2.55 miles
42nd st loop
57 degrees
Did a shorter run today. Warmer, overcast, not too windy. Heard some black capped chickadee’s doing their fee-bee call before I headed out, then the loud drumming of a woodpecker about a mile into the run. As usual, everything was green. Anything else I remember from my run? Saw and heard some roller skiers clickity-clacking. Also heard a kid calling out to an adult–“Let me go first!” And heard a woman, with a lot of anger in her voice, recounting a story about what some other woman had done–I don’t know what it was but I know that “she REALLY shouldn’t have done it!”
Memorized the rest of the Katie Farris poem, What Would Root. An epic undertaking! 402 words. Too much for reciting while running, I think. I do really like this poem and am glad to have memorized it. Will I try another this long again? Not sure. Sometimes Farris uses articles (like the) and sometimes she doesn’t. Sometimes she includes a that, sometimes she doesn’t. I find it hard to always remember when. I like how she repeated the phrase “I could see everything” 4 times.
Listening back to the recording I made, right after I finished my run, staring into the sink hole at 7 Oaks, I noticed I dropped or added a few words. And I forgot one of my favorite lines: “that they were a part of my body I could not doubt, there were living and enervated and jutting out.”Not too bad for my first attempt at memorizing the entire thing. What a strange, wonderful poem. What does it all mean? Not sure about that yet. After I fully memorize it, I’ll have to dig into the lines, maybe on a longer run?
Last night, I worked some more on my Ode to Green poem. I’m still trying to figure out the form of the lines–tercets? a prose poem? one long series of lines? In “Ode to My Right Knee” Rita Dove uses couplets but I don’t think those works with my lines. Here’s the tercet version:
Ode to Green/ Sara Lynne Puotinen
Greedy gorge gobbler grifting
vistas. Vanishing views.
Overrunning overlooks. Orchestrating
take-overs–trees tressed,
scenes stolen, senses smothered. Stop.
Yield your yearly
domination. Dress down. Decide
against always
exuding excess.
Oh overabundant obstruction,
we want windows, ways
out, openings, other
perspectives, possibilities. Please
share some space. Surely
room remains
for faithful friends forever
craving crowd-less calm
where water waits, wants witnessing, where
laboring lungs long
to take
bigger, bug-less breaths beside
river’s rim?