Category: Running Log

march 29/RUN

5.3 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
18 degrees

Yes, 18 degrees. Brr. Yesterday the weather app predicted 20 inches of snow for next week. Thankfully today it’s predicting 2 inches of rain instead. Who knows what will actually fall (please, please, no snow!).

A nice run. Mostly relaxed, although my left hip/knee was a little tight. No headphones for the first 3 miles, then a playlist for the last 2.

Noticed the river — open and brown just off to the side as I ran down Franklin hill, a bright blue far off in front of me. Also noticed an orange sign announcing a road closure for a race this weekend at the bottom of the hill and to the left. I kept moving my eyes — straight ahead, then off to the right, off to the left — to see how that would change what I saw. Not much, although the orange did seem to disappear in my peripheral a few times. Strange.

Heard the knocking of a woodpecker on some dead wood in the gorge. Ran on more of the walking path. Shuffled on some grit. Felt a cold wind on my face.

Look!

Just restarting my run near the top of the hill, a woman stopped me and asked if I wanted to see a baby screech owl. It was 10 or 12 feet up in a small hollow in a tree. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to see it, but I did! It looked like a little bat to me. I thanked the woman for stopping to show it to me, wished her a great morning, then began running again with a big smile on my face. I have wanted to stop and answer someone’s kind look! for some time now, but I’ve never managed to do it; I’ve just kept running, too intent on keeping moving. Today I stopped and it felt good.

Happy Birthday to my 2 wonderful kids, FWA (20) and RJP (17), born on the same day 3 years apart. I rarely mention their birthdays on my blogs — I just spent the last 5 minutes looking through Trouble, Story, and RUN! and found only 2 instances of it. It’s hard to believe that I started this log, and found poetry again, when FWA was 14 and RJP 11.

before the run

I’m still trying to work on a series of color poems. Right now: orange, later in May: green. It’s a lot of showing up, sitting in front of the page, trying to find a way into ideas about orange as the color that takes up the most space in my practical life. Orange, everywhere. Rarely bright orange — no pops of vermillion or citrus — but orange as usually (not always) the only color that registers as color, something other than gray or dark. In the midst of trying to figure this out, I returned to an essay I remembered reading last year (see: april 16, 2022) about poetry and the void. I thought of it because so much of seeing orange, especially when swimming across the lake in the summer, is about feeling its absence.

sometimes when I’m swimming across the lake I feel a presence that I can’t see — the idea of orange, a hulking shape…I look but nothing is there…yet, I feel its absence…something is there — the trees don’t look quite right

june 26, 2022: hardly ever saw the orange of the orange buoy, mostly just a hulking shape or a void surrounded by a “normal” view — there was no buoy, just an empty space that disrupted the expanse of sky and trees. 

from my notes for Orange

Elisa Gabbert offers this interesting line about poetry:

I think poetry leaves something out. All texts leave something out, of course — otherwise they’d be infinite — but most of the time, more is left out of a poem.

The Shape of the Void: Toward a Definition of Poetry/Elisa Gabbert

At this point, I was planning to write more, but it was already 10:45 and I wanted to go out for a run before it got much later, so I stopped. If I had kept writing, I would have included more from Gabbert, like this:

Verse, by forcing more white space on the page, is constantly reminding you of what’s not there. This absence of something, this hyper-present absence, is why prose poems take up less space than other prose forms; the longer they get, the less they feel like poems. It’s why fragments are automatically poetic: Erasure turns prose into poems. It’s why any text that’s alluringly cryptic or elusive — a road sign, assembly instructions — is described as poetic. The poetic is not merely beauty in language, but beauty in incoherence, in resistance to common sense. The missingness of poetry slows readers down, making them search for what can’t be found. 

The hyper-present absence of something (orange orange everywhere) as poetry. Its inability to reveal itself in “normal” and straightforward ways to me (as in: look with my eyes and see orange). Its missingness makes me notice/attend to it even more.

In the next line, Gabbert suggests that the frustration of incoherence, mystery, not being able to make sense of something is alluring, erotic. It’s why many of us are drawn to poetry — to slow down, notice, get the chance to dwell in the unknown. Before I left for my run, I was thinking about how my perspective is slightly different. I don’t need to be encouraged to slow down or given the chance to embrace incoherence, resist common sense. Because of failing vision and my overworked brain, I am already slow. Much of what I see is incoherent — or never quite coherent. Common sense ideas of how we see or how to be in the world have already been upended for me. I see poetry, and its way of navigating or negotiating or communicating/finding meaning not as desirable, but as necessary, practical, useful, a way to be that speaks to where I already am.

during the run

I started out thinking about the hyper-presence of an absence as I ran in terms of the open space of the gorge, but these thoughts didn’t last long. I became distracted by my effort. Did I ever return to them? If I did, I can’t remember.

after the run

After highlighting two delightful letters by poets Emily Dickinson and Rainer Marie Rilke, Gabbert writes:

In these letter-poems, poetry reveals itself as more a mode of writing, a mode of thinking, even a mode of being, than a genre. The poem is not the only unit of poetry; poetic lines in isolation are still poetry. The poem is a vessel; poetry is liquid.

Poetry as a mode of writing, thinking, being. Made of more than just poems. Yes! I do feel that often my way of navigating losing my vision, finding a way to be when I cannot see, is through the approach of poetry and embracing uncertainty and the unknown.

The architect Christopher Alexander thought big plate glass windows were a mistake, because “they alienate us from the view”: “The smaller the windows are, and the smaller the panes are, the more intensely windows help connect us with what is on the other side. This is an important paradox.” To state the Forsterian obvious again, adding breaks to a paragraph is not always going to make an interesting poem — but most poets don’t write that way. They write in the line, in the company of the void. That changes how you write — and more profoundly, how you think, and even how you are, your mode of being. When you write in the line, there is always an awareness of the mystery, of what is left out. This is why, I suppose, poems can be so confounding. Empty space on the page, that absence of language, provides no clues. But it doesn’t communicate nothing — rather, it communicates nothing. It speaks void, it telegraphs mystery.

To write, to think, to be in the company of the void — the absence that leaves a residue or that can’t be seen but is always felt.

This idea of communicating nothing (with nothing not as no thing but as something in and of itself) reminds me of something else I read earlier this year about “making nothing happen” but couldn’t remember where I had read it. It took me almost an hour to track it down yesterday. The “make nothing happen” is in W. H. Auden poem for Yeats:

from In Memory of W. B. Yeats/ W. H. Auden

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

And the reading about it comes from Ross Gay and one of his incitements in Inciting Joy, which I first read as an essay for the October 2022 issue of Poetry:

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard conversations about W. H. Auden’s famous line from his poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”: “poetry makes nothing happen.”…At some point, probably I heard someone else say it,7 it occurred to me that all these poets, and all these conversations, were misreading Auden’s line, and that he was really talking about (inasmuch as a poem is him talking about something) what poetry makes, the sometimes product or effect or wake or artifact of poetry, of a poem. Granted the line feels emphatic, grand, provocative even—seriously, I can’t tell you how many tweed-jacketed refutations to Auden’s line I have endured; no one has ever explained to me the elbow patch—but what the line makes made is not nothing, but nothing happening. Or rather, nothing happening. The happening it makes is nothing. In other words, a poem, or poetry, can stop time, or so-called time at least. First of all, what a good reminder it is that a poem is an action, and as Auden has it, a powerful one, too. Secondly, and not for nothing, this is one of the suite of poems Auden wrote in the late thirties and early forties, a period when one might have wanted so-called time—the clock, the airplanes, the trains, the perfectly diabolical synchronous goosestep rhythm of time itself—to stop.

Out of Time (Time: The Fourth Incitement)/ Ross Gay

He adds:

you, too, might’ve been praying for a way to stop the march of so-called time, and poems, sometimes, might do that. Poems are made of lines, which are actually breaths, and so the poem’s rhythms, its time, is at the scale and pace and tempo of the body, the tempo of our bodies lit with our dying. And poems are communicated, ultimately, body to body, voice to ear, heart to heart.9 Even if those hearts are not next to one another, in space or time. It makes them so. All of which is to say a poem might bring time back to its bodily, its earthly proportions. Poetry might make nothing happen. Inside of which anything can happen, maybe most dangerously, our actual fealties, our actual devotions and obligations, which is to the most rambunctious, mongrel, inconceivable assemblage of each other we could imagine.

Perhaps I’m wandering too far away from the orange void here? Poetry as speaking the void, making Nothing happen, existing outside of the normal/rational/obvious/taken-for-granted. Gay’s explicit connection to time and against capitalism resonates deeply for me. Stop those clocks, those planes, that machinery we’re using to destroy the planet, the future.

The poem’s lines as breaths, as bodily rhythms. In a poem about the color gray I mentioned gray breaths. What are orange breaths? Orange time, orange rhythm?Orange devotions and obligations?

One last thing, and a return to Gabbert’s essay. Gabbert claims that the mystery of poetry is not simply metaphor or making things strange, but how we use or don’t use language to shape our relationship to the Void. And, she suggests it is the missing mountain in Shane McCrae’s “The Butterflies the Mountain and the Lake”:

the / Butterflies monarch butterflies huge swarms they
Migrate and as they migrate south as they
Cross Lake Superior instead of flying

South straight across they fly
South over the water then fly east
still over the water then fly south again / And now
biologists believe they turn to avoid a mountain
That disappeared millennia ago.

The missing mountain is still there. The no longer visible orange buoy is still there too.

added a few hours later: Trying to find a source for this cool butterfly fact, I discovered that it was written about in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

Monarchs are “tough and powerful, as butterflies go.” They fly over Lake Superior without resting; in fact, observers there have discovered a curious thing. Instead of flying directly south, the monarchs crossing high over the water take an inexplicable turn towards the east. Then when they reach an invisible point, they all veer south again. Each successive swarm repeats this mysterious dogleg movement, year after year. Entomologists actually think that the butterflies might be “remembering” the position of a long-gone, looming glacier. In another book I read that geologists think that Lake Superior marks the site of the highest mountain that ever existed on this continent. I don’t know. I’d like to see it. Or I’d like to be it, to feel when to turn.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, page 253-254 in the 1988 edition

Even as I’m disappointed that Dillard didn’t offer any sources for her facts here, I LOVE her last lines: I don’t know. I’d like to see it. Or I’d like to be it to feel when to turn. Not to see, but to be it, to feel it. Wow — this idea is going in my orange poem, for sure. Not to see orange, but to be it, or to feel when to turn around it. I do feel that, but can I ever put it into words?

march 27/RUN

5 miles
veterans’ home loop
32 degrees

Feeling tired after these 5 miles. Is it because this is the 5th day in a row that I’ve run, or because I waited until 11:00 to start, or because there was a cold wind? Probably it was because of all 3. Sitting here, 30 minutes after I finished, at my warm desk, my ears are still burning from the cold.

Still glad I ran. I don’t remember hearing the falls, but I do remember admiring the beautiful river and thinking it looked almost bronze in the sun and with all the brown that’s replacing the white snow.

Running south, I listened to my headphones case banging in my pocket, kids playing on the school playground, grit under my feet, and some woman tell another that she needed to fill out some paperwork for her 401k. At the halfway point, in Wabun park, I stopped and put in a playlist, Summer 2020.

Image of the day to remember

Running across the high bridge that leads to the Veterans’ Home peninsula, I looked down for my shadow. My first glance was of a big dark spot on the gorge floor that almost looked like my shape from the side– my shadow? Nope, too big and too far down. Even though it wasn’t actually my Shadow, I like imagining that she was that big and that close to the creek, listening to the rushing water.

The other day I checked out Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets and I’ve been (definitely not slowly enough) reading through the sonnets. So painfully ugly and beautiful and raw, and necessary, I think, to be read at least once all together. Wow! I’ve already posted a few of them on this log over the past year. Here’s one for today:

[from this bench I like to call my bench]/ Diane Seuss

From this bench I like to call my bench I sit
and watch my tree which is not my tree, no one’s
tree, the quiet! Except for barn swallows which are
not loud birds, how many exclamation points can I
get away with in this life, who was it who said only two
or maybe seven, Bishop? Marianne Moore? Either way
the world is capable of quiet if everyone stays indoors
and no jet planes, my tree, it just stands there
in the middle of everything in a meadow on the bay
looking what Barthes called “adorable,” then I drove
the mile west to the sea which had decided to be loud
that day, the sunset, oh, ragged and bloody as a piece
of raw meat in the jaws of some big golden carnivore,
and I cried a little, for none of it! none of it will last!

After reading this sonnet, I tried unsuccessfully to pin down the exclamation point line — was it Bishop or Moore? Still not sure. In the process of searching, I found some interesting stuff about Emily Dickinson and exclamation points, including that she used 384 in her writing! Does there need to be a limit on the number of exclamation points we use — maybe in writing, but in life? I hope not. When I was an academic, and writing in my TROUBLE blog, I loved the question mark. It was, by far, my favorite form of punctuation. I still love it, but now it’s rivaled by the exclamation point. Sure, I like to wonder about things (?), but I also like to be in wonder of them (!). Right now I can’t imagine it, but there could be a time when I love the period too, although that seems impossible, which means it will definitely happen.

I couldn’t find the exclamation point source, but I think I found the Barthes quote for adorable. I found it on Goodreads:

Adorable
Yet, at the same time that adorable says everything, it also says what is lacking in everything. 

I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds, but of these hundreds, I love only one. 

The choice, so vigorous that it retains only the Unique, constitutes, it is said, the difference between the analytical transference and the amorous transference; one is universal, the other specific. It has taken many accidents, many surprising coincidences (and perhaps many efforts), for me to find the Image which, out of thousand, suits my desire. 

Herein a great enigma, to which I shall never possess the key: why is it that I desire so-and-so? Why is it that I desire so-and-so lastingly, longingly? It is the whole so-and-so I desire. 

In that case, what is it in this loved body which has the vocation of a fetish for me? what perhaps incredibly tenuous portion — what accident? The way a nail is cut, a tooth broken slightly aslant, a lock of hair, a way of spreading fingers while talking, while smoking? About all these folds of the body, I want to say that they are adorable. Adorable means: this is my desire, insofar as it is unique.

The adorable is what is adorable. Or again, I adore you because you are adorable, I love you because I love you

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

I haven’t studied sonnets. Well, early on, I wrote one for a class, but I haven’t studied them closely. Not Shakespearean sonnets, or Terrence Hayes’ “American Sonnet for my past and future Assassin.” Maybe I should. I know that the basic form includes 14 lines and a volta. A volta is a turn of thought. I think Seuss’s ragged and bloody sunset is the volta in this poem.

a few sources to remember and explore

march 26/RUN

2.5 miles
dogwood run!
29 degrees

Finished up a 20+ mile week with a shorter run with Scott to Dogwood. According to my log, the last time we ran to Dogwood together was August 1st. Wow. A wonderful morning for a run. Bright sun, low wind, chirping birds, a clear path. So nice to be outside moving! Even though it was below freezing and I was wearing winter layers, it felt like spring. Noticed the open river, heard and felt the grit under my feet, admired the clear view to the other side. Running up the short hill to the greenway trail I heard a goose honking. When Scott didn’t hear it, I wondered (out loud), was it a honking goose or a bike’s bad brakes? Funny what other things honking geese sound like to me. A few months ago I recall comparing a goose honk to a dying car (what my sister would call h-for-c — hurting for certain) that grumbled to a stop near the trestle.

Anything else? Greeted both Mr. Morning and Dave, the Daily Walker, but in both cases I didn’t realize it was them until right as we were passing each other. Noticed Scott’s and my shadow running side by side. Saw a few runners in shorts, including one women in shorts and a short-sleeved t-shirt. Scott mentioned that she had bright pink legs. Passed orange signs for yesterday’s Hot Dash race. Wondered when the walking paths would be fully cleared of snow and mud.

Here’s a random poem found on my reading list that I’d like to gather before the poetry person who tweeted it leaves twitter, or before twitter is finally killed off:

Words/ Franz Wright

Words I don’t know where they come from.
I can summon them
(sometimes I can)
into my mind, into my fingers,
I don’t know why.
Or I’ll suddenly hear them
walking, sometimes
waking—
they don’t often come when I need them.
When I need them most terribly,
never.

march 25/RUN

3.4 miles
river road, south/north
33 degrees
100% clear path

Felt good this morning. Maybe, a week since my 24 hour bug, I’m feeling mostly normal? Today it was colder. No thaw, everything frozen, or not quite frozen. Puddles with a thin sheet of ice on top. Mud hardened. Another layer — gloves, a buff. Ran south and recited the poem I memorized this morning to myself: A Murmur in the Trees — to note. Heard the loud knock of woodpecker nearby — was it in that tree, right there? Also heard a strange version of chickadee’s feebee call and the rhythmic swish of my coat as I moved.

Ran to the locks and dam #1 and decided to head down the hill and back up it instead of running under the ford bridge (I imagined it would be icy and uneven under the bridge). Halfway down, when I encountered a solid sheet of ice, I turned around and ran back up. Nice — I’ll have to add this hill into my routes for the spring and summer. The trails were crowded, some bikers, some walkers with dogs, some runners. Ran most of the route with no headphones; put in a playlist for the last mile.

A Murmur in the Trees – to note – / Emily Dickinson (F433 — 1862)

A Murmur in the Trees – to note –
Not loud enough – for Wind –
A Star – not far enough to seek –
Nor near enough – to find –

A long – long Yellow – on the Lawn –
A Hubbub – as of feet –
Not audible – as Ours – to Us –
But dapperer – More Sweet –

A Hurrying Home of little Men
To Houses unperceived –
All this – and more – if I should tell –
Would never be believed –

Of Robins in the Trundle bed
How many I espy
Whose Nightgowns could not hide the Wings –
Although I heard them try –

But then I promised ne’er to tell –
How could I break My Word?
So go your Way – and I’ll go Mine –
No fear you’ll miss the Road.

I can’t remember if I’ve written about this poem on this log before. When I first read it, I was immediately struck by its connection to “We grow accustomed to the Dark –“. The neighbor’s lamp in that poem, with the long — long Yellow — on the lawn in this one. To meet the Road erect, with no fear you’ll miss the Road. In one poem, ED wants to adjust, for Life to step almost Straight. In the other, she wants to hang out with the little men and the robins in the trundle bed in the Dark. I want to do both of these things too. To find new ways to see so that life steps almost straight. To explore the different ways I see, or the ways I can be without light/sight, to find new, more magical, worlds.

march 24/RUN

3.85 miles
river road, north/south
38 degrees

Ran just after noon today. Sunny and warm. My legs felt a little sore, but the rest of me was loving this spring weather. Right before I went out, I read this poem and gave myself an assignment:

Thaw/ Edward Thomas

Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed
And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flowers of grass,
What we below could not see, Winter pass.

Thaw as the theme for my running today. How many instances of it can I encounter?

10+ Thawed Things

  1. water dripping down the sewer, a fast flurry of drips, sounding like glitter looks
  2. sandy grit on the edge of trail, left behind by the melted snow
  3. also remaining after the snow melted: mulched-up leaves, small, brittle twigs
  4. mud!, part 1: thick and wet and milk chocolate brown, ruts from a vehicle’s tires running through it
  5. mud!, part 2: sloppy, mixed with decomposing leaves, covering the walking path
  6. bare, dark brown dirt at the edge of someone’s yard
  7. water gushing down the ravine
  8. less layers = 1 pair of running tights, 1 running shirt, 1 running vest, no gloves, no buff, no winter cap
  9. a quick flash of an earthy smell
  10. puddles — none of them too deep or covering the entire path
  11. a class — elementary school kids? — near the trestle. It’s warm enough for spring field trips!
  12. the walking path — was able to run on more of it, and less of the bike path, today
  13. a runner in shorts

march 23/RUN

4.4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
28 degrees
99% clear biking path

Only 28 degrees this morning, but it sure felt like spring! Sun, blue sky, less snow, warmer air! Heard some black capped chickadees and robins cheering me up. Felt the grit under my feet. Noticed my shadow. Saw more walkers walking below on the Winchell Trail. The river was sparkling and beautifully blue.

Before I went for my run, I read the first (and my final) page of the Schuyler poem and thought more about my “How to Sink” poem. I was particularly interested in thinking about the different ways water might sink or fall. About a minute into my run, I heard water dripping fast down the sewer — tinkling or shimmering or sounding like glitter falling. I held onto the memory of this sound throughout the run to the falls, adding more ideas of water falling as I encountered them. Then I stopped and spoke them into my phone. Here’s a brief list:

  1. water dripping down the sewer drain, a glitter of sound, or little dots of sound cascading down
  2. the slow, steady drip
  3. the seeping in or out of the limestone
  4. the falls –a rush or gush, almost like it’s being dumped, buckets of rain — surrender as a sudden collapsing and dumping, all at once, not gradually, like the abrupt shutting down of everything in early March of 2020

The buckets of rain made me think of a poem, but I couldn’t remember which one. In the recording I said, I bet it’s in Hymn to Life. Yep. Page 9. I recall thinking about writing about the “buckets of rain,” but I guess I didn’t.

The rain comes down in buckets:
I’ve never seen that, though you often speak of it. The rain
Comes down and brings depression, too much and too often.

James Schuyler, Hymn to Life, Page 1

Yes, I’m ending with the first page. It begins with The wind rests its cheek, and ends with Didn’t keep them.

The wind rests its cheek upon the ground and feels the cool damp
And lifts its head with twigs and small dead blades of grass
Pressed into it as you might at the beach rise up and brush away
The sand.

Love it! I need to add this to my collection of lines about the wind. Maybe I should create my own Beaufort Wind Scale. What speed would this be? 2 mph?

The day is cool and says, “I’m just staying overnight.”

I like the idea of the day saying something like this, although I’m not sure I totally understand what it means.

The world is filled with music, and in between the music, silence
And varying the silence all sorts of sounds, natural and man made:
There goes a plane, some cars, geese that honk and, not here, but
Not so far away, a scream so rending that to hear it is to be
Never again the same. “Why, this is hell.”

These first two lines are wonderful. I’d like to use them as epigraph for a poem. And that scream at the end….wow. Have I ever heard a scream like that?

Out of the death breeding
Soil, here, rise emblems of innocence, snowdrops that struggle
Easily into life and hang their white enamel heads toward the dirt

Death breeding soil. To struggle easily. Snowdrops hanging their heads to the dirt instead of up to the sun. Everything flipped

And in the yellow grass are small wild crocuses from hills goats
Have cropped to barrenness. The corms come by mail, are planted.

corms = “a rounded underground storage organ present in plants such as crocuses, gladioli, and cyclamens, consisting of a swollen stem base covered with scale leaves.”

Flowers courtesy of goats and mail-order.

Then do their thing: to live! To live! So natural and so hard
Hard as it seems it must be for green spears to pierce the all but
Frozen mold and insist that they too, like mouse-eared chickweed,
Will live. The spears lengthen, the bud appears and spreads, its
Seed capsule fattens and falls, the green turns yellowish and withers
Stretched upon the ground.

To live! To live!

Tomorrow
Will begin another spring. No one gets many, one at a time, like a long
Awaited letter that one day comes. But it may not say what you hoped
Or distraction robs it of what it once would have meant.

How many people write letters anymore? I don’t because it’s very hard to write by hand with my vision, and I can hardly ever read anyone’s handwriting — not because it’s messy but because of my failing vision. If no one is writing letters anymore, does this metaphor work? How are poets using email in metaphors in compelling ways? Or text messages? Can we even imagine time/life in such slow ways as letter writing and receiving anymore?

Spring comes
And the winter weather, here, may hold. It is arbitrary, like the plan
Of Washington, D.C. Avenues and circles in asphalt web

Here in Minneapolis, the weather remains fairly reliable (reliably bad in spring, that is): a cold March, a big snow storm in April, a lingering chill in the first week of May, then suddenly 90 degrees and summer in mid-May.

and no
One gets younger: which is not, for the young, true, discovering new
Freedoms at twenty, a relief not to be a teen-ager anymore.

My son turns 20! next week. Since returning from his band trip to Spain and France, he is feeling these lines. February and March such big months of transformation for him.

One of us
Had piles, another water on the knee, a third a hernia—a strangulated
Hernia is one of life’s less pleasant bits of news—and only
One, at twenty, moved easily through all the galleries to pill
Free sleep. Oh, it’s not all that bad. The sun shines on my hand
And the myriad lines that criss-cross tell the story of nearly fifty
Years.

In 1951, Schuyler was introduced to Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery at a party in New York. The three poets would go on to share an apartment on 49th Street in Manhattan and to work closely together, often collaborating on a variety of writing projects.

Poetry Foundation

So, which one of them had the piles, which the water under the knee, and which the hernia?

Reading these lines, I was imagining an old man. But, he’s nearing 50! That’s my age. I suppose I do feel old often. I do not will not feel old for the next 30 years. Feeling old is for when I’m 80 — maybe I should chant this to myself every morning, like a spell?

So, that’s it. I read the whole poem. So much fun! Should I leave it at that, or continue exploring Schuyler for a few more days?

march 22/WALK

30 minutes, with Delia
neighborhood, near the river
29 degrees

It rained last night, which helped melt some more snow. Everything wet and dripping today. Mud and muck on the edges, puddles in the middle. Walking by a neighbor’s house I heard a rhythmic drip drip drip. Also heard a pair of woodpeckers pecking, then laughing. Whispered Brooks’ “The Crazy Woman” and Oliver’s “Wild Geese” to myself as I walked.

James Schuyler, Hymn to Life, Page 10

Begin with As windows are set, end with What are the questions you ask?

As windows are set in walls in whited Washington. City, begone
From my thoughts: childhood was not all that gay. Nor all that gray,
For the matter of that.

Yesterday I looked it up and discovered that Schuyler grew up in Washington, which I would have figured out anyway after reading this line.

Gay and gray. My favorite use of this pair is in Gwendolyn Brooks’ wonderful poem:

The Crazy Woman by Gwendolyn Brooks

I shall not sing a May song.
A May song should be gay.
I’ll wait until November
And sing a song of gray.

I’ll wait until November
That is the time for me.
I’ll go out in the frosty dark
And sing most terribly.

And all the little people
Will stare at me and say,
“That is the Crazy Woman
Who would not sing in May.”

May leans in my window, offering hornets.

What a line! Speaking of hornets — or wasps? or yellow jackets? or something that stings like that? — we have a few nests in our eaves. Every winter I talk about removing them before it gets too late in the spring, and every year we forget. Will we remember this year?

The fresh mown lawn is a rug underneath
Which is swept the dirt, the living dirt out of which our nurture
Comes, to which we go, not knowing if we hasten or we tarry.

The daily tasks, like mowing the lawn, a way for us to try to keep the inevitable at bay, or to think we have some control over death, or to avoid confronting it.

May
Opens wide her bluest eyes and speaks in bird tongues and a
Chain saw.

I love this line and how he brings together these two sounds! I’m always thinking about, and writing about, hearing the birds mixed in with the buzz of chainsaws or leaf blowers or lawn mowers. I like imagining that all of these sounds are May speaking.

The blighted elms come down. Already maple saplings,
Where other elms once grew and whelmed, count as young trees.

whelmed = archaic; engulfed, buried, submerged.

Was wondering if there are elms in the Mississippi River Gorge. Found some info about the invasive species, Siberian Elm.

Also, just remembered a poem I posted back in 2019:

Elms/ LOUISE GLÜCK

All day I tried to distinguish
need from desire. Now, in the dark,
I feel only bitter sadness for us,
the builders, the planers of wood,
because I have been looking
steadily at these elms
and seen the process that creates
the writhing, stationary tree
is torment, and have understood
it will make no forms but twisted forms.

In
A dishpan the soap powder dissolves under a turned on faucet and
Makes foam, just like the waves that crash ashore at the foot
Of the street. A restless surface. Chewing, and spitting sand and
Small white pebbles, clam shells with a sheen or chalky white.
A horseshoe crab: primeval. And all this without thought, this
Churning energy. Energy!

Sometimes I can be dense, so here’s a potentially dumb question: is he talking literally about waves — I know the narrator of this poem lives near the ocean — or is this a metaphor for the waves of debris on post-winter streets, reemerging in spring? I imagine it could be both. I’ll take it as a metaphor and wonder about what crushed up crustaceans might be unearthed in asphalt eroded by winter salts. Here in Minneapolis, near the Mississippi River Gorge, we were once part of the Ordovician Sea, so I can imagine some of that might still be present in the crushed up rock used to pave our paths and roads.

The sun sucks up the dew; the day is
Clear; a bird shits on my window ledge. Rain will wash it off
Or a storm will chip it loose.

Ha ha. I love the word shit and what it does to this image — it doesn’t cheapen or tarnish it, but makes it more real, mundane, less precious. Oh — and it makes it a little gross, which I like.

Life, I do not understand. The
Days tick by, each so unique, each so alike: what is that chatter
In the grass?

Sometimes I’d like to understand, to have my questions answered, but more often I like not knowing, or not yet knowing what that chatter in the grass is. I like having the space to imagine all the different things it could be. Perhaps what it is is more magical than I could have imagined. Understanding is necessary, and so is imagination and possibility.

May is not a flowering month so much as shades
Of green, yellow-green, blue-green, or emerald or dusted like
The lilac leaves.

A few days ago, while doing some research on colorblindness for the series of color poems I’m currently writing I came across a video about “what it’s like to be colorblind.” In the video they included some side-by-side images of “normal” and “colorblind.” Both images looked almost the same to me, especially what was green. I could tell it was green, but it also could have been gray or brown (and maybe it was in the image that someone who is colorblind would see). The variations of green, the subtle differences between yellow-green or blue-green or emerald green are mostly lost on me. Instead, I see green or light green or dark green or gray green or brown. This May, I’ll have to pay close attention to green and what I see, then write about it.

The lilac trusses stand in bud. A cardinal
Passes like a flying tulip, alights and nails the green day
Down. One flame in a fire of sea-soaked, copper-fed wood:
A red that leaps from green and holds it there.

I have lost the ability to be shocked or startled by red, especially from a cardinal. There is a cardinal that summers in our yard — my daughter has named him Chauncy — but I never see his red coat. I only know him by the shape of his head, looking like an angry bird, and his birdsong. This month he has decided to help usher in spring by perching himself on the tree outside my kitchen window.

A lot is lost and missed when you can’t see the red flash — the flying cardinal, a small blinking light, a flare somewhere — that everyone else sees and instantly understands and assumes that you see too.

Reluctantly
The plane tree, always late, as though from age, opens up and
Hangs its seed balls out.

It’s not just me, right? You are picturing an old guy with his balls hanging out too?

Winter is suddenly so far away, behind, ahead.

Yes, like it never happened, or it happened to someone else. I call her Winter Sara.

From the train
A stand of coarse grass in fuzzy flower.

I love tall, ornamental grasses with fuzzy ends that look like feathers or flowers! Someday I will plant some in my yard.

I like it when the morning sun lights up my room
Like a yellow jelly bean, an inner glow.

I’m not a huge fan of jelly beans, but I appreciate that Schuyler’s line gave me the chance to think about them and to imagine that intense yellow in the center of a jelly bean, one that has a translucent shell, not an opaque one. As an adult, I’ve grown to love the color yellow. I wonder, would a yellow marble work for this too?

May mutters, “Why
Ask questions?” or, “What are the questions you wish to ask?”

I love this as the last line of the poem!

march 21/RUN

3.25 miles
trestle turn around
32 degrees

Right before I started I saw some snow flurries but by the time I was running, they had stopped. Windy, humid. A cold 32 degrees. Began the run needing to lose my anxiousness. I did. Some parts of the run were hard; I’m not sure I’m completely over my sickness. But some parts of it were great. For a few minutes I felt like I was flying and free. I did a lot of triple berry chants on the way north. Stopped at the trestle to look down at the brown flat river. Then I put in the Fame (1980 version) soundtrack and ran back south. Timed it so “I Sing the Body Electric” was on as I ran up the last hill. As I sped up, I could hear some geese honking over the gorge, almost like they were racing me. Yes!

10 Things I Noticed

  1. mud — thick, gooey, dark brown — on the edge of the path and alongside the lingering snow
  2. sporadic geese honks throughout the run
  3. the path was almost completely clear, only a few puddles and strips of ice
  4. the wind was strong and in my face as I climbed out from under the lake street bridge
  5. under the bridge, a parked suburu was facing the wrong way
  6. some of the walking path was clear
  7. the river was open and brown. It looked less like water and more like a flat wall
  8. near the end of the run, I stopped for a minute to admire the view between the trees of the lake street bridge and the cars traveling over it
  9. faintly recall hearing some birds chirping in a distinctive way — was it cheer up cheer up?
  10. can’t remember if I heard the sound of my feet striking and sliding on the grit, but I felt it

James Schuyler, Hymn to Life, Page 9

Begins with Have much to thank you for, ends with the evening star seems set.

This page — wow.

And someone
You know well is suffering, sees it all but not the way before
Him, hating his job and not knowing what to change it for. Have
You any advice to give? Have you learned nothing in all these
Years? “Take it as it comes.” Sit still and listen: each so alone.

How often do people, when they’re suffering and tell others about it, want advice? How often do I? Sometimes. Mostly I want acknowledgment. Someone to witness what I’m feeling and to honor that it is real, true. Rarely do I want someone to tell me it will be okay or that I’m making a bigger deal out of it (whatever it is) than I should. I try not to give advice, often falling back on the classic, that sucks. More often than I should — should I ever do this? — I try to relate to the other’s pain, share a story of what I think is a similar experience. My daughter hates when I do this, it makes her feel worse. Often I can’t help myself. Slowly, I’ve been getting better at just listening, sitting still.

“Time heals
All wounds”: now what’s that supposed to mean? Wounds can
Kill, like that horse chestnut tree with the rotting place will surely
Die unless the tree doctor comes. Cut out the rot, fill with tree
Cement, score and leave to heal.

I think about this one in terms of grief, especially my grief over my mom’s death. It’s true that it isn’t as hard, and I’m not as undone as I was right after she died. But, what does it mean to heal? And, how often do things heal on their own, without any effort or attention? Maybe time doesn’t heal but…gives you more practice living with it? I’m sure this doesn’t totally apply, but I always think about what I’ve heard long-time and/or pro runners say about running long distances: it never gets easier, you just get better at enduring it.

And there
Is the fog off the cold Atlantic. No one is at his best with
A sinus headache. It will pass. Stopped passages unblock

I appreciate that he put this detail in. Just before reading this page, I was having what I call, a sinus episode. Not quite a headache, but a strange ache and heaviness that descends. No sharp pain, but discomfort, a queasy uneasiness. Pressure. Sometimes feeling like a thick iron plate is pressing down on my face. I’ve been getting these ever since the pandemic started — are they anxiety? Maybe partly? They used to last all day, but now that I’ve learned to put on a breathe right strip, they usually go away pretty quickly.

why
Let the lovely spring, its muck and scarlet emperors, get you
Down. Unhibernate. Let the rain soak your hair, run down your
Face, hang in drops from facial protuberances. Face into
It, then towel dry. Then another day brings back the sun and
Violets in the grass.

Unhibernate. Face into it, then towel dry. I like this idea better than time heals all wounds.

Far away
In Washington, at the Reflecting Pool, the Japanese cherries
Bust out into their dog mouth pink. Visitors gasp. The sun
Drips, coats and smears, all that spring yellow under unending
Blue.

Why does this poem keep returning to DC? I’ll have to look that up. I did (hours later). Not sure if this is the only answer, but he grew up in D.C.

I love his description of the intense, over-the-top ripeness and showiness of spring. I’m reminded of Ada Limón and her line, “the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton-candied color blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains” (almost remembered it word for word!). The difference is Schuyler’s sun and how it drips, coats and smears, all that spring yellow. This reminds me of living in Atlanta and the yellow pollen, coating every surface. Yuck! For me it just looked gross and stained everything, for others it made it very hard to breathe.

Only the oaks hold back their leaf buds, reticent.
Reticence is not a bad quality, though it may lead to misunderstandings.
I misunderstood silence for disapproval, see now it was
Sympathy.

Are the oaks the last to bud here in Minnesota. I’ll have to watch in the next month. Is it reticence or patience, or maybe a desire to hang back and stay out of the fray of frantic growing and greening? I might be asking this of myself and not the oaks.

Reticent = reserved, holding back, restrained
Patience = not hasty or impetuous, measured

I’m not sure whether or not oaks are the last to bud here in Minnesota, but when they do, they aren’t reticent, and their leaves don’t hold back. Within weeks they have consumed the trees, then my view of the gorge. Never in pleasing, controlled shapes like maples, but a hungry, sprawling green everywhere.

Thank you, May, for these warm stirrings. Life
Goes on, it seems, though in all sorts of places—nursing
Homes—it is drawing to a close. Abstractions and generalities:
Grass and blue depths into which the evening star seems set.

Not sure what to say about this bit, but I wanted to leave it in.
note, 29 march 2023: Looking back at these lines I started thinking about vision — my vision as an old person’s vision — and how details are lost, things appear mostly in the abstract and as forms — outside, blue sky and grass.