Tag: vision

july 7/RUNSWIM

4.25 miles
monument and back
71 degrees
dew point: 64

Hot! I’ve never liked running in the heat but now that I’m taking lexipro my heat intolerance has increased. For some moments of the run I felt great, other moments I didn’t. So I walked some, ran some, and walked again at different stretches.

10 Things

  1. I kept seeing orange flashes — a sign, a cone, a tree marked for removal
  2. kids yelling and laughing outside at a daycare attached to a church
  3. the river from above, on the bridge, heading east: brown, and looking shallow — were those sandbars I was seeing near the surface?
  4. trickling water out of the limestone below the bridge
  5. the sound of shadow falls, falling
  6. a kid’s voice rising from the ravine
  7. construction on the other side of the lake street bridge — orange cones, trucks, yellow-vested workers, the buzz of equipment
  8. the river from above, on the bridge, heading west: blue and covered in the reflections of clouds*
  9. click clack — a roller skier
  10. seen, not heard: a dog, by the clanging of their collar

*stopped at the bridge overlook to take a picture of the clouds reflected on the surface of the water. Is it just me, or does this look like an impressionist painting?

a view from above the river: gray, corrugated water with reflections of clouds and trees
river with clouds, 7 july 2025

the color of water

How to Read Water is fascinating. Here are some things I’d like to remember from the chapter on color:

The colors we see in water depend on the brightness and angle of the light and the water’s depth, as well as what’s on, in, and under that water.

How to Read Water

something to consider: are you looking at water, or something in or under the water, or a reflection on water’s surface. Is it the color of water, or the color of the ground beneath the water (a puddle), or the color of cloud on its surface? What angle are you looking from?

. . . in many circumstances when we think we are looking at the water, we are actually looking at something different and in the distance. Looking out to the sea in the distance is a great example: What we see in that situation is dominated by the reflection of the sky even further in the distance. This is why the distant sea appears blue in fine weather and gray on overcast days.

How to Read Water

This water looks blue because it’s reflection the sky is one I’ve heard a lot, but I think I’ve always heard it as the reason, not one reason under certain circumstances.

What about when we see different colors — which I often do as I run across the bridge and look down at the water? The different colors are based on how much of the water we are actually seeing. Sometimes I see brown, sometimes blue.

You will notice this if you look for it, but not if you don’t because our brain has gotten used ot this effect and so oesn’t register it as at all peculiar.

something to try: Can you find the area/the moment where the shift takes place from looking only at reflections to being able to see water?

the exact color that can travel furtherest through the water without being absorbed: blue-green color, wavelength = 480 nanometers

Is it a big cloud or Jaws? People often think it has gotten deeper or there are fish around when the water darkens, but it might just be a big cloud.

eutrophication = excessive nutrients — algal blooms reduce light, use up a lot of oxygen, change the color of the water

oligotrophic = low in nutrients, clear

my sparkle friends! “A lot of the particles that see in water will be inorganic, a mixture of mud, sand, clay, silt, chalk, and other substances, each one affecting the colors we see.” Do I see them as anything other than the color sparkle?

Today I’m swimming at Cedar Lake, which is much deeper than Lake Nokomis. It is also more of a “natural” lake than nokomis. What impact do these factors have on its colors and my experiences of them?

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

The water by the orange buoy closest to Point Beach was almost hot — so warm! It was a little cooler in the middle of the lake and near Hidden Beach, but not that cool. It was also calm. Not much wind, no waves. A few vines floating over and under and around me. Some milfoil by the beach. I forgot to look at the color of the water from above, but I did look below. Blue-green, a few hints of yellow. Opaque.

10 Things

  1. driving past another part of the lake: the surface covered with green vegetation
  2. clear blue sky, then a few clouds, the more clouds, then dark
  3. the first orange buoy seemed much farther out in the water
  4. breathing to my right, seeing some other swimmers halfway across the lake
  5. yellow safety buoys
  6. something in the sky — a plane? a bird? I’m uncertain
  7. the warm water was buoyant; I felt higher on the water
  8. bubbles around my hands
  9. a line of white buoys at hidden beach
  10. a breaststroker, stroking with intensity — are they trying to race me?

Is that what bothers me about breaststrokers I encounter: that they always look so intense and like they are trying to race me or keep up with me? I think of breaststroke as a chill stroke, where you glide and kick as you travel on the surface of the water, able equally to see above and below. But, there’s nothing chill or relaxed about the breaststrokers i encounter!

Before swimming, I worked on memorizing some more lines from Alice Oswald, this time from Nobody, but I got stuck on the beginning and wasn’t able to recite them in my head as I swam:

There are said to be microscopic insects in the eye
who speak Greek and these invisible
ambassadors of vision never see themselves
but fly at flat surfaces and back again
with pigment caught in their shivering hair-like receptors
and this is how the weather gets taken to and fro
and the waves pass each other from one color to the next
(Nobody/ Alice Oswald)

july 4/REST

Fourth of July, so no open swim. Bummer. Too hot to run, besides I haven’t taken a day off from running since last Thursday. Today a break from disciplined moving outside. But not from thinking and writing and reading and dreaming.

Sometimes when something is missing, what you have left is making and believing (Keith S. Wilson).

Copying this quotation from Keith S. Wilson into this entry, I wasn’t thinking about the missing in relation to the green buoy I couldn’t see last night, yet swam straight towards. But somehow, it was the next thought I had as I stared at the words.

a few hours later: I’m sitting under the crab apple tree in my backyard in the shade — thank you, tree, for this shade on a hot day — and I’m re-reading Alice Oswald’s nobody and pondering a word, rumor/rumour:

what kind of a rumour is beginning even now
under the waterlid she wonders there must be
hundreds of these broken and dropped-open mouths
sulking and full of silt on the seabed
I know a snorkeller found a bronze warrior once
with the oddest verdigris* expression and maybe
even now a stranger is setting out
onto this disintegrating certainty this water
whatever it is whatever anything is
under these veils and veils of vision
which the light cuts but it remains

unbroken

*verdigris: a green or bluish deposit especially of copper carbonates formed on copper, brass, or bronze surfaces

A fun rumor to make imagine believe in spread: maybe your brain, or some part of your brain, or your breath, or some other part of you that is not (only) you, has secret conversations with the water in which the water reveals the location of the buoy and the part of you that is you but not (only) you guides you towards it. Of course, this only works if you listen, which I have learned to do. Can you?

rumour (OED):

General talk or hearsay, not based on definite knowledge

General talk or hearsay personified
1600: “Open your eares; for which of you wi’l stop The vent of hearing, when lowd Rumor speaks?”/ W. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2 Induct. 2

Clamour, outcry; noise, din. Also: an instance of this

To make a murmuring noise

This last one — to make a murmuring noise — reminds me of the idea of bubbles speaking to me in a soft, faint, bubble-whisper. And now, I’m thinking of a book that I checked out of the library years ago: How to Read Water. Since the ebook is available, I just checked it out again! What are water’s languages?

Back to Alice Oswald’s words and her bronze warrior. Have I written about these particular lines (I’ll check later)? I’m thinking of the ghosts — people who drowned, objects forgotten or carelessly discarded — on the bottom of the lake. What do/can they say to me? Do their messages travel through the pale milfoil that stretches up to the light?

july 2/RUN

4 miles
franklin loop
68 degrees
humidity: 81%

Started at 7:30 a.m. and it was already hot and humid. That sun! Ran with Scott. We talked about AI and whether or not art was a purely human expression and how, within running circles, humidity is considered a “poor man’s altitude training.” We ran over the lake street bridge and the franklin bridge and above the mississippi rowing club and wondered what the loud buzzing noise below was. Trucks. My guess: doing something with the sewer vents by the rowing club. Scott’s guess: pulling a car out of the river.

10 Things

  1. a single rower on the river
  2. graffiti under the lake street bridge: Stop Hate
  3. cloudless blue sky
  4. everywhere, a thick green veil
  5. all the benches we ran by were facing a wall of green — on the other side of that: an unseen river
  6. 2 runners ahead of us disappearing into the trees — passing the spot a minute later, we noticed a steep dirt trail
  7. the cracked pavement that I’ve been monitoring for years has grown into a sinkhole
  8. the color of the river: brown in the foreground, blue in the background
  9. I don’t remember seeing shadows, just experiencing the cooling effects of shade
  10. beep beep beep — a truck backing up somewhere nearby

We started out doing 9/1, but had to take an extra minute of walking after the second interval. Still, we got outside and moved over 4 miles in the heat. Small victories: we ran more again in the last 2 miles and we ran up the entire section of the franklin hill even though I had initially wanted to walk it.

Found this definition of poetry by Wang Ping. Several years ago, she wrote a wonderful poem about the Mississippi River Gorge.

That’s what poetry is: a wind, a leaf of grass that ties time and space together (Wang Ping).

field

Continuing to think about the visual field test and the idea of my visual field. Today: what is a field? and can I play around with the idea of a field?

The visual field is “that portion of space in which objects are visible at the same moment during steady fixation of the gaze in one direction”; in ophthalmology and neurology the emphasis is mostly on the structure inside the visual field and it is then considered “the field of functional capacity obtained and recorded by means of perimetry”.

wikipedia

A single, fixed view from one direction — the space, and what’s contained within that space that can be seen.

I think I’ll leave thoughts about visual fields alone for now. Instead, I want to turn to a wonderful chapbook I just bought — as part of an entry fee for a chapbook contest — from Driftwood Press: Questions about Circulation

ruins/ Charles Malone

III.

The kitchen ceiling falls to the floor—
soaked plaster, moldy wood.
Hundred-year-old floors warp
something more sinister than time
in the farmhouse.
Plants grow to cover the windows,
the smell chokes
a massive colony of honeybees takes up in the siding,
raccoons come and go from the basement window.

This is the process by which a home becomes not,
a process other than a real estate transaction—
spills, arguments, accidents, cruelties.
You see other farmhouses stripped of paint
ducking behind wilding shrubs and flowering weeds.
The boundary between in and out blurs,
a sign with shameful orange letters on the door.
What action and inaction, what ruins a house
for the body and the lungs and recollection?
Rain, the creep of ivy, the sedimentary accumulation of dirt
this is the opposite of the joy of work.

1

Scott and I recently discovered more seasons of the Great House Revival where people take abandoned houses in Scotland Ireland (oops) and restore them. There are lots of discussions of water damage and rotten floorboards and overgrown yards and critters wandering in and out of basements and kitchens and first-floor (which is the second floor in a U.S. house) bedrooms.

2

Ever since I discovered the concept of re-wilding, I’ve been thinking about my eyes becoming wild again. At some point, my cone cells began scrambling then leaking then scarring then dying. Sometimes, I think of my central vision less like a wilderness, and more like a wasteland. But, there is something wild/feral about the refusal to fix/tame an image. Everything moves slightly — shakes, shimmers, fuzzes, fizzes. Nothing is still.

july 1/RUNSWIM

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
73 degrees
humidity: 75%

I planned to get up early and go out sooner, when it was still in the 60s, but I decided I needed sleep more, so I didn’t go out for my run until 9. Hot! I managed to stick with my plan for longer than I thought I could, and also to know when I needed to walk a little more.

10 Things

  1. a line of bikes — 20? — emerging from under the ford bridge to turn up the trail right in front of me — nobody called out, runner, to alert the others
  2. a faint spray coming off of the falls
  3. a group of workers — do they belong to the semis parked in front of the park building? — cooling off in the shade
  4. a turkey on the hidden part of the trail that dips below the road — when they saw me, they turned and almost slithered into the vegetation
  5. a sandbag near a drain in the grass, initially looking like a dead animal
  6. a faint voice below — a coxswain, I think!
  7. trickling water at the 44th street ravine
  8. the water fountain on the edge of the park does not work yet — or ever this summer? I’ll have to check again
  9. a tree down on the winchell trail, almost, but not quite, covering the entire trail
  10. a biker’s headlights cutting through the trees where the road curves

As I ran and walked, I thought about my vision tests. First, the colorblind plates. The feeling when I took the test was relief and recognition — positive feelings. Later, more mixed feelings. The loss of a language is difficult. But, failing the test is an opportunity to form a new relationship with color. How to represent that? I’m still struggling.

Second, I thought about the visual field test. I have taken it 3 times, I think — once when I was first diagnosed, once 3 years later, and just last month. You put your chin on a chin rest, press your forehead up against a bar, and look through a visor. You’re supposed to stare directly at a center dot and click a button when you see flashes in other areas of the visual field. How could I represent that in a poem?

I’d like to ask the ophthalmologist who administered my test if I could get a copy of the scan, to see exactly what my field looks like. Then, I might try to map my field onto a poem somehow — or map a poem onto my field. It could be like an erasure poem — an erasure of my own writing? Another idea: instruct the reader to keep staring into the center at the dot and try to see the words in different parts of the visual field. This one could be a series of “images” of the field with words.

As I keep thinking about these tests, here’s some more information about the visual field test.

on this day inspiration

On 1 July 2020, I posted Aram Saroyan’s famous “electric” poem:

I’ve discovered that the best work I can do now is to collect single words that happen to strike me and to type each one out in the center of a page. The one word isn’t “mine” but the one word in the center of the page is. Electric poems I call them (in case anyone starts throwing Concrete at me)—meaning that isolated of the reading process—or that process rendered by the isolation instant—each single word is structure as “instant, simultaneous, and multiple” as electricity and/or the Present. In effect the single word is a new reading process; like electricity—instant and continuous.

Aram Saroyan and the Art of the One Word Poem/ Paul Stephens

And now I’m thinking about my visual field test poetry, wondering how I might find an “electric” word to put in the center. And, could I put some related words in other parts of the field? What about a phrase?

here

I need to think more about what word/s to use. I like here, but it also seems like a place-holder for a more dynamic word. Thought about “don’t look away” or “look here” or “stare” or no word, but a dot or an x or ?

Now I’m remembering Rob Macaisa Colgate’s Hardly Creatures and his series of 3 poems: the first, the original artwork, the second was a replica, the third a souvenir. I could write a “regular/intact” poem, then condense it to fit with my visual field.

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
83 degrees

A great swim! One of the orange buoys was missing, but they replaced it with a green one. The buoys seemed to be farther out and it took 3 tries for me to finally swim straight to the final green one. But I did; I cracked the code.

10 Things

  1. loose vines, wrapping themselves around me
  2. menacing swans
  3. military planes buzzing overhead — heard and seen
  4. a nice chat with another regular — an older women I’ve seen for a couple of years. I asked her about the course; she asked me why the water was so cold
  5. pale, marble legs underwater
  6. frog legs almost kicking me
  7. ghostly milfoil
  8. the far green buoy, nearest the little beach, always looked pale blue to me
  9. a squeaky nose plug, leaky goggles
  10. sparkle friends!

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 19/RUNBIKESWIM

2.75 miles
trestle turn around
73 degrees
dew point: 63

Ugh! Too warm for me today. I wanted to get up earlier, so I went to bed at 9:45, but I still slept poorly and didn’t wake up until 8. A small victory: I wanted to turn around at a mile, but I kept going until I got to the trestle. Took a walk break, then ran a faster mile. I heard rowers and kids yelling. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker and Daddy Long Legs. Dodged a pack of people emerging from the rowing club entrance. Admired the cottonwood fuzz looking light green on the edge of the trail. Counted the stones stacked on the ancient boulder: 3, with another stone waiting for a friend. Stopped and stared at the ironwork of the trestle stretching to the east bank of the river.

before the run

Yesterday, this was the poem of the day:

Altitude/ Airea D. Matthews

Icarus, he advised,
heed the warning: don’t fly 
too near the sun or sea; 
stay the path.

But I mistook the sky for an iris,
and entered at the northern horizon,
where map edges blister,
and the compass wasps. 

I was dutiful but unwooed
by chisel and bench, contracts
scribbled in fig sap, or watching
Ariadne ungold time.

          What awe is there
in earthen labyrinths?

Wax molds itself sublime,
shapes wings each night.
Light refracts my name in
dialect only moths comprehend.

I belong elemental, where trees 
chance to become constellations,
where the bar-headed goose flies
past with the heart of a clock and

Zeus is a silver kite tethered
to Olympus by harp strings
trembling an offering. 

          Of bliss? To remember
the why of it all. 

Bliss is a body absconding
warp speed toward 
a dwarf star whispering,
Unsee the beheld.

My fall, well, yes,
those depths matter less.
What I learned by height—
that’s the story.

Iris? A flower? Part of the eye?

map edges blister
compass wasps
I love these nouns as verbs

ungold time — love how that sounds, but what does it mean to ungold something? to tarnish it? Looked up Ariadne — from Green mythology, gave Theseus a thread to help him survive the labyrinth, kill the Minotaur, known to some as goddess of weaving, also her diadem ends up in the sky as a constellation

light refracts in dialect only moths comprehend — I might want to use that — so good

a goose with the heart of a clock, to belong elemental

bliss
the why of it all
bliss is a body

Unsee the beheld — I want to devote some time to thinking through what this idea might mean to me

And here’s the poet’s expanation:

About this Poem

“‘Altitude’ reimagines the myth of Icarus not as a cautionary tale of hubris, but as a meditation on ecstatic pursuit, disobedience, and the search for transcendent knowledge. The speaker rejects Daedalus’s pragmatic warnings, drawn instead to a metaphysical journey—flying not for safety or ambition, but to answer an elemental, inner urge to transform, no matter the consequence.”

during the run

As I suffered through my run, when I wasn’t thinking about wanting to stop or how hot it was, I thought about the command, Unsee the Beheld. I held onto the thoughts and spoke them into my phone at the end of the run:

Unsee as different than not-seeing (which I ‘ve thought/written about before). Not seeing is a static thing; you just don’t see it. To unsee is more active and also suggests a process of unravelling which is where my vision is at.

A few minutes later in the walk, I thought about flipping the phrase to, behold the unseen.

after the run

I like thinking about to unsee as a verb, an act, a process, a type of prayer? Just as seeing is not a static thing, where you simply see, but a process of light and signals and filtering and guessing by the brain, unseeing is a process of slow (or sporadic) unravelling then adapting — a brain doing mysterious and magical things with the scrambled and limited data it receives, a mind developing new ways to witness/behold without stable and dependable eyes.

And now I’m thinking of unseeing as eroding/erosion and the creation of the gorge. Rock erosion occurs in 2 main ways at the Mississippi River Gorge: 1. soft sandstone slowly and gradually wears away as it encounters water and air and 2. this wearing away weakens the foundation for limestone until it breaks. My unseeing process could be similar: the slow and gradual dying/not working of cell cones until a final break and no central vision. Is this how it will happen? Maybe, but maybe not.

a volta

A few months ago, I briefly wrote about the volta. When? Just remembered: it was during my study of time and thinking about the cyclical time and turning while I was listening to the Byrds — to everything turn, turn, turn. This morning, reviewing a poem I posted on this day in 2022, I think I found a good example of it in Ada Limón’s poem, Calling Things What They Are. For much of the poem, she is writing about what a difference it makes to know the names of birds or trees and how she likes to call things in the natural world what they are. Then she ends the poem with this:

I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates you, and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in, but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.

a thought on time from the novel. The Bear

I’m reading a beautiful novel, The Bear by Andrew Krivak. A bear and a young girl are discussing how all creatures can speak. Skeptical, the girl asks, What about the trees? After instructing her on how and where to listen to the trees the bear said,

the voices of the trees were the voice of the forest, and that when they spoke, they spole with such indifference to time that it would take the girl several moons to hear one of their conversations, the better part of one just to hear a single word.

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
84 degrees

Another anxiety-free bike ride, and no knee pain. Hooray! Hotter and harder on the way there. It felt like I was biking into some wind. The bike back was wonderful. A little cooler, the glow of a lower sun and my satisfied muscles. I thought about how I don’t ever want to take biking for granted. I never know when my last cone cells will go and I’m not sure what that will mean for biking. Will it be too scary and unsettling? I want to bike more this summer.

5 bike things, 5 swimming things

  1. bike: nearing lake nokomis I heard a siren, then saw an ambulance by the lake. Was it coming from the beach?
  2. bike: 3 or 4 kids yelling and running across the path toward the creek with inner tubes. A dad called out to one — not to caution or scold but to collect their glasses
  3. bike: a recumbent bike, slow and low to the ground
  4. bike: going slower so I could keep a good distance between me and a group of bikers up ahead. The last one in line was wearing a dark pink shirt
  5. bike: turning onto the part of the path that’s between hiawatha and the creek and looking down at a part of the creek that I don’t know very well
  6. swim: olive green water
  7. swim: waiting in the shallow water before it started, the kids were so LOUD — I flinched as they screamed near my ear
  8. swim: the visibility underwater was good — I saw a lot of pale legs kicking
  9. swim: clear enough that I could see how deep the water was as milfoil stretched up from the bottom — delightfully creepy!
  10. swim: my sparkle friends were joined by shafts of light

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
84 degrees

Got to the lake early — a half hour before it started — to make sure I got a spot for my bike and my bag. I was hoping they’d start as early as they did on Tuesday. Nope, but still 5 minutes early. My left shoulder hurt a little at the beginning, but by the end it was okay. It wasn’t the easiest swim — I’m out of shape — but it was still amazing. I kept thinking about how I’ll feel after a couple of weeks of steady swimming: amazing.

At one point when I was ready to be done, I had a flash of a thought: what would happen if my body just shut down right here in the middle of the lake. No panic, just curiosity. At another point, I thought about unsee the beheld, both the unsee and beheld part. what was beheld? swimming, a practice in unseeing.

This just popped in my head: See no cola, Hear no cola, Drink uncola. That’s on my favorite sleeping bag from the 70s.

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

  1. at least 2 roller skiers standing at the top of the franklin hill
  2. voices below — rowers!
  3. 2 minneapolis park trucks on the path, both hauling riding lawn mowers
  4. Mr. Morning!
  5. a big branch loaded with green leaves on the ground near the welcoming oaks, blocking a small section of the path
  6. 2 or 3 stones stacked on the ancient boulder
  7. the sliding bench was empty
  8. encountering Max, a big and gentle German Shepherd
  9. a mini-peloton on the road — a dozen or so bikes
  10. 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

  1. put my bag down under the lifeguard stand, next to some kid’s swim trunks that were swarming with gnats (gross!)
  2. milfoil reaching up from the bottom, thick and pale orange until it faded into the dark blue-green water
  3. cold water with pockets of warmer water
  4. baby bros (15 or 16? year-olds) playing football in the shallow water, cheering every time someone caught a pass or missed a pass
  5. the legs of another swimmer doing breaststroke, looking pale underwater
  6. bubbles! the translucent, almost white ones, that remind me of the bubbles in scooby doo
  7. my sparkle friends! the small glittering particles floating in the water
  8. open swim was set up a full 15 minutes early! the lifeguards have their shit together again this year
  9. the familiar form of the beach house dome, viewed mid-lake
  10. 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 16/VISION TEST

This evening, I’ll do my first open swim at Cedar Lake. Now (10:45 am), I’m doing a close reading of a poem before I go for a vision test to see if I qualify for a study on new goggles that help people with central vision loss read (if I’m remembering this correctly; I was originally scheduled to do this test in mid-March, but they’ve had to reschedule it twice now). The goggles sound cool, and I appreciate their approach to vision loss — create tools to help instead of trying to “cure” someone, but I especially interested in having my eyes checked out. Will I find out anything new?

Back to reading my poem. It’s by Kaveh Akbar and is the poem of the day on poets.org.

Love Poem with Tumor and Petrified Dog/ Kaveh Akbar

There is a tumor in my sacroiliac joint  
and snowflakes in my coffee.  

I’m in Iowa with the cats 
and you’re in Pompeii. 

You send a video: lizards rushing into limestone 
which remind you of being a kid in Florida.  

In Florida we memorized sonnets 
while leaping around green anoles.  

I’ve forgotten the poems.  
Your black tights, even in that heat.  

Mostly that’s what I remember. 
It’s okay to say it straight.  

Like: I’m scared, still, 
that I might be dying.  

Pomegranates growing from Pompeiian ash,  
scandalizing propriety— 

you send a picture and I do not say, 
It just looks like a tree

or Another of God’s secrets 
wasted on me.  

Which part of the mind  
gets you to the soul? 

I am reading St. John of the Cross, 
a character you might’ve put in a poem: 

In the evening of life,
we will be judged on love alone. 

Some petrified dog. Table bread, 
a painted doorway.  

You’ve been with me forever. 
You know all my angels. 

How could I say no to you, 
taking off your earrings to kiss me? 

This first couplet! Starting with the tumor, and then the snowflakes in coffee. So many questions — snowflakes? is it winter? is he outside? are the actual snowflakes?

each couplet its own thing yet together they make a story

I love the brevity and the space — room to breathe and to think

anole: a type of green lizard

still: as in, motionless? frozen? and as in, I continue to be? I love playing with the different meanings of still. I could try doing a Jane Hirshfield assay about “still” or a poem like, Pine or To Cast

pomegranates in ash scandalizing propriety? Looked it up, and my best guess, thanks to AI, is that the scandal is over dating the eruption. People thought it was August, but the presence of pomegranates suggests later in the fall. Is that the reference?

“Which part of the mind gets you to the soul?” I love the inclusion of this question amidst the descriptions of their fear and what they’re reading and their recollections of their beloved

petrified dog? Had to look that one up too: Victim 8 — a dog chained to a pillar, trapped, suffocated, preserved

Searching for clues to some of these lines, I encountered a reference to a early version of pizza preserved in the ash, referred to as a Still Life, and it clicked: Akbar’s “still” — scared stiff? — is made metaphor in the preserving ash of Pompei. Wow! I love how what poets do with myths/facts/(his)story!

Just got back from my vision test to see if I’m a good fit for the study. I passed the first round and am a “very interesting candidate.” Nice. Apparently my vision is unusual in its fixation on the center. At one point I said, I’ve trained myself to not look away from the Void. Ha ha — what a poet-y thing to say. At the end, I asked if he thought I might be close to legally blind. He thought so and encouraged me to meet with my ophthalmologist to be tested and to fill out paperwork for disability benefits. This news doesn’t make me sad: strangely, I see it as validation or verification, and the tax breaks are significant.

A few other things: To determine if I was a good candidate, I had to take a cognitive test, which I’ve never done. What is the year? The season? Repeat these words after me: book pencil wristwatch. Take this piece of paper from me with your right hand and fold it in half, then put it on the floor. Spell world backwards. The last one: write a sentence on this piece of paper. My sentence: Tests make me nervous.

The main test I took was a Vision Field Test. The last time I took this test was in 2019. You put your chin on a chin rest, your forehead up against a bar, and look into a camera at a red circle in the center. With a clicker in your hand, click every time you see a light. Not too many clicks. At one point, my purple spinn-y friend — the floater in my eye that is neon violet and looks like a small ball with a feather attached that spins around — appeared. Hi friend! This test isn’t hard, just long: about 8 minutes per eye, and tiring — having to sit still, and stare at the same spot. Sitting there, I thought, I should write a poem about this: the sound of the clicking, the dark room, the red circle that was there, then wasn’t, then was again, my spinn-y friend, after the test seeing the image with so much black. Last time I took this test, I felt some anxiety about vision loss. This time: none. More curiosity and fascination.

Open swim cancelled.

Threat of severe weather. Bummer. Already, open swim has been cancelled 3 times. Oh well, the weather looks great for tomorrow night and not swimming tonight gives my shoulder one more day to rest up.

june 13/RUN

3.1 miles
ford bridge turn around
58 degrees / damp, post-rain

Pre-run Sara

Friday the 13th! Tonight, Scott and I will watch the original movie. Today, I run between rain drops. No open swim last night or this morning because of rain. Ordinarily I’d be upset, but I overdid it on Tuesday’s first open swim and my left shoulder hurts. If there was open swim, I’d be tempted to do it, which might further injure my shoulder. Now I don’t have a choice. That’s good. Speaking of injuries, my left knee is a bit stiff and it feels like there’s some sort of swelling on the back. It doesn’t hurt too much, just feels tight and stiff. I don’t think it’s a big deal, so I’ll do a short run this afternoon. Post-run Sara, let me know how it goes!

Mid-run Sara

a spasm of sirens ringing across the river
the usual puddles to leap over
a chorus of hammers
dark green
rich brown
rusted red leaves
a new trail descending deeper into the gorge
empty benches
no walk breaks
a triple chant: history / mystery / first story / my story / her story

Post-run Sara

I’m happy to report that the run felt great and because I wore compression socks, my left knee and calf don’t hurt. Hooray! I also wore a different pair of shoes — did that help, too? The run seemed to also loosen up my left shoulder.

On my walk home, after the run, I recited Wallace Steven’s excellent vision poem, “Tattoo.” The light is like a spider. . . This led to more thoughts about light as an insect, or a spider, or a fish, or a tiny robot. Then I remembered the song in my new favorite musical, Maybe Happy Ending about dragonflies as little robots. Never fly away/little robot. I started imaging little robots of light helping me to see, and what that technology might look like.

june 7/RUN

3 miles
trestle turn around
70 degrees

Wow, summer! Sunny, not too warm. Strong legs, mental toughness. A good morning to be outside and moving. Heard the rowers and a roller skier, someone blasting an old rock song — what was it? I remember identifying it and thinking that I needed to try and remember the title, but now I can’t. Encountered lots of bikers and walkers and runners, but no turkeys or squirrels or lunging dogs.

10 Things

  1. siren
  2. coxswain
  3. hearing the glittering of trees
  4. click (ity clack)
  5. bugs
  6. headphone fail
  7. pack(ed)
  8. radio
  9. fragment (overheard)
  10. concealed

A police siren that I thought was a loon, the coxswain’s voice calling out instructions, a breeze passing through the leaves and hearing the glittering of trees. The click of roller skier’s poles striking the ground, an itchy bite from a bug. Turning on my “Doin’ Time” playlist, expecting to hear the music in my ears, instead hearing it all around — a headphone fail. Someone blasting music from a radio. A fragment of a conversation overheard, the words now forgotten. The river, the rowers, the ground below, concealed by a wall of green.

Walking back, after I was done, I heard a Dad reading to his son about a baby bird in a tree. Very sweet. It almost sounded like, are you my mother? Was it?

Finished reading through Hardly Creatures for the first — but not the last — time. Their playing around with what access means is fascinating. I’m thinking about my ekphrastic/alt-text project and how access might work in it. In my next read through of the book, I’ll think about access and what it means to me and take notes on the different ways Colgate practices/invokes/addresses it.