Time for another one of these, On This Days. Reading through these entries, then writing briefly about them, is very helpful and generated a lot of great suggestions for future writing: revising my poem about the east river flats; trying but always failing to exhaust a place or an idea; and returning to my Haunts project and adding more about trails and traces and going “back to the rough ground!”. I love this exercise and I’m excited for how it might get better as I add more years and accumulate more entries!
dec 4, 2017/ 5.25 miles / 45 degrees
On this day, I wrote about exploring the east river flats paved trail with Scott. I had discovered it the week prior as I ran above it while doing the franklin loop. 2 things strike me about this entry: I didn’t realize I discovered this trail as early as the end of 2017 (not quite a year into this project) and the abecedarian poem I wrote about it has some promising lines! I love the ending. Maybe I could clean it up and turn it into something?
In the entry I mention that I had discovered the trail a week before. Found that entry, November 17, 2017 and what I wrote:
Running up the St. Paul side of the river road towards Franklin and the U of M, I looked down at the gorge way below and noticed a paved path that I didn’t know existed. Pretty cool. I’ve run this loop at least 2 (3?) dozen times and have never noticed this path. I’d love to take it before it closes for the year.
As I ran I thought about how in late fall and early spring the gorge’s mysteries are briefly revealed–the bones of the woods, the forest floor, the sandy flats by the river and secret trails–before being concealed again by leaves or snow.
nov 27, 2017
And here’s the poem:
Lower East River Parkway Trail
After seeing the paved path
Beckoning me from below, how
Could I resist? How could I not
Descend into the
East River
Flats on the St Paul side of the
Gorge? I
Had seen the steps near the Franklin bridge before but
Ignored them
Just running by, never needing to
Know where they went. Never
Looking down to the river but only across to
Minneapolis.
Never stopping—if
Only for a moment—to
Pose the
Question, what is beneath me on this side of the
River?
Surely something more than
Trees and
Under that, sand and dirt and dead leaves, dwells below my
View across? I had never asked but on Monday, I looked down at the
Water of the Mississippi and saw a flash of something
uneXpected—a paved path
Yearning to be traveled,
Zigzagging through the floodplain—and suddenly I wanted to know everything.
dec 4, 2019/ 3.2 miles / 34 degrees
Discovered Georges Perec’s cool project, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place and a wonderful poem by Toi Dericotte: Cherry blossoms
Thinking about attempting to exhaust a place as KNOWING everything about it makes me think again about my last line in my east river flats poem about wanting to know everything. I don’t think this is possible, nor do I wish it to be. How can we know everything about a place? Where does mystery go? Yet, the idea of knowing more, as much as I can, is one of my goals for documenting my runs by the gorge. The distinction: I don’t ever believe I can know everything, and I hope I will never exhaust a place, but there’s something important/compelling/useful about trying to learn as much as I can. Continuing this rambling thought, one reason I can’t know everything about the gorge: I forget what I know all the time. I’m constantly having to work to remember. Partly this is about the limits of my memories, partly it’s about how the gorge works with the seasons to conceal things. Also: I can’t know everything, but the gorge is constantly changing.
dec 4, 2020/ 2.5 miles / 38 degrees
On this day in 2020, I wrote about Richard Siken and his “about the poem” explanation as its own poem. I’d like to try something like this.
Richard Siken is the Best
I think it was last year that poets.org began including an “About this poem” author’s note with the poem-of-the-day. I find them helpful and interesting and always look at them after my initial reading of the poem. Richard Aiken’s “About this poem” note for today’s “Real Estate” is the best, most delightful one I’ve ever read. It offers an explanation that helped me to (start to) understand the poem, which is great, but it also offers itself up as another poem to place beside the first one. How cool to turn the note into a poem! I want to experiment with doing this, especially since I am so resistant to offering explanations for what I’m doing (even as I feel I should and/or long to).
Real Estate/ Richard Siken
My mother married a man who divorced her for money. Phyllis, he would say, If you don’t stop buying jewelry, I will have to divorce you to keep us out of the poorhouse. When he said this, she would stub out a cigarette, mutter something under her breath. Eventually, he was forced to divorce her. Then, he died. Then she did. The man was not my father. My father was buried down the road, in a box his other son selected, the ashes of his third wife in a brass urn that he will hold in the crook of his arm forever. At the reception, after his funeral, I got mean on four cups of Lime Sherbet Punch. When the man who was not my father divorced my mother, I stopped being related to him. These things are complicated, says the Talmud. When he died, I couldn’t prove it. I couldn’t get a death certificate. These things are complicated, says the Health Department. Their names remain on the deed to the house. It isn’t haunted, it’s owned by ghosts. When I die, I will come in fast and low. I will stick the landing. There will be no confusion. The dead will make room for me.
ABOUT THIS POEM
“I had a stroke and forgot almost everything. My handwriting was big and crooked and I couldn’t walk. I slept a lot. I made lists, a working glossary. Meat. Blood. Floor. Thunder. I tried to understand what these things were and how I was related to them. Thermostat. Agriculture. Cherries Jubilee. Metamodernism. I understand North, but I struggle with left. Describing the world is easier than finding a place in it. Doorknob. Flashlight. Landmark. Yardstick.”
—Richard Siken
IDEA FLASH: What about a series of poems side by side that take the same kernel of an idea — I’m thinking of what I’m working on with my color poems right now on Dec 4, 2022, a gray day — and write it differently, take a different angle on it. The goal: not to find the best words or the best version, but to find more versions. I could call it Gray Variations, or 5 variations on gray, or something like that…
dec 4, 2021/ 3.7 miles / 33 degrees
Reading through this entry, I found a great line from Wittgenstein:
Back to the rough ground!
This line had been prompted by what I’d been thinking about on that run:
The dirt was very hard and made no sound. Not as fun as when it’s warmer and the dirt is softer and makes a pleasing shshshsh sound as I strike it. All I remember from my run is thinking about how running on uneven ground can be good for my muscles, making them work more to find balance and stability.
I’ve loved this quote from Wittgenstein for decades — did I first hear about it from a colleague at the University of Minnesota, or before in a philosophy class in grad school? I can’t remember. Anyway, for years I loved it as a metaphor and connected it to the value of rumination and being unable to easily consume ideas. When I started running by the gorge in the winter, over ice and crunchy snow, I began to think about it differently, more concretely. Throughout the year, as I run above the gorge, I experience different textures under my feet. I find the rough ground more interesting — more rewarding, more distracting (from the effort of running), requiring more attention (to my surroundings). I like the idea of starting a poem, or titling a poem, or both, with the command/entreaty: Back to the rough ground!