run: 5 miles
franklin loop
70 degrees
9:00 am
Such a nice morning for a run! Sunny, with lots of shade. No stiff wind, only a welcoming breeze. Heard the rowers on the river. Yesterday, as Scott and I were driving on the river road, we encountered a truck with a trailer filled with 4 (or more?) big, 8-person rowing boats — they’re called octuple sculls. So long. Wow!
Can I remember 10 things from my run? I’ll try…
10 Things I Noticed
- a revving chainsaw in the gorge, near the floodplain forest
- a coxswain’s distorted voice, counting off drills
- someone cutting across the trail, then disappearing through a hole in the treeline
- cracked open acorns underfoot
- 4 or 5 stones stacked on the cairn
- a slash of orange spray paint marking a tree’s trunk — will it be cut down soon?
- crossing the franklin bridge, a sign: roadwork ahead (RJP’s perpetual joke: Road work ahead? I sure hope so!). Then, a few trucks parked on the side of the road
- the ravine smelling like a porta potty or a poorly venitilated outhouse
- my toe — the one next to the big toe on my left foot. Ouch! After my swim on Monday, I thought I had completely washed the sand from between my toes before I went out for a run. Nope. A few miles in, I got a blister. That blister popped and become a raw sore that ached today, even through the bandaid
- no geese, no music, no roller skiers
Last night, Scott and I started watching the second season of Only Murders in the Building. So good! In the second episode, a character played by Shirley MacLaine describes her vision:
I have a bill of sale here somewhere that I… when I first bought it from the artist, and…
Oh God. Here! You find it! ( grunts )
I’ve got macular degeneration. I…
Nothing but a big bubble in my middle vision, and…
But I have very accurate peripheral vision, so you just…
Scott and I agreed that we had never heard vision/macular degeneration described in that way before on television. Very cool, and accurate. Such a great thing to include as a way to educate people on different ways of seeing.
I found a wonderful craft essay this morning by Amorak Huey: The Prose Poem & the Startling Image. I hope to write more about it soon. For now, here’s a prose poem he includes in his discussion of finding images that startle:
poem about water/ sam sax
i get it. your body is blah blah blah percent water. oceans levitate, clouds urinate on the ground that grows our food. this is considered a miracle – this is a problem of language. i could go on for days with facts about the ocean and it will always sound like i’m talking about love. i could say: no man has ever seen its deepest trenches, we know less about its floor than the stars, if you could go deep enough all your softest organs will be forced out of your mouth. you can be swallowed alive and no one will hear a sound. last summer three boys drowned in the sound and no one remembers their names, they came up white and soft as plastic grocery bags. i guess you could call that love. you’d be wrong.
Now I’ve started reading more of sam sax’s work. Water is a big theme in their collection, Bury it. And, how about this wonderful image in their poem, Prayer for the Mutilated World?
after phone lines do nothing
but cut the sky into sheet music
& our phones are just expensive
bricks of metal & glass
Or how water works in this poem:
swim: 1 small loop = .5 loop
cedar lake open swim
76 degrees
6:00 pm
Went to open swim with FWA. Just as we arrived, it started to rain. Then it rained harder. We almost turned back, but we didn’t. By the time we made it to the water, the rain had stopped and the sun was peeking through the clouds. The water wasn’t as clear as it has been, but still much clearer than Lake Nokomis. When we reached the far beach, we stopped for a few minutes. FWA picked up some rocks (with his feet, underwater), and started knocking them together. They made a sharp satisfying clicking noise that we could hear above water. I wonder if other swimmer could hear it below, and from how far away? Did it bother the fish?