august 13/RUN

1.8 miles
river road path, north/south
64 degrees
9:00 am

Overcast and cooler. Feeling more like fall is coming. Breezy. Heard lots of shivering leaves, some roller skiers’ poles clicking and clacking. Got a “good morning!” and “have a great day!” from Mr. Morning! and a “Say hi to my wife!” from Dave, the Daily Walker. No rowers or views of the lake. Lots of voices — from runners and walkers — hovering in the air.

Scrolling through my Safari Reading List, I found two poems I had saved, both featuring ants:

The Sunset and the Purple-Flowered Tree/ Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

I talk to a screen who assures me everything is fine.

I am not broken. I am not depressed. I am simply

in touch with the material conditions of my life. It is

the end of the world, and it’s fine. People laugh

about this, self-soothing engines sputtering

through a nosedive. Not me. I’ve gone and lost my

sense of humor when I need it most. This is why I

speak smoke into a scene. I dance against language

and abandon verse halfway through, like a broken-

throated singer. I wander around the front yard,

pathless as a little ant at the tip of a curled-up

cactus. Birds flit in and out of shining branches.

A garden blooms large in my throat. Color and life

conspire against my idea of the world. I have to

laugh until I am crying, make an ocean to land

upon in this sea of flames. Here I am.  

Another late-winter afternoon,

            the sunset and the purple-flowered tree

trying their best to keep me alive.

With Ant and Celan/ Eamon Grennan

This tiniest mite of an ant, no bigger
than a full stop, is making its careful
way across a poem by Celan and
stopping to inspect with its ant
feelers (can it smell or see? is all in
the idiom of touch?) each curve of
each letter, knowing nothing of the
mill of thinking that ground into it,
into each resonant syllable of each
word. The ant stops on Sprache and
sniffs at its ins and outs, its blank
whites and curlicues of black, then
moves on to the next word, Sprache,
and busies itself with its own ant-
brand of understanding; but finding
nothing of what it seeks it moves to
the blank margin of nothing more,
stumbles over the edge of the page
and I have to imagine it is saying (if
that’s the word) to itself something
that translated means No food.
Nothing here . . . And so now, gone
back into its own weird world of
stones and weeds and grass and sun-
shadows, it is lost to me as I go back
into the dark wood of Celan’s poem—
a world of words I feel my diligent
way through, sniffing at its tangle of
branches, its brief sun-flower flashes: 
Language, language, it will sing in
translation: Partner-Star . . . Earth-
NeighborPoorer. Open . . . Then: 
Homelike. Homely. Homelandlike.
Heimatlich. And so I take its final
word to heart, the way that most
minuscule creature might take back
to its own earth-burrow a seed, a
scrap of anything either edible or
useful, anything it could translate to
nourishment, and live a little with it.

I have posted several poems by Eamon Grennan before. Such beautiful poetry! Here’s a link to more poems, read by the author.

august 12/RUN

3.8 miles
marshall loop
62 degrees / humidity: 87% / wind: 14 mph
10:30 am

Rained this morning, so open swim was cancelled. Bummer. Is this first time it’s been cancelled this year? Maybe — except for the e-coli problem at Cedar Lake for one day. Everything was wet, dripping. Mostly I heard it as it mixed in with the rustling leaves in the wind.

Running over the bridge, I had to hold onto my cap so it wouldn’t blow off. At one point, I felt like I was going to blow off the bridge! Noticed a few waves on the water.

No rowers. No roller skiers. Not too many people running or walking or biking.

Discovered this awesome book yesterday: A Walking Life / Antonia Malchik. Here’s a description from her site:

How did we lose the right to walk, and what implications does that have for the strength of our communities, the future of democracy, and the pervasive loneliness of individual lives?

Driven by a combination of a car-centric culture and an insatiable thirst for productivity and efficiency, we’re spending more time sedentary and alone than we ever have before. The loss of walking as an individual and a community act has the potential to destroy our deepest spiritual connections, our democratic society, our neighborhoods, and our freedom. But we can change the course of our mobility. And we need to. Delving into a wealth of science, history, and anecdote — from our deepest origins as hominins to our first steps as babies, to universal design and social infrastructure, A Walking Life shows exactly how walking is essential, and how deeply reliant our brains and bodies are on this simple pedestrian act — and how we can reclaim it.

Wow!

august 11/RUNBIKESWIM

run: 3.1 miles
turkey hollow loop
70 degrees
9:00 am

Overcast this morning. Listened to an old playlist and ran a route I did a lot during the early days of the pandemic. No turkey sightings. Bummer. Don’t remember much about the run, except for that it felt pretty good. No need to stop and walk.

Read more of Alice Oswald’s Nobody yesterday and decided that I need to reread The Odyssey to get her references. So I picked up FWA’s copy from his first year of college. I recall reading it my freshman year too. It’s great, especially this recent-ish translation by Emily Wilson. Very cool. How long will it take my slow eyes to finish? Unsure.

Found a great poem by Linda Pastan on twitter yesterday:

Imaginary Conversation/ Linda Pastan

You tell me to live each day
as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen
where before coffee I complain
of the day ahead—that obstacle race
of minutes and hours,
grocery stores and doctors.

But why the last? I ask. Why not
live each day as if it were the first—
all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing
her eyes awake that first morning,
the sun coming up
like an ingénue in the east?

You grind the coffee
with the small roar of a mind
trying to clear itself. I set
the table, glance out the window
where dew has baptized every
living surface.

Speaking of the sun coming up, this morning I woke up too early, around 5:45. I was going to try to fall back asleep then suddenly I thought: if I get up now, I’ll get to see the sunrise. Wow! What a sunrise. One half of the sky the color of a neon pink crayola with edges of bright blue. It lasted less than 5 minute. I sat out on the deck, wrapped in a blanket with my coffee and marveled at it. I remember thinking how ridiculously simple it seems to make a day worth it, and how difficult it is to remember to do it.

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
82 degrees
4:45 pm / 6:45 pm

Biked with Scott over to the lake. Perfect weather for biking and being outside!

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
82 degrees
5:15 pm

Another wonderful swim! Why does open swim have to end in 2 weeks? Oh well, then it’s time for fabulous fall and winter running, and listening to crunching snow and breathing in the crisp, cold air.

Tonight it was crowded — at Sandcastle, on the beach, in the water. Lots of menancing sail boats and swan boats and kayaks. I kept seeing them at the edge of my vision and feeling wary.

Scott asked how the water was. I said there were waves, but they were gentle like a cradle, not rough like a spin cycle.

I felt strong and fast and amazing, cutting through the water. What a great feeling!

Looked down: opaque, almost greenish-yellow.

The water was warm. No pockets of cold, just warm.

Rounding the far orange buoy, a sudden shadow and coldness. Strange.

august 10/RUN

3.4 miles
river road path, north/south
73 degrees / dew point: 66
10:10 am

A later start. A warmer day. Still a great run. Relaxed. Thought about thoughts and trying to let them pass through me like the wind. Decided it’s easier to think about something else than trying to stop thinking about something. Recited Emily Dickinson’s “Before I got my eye put out –” Favorite lines today: “The motion of the dipping birds/the morning’s amber road” Greeted Mr. Morning! and overhead a conversation that I can’t remember now. Thought I heard the rowers below, but I’m not sure.

Walking through the alley after my run finished, I heard a blue jay. First, the tin whistle sound, then the screech. I’ve decided that, whether I like it or not, the blue jay is my new bird for this year. With that in mind, here’s an ee cummings poem I found. It’s making me appreciate the blue jay just a little bit more.

crazy jay blue/ ee cummings

crazy jay blue)
demon laughshriek
ing at me
your scorn of easily

hatred of timid
& loathing for(dull all
regular righteous
comfortable)unworlds

thief crook cynic
(swimfloatdrifting
fragment of heaven)
trickstervillain

raucous rogue &
vivid voltaire
you beautiful anarchist
(i salute thee

I haven’t read much ee cummings, so I had to look up how to read/make sense of his parenthesis. Here’s something helpful I found in What is the key to reading E.E. Cummings poetry?:

“Cummings often arranges the lines of his poems in seemingly strange ways:

un(bee)mo

vi
n(in)g
are(th
e)you(o
nly)

asl(rose)eep

(Cumming Complete Poems 691)

The key is to read everything within the parentheses first, then to begin again at the top with the remaining words: Bee in the only rose, unmoving. Are you asleep? If that is all he meant to say, why didn’t he write it that way? He wants us to discover the bee for ourselves as perhaps a bee surprised him when he peered into the heart of a rose. Why the “only” rose? Because our attention is completely focused at the moment on one particular blossom, it is as though no other rose exists. Why isn’t the bee moving? Is he dead? Is  he sleeping the sleep of the sated?”

august 9/RUNSWIM

run: 3.1 miles
2 trails
73 degrees
10:00 am

I recorded some notes by speaking into my phone after I finished the run. Warmer today. Ran mostly in the shade. Ran the 2 trails. Saw a firetruck — well, I heard its siren first — as I approached 42nd st. I wondered why rescue workers were here. Were they going down to the river to rescue someone? To recover a dead body? I never found out.

a thought about water: It’s nice to run beside or above or around water. It’s even nicer to be on water — in a boat, on a raft. But it’s nicest yet to be in water. Swimming, immersed. What a transformation it makes to be in water, the intensity of feeling about a space when you’re in it.

idea for a lecture for my podcast: I’d talk about these various ways that runners and writers try to hold onto thoughts while they are moving and the idea of thoughts and what happens to them while you’re moving. A lot of poems, possibly multiple lectures about this topic. At the end of the lecture, I could offer a few activities that I do to hold onto thoughts.

image: I had to stop and walk because a big tree had fallen over the lower trail. It was high enough that I could duck under it easily, but too low to do that quickly. It was forked with 2 branches, leaning from above, propped up by the fence. No leaves, just bark. It looked dead.

Returning to my idea for a lecture, or a series of lectures, on thoughts, I read some great lines from Alice Oswald in Nobody yesterday that involve thoughts and where they travel:

from Nobody/ Alice Oswald

As the mind flutters in a man who has travelled widely
and his quick-winged eyes land everywhere
I wish I was there or there he thinks and his mind

immediately

as if passing its beam through cables
flashes through all that water and lands
less than a second later on the horizon
and someone with a telescope can see his tiny thought-form
floating on the sea-surface wondering what next

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
85 degrees
5:30 pm

Warm and crowded tonight. Lots of people on the beach, lots of boats in the water. A paddleboard and a group of kayaks paddling right through the swimming area. A menancing swan boat. This barely bothered me. What do I remember about the water? Heard some loud sloshing noises. Saw a lot of planes flying above me. Something hard bumped into me — not a person, also probably not a fish. A stick? The sun was blinding and it was impossible to see anything on the way back — no sighting the buoy or the beach. I breathed every 5 or 3 or 4. Felt strong and fast (even though I went the same speed I always do, about 1:45-1:50 per 100 yds).

august 8/RUNSWIM

run: 5.5 miles
ford loop
57! degrees
8:15 am

What a wonderful morning for a run! I love when it’s cooler. So much easier. Ran the ford loop without stopping. Slow and steady. Only a few thoughts that I can remember, an overheard conversation, and foot strikes, breaths, a few things noticed.

thought: my desire for a view to the other side is not about seeing it, but feeling it, being aware of it.

overheard conversation: 1 male role skier to another, while climbing a hill ahead of me: She’s only waterskiied once! I told her, you can’t say you almost died waterskiing when you’ve only tried it once!

10 Things I Noticed

  1. gushing water out of the sewer pipe below 42nd st
  2. the voices of kids playing on the playgrouds at the church daycare and Dowling Elementary
  3. dripping water from the bluff on the east side of the river
  4. rowers! the coxswain’s voice, 2 shells with 4 rowers each on the river + the boat with the coxswain
  5. climbing the hill near Summit Avenue, almost catching up to the biker ahead of me who seemed to be struggling
  6. beautiful flowers near the monument — can’t remember what kinds or what colors
  7. more views of the blue river on the east side (as opposed to the west side, where I regularly run)
  8. screeching blue jays and squirrels
  9. the small hill just off the ford bridge and down to the river road was dark green and looked mysterious
  10. at the top of the Summit hill on the east side, everything was darker, greener. So dark that the street lamps lining the path were on

Love this poem by Alice Oswald. It would be a great one to memorize — maybe as part of a group on listening?

Birdsong for Two Voices/ Alice Oswald

A spiral ascending the morning,
climbing by means of a song into the sun,
to be sung reciprocally by two birds at intervals
in the same tree but not quite in time.

A song that assembles the earth
out of nine notes and silence.
out of the unformed gloom before dawn
where every tree is a problem to be solved by birdsong.

Crex Crex Corcorovado,
letting their pieces fall where they may,
every dawn divides into the distinct
misgiving between alternate voices

sung repeatedly by two birds at intervals
out of nine notes and silence.
while the sun, with its fingers to the earth,
as the sun proceeds so it gathers instruments:

it gathers the yard with its echoes and scaffolding sounds,
it gathers the swerving away sound of the road,
it gathers the river shivering in a wet field,
it gathers the three small bones in the dark of the eardrum;

it gathers the big bass silence of clouds
and the mind whispering in its shell
and all trees, with their ears to the air,
seeking a steady state and singing it over till it settles.

swim: 5 little loops = 3 big loops
cedar lake open swim
73 degrees
5:30 pm

Wow, what an evening! Sunny, no wind, cooler. The water was clear (visibility at cedar lake = 15.5 feet vs. Nokomis at 1.5 feet). I didn’t worry about getting off course. Not a single swimmer routed me. I swam 4 loops without stopping, then took a quick 30 seconds break before doing the last loop.

Anything I remember? I knew where I was going so it didn’t matter, but I couldn’t see the orange buoy closest to the start until I was almost on top of it. The cause? My vision + a strange placement of the buoy + bright sun in my eyes

One other thing I remembered: as I swam toward hidden beach, I kept thinking someone was next to me, on the left. Almost like a black shadow. Whenever I looked, nothing. Later, swimming back to east point beach, I kept thinking there was a kayak or paddleboard or something off to my left (again, to the left). Nothing and no one. Strange.

august 7/BIKESWIMBIKERUN

bike: 8.5 miles
lake nokomis and back
68 degrees / steady drizzle
9:10 am / 11:00 am

Cloudy. Then a few minutes into the bike ride, a steady, soft drizzle. Anything memorable on the ride? Not really.

One thing I’m wondering about: often on Sundays — is it just Sundays? — I notice a clapboard sign on the edge of the small stretch of bike path after you cross the road at Dairy Queen and before you cross the road to the falls parking lot. Usually at least one person is standing beside it. What is it? Is it for a church service at the falls? Some other religious thing? Something else? I’ve never stopped to ask or look at it closely. Will I ever? Probably not.

swim: 4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
68 degrees / cloudy, then drizzle
9:45 am

These 4 loops took me about 60 minutes to swim, no stopping. A loop this year is less than it has been in the past. Partly because I’m looping around the far buoys instead of swimming almost to shore. Maybe I should start trying to swim to shore again, to make these loops longer? I’ll try it on Tuesday. I started out breathing every 3, then as I warmed up, every 5. I spent a lot of the first loops trying to not worry too much about an ailing parent. The other thing I had trouble getting out of my head: the line from a Mary Poppins’ song: Anything can happen if you let it. What kind of bad magic is in that line that makes me unable to get it out of my head?

10 Things I Remember

  1. a few planes flying above me
  2. the opaque water below me — looking down at the nothingness between breaths
  3. thinking about the other world being underwater and holding my breath creates
  4. having some difficulty breathing to my left — I might be breathing too soon, tried working on waiting a little longer in my stroke to breathe
  5. the lifeguard kayaks were closer into the buoys, the buoys were farther from my favorite landmark: the silver bottom of an overturned rowboat
  6. the green buoy getting lost (at least for me) amongst the while sailboats
  7. one annoying swimmer who was swimming faster than me but managed to time it so they ended up at the buoys at the same time as me and would route me again and again and again (at least 3 times)
  8. feeling warmed up and on auto-pilot by the end of the 3rd loop
  9. thinking my goggles had fogged up for the 4th lap, then realizing when I stopped that it was raining. I hadn’t felt the rain at all in the water
  10. barely underwater, trying to see the raindrops as they broke through the surface. I couldn’t; the water was too cloudy

Speaking of rain, found this wonderful poem yesterday:

The Rain Stick/ Seamus Heaney

Up-end the stick and what happens next
is a music that you never would have known
to listen for. In a cactus stalk

Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash
come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe
being played by water, you shake it again lightly

and diminuendo runs through all its scales
like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes
a sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves,

Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies;
the glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.
up-end the stick again. What happens next

is undiminished for having happened once,
twice, ten, and thousand times before.
who cares if all the music that transpires

is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?
You are like a rich man entering heaven
through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.

I’m sure I’ve heard a rain stick before, but it’s been a long time. These descriptions of the sound of water helped me to remember something from the end of the swim: after exiting the water, walking through the soft drizzle (was it a glitter drizzle?), I heard the rain falling off of the roof of the building. At the edges of the building, just past the overhang the water would collect momentarily then fall louder and harder and bigger than when it came straight from the sky. Out in the open the water was silent, gentle. Near the building, it was hard and loud.

run: 3.1 miles
trestle turn around
75 degrees / dew point: 65
4:30 pm

Decided to run so I could reach my weekly goal of 20 miles. It’s been harder to reach it in the summer, with all the swimming. The first mile was fine. After that, I felt warm. Listened to a playlist because I’m still trying to get Mary Poppins out of my head. Ended with Beyoncé. I don’t remember looking at the river even once while I ran. The sky was a white-ish gray. Rain’s coming back in a few hours.

an image: near the trestle, a black bike hoisted up off the ground, kept in a place by a bike lock attached to the railing. A strange way to lock up a bike! Joined by a bunch of other bikes all along the fence, near the stone steps that lead down to the Winchell Trail. What’s going on down there?

august 6/RUN

4.6 miles
veterans’ home loop
73 degrees
humidity: 91% / dew point: 70
noon

Slept in until 9 this morning! That’s the latest I’ve been asleep in years. Nice. It’s probably because it was dark and rainy this morning. A few thunderstorms too. Finally able to make it outside at noon. A nice, relaxed run.

Evidence of Rain

  1. puddled path
  2. squeaky shoes
  3. gushing ravine
  4. a big green mass of leaves at the edge of the trail, drooping so much I almost had to duck as I ran under it
  5. dripping trees
  6. slick car wheels
  7. mud on the sidewalk — I almost slipped!
  8. wet asphalt
  9. a roaring falls
  10. everything a little greener, richer, fuller

A few other things:

  1. the metallic whistle of a robin (I think?)
  2. a wedding party at the falls
  3. music playing out of a car stereo
  4. a young kid biking next to a running, shirtless adult
  5. running up the stairs two at a time
  6. loud birds below me near the creek as I ran over the bridge to the veterans’ home
  7. a woman on the path, kindly moving over for me as I ran by
  8. wildflowers growing through the slats of a bench near the locks and dam no. 1
  9. a group of bikers meeting up at the falls
  10. kids at the wabun playground, constantly ringing a bell — a ring and a pause then a ring again…ring….ring….ring

Found a wonderful essay on craft via twitter from a local teacher/poet. Here’s a passage about the last 3 lines, then the poem it refers to:

It’s an ecstatic moment. We break horses; we break into song; daffodils break into blossom; the line broke on break; and the whole damn thing just broke me wide open. I read the poem again and again, always focusing on that lovely turn. It seemed the enjambment to end all enjambments, 

Crafty Craftiness of Uncraft/ Michael Bazzett

A Blessing/ James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.