4.4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
10 degrees / feels like 1
100% snow-covered
Cold, but not cold enough to freeze snot, sunny. Lots of birds singing: some chickadees, cardinals (I think?). The shadows were sharp, strong. I noticed them heading south: the shadows of a sign, then a fence post. Heading north, my shadow, beside me. The path was covered in snow, some parts of it tamped down, others loose and soft. Hard work. Happy to be outside, remembering how much I love the snow, how it connects me to my north woods roots.
10 Things I Noticed
- at least a dozen people walking around the falls, some of them up above, a few below, 2 walking across the frozen creek
- the river, heading south: such a bright white, glowing, shining, blinding
- lots of people on the Winchell Trail — the trees were so bare that I could see them clearly: someone with a dog, later someone in a bright orange or red jacket
- the Winchell Trail between 42nd and 44th was hidden by snow
- a sharp, loud bark from a dog somewhere below me, way down by the river?
- 1 or 2 fat tires
- a man talking on a bluetooth headset, just exiting the walking part of the double bridge
- A guy walking a dog, carrying a kid in a backpack
- the sky, bright blue, cloudless
- the river, heading north: flat, dull, looking more like a white field
Found these on Couplet Poetry:
Ekphrasis as Eye Test/ Jane Zwart
If you wake to a Rothko where the windows
should be, to the dark wearing an indistinct belt
between uneven sashes of glass, one oxblood
shoe-polish, one midnight blue, the problem
is refraction. The light–what little outruns
the dark–has turned its ankle on the retina,
bouncing false on a trampoline inside your eye.
Of course some afflictions also disappear in the dark,
which swallows the man whole. At night a Reinhardt,
in day the fellow’s fifty-year-old face is a Rembrandt,
an oval of flesh glaucoma vignettes; blindness
likes to lick the outskirts of likeness first.
Other losses begin in the middle of the field:
redacting the kiss at a picture’s center–
wrapping lovers’ heads in pillow slips; hovering doves
at eye level anywhere hatted men stand.
They could be anyone, the strangers Magritte painted
almost as their mothers, maculas wasted, would see them.
But usually the picture dims proportionally, cataracts
stirring gray into haystacks and ground and dust-ruffle
sky. Maybe you will finally understand Monet, his play
in thirty acts, his slow lowering of the lights in Giverny.
At last there is nothing left to squint against.
Ekphrasis as Eye-Test/ Amit Majmudar
Ecstasy is not to see a stranger’s vision but to say it,
Echolocating, in your own voice’s
Existential mirror,
Ecstasy.
Ecstasy means to stand outside the
Ecstatic moment itself. You have to
Ache toward the vision whose
Ekphrasis
Awakens phrases in you that dead
Reckon the unseen by way of the seen.
Echo-shaped, you take on the vision’s
Edges, take an
Axe to the lake that froze around your legs
Decades ago. The eye that
Examines is your self. The stranger’s vision you
Recreate through
Ekphrasis
Expresses through
Ecstasy
Ecstasy.