3 miles
trestle turn around
72 degrees/ 85% humidity
1 2 3 4/1 2 3 4/1 2 3 4…counted to four over and over again to keep myself steady and moving forward in the heat and humidity (dew point: 69). In the gorge, it’s starting to look like fall even if it doesn’t feel like it. Leaves floating, then littering the ground. Saw some more slashes of red, a few blobs of orange, some yellow stripes. Greeted the Daily Walker and 3 or 4 other runners and walkers. Smelled the sewer pipes. Avoided squirrels.
Thought more about my project and what I’m trying to do with it. Today’s goal: play with some lines of text from the “Great River Greening Management Plan, 2002” and Chapter 2 of the Mississippi Gorge Regional Park Master Plan 2018/2019. Possibly a cento? I’m specifically interested in phrases describing the impact of humans on the gorge and plans for protecting the gorge from humans.
Currently reading Wilder by Claire Wahmanholm which I discovered yesterday. Love it. A mix of free verse with erasures (taken from Sagan’s Cosmos!), and prose poems (some based on a letter or the alphabet or an ongoing story she’s telling).
ALMANAC/claire wahmanholm
We head grown leaky. Our heads were full of fissures that wouldn’t seal no matter how tightly we claimed the vises’ jaws around our temples. Our scalps wept until only the present rattled in our ears, bone-dry and rabid. We walked around the corner or had been walking for years. We entered the same empty house at the end of the same dirt road. In every room I found a yellow almanac under the bed and read the same page, which told me the time Neptune would rise, the time civil dust would descend. I pressed the almanac to my head. What was time? What was descend? Whenever I left the house I would take the almanac with me. I put it under my raw-hide pillow, hoping that while I slept, my head would somehow mend. Every night I dreamed of frost spreading across a ragged field, knitting the furrows with its uniform white.