnel of trees, difficult to see if other people were there
the pedestrian part of the double-bridge between 33rd and 32nd streets is overgrown with vines and bushes and leaves. Makes it harder to see if someone’s coming the other way, and narrower, making it harder to pass. Thankfully, no collisions today
the small stretch of dirt trail that I take as the path nears the lake street bridge is wet — I think there was a brief, strong storm last night, or was that a dream?
a group of 3 fast bikers riding on the road, a cautious car following behind
a darting squirrel
a flash of movement of the leaves beside the trail – was the flash from the sun hitting the leaves just right, or a critter — a bird or chipmunk or squirrel?
later in my run, encountered Mr. black sweatsuit with white towel again. He said a soft, “morning,” and I nodded my head as a reply

Wow. Finding 10 things today took some thinking and remembering and getting past my overriding feelings of heat and discomfort. Such a great exercise in noticing!

Oh — I almost completely forgot: I also chanted in triple berries. Lots of strawberry/blueberry/raspberry and gooseberry/blackberry/red berry to keep my feet striking steadily. Added in a few mystery/history/mystery, which didn’t quite work, and butterscotch/chocolate sauce/caramel, and please don’t stop. Now I wish I had done more of them. I love the triple berry chants.

At the end of my run, as I was walking back, I listened to my first lecture for the class I’m teaching. I’m asking the students to listen to it on their first walk or run outside. I’m doing this partly because I’d like to make outside be the classroom space as much as possible, and partly because I think listening while moving can help you hear/process the words differently than when you’re inside, sitting still. One thought about the lecture: will my voice put them to sleep?

Mostly I don’t use headphones, but I do like to listen to podcasts or music sometimes. It’s strange how ideas or stories I’ve heard while running get imprinted on where I was on the trail. Even now, years later, as I run below the lake street bridge, I often think of the first season of Serial. Running from downtown to the Bohemian Flats, I think about an episode of “On Being” with Eula Biss. Listening to music or podcasts while moving might seem like a distraction from giving attention to a place, and it can be. But it can also be a chance to create a map of a place, connecting ideas that matter to you with locations that you move through regularly. Does that make sense?

Many people have strong opinions about whether or not you should be listening to anything while you’re moving. Although I do move much more without headphones, I like wearing them too. In my first year of doing this running project, I wrote a series of four acrostic poems exploring this no headphones/playlist debate: Playlist/No Headphones, some reflections

note: I’m typing this paragraph an hour later. When I was writing about headphones and listening, I thought there was something else I wanted to say, but it had drifted from my mind. It came back, in the midst of thinking about podcasts.

When I listen to podcasts, I always wear headphones, not broadcasting them to anyone else on the trail. For the most part, I prefer that others listen with headphones too. Yet, even as I write this, I’m reminded of how hearing someone’s irritating TEDtalk inspired a poem, and how I find some delight in hearing a song blasting from a bike speaker, especially if it’s accompanied by the Doppler effect.

Found this Anne Carson poem on twitter this morning:

Could I/ Anne Carson

If you are not the free person you want to be, you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to be unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.

(added this later in the day):

bike: 8.5 miles
lake nokomis and back
87 degrees
4:30 pm (there) / 6:00 (back)

Biked without any problems. 2 distinctive memories, one of the way to the lake, one on the way back.

to the lake: Coasting down the hill between the double bridge and Locks and Dam No. 1, in the hot sun, I passed someone pushing a canoe on wheels. It looked awkward and like they were struggling. I tried to imagine the scenario where you would be pushing a canoe at this spot.

from the lake: Biking under the echo bridge, I heard 2 flutes playing a duet under the bridge, on the other side. It sounded very nice. I imagined calling out, “that sounds great” or “you’re awesome” but I didn’t.

This is the first time I’ve witnessed a canoe being pushed on the paved path or 2 flutes playing a duet under a bridge.

swim: 2 loops
87 degrees
windy

So much wind again. I’m getting used to it. I stayed on course. There was one point where I oriented myself in relation to another swimmer who was off course, so I got a little too close to the buoy, but otherwise, no problem. Again, I seem to swim straight towards the buoys even when I don’t see them, or think I see them. My googles leaked a little, and when I got out of the water there was a film over my eyes. Everything looked like it was fogged up, even though I wasn’t wearing glasses.

One memorable thing: Rounding the last green buoy, parallel to the big beach, I suddenly hit something hard with my hand. Huh? A green plastic bucket. As I flinched and lifted my head out of the water in surprise, I heard a woman laugh. Was she laughing at me? I doubt it. How did the bucket make it out this far?

I breathed every 5 strokes and had fun punching the water when it was extra choppy. Noticed a few planes and clouds above. An occasional flash below, and nothing else but brown, opaque water. Oh — a menancing sailboat, off to my left side. The first one this year!

addendum, june 22: I remembered 2 more memorable things that I don’t want to forget. One while I was swimming, the other while biking.

swimming: I kept seeing another swimmer out of the corner of my eye, but when I looked back again, they were gone. It was strange, because it happened more than once and felt very real, like they were there, and then they weren’t. Maybe it was the yellow buoy tethered to my waist?

biking: Biking back home on the river road trail, I passed a runner, running smoothly and quickly, snapping their fingers repeatedly. Why where they snapping? Not sure. In all the times I’ve passed a runner while biking (or while running), I don’t think I’ve ever heard them snapping!

may 3/RUN

2.85 miles
2 trails
56! degrees

In honor of an entry I posted a few years ago on this day in which I gathered triple phrases, I’m giving a summary in triples today:

Sunny day
crowded trail
noisy kids
singing birds
got my shoes
stuck in mud
almost fell
dangerous
overdressed
dripping sweat
apple watch
stopped again
my legs hurt
difficult
not much green
lots of brown
and some blue
sewer pipe
drip drip drip
muddy path
slip slip slip

This morning, I began listening to David Naimon’s interview with Jorie Graham for Tinhouse. Wow! So many amazing ideas. In it, she’s talking about her latest collection, Runaway. I checked it out of the library and look forward to reading it. Here’s the first poem in it read by Graham. I love how she reads and how much her reading helps me to slow down and sit with the words.

All/ Jorie Graham

After the rain stops you can hear the rained-on.
You hear oscillation, outflowing, slips.
The tipping-down of the branches, the down, the
exact weight of those drops that fell

over the days and nights, their strength, accumulation,
shafting down through the resistant skins,
nothing perfect but then also the exact remain
of sun, the sum

of the last not-yet-absorbed, not-yet-evaporated
days. After the rain stops you hear the
washed world, the as-if inquisitive garden, the as-if-perfect beginning again
of the buds forced open, forced open – you

cannot not unfurl
endlessly, entirely, till it is the yes of blossom, that end
not end – what does that sound sound like
deep in its own time where it roots us out

completed, till it is done. But it is not done.
Here is still strengthening. Even if only where light
shifts to accord the strange complexity which is beauty.
Each tip in the light end-outreaching as if anxious

but not. The rain stopped. The perfect is not beauty.
Is not a finished thing. Is a making
of itself into more of itself, oozing and pressed
full force out of the not-having-been

into this momentary being – cold, more
sharp, till the beam passes as the rain passed,
tipping into the sound of ending which does not end,
and giving us that sound. We hear it.

We hear it, hands
useless, eyes heavy with knowing we do not
understand it, we hear it, deep in its own
consuming, compelling, a dry delight, a just-going-on sound not

desire, neither lifeless nor deathless, the elixir of
change, without form, we hear you in our world, you not of
our world, though we can peer at (though not into)
flies, gnats, robin, twitter of what dark consolation –

though it could be light, this insistence this morning
unmonitored by praise, amazement, nothing to touch
where the blinding white thins as the flash moves off
what had been just the wide-flung yellow poppy,

the fine day-opened eye of hair at its core,
complex, wrinkling and just, as then the blazing ends, sloughed off as if a
god-garment the head and body
of the ancient flower had put on for a while –

we have to consider the while it seems
to say or I seem to say or
something else seems to we are not
nothing.

Graham’s poem inspired me to create a writing/noticing experiment for my list:

Follow along as Jorie Graham reads her poem, All. Then one day after it has rained, go to the gorge with her lines: “After the rain stops you can hear the rained-on” and “After the rain stops you hear the washed world”. Listen. Can you hear the rained-on? What does the washed world sound like? Make a list of your answers.

march 10/RUN

5 miles
franklin bridge and back
17 degrees / feels like 7

What a gift this winter-almost-spring run is this morning! A reminder of why I love winter runner with its cold, crisp air and quiet calm. It was a little difficult to breathe, with my nose closing up on me (hooray for sinuses), and it didn’t always feel effortless. Still, I was happy to be outside with the world — the birds (pileated woodpeckers, geese, cardinals), the Regulars (Dave, the Daily Walker and Daddy Long Legs), and the river, sometimes brown, sometimes blue.

Before I went out for my run, I read a lot of different poems and essays about poetry and breath. Decided I would think about rhythmic breathing, running rhythms, and chants. I started by counting my foot strikes, them matching it up with my breathing of In 2 3/ Out 2 or Out 2/ In 2 3: 123/45, 123/45 then 54/321, 54/321. A few miles later, I thought about a verse from Emily Dickinson’s poem, ‘Tis so much joy! Tis so much joy!” that I imagine to be a prayer or a spell or reminder-as-chant. I started repeating it in my head:

Life is but Life! And Death, but Death!
Bliss is, but Bliss, and Breath but Breath!

With this prayer/chant, I matched the words up to my foot strikes in several different ways, none of which were 123/45 or 54/321.

Equal stress on each syllable/word, and the altering of the poem slightly:

Life Is But Life
Death Is But Death
Bliss Is But Bliss
Breath Is But Breath

Then in ballad form (I think?), with alternating lines of: stressed un un stressed / 3 stressed but silent beats (or not silent, but voiced by my feet, striking the ground):

Life is but Life
x x x
Death is but Death
x x x
Bliss is but Bliss
x x x
Breath is but Breath
x x x

Then in 6, with 2 feet of stressed, unstressed, unstressed (a dactyl):

Life is but Life is but
Life is but Life is but
Death is but Death is but
Death is but Death is but
Bliss is but Bliss is but
Bliss is but Bliss is but
Breath is but Breath is but
Breath is but Breath is but

Then in 4 again, one spoken beat, three silent:

Life xxx
Life xxx
Life xxx
Life xxx

Or, like “The Safety Dance”:

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

These were so much fun to do, and helpful in keeping me going as I grew tired. When I chanted them, my pace was about 8:40 and my heart rate was in the upper 170s (pretty standard for me). At one point, I pulled out my phone and recorded myself mid-run. Later, when I stopped running and was walking back, I recorded myself again.

Dickinson chant during run

Dickinson chant after run

It’s interesting to check back with the poem now and see that I had added words to make the rhythm more steady and even. Seeing how Dickinson wrote it, I want to try these chants on another run with the right words. How will I fit “And Death, but Death!” with my feet? Is this part of Dickinson’s disruption of rhythm?

I like the repetition of these chants and how, if you repeat them enough, they lose their meaning, or change meaning, or change the space you’re running through, or change you. It reminds me of some lines from a poem I recently wrote about running by the gorge and rhythmic breathing. It’s in 3/2, In 2 3/Out 2:

settle in-
to a

rhythm: 3
then 2.

First counting
foot strikes,

then chanting
small prayers.

I beat out
meaning

until what’s
left are

syllables,
then sounds,

then something
new, or

old, returned.

Wow, this is so much fun for me, thinking through how my running, and breath, and poetry, and body, and the words work (and sometimes don’t work) together. Very cool.

And, here’s a poem that doesn’t fit neatly with my running rhythm/chants, but fits with the idea of getting outside to move by the river:

How to Begin/ Catherine Abbey Hodges

Wipe the crumbs off the counter.
Find the foxtail in the ear of the old cat.
Work it free. Step into your ribcage.

Feel the draft of your heart’s doors
as they open and close. Hidden latches
cool in your hand.

Hear your marrow keep silence,
your blood sing. Finch-talk
in the bush outside the window.

You’re a small feather, winged seed, wisp
of cotton. Thread yourself
through a hole in the button on the sill.

You’re a strand of dark thread
stitching a word to a river. Then another.

march 8/RUN

5 miles
Veterans’ Home Loop
34 degrees

A bright beautiful morning for a run. Ran south to Minnehaha regional park, past John Steven’s House, over to the Veteran’s Home, through Wabun, then back north on the river road trail.

10 Things I Noticed

the river was open, the water brown, the banks glowed with white snow
there were big puddles on the sidewalk, but the trail was almost completely clear
one huge puddle covered almost the entire trail between 42nd and 44th
bird sounds heard: the song and drumming of a pileated woodpecker; a cardinal’s trill; the fee bee song from a black-capped chickadee; a goose’s honk
kids were playing at minnehaha academy; I could hear their laughter. Also heard the teacher’s whistle for the end of recess
some of the sidewalks around minnehaha regional park were covered in sharp, crusty snow that had frozen again overnight
at Wabun Park, I had to stop and walk in the snow because the trail was covered in a thick, slick sheet of barely frozen ice. A fat tire slowed way down to bike over it. I liked the crunching sound of the fat tires as they crushed the ice
a traffic jam at the 3 way stop near the entrance to wabun: 4 cars went by before I could cross
just north of the 44th street parking lot, something orange near the WPA stone steps down to the Winchell Trail caught my eye as I ran by. A jacket? Graffiti on the stones? Not sure, but I think it was the sign on a chain stretched across the railings to block the entrance. I couldn’t see anything clearer, partly because of my vision and partly because I was in motion. It was almost as if my brain called out to me, “Orange!”, and that was it
a wide open, brilliant view over to the other side

vision check

At least twice in the past week, when I’ve been running south on the river road trail, this has happened: I see a runner approaching from a distance. As I get closer, I check to see where they are, but they’ve disappeared. I can’t see them at all. I look again and they’re back. I must be losing more cone cells.

an experiment

It didn’t last for a long, but I tried chanting in triple berries (strawberry/blueberry/raspberry), then counted my rhythms: 123/45 and 12/345. I tried matching a few words to the rhythms, but now I can’t remember the words. I tried experimenting with these 123/45s and 12/345s a few years ago. I’d like to try again.

Found this wonderful poem on Two Sylvia’s Press in the chapbook, Shade of Blue Trees:

FIG TREE AT BIG SUR/ Kelly Cressio-Moeller

Each day leaning
into morning,
five-fingered leaves
wave in unison,
beckon jays
for branch-play.

The youngest leaves
arch green faces upward,
devour sun off the Pacific.
The golden elders
bow closer to earth–
the perfect shape
for water to run

as rain, as fog
down to the root line.
When afternoon rays
light them just right,

they become a ring
of open palms
giving the last
of what they have.

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.

oct 10/RUN

3 miles
2 schools loop
50 degrees

Another beautiful fall morning. I thought about doing a longer run, crossing the ford bridge, running up the east side of the river, but I knew it would be annoyingly crowded on a Saturday morning. So I did what I often do on the weekends, ran around the kids old elementary schools: Hiawatha (K-2) and Howe (3-5). Started on the river road trail but soon crossed over to edmund. I don’t remember the view, only the multiple times I had to stutter step to avoid streaking squirrels. Inspired by a podcast I listened to yesterday, I tried to focus on my breathing and striking feet. I chanted triples. At first, it was difficult. I kept repeating “strawberry/blueberry/raspberry” but eventually I expanded my list:

delightful
bemusement
mystery
logical
circular
wonderful
difficult
diffident
caterwaul
symphony
musical
deduction
induction

I am a little out of practice with these. I haven’t spent much time chanting; I’m too busy trying keep my distance.

Today’s October Surprise

First: Watching the original 101 Dalmatians with Scott last night. I love the jazzy, be-spotted opening credits. I couldn’t read all the text (not even close) but I still enjoyed it. Interesting fact from Scott and Mental Floss: 30% of all Dalmatians are deaf:

Around 30 percent of all Dalmatians are inflicted with deafness as a result of their spotted markings. Breeding dogs with this coat can lead to a lack of mature melanocytes (melanin producing cells) in the inner ear. Without these, dogs can become hard of hearing. Dogs with larger patches of black are less likely to be deaf.

Second: Running around Howe School, I noticed a quick white flash up in the clear blue sky. Was it the moon or a plane? Even though the upper regions of my central vision are all dark, I was able to tilt my head and see that it was a plane. Such a small thing, but the more I learn about my vision, the more astonished I am when I see anything that small in such a broad field of blue!

feb 19/RUN

4.2 miles
trestle turn around plus extra
5° feels like 4 below
50% snow and ice covered

A only slightly edited transcript of my notes about the run, dictated into my notes app on my phone.

A lot of slippery spots. Very sunny this morning. It felt really cold. About a mile in greeted Dave the daily walker. Almost yelled out to him, “it’s cold today!” He is hard-core–no coat again but some gloves. Running right before I got to the trestle I heard a beep beep beep beep beep beep beep sound. I wondered if it was the train and then after I crossed under the trestle and was still heading towards downtown, I heard the rumbling of a train. It lasted a long time. I thought about turning around and running back so I could see the train but I decided against it because I wanted to keep going north. I listened to the rumble and I couldn’t quite tell if it was coming from Saint Paul over to Minneapolis or from Minneapolis over to Saint Paul. I experimented with chanting in threes when I turned around and headed south again. Uppercut/ bowling ball/ sweaty brow Then I started chanting in triple berries: raspberry/ blueberry/ red berry/ green berry pink berry/ orange berry/ blueberry/ raspberry/ gooseberry/ mulberry I chanted them over and over again to try and keep a steady rhythm. I saw a couple other runners, a few walkers. I thought I heard some kids yelling in the gorge but then I realized it was geese honking.

thoughts about dictating running notes

Not sure if I like the notes app for this. It was a bit awkward and I think (at least I hope) it added in some random words.
I write much better than I speak.
I need to stop feeling so self conscious doing this. I also need to be more deliberate and thoughtful in what I say.
I still have to add in periods and capitals, which is irritating.
This is a good exercise for me. I need to get used to doing something that someday might be necessary.

The Blink Reflex/ Rick Barot

I have this notion that if you live long enough,
there are three or four great stories that you will have in your life.

A story of a journey or a transformation.
A story of love, which will likely mean the loss of love, a story

of loss. And a story of spiritual illumination,
which, for many, will probably be the moment of death itself,

the story untellable, its beginning and middle
and end collapsing with its teller into a disappearing conclusion.

I have believed long enough in my notion
to know that it is a romantic notion, that it erodes each time

I realize that the shard and not the whole
comprises a life, the image and not the narrative. Otherwise,

there’s no reason why all I remember of the airplane
I took as a child from one country to another

is the moist towelette packet we were given with our meal,
the wonder and absurdity of it. Or that, in love,

high in a tree in the dark, and high, he and I sat in the rain-damp
branches and ate 7-Eleven donuts. Or this, this piece

of a story that isn’t even mine, that isn’t even a story
but a glance of an experience, of the friend who held the stray

dog after it was struck by a car. Not knowing whether the dog
was dead, my friend called a friend

who worked for a vet. Poke the dog in the eye, this friend said.
Because if the animal no longer has a blink reflex,

it probably means the animal is dead. Decades after
college, when you could do such a thing, I typed his name

into a search engine to find out what became of the 18-year-old
boy from the tree. Like dozens of old keys

in a drawer, so many of the wrong people with the right name.
The child dead from leukemia, with a school gym

named for him. The wrestler who had a perfectly square jaw,
like a cartoon police detective in a fedora.

When I arrived at a page that was certainly
about him, I no longer knew the face, but I recognized the life

that he had had. He had transferred to
another college, gone to film school, and become a producer

of TV documentaries. A film about fishermen, the harsh fishing
season in Alaska. A film about Abraham Lincoln

and a film about the last days of Adolf Hitler.
A film about the Sherpas who go up and down the Himalayas.

What a beautiful poem. I love the title and the way the stories/fragments are woven together and the sweet, soft rhyme of “and high, he and I” and the playing with the romantic notion that we each only have 3 or 4 great stories.

feb 16/RUN

3.35 miles
river road, south/north
19 degrees/feels like 11
15% ice-covered

Ahhhhhh!! Winter running! Not too cold but cold enough to be able to breathe in fresh, cold, crisp air. A mostly clear path. Not too much wind. Not too many people. Everything quiet, still. Saw at least three people walking their dogs down on the Winchell trail. Encountered a fat tire biking alongside a runner. A few pairs of walkers. One or two other runners. Don’t remember hearing any birds cawing or chirping or honking. Not much traffic noise. Thought I heard some sloshing or dripping water at one point. Marveled at my new favorite view just past the oak savanna. One problem: I don’t remember there being so many bare trunks here between me and the river. Am I remembering the wrong spot? I love how the flat hill at the savanna–we call it the mesa–curves down to reveal the river.

triple berry chants

Did some triplet chants again: all berries. Without thinking, briefly chanted blueberry/ blackberry/ red berry. Then wondered why a raspberry is called a raspberry and not a red berry and why blueberries are called blueberries and not something else. Found a buzzfeed article that was a little helpful: The Delicious Origins of Summer Fruit Names

Here’s what is written about raspberries:

Like the strawberry, the raspberry isn’t a true berry in the biological sense of the word. And also like the word strawberry, we don’t know what its rasp- is about.
The word raspberry is found relatively late in English, attested in the early 1600s. An earlier form, raspis-berry, might give clues to its origins. In Middle English, raspise was a sweet, pink wine, possibly from the Anglo-Latin vinum raspeys. But this raspeys remains unexplained. Suggestions include the French rasper, “to scrape,” referring to the fruit’s rough appearance, and an Old Walloon word for “thicket.”

The listicle also mentions gooseberries and mulberries. And further down, it happens to mention the tree, sycamore. Another satisfying triplet. Maybe I’ll chant: gooseberry/raspberry/mulberry and then some trees: sycamore/cottonwood/? Need to think more about a third triplet tree.

to float, to haunt

At some point, thought about the article I read earlier this morning about the biomechanics of the run and the “double float” phase, which is when both feet are off of the ground. I usually think of this as flying but is also cool to think of it as a floating. What else floats: clouds, hot air balloons, ghosts, bodies in water, buoys, bubbles. I like the idea of being a ghost, floating and haunting the trail that I’ve traveled so many times in the last five years. Haunt is such a wonderfully rich word: to frequent, visit often; to continually seek the company of; to trouble; to reappear continually in; to visit or inhabit as a ghost; to stay around or persist, to linger; a place habitually frequented

feb 11/RUN

5 miles
stone arch bridge, one way
25 degrees
50% snow-covered

After noticing how pretty it looked in the (bohemian) flats yesterday afternoon, decided to run north on the river road to stone arch bridge today. Scott had a meeting downtown, so he could drive me home. One way runs are great. Yesterday afternoon the path looked clear and dry but it must have snowed a little last night because a lot of it was covered in soft, slippery, energy sapping snow. And, there was a blustery wind too. Still a great run. Still very glad to have done it.

Greeted Dave the Daily Walker as I ran up from under the lake street bridge. Admired the curved wall and fence on the Winchell Trail between the trestle and franklin bridge. Noticed the river flowing quickly. Not looking slush slow today. Reaching the bottom of the hill, running past Annie Young Meadow, I heard water gushing through the limestone cliff, close to where a mudslide had closed the road for almost 2 years. At the top of the hill near the turn off to Wilson Library at the U, the sun came out and so did my shadow. Hello friend! Then I noticed the river was no longer brown but blue. Not steel blue but blustery blue. Beautiful. Attempted to run up the steep hill with the I-35 bridge. Made it about halfway, then walked a few minutes. Ran again all the way to the stone arch bridge and watched the roaring, choppy, churning water of St. Anthony Falls.

Had some thoughts about my How to Be project and the ways running fits into it but cannot remember them now. Right before heading outside for the run, I thought about the importance of surrender. Paying attention by letting go. Not trying to control but to breathe.

Speaking of breathing, I just remembered something about my run. To regulate my pace and breathing, I chanted. Strawberry/ Blueberry/ Raspberry. Over and over again. One foot strike for every syllable. As I ran down the franklin hill I decided that blackberry fit better than strawberry and chanted that: Raspberry/ Blueberry/ Blackberry. I chanted this mostly in my head. A few times, I mouthed it and at least once, I whispered it. Very helpful in keeping me steady and in a dream-like state. Considered switching in other 3 syllable words but never did.

Triplet Words/Rhythms/Dactyl Meter

Beautiful
Terrible
Wonderful
Mystery
Decadent
Diffident
Dental Care
Vision Quest
Telephone
Underwear
Prototype
Punching bag
Summer time
Radical
Reticent
Waterfall
Avalanche
Certainly
Understood
Icy cold
Ignorant
Buttercream
Factual

Interesting note found in my research about dactyls: “Strawberry (as the word is pronounced in East Tennessee—elsewhere it’s two longs and a short).” So East Tennesseans say it the British way, I think. Speaking of East Tennessee, I was just listening to an episode of Dolly Parton’s America and learned that East Tennessee was originally a part of the Union during the Civil War. Maybe I knew that at one point, but I had forgotten.

may 4/RUN

2.25 miles
mississippi river road, north/south/north
71 degrees

Is everyone in Minneapolis out biking today? It seems like it. I’m glad I ran instead. I would have been scared to be on such crowded bike trails with my bad vision today. Not being able to bike as much as I’d like sucks. Did a combination of running and walking because I just ran 6 miles yesterday. So warm and sunny! My legs felt sore. Do I remember much of the run? Big groups of bikes on the road and the path. Not too many runners. Lots of traffic. The river was beautiful. What a day!

some 3 beat phrases:

what a day
it’s so hot
lots of bikes
stopped to walk
sun beats down
not much wind
green abounds
afternoon
legs are sore

eat my shorts
dive right in
shut your mouth
eat your greens
take the steps
on your left
river road

Summer Haibun
Aimee Nezhukumatathil

To everything, there is a season of parrots. Instead of feathers, we searched the sky for meteors on our last night. Salamanders use the stars to find their way home. Who knew they could see that far, fix the tiny beads of their eyes on distant arrangements of lights so as to return to wet and wild nests? Our heads tilt up and up and we are careful to never look at each other. You were born on a day of peaches splitting from so much rain and the slick smell of fresh tar and asphalt pushed over a cracked parking lot. You were strong enough—even as a baby—to clutch a fistful of thistle and the sun himself was proud to light up your teeth when they first swelled and pushed up from your gums. And this is how I will always remember you when we are covered up again: by the pale mica flecks on your shoulders. Some thrown there from your own smile. Some from my own teeth. There are not enough jam jars to can this summer sky at night. I want to spread those little meteors on a hunk of still-warm bread this winter. Any trace left on the knife will make a kitchen sink like that evening air

the cool night before
star showers: so sticky so
warm so full of light

I’ve talked about it for a while but I’d finally like to try writing a few haibuns about my running routes. A goal for this month! This example from Aimee Nezhukumatathil is beautiful. I love the line, “There are not enough jam jars to can this summer sky at night.”

may 23/RUN

5.1 miles
67 degrees/81% humidity
the franklin loop

3 miles in, I decided to stop and walk on the franklin bridge. I’m glad I did. Looking out over the Mississippi, I saw one of the biggest birds I’ve ever seen. To me and my questionable vision, it looked almost like a mini-plane floating way up in the sky. Wow, what a wing span! Could it have been a broad-winged hawk or an eagle or a kestrel or a falcon? No idea, but it was cool to see. Tried rhythmic breathing while chanting in my head:

raspberry/coulis
strawberry/custard
mundane is/monday
terrible/tuesday
wonderful/wednesday
terrific/thursday
fabulous/friday
saturday/so so

Not sure how it works for me, but I’ll try it again next time I run. Didn’t see the Daily Walker but was able to greet a few other runners. Didn’t see many bikes or roller-skiers or dogs. Smelled some lilac bushes. Heard the hum of traffic and the shuffle shuffle scratch scratch of my feet on the gritty path. I finished at my favorite part of the path and before the mosquitoes found me, I enjoyed stopping and peering down into the gorge. And I realized: I’ve been writing about the gorge in the summer as having a thick, green veil that blocks your view. That’s not quite right. The trees are thick and you can’t see the river, that’s true, but they don’t totally block your view of what’s down below. Part of what makes it feel so mysterious is how the trees are spaced out, offering quick flashes of more than green. When I look closely, I can see the steep slope and the trunks of the trees reaching above and below me. Even as I can’t see the floor of the floodplain forest, I feel it and how high above it I am. I’d like to spend more time studying this spot and figuring out how to better describe it.

bonus: here’s a great list of the birds found near the Mississippi River Gorge. What’s a mergenser or a tern? I need to find out.

may 19/RUN

2 miles
59 degrees/79% humidity
mississippi river road path, north/brackett park

Overcast. Thick, heavy air. Buggy. Relentlessly green. Cool but clammy. Went on a quick run with Scott. Kept it nice and easy and talked most of the way about the book I’m reading on rhythmic breathing. Earlier today, while I was waiting for Scott to wake up, I did a writing experiment with rhythmic breathing:

For slow, easy runs breathe in for 3, out for 2.

In 2 3.
Out 2.
Blueberry
crumble
Raspberry
tartlet
Vanilla
custard
Strawberry
ice cream
Beautiful
dreamer
Primary
colors
Mystery
novel
Forbidden
forest
Untimely
death — update, 19 may 2024: just noticed that this only has one syllable. How did I not notice that before?
Let it be
over
Long lost love
refound
Terrible
headache.

For fast runs, breathe in 2, out 1.

Refried
beans
Oven
fries
release
doubt
embrace
me
Sara
smile
Sunshine
bright
Flowers
bloom
Tempers
flare
Striking
feet
Flailing
arms
Yelling
font
Famous
fig
Noisy
bar
Smoky
room
Salty
beer
Bathroom
line
Early
heat
Maple
tree
Thunder
thighs
Coming
storm
Nervous
dog
Gangly
knee
Giving
up
Staring
out.

So much fun!

dec 1/7 MILES

37 degrees
franklin hill turnaround + extra

7 miles on a beautiful morning. Next week it’s supposed to get much colder but not today. Great weather for running! As I neared the big Franklin hill I decided to mix up my running rhythm and create a chant in 6/8 time with triplets instead of 4/4 time with straight quarter notes. It was hard to quickly compose sentences with this rhythm so I went for 3 syllable words. After trying out:

mystery beautiful mystical marvelous wonderful magical

I settled on a 4 bars of 6/8 with the words:

raspberry
strawberry
blueberry
chocolate

Occasionally I added in a fifth bar/word: delicious

This chant worked well for keeping me focused and steady. It especially helped me run up the Hill.

Towards the end of the run I encountered by favorite person on the path: the Daily Walker. I always see him, all year round. He’s very dedicated with his walking.

6 mileshidden falls overlook40 degrees

10 Things

4.5 milesveterans home (reverse)36 degrees

10 Things

before and after the run

THE CUTTING PROW: FOR HENRI MATISSE/ Ed Sanders

3.1 milestrestle turn around44 degrees / rain

3 milestrestle turn around51 degrees

Air

2.5 miles2 trails70 degreeshumidity: 67%

10 Things

4.1 milesriver road, north/south61 degreeshumidity: 90% / dew point: 60

4.3 milesminnehaha falls and back61 degreeshumidity: 91% / dew point: 64

10 Things

4.1 milesriver road north/south70 degreeshumidity: 88% / dew point: 68

possible you are here locations

4.3 milesveterans home and back61 degrees

10 Things

swim: .75 looplake nokomis main beach76 degreeswind: 29 mph gusts

5.25 milesbottom of franklin hill58 degrees

10 Things

2.5 miles2 trails73 degreesdew point: 64

before the run

one

two

three

swim: 2.5 loops (5 cedar lake loops)cedar lake open swim74 degrees

4 milesriver road, north/river road, south67 degrees / dew point: 63

10 Things

bike: 8.7 mileslake nokomis and back78 degrees

swim: 2 loopslake nokomis open swim79 degrees

10 Things

5.3 milesford loop65 degrees / steady drizzle

10 Things

excerpt from “Que Sera Sera”/ A. Van Jordan

5.5 milesford loop44 degreesdrizzle

10 Things

more on the moment as between

4.3 milesminnehaha falls and back36 degrees

10 Things

Color Keeps Time / Patrycja Humienik

4 milesriver road, north/south32 degrees

3.35 milestrestle turn around43 degrees

10 Things

6.1 milesflats and back24 degrees / flurries

an emptied mind — emptied of memories, emptied of everything

more than memory

2.6 milesriver road, south/north8 degrees / feels like -125% snow-covered

10 Things

My Heart Has Known Its Winter/ Arna Bontemps

5.4 milesbottom franklin hill and back37 degrees20% snow-covered

10 Triple Berry Chants

early morning coffee

4.15 milesmarshall loop (cleveland)65 degreeshumidity: 85% / dew point: 60

10 Things

Legacy/ Diane Seuss

from The Man with the Blue Guitar/ Wallace Stevens

3.45 milestrestle turn around48 degrees

That 12-figured Moon Skull!

[My favorite time is in time’s other side]/ Etel Adnan

5.8 milesdown the franklin and back31 degrees

How I See

Monet Refuses the Operation/ Lisel Muller

3.6 milestrestle turn around (+ extra)65 degrees / 72% humidity

10 Things I Noticed While Chanting Triple Berries

3.25 milestrestle turn around32 degrees

10 Things I Noticed

James Schuyler, Hymn to Life, Page 9

3.1 milesford bridge turn around29 degrees

James Schuyler, Hymn to Life, Page 8

5.25 milesbottom of franklin hill and back64 degrees / drizzle

10 Things I Noticed

Shirley, Midlake/ Tanis Rideout

5.9 milesbottom of franklin hill and back70 degrees / humidity: 95%8:45 am

10 Things I Remember From My Run

Goldenrod/ Maggie Smith

2.6 miles2 trails80 degrees / dew point: 69noon

run: 3.6 milesmarshall loop67 degrees8:40 am

Moon/ AMY E. SKLANSKY

swim: 3 loopslake nokomis open swim85 degrees5:30 pm

6 miles
hidden falls overlook
40 degrees

4.5 miles
veterans home (reverse)
36 degrees

3.1 miles
trestle turn around
44 degrees / rain

3 miles
trestle turn around
51 degrees

2.5 miles
2 trails
70 degrees
humidity: 67%

4.1 miles
river road, north/south
61 degrees
humidity: 90% / dew point: 60

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
61 degrees
humidity: 91% / dew point: 64

4.1 miles
river road north/south
70 degrees
humidity: 88% / dew point: 68

4.3 miles
veterans home and back
61 degrees

swim: .75 loop
lake nokomis main beach
76 degrees
wind: 29 mph gusts

5.25 miles
bottom of franklin hill
58 degrees

2.5 miles
2 trails
73 degrees
dew point: 64

swim: 2.5 loops (5 cedar lake loops)
cedar lake open swim
74 degrees

4 miles
river road, north/river road, south
67 degrees / dew point: 63

bike: 8.7 miles
lake nokomis and back
78 degrees

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
79 degrees

5.3 miles
ford loop
65 degrees / steady drizzle

5.5 miles
ford loop
44 degrees
drizzle

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
36 degrees

4 miles
river road, north/south
32 degrees

3.35 miles
trestle turn around
43 degrees

6.1 miles
flats and back
24 degrees / flurries

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

5.4 miles
bottom franklin hill and back
37 degrees
20% snow-covered

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

3.45 miles
trestle turn around
48 degrees

5.8 miles
down the franklin and back
31 degrees

3.6 miles
trestle turn around (+ extra)
65 degrees / 72% humidity

3.25 miles
trestle turn around
32 degrees

3.1 miles
ford bridge turn around
29 degrees

5.25 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
64 degrees / drizzle

5.9 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
70 degrees / humidity: 95%
8:45 am

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

run: 3.6 miles
marshall loop
67 degrees
8:40 am

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

5 miles
bottom of franklin hill
69 degrees
humidity: 79% / dew point: 64
8:30 am

swim: 1 small loop
cedar lake open swim
80 degrees
6:00 pm

run: 2.25 miles
river road trail, north/south
73 degrees
humidity: 87% / dew point: 73!
7:45 am

bike: 8.5 miles
lake nokomis and back
87 degrees
4:30 pm (there) / 6:00 (back)

swim: 2 loops
87 degrees
windy

2.85 miles
2 trails
56! degrees

5 miles
franklin bridge and back
17 degrees / feels like 7

5 miles
Veterans’ Home Loop
34 degrees

3.15 miles
turkey hollow
50 degrees
humidity: 81%

3 miles
2 schools loop
50 degrees

4.2 miles
trestle turn around plus extra
5° feels like 4 below
50% snow and ice covered