Month: December 2022

dec 13/RUN

5.65 miles
franklin loop
33 degrees
sleet/rain

Just as the sidewalks and path get completely cleared, another storm moves in. This afternoon rain then snow. Oh well. This morning it was great to run on a dry, almost ice-free path.

A gray day. Not dark gray, but heavy. Difficult to see clearly, everything out of focus. Reviewing my entries from the past year for my annual summary, I came across this description of trying to see on a gray day from March 2nd:

This light/color really messes with my vision and lack of cone cells. Looking up, the sky was almost pixelated, or maybe it was more like static? Not total static, like when tv stations would end programming for the night, but static sprinkled into the image, making everything dance or bounce or just barely move.

log entry from 2 march 2022

I was able to greet Dave, the Daily Walker and notice that the river was open and full of ripples from the wind. I don’t remember hearing any birds, but I did hear something rumbling or buzzing, some sort of equipment for repairing the street.

I ran most of the way with no headphones. For the last mile, I put in Taylor Swift’s 1989.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. on the west side, the river was a dark gray
  2. on the east side, the river looked more grayish-brown
  3. hardly any color, almost everything gray, a few dead leaves in orangish-brownish-gold
  4. one panel of the black steel fence on the east side of the river is slightly bent and bows in the center
  5. several times dark, hulking shapes out of the corner looked like people approaching. They were trees
  6. tried to sync up my steps with a car horn that was honking repeatedly
  7. the wind was swirling, sometimes in my face, sometimes my back, helping me to run faster
  8. heard some dripping under the lake street bridge on the east side
  9. saw a tarp or a blanket on the ground under the lake street bridge on the west side
  10. noticed lots of leaves skittering across the snow, being pushed around by the wind

Completed a draft of another colorblind plate poem. I have 5 now. I’m pleased with all off the longer poems that fill the circle, but a little unsatisfied with the one word versions of the poems that are hidden in the colorblind test. It’s difficult to condense a poem into one 3-5 letter word!

dec 12/SWIM

1.5 miles
ywca pool

After a week and a half off because of COVID quarantining (daughter RJP had it, not me), I was able to go back to the pool. Crowded. Did my usual swim — continuous 200s, breathing every 3/4/5/6 by 50s, not stopping until I saw Scott at the end of the lane. I felt strong and steady and happy to be using my muscles differently. My kneecap (or was it just above my knee?) felt weird once, but otherwise was fine.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. Miss Luna came about 20 minutes into my swim
  2. my nose plug kept shifting and I had to stop a few times to adjust it. I didn’t feel any water coming in my nose, but I could feel my air coming out
  3. after the first few flip turns, my nose burned from the chlorine
  4. looking straight ahead underwater, I watched as my hands made bubbles as they entered the water
  5. the woman one lane over was swimming breaststroke, her frog kick looked extra froggy
  6. a man in black swim trunks was walking the length of the pool by the far wall. Why?
  7. looking up, I noticed someone at the end of my lane. She asked to share a lane. Sure! I think I might have said yep too.
  8. the woman sharing my lane kicked a lot as she swam freestyle. I saw, but didn’t feel, the water churning as I swam past
  9. turning on the wall, pushing off, looking ahead and noticing the bubbles of my lane partner, and thinking about how I was gaining on her*
  10. orange: my orange bag, the orange sign saying No lifeguard on duty, Scott’s orange swimming trunks

*I’m not really that competitive (am I?), but I do get some pleasure in being faster and passing people. I don’t want to race them, just pass them. It makes me feel like I’m going faster.

In the middle of my swim I started thinking about the Ishihara plate I’m working on, the one about the test and why it, and the Ishihara plate as form, is important to me. I thought about how the draft I worked on this morning seems to offer a redemptive conclusion — I will choose to see my changing vision not as losing it, but it being made strange. Then I thought about how I don’t want to do that, to resolve it, to make it a moment of redemption. As I circled around the pool, I wondered how to make this Ishihara poem more messy and uncertain. Even as I do prefer to understand my vision as strange and not lost, I don’t want to conclude the poem with this idea. As I was thinking this — and in far less words than I’m writing now! — I thought of something else, how I find the Ishihara plate pleasing with its many circles and dots — I love polka dots! — and colors, but I also find it a little gross and upsetting. It looks like disease or cancer cells under a microscope. I’m thinking about cancer a lot right now. Scott’s mom just died of lung cancer, and we’re watching Walter White deal with lung cancer on Breaking Bad — FWA finally convinced us to watch it and wow, what a show! What to do with this idea in the poem? Not sure, but I’m also thinking about cancer cells as uncontrolled growth and the uncontrolled growth of the market as progress in capitalism, and then how the version of cone dystrophy I have is progressive — it gradually worsens, so here progress is not about getting better, but getting worse. Whew — that’s a lot! Not sure how, if it all, I’ll use this in the poem, but it was helpful to think about it in flashes as I moved through the water.

dec 11/RUN

3.4 miles
trestle turn around
31 degrees
10% snow-covered

Getting closer to my running goal for the year: 1000 miles. With today’s run, I have just over 34 miles left! Sloppy today — not so much on the bike trail, which was mostly dry, but the sidewalks and the roads. Everything slushy, almost melting. My socks splattered with mud.

Another good run. Started slow, stuck behind a runner who was going about my speed. I kept my distance (40 or 50 feet?) but I wondered if they were irritated by my constant presence. Or is that just me? A mile in, as we climbed the hill out from under the lake street bridge, I sped up and passed her.

I listened to an old playlist titled, bday2018. Lizzo, Justin Bieber, Little River Band, Lorde.

Greeted Mr. Morning! and waved at a bunch of runners. Slipped on a few stray bits of ice. Noticed the river — white, covered in snow. Didn’t look at the sky. (Checking now, it’s gray). Saw walkers, dogs, fat tires. No birds or squirrels or coyotes.

I’m working on my fifth colorblind/Ishihara plate poem. This one is about the Ishihara plate and why it’s a significant test for me. I want to do something with the circles and loops and the idea of taking this test and not seeing the number as the first big moment of recognition that there was something wrong with me. I dismissed it, thinking only that it meant I was one of those rare, quirky people who saw color strangely. But it was the first moment of acknowledgement that whatever strange things I had been experiencing for years weren’t just in my head. Others — my husband and kids — could see that I saw differently too. I feel like I keep writing this in different ways on this log, over and over, trying to find the right way to express it. Maybe that’s part of the circles/circling too? There’s something about the idea of inside and outside here too — this test made what had only been inner (my unexpressed/not-yet-understood thoughts about seeing strangle) outer (visible to the word, acknowledgement as a problem, or as a real thing that I was experiencing).

dec 10/RUM

5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
32 degrees / sleet
20% snow-covered

A wonderful morning run. I was worried that it would be icy, but it was fine. Only a few slick patches. A gray day. The sky, mostly white with some gray. The ground, white and gray and almost brown. Didn’t really see the river; I was too focused on avoiding slick spots and approaching runners. Not too crowded, but more runners and walkers, 2 fat tires that I first encountered at the falls. Greeted lots of walkers with a good morning! and runners with a smile or a wave of my hand. I felt relaxed and strong as I ran above the gorge. On the way back, when I reached 42nd I crossed over to edmund to avoid the growing number of people on the path.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. smoke from a chimney as I ran by a house on edmund– in the same spot, all winter, every winter
  2. a strange whirring or dripping or buzzing sound coming from “Carly’s house” (or, as RJP pronounces it, Kerler’s house) — named after RJP’s classmate, Carly, who lives there
  3. a frozen falls
  4. 2 women hardly moving over at all on the path. I almost brushed elbows with one of the women, even as I tried to go as close to the edge I could, which prompted me to mutter, fuck, under my breath after I passed her
  5. the tinny recording of the bells of the light rail car leaving the 50th street station
  6. near the end I felt wetness on my face — sleet? rain? snow?
  7. 2 runners approaching from behind, one of them talking about planting seeds, I think?
  8. someone walking through turkey hollow, everything white and covered with snow
  9. heading back, running on edmund, I noticed a runner over on the river road running slightly faster than me. Suddenly I heard someone yell out to them — another runner who knew them was greeting them enthusiastically (I think?)
  10. finishing up my run, crossing 46th avenue, I heard some people greeting each other at the mailbox — Merry Christmas!

Found this poem the other day. How? I think I might have been searching for green? Anyway, a great poem to add to my bird poems and poems about naming and knowing:

Praise/ Michelle Poirier Brown

It is not yet time for singing.
Although I could allow this lake stroking the shore as song.

I feel a tenderness towards the small stones under my feet.
That’s a good sign.

And gratitude for the sun warming my neck.

I am learning the names of birds.
At the pond last week,
a soft-colored green bird with a white stripe down its head.
A widgeon.

And just now, a small shore bird, black with hints of red at the back of its neck,
hops across the wave foam, pert and legged like a gymnast.
It has a name.

For praise, one needs vocabulary,
to know the difference between a call and a song,
and that birds that sing are among the passerines.

passerine: A passerine is a perching bird in the formal scientific order Passeriformes. These are the most familiar, typical birds and the term can be applied to more than half the world’s unique bird species, including all the classic songbirds, sparrows, and finches (Guide to Passerine Birds).

dec 9/BIKERUN

bike: 25 minutes
bike stand, basement
run: 1.25 miles
treadmill

Not too cold outside, but a bit icy, uneven. Today’s workout was all about adding another mile to my year total and getting a chance to move after sitting at my desk all morning while working on a poem. Watched a race while I biked, listened to Lizzo while I ran.

Worked all morning on a colorblind plate poem. This one is a cento and includes lines with colors from some of the almost 800 poems I’ve gathered on this RUN! log. Yesterday afternoon, I gathered them and discovered something: many — most? — of the poems I’ve gathered don’t mention color. Colors popped into my head as I pictured the images in the poems, but because of association and the colors I connect with certain things, not because color words were used. This was surprising to me.

The name of this poem is In (or inner if Scott can fit it in the colorblind plate), which refers to my inner color world, how I imagine color now that I can’t see it as well. Here it is:

draft of IN

Lines from the following poems:

Separation / W.S. Merwin
Ars Poetic / Aracelis Girmay
Cold Morning / Eamon Grennan
Becoming Moss / Ella Frears
Wild Geese / Mary Oliver
With A Song / Christina Pugh
Paean to Place / Lorine Niedecker
Trilliums / Mary Oliver
The Road Not Taken / Robert Frost
Forsythia / Ada Limón
Autumn / Linda Paston
Colors passing through us / Marge Piercy
A Rhyme for Halloween / Maurice Kilwein Guevara
Orange / Wendy Cope

Here’s one of the poems that I hadn’t posted yet. It’s a great one for winter; I might use it for my class!

With A Song/ Christina Pugh

There’s something about music: the wish to
be in the dark. Like I don’t know what person
this voice must belong to. At times I love
a secret, what sheers away from intellect.
Intrepid horn of birdsong when you won’t
see or know the bird. Or sometimes
I’m riding in the car on I-80, dipping
my eyes into the glamour of Ohio, its red
barns or white barns severally unpainted
by tactile fingers of winter weather.
White barns with green roofs. Sky-blue
with white roofs. Wait, isn’t sky-blue brighter
than any sky you really see? Canned sky,
you might reply, hyperbole of color. Platonist
Crayola blue. Would anyone trade a teal
feather for a trill? The highway will line
with mud and snow stripes along a fence,
then apple orchards spider in the ice.
A long stand of pines before the strip mall.
And still from the radio, an alto atremble:
I love not knowing who it belongs to.


dec 8/RUN

5.5 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
19 degrees
80% snow-covered

Hooray for blue sky, not too much wind, staying upright on slippery paths! Another wonderful winter run. Ran north without headphones. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker. Noticed how the river was almost completely white — the dusting of snow we got yesterday morning covered the thin ice. Heard some chirping birds. Saw a few runners in bright yellow shirts, one running fast with a dog. Right before turning around at the bottom of the hill, I noticed a few open spots on the river — dark water in contrast to the white ice. Ran back up the hill. When I reached the top, I stopped, fumbled with my headphones, and put in a playlist. I ran back south listening to Harry Styles, Elton John, Foo Fighters, and Queen.

Inciting Joy: Skateboarding, the Fifth Incitement

For December, I’m reading Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy. Here are some notes for the fifth incitement.

Skateboarding: skateboarding with a friend, beholding each other as you attempt to do tricks in a dark parking lot after hours — a feeling of groundless (the mysterious, unknown). Also: sharing extra parts with skateboarding buddies (practicing gift economy). Gay places this practice of possible joy/ethics of sharing in larger context of 80s excess/hoarding of wealth, especially in terms of property and the criminalizing of skateboarding in public spaces, or private spaces that weren’t yours.

a new word: USUFRUCT “the right to enjoy the use and advantages of another’s property short of the destruction or waste of its substance.” As in, “Gonz (famous skateboarder) is just one of a trillion apostles of the form, the genre–is because he usufructs the skateable world, which includes benches, picnic tables, walls, handrails, flights of steps, curbs, fire hydrants, ledges, parking lots, sidewalks, driveways, loading docks, loading ramps, bus stops…” (Gay, 60).

Wow. Gay’s ability to move between his particular lived experiences and a more general context is amazing. What a writer! And the idea of joy as not looking away from the larger, less joyful context, is so powerful and helpful.

I love the ethics and possibilities for joy around sharing your bucket of parts:

It was the just the case that whatever you had extra–and skateboarding, with its many components (decks, wheels, bearings, trucks, bushings, riser pads, rails, Rip Grip, bolts, etc. ) made for extra–you passed along. Most of us had a bucket of some sort where, when someone needed something, we dug around to find it. I never once heard anyone express it as an ethics (sharing, redistribution, commonwealthing), though if you tried to keep your extra to yourself, if you spoke to no one of your bucket, and then it got out you had one…the reaction would be an ethical one: Yo, that’s fucked up, man.

Sharing the bucket = sharing parts; sharing in the experience of skating into the unknown, over railings, across dark parking lots, over bumps; sharing space — public, private, off limits; and sharing “skateable” locations. I love the last line of the chapter:

join us at the new spot, this new stain , this wreckage, this abandonment, this ruin, this commons, this c’mon.

Found this poem on Instagram this morning, via The Slowdown. I love its compact lines and the idea of “the soft dislodging of eyes.”

sunrise through mount vernon, wa/ Jasmine Khaliq

after beauty I am
entranced by the soft
dislodging of eyes:

blurs of cows
necks sloping
lapped-rainbows

colors thinner
than water
and running

this is where
I most miss
the dead:

a highway pasture
bisected body
and always

I am on the other side

dec 6/RUN

5.6 miles
franklin loop
20 degrees / felt like 12
25% snow-covered

A wonderful run on a wonderful, wintery morning! Sunny, calm, cold but not too cold. I know I noticed many different things, had lots of interesting thoughts, but I’m distracted now, having read a beautiful, caring, generous post from a friend from grad school about sickness and death and recently being diagnosed with cancer. Ugh. I wanted to write a comment, to do more than “like” her Facebook post, but…too many thoughts. I’m thinking about Ross Gay and inciting joy and grief and how joy can show up when we’re willing to let others meet our sorrow and willing to take the time to meet theirs. About how much I appreciate my friend’s words and her story, how awful it is that she’s living in limbo for weeks, waiting to hear how bad her cancer is, how I felt every word and didn’t look away. About how cancer and death and grief are everywhere — Scott lost 2 aunts, a mother, and a beloved godmother in the second half of 2022, one after the other: August, September, October, November. And about the beautiful words I heard from the poet Kemi Alabi on the VS. podcast when she was asked what was moving her:

Grief is moving me. Like it’s literally running me, I feel so governed by grief. And not just personally or with my community, but collectively just seems like you can’t walk down the street without encountering, stumbling on this grief. So I’m thinking about Rebellious Mourning. That’s actually the name of an anthology, where a lot of poets thinkers and movement builders are considering what it means to mobilize around our grief, understanding that so many social movements are catalyzed by collective grief at the injustices that we’re experiencing. Grief can be a really powerful force to harness for transformation, if we’re allowed the space to be together with it, to honor it, and to actually move through it together, to let it move us, and to not run from it. 

Kemi Alabi vs. Divinity

Typing all of this out reminds me of one feeling I had throughout the run. I felt tender — not quite raw, but vulnerable, open to others, having experienced great loss recently. Apparently Scott hates the word tender; it ranks up there as one of the worst words with moist. I love it, devoted September to it. I don’t think I’d say I enjoy being tender, but I deeply appreciate the space it allows me to inhabit, the openness it offers.

10+ Things I Noticed

  1. the river: mostly frozen over with a thin skin of ice. Where the ice was thinner, it looked gray, thicker white
  2. a strange back-up on the franklin bridge. not sure what was happening. Cars were stopped, one was diagonal. No evidence of a collision. Heard some honking after I passed it
  3. a man walking 3, or was it 4?, dogs
  4. at least one bike
  5. saw my shadow off to the side, dark-ish gray
  6. colors: a lot of gray, pale blue sky, an orange cone, my pink jacket and gloves, red stop sign, sepia-toned ice, yellow dividing line on the bike path, yellow truck
  7. the air was cold as I breathed it in
  8. the biking path on the east side of the river, mostly clear
  9. some loud thuds — from the construction being done on a house across from the river?
  10. the sharp, whining whirr of a drill, or some other tool, being used by a road worker in a yellow vest in a hole in the street
  11. lifting my knees as I powered up the last hill

Near the end of my run, walking up the steps to the lake street bridge, I stopped and recorded the following thoughts. Then I put in a Taylor Swift playlist.

notes / dec 6

dec 5/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
27 degrees / feels like 21
75% snow and ice covered

Icier than I expected so I went slower. A gray day. Fuzzy, unformed or unfixed or out of focus. The sky filled with static. I ran south, planning to check out my favorite winter spot — just past the oak savanna where the hills part and open to a view of the river — but I forgot, or I was distracted as I tried to avoid slippery spots and pedestrians.

About a mile in, was passed by another runner. I could hear their soft footsteps approaching. After they passed I watched them fly away. Their gait seemed a little erratic, like they were almost about to slip on the snow with each step. Speaking of slips, running up the hill between Locks and Dam #1 and the double-bridge, I witnessed a biker almost wipe out on some chunks of ice the plow had kicked up from the street. Yikes. I stopped to let me go by safely.

The falls were frozen. The river was too, but not completely.

10 (groups of) People I Encountered

  1. a group of walkers, paused by the sign for the bike surreys at the falls
  2. another group of walkers near locks and dam #1. Heard one of them say, “The farmer had to fish her out of the river.”
  3. a guy and an exuberant dog by the Longfellow poem at the park
  4. the speedy runner I mentioned above
  5. the biker who almost fell
  6. someone on a fat tire
  7. kids at the school playground across the street, more subdued than usual, but still laughing and yelling
  8. a guy blasting his phone or radio as he walked. I think he was listening to music, but I can’t remember what kind
  9. a runner in a bright blue jacket, over on the trail, when I was on edmund. we ran parallel for a few minutes then he inched ahead
  10. a runner carefully crossing over some ice as she talked on a bluetooth phone to someone

Running back from the falls, I crossed over to edmund to avoid the crowd, and the ice on the trail. Stopped at my favorite poetry house that puts a poem on their front window. Was there a new one? Yes! Here it is:

Maybe Alone On My Bike/ William Stafford

I listen, and the mountain lakes
hear snowflakes come on those winter wings
only the owls are awake to see,
their radar gaze and furred ears
alert. In that stillness a meaning shakes;

And I have thought (maybe alone
on my bike, quaintly on a cold
evening pedaling home), Think!–
the splendor of our life, its current unknown
as those mountains, the scene no one sees.

O citizens of our great amnesty:
we might have died. We live. Marvels
coast by, great veers and swoops of air
so bright the lamps waver in tears,
and I hear in the chain a chuckle I like to hear.

I’m glad to have found this poem. Think! and we might have died. We live. Marvels/coast by, great veers and swoops of air I love the title of the poem and where it sits at the start of the second stanza. Weather and light like today — the gray, overcast, wintery light, not dim, but not bright either — is conducive for thinking and reflecting and being grateful to be alive and to notice the veers and swoops of air, the chuckle of a bike chain.

Yes, gray is for thinking and wondering and for opening up to the world.

Inciting Joy: Through My Tears I Saw [Death: the Second Incitement]

Before heading out for a run, I read Gay’s second incitement about the death of his father. I don’t want to summarize it because it’s not meant to be summarized, but experienced, endured, read closely without looking away. Wow — Gay is an amazing writer. His descriptions of his dad’s diagnosis of cancer, his illness and decline, his death, are so powerful and vivid. I could feel the pain of my own grief — over my two moms, one dead for 13 years, the other for 2 months — in my body, especially in my sinuses and throat. My body tightening, tingling, wanting to close up.

At one point, as I read the 17 page chapter, I thought of Marie Howe and her entreaty to not look away, even when it’s painful. To face the sadness and grief, to let it in. In the poem I posted yesterday, Levine writes about how this letting in — dragging our grief out of the river and putting our mouth on it — can lead to a loosening, an opening up, a joy. Gay writes about this too, in the conclusion to the chapter, as he says goodbye to his dying father:

Can you hear me Dad, Can you hear me, and by now I was crying hard, and I was kissing my father’s face again and again, telling him I loved him again and again, it was the softest face in the world, my father’s face, so quiet like that, I never knew it, I had never touched it before, I was crying onto his eyelids and cheeks and kissing him and telling him again and again I loved him, I love you Dad, his brown face was lit with my tears. and with my forehead pressed into his, and my hands on his cheeks, I noticed that my father had freckles sprinkled around the bridge of his nose and his upper cheeks. It was like a gentle broadcast of carrot seeds blending into his skin, flickering visible from this distance. It was through my tears I saw my father was a garden. Or the two of us, or the all-of-us, not here long maybe it is. And from that what might grow.