Tag: windows

june 11/RUN

9:45 am*
2 miles
river road trail, south/42nd st/edmund, north
66 degrees / humidity: 85%

*I’m trying out adding the time to my basic details for these entries. I always tag them with “morning” or “afternoon” or “evening,” but I thought it would be interesting to see if it helps to get more specific. The tag is great for getting a general sense of when I run, but is that enough?

Here’s how it breaks down by tags:

morning: 1.092 entries (including today’s entry)
afternoon: 168 entries
evening: 16 entries

That’s a lot of mornings! I’m actually surprised that I’ve run as many as 16 times in the evening. I don’t like running in the evening. Should I try to change that?

A quick run on a humid Saturday morning, after some light rain that fell just before I woke up. Decided at the last minute to listen to some faster songs so I could work on increasing the speed of my cadence. Not because I want to go faster, but because I’m wondering if it might help my runs feel easier and improve my form. My go-to song for this: Misery Business/ Parmore. Elton John’s I’m Still Standing came on next, and that was a good speed too. It felt easy for the first mile, harder for the second. I think I should try doing this once a week. Maybe run with a quicker cadence (175) for a song, then a little more relaxed for a song, then repeat?

I’m sitting on my deck as I write this and the chickadees are going crazy: “chick-a-dee dee dee dee” — or, is it a chickadee? Now, I’m not sure. All I know is that it’s loud and steady and a bit frantic.

Encountered a running group. Not rightly packed, but strung out on the trail, a pair of runners here, a pair of runners there, for 1/4 of a mile. What are the training for? I didn’t look at the river or the oak savanna. Didn’t smell anything strange or hear any alarming sounds. No deep thoughts that I can remember. No felled trees to wonder about, or roller skiers to delight in (seeing a roller skier on the trail, is a good omen for me).

an image I remember: On my block, just before starting my run, I heard a woman softly speaking a few words (I couldn’t tell what the words were), then a collar jangling. I looked across the street and saw a woman running with a dog. The dog was medium-sized and on a leash, tethered to the runner’s waist. They looked like a puppy that might soon become a much bigger dog. They were running ahead of the runner. Something about their (the runner and the dog) movements seemed awkward, or not-quite-right. Was it that they were going too fast? Was it just not what I expected? I don’t know. I also don’t know why this image seems more vivid to me than anything else that happened on my run.

a new podcast to check out

I stumbled upon a poetry podcast that I’d like to try out: Words by Winter

Words by Winter: Conversations, reflections, and poems about the passages of life. Because it’s rough out there, and we have to help each other through. Each brief episode includes a story or conversation, along with a poem.

The creator/author of this podcast is based in Minneapolis, which is pretty cool.

my upcoming class

I think I mentioned that I’m teaching a class at the Loft Literary Center this summer. I’m very excited! It’s based on my work over the past 5+ years here on this blog. Here’s the description for “Finding Wonder in the World and the Words While Outside and in Motion“:

In this class, we’ll explore how cultivating the habit of being outside and moving regularly can make us more attentive and open to finding wonder in the world. And we’ll experiment with different methods for transforming that wonder into words, including creating and maintaining a movement log. We’ll read how writers use moving outdoors to help their creative process; investigate different forms of attention and how being in motion influences them; practice wonder, both as delight and curiosity, on our walks or runs; spend time with poems while moving to see what happens to them and to us; study how moving through land transforms how we know and describe it; notice our breathing as we move at different speeds, then compose poems that match its rhythms; and develop ways to remember ideas that occur as we move outdoors. 

Each week will consist of discussion, writing prompts, sharing strategies for your own outdoor-in-motion habits, and a few experiments to try during the week. Optional meet-ups by the Mississippi River Gorge are possible for those interested. Readings will be from Ross Gay, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, J. Drew Lanham, Aracelis Girmay, Mary Oliver, Georgina Kleege, Ada Limón, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Gardner, and others.

The class starts in 11 days and it’s all online, so I’m working on creating the content for it right now. It’s about the value of developing the habit of being outside and in motion for your writing/creative process/life. I’m especially interested in experimenting with how paying attention while moving (instead of while stopped, standing still) might open us up, and open up certain forms of attention that many of us don’t often use: soft attention or passive attention or attention that’s not about focusing closely on one thing, but on getting a bigger picture (the forest, no the trees). Not staring at or scrutinizing something in order to KNOW it, but becoming aware of something, feeling it, beholding it. How does that type of attention work, and how can we translate it into words? That’s what we’ll be playing around with in the class.

I mentioned chickadees earlier in this entry — the ones chattering noisily near my backyard — so I looked up “chickadee” on the poetry foundation site. Here’s the last section of a poem by Juan Delgado:

The Evidence is Everywhere/ Juan Delgado

V.

Outside my window,
the sky is suddenly
draped by a hum,
a hummingbird’s hunger.
Her wings wrinkle the sky.
Unlike
a chickadee too busy
and full of seed chatter,
the hummingbird
puffs up the air,
feeding like a storm,
a redness, a sideway rocket
past the world’s ear.

That spark reminds me of you.

Thin-rooted, lingering too
long, absorbed in window
reveries, I’ll be released. Here,
the soil is moist, sponge-like,
storing. Worms surface,
digesting their way up.
I, too, am ready
for the driving winds
of another season.

june 10/RUN

3.6 miles
marshall loop
71 degrees

71 degrees at 9:30 in the morning. I need to start my runs earlier. Today is my daughter’s last day of school so I can. Hooray for not having to wake her up, help her find something to eat, get stressed out when school has already started and she hasn’t even come downstairs! Another good run. Hardly any wind, not too much sun. Dry. Too dry. I could feel it in my tight skin and the inside lining of my nose.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. the river, nearing the lake street bridge on the west side: such a pale blue it was almost white, a nice contrast with the vibrant green
  2. the river, heading east over the lake street bridge: still, quiet, no waves, no sparkling. Something about its flatness, combined with the unruly green made it look hot — not like the water was hot, but that being near it was
  3. the river, heading west back over the lake street bridge: the water was split with one half blue, the other half brownish-green — a reflection of the trees along the shore
  4. the river, standing at the overlook at the middle of the bridge: more cloudy currents below. What causes this? Is it sand bars, or something else?
  5. on the bridge, I noticed a big crane over on the St. Paul side. I wondered if I encounter it while running through the neighborhood (I didn’t).
  6. below the bridge, I noticed the walking trail was open again — they must have fixed the bit that caved in
  7. a runner ahead of me on the bridge and then running up the marshall hill. They kept going on marshall; I turned on cretin
  8. at the top of the hill, Blacks coffee looked mostly empty, at least the low of empty stools I saw in the front window
  9. today, I remembered running through the tunnel of trees. This time I was heading south instead of north. What I remembered: a blur of green off to the side, a paved path stretching far in front of me, no one else around
  10. no stones stacked on the boulder

Did I hear any birds out by the gorge? I can’t remember.

Bird/ DORIANNE LAUX

For days now a red-breasted bird
has been trying to break in.
She tests a low branch, violet blossoms
swaying beside her, leaps into the air and flies
straight at my window, beak and breast
held back, claws raking the pane.
Maybe she longs for the tree she sees
reflected in the glass, but I’m only guessing.
I watch until she gives up and swoops off.
I wait for her return, the familiar
click, swoosh, thump of her. I sip cold coffee
and scan the room, trying to see it new,
through the eyes of a bird. Nothing has changed.
Books piled in a corner, coats hooked
over chair backs, paper plates, a cup
half-filled with sour milk.
The children are in school. The man is at work.
I’m alone with dead roses in a jam jar.
What do I have that she could want enough
to risk such failure, again and again?

june 3/RUN

5.25 miles
franklin hill and back
60 degrees

Ah, such lovely weather this morning! Ran north on the river road, through the tunnel of trees, under the lake street bridge, above the rowing club and the white sands beach, under the trestle, down the franklin hill, then everything again, in reverse. A nice run. I sped up too much in the second mile, and paid for it at the bottom of the hill. Decided to walk a bit of it. Then put in a playlist and ran back.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. cigarette smoke from somewhere — a car driving by? a person below, in the gorge?
  2. a screeching blue jay (or is it bluejay?)
  3. no stones stacked on the ancient boulder
  4. rowers on the river! I didn’t see them, but heard the coxswain calling out instructions through her bullhorn
  5. a roller skier slowly approaching from behind, not moving much faster than me. At first, the striking of the their poles was a loud sharp “clack!” in a steady rhythm. Clack! Clack! Clack! Clack! Then, heading up a hill, it shortend and softened: “clack clack clack” It took them almost half a mile to pass me
  6. saw at least 3 people with fishing poles — 2 walking on the trail, one by the edge of the river, ready to cast their line — what fish can you get in the river near franklin avenue?
  7. wind and a few creaks from the trees
  8. a large group of bikers spread out on the franklin hill, traveling up it at various speeds. Some were charging up it, others steadily plodding, one biker was weaving back and forth, another barely crawling. The bikers at the very back were walking their bikes
  9. all the benches were empty — were they lonely or relieved to have some solitude?
  10. ended in the tunnel of trees and marveled at the dappled/dappling light

Standing in the tunnel of trees was wonderful. Quiet, sheltered, calm. And, no bugs! Pretty soon that won’t be possible. I did a recording of the wind in the trees but listening back to it, I mostly hear static and car wheels whooshing from up above. I have decided that I’d like to give some more attention to the creaking trees and the sound of the wind moving through the branches. I have such happy memories of listening to the wind in the aspens up at my grandparent’s farm. It used to be my favorite sound.

The Sound of Trees/ ROBERT FROST

I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?
We suffer them by the day
Till we lose all measure of pace,
And fixity in our joys,
And acquire a listening air.
They are that that talks of going
But never gets away;
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.
My feet tug at the floor
And my head sways to my shoulder
Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door.
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare
The white clouds over them on.
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone.

may 26/RUN

4 miles
marshall loop
50 degrees

The heat is on in the house again this morning. Tomorrow it warms up, then next Monday, 90. I wonder how cold the lake water is right now? I might try to swim in it next week. Today’s run was good. With yesterday’s rain and today’s gloom everything was a rich, dark green. Very cool.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. the stones stacked on the ancient boulder were small and leaning
  2. workers #1: the walking part of the double bridge near 33rd seemed clearer today — did they come through and trim some bushes and trees?
  3. the steady click click click clack of ski poles hitting the ground as a roller skier powered up the small hill just south of lake street
  4. workers #2: the dirt trails leading down into the gorge between 33rd and lake street were a dark, deep brown. I wondered if workers had brought in some mulch, but then decided the trails were just wet
  5. the dirt trail right next to the paved one near a park sign, was mushy and soft and difficult to run over
  6. heading east on the lake street bridge, the water was blue and empty — no logs or rowers
  7. peering through the windows at Black coffee at the top of the Marshall hill, I noticed several tables were empty (also: no smells of delicious waffles today)
  8. workers #3: the distinctive smell of fresh tar, then bright orange cones, a few trucks, and some workers filling in potholes and cracks in the road
  9. the water from shadow falls, which only comes after it rains, sounded like it was spraying out of a shower on a soft setting
  10. nearing the lake street bridge, I thought I heard leaves rustling in the wind, but I think it was another hidden waterfall — is it possible to hike hear this one, or see it from the other side?

I had never listened to Japanese Breakfast until Scott and I heard them?her? perform on SNL this past Saturday. I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not, but since then I’ve listened to the album Jubilee a few times and earlier today I looked up the lyrics to the first song — and the one I saw them perform on SNL: Paprika. Wow, some deep, interesting lyrics!

Paprika/ Michelle Zauner

Lucidity came slowly
I awoke from dreams of untying a great knot
It unraveled like a braid 
Into what seemed were 
Thousands of separate strands of fishing line
Attached to coarse behavior it flowed
A calm it urged, what else is here?

How’s it feel to be at the center of magic
To linger in tones and words?
I opened the floodgates 
And found no water, no current, no river, no rush
How’s it feel to stand at the height of your powers
To captivate every heart?
Projecting your visions to strangers who feel it
Who listen, who linger on every word
Oh, it’s a rush
Oh, it’s a rush

But alone it feels like dying
All alone I feel so much

I want my offering to woo, to calm, to clear, to solve
But the only offering that comes
It calls, it screams, there’s nothing here

How’s it feel to be at the center of magic
To linger in tones and words?
I opened the floodgates 
And found no water, no current, no river, no rush
How’s it feel to stand at the height of your powers
To captivate every heart?
Projecting your visions to strangers who feel it
Who listen, who linger on every word
Oh, it’s a rush
Oh, it’s a rush

may 20/RUN

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
56 degrees

Hailed this morning for a few minutes. Small pellets today. Yesterday afternoon, golf ball sized ones flinging themselves against the windows. A thunderous noise. Strange weather.

Ran to the falls. Didn’t realize it until much later, but my watch died 30 seconds in. I need to get a new watch, or stop wearing a watch. I’m thinking about the latter. Earlier on, wearing a watch and tracking my miles, pace, minutes exercised, calories burned seemed important as motivation. Now I don’t really need it…or want it. Maybe I’ll try not having it this summer and see how that works (or doesn’t work).

Ran to the falls without headphones, listening to the kids playing at the Dowling Elementary School playground. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the kids at the Minnehaha Academy playground and how their yells seemed menancing and mean. Today’s kids were not mean but out of control with exuberance. Not completely joyful, but not unjoyful either. As I listened to the “woo woo woos” and the “aaaaaaaahhhhhhs” I thought about being unhinged or out of control and how it can be connected to a sense of freedom or letting go.

I also thought about soft attention and noticing through the peripheral, not focusing on the edges, but making note of what’s happening there — what’s off to the side or below you. Looking ahead at the trail, I noticed a walker across the road and off to the side of me. I think they were waving their arms. Was it at me as a greeting. Not sure.

There was lots of debris on the sidewalks and the trail from the violent rain/hail last night. Not any big branches, just lots of leaves and twigs and muck. Yuck! Did I see any worms? I don’t think so. Did I look at the river? I think so, but I can’t remember what color it was or if it had any foam on it.

I ran by Minnehaha Creek right before it spilled over the falls. It was high and rushing. I didn’t look at the falls, but I could hear them gushing — or, I felt they were gushing? A school group was there somewhere, but I didn’t run into any of the kids. 2 long rows of porta potties lined the path, ready for the “Women Run the Cities” race tomorrow. I ran it a few pre-pandemic years ago.

When I entered Minnehaha Regional Park, I looped around the falls, then stopped to take off my sweatshirt and put in my headphones. The first song I listened to was Paramore’s “Misery Business.” It’s 173 bpm and helps me lock into a quick, steady rhythm. After that, Foo Fighter’s “The Pretender” helped me keep that rhythm. No more thinking about anything, just steadily moving.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. a frantic squirrel almost jumped out in front of me, but quickly turned and ran up the tree next to me
  2. I just remembered that the school group I mentioned above was below me, at the spot where the creek collects and kids wade in the summer
  3. a few big puddles on the path — I avoided all of them
  4. the sewer pipes were all dripping or gushing
  5. I waved to at least 2 other runners
  6. a biker whizzed by me from behind — it felt close!
  7. I encountered a tall runner in shorts and a t-shirt — I think they were both gray — twice, once heading south and once heading north
  8. no kids at the Minnehaha Falls playground
  9. someone was stopped at the water fountain in the 36th street parking lot, filling up a water bottle
  10. At the start and end of my run, as I neared the river, a street crew was blowing smoke through the manhole, checking for sewer cracks and leaks. Smoke billowed up and spreading out across the street

That list of 10 things was hard to create, probably because I had already described so many things I noticed. I can’t believe I almost forgot about the sewer smoke. It was a very memorable sight.

In the Clearing/ Patricia Hopper

After last night’s rain the woods
smell sensual—a mixture of leaves and musk.
The morels have disappeared, and soon I’ll come across
those yellow chanterelles, the kind they sell
in town at the farmers’ market. Once I saw
the Swedish woman who raises her own food
foraging for them, two blond boys
quarreling near the pickup, and the next morning
they were selling them from their stand beside the road.

Out here, among last year’s dead
leaves with the new shoots of spruces
poking through them, I’ve come to the place where light
brightens a glade of ferns and the log someone else
placed here—carved “B.W.”—where I sometimes sit
to listen to the birds. Today the sun is breaking through
the wet branches, revealing a clean sky,
brilliant, cerulean. Then, suddenly, a raft of scudding clouds

promising more rain. If it comes, I’ll read all afternoon—
Henry James, or maybe Eudora Welty’s
Delta Wedding, where so many characters
vie for attention I can never keep them straight.
Here, there’s no one else, no one to worry over
or argue with or love. Maybe the earth was meant
only for this: small comings and goings
on the forest floor, the understory astir
with its own secret life. If I sit still enough
among the damp trees, sometimes I see the world
without myself in it, and—it always surprises me—
nothing at all is lost.

I love how this poem describes the clearing so clearly, and the last few lines about seeing the world without myself in it.

may 12/RUN

4.5 miles
Veterans’ Home loop
65 degrees
humidity: 90%

It felt much warmer than 65 degrees. The humidity, my nemesis! I felt drained and decided to walk a few times after reaching the falls. Speaking of the falls, they were gushing. We had a intense storm last night, with tornado warnings and severe weather sirens going off at least twice. Everywhere I looked this morning, I witnessed the aftermath. Nothing too bad, just small branches on the ground, water gurgling out of the sewer pipes, dirt and mud washed up on the sidewalk, leaves piled up on the path.

Someone posted an excerpt from a Louise Glück poem on twitter the other day that made me stop scrolling. I liked it, but wanted to find where it came from: her poem, “October,” in Averno. I particularly wanted to know what happened to Beauty. Here’s the excerpt from twitter:

What others found in art,
I found in nature. What others found
in human love, I found in nature.
Very simple. But there was no voice there.
Winter was over. In the thawed dirt,
bits of green were showing.
Come to me, said the world. I was standing
in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal—
I can finally say
long ago; it gives me considerable pleasure. Beauty

And here’s the larger (more complete) excerpt from “October“:

3.
Snow had fallen. I remember
music from an open window.
Come to me, said the world.
This is not to say
it spoke in exact sentences
but that I perceived beauty in this manner.
Sunrise. A film of moisture
on each living thing. Pools of cold light
formed in the gutters.
I stood
at the doorway,
ridiculous as it now seems.
What others found in art,
I found in nature. What others found
in human love, I found in nature.
Very simple. But there was no voice there.
Winter was over. In the thawed dirt,
bits of green were showing.
Come to me, said the world. I was standing
in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal—
I can finally say
long ago; it gives me considerable pleasure. Beauty
the healer, the teacher—
death cannot harm me
more than you have harmed me,
my beloved life.

I posted a different section from this poem 2 or 3 years ago. It’s a beautiful poem, so I decided to request the collection from the library.

may 4/RUN

3.25 miles
trestle turn around
58 degrees

Ran in the early afternoon today. Warm enough for shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. Spring! Already feeling too warm. I remember where I was when I stopped to look at the river — just past the railroad trestle, down the recently replaced steps — but I don’t remember what it looked like, other than blue and calm. Heard lots of birds, my feet striking the ground in a dull thud, a funky baseline spilling out of a car window, a few fragments of conversation — one of them had something to do with the weather? — and a dog collar clanging.

After looking at the river, I kept walking on the dirt path below the paved one. I felt almost, but not quite, removed from everything, but still part of it too. Beside it. I thought again about how stepping only a few feet off of the main trail enables you to have some space, to feel left alone. This space beside below next to everything else is not outside, or even on the threshold. Is it on the front stoop, or the front yard? Not sure what it is exactly or even that it needs a fixed name. An image: a dirt trail beneath my feet, mostly dry with a few muddy spots, perched on a steep edge. To the right: a few tree branches, open air, the river down below. To my left: a small hill with wood railing at the top. An occasional voice traveling down, evidence of the paved path above.

This morning, I read a wonderful interview with Jorie Graham on Lithub. It’s from 2018 and about her book, Fast. This title made me think of its opposite. In her interview with David Naimon for Tinhouse, Graham said a few times, “Pay attention! Slow down!” I kept thinking about what slow might mean for me. Not just moving slower, but moving less efficiently or productively. Moving without purpose or a fixed goal. Moving with ease (and without haste) through open space, not crammed with appointments or tasks or destinations.

It is exciting to find great poets with amazing poems and wonderful advice and reflections on how to be. I really like Jorie Graham. Looking through another one of her collections, Erosion, I found this great poem:

Still Life with Window and Fish / Jorie Graham (recording)

Down here this morning in my white kitchen
along the slim body
of the light,
the narrow body that would otherwise
say forever the same thing,
the beautiful interruptions, the things of this world, twigs
and power lines, eaves and ranking
branches burn
all over my walls.
Even the windowpanes are rich.
The whole world outside
wants to come into here,
to angle into
the simpler shapes of rooms, to be broken and rebroken
against the sure co-ordinates
of walls.
The whole world outside….
I know it’s better, whole, outside, the world—whole
trees, whole groves–but I
love it in here where it blurs, and nothing starts or
ends, but all is
waving, and colorless,
and voiceless….
Here is a fish-spine on the sea of my bone china
plate. Here is a a fish-spine on the sea of my hand,
flickering, all its freight
fallen away,
here is the reason for motion washed
in kitchen light, fanning, gliding
upstream in the smoke of twigs, the rake
against the shed outside, the swaying birdcage
and its missing
tenant. If I should die
before you do,
you can find me anywhere
in this floral, featureless,
indelible
surf. We are too restless
to inherit
this earth.

I want to do something with that last line, I think. Something about my own restlessness.



april 18/RUN

4 miles
marshall loop
35 degrees / feels like 25
wind: 16 mph / snow flurries

Before heading out for a run, watched the Boston Marathon. The thing I remember most about it was during the men’s push-rim race, when the announcer (who I think was a push-rim racer himself) talking about the racer’s gloves: they’re plastic and 3D-printed for precision, and when they bang on the metal wheel rim, they create a steady rhythm that the racer’s use for pacing themselves. Very cool. Later, I remembered this fact as I neared the end of my run.

Today, it is cold and windy and snowing again, but the birds are singing and calling — lots of fee bees — so I know spring will be here soon. Maybe by next weekend? I picked the right route for the direction of the wind. It was at my back as I ran over the lake street bridge and up the Marshall Hill. The only part where I was running directly into it was on the way back over the bridge.

Heard: the bells chiming near Shadow Falls; a dog barking and kid yelling below in the gorge; and the branches creaking from the wind again. This time the branches creaking sounded almost like a rusty hinge, with a door slowly creaking open. I like that image and the idea that some sort of door to somewhere was opening for me at that moment — and that there was something mysterious and scary about this door leading down into the woods or the earth. I like mysterious and scary.

Near the end of my run, I think after I remembered the rhythm of the gloves hitting the push-rim, I started chanting some of an ED poem:

Life is but life/And death but death/Bliss is but bliss/And breath but breath
Life is but life/And death but death/Bliss is but bliss/And breath but breath
Life is but life/And death but death/Bliss is but bliss/And breath but breath

Stopped to study the river for a minute — and to get a break from the wind — on the lake street bridge: it was a steely gray with ripples and a few eddies.

One more thing: Running above the floodplain forest and the Hiawatha Sand Flats, I heard a ferocious dog bark, then a whimper, almost but not quite, like a squeaky toy. Was the dog chasing or killing a bunny down there? Possibly. A minute later, I heard the deep voice of a human calling out repeatedly, then a steady rhythm of dog barks and sharp commands of some sort.

before the run

Scrolling through poems I’ve archived on my Safari Reading List, I found one that builds off of being dug up and excavated, but is also about returning, caring for, and re-planting:

Pear Snow/ Todd Dillard

A flood unzips a graveyard.
Cadavers sluice down Main St.
It’s my job to find the dead,
chauffeur them back to their plots.
The problem being the dead speak.
They want to swing by their old places,
check on spouses, kids grandkids
glimpsed in sepia windows
beneath the blue of evening news.
They whisper: “That tree was a sapling when I planted it,”
or: “I forgot what her laugh was like,”
or they call a dog that refuses to come.
Then, embarrassed by their weeping,
by how dry it is,
the dead ask me to take them home,
and on the drive I recite this line I’m working on
about the graininess of two-day-old snow.
“Pear snow,” I call it.
The dead say nothing
in response. The air velvets
as if it’s going to rain,
though the sky is clear,
the moon wet as the light in a child’s pupil.
Gentle, I lower the dead
back into their cradles. The earth,
for all its stripped rancor,
heavy in my shovel.
The work hard, but familiar.
The pay, at least, good.

What do we do with the ghosts that resurface, whether we want them to or not? How do we care for the stories of those who came before us?

Here’s another poem I posted last year about what the earth can yield and how we might notice it:

After the Rain/ jared Carter

After the rain, it’s time to walk the field
again, near where the river bends. Each year
I come to look for what this place will yield –
lost things still rising here.

The farmer’s plow turns over, without fail,
a crop of arrowheads, but where or why
they fall is hard to say. They seem, like hail,
dropped from an empty sky,

Yet for an hour or two, after the rain
has washed away the dusty afterbirth
of their return, a few will show up plain
on the reopened earth.

Still, even these are hard to see –
at first they look like any other stone.
The trick to finding them is not to be
too sure about what’s known;

Conviction’s liable to say straight off
this one’s a leaf, or that one’s merely clay,
and miss the point: after the rain, soft
furrows show one way

Across the field, but what is hidden here
requires a different view – the glance of one
not looking straight ahead, who in the clear
light of the morning sun

Simply keeps wandering across the rows,
letting his own perspective change.
After the rain, perhaps, something will show,
glittering and strange.

during the run

I tried to think about these two poems and excavating truths and caring for ghosts and noticing the things that are buried in the ground, but I couldn’t hang onto my thoughts. It could have been wind or the effort I was making to run in it that distracted me. Near the end of my run I thought about this before/during/after the run experiment and how it works sometimes and not others. I think I need to fine-tune it — maybe narrow my focus, or be more deliberate with what I want to think about before I head out on my run?

One other thing I remember was thinking about surfaces and depths, and the value of both. And now, writing this entry hours later, I’m thinking about how both of the poems in my “before the run” section involve water (rain) and how it brings the things buried to the surface. This reminds me of writing about water last July and Maxine Kumin’s idea of the thinker as the sinker (july 22, 2021). I’m also thinking about floating and bobbing to the surface and how humus (which I wrote about earlier this month) is the top layer of soil — 12 inches at the surface.

after the run

I want to return to the creaky branches sounding like the rusty hinge of a door. Last April, I read a poem by Mary Oliver with a hinge in it:

from Dogfish/ Mary Oliver

I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery

I’m thinking of door hinges and poems as opening a thousand doors and the wings of the seven white butterflies and “how they bang the pages/or their wings as they fly/to the fields of mustard and yellow/and orange and plain/gold all eternity” (Seven White Butterflies/ from West Wind)

april 17/RUN

1.5 miles
winchell trail, south/42nd st east/edmund, north
41 degrees

Headed to the gorge with Scott this morning — a quick run above the river. I know I looked at the river, but I can’t remember much about it. Most likely, with this gloomy sky, it was a brownish-gray or grayish-brown with no sparkle. We talked a lot about Lizzo and what a great job she did on SNL last night, both as the host and the musical guest. The only other thing I remember right now is running the opposite way on the Winchell Trail (usually I run north on it) and noticing how much longer the Folwell hill was this way. The other way it’s steep but short, this way it’s slightly less steep, but winding (or wind-y?) and long.

before the run

Yesterday I suggested that my next dirt topic should be gardens/gardening. Here are a few ideas:

1 — tune my body and my brain

My exploration of dirt began when I started thinking about the phrase from a kids’ song, or a song often sung to or by kids: “the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out.” Here’s another kids’ song that doesn’t have the word dirt in it, but is about dirt and death and life and gardens. Both my kids sang it in elementary school concerts:

Here are a few verses:

Inch by inch, row by row
Gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground

Inch by inch, row by row
Someone bless these seeds I sow
Someone warm them from below
Till the rain comes tumblin’ down

Pullin’ weeds and pickin’ stones
Man is made of dreams and bones
Feel the need to grow my own
‘Cause the time is close at hand

Rainful rain, sun and rain
Find my way in nature’s chain
Tune my body and my brain
To the music from the land

2 — Alice Oswald and “echo-poetics”

It is perhaps this blending of the ecological sensibilities learned through gardening with those of the poet that makes reading Oswald’s editorial and poetic work so compelling, and not only for the many pleasures it brings. It also offers an acoustically informed aesthetic, a way of re-tuning how we think about and make beauty and meaning in verbal forms, especially those inspired by the earth’s processes, things, places. Principled with the desire to bring living things unmediated into text, Oswald’s writings illustrate a heightened and recursive sensitivity to the acoustics of environment, with the ear, of course, in its critical role as converter of signals. They recognize sound as summons, access, and mode. They value gardening (and other physical work) for the ways it creates possibilities for encounter by situating the body in motion and out-of-doors. They invite and invent expressive forms that are organic to these encounters, or that modify existing forms so they are apt and up to the task. They reveal a rootedness in rhythm, syncopation, harmony, or some other musicality within the external world. They practice acute hearing and engage in humble, patient, and empathie listening. They gesture toward the sonic rounding out of envi-ronments and their many natural, social and cultural complexities. And they practice accretion as a writer’s technique inspired by a natural process. Thus Oswald begins to define what I might term an “echo-poetics.”

Voice(s) of the Poet-Gardener: Alice Oswald and the Poetry of Acoustic Encounter/ Mary Pinard

3 — digging work

It’s certainly true that when you’re digging you become bodily implicated in the ground’s world, thought and earth continually passing through each other. You smell it, you feel its strength under your boot, you move alongside it for maybe eight hours and your spade’s language (it speaks in short lines of trochees and dactyls: sscrunch turn slot slot, sscrunch turn slot slot) creeps and changes at the same pace as the soil. You can’t help being critical of any account of mud that is based on mere glimpsing.

“The Universe in time of rain makes the world alive with noise” / Alice Oswald

Digging/ Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb   
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   
Bends low, comes up twenty years away   
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

4 — listening work

People often ask me what I like best about gardening. . . . The truth is it’s the sound. I don’t know anything lovelier than those free shocks of sound happening against the backsound of your heartbeat. Machinery, spade-scrapes, birdsong, gravel, rain on polythene, macks moving, aeroplanes, seeds kept in paper, potatoes coming out of boxes, high small leaves or large head-height leaves being shaken, frost on grass, strimmers, hoses . . .

“The Universe in time of rain makes the world alive with noise”/ Alice Oswald

Poems are written in the sound house of a whole body, not just with the hands. So before writing, I always spend a certain amount of time pre- paring my listening. I might take a day or sometimes as much as a month picking up the rhythms I find, either in other poems or in the world around me. I map them into myself by tapping my feet or punch- ing the air and when my whole being feels like a musical score, I see what glimpses, noises, smells, I see if any creature or feeling comes to live there. Then, before putting pen to paper, I ask myself, “Am I lis- tening? Am I listening with a soft, slow listening that will not obliter- ate the speaker?” And if, for example, I want to write a poem about water, I try to listen so hard that my voice disappears and I speak water.

“Poetry for Beginners” for the BBC’s Get Writing/ Alice Oswald

5 — In Search of our Mother’s Gardens*

*a reference to the powerful essay by Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens,” that I often taught in my Fem Theory classes.

things to think about while running:

  • How can I “tune my body and brain to the music of the land”?
  • What is digging work? Where can/do we do digging work?
  • What are the sounds of my backyard garden?
  • What can I plant in my garden this year?
  • Why do I love doing physical, outdoor work? How is digging/gardening/weeding work different from listening/noticing/caring/writing work? How is it similar?

during the run

Ran with Scott, and we didn’t talk about gardens or digging until the end, when I mentioned gardening, digging, and the digital story about my mom. He suggested that I look up the lyrics for Peter Gabriel’s “Digging in the Dirt.”

after the run

Here are a few lyrics from Gabriel’s “Digging in the Dirt”:

Digging in the dirt
Stay with me, I need support
I’m digging in the dirt
To find the places I got hurt
Open up the places I got hurt

The more I look, the more I find
As I close on in, I get so blind
I feel it in my head, I feel it in my toes
I feel it in my sex, that’s the place it goes

This time you’ve gone too far
This time you’ve gone too far
This time you’ve gone too far
I told you, I told you, I told you, I told you
This time you’ve gone too far
This time you’ve gone too far
This time you’ve gone too far
I told you, I told you, I told you, I told you

And the refrain at the end, repeated several times:

Digging in the dirt
To find the places we got hurt

And here’s the video, which I can’t embed). Wow, the imagery in this fits with so many things I’ve been discussing! Worms, digging as excavating deeper truths (I think I’ve mentioned this before), death, dust, grass, pebbles, sand, rocks, mushrooms speaking! (in the video they spell out “help”).

video: Digging in the Dirt/ Peter Gabriel

addendum, 18 april 2022: almost forgot to add this image from my notes for my memoir (still in progress) about my student and teaching life”

planting a seed, lower right

Instead of cropping out the key part — the picture of a plant growing inside a head in the lower right with the text, “planting a seed” — I decided to post the entire image. When I taught feminist and queer classes a decade ago, my aim was to plant seeds. Not to force ideas on students or to expect instant results — where they could immediately “get” something or be transformed, but to introduce ideas and offer up invitations that might, in the future, lead to transformation and deeper understandings.

april 15/RUN

3.5 miles
trestle turn around + extra
29 degrees / feels like 20
wind: 15 mph

Cold and windy. Again. Ran north, thinking I would have the wind at my back. Nope, in my face. Difficult. As I got closer (but not too close) to the porta-potty under the lake street bridge, it suddenly opened and a runner ran out. He was ready to go, I guess. Also saw a woman ahead of me walking down the service road to the Minneapolis Rowing Club. Rowers on the river today? If there were, I didn’t see or hear them. Ran past the trestle and stopped at the recently replaced steps. Then took them — about 30 steps, I think — down for a closer look. The river, with the sun reflecting the blue sky, the brown trees, the gray stone, looked almost mauve to me. Mostly brown, with hints of blue and gray and dark pink — where/how was I seeing pink? Saw a few fluttering birds, some ice on the edge of the entrance to the trail.

Almost forgot, but was reminded by hearing a dog bark here at my desk: Running south from the trestle, across the road from the fancy houses on Edmund, I heard a dog barking a deep, low bark in one of the houses. Then another a few doors down dog joined in. The second bark sounded almost like the impersonation of a frantic bark, like an unhinged kid trying to sound like a dog. I wondered which it was — a real bark or the copy of a bark? I never did find out, even as I listened for several minutes.

before the run

Today’s dirt topic: dust. Dust as the great equalizer (we all come from dust and return to it); how we are dust and more than dust; dusting as a sacred chore; dust as a fine powder we inhale/absorb without noticing; toxic dust; environmental racism and who does/doesn’t have access to cleaner air

1 — Dust Poem/ Philip Jenks

The idea was.
At least in theory,
Dust was a bad thing.

There was a bowl
Of it. At another
Point in time
The conclusion
Was reached
That everything
Was of it.

No season, no
Nothing to measure
To measure against
So no love or hate.
Left us without no
Moorings or so my
Father told me

Vanity tables of it?
Isn’t that what a vanity
Table is for?
What happens to
As its failings accrue?

No mission but to be clean.
Of itself.
But existing (time)
And problems there –
The problem of now
We are back here.

See the whole dust problem’s
No measure.
All’s dust, check.
All’s virtuous, check.
So why not live it up then?
And thus, YOLO etc. etc.

{These fok whirr pretty smart.
Thing is, even in
The dust bowl, the
Idea, a very American
One was that something
Wasn’t dust.
I wasn’t.
The Bowl wasn’t.
The dust wasn’t.

Since Ecclesiastes,
Been trying this one on.
(how’s that working out for you?)
One needn’t be geologically
Or for that matter
Psychologically trained to
Begin unpacking the diffident
And sometimes strained
Relation the nation holds with
All that is vanity.

The poet’s explanation of the poem was helpful for me in trying to dig in:

And I don’t say of myself much, or “I” much. I sometimes even just do search replace and take out “I” and put in “it” to try to take myself out as some small measure of humility.

“What happens to
As its failings accrue?

No mission but to be clean.
Of itself.

Dust Poem in PoetryNow

The idea of an “I” — writing as an “I,” being an “I.” How to navigate between a recognition that we are both more than dust and only dust (“All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.”–Eccleasiastes 3:20)? What is the “more” and how do we express/live it in ways that don’t deny the dust and in which our humility doesn’t erase our own existence? Is this too vague sounding? This question of being an “I” — having a unique voice, claiming a space — without doing violence to others (being too arrogant, taking too much) is one of the primary questions I struggle with in my life/writing. I tend to be too humble, too quick to erase or replace my “I”.

2 — Dusting/ Marilyn Nelson

Thank you for these tiny
particles of ocean salt,
pearl-necklace viruses,
winged protozoans:
for the infinite,
intricate shapes
of submicroscopic
living things.

For algae spores
and fungus spores,
bonded by vital
mutual genetic cooperation,
spreading their
inseparable lives
from equator to pole.

My hand, my arm,
make sweeping circles.
Dust climbs the ladder of light.
For this infernal, endless chore,
for these eternal seeds of rain:
Thank you. For dust.

I like how Nelson connects the chore of dusting — an everyday act of labor — with the deeper substance/s of life: tiny particles of ocean salt, algae and fungus spores, winged protozoas. For Nelson (and Jenks mentions it in his poem too), dust is more than dust, it is life, everything — and dusting is more than chore, but our access to that life.

Nelson’s reimagining dusting as sacred, reminds me of a poem I posted earlier this year, or late last year, Drift, which is about, among other things, rethinking the possible joy in shoveling snow.

3 — Dust/ Dorianne Laux

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor —
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn’t elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That’s how it is sometimes —
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it.

Dust = fine powder we inhale, surrounding us but often unnoticed. For Laux, truth as dust

dust: fine, dry powder consisting of tiny particles of earth or waste matter lying on the ground or on surfaces or carried in the air.

4 — Household Dust and Our Health

My 100+ year old house in the middle of the city gathers a lot of dust. I don’t often think about what all that means, and what all I’m inhaling/absorbing inside. Yikes.

As sure as the sun rises, houses collect dust. It gathers on our knickknacks and dirties the carpets. More than just dirt, house dust is a mix of sloughed-off skin cells, hair, clothing fibers, bacteria, dust mites, bits of dead bugs, soil particles, pollen, and microscopic specks of plastic. It’s our detritus and, it turns out, has a lot to reveal about our lifestyle.

For one thing, dust is far from inert. Those shed hairs and old skin cells can soak up a constellation of contaminants originating from consumer products that we bring into our homes. Other environmental contaminants can be tracked indoors on the soles of our shoes. So in addition to fluffy hair and garden dirt, dust can hold a witch’s brew of persistent organic pollutants, metals, endocrine disruptors, and more.

Not only does dust hold a long memory of the contaminants introduced to a house, but it’s also a continual source of exposure for the residents. Dust gets resuspended when it’s disturbed and will recirculate throughout the house, picking up substances before returning once more to the floor. “Year over year, dust accumulates in the home,” says Miriam L. Diamond, an environmental chemist at the University of Toronto. Even after regular cleaning, it still accretes because homes are tightly sealed environments, and the dust gets entrenched in carpets and crevices. Dust from an old house may retain legacy pollutants such as DDT that were banned almost half a century ago, she says.

Tracing the chemistry of household dust

5 — Dust, Toxins and Environmental Racism

So, we’re breathing in a lot of bad shit inside our individual houses — toxic chemicals that may not have even be used for decades. What about in our neighborhoods? And which neighborhoods are subject to more toxic and why?

At MCEA we believe in seeking justice for communities that have been harmed by historic and ongoing toxic pollution and contamination. By design and neglect, this harm has affected Black, Indigenous and other communities of color to a much greater extent than white neighborhoods.  Whenever municipal development is proposed in these communities, a necessary first step is to make sure the voices of neighboring community members are engaged and respected. Key decisionmakers must invite community members to the table to work towards a goal of eliminating new, harmful sources of pollution in neighborhoods experiencing systemic pollution and poor air quality.

The East Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis is one of these communities. This neighborhood continuously ranks as having some of the worst air quality in Minneapolis, and it is still being harmed by one of the most brazen and widespread urban polluters in Minnesota history.  An insecticide manufacturer at East 28th St. and Hiawatha Ave. polluted the neighborhood with arsenic from the 1930’s to the 1960’s, resulting in a massive cleanup of contaminated residential yards. 

The area surrounding this Superfund site is recognized in state law as being overburdened by pollution. State law requires that no permit shall be issued by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency in the area “without analyzing and considering the cumulative levels and effects of past and current environmental pollution from all sources on the environment.” 

The City of Minneapolis has proposed building a new “Hiawatha Campus” adjacent to the former manufacturing site to house city offices and vehicles. 

Ensuring community voices are heard in East Phillips

Environmental racism: Although the proposed project is expected to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions in city operations, this would come at the direct expense of local environmental quality by increasing pollutants from traffic near this site. As a neighborhood that is 83% Black, Indigenous, and people of color, the East Phillips community would be expected to bear the brunt of the impact for the “greater good,” which is an unacceptable trade-off. Racism has recently been declared a public health emergency in Minneapolis. Knowingly increasing the amount of pollution in a neighborhood primarily populated by Native American, Latinx, East African and Black communities will only exacerbate this problem and demonstrate the hypocrisy of the city’s words.

Poor governance to bring new toxicity to the ‘Arsenic Triangle’

during the run

Did I think about dust while I was running? I tried. At one point, I remember thinking about the invisibility of dust and how it’s in the air, as opposed to dirt on the ground or sandy muck in the water. I also thought about breathing and breath and how dust travels between lungs.

after the run

Here’s something to add to the list of invisible things around us all the time, and another possible reason why I have “sinus episodes” so often: dust mites

Dust mites are microscopic, insect-like pests that feed on dead human skin cells and thrive in warm, humid environments. They are not parasites that bite, sting or burrow into our bodies. Instead, people who are allergic to dust or dust mites are reacting to inhaling proteins in dust that comes from dust mite feces, urine or decaying bodies. Any inflammation of the nasal passages caused by dust mites is considered a dust allergy.

Dust and Dust Mites