5.35 miles
franklin loop
39 degrees / feels like 32
wind: 15 mph / 28 mph gusts
Blustery but bright with a warming sun. My left knee has been stiff at the end of my runs for the past few weeks (months?) and my left foot hurt at the beginning — the result of my new shoes and the strange redesign that is too tight on my toe. Who cares?! It was a great run. Mid to late November when all the leaves are gone and the sun can reach every corner of the forest is my favorite time to run. My love for it is heightened by the knowledge that soon snow will come and these lower trails will be un-runnable until March or April.
Starting sometime last week, I began a series of poems on haunting and haunted. I’ve been using my runs to help me figure out some of the lines. Today, again, it worked. I went out for my run wanting to work on this unfinished line: what is a ghost but… About a mile and a half in, I came up with some ideas: a part of the past we carry with us visible to anyone who notices. I also came up with an ending, connected to these lines: I am both haunting and haunted. I’m very pleased with how helpful my runs have been for my writing lately.
10 Things I Noticed
- Running on the east side, near the U, the knocking of a woodpecker somewhere on a wooden kiosk. Was it on the top of the roof? Inside or outside? I stopped to look, but couldn’t tell
- Shadows, 1: running above the floodplain forest, the sun was shining down casting shadows everywhere
- Shadows, 2: Following my sharp, defined shadow right in front of me
- Crossing the franklin bridge: the river was blue and slightly rough from the wind
- A city/park/state truck repainting the white line for the bike lane
- A city worker halfway up the bridge steps, painting the railing
- 2 orange cones and some tape blocking the entrance to the steps
- A pile of dead leaves pushed by wind up against the bridge railing
- Someone stopped at the overlook on the bridge
- Looking down from the lake street bridge at the rowing club: a little cove, dark blue water, a white dock, a line of stone slabs in the river
Here’s a poem that feels very right for today and my thoughts about knees and carrying history with us:
In Passing/ MATTHEW SHENODA
There is something inside
each of us
that scurries toward the past
in our bodies a rooted history
perhaps in the balls of our feet
a microscopic yearning
that floats inside that sphere
yearning in a language we’ve forgotten.
History is too in our knees
in the ball that pops
& twists as we journey.
And for those of us blessed to be old
& for those of us blessed to be young
it lives inside the tiny ball of skin
deep inside the belly button
tickles recollections from our tongues
stories of stories from then—
history lives in circles & spheres
floating
always suspended
waiting for release.