3.5 miles
trestle turn around
42 degrees
It didn’t feel as warm as it was because of the wind and the clouds. The sky, smudged white. Gloomy. Clear paths with a few chunks of ice still sticking around. How did they not melt yesterday when it was 49 degrees and sunny? A good run, even if my left IT band was sore.
IT doesn’t stand for iliotibial, it stands for:
- Itchy Teeth
- Irksome Toes
- Incandescent Tonsils
- Infatuated Trapezoids
- Indigo Toenails (from Scott)
- Inconceivable Tracheas (from RJP)
10 Things
- a noisy car speeding down the river road — don’t remember the color of the type of car or who was driving it, just remember that it was LOUD and FAST
- chick a dee dee dee dee
- the floodplain forest was roomy and deep brown and open to the river
- click click clack — roller skiers hitting their poles on the path
- bright headlights cutting through the tree trunks on the other side of the ravine
- can’t remember the color of the river — probably pale brown or gray or brown — just that it was soothing (looked at my video: blueish white)
- at the start of the run, the pavement was wet — why? melted snow?
- a regular — Santa Claus! we raised our hands in greeting
- overdressed — took off my orange sweatshirt at the turn around
- a mom on roller skis to her kids, also on roller skis — we’re almost there! I’m assuming she meant the big franklin hill
Listened to my breath, my striking feet, the cars driving by as I ran north. Put in a Billie Eilish playlist running back south.
Before turning around, I took some video at a favorite spot: the curved fence on the Winchell Trail before Franklin:
After I finished running, I recalled a line I had composed while running for a poem I’m working on about the bells of St. Thomas:
Have others
outside
forgotten
those bells?
Or do they
hear them
ringing still?
I like the double meaning of still here — both: continuing to ring and ringing until they become still/stop. I have to sit with it longer, but I think I’d like ring instead of ringing, but it doesn’t fit the 3/2 form.
As I write this I’m remembering another thought I had: getting rid of all of the longer poems that begin with I — I go to the gorge, I sync up my steps, I want connection, I orbit the gorge, etc. Those are the ghosts that haunt this Haunts poem — they are the traces/residue/palimpsest that is still there, but not fully. I think this makes sense to me, but I’m not sure if I can remove all of those words that I love and have spent so much time with…yet.
