Tag: walk

march 2/WALK

2+ mile walk
neighborhood/river/Winchell Trail
50 degrees

Tomorrow Scott and I will do our weekly “long” run, so today we walked. A beautiful morning. Earlier, after sitting at the dining room table for too long, I stood up and my calf felt weird. So difficult to describe it — no pain, just a strange, slight tightness — oh, I also remember that it ached a little on the posterior side. It made me anxious. Would it cramp? Why was it tight? During the walk it felt strange occasionally, but never hurt. I tried to be aware of my walking and to stay loose, relaxed, like Shaggy from Scooby Doo, I decided. Yes, loose ankles, almost floppy feet.

Down on the Winchell trail, Scott pointed out how clear and ice-free the river. I’d add: blue and calm and, at one spot, burning the white heat of light hitting the water. Such a wonderful day for a walk.

As we walked and tried to stay relaxed, I kept thinking about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world. Last week, when I was watching some interviews with Courtney Dauwalter (CD), she kept talking about how we can change the stories we tell ourselves when we’re in pain and that stories matter. I need a new story — new stories? — about my aging, anxious body.

I mentioned to Scott that when CD is having difficult in a 100 mile race, she visualizes opening a filing cabinet and looking through folders of past experiences, trying to find something that could help her figure out how to handle her problem. CD loves facing and solving problems. Before she ran professionally, she was a high school science teacher.

Lately, I’ve started describing my approach to handling aches and pains and anxiety: cracking the code. What code? I think I mean the code of why I react to all these minor aches and pains with mild panic. And I also mean: the code of why the anxiety travels around my body, not staying too long in one spot: a strange-feeling calf, a tight throat, an upset stomach. During the pandemic, it was sinus headaches, a heavy face weighed down by an imaginary iron plate. This code story is useful and makes me feel empowered, like I’m doing something or gives me the illusion of control. Sometimes I need that illusion.

Walking on the Winchell Trail, looking out at the river, I told Scott about the 5 (or 4?) time Ironman winner Natasha Badmann and her approach to dealing with difficulties in a race. In particular, she talked about the Energy lab, which is one of the most brutal stretches of the Kona Ironman. While most racers think about this stretch as taking your energy, she understood it as giving it to her — while running through it, she could look off in the distance and marvel at the dolphins swimming in the ocean. I need to find this interview again. I told Scott that I’d like to change my story to think about what pain/anxiety is giving me, instead of what it is taking away/depriving me of. When I started this blog, I wrote about how the new aches and pain I was feeling while running were an opportunity for me to pay attention to a body that had been neglected for decades.

CD’s story about pain and facing challenges and bodies that are trying to convince you to quit is the pain cave. She visualizes putting on a hard hat, grabbing a chisel, going to the very back of a cave, and then trying to make it bigger. Carving out more space for what could be possible.

One more story that I mentioned while we walked (and that I mentioned on here last week). Emma Bates talks about greeting the pain like an old friend.

Old Friends from Merrily We Roll Along

Hey, old friend,
Are you okay, old friend?
What do you say, old friend,
Are we or are we unique?
Time goes by,
Everything else keeps changing.
You and I,
We get continued next week.

Most friends fade
Or they don’t make the grade.
New one’s are quickly made
And in a pinch, sure, they’ll do.
But us, old friend,
What’s to discuss, old friend?
Here’s to us who’s like us
Damn few!

Maybe I should create a friend playlist and try to be better friends with my body?

feb 26/WALK

40 minutes
to the river and back
57 degrees

A warm, windy February afternoon. Took a walk with Delia the dog and Scott. Heard some kids on the playground that I mistook for a siren. Then later, heard some actual sirens. Also heard some ragtime music coming from a bike on the path. Marveled at the gnarled oaks and the jagged shadow one cast on another branchless tree. Noticed how high the bluff was above the forest floor. Encountered many happy, chatting walkers, one runner without a shirt.

It’s Windy

Is it the strange, too-early spring weather? The fact that I’m turning 50 in 4 months and that my kids are turning 21 and 18? Not sure, but my thoughts have been scattered lately, flitting from one idea to the next without landing anywhere for too long. Maybe it’s the wind. This morning I said to Scott, what a beautiful morning! Too bad it’s windy. Then Scott started singing “Windy” by the Association — I tried to join in, but I was in the wrong key (as usual). I should have a t-shirt that says, I’m always in the wrong key, I said (which, I think, isn’t always a bad thing to be in). Anyway, I decided to listen to the song and read the lyrics. It’s actually about wind! How delightful!

Who’s tripping down the streets of the city
Smilin’ at everybody she sees
Who’s reachin’ out to capture a moment
Everyone knows it’s Windy

And Windy has stormy eyes
That flash at the sound of lies
And Windy has wings to fly
Above the clouds (above the clouds)
Above the clouds (above the clouds)

I think I might create a page of wind poems/songs and add this, along with “They call the wind Mariah” from Paint Your Wagon and “I Take to the Wind” by King Crimson.

an idea (for the future? now?): Yesterday I posted a poem that uses an Emily Dickinson line in the title (I heard a fly buzz), then obliquely references her in the poem. A year or so ago, I had the idea that I’d like to write a series of poems that use some of my favorite Emily Dickinson lines as titles for my poems about vision loss, how I see, and how I’ve been carving out a new way of being with my moving practice. I’ve already written one that was published this past December in the print journal, Door is a Jar:

The Motions of the Dipping Birds/ Sara Lynne Puotinen

Because I can no longer see
her face, when my daughter talks I watch

her small hands rise and fall,
sweep the air, flutter.

I marvel at the soft feathers her fingers make
as they soar then circle then settle

on the perch of her hips waiting
to return to the sky for another story.

I think Victoria Chang’s collection, The Trees Witness Everything, in which she uses W.S. Merwin poem titles and then writes her own poem, might be a good inspiration. I’ve been wanting to do this project for several years, but I wasn’t quite ready. Am I now? I’ve already been moving towards it with my interest in memorizing 50 Emily Dickinson poems before my 50th birthday — did I mention that in here, or was it just in my “to do” list? Oh, I hope this idea sticks and helps me to write more poetry. Lately, I’ve had tons of ideas that I start, but that really don’t go anywhere.

As part of this Dickinson project, and inspired by yesterday’s poem, I decided to memorize ED’s “I heard a fly buzz — when I died”. After memorizing it, I listened to someone else’s reading of it and noticed a line change:

[original] The stillness in the Room
[alternate in video] The stillness round my form

Which is correct, I wondered. At first, I thought the alternate might be the correct one, but it didn’t seem quite right — form neatly rhymes with the last line of the verse: Between the Heaves of Storm. ED liked slant rhymes, not straight ones. I looked it up and discovered that ED’s first editor, Mabel Loomis Todd, had changed the line to form. She also took out ED’s dashes. I’ve read about the fraught relationship between ED and Todd (who was ED’s brother’s lover) and Todd’s heavy-handed editing, so I’m sticking with the original!

medical term fun!

I’m still working with g a s t r o c n e m i u s and s o l e u s scrabble tiles. Last night’s favorite:

Guess a minute’s colors

I told RJP and she said, 7:42 is yellowish-green. Do I see any particular minute’s colors? No. But I do like trying to describe what colors I see at any given minute.

What happens when I reverse 2 words: Guess a color’s minutes?
Or, Minutes colors a guess?
Or, As color, minutes guess
Or, minutes: a color’s guess (as in, meeting minutes)
Or, a guess colors minutes

Back to ED’s buzzing fly. Whenever I read this poem, I think about an article I discovered a few years ago that discusses how accurately and effectively ED describes the physiology of the dying eye — 15 march 2021

may 26/WALK

45 minutes
with Delia the dog
neighborhood + 7 Oaks
78 degrees

Took a walk in the afternoon with Delia the dog through the neighborhood, almost to the river trail, then to 7 Oaks. Felt like summer. RJP told me the other day that the buoys are up at the lake. Next week — maybe on Tuesday? — I’ll test out the water!

10 Things I Noticed

  1. a black capped chickadee
  2. the neighbor on the next block who almost always sits on his front steps smoking was sitting on his front steps smoking
  3. someone at cooper field was dribbling a soccer ball then shooting it into a net set up in the batting area — not sure how old he was, but his bike looked like it was for someone around 12
  4. someone “mocking” in a blue hammock in the grassy area between edmund and the river road. When I walked by, I could hear soft music — not sure what it was
  5. angled solar panels on the roof of a tall and big house — maybe a duplex?
  6. a recently dug up dirt patch in one corner of an otherwise pristine yard — I wondered how upset the woman/gardener who lives there is about this blemish
  7. crossing the street, taking a few steps through someone’s grass to reach the sideway — wow, such thick, soft grass. What did they have to do to have such lush grass?
  8. Delia decided to poop on the edge of another yard in the thickest part of the grass. From a distance, this grass looked like it might be soft too. Nope. Spiky, stiff, sharp
  9. lots of little wrens or sparrows — not sure I can tell the difference
  10. no birdsong coming from the sink hole at 7 Oaks — all the birds were in neighborhood trees

Mary Ruefle and Yellow Sadness

Yellow sadness is the surprise sadness. It is the sadness of
naps and eggs, swan’s down, sachet powder and moist tow-
elettes. It is the citrus of sadness, and all things round and
whole and dying like the sun possess this sadness, which
is the sadness of the first place; it is the sadness of explo-
sion and expansion, a blast furnace in Duluth that rises
over the night skyline to fall reflected in the waters of
Lake Superior, it is a superior joy and a superior sadness,
that of revolving doors and turnstiles, it is the confusing
sadness of the never-ending and the evanescent, it is the
sadness of the jester in every pack of cards, the sadness of
a poet pointing to a flower and saying what is that when
what that it is a violet; yellow sadness is the ceiling fresco
painted by Andrea Mantegna in the Castello di San Gio-
gio in Mantove, Italy, in the fifteenth century, wherein we
look up to see we’re being looked down upon, looked
down upon in laughter and mirth, it is the sadness of that.

The citrus of sadness. I like that. I can also see yellow as the sadness of naps or of expansion and explosion. In “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde writes about yellow:

During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. Then taking it carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the color had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly coloring it. I find the erotc such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experiences.

“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” / Audre Lorde

I remember reading this essay in grad school and liking it this image of the spreading joy that colors everything. Energy, intensity, strength. A warm yellow.

As I walked I looked for yellow — a very bright yellow shirt on a biker, dandelions dotting the grass at 7 oaks. I thought about the sun as leaving smears of yellow and yellow as piercing the eye. I also thought about the strange level at the Guthrie Theater where everything looks yellow. And now, writing this, I’m remembering how I discovered some research about Van Gogh and yellow. He only say yellow, or something like that. An image of mustard came into my head — ballpark mustard, not grainy or spicy mustard. Not sure why not spicy mustard — I like its color and taste much more than “regular” mustard.

may 2/WALK

45 minutes
with Scott and Delia
neighborhood
60 degrees

Since I ran yesterday, I decided to walk today. Windy. Fire warning. Everything so dry. The grass in the boulevard sounded like we were walking over plastic. Spent most of the walk frustrated, discussing how to parent — not frustrated with each other, but the situation. As a result, didn’t notice much on the walk. Can I think of 10 things?

10 Things I Noticed

  1. the call of at least one black capped chickadee
  2. all the snow has finally melted at cooper field
  3. our neighbor’s tree has big white blossoms exploding on every limb
  4. the sun was warm, the air dry
  5. a sidewalk marked with the dreaded white dots that mean they need to be replaced — and that the homeowner will have to pay for it. We paid $3200 last year for the squares we needed replaced
  6. same house: beautiful purple flowers all over the grass
  7. the next house: no white dots, even with several chipped squares — have they not come through to mark this section yet?
  8. the trail down to the bottom of the sink hole at 7 oaks was green and inviting
  9. at the very end of our walk, the teenage son of our neighbor pulled up fast in front of their house — okay, I assume it was the teenager because of his reckless way of driving
  10. the worn down tracks from car tires in the grass below edmund and just above the river road — when did a car drive through here?

Mary Ruefle

A brief return to “On Theme”: I found a helpful essay by Ron Slate on Madness, Rack, and Honey yesterday after I posted my entry. His name sounded familiar and his writing so helpful that I imagined I’d encountered him before. Not sure, but I discovered he’s Jenny Slate’s dad. Very cool. Anyway, back to his helpful commentary from his blog On the Seawall. Here is one idea to archive:

In her lectures, Ruefle behaves like a poem:

As a poet, Ruefle has often found the strange sublime wherever her glance settles, and as a teacher she leaps from topic to topic, critiquing American culture here, then quoting Clarice Lispector or Charles Lamb over there on a different subject. Everything coheres through the stickiness of her solitary mind.

Commentary on MRH

To behave like a poem! I love this idea, both as a description of what MR is doing and also as an aspirational goal.

Earlier in his commentary, Slate mentions another one of Ruefle’s lectures, “Someone Reading a Book is a Sign of Order in the World,” so I’ll read that one next.

Someone Reading a Book

At the start of reading this lecture, I’d like to note my current relationship to reading and my deep belief in books: Reading with my diseased eyes is still possible, but difficult. And difficult to explain. It’s not that the words are so fuzzy or faint to be illegible. Mostly I can make them out, but the page and the words seem to be in constant motion, vibrating. Not quickly, but constantly. Or, is it my brain that’s vibrating? I can’t tell. What I can say with some certainty is that my experience of struggling to read with faltering eyes does not involve a harsh voice in my head sternly saying, I can’t read!, or a panicked voice muttering, i can’t read?, which is what I thought would happen if I were to lose my sight when I imagined such a horror as a kid playing a game of would you rather lose your vision or your hearing? Or maybe I thought I’d cry out, Pa! I can’t see!

No, struggling to read involves a lot of distractions and falling asleep mid-sentence and struggling to finish 400 page books within the 3 week check-out period from the local library. Unintentionally skipping entire lines, wanting to get lost in a good book but somehow managing to do anything and everything else instead — dishes, laundry, scrolling through instagram. Even as I wish I could read as much and as fast as I used to, I am grateful to have the small comfort of gradually easing into the loss, not having one single terrifying moment of recognition. Thank you, brain.

I am in year 4 of the 5 that my eye doctor predicted I had before losing all of my central vision. A few cone cells right in the center of my central vision are holding on, diligently delivering data so that I can read Ruefle’s lecture or this entry. But, how well can I actually read this entry? Even as I try to proofread, I often leave out words or spell them wrong. When those cone cells die — is it certain that they will die? — will I finally have that moment of terrible recognition? Will it be like Ruefle describes when she woke up one morning and couldn’t read:

When I was forty-five years old, I woke up on an ordinary day, neither sunny or overcast, in the middle of the year, and I could no longer read….the words that existed so I might read them sailed away, and I was stranded on a quay while everything I loved was leaving. And then it was I who was leaving: a terror seized me and took me so high up in its talons that I was looking helplessly down on a tiny, unrecognizable city, a city I and loved and lived in but would never see again.

(She concludes: “I needed reading glasses, but before I knew that, I was far far away.” In the margins of the book I wrote: drama bomb, which we — me, Scott, RJP, and FWA have been saying a lot lately.) I can’t know for sure, but I doubt that even if I do wake up tomorrow without being able to read the words on a page that this type of terror will seize me. Maybe one reason is that when I can’t read with my eyes, I can still read with my ears. I’ve spent the last 4 years building up my reading-as-listening skills. And there are so many amazing audio books available!

This is not to say that losing my ability to stare endlessly at words and understand them is not painful. It’s strange to walk by the bookshelves crammed full of all my wonderful books from grad school, filled with notes in the margins, and know they’re useless to me. Or to go to a bookstore, which used to be one of my favorite things to do, and hate — or maybe just strongly dislike — being there, unable to read the title of books unless I pick them up and slowly study them. It’s painful, but not tragic or a tragedy.

But, back to Ruefle. Here are a few things from it I’d like to remember:

1 — ridiculousness

I heard someone say, at a party, that D. H. Lawrence should be read when one is in their late teens and early twenties. As I was nearing thirty at the time, I made up my mind never to read him. And I never have. Connoisseurs of reading are very silly people. But like Thomas Merton said, one day you wake up and realize religion is ridiculous and that you will stick with it anyway.

2 — a journal entry

I find nothing in my life that I can’t find more of in books. With the exception of walking on the beach, in the snowy woods, and swimming underwater. That is one of the saddest journal I ever made when I was young.

When I read her journal entry, my first reaction was, yes! Then as I kept reading, it was, why is that so sad? I agree that there is more than books and walking and woods and swimming, but a life filled with these things isn’t sad. But then I remembered that she has her own issues with the body — being outdoors and athletic — which she brought up in “On Theme,” believing “stupidly they will disenhance whatever intellectual qualities I may possess” (59). Being a body, especially an active body moving through outdoor space, does not diminish your ability to think critically or creatively or intellectually. Instead, it can strengthen these abilities.

3 — connection

We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love — a connection between things. This arcane bit of of knowledge is respoken every day into the ears of readers of great books, and also appears to perpetually slip under a carpte, utterly forgotten. In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a a single life span….

4 — a list of book titles

In the last section, on page 199, Ruefle offers a list of book titles mixed in seamlessly with types of/ways of reading. The Sun Also Rises with luminous debris and the biography of someone you’ve never heard of.

from Madness, Rack, and Honey/ Mary Ruefle

Against the Grain. Nightwood. The Dead. Notes for the Underground. Fathers and Sons. Eureka. The Living. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The Sun Also Rises. Luminous Debris. Childish Things. The Wings of the Dove. The Journal of an Understanding Heart. Wuthering Heights. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Tristes Tropiques. The Tale of Genji. Black Sun. Deep Ocean Organisms Which Live Without Light. The Speeches of a Dictator. The Fundamentals of Farming. The Physics of Lift. A History of Alchemy. Opera for Idiots. Letters from Elba. For Esmé–with Love and Squalor. The Walk. The Physiology of Drowning. Physicians’ Desk Reference. Bleak House. The Gospel according to Thomas. A Biography of Someone You’ve Never heard Of. Forest Management. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. TGravels in Arabia Deserta. The Collected Works of Paul Valéry. A Book Written in a Language You Do Not Understand. The Worst Journey in the World. The Greatest Story Ever Told. A Guide to Simple First Aid. The Art of Happiness.

inspiration

I really like this lecture and her various accounts of reading books. It makes me want to offer up my own account, especially in the shadow of my vision loss. I appreciate the format of fragments that are their own things but also loosely connect with each other.

march 22/WALK

30 minutes, with Delia
neighborhood, near the river
29 degrees

It rained last night, which helped melt some more snow. Everything wet and dripping today. Mud and muck on the edges, puddles in the middle. Walking by a neighbor’s house I heard a rhythmic drip drip drip. Also heard a pair of woodpeckers pecking, then laughing. Whispered Brooks’ “The Crazy Woman” and Oliver’s “Wild Geese” to myself as I walked.

James Schuyler, Hymn to Life, Page 10

Begin with As windows are set, end with What are the questions you ask?

As windows are set in walls in whited Washington. City, begone
From my thoughts: childhood was not all that gay. Nor all that gray,
For the matter of that.

Yesterday I looked it up and discovered that Schuyler grew up in Washington, which I would have figured out anyway after reading this line.

Gay and gray. My favorite use of this pair is in Gwendolyn Brooks’ wonderful poem:

The Crazy Woman by Gwendolyn Brooks

I shall not sing a May song.
A May song should be gay.
I’ll wait until November
And sing a song of gray.

I’ll wait until November
That is the time for me.
I’ll go out in the frosty dark
And sing most terribly.

And all the little people
Will stare at me and say,
“That is the Crazy Woman
Who would not sing in May.”

May leans in my window, offering hornets.

What a line! Speaking of hornets — or wasps? or yellow jackets? or something that stings like that? — we have a few nests in our eaves. Every winter I talk about removing them before it gets too late in the spring, and every year we forget. Will we remember this year?

The fresh mown lawn is a rug underneath
Which is swept the dirt, the living dirt out of which our nurture
Comes, to which we go, not knowing if we hasten or we tarry.

The daily tasks, like mowing the lawn, a way for us to try to keep the inevitable at bay, or to think we have some control over death, or to avoid confronting it.

May
Opens wide her bluest eyes and speaks in bird tongues and a
Chain saw.

I love this line and how he brings together these two sounds! I’m always thinking about, and writing about, hearing the birds mixed in with the buzz of chainsaws or leaf blowers or lawn mowers. I like imagining that all of these sounds are May speaking.

The blighted elms come down. Already maple saplings,
Where other elms once grew and whelmed, count as young trees.

whelmed = archaic; engulfed, buried, submerged.

Was wondering if there are elms in the Mississippi River Gorge. Found some info about the invasive species, Siberian Elm.

Also, just remembered a poem I posted back in 2019:

Elms/ LOUISE GLÜCK

All day I tried to distinguish
need from desire. Now, in the dark,
I feel only bitter sadness for us,
the builders, the planers of wood,
because I have been looking
steadily at these elms
and seen the process that creates
the writhing, stationary tree
is torment, and have understood
it will make no forms but twisted forms.

In
A dishpan the soap powder dissolves under a turned on faucet and
Makes foam, just like the waves that crash ashore at the foot
Of the street. A restless surface. Chewing, and spitting sand and
Small white pebbles, clam shells with a sheen or chalky white.
A horseshoe crab: primeval. And all this without thought, this
Churning energy. Energy!

Sometimes I can be dense, so here’s a potentially dumb question: is he talking literally about waves — I know the narrator of this poem lives near the ocean — or is this a metaphor for the waves of debris on post-winter streets, reemerging in spring? I imagine it could be both. I’ll take it as a metaphor and wonder about what crushed up crustaceans might be unearthed in asphalt eroded by winter salts. Here in Minneapolis, near the Mississippi River Gorge, we were once part of the Ordovician Sea, so I can imagine some of that might still be present in the crushed up rock used to pave our paths and roads.

The sun sucks up the dew; the day is
Clear; a bird shits on my window ledge. Rain will wash it off
Or a storm will chip it loose.

Ha ha. I love the word shit and what it does to this image — it doesn’t cheapen or tarnish it, but makes it more real, mundane, less precious. Oh — and it makes it a little gross, which I like.

Life, I do not understand. The
Days tick by, each so unique, each so alike: what is that chatter
In the grass?

Sometimes I’d like to understand, to have my questions answered, but more often I like not knowing, or not yet knowing what that chatter in the grass is. I like having the space to imagine all the different things it could be. Perhaps what it is is more magical than I could have imagined. Understanding is necessary, and so is imagination and possibility.

May is not a flowering month so much as shades
Of green, yellow-green, blue-green, or emerald or dusted like
The lilac leaves.

A few days ago, while doing some research on colorblindness for the series of color poems I’m currently writing I came across a video about “what it’s like to be colorblind.” In the video they included some side-by-side images of “normal” and “colorblind.” Both images looked almost the same to me, especially what was green. I could tell it was green, but it also could have been gray or brown (and maybe it was in the image that someone who is colorblind would see). The variations of green, the subtle differences between yellow-green or blue-green or emerald green are mostly lost on me. Instead, I see green or light green or dark green or gray green or brown. This May, I’ll have to pay close attention to green and what I see, then write about it.

The lilac trusses stand in bud. A cardinal
Passes like a flying tulip, alights and nails the green day
Down. One flame in a fire of sea-soaked, copper-fed wood:
A red that leaps from green and holds it there.

I have lost the ability to be shocked or startled by red, especially from a cardinal. There is a cardinal that summers in our yard — my daughter has named him Chauncy — but I never see his red coat. I only know him by the shape of his head, looking like an angry bird, and his birdsong. This month he has decided to help usher in spring by perching himself on the tree outside my kitchen window.

A lot is lost and missed when you can’t see the red flash — the flying cardinal, a small blinking light, a flare somewhere — that everyone else sees and instantly understands and assumes that you see too.

Reluctantly
The plane tree, always late, as though from age, opens up and
Hangs its seed balls out.

It’s not just me, right? You are picturing an old guy with his balls hanging out too?

Winter is suddenly so far away, behind, ahead.

Yes, like it never happened, or it happened to someone else. I call her Winter Sara.

From the train
A stand of coarse grass in fuzzy flower.

I love tall, ornamental grasses with fuzzy ends that look like feathers or flowers! Someday I will plant some in my yard.

I like it when the morning sun lights up my room
Like a yellow jelly bean, an inner glow.

I’m not a huge fan of jelly beans, but I appreciate that Schuyler’s line gave me the chance to think about them and to imagine that intense yellow in the center of a jelly bean, one that has a translucent shell, not an opaque one. As an adult, I’ve grown to love the color yellow. I wonder, would a yellow marble work for this too?

May mutters, “Why
Ask questions?” or, “What are the questions you wish to ask?”

I love this as the last line of the poem!

march 10/SHOVELWALK

shovel: 25 minutes
about 2 inces

At some point during the speculation over this storm, they predicted 3-5 inches. We might have gotten 3 total, over 2 days of on and off snow. The snow was soft and not too difficult to shovel, except for the bits caked on that my shitty Target shovel couldn’t seem to scrape.

walk: 1 mile
neighborhood with Scott and Delia

A beautiful walk through a winter wonderland. We headed north on Edmund and I was able to admire the white Welcoming Oaks from across the road. Later, on 34th, I made sure to check and see if the house that recently acquired new owners still had the little anemometer (measures wind speed) perched on the fence near the garage. Yes! Noticed how all the snow on the streets had melted. Excellent.

the tree outside my window

During my month with Linda Pastan, I read a lot about the tree outside her window. The tree outside my window belongs to my neighbor. Earlier this week, the heavy, wet snow caused a a big section of it (which is a big tree) to fall. Here’s what I wrote about it on Monday:

Woke up this morning, walked downstairs, opened the blinds. Hello huge tree branch sprawled across the side yard! Sometime during the night as it snowed a branch from my neighbor’s tree fell. It starts in their yard and ends by the edge of my house. Luckily, no damage. I wonder how long it will be before it’s removed?

RUN! log entry from 6 march 2023

How long will it be? It’s still there. Yesterday Scott and I talked about whether or not we should do anything about it. We decided we’ll wait until it’s warmer. It’s not blocking anything, or causing any damage, and it is their responsibility. I wouldn’t mind clearing off some of the branches, but the biggest part of the fallen tree looks heavy and will be difficult to remove. Of course, this fallen tree isn’t a big deal, but it’s difficult to ignore when it’s right outside my window, always there, reminding me that something will need to done about it at some point, and that I’m incapable of talking with my neighbors about it.

a mini-project on Schuyler

Yesterday I decided to print out James Schuyler’s lllooonnnnggg poem, Hymn to Life. 10 pages 1.1 spaced in 13 pt Helvetica-Neue. It just fits on my desk, under the glass. My plan is to spend some time with a different page each day (or each time I read it and write about it) and pick out bits that stand out for me.

James Schuyler, Hymn to Life, Page 2

Today I worked on page 2, which begins with As the seasons turning, and ends with bigger gravestones than the lesser fry. Why did I begin with page 2 and not page 1? Maybe it was because I’ve read the first page many times, but rarely beyond it — I was too daunted by the number of lines left to read. And because I discussed the first page a little yesterday.

tree, that dominates this yard, thick-waisted, tall/ And crook branched. Its bark scales off like that which we forget:/ Pain, an introduction at a party, what precisely/ happened umpteen Years or days or hours ago. This line reminds me of a bit of Schuyler’s diary that I read yesterday:

March 5 — in this case from 1971:

“As beautiful a morning as ever was, as though the two days wind had blown something away and left — not spring, by any means: a kind of russet flash in this swept clean clarity.  The plane tree looks as though it’s shedding its flakes and scabs of bark in the interest of a new nakedness, its upper trunk like a sinewy throat. 


Putting these two fragments together complicates and deepens my understanding of that which we forget. When I initially read the poem, I was thinking more about the regret of forgetting someone’s name, or what happened in the past. Also — just last week, RJP had a check-up at the dentist. After she was safely done, I told her about how painful one of my cleanings had been and how I wished I could have recorded that pain I felt because I hadn’t flossed enough and play it back for myself every time I didn’t want to floss! Now reading the lines in Schuyler’s diary about shedding bark and becoming something new, I’m thinking about why I sometimes want to forget, to let go of old memories and experiences, to become something new. So, some things we want to forget — like me and the problem of the tree — and some things we want to remember — like the voices and gestures of someone we love, the pain of a bad cleaning. Both are true, and the tree bark can be about forgetting as welcomed or feared.

And that same blue jay returns, or perhaps/ It is another. All jays are one to me. This makes me think of bird as form, which is how I often understand birds because of my inability to see their fine details. Although, as I learn more of their songs, I can distinguish between some types. Just this past fall I finally realized that what I thought was an irritating crow call is actually the screech of a blue jay, and that the tin-whistle song that I always here is a blue jay too. I’m also thinking about the rare occasion when I wonder about the life span of the creatures I encounter — squirrels, birds, butterflies, bees. I looked up blue jay: 7 years, on average, but as old as 27. I’ve lived in my current house for 8 years, so I might be encountering the same bird each year.

But not the sun which seems at/ Each rising new, as though in the night it enacted death and rebirth I don’t imagine the sun in this way. Is this because I hardly ever sit and watch it set? I should. What would it feel like to imagine that the sun is performing death every night, being reborn every morning? How could that shift my perspective on everything?

a future which is just more Daily life. I love daily life — the mundane, sometimes made magical, but often small and quiet and repeated. I find comfort in the patterns, find meaning in the accumulation of day after day.

It/Is spring. It is also still really winter. Not a day when you say,/“What a beautiful spring day.” A day like twilight or evening when/You think, “I meant to watch the sun set.”

I meant to watch the sun set. This line comes after the flowers blooming, daily life, and a bit about his cat is always getting into fights. A fun surprise to realize, just now as I read this again, that Schuyler was setting me up for regret about not seeing a sun set! And now, noticing how I wrote sunset and he wrote sun set, I’m thinking about the difference between the two, one as a noun, the other a verb, and how believing in the sun setting as opposed to the sunset is much more fun, and open, and makes imagining that the sun could be doing something like performing death every night much more possible. Verbs are the best!

march 5/WALKBIKE

35 minutes
neighborhood
30 degrees

Took a morning walk with Delia the dog and Scott around the neighborhood. Blue sky, low wind, fresh air. The sidewalks were mostly clear with a few stretches of ice — the fun kind: crisp, thin, barely covering puddles. At the start, both of us were complaining about something, but by the time we had reached Cooper School and saw the piles of snow we forgot why it mattered.

Today would have been my mom’s 81st birthday. Yesterday I put together a page of videos and links to past reflections, essays, and poems about her. This morning, before heading out for the walk, I wrote something for new shadow series:

march 5, 2023/ sara lynne puotinen

Today my
shadow

is the grief
too big

to fit in
my small

body — the
love that

needs room to
breathe the

tenderness
searching

for a place
to be

possible
the dis

belief it
has been

thirteen years
since she

grew older
hoping

for better
views. My

shadow leads
as we

head east to
the gorge

to see what’s
on the

other side.

The ending still needs work, I think.

bike: 25 minutes
basement

I successfully resisted the desire to go out for a run — I need to rest my knees and my IT band for one more day, I think. Feeling restless and wanting to stretch out my legs, I decided to do a bike ride in the basement. Watch the last 5k of the Tokyo marathon.

Before biking, I decided to start memorizing Emily Dickinson’s “I measure every Grief I meet.” I made it through the first 6 (out of 10) stanzas. Each time I memorize an ED poem, I’m delighted, then amazed by her choice of words. So good!

I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, eyes —
I wonder if it weighs like Mine —
Or has an Easier size.

I wonder if they bore it long —
Or did it just begin —
I could not tell the Date of mine —
It feels so old a pain —

I wonder if it hurts to live —
And if they have to try —
And whether — could they choose between —
It would not be — to die —

I note that Some — long patient gone —
At length, renew their smile —
An imitation of a light
That has so little Oil —

I wonder if when Years have piled —
some thousands — on the harm —
That hurt them early — such a lapse
Could bring them any balm —

Or would they go on aching still
Through centuries of Nerve —
Enlightened to a larger Pain –
In Contrast with the Love —

march 1/WALKSWIM

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

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

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

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

ordinary birdsong / 1 march

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

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

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

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

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

swim: 1.8 miles
ywca pool

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

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

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

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

Q and A/Linda Pastan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

jan 24/WALKRUN

walk: 20 minutes
neighborhood with Delia the dog

Went out for a brief walk through the neighborhood and listened to the birds. I love the sounds of birds, especially in the winter. Lots of chattering, making it feel warmer than it was. Then I heard the rapid knocking of the woodpecker. It echoed down the block. Passing under a tree, I heard a strange sound. Was it a bird, or a squirrel? I’m not sure. Did I see any of the birds that I heard? I don’t think so.

3 miles
ywca track

Ran at the track in the afternoon with Scott. We didn’t run together, but at the same time. I intended to listen to music, but I forgot the extra dongle I need for my headphones. Oh well, running without music was fine. In fact, I liked it. Hearing my feet striking the track, the basketball shoes down below squeaking on the gym floor, the battle ropes forcefully striking the ground. Did I think about anything? I can’t remember much. I do recall thinking about my form — keeping my shoulders relaxed — and noticing the time every few laps. Can i think of 10 other things?

10 Things I Noticed

  1. a man boxing in the corner — I could hear him hit the punching back, see it swinging back and forth
  2. when I first got there a tall man in a blue shirt was running. Later, he stopped running and was walking
  3. a man in dark sweatpants and a tan shirt, or was it a dark shirt and tan sweatpants?, was running and working hard. As I passed him, I could hear his jagged breathing
  4. a blur below — a guy sprinting on the track
  5. a woman in black, walking and veering into the middle
  6. 2 different sets of walkers, talking and slowly traveling around the track
  7. someone on a spin bike in corner
  8. a man sitting on a bench by the door –were they watching me as I ran by?
  9. a runner in a white t-shirt and black running tights, looking relaxed
  10. near the end of the run, someone was pushing the heavy sled in the corner

While drinking my coffee this morning, I found this video abut Ice Swimming. I’m not interested in trying it out, although I wouldn’t mind swimming in an outdoor pool in the winter.

note: I’m adding this poem in a few days later because it fits with the video.

Cold Shock Response/Anna Swanson


Note: All words (with the exception of title) transcribed from garbage found in the Cape Broyle swimming hole, NL.


Gasp. Cautionless
mouthfuls. No skill or aim,

only appetite in gloves of slush.
Gasp, we grab at the air

before asking, Is there air?
Alight with cold, classroom 

potassium dropped in water. 
Blood, punching. Our old code

calling. We gasp, cold bells
that cannot stop ringing.

Love that line about being cold bells that can’t stop ringing! A few months ago, I put together a page on my “How to Be” project over at Undisciplined. It was “How to be…a bell.” I included several poems and songs and passages about bells. Unfortunately that page was erased and I haven’t tried to recreate it. If I do, I’ll add this poem to it.

jan 22/WALKBIKE

walk: 25 minutes
winchell trail between 44th and 42nd
17 degrees / snow flurries

I needed some pictures for my class, so Scott, Delia, and I took a walk by the gorge. Because of the slippery conditions we drove to the parking lot, then slowly walked around. Scott took some great pictures, Delia had fun romping around in the snow, and I loved breathing in all the cold, crisp air!

Here’s one of my favorite shots:

bare trees, snow, a person in a green jacket with a small white dog in a cute sweater
Sara and Delia, the Winchell Trail

A beautiful walk. Near the end of it, we noticed it was snowing. Saw lots of walkers and runners out there this morning.

bike: 25 minutes
basement

Felt like I wanted to work my legs a little more this afternoon — thanks, restlessness — so I decided to do a short bike ride in the basement. Watched new videos from the 2 running YouTubers I follow. Didn’t bike that fast, but it felt good to move some more after sitting and reading most of the afternoon. Current book: Mornings with Rosemary, which is the American title for the British book, The Lido. I prefer the British title, especially since the book is all about the lido. American audiences can figure out what a lido is, I think. If they grew up in the late 70s and 80s like me, they should know what a lido is from The Love Boat and its lido deck!