Tag: windows

feb 3/BIKERUN

bike: 20 minutes
run: 3.1 miles
basement
outdoor temp: 0 degrees / feels like -13

Inside today. Some Dickinson while I biked, a podcast (You are Good) while I ran — well, for most of my run. The last few minutes I listened to a playlist. Audio books and playlists make the time pass much faster when I’m on the treadmill.

I’m ready for the bitter cold to be done. Much less inspiration inside. Did I notice anything other than the single lightbulb reflecting in the dark window?

A poet that I like, Linda Pastan, died a few days ago. The first poem of hers that I read was “Vertical.” I found it just as I was starting to fall in love with poetry and the way it helped me to notice and be in wonder of a place. I spent a lot of time with that poem, even writing a response in which I used its first sentence to wander and wonder about trees. Since 2017, I’ve gathered and posted several of her poems, including:

And here’s one more I just found:

At My Desk/ Linda Pastan

To William Stafford

How many times
I have sat this way
with the poem’s intractable silence
between me and the world,
with the tree outside the window
refusing translation:
my leaves are more than syllables
it seems to say.

I think of you
miles west
floating on the tide of language
so easily, giving only
a scissor kick now and then,
coming to shore
some unexpected
but hospitable place.

Still we share between us
a certain stubbornness,
rising each morning
to the blank page,
climbing the ladder of light
at the window all day,
listening, both of us,
as hard as we can.

added Feb 14, 2023: Rereading this poem, I remembered something Pastan had said about Stafford in her Paris Review interview:

Often when I sit at my desk unable to write, “blocked” as they put it, I open a Stafford book and start to read. He makes it sound so easy, almost conversational, that I find I have to answer him, and so I start to write. My first four or five lines may have a Stafford ring to them, but then my own voice kicks in and I am on my way. I loved and admired William Stafford both as a man and as a poet. I hate to use adjectives like wise or humble but they seem to fit him as comfortably, as unpretentiously, as an old sweater.

feb 2/SWIM

1.2 miles
ywca pool

Met my almost 17 year-old daughter at the pool and then we swam together. She’s swimming for online gym. I love swimming with my kids. This summer I swam at the lake with my 19 year-old son, now I get to swim at the pool with my daughter. I try to stay chill and not scare them with my enthusiasm, but it’s difficult.

Tried using a pull buoy for the first time in a few years. So much easier to breath when my body is higher up on the water. I should probably find some more drills to help with keeping me higher.

A few laps in I noticed an oval of bright light on the pool floor, not near the windowed wall, but the windowless one. A strange, beautiful thing to see.

I pushed off the wall underwater for my first lap ritual and swam just above the pool bottom. Noticed a black thread or hair floating right below my nose. A strange, ugly thing to see. Lots of crud in the water this afternoon. Nothing big or too gross, but small bits of something that made the water cloudy.

Later in the swim, I noticed lines of light on the bottom close to the window. Remembered to look up above the water as I flipped at the wall. Today above the surface looked pink to me. Forgot to notice the moving shadows on the pool floor.

At the beginning of the swim, when there was only one other person in the water, I heard some splashing or sloshing underwater. Was it from me? I don’t think so.

Later, after the swim, in the hot tub with Scott, I noticed another woman sitting in the corner, miming freestyle strokes in the hot water.

Also in the hot tub: crouching down, my chin just above the surface, I watched the light catch the spray of water made by one of the jets, making the spray look like fizz from my favorite grapefruit seltzer. Below, the jet made the water look like swirling smoke.

not a cabinet of curiosities

Talked to Scott about my class and my week on wonder as curiosity, which is coming up in a few weeks. There’s a quote by Thoreau that I’m interested in challenging. Well, maybe not challenging, but imagining curiosity against?

[24] In winter, nature is a cabinet of curiosities, full of dried specimens, in their natural order and position.

A Winter Walk/ Thoreau

Thoreau is describing a particular type of western scientific attention: study the natural world as individual things (specimens) to be isolated, classified, and categorized. To learn about, not from. To see non-human beings only as objects, never subjects.

I want to contrast this cabinet of curiosities with Robin Wall Kimmerer and her expanded understanding of knowing:

I would describe my journey as a circle, moving out into academia but coming back to the way that I knew plants as a child. I grew up in a rural area much like where we’re sitting today, and I was interacting every day with plants in the garden, the woods, or the wetlands. I couldn’t go outside without being surprised and amazed by some small green life. I suppose it was their great diversity of form that first drew my interest: that on a small patch of ground there could be so many different ways to exist. Each plant seemed to have its own sense of self, yet they fit together as a community. And each had a home, a place where I knew I could find it. This inspired my curiosity.

From as far back as I can remember, I had this notion of plants as companions and teachers, neighbors and friends. Then, when I went to college, a shift occurred for me. As an aspiring botany major, I was pressured to adopt the scientific worldview; to conceive of these living beings as mere objects; to ask not, “Who are you?” but, “How does it work?” This was a real challenge for me. But I was madly in love with plants, so I worked hard to accommodate myself to this new approach.

Later in my career, after I’d gotten my PhD and started teaching, I was invited to sit among indigenous knowledge holders who understood plants as beings with their own songs and sensibilities. In their presence, and in the presence of the plants themselves, I woke from the sleep I’d fallen into. I was reminded of what I’d always known in my core: that my primary relationship with plants was one of apprenticeship. I’m learning from plants, as opposed to only learning about them.

I was especially moved by an elderly Diné woman who told the biographies of each plant in her valley: its gifts, its responsibilities, its history, and its relationships — both friendships and animosities. As a scientist I had learned only about plants’ physical attributes. Her stories reminded me of how I had encountered plants as a young person. That’s why I say I’m coming full circle after all these years — because I’m able to stop speaking of plants as objects.

2 Ways of Knowing/ Robin Wall Kimmerer

I’m struggling to turn all of my thoughts about curiosity and wonder into a pithy, coherent statement for a lecture. So much time spent circling around these ideas. Frustrating.

jan 30/BIKERUN

bike: 15 min warm-up
run: 3.2 miles
outside temp: 2 degrees / feels like -15

Because of the cold air, the icy paths, and the 10 mph wind, I decided to move in the basement today. Finished the episode of Dickinson I had started a few days ago while I biked, listened to the latest episode of If Books Could Kill (Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus) while I ran. Running on the treadmill in the basement is very different from running outside. A dark, unfinished basement with windows mostly blocked by a shelf with old lamps on it. Staring straight ahead, I can see a blank tv screen and then behind that, a dark window and the old coal chute. To the side, shelves with old paint cans (left) and a long work bench (right). Not much to notice, except spiders and dust. Difficult to run for that long and to remember any of my thoughts. I don’t mind running down here on occasion, but I couldn’t do it all the time. I’m so glad that I have the gorge.

a moment of sound

On days when it’s too cold for me to move outside, I record a moment of sound. Today’s moment was on my short walk back from the alley, where I had brought out some trash. It features my favorite, crunching snow, and another irritating delight: the cold, shrill creak of our iron gate. I walked through the snow in my small backyard and stopped briefly by the crab apple tree:

jan 30 / 3:00 pm

Here’s a poem I found on twitter today by Dana Levin about walking and thinking and wandering/wondering and being in and out of a body:

A Walk in the Park/ Dana Levin

To be born again, you need
an incarnation specialist—a team
from the Bureau of Needles
to thread you through—
Your next life
turns
on an axle of light—which Plato likens
to a turning
spindle—what was that?
I mean I knew

what a spindle was
from fairytales—how it could
draw blood
from a testing finger, put a kingdom
to sleep—
but what
did it actually do, how
did a spindle look
in real life?
I didn’t know. As with
so many things:
there was fact and there was

a believed-in dream . . .

Everyone had one back
in the ancient day,
spindles.
When we had to weave
our living-shrouds
by hand.
“A slender rounded rod
with tapered ends,” Google said. Plato’s,
so heavy with thread,
when viewed from the side,
looked like a top—
though most diagrams assumed

the hawk-lord view . . .

Moon thread, threads of the planets, earth thread.
Your thread.
Everyone else’s.
Nested one
inside the other, a roulette
machine—
If a thread could be spun from liquid light was what
I kept thinking—
imagining a sluice
of electric souls
between the earth wheel’s rims—
there “I”

was a piece of water, Necessity
wheeled it around―Necessity,
who was married to Time,
according to the Greeks—
Mother of the Fates.
Who would measure and cut your

paradise/shithole extra life . . .

Well we all have ways of thinking about
why,
metaphysically-speaking,
anyone’s born—
though the answer’s always Life’s
I AM THAT I AM
—how it hurls and breaks!
on Death’s No there
there . . .

—which sounded kind of Buddhist.

According to the teachings we were all
each other’s dream . . .

And soon able to vanish—

out of the real
without having to die, whoever’s
got the cash—to pay
the brainier ones
to perfect
a Heaven upload—to cut
the flesh-tether
and merge

with the Cloud . . .

Well we all have ways of constructing
Paradise.
To walk alone deep in thought
in a city park
was mine
for several minutes,
thinking about spindles.
Before the vigilance
of my genderdoom

kicked in—

And there it was, the fact
of my body—
all the nerves in my scalp
and the back of my neck,
alive—
How it moved through space, how close
it had strayed
toward concealing trees, my
female body—
Jewish body—inside my
White body—dreaming
it was bodiless

and free . . . 

to decide:

how and when and if to fill the body’s hungers—
how and when and if to walk in thought
through the wilderness . . .

before Death comes with its Fascist hat.

Its Park Murder Misogyny hat.

Its Year Ten in a Nursing Home stink
    hat—    

However spun
    my thread . . .

Anyway,
it’s peaceful here
in the park, at midday,
if a little deserted. I’ve moved to the path that winds
closer to the street.
Thinking again, as I always do,
about body and soul. How they
infuse each other. How they
hate each other.
How most people pledge allegiance
to one or the other.
How painful it was! To be
such a split

creature—

jan 26/SWIM

1.5 miles
ywca pool
outdoor temp: 14 degrees

Swim! I wouldn’t have minded running in the cold today. It’s sunny and bright. But I’m trying to swim at least once a week. Partly because I love swimming, partly because it feels good after a few hard runs on the rough paths. Today’s swim was wonderful. Only one other person in the pool. The sun was streaming in the big windows and making the whole pool floor dance with shadows.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. the woman next to me was wearing a swim cap that looked like it was from open swim. I wanted to ask her, but we were never stopped at the same time
  2. she was in a black suit — I think it was a tri suit. She swam breaststroke and freestyle and also ran in the deep end, her legs pedaling under the water
  3. there was something big and white on the pool floor, right on the part that slants down — what was it? I couldn’t tell*
  4. after the woman next to me left, I was alone in the pool for most of the time
  5. shadows on the pool floor, 1: faint, from the trees outside, flickering gently
  6. shadows on the pool floor, 2: a sharp, long cylinder of darkness — the lane line
  7. shadows on the pool floor, 3: the sun brightened and more dancing shadows with a long strip of light
  8. shadows on the pool floor, 4: in the lane next to me, a small ball of light — the opposite of a shadow, glowing. In the shallow end of the pool. I could see it from the far end after finishing my flip turn
  9. colors noticed: orange (of course), blue, a little green, yellow (maybe?) near the door to the locker room
  10. not always, but sometimes, I noticed the small bubbles my hands made as they pierced the water

*the white thing on the bottom was very distracting. What is it? I kept looking down, trying to study it, but with my bad eyes, I didn’t have a chance. It was almost the size of my fist. I thought about swimming down and picking it up. Gross! I decided one of the kids on the Otter’s swim team would probably pick it up during practice this afternoon.

The only one in the pool, nearly submerged for 45 minutes, I felt alone and not alone:

Alone and Not Alone/ Carl Sandburg

There must be a place
a room and a sanctuary
set apart for silence
for shadows and roses
holding aware in walls
the sea and its secrets
gong clamor gone still
in a long deep sea-wash
aware always of gongs
vanishing before shadows
of roses repeating themes
of ferns standing still
till wind blows over them:
great hunger may bring these
into one little room
set apart for silence

I found this poem last week and have been wondering when to post it. Today was the day. I like Carl Sandburg and his space for shadows, his sea and its secrets, his one little room set apart for silence!

jan 20/RUN

4.35 miles
river road trail, north/south
27 degrees
99% ice and snow-covered path, slick

Very slick outside today. A lot of ice covered with an inch or two of snow. That part of it wasn’t fun, but the rest of it — the cold air, the open river, the gray sky — was wonderful. Greeted Dave the Daily Walker. Passed Daddy Long Legs. Noticed all of the rusty orange leaves still on the trees near the tunnel of trees. Heard goose honks under the lake street bridge. Later, also heard some runner coughing as he crossed the bridge then turned down to enter the river road. No! Every few seconds, a deep cough, full of gunk. I sped up to try and stay ahead of him and his germs. It worked. For a few minutes, I kept hearing the jagged coughs, then it stopped.

Anything else? The river was brownish-gray, the sky sunless.
No headphones for most of the run. During the last mile, I put in an old coming-back-from-injury playlist: I heard “Upside Down” and “Fantastic Voyage.”

FWA is on band tour in Spain and France right now. 29 years ago, Scott and I were on our European band tour. 29 years ago? Wow. Very excited for FWA.

Sitting at my desk, writing this, I’m also looking outside my window at the robins running around on the snow and rooting in the hydrangea bushes for twigs? seeds? Quietly, they scamper then fly low right in front of me. What are they looking for?

Encountered a beautiful poem on twitter this morning that I thought I had already posted on my log but hadn’t.

A Stranger/ Saeed Jones

I wonder if my dead mother still thinks of me.
I know I don’t know her new name. I don’t know  

her, not now. I don’t know if “her” is the word
burning in a stranger’s mind when he sees my dead  

mother walking down the street in her bright black dress.
I wonder if he inhales the cigarette smoke  

that will eventually kill him and thinks “I wish I knew
a woman who was both the light and every shadow  

the light pierces.” I wonder if a passing glance at my dead
mother is enough to make a poet out of anyone. I wonder  

if I’m the song she hums as she waits for the light to change
or if I’m just the traffic signal holding her up.

This poem was posted as part of a thread. I want to post the next one, which is by Todd Dillard (one of my favorite poetry people). I like his introduction of the poem in a tweet:

I have so many poems also grieving my dead mother by giving her a kind of life after life.

Mom Hires a Stunt Double/ Todd Dillard

Sick of all the impossible I ask of her
in these my griefiest poems,

Mom hires a stunt double: same white hair,
same laugh, same false teeth, same dead.

Now when I write “Mom curls like rinds in a bowl”
it’s her stunt double twisting herself into pithy canoes.

When I write “At night my mother sheds
the skin of my mother revealing more mother”

it’s her stunt double that unzips her body,
stands there all shiver and muscle and tendon,

waiting for the next line. “What’s in it for you?”
I ask, and Mom’s stunt double shrugs,

lighting one of those familiar Turkish Silvers
as behind her my mother mounts a Harley

and barrels into the margins. “You’re a good kid,”
the double says. But she doesn’t touch my hair.

This close to her, her eyes are all pupil,
all ink. Her smell: paper and snow.

When she exhales smoke spills from her lips
and unfolds into horses.

Oh, I love both of these poems!

jan 19/SWIM

1.6 miles
ywca pool
outside: snowing (2+ inches)
31 degrees

Hooray for another swim. Such a good feeling to be moving through the water. Maybe it was because it was still snowing, but the pool was almost empty. Excellent. Mostly, I swam continuous 200s, breathing 3/4/5/6 by 50s. Starting the second mile, I tried something new, partly as a way to stretch my legs/bend my knees without stopping: I added in an occasional 25 of breaststroke. It seemed to work well.

dancing shadows

About 1000 yards in, I noticed the pool floor was moving slightly. I think it was the faint shadows of the snowflakes falling* on the other side of the big windows that stretch across the one side of the building. It made everything feel magical and dreamy and strange.

*Actually, when I was swimming, I thought the shadows were from the trees. It wasn’t until I was writing this entry, right now, that I realized it was probably the falling snow making the dancing shadows. Very cool. I think if I had realized that it was the snow, the whole experience of swimming would have felt even stranger and dreamier.

In addition to the moving shadows, I saw one solid shadow line stretching the length of the pool — a shadow of the lane line. Where was that shadow coming from? The bright ceiling light or the light from the snowy sky?

Seeing these shadows and continuing to pay attention to them, shifted me into a different state of being, one that was dreamier and surreal, and where I rethought what was possible or impossible. I imagined the water as air that I was swimming through. When I reached the deep end and looked down at the pool floor below me, I imagined that I was flying high above the ground through empty space. How fun and distracting. I forgot how many flip turns I had done, how many laps I still wanted to do.

Some other things I noticed:

  1. the sloshing of the water (below)
  2. the loud voices of some women talking and joking (above)
  3. the water running guy, doing running drills in the shallow end, then pushing off and vigorously kicking in the deep end, then finishing with some freestyle
  4. everything seemed blue below
  5. everything orange above
  6. the water was not completely clear, but wasn’t that cloudy either
  7. no harsh chlorine feeling
  8. I swam in lane 2, no one ever swam in lane 3, running dude was in lane 5
  9. nothing floating in the water, only random bits of something on the pool floor
  10. little bubbles in front of me as I sliced through the water and a slight spray as I lifted my elbow up into the air

Remembered reading a description of swim practice and the pool early in the morning, thick with a chlorine haze, in Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Lessons. Thought it might be nice to collect a few pool descriptions. Also thought about composing some more swimming breathing poems, where syllables match my breaths: 3/4/5/6.

Happy Birthday, Edgar Allen Poe (b. Jan 19, 1809)

I randomly searched, “Edgar Allen Poe swimming” and discovered that he was a swimmer! I had no idea. I found a promising article, “Edgar Allen Poe — Exercise Enthusiast,” but it was beyond a paywall so I couldn’t read it. Then I found this bit of information on a listicle about him:

Poe was a big fan of the long walk. He took many solitary strolls over High Bridge in the Bronx in 1847, after his wife Virginia died. There, staring up at the stars, he would conceive his lengthy cosmic prose poem, Eureka. But he also liked rowing and swimming: as a young lad, he was renowned among his friends for swimming six miles upriver in the Charles River in Virginia, and when he moved to New York City (for the second time) in 1844, one of his first acts was to row a skiff up the East River, all the way up past Roosevelt Island.

sidenote: I want to write a poem titled, “Edgar Allen Poe — Exercise Enthusiast”!

jan 13/BIKERUN

bike: 25 minutes
run: 2.4 miles
basement
outside: an ice rink

Ugh. Hopefully it will warm up enough in the next few days so that the ice on the sidewalks will finally melt. I can run in snow and in the cold, but when the sidewalks and most of the road are one sheet of bumpy, uneven, super slick ice, I have to stay inside. Before I went down to the basement, I took Delia the dog for a walk for some recon. Almost fell at least twice on the short 2 block walk. Something interesting: even though it was very slippery and I almost fell, I never had that anxious, I’m-going-to-fall-feeling. No tensing up of my legs or shoulders.

Watched a comedian my sister told me about, Rhys Niccholson, on Netflix while I biked. I laughed a lot. Listened to the book, An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed, while I ran. I loved An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good, so I was excited for another book, more time to spend with Maud. Thought I might run a 5k, but I felt ready to stop a bit sooner. All I remember from my run, other than listening to Maud pretend to be senile and feeble in order to not be found out as a murderer, was thinking that treadmill runs feel longer and are much less fun than outdoor runs. Oh — I also remember noticing my stride and trying to focus on the rise and fall of my feet and relaxing my shoulders as I swung my arms.

A few days ago, I bookmarked a wonderful essay by the Diné poet Jake Skeets: My Name is Beauty. I just started reading it and found so many wonderful passages, including this one:

Viola Cordova defines the concept of cultural relativity in her essay “Language as Window” as the way Western constructs constrict worldview to one single thing and dismiss differing worldviews. However, Cordova, through an analysis of the work of linguist Benjamin Whorf, states that language is the key to interpreting the world in different ways. Using an egg paradigm, Cordova asks us to imagine the Earth not as a physical rock in space but as the yolk of an egg. She asks us to imagine ourselves swimming through air rather than walking, and to consider ourselves within something, not on something.6 Seen this way, the Earth becomes a womb, a nest, an embrace.

The swimming through air reminded me of studying fungi this past April. Here’s something I wrote on April 21, 2022:

Thought about nets and this passage from The Mushroom at the End of the World:

Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungi. Fungi are diverse and often flexible, and they live in many places, ranging from ocean currents to toenails. But many fungi live in the soil, where their thread-like filaments, called hyphae, spread into fans and tangle into cords through the dirt. If you could make the soil liquid and transparent and walk into the ground, you would find yourself surrounded by nets of fungal hyphae (137).

Thought about imagining the soil was liquid and transparent and then entering it, surrounded by nets of fungal hyphae. What if I could swim in the soil? Swim through these nets of fungal hyphae?

I must return to this essay later and work through it slowly. So many amazing ideas! In the meantime, here is one of Skeets’ poems:

Soft Thunder/ Jake Skeets

narrowmouth toads dapple pink sandstone
knee-deep in a brown bowl of brown water

before the croon of limb and wind on weeds
puddles from the pour gather for a morning song

the sun rises from a flatbed load of open palms
                : each crease a ripple a leg a half smile

the sun knows best when it rises
                : each tide and oak and uplift sung the same

each killdeer and mare and desert bighorn
each I I gorge each I I ravine each I I—

and each part of me is hung out to dry marooned

and wrung of rain, wrung of every I until no I is left
                        :      soft thunder
                                        ponds in a clearing

jan 6/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
14 degrees / feels like 6
100% snow-covered

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we had a big snowstorm. 14.9 inches of snow in total. Schools went online — which is what they do now instead of snow days; students still have to show up, but just to their computers. Because it kept snowing, the city of Minneapolis didn’t declare a snow emergency and begin plowing side streets until it was over on Wednesday. The result: a mess. Today, they’re on day 3 of the snow emergency (plowing the odd side of the street) and walls of snow have appeared at the ends of sidewalks and where streets cross each other. These walls made for a slow start to my run as I climbed over them on my way to the river. The river road trail was plowed, but still covered with a hard pack of snow. I wore my yaktrax, which helped. I didn’t mind running on the snow and was able to sight and avoid all of the big, hard chunks of snow on the path. I didn’t slip, but once I almost rolled my ankle on some snow as I turned a corner at the falls.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. lots of soft ruts in the street — snow almost the color and texture of sand
  2. the river was completely white and still
  3. the dark, sharp shadows of bare tree branches sprawled across the white path
  4. kids having fun at the school playground — I couldn’t see them, but heard their exuberant voices
  5. a strange clanging, clunking, banging noise coming from the school –was it kids? — or Becketwood — a furnace?
  6. the falls weren’t falling, but frozen
  7. as they neared a tight curve by locks and dam #1, several cars slowed way down
  8. a smaller parks plow cleared off the walls of snow at the entrance to the trail near the falls
  9. the snow was so white, the sun so bright, that it all looked blue — the palest shade of blue
  10. a congress of crows calling out to each other. I remember thinking that they sounded much more pleasant than bluejays

overheard: Unfortunately, even though I tried to hang onto all of the words I heard as I ran by two walkers, I’ve forgotten some of them.

A woman to her walking companion: “Not all bosses are like that, Sheldon. My boss doesn’t do that…”

I wondered what her boss doesn’t do. Then, I thought about her frustrated tone and wondered if it was frustration over a boss who didn’t do things they way she wished, or Sheldon for assuming all bosses did things in the same way or for appreciating how his boss did things. The question became: for her, who is the asshole, the boss or Sheldon? All I had to go on were her words and her tone, which didn’t seem like enough. I imagined (but knew I’d never do) stopping to ask her: Excuse me, I’m not trying to be nosy, but what doesn’t your boss do? I thought about how not knowing was an opportunity to reflect on how we communicate and what clues we give with our inflections.

relying on my practice

A great run one day after my colonoscopy. A few days ago, I had mentioned that I was stressed out about the procedure. It went fine. In fact, there were parts of it I actually enjoyed — maybe “enjoyed” is too strong of a word? I’m glad it’s over, but it wasn’t that bad. Mostly because I’m healthy and they didn’t find anything wrong, but partly because I used the noticing skills I’ve developed from my practice of running and writing about it on this log to distract me. Is distract the right word? Maybe keep me focused on remaining present? Or occupied with something other than worry? As I waited in the crowded (but not too tightly packed) waiting room, I took notes of what I noticed. I kept paying attention (but without the notebook) when I headed back for preop and as they wheeled me into the operating room. Maybe I could turn it into a poem?

More than 10 Things I Noticed Before My Colonoscopy

  1. lime green chairs
  2. an older man, restless, tapping on the table like he was playing a keyboard or typing on a computer
  3. a nurse calling out, Sue
  4. the steady hum of the machine that circulates the air
  5. the sound of someone watching a video on a phone — the volume was low, so all I heard was a constant buzz of voices
  6. a woman with a mask below her nose walking by
  7. nurse: Sherry with Barb
  8. the hum of a copy machine or a printer
  9. Julia
  10. Tanika
  11. Isaiah (a little kid in pajamas walked by holding a woman’s hand)
  12. Mark
  13. Brandon
  14. the soft sound of someone folding a crease into a piece of stiff paper
  15. the rustling of a winter coat or nylon pants
  16. Scott’s keyboard keys clicking
  17. a deep rumbling voice
  18. a person walking by wearing bright red sneakers. I wasn’t sure if they were red or orange, so I asked Scott
  19. a cart with a blue cover being pushed by a nurse through the waiting room
  20. someone playing music — I could tell it was music, but not what kind or any of the words that were being sung
  21. a woman wearing a bright yellow stocking cap walked by
  22. Bridget
  23. Nancy
  24. the woman with her mask down coughing and sneezing and blowing her nose then making a call and saying something about 4%
  25. someone saying the phrase, Dad Bodies
  26. Wendy
  27. Travis
  28. feet shuffling, the low hum of murmuring voices

A few other things: 2 of my nurses were also named Sara/h — one was Sara, the other Sarah. My doctor’s sister is Zara. He told me the name means “flower.” When I was wheeled into the operating room, they were talking about how amazing air fryers are. As I drifted off to sleep I heard one of them saying, It’s the best appliance I have. Better than a microwave. I use it 6 or 7 times a week!

orange!

I’m continuing to work on my colorblind plate poem about orange. One key theme: I see orange everywhere. Here’s something to add to that: as the nurse (Sarah) was putting in my iv, she told me to look at the orange leaf (which was her way of saying look away so you don’t see me poking you and freak out). I turned and noticed a photograph of gray rocks with a bright orange leaf resting on them. Orange! Later, after I left the room I wondered if I had remembered correctly. Was it orange or red. But then I thought that it didn’t matter because I still thought of it as orange. This fits with my sighting of the red (which I though might be orange) sneakers (#18).

Found this poem on twitter this morning:

Blink/ Donna Vorreyer

A blur of movement where it does not belong,
a white floater in the window’s darkening eye.

A plastic bag, I think, caught in an updraft
or a bit of the dying yucca’s autumn fluff,

but I discover it is a hawk, all muscled breast
and feathered intent, settling to perch in the tree

outside my window, to survey the yard then
fly again, gone as quickly as it came, the same way

joy arrives. Without warning. Sometimes
unrecognizable. Never promising to stay.

Here’s what Vorreyer said about the poem: “If @MFiteJohnson hadn’t sent me the picture, I might have not believed it actually happened, but I have a poem keeping company with hers in the new issue of @pshares, something I thought I would never say. It’s a small poem about being in the moment, something I want to do more.

jan 3/BIKERUN

bike: 25 minutes
run: 2.25 miles
basement
outside: winter storm/snow

Winter storm today. Heavy snow mixed with some freezing rain. No running outside or driving to the y. Glad to have the bike and treadmill in the basement. While I biked, I watched a few minutes of a documentary by Tracksmith called “The Church of the Long Run.” (interesting side note: a search for “the church of the long run tracksmith” will also take you to tracksmith’s catalog for long run gear — the marketing of a sacred ritual…I have mixed feelings about this, and no time to explore them). Also watched some of the 2012 Women’s Triathlon from the London Olympics. As I ran, I listened to a book: Disappearing Earth. Such interesting storytelling about the disappearance/presumed kidnapping of 2 young girls and its impact on a wide range of women living in remote Russia.

After I finished my workout, I quickly had my last meal before a (nearly) 2 day fast for a colonoscopy on Thursday morning. My first colonoscopy. I wonder how I’ll handle not being able to eat tonight and all day tomorrow? I’ll be very glad when it’s over.

note: I don’t want to write that much about it now, but for the sake of future Sara and because this log is, among other things, about aging and learning to love/live in and with an aging body, I’ll say that this colonoscopy is stressing me out. Difficult to put into words (maybe a poem after?), but it’s about a lot of different things: frustration and feelings of helplessness over bad insurance and medical care that prioritizes profit over patients, too many people I love dying or diagnosed with different forms of cancer lately, anxiety over what I will or won’t be able to see because of my bad vision as I check-in and deal with people at the clinic, wondering if they’ll find anything that explains my gastro problems for the past 6 months. To relieve anxiety, maybe I should turn colonoscopy into anagrams?

a few minutes later: I thought colonoscopy would be difficult, so I tried endoscopic (for endoscopic exam) and it was hard too. Here’s how I did it. I put each of the letters on a different post-it note and then moved them around on my desk. I could only think of 3. I like this post-it note approach. I’ll have to try it again! Maybe I should use some old scrabble letters?

It’s not an endoscopic exam, it’s a

No Cod Spice Exam
Ponce (as in the Atlanta road, Ponce de Leon) Disco Exam
In Cop Codes Exam

Not the greatest, but still fun to try!

Working on my winter wonder class that starts at the end of this month. Seems fitting as I look outside at the snow falling, then stopping, then falling again. The snow has been heavy, but not blizzard-heavy. Not quite as bad as in this poem by Linda Pastan that I’m planning to use in my class:

Blizzard/ Linda Pastan

the snow
has forgotten
how to stop
it falls
stuttering
at the glass
a silk windsock
of snow
blowing
under the porch light
tangling trees
which bend
like old women
snarled
in their own
knitting
snow drifts
up to the step
over the doorsill
a pointillist’s blur
the wedding
of form and motion
shaping itself
to the wish of
any object it touches
chairs become
laps of snow
the moon could be
breaking apart
and falling
over the eaves
over the roof
a white bear
shaking its paw
at the window
splitting the hive
of winter
snow stinging
the air
I pull a comforter
of snow
up to my chin
and tumble to sleep
as the whole
alphabet
of silence
falls out of the
sky

dec 27/RUN

3.3 miles
under ford bridge and back
18 degrees / feels like 8
95% snow-covered, a few slick spots

And, goal achieved! In the middle of my run, I reached 1000 miles. Probably as I ran over the double bridge on my way back, maybe as I encountered another person who was stopped on the bridge. We did that annoying thing where we both went the same way, then shifted and went the same way again, then finally went in opposite ways.

A good run. It felt hard at the beginning. Difficult to breathe through a stuffed-up nose. I’m not sick, it’s just living inside in the dry air for too much of the day. As I warmed up, it got a little easier. The sidewalks were covered in packed, uneven snow, slick in spots.

I think I saw my shadow. I can’t remember if I saw them today, but a few days ago, driving on the river road, I admired the long, dark, twisted shadows the trees were casting on the completely white, completely snow-covered river road.

I heard some chirping birds, sounding like spring. As I started the run on my block, I heard a howl or a bellow. A dog? A coyote? A dog. Whining at the back door of a neighbor’s house. And I heard my feet striking the packed snow on the path. No pleasing crunch, or delightfully annoying grind. Only muffled thuds. Thought I heard some wind chimes coming from a neighbor’s deck. No headphones heading south, my “swim meet motivation” playlist heading back north.

Smelled the fire at the house on edmund that always seems to have a fire in the winter.

Felt my feet slip a little as I ran over slick spots. Enjoyed feeling the dry pavement — solid, secure — on the very rare and brief spots where the path was dry. Felt my burning, flushed face — was I overdressed? Felt a strong, sharp wind blowing in my face.

At some point in the run, I was interrupted by the sound of the wind rushing through some dead, orange leaves on an oak tree. What was I interrupted from? Maybe thinking too much about my effort or whether or not I would encounter another person or concentrating on the words to the song I was listening to. This interruption reminded me that one key way I use moving outside to pay attention is through passive noticing, answering when the world calls to me. Making myself open and available to the world. Yes! Before I went out for a run, I was working on the schedule for the class I’m teaching in the winter. I was trying to figure out how to tighten it up, rein it in a little, so I didn’t have too much (too many ideas, activities, readings) that might overwhelm students. I think this idea of passive attention and letting the world in, being open, is key to that. Cool.

Speaking of my class, here are some passages from an essay (Thinking Like a Sidewalk) on sidewalks and running in the winter that I might want to use in my class:

gradations of gray

My hometown of Carbondale, Colorado is buried in enough snow each winter to force most of us to become connoisseurs of concrete. Having spent the spring inviting peaking greens, all summer squinting across a singed expanse, and the fall celebrating the leafy explosion, each winter I relearn how to appreciate the gradations between smoke, cool ash, slate, pewter and pearl.

treadmill window

I realized what made me feel part of the wild was not physical proximity, but emotional. The intimate connections I formed with my wintery tableau from the treadmill felt as real and important as any experience on the trail. I became more familiar with that patch of snowy creekbed than many people ever would, and even worried when my nuthatch friend failed to report for pine-branch duty (If you’re reading this, please reach out). 

The treadmill window allowed me to become what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the “transparent eyeball” in his essay, “Nature.”

I am nothing, I see all. 

a practice

Similar to a new strength routine, or a pre-race visualization, cultivating the habit of noticing the confident posture of a rook on its telephone pole perch takes focus, intent and repetition.

This demands turning attention toward the rustle of grass that says you aren’t running solo or the shallow pawprint that shows you aren’t the only critter perfecting their strides. Each run offers an opportunity to broaden our understanding of what wildness is, and connect with it in and around ourselves. 

Perhaps the sidewalk doldrums are due less to the monochrome concrete as the decline in our ability to appreciate the wilderness that exists between the cracks, and that exists in us.  It’s one thing to value a majestic vista worthy of posting on Instagram, something more subtle to celebrate the subtlety of snowy sidewalk. 

Thinking Like a Sidewalk

Wow! I’m definitely going to use bits of this essay for my class. Love it. note: the title, Thinking Like a Sidewalk, is a reference to Aldo Leopold and his essay, Thinking Like a Mountain.

Other things I want to read that are mentioned in the essay:

dec 18/BIKERUN

bike: 15 minutes
stand, basement
run: 1.2 miles
treadmill
outside: 5 / feels like -3

Stayed inside all day because of the cold and feeling sore from my outdoor run yesterday. Didn’t decide to run until the late afternoon. Watched some world championships swimming while I biked, listened to the “swim meet motivation” playlist while I ran. I’m getting closer to my 1000 miles — about 15 miles left!

This morning I read chapter one of Adam Gopnik’s Winter: Five Windows on the Season: Romantic Winter. It was good, but I was thinking it would help if I was listening to it instead of straining my eyes by looking at it. Just now, I found this: The CBC Massy Lectures: Winter, Five Windows on the Season, all 5 parts! Excellent.

Speaking of winter, I’m thinking about a poem I might use parts of it for my class:

Winter Journal: Disseminate Birds Over Water/ Emily Wilson

The reservoir churned and cloud-deformed
The far line of hills, fused, bunched color
bitter wind against this hunch
my folded bones
I can see the rust earth beneath trees, the rough mats
gathering weight in semi-darkness, dim
nesting bases of trees
Graft of dark cloud upon lighter one behind, building up
of something, a thickening, deposit of cold air, dark web
of insistence, built up in me
How long can it be here?
A simmering of trees, a dark moiling
a winter weight
a mid-shimmering of heat-distorted things
The positioning of bolts of deep orange, gold-green and amber
molded, wicked in together
Drops in pressure, now, a field of cold, a shift
between rain and snow
The movement into this remembering
of separate things, train sounding its horn, removing
itself from the scene
Snow thickening the far bars of trees, graying them in
Blotting, dulling, gauzing over this dream
It is snowfalling, it is beauty-filling and cleansing
this burn of words
it is delivering something seeming to uplift and to begin
pressing downward, this ink into frozen droplet
this thing

Snow plinking in the leaves, the left hands of trees
the neat levers and pulls
the odd weeds
The rich fringe of emptying trees
the shifted pins
the breaks into dense pines into period reeds into gutterings
What happens to the opposite shore
is untenable
is unmanageable to me
That stratagem of damage, that unmattering
Believe me it is some abomination of things being killed and
that mattering to me
That exquisite built thing that is obliterated
its tiny white amplitude, its singing crushed into
particles, its must on the undersides of leaves
Now I am sure
the world has not unfolded before me
anymore but has closed into rows
of its foldings
Something in the collections of those trees
bare branches upthrust, the brush of them
bare branches up-brushed
their lip along mesh of shore weeds, the flanged grasses
the scrim of their midst
I am in them again
meddling in darks that are in them
and the white gold that is their outermost
screen that is their leafleting their grief that is in me
thin dredge of pebbles and
strange glandular patternings of trees
against trees against cut-bank against breath

The rubied lung of sumac
tragedian


dec 17/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
18 degrees / feels like 8
100% slick snow

Another dusting of snow last night. Just a slow, steady accumulation. Everything a bright, blinding white — the sky, the path, the trees, even the river, at least in one spot where the sun hit it just right and made it burn or glare or whatever word you might use to describe a blinding white light. Wow.

Layers: 2 pairs of black running tights, green shirt, pink jacket, gray jacket, buff, black fleece-lined cap with brim, 2 pairs of glovers (black, pink and white striped)

No headphones on the way to the falls; an old playlist titled “swim meet motivation” on the way back — David Bowie, Beck, Todd Rundgren, Ozzy Osbourne, Pat Benetar

10 Things I Noticed

  1. the creek was flowing and the falls were falling, making a delightful rushing sound
  2. when I stopped just before my favorite spot (because a couple and a kid were already at my spot), I could hear the falls as they fell. When I looked, all I could see was one white tree after the next
  3. the trail was not too slippery, but slippery enough to make my legs work harder
  4. I think it was between locks and dam #1 and the double bridge — as a car passed me , I smelled hot chocolate. did it come from the car, or was that just a coincidence?
  5. on the way back, stopped to walk on side of the double bridge that doesn’t get plowed in the winter. I looked down into the white ravine as I trudged through the snow
  6. glancing at the river through the trees, something about all the white in the trees, the light, and my vision made the river look like it was sepia-toned
  7. nearing the ford bridge, looking ahead, I noticed something that looked like an animal. I couldn’t see an owner and wondered if it was a coyote and not a dog. As I got a little closer I realized it was a person wearing a shirt so light — pale blue? gray? white? — that it blended into the sky. The dark I had seen was their pants. This is not the first time this has happened to me
  8. running by some steps saw the briefest flash of orange — must be a sign warning people not to enter, I guessed
  9. one car crawling along the river road, the line of cars growing behind it
  10. a runner in a bright orange stocking cap and bright yellow jacket

Discovered Wendell Berry’s window poems. I like collecting window poems. This morning, I was thinking about them in relation to winter and windows as frame for the world, and layer between you and the world, and a place to be delighted when it’s too cold to be outside. I think I want to add something about windows to the section in my winter wonder class about layers.

As I was writing this last sentence, I started thinking about Emily Dickinson and how she wrote so many of her poems sitting in front of her windows, so I googled, “Emily Dickinson window” and this post was one of the top results: Emily Dickinson and the Poetics of Glass. Very cool!

Aside from working in the garden and walking the grounds of the property, looking through windows was her primary mode of relating to the landscape around her.  Fortunately for Dickinson, she lived in a house abundantly punctuated by windows.

There were approximately seventy-five windows at the Dickinson Homestead.

Emily Dickinson and the Poetics of Glass/ Xiao Situ

Thinking about the literal windows in ED’s house, made me think of Berry’s Window Poem 3#:

from Windows/ Wendell Berry

The window has forty
panes, forty clarities
variously wrinkled, streaked
with dried rain, smudged,
dusted. The frame
is a black grid
beyond which the world
flings up the wild
graph of its growth,
tree branches, river,
slope of land,
the river passing
downward, the clouds blowing,
usually, from the west,
the opposite way.
The window is a form
of consciousness, pattern
of formed sense
through which to look
into the wild
that is a pattern too,
but dark and flowing,
bearing along the little
shapes of the mind
as the river bears
a sash of some blinded house.
This windy day
on one of the panes
a blown seed, caught
in cobweb, beats and beats.

To add to this wandering, I remembered listening to Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine (the album that I had listened to over and over while writing my dissertation back in 2004/5) earlier this week and noticing her song about breaking the window. Had I ever thought about these lyrics in all those dissertation writing listenings?

Window/ Fiona Apple

I was staring out the window
The whole time he was talking to me
It was a filthy pane of glass
I couldn’t get a clear view
And as he went on and on
It wasn’t the outside world I could see
Just the filthy pane that I was looking through

So I had to break the window
It just had to be
Better that I break the window
Than him or her or me

I was never focused on just one thing
My eyes got fixed when my mind got soft
It may look like I’m concentrated on 
A very clear view
But I’m as good as asleep
I bet you didn’t know
It takes a lot of it away
If you do

I had to break the window
It just had to be
Better that I break the window
Than him or her or me

I had to break the window 
It just had to be
It was in my way
Better that I break the window
Than forget what I had to say
Or miss what I should see

Because the fact being that
Whatever’s in front of me
Is covering my view
So I can’t see what I’m seeing in fact
I only see what I’m looking through

So again I done the right thing
I was never worried about that
The answer’s always been in clear view
But even when the window was cleaned
I still can’t see for the fact
That it’s so clear I can’t tell what I’m looking through

So I had to break the window
It just had to be
It was in my way
Better that I break the window
Than him or her or me

I had to break the window
It just had to be
Better that I break the window
Than miss what I should see

I had to break the window
It just had to be
It was in my way
Better that I break the window
Than forget what I had to say
Or miss what I should see
Or break him her or me
Especially me

dec 4/WALKBIKERUN

walk: 20 minutes
neighborhood
32 degrees

note: Reviewing this entry the next morning I’ve found several typos, which I corrected just now. There are probably more that I still can’t see. As my ability to see clearly diminishes, I imagine these typos will increase.

COVID update: RJP’s doing fine, felt like her usual cold. She’s been in her room since Wednesday night, only leaving to go to the bathroom or eat. So far, Scott and I are okay. He tested today: negative. Neither of us are too anxious.

update from the next morning: Even though she feels fine, RJP is still testing positive. It was the same for FWA when he had it in September. He thought he had a cold. Finally tested near the end of it. Felt fine, tested positive for 10 days.

Scott and I took Delia the dog for a quick walk around the neighborhood. Warmer, sunny, slushy sidewalks. Fresh air! He talked about video games, I talked about this log and the latest episode of ‘You’re Wrong About.” The only memorable thing about the walk: the field at Howe School was covered in snow — not smooth or flat but filled with mini mounds from hundreds of boots kicking and stomping, and hundreds of bodies rolling around in it during recess last week.

bike: 14 minutes
bike stand, basement
run: 2.2 miles
treadmill

Too dark to run outside in the later afternoon, so I went to the basement. Watched Miss Space Cadet on YouTube while biking, listened to Apple’s 80s “Fitness” playlist on the treadmill — “Holding Out for a Hero,” “Material Girl,” “Super Freak,” and “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go.” I need to put together a running playlist again. Didn’t think about much while I ran. As always, it felt good to move.

Inciting Joy: Day One, The First Incitement

This afternoon I started Ross Gay’s wonderful book, Inciting Joy. I’m going to try and read an incitement (there are nine) this month. Here are some notes and thoughts for the first incitement:

To define joy, he begins by saying what it’s not: it’s not sparking joy or capitalist-joy-as-acquiring-better-stuff-or-doing-big-things. It’s not the happy place where you go to be safe or comfortable — a sanctuary protected with a heavy lock, keeping out all the bad stuff: heartbreak, sadness, worry. It’s not unserious or frivolous to talk about (or experience), even as we are made to think it is, and it’s not separate from pain and suffering:

But what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks?

effloresces = blossoms

He suggests that instead of avoiding/ignoring/quarantining sorrow that we invite it in, and invite others in too so they can meet our sorrow, and we can meet theirs. Then he offers a vivid description of what that party might look like, all of us bringing a dish for a potluck, along with our sorrow, breaking bread together (and some furniture, I guess):

…and the thud skips the record back to the beginning of Sly Stone’s “Family Affair” and the dancing, which has been intermittent, just blasts off, all of us and our sorrows, sweaty, stomping and shaking, tearing it up, the pictures falling off the walls, the books from the shelves, some logs ablaze even spilling from the stove, riotous this care, this carrying, this incitement, this joy.

At the end of the chapter, he describes the goal of his book: to investigate what stuff we think/do/believe that incites joy and to wonder what joy might incite. He has a hunch — it might incite solidarity, which incites more joy, and then more solidarity — not over the same sorrows but over the shared experience of sorrow. This sharing of sorrow might lead us to discover what we do or might love together, which might help us survive.

I deeply appreciate this idea of joy as connected to suffering and that, when shared and cared for, might lead to love. Did that last sentence make sense? I’m excited to read the rest of these incitements. I think I might add my own incitement: gray days. Or, I might develop my own idea of gray joy?

Gay’s vision of a raucous party, overflowing with people meeting each others’ sorrows, seems a bit overwhelming to me. I’m not sure I would find joy in caring and developing solidarity in such a big, messy crowd. But, there are others ways, I think, in which we can invite sorrow in too. Gay’s discussion reminded me of another psalm poem I read by Julia B. Levine, especially her last lines:

Psalm with Wren in Daylight Saving Time/ Julia B. Levine

Late afternoon, I chop onions by feel,
listening to crows cry to each other across the ridge.

Gone now, white recipe card on the white floor,
green sea glass found on a Humboldt beach.

But this hour I have been given back, carried out
of gorse, red flash of maples, finches in our cedar.

Meaning, today I returned for the first time
to the moment I understood I was going blind.

Months I hid from myself that the V of geese
flying over the valley extinguished too soon into fog,

a darkness fine as sugar sifted over the chard, the roses.
Now I hear the soft tick of a bird landing on the counter.

Feel her gaze turn away from mine. When she hops
table to chair to floor, I open all the windows and doors.

Sometimes we must drag our grief out of the river
and put our mouth on it. And then a loosening comes.

One morning I rose and sat outside on my lawn
under budded glory vines. There is no hurry, I say

to the stirrings of one so small it has to be a wren.
Once I let the missing in, there was possibility.

There was a heavy rain in sun—every blade of grass
blurred, and for a moment after, only shine.

—

Let that missing in! Open those doors and windows! Drag the grief out of the river! I imagine this opening up to grief as more than a solitary practice. It’s an opening up to and connecting with the world.

nov 18/BIKERUN

bike: 25 minutes
bike stand, basement
run: 2 miles
treadmill, basement
outside: 19 degrees / feels like 6

Stayed inside this morning because of the cold, the wind, the too bright white, and the icy paths. It’s very early in the winter season, and I doubt they’ve treated the trails. Watched a few races while I biked, listened to Taylor Swift’s Reputation while I ran. The thing I remember most about the run: trying to stop myself from looking at the time to see how long I’ve been running, how much I’ve got left. Also: stared at the reflection of the light in the back window, noticed again how it looks like an upside moon casting light on water above it.

Before deciding on watching some track races, I started “Servant” on Appletv. The opening credits had way too little contrast; I could barely tell there was text on the screen. Then the title appeared in red. I couldn’t read it all. Looking at it paused, when it wasn’t moving and I had more time to stare, I could mostly see it. Red letters on a black background are hard for me to see. I might try watching this show some other time, but it might be too dark. So many of the thriller or mystery or dramatic shows available now are dark or darker or dim, which makes it almost impossible for me to see what’s happening.

color project

I’m continuing to work on my color/colorblind project. I was telling Scott about my writing process the other day and how some poems insist on being written. I’ve tried to drop this color thing, especially with the colorblind plates several times, but it keeps coming back up again and again. I’ll be working on something else, and whatever that something is will end up at color and how I do or don’t see it. It’s wild.

I heard some birdsong just now from behind my shaded window. Sounding like spring. I looked — a bird is doing something near the foundation, just below me. Gathering twigs?

Back to my color project. Yesterday Scott helped me to figure out the template for the second plate that serves as the form for a longer poem that’s related to the color word hidden in Ishihara loops from the first plate. I put some text in it, using part of a free-write I did the other day. The text is rough, with some typos, but it still helps me to get a sense of how this will work. Very cool!

Each of these poems has 772 characters, including spacing and punctuation. Today I want to start gathering bits — descriptions, lines from other poets’ poems, stories, associations with colors, mishaps, etc. — to include in these poems. One early idea: separate poems about colors that are significant to me: orange, yellow, green, brown, and gray.

note: I returned to this entry to fix some typos I missed and I was struck by how off and excessive my commas are. What is that all about? I seem to hear commas and pauses all the time. Am I trying to slow down the words? Force some hesitation?

nov 15/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
30 degrees / steady light snow
walking path: 60% snow-covered / bike path: 10% snow-covered

The first winter run in the snow of the season! Wonderful. Slushy, a few slick spots, little snow flakes occasionally pelting my face. Loved it! Not too many people on the trails. Exchanged greetings with Mr. Morning! Morning! Good morning!

I forgot to look at the river or, if I looked, I don’t remember what I saw. It was probably blue gray. There’s no way it was white yet.

We already have a few inches on the ground, so it looks like a winter wonderland. Some of the snow has painted the trees white.

The falls were falling, but not gushing.

The sky is a very light gray. Almost everything some shade of gray. Somewhere on the trail — maybe near the falls — I saw some light green leaves decorating a tree. How is that possible?

Thought about Emily Dickinson and the idea I had earlier this morning, based on my current reflections on gray and my devotion to her poem, “We grow accustomed to the Dark –“: I grow accustomed to the Gray. For me, not everything is dark, really. It’s gray. Literally — as colors drain away in light that isn’t just right, many things often look gray. I don’t usually notice it until I think about how that dark car over there isn’t dark blue or dark red, it’s just dark gray. Or that fir tree outside of my writing studio window isn’t dark green but a very dark gray. It’s also metaphorical — I’m in this in-between state, where I can sometimes see, sometimes can’t. Or I can see well enough to get by, but not very well. I’m in transition, in the process of losing, not in the state of having lost.

today’s gray: gray area

definition from google: an ill-defined situation or field not readily conforming to a category or to an existing set of rules.

Not sure if this really fits, but the in-betweeness and ambiguity of a gray area, makes me think of optical illusions like the duck and the rabbit, or the old lady and the young woman, or the white and gold or blue and black dress, which makes me think of this passage from Georgina Kleege:

I surmise that my general visual experience is something like your experience of optical illusions. Open any college psychology textbook to the chapter on perception and look at the optical illusions there. You stare at the image and see it change before your eyes. In one image, you many see first a vase and then two faces in profile. In another, you see first a rabbit then a duck. These images deceive you because they give your brain inadequate or contradictory information. In the first case, your brain tries to determine which part of the image represents the background. In the second case, your brain tries to to group the lines of hte sketch together into a meaningful picture. In both cases there are two equally possible solutions to the visual riddle, so your brain switches from one to the other, and you have the uncanny sensation of “seeing” the image change. When there’s not much to go — no design on the vase, no features on the faces, no feathers, no fur — the brain makes an educated guess.

When I stare at an object I can almost feel my brain making such guesses.

Sight Unseen / Georgina Kleege

Sometimes, but not always, I can feel my brain making guesses. I usually notice this when it guesses wrong and then I realize what the thing I’m looking at actually is. Or, maybe it is more like this: I see something that seems strange to me, like a dead or sleeping squirrel on a big rock. That’s what it looks like, what the visual data is telling me (Sara’s brain) it is, but I can’t quite believe it. It seems off. I look closer. Finally, after staring for too long, I realize it is a stocking cap with a furry brim.

Ambiguous. It could mean this or that or this and that.

nov 13/RUN

5.6 miles
fairview loop
26 degrees

Yes! Love this weather: cold, but not too cold, hardly any wind, no snow or ice on the paths yet. Cold enough to keep the crowds away and for me to keep my gloves on for the whole run. Calm enough for the river to be a mirror reflecting an upside world — the arches of lake st bridge smiling instead of frowning.

Layers: black running tights (the thicker ones), green base shirt, pink jacket with hood, pink head/ear band, black and white polka dot twins cap (used to my daughter’s because, yes, my head is small enough to fit into a girl’s cap), black gloves

Heard a strange bird call in the gorge, which made me think “whip-poor-will,” but it’s most likely not that bird because they’re nocturnal and they’re listed as rare in my birds of the mississippi river guide.

Just as I neared the river road on the east side I heard a honking goose and the bells of St. Thomas.

Saw a few, and by a few I mean less than 10 total, snow flurries in the air.

This route is only 5.6 miles and takes only a little over 50 minutes, but it felt like I ran through a lot of places: cooper neighborhood, on lake street, over the lake street bridge, up marshall in st. paul, beside St. Thomas, on Summit, above the river on the east and west sides, past grand old houses, big brick apartment buildings, corner stores, salons, ice cream parlors, gas stations, cafes, a university, a WWI monument, falls hidden in ravines.

Today’s gray theme is: gray as (the absence of?) color

Thinking about color: Yesterday afternoon, in the chapel at Gustavus, which was not dim but not bright either, I started to notice that looking one direction, toward the far window on the other side, the only color I could see was an occasional red square embedded in the walls (I double-checked with Scott; there were also a bunch of blue squares too). The hymnals 15-20 feet away, which I know are red, looked dark but colorless. Staring out at the crowd of people, everyone looked like they were dressed in dark or light — not quite black or white, just dark clothes or light clothes. No variation, no purples or blues or oranges or anything but dark and light. It was strange, partly because it didn’t feel strange. It wasn’t like I thought, where is all the color? It felt more like when I wake up in the dark and, after my eyes adjust, I see the room and it looks like the room, but just darker, dimmer and without color. And, usually I don’t think there’s no color — sometimes I might even think I see color because I know my robe is purple or the pillow is yellow, or I don’t see yellow, but I recognize the pillow on the couch as that yellow pillow because I already know it’s yellow. Hope this description makes sense to anyone reading this, including future Sara.

Anyway, because my theme for today is gray as color (or colorless) and because I was still thinking about my experience in the chapel last night, I gave particular attention to noticing colors today. I wondered if I would struggle to see colors because it was a gray, darker day. I don’t think so. Would I be able to tell? Here’s the colors I noticed:

10 Colors I Noticed

  1. green grass, green stoplight
  2. red stop sign, red stop lights
  3. yellow stop light, yellow leaves
  4. rusty brownish red stain on the lake st bridge
  5. blueish water
  6. pinkish, purplish jacket on a walker
  7. orange traffic cone
  8. brown dirt
  9. white patches of snow in the corners of the sidewalk
  10. my black running tights

A few grays that come up a lot in poetry: gun metal gray, pewter

added a few hours later: Thinking about color more and how I see it or don’t see it. This afternoon I was wondering about how others describe their inability to see color in the dark/low light, like when you wake up in the middle of the night, look around, and nothing has color. It’s all dark or light or gray. Using the search, “seeing color in the dark,” I came across this article: Why We See Swirling Color When Our Eyes Are Closed. Among other interesting things, it mentions intrinsic gray or eigengrau:

The color black is often referred to as the absence of light, but when it comes to the human visual system, eigengrau is the color perceived in the absence of light. Eigengrau is a German term that roughly translates to ‘intrinsic gray’ or ‘own gray.’ When deprived of light — as in when our eyes are closed, or when we are in darkness with our eyes open — we are unable to perceive true blackness, and rather, perceive eigengrau. This is because light provides the contrast necessary to perceive darker-ness. For instance, the black ink of text might appear darker than eigengrau because the whiteness of the page provides the contrast the eyes need to understand black.

Here’s a little more info from another article:

Scientists believe that Eigengrau is the dark grey colour that human eyes see in perfect darkness and this is said to be the result of visual signals from optic nerves.

German philosopher and physicist Gustav Theodor Fechner is believed to have investigated and popularized the term Eigengrau. He is also known for his key role in the genesis of the measurement of human perception.

Eigengrau is the Dark Gray Colour That Most People See in the Absence of Light

The term eigengrau is not used that often now. Instead, it’s referred to as visual noise or the static in your retina. In the article, eigengrau was also called “brain gray.”

nov 8/SWIM

1+ mile (1950 yards)
ywca pool

Another swim! So happy to be able to swim this late fall and winter. I did my usual: continuous 200s freestyle, broken up by 50s, breathe every 3/4/5/6 strokes. On a few flip turns, my right knee cap felt strange, but otherwise it was okay. I felt strong and buoyant, stretched flat at the surface.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. A woman in a blue and green suit with booties, then flippers, on, swimming breaststroke, backstroke, and freestyle. Older, I think, and a good, strong swimmer
  2. An older man in a speedo on the other side of me, swimming freestyle and breaststroke
  3. A man in black board shorts swimming along the bottom, then running — was he injured?
  4. the colored tiles on the bottom of the pool looked extra blue
  5. a few white tiles had some stuff on them — chipped? mildew?
  6. at the end of the lane, the wall is marked with a giant plus sign — I think of it as black, but it is probably blue to match the tiles. I had no problem seeing it
  7. I struggled to see if there were any swimmers in the water when I was picking my lane — is that an elbow, or just a trick of the light?
  8. everything I lifted my head (still practicing sighting every so often), I saw orange. Where was the orange coming from?
  9. as my arms entered the water and my body rotated slightly, I felt like a boat with my feet as rudders
  10. glanced down at the big drains on the bottom of the pool and thought about Jaws and the great opening chapter I just read a few months ago (The Swimmers)

Continuing November’s theme of gray. Today: smudge. Thinking about one of my favorite vision poems, I Look Up from My Book and Out at the World through Reading Glasses by Diane Seuss. It begins, “The world, italicized.” and ends,

It’s a paradise of vagaries.
No heartache.
Just and eraser smudge,
smoke-gray.

All forms, the man wrote, tend toward blur.

Today looking at the lines, posted on poets.org, I puzzled over one: Just and eraser smudge. I’ve thought about this line before and wondered what it means. Just and? What is the just here? Suddenly I wondered if it was a typo. I checked out the ebook from the library and looked. Yes! Here’s the actual line:

Just an eraser smudge,

That makes so much more sense! I thought I just wasn’t getting it, which can happen with poetry.

I like the smoke-gray and smudge gray. It makes me think of a vision poem I started, but has stalled, about not being able to see my daughter’s face when she tells me a story:

the motions of the dipping birds/ sara lynne puotinen

My daughter sits on a couch near the window and tells me a story.
I listen to her words, watch her small hands rise and fall,
dart and flick, sweep the air. Each shift in movement
the difference between excitement anger exasperation disdain.

When I look up, the space where a face should be is not
a face but a smudge, as if someone took a dried out eraser
from the end of an old pencil and tried to remove the lines
but failed. Each attempt has darkened the page until

what remains is a mess of almosts — a space almost filled,
lines almost legible, a face almost there. My eyes move
to her shoulder to find her features in my periphery.
I look again at her center and almost see an eye, a nose, her mouth.

My gaze returns to her hands. I listen to her words
and marvel at the soft feathers of her fingers.

nov 1/RUN

3.1 miles
turkey hollow
67 degrees

A memory: wild turkeys near Beckettwood. One, flapping its wings as it moved away from me.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master

On Sunday, November 6th, Scott accidentally deleted everything I had written for the past six days. I lost this entry. I don’t want to try to remember everything/anything that happened on that day, but I do want to document the basic details of the run and to have it marked on my calendar so that later, when I glance at it, I can see when I worked out that month.

I didn’t just lose this entry, I lost all the entries for this week. I lost 2 new pages I created for my big (as in, spanning decades) project, How to Be. One called, “How to be…a Bell.” The other, “How to be…Enough.” I lost the various edits I did to my writing portfolio site, announcing the publishing of 2 of my mood ring poems at The Account. I lost the poem links I added to my “poems gathered” section. I lost an “On this Day” page I created for all the entries, from 2017-2021, that I posted on November 4th. And I lost little bits — quotations, interviews, video clips — that I posted on various pages on Undisciplined. At least, that’s what I remember losing.

It happened on Sunday morning around 9. I was sitting upstairs reading something. I heard Scott sigh loudly. Uh oh. What’s wrong, I asked. I think he might have started with, I have some bad news or I’m sorry, but…. Scott is like his dad when he tells a story. He likes to give a lengthy, dramatic explanation before getting to the point. As he rambled on with details, I tried to guess what the conclusion would be. I am like my mom when I hear a story; I worry and jump to conclusions and don’t care about the details. I want the ending first, then I can listen to the excrutiating minutia of what happened. As he talked, I thought he was going to tell me that he had deleted all of the customizations I had made to my wordpress themes for my 3 main sites. When he said that he had lost anything I had written/posted in the last six days, I was relieved. At least I don’t have to redo the themes, and try to remember all the css that I‘ve forgotten because I only use it every couple of years when I redesign my sites! But slowly it hit me. How much I had written this week. A lot. More than most weeks.

I’m a little sad about the words I’ve lost, but not angry. I’ll remember them, or I won’t. Maybe I’ll even remember better versions of them.

One Art/ Elizabeth Bishop (audio version)

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

I knew I knew, somewhere in the dim caverns of my mind, what form Bishop’s poem is in, but I forgot and had to look it up: a villanelle. Of course! I tried writing a few of these way back in year 2. I searched in my archive and found the entry, jan 18, 2018. Here’s what I wrote:

Yesterday, I experimented with the villanelle form and wrote a poem about running around the track. Here’s the form of a villanelle:

19 lines; 5 tercets + 1 quatrain; 1st and 3rd line of beginning tercet are alternately repeated in third line of remaining tercets, then last two lines of quatrain; rhyme scheme = aba/aba/aba/aba/aba/abaa

A RUN AROUND THE TRACK ISN’T HARD TO DO

A run around the track isn’t hard to do
with its road that never runs out
An endless loop, run until you’re through

Warm and dry with a clear avenue
no cars to avoid, no need to shout
A run around the track isn’t hard to do

A little tedious, a lack of view
but a chance to fly fast, to go all out
on this endless loop, run until you’re through

Your brain can go blank, your thoughts can be few
mechanically moving without doubt
A run around the track isn’t hard to do

It can be monotonous, that’s true
encountering the same people on this repetitive route
of endless loops, run until you’re through

So little to look at, so little to do
but keep track of the laps, not losing count
A run around the track isn’t hard to do
but it’s a boring, endless loop, run until you’re through

Wow. This is definitely a poems that’s about trying out a form. Should I try again? Maybe this month…

A poem I posted in one of the lost entries:

Wild Turkey/ Heid E. Erdrich

Not the bottle
Not the burn on the lips
lit throat glow
Not even wild     really
but a small-town bird
whose burgundy throat
shimmers like nothing ever
A huge bird    impressive
who lurches and stalks me
window to window in this
desert retreat
What does he want?
Clearly he is lonely
pecks his reflection
and speaks to it in a low gubble
(not gobble) gubbles so tenderly
Soon as I think of him     his eye hits on me
We have watched each other for days
His shifting colors fascinate me  his territorial strut
But it is his bald and blue-red head
his old man habits and gait that move me
If I even think of him        I taste whiskey
Drunk on solitude    I’d talk to anybody
I try his language on my lips
His keen response burns     like shame

october 29/RUN

5.25 miles
fairview loop*
44 degrees

*another Marshall loop variation/expansion. This is my fall 2022 weekend routine. Today I added some more distance by staying on Marshall until I reached the next main street after Prior Avenue at Fairview. A few more blocks, a little more distance, some more of St. Paul to see.

A good run, even if my kneecap was not quite in place for the first mile. Mostly it’s okay, though I worry about it rubbing and creating another bone spur. The weather was close to perfect: mid 40s, sun, not much wind. I felt strong and relaxed and not wanting to stop for any lights. I like this loop, even if it feels longer than it actually is. The hill up Marshall is not bad, especially after Cretin, and the hill down Summit makes it feel easier. I wonder how much I can keep adding onto this loop?

10 Things I Noticed

  1. running across lake street bridge, looking over the railing, I saw an 8-person shell heading south. I stopped briefly to admire it
  2. the river was smooth and dark blue and beautiful
  3. graffiti below the bridge on the st paul side
  4. running by the former Izzy’s ice cream, where FWA and RJP shared a birthday party, I noticed a wooden shelf jutting out of a window — was this the takeout window?
  5. a big apartment building with huge windows near the door stretching multiple floors—I think I remember seeing a big gold chandelier
  6. a big fancy house on Summit with stone pineapples at the end of the driveway
  7. the hill on marshall: steepest at the beginning, then much more gradual until it kicks up a little between prior and fairview
  8. the bells at st. thomas were ringing
  9. reaching the river, running up the hill near Summit, hearing voices behind me — runners, I think. One of them encouraging another to go! go! go! Were they going faster than me? No. Either they turned off or were slower
  10. more shells on the river. I could hear a male coxswain instructing the rowers. Also heard people cheering for the 1/2 marathon races on the west side

This poem makes me think of the various poems I studied last October about bells. Maybe it’s time to revisit the bell for the end of October?

Let this darkness be a bell tower/ Rainer Maria Rilke

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am

october 27/RUN

3.5 miles
trestle turn around
55 degrees

Black shorts, glowing yellow long-sleeved shirt, bright orange sweat shirt. An afternoon run with wind, some sun, lots of golden and orange leaves. First half of run = no headphones / second half = an old playlist (9 to 5, Misery Business, I’m Still Standing, Can’t Touch This).

Some slipping and sliding of my right kneecap. No lingering problems, but still worrisome. Ugh! Late fall and winter are my favorite times to run. Please behave, knee!

Currently, I’m thinking about my vision and trying to find a way into some poems about adjusting/becoming accustomed to my strange vision. I have some ideas, but nothing has quite stuck yet. I’ll keep working at it, at least for a while longer. Maybe I’m not ready to write about this stage yet? No. I think I just haven’t found the right form yet. Should I try more snellen charts or mood rings (with a different size of the ring?) The latest shift in my vision, involves a lot of difficulty in seeing colors properly. What to do with that? I’m also interested in the moment before a scene makes sense. Earlier in October, when I first started with Glück, I brought up the “moment” a few times. I’m also very interested in the idea of almost, not quite, approximate — Emily Dickinson’s ending line to “We grow accustomed to the Dark –“: Life steps almost straight. Almost.

almost

As I was walking with Delia the dog earlier today, I was trying to pay attention to how I was seeing everything. I kept thinking, almost. Almost real. I can see trees, cars, people, houses, the sidewalk, squirrels darting. But the license plates on the cars are blurry and I can’t see house numbers or people’s faces. The sidewalk moves — only slightly, but it seems not quite stable. The sky has some static. There is just enough strangeness in the scene to make me feel like I’m not quite there within this world. At some point I wondered, is this lack of realness the result of my attachment to sharp vision? Can I learn to feel connected through softer vision, or sounds and textures?

Here’s a poem I found on twitter the other day. I’m struck by the moments that the befores and afters in this poem create:

Transubstantiation/ Susan Firer

Before rain hits the ground,
it’s water. It has no smell.
After it hits the ground, it’s
memories: my mother,
on crutches, moving toward me,
in rain, that last dry summer with her,
or a man, who later became my
husband, in a tent with me, in the
petrichor air, our bodies becoming
changelings, becoming a new house-
hold, becoming new gods, with
their own new myths. I was taught
that before the priest raises the host
and wine and says, “This is my body;
this is my blood,” and before the altar
girl rings the bells, the host is bread,
the wine is wine. After the words,
the host is God’s body the wine is
God’s blood. Transubstantiation: me
after him, a baby sucking my nipple,
rain ribboning windows. Now
my six-year-old grandson, in the early
August rainy morning, piano-practices
“The Merry Widow Waltz.” Before
I was a widow, that song was
only a practice piece, a funny
opera. The rocks along my lake
are always most beautiful in rain.
In rain, their colors deepen and shine.
The smell after rain hits the ground
has a name: petrichor,
from the Greek words petra,
meaning stone, and ichor, which is
the fluid like blood in the veins of gods.

I looked Susan Firer up and she seems very cool. I’ll have to dig deeper into her work. Here’s part of documentary about her I found on her site:

oct 17/BIKE

bike: 30 minutes
basement, bike stand

I’d like to run this morning, but I won’t. I’m trying to give my right knee a break. So instead, I did a short bike ride in the basement. Hopefully, later this week, I’ll swim at the Y. No deep thoughts while biking, just the chance to move and get my heart rate above 120 bpms. Thought about starting the second season of Cheer! — I watched the first during the winter of 2020 — but ended up watching another track race. Maybe next time I’ll start re-watching Dickinson? I’ve started listening to the awesome poetry podcast about the show, The Slave is Gone, and I’ve been wanting to return to ED’s poems, and read the book I bought earlier this year, My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe. Too many projects, not enough time or energy. Oh well.

Marie Howe and the Moment

Yesterday, I posted 2 poems from Marie Howe, Part of Eve’s Discussion and The Meadow, and I mentioned a third that I had posted earlier in this year on July 19, “The Moment.” Here it is:

The Moment/ Marie Howe

Oh, the coming-out-of-nowhere moment

when, nothing

happens

no what-have-I-to-do-today-list

maybe half a moment

the rush of traffic stops.

The whir of I should be, I should be, I should be

slows to silence,

the white cotton curtains hanging still.

This last line about the white curtains hanging still reminds me of an interview with Howe that I posted an excerpt from 3 days later. When asked about caring for her dying brother, she mentions a green, flapping shade:

 being with John when he was alive in those hours and days in his room with the green, flapping shade. Sitting by Johnny and just talking in those ways for those hours and all the particulars: the glass, the sandwich, the shade, the bedclothes, the cat, the summer heat outside pressing against the windows, the coolness in the air, the dim room. The peacefulness. The sounds of kids on bikes outside. For once there was nothing else going on but that. That’s the freedom of it, right? What’s more important? Nothing. So you’re actually living in time again.

and also this:

That was really a big deal. I was given this place to be without any expectations really. And everything changed so that the particulars of life—this white dish, the shadow of the bottle on it—everything mattered so much more to me. And I saw what happened in these spaces. You can never even say what happened, because what happened is rarely said, but it occurs among the glasses with water and lemon in them. And so you can’t say what happened but you can talk about the glasses or the lemon. And that something is in between all that.

Reading her words here, and thinking about the death of her brother, has helped me to enhance/shift my understanding of a few lines from “The Meadow”:

But in this world, where something is always listening, even
murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan

in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be
all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget

what you are. 

I first wrote about these lines on july 13 and 14, 2020. In those entries, I talked a lot about the value of forgetting. To forget what you are and just be, without judgment, giving attention to the light and the breeze and a flapping, green shade.

a few more thoughts about moments:

In “Logic” Richard Siken writes the moment before something happening and sleeping and possibility. I don’t completely understand his words, but they reminded me of Howe’s words:

A hammer is a hammer when it hits the nail. 
A hammer is not a hammer when it is sleeping. I woke 
up tired of being the hammer. There’s a dream in the 
space between the hammer and the nail: the dream of
about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream, but the nail will
take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever. 

Also, I keep thinking about a moment as not being a unit of time, but a location, that in-between space. And I’m also thinking of time outside the clock, which is a theme I’ve return to a lot, and that comes up in the bit of the poem I re-memorized yesterday:

Our clock is blind, our clock is dumb.
Its hands are broken, its fingers numb.
No time for the martyr of our fair town
Who wasn’t a witch because she could drown.

It’s also in the a few lines I wrote in my long poem, which I was calling “Haunts,” but am now thinking of it as “Girl Ghost Gorge”:

I slip through time’s tight
ticks to moments so
brief they’re like shudders,
but so generous
they might fit every-
thing left behind by
progress.

oct 7/RUN

3.1 miles
trestle turn around
43 degrees / mist

Even though I had been sitting at my desk in front of 2 big windows this morning, I hadn’t noticed that it was raining. Oh well, by the time I was ready to run the rain was mostly done. Just a fine mist and dripping trees. I guess I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t realized it was raining/had rained: my neighbor had their sprinkler on and was watering their lawn!

Yesterday I mentioned that I should try doing a warm-up inside before going out for my run. I did, and it worked! I could feel my muscles activating and no kneecap slips. Excellent!

A beautiful, muted morning. Quiet, cooler, soft. Even the glowing oranges and reds seemed softer, more subtle in their show. I felt really good — strong, relaxed, making an effort but not working too hard. Flying or floating or bouncing off the trail in a steady rhythm.

To test how hard I was working, I tried (and mostly succeeded in) reciting Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall” out loud. In an easy run, you should be able to carry on a conversation without any problems, or in this case, be able to recite a poem without needing to take a breath every word. I stumbled over a few words, but that was my memory’s fault not my lungs’.

I think I saw Santa Claus at the beginning of my run. Good mornied! Mr. Morning! Heard the rowers down below and the geese up above. Glimpsed the river though the thinning leaves. Dodged some walkers. Squeaked on the wet leaves.

Thought about stopping at the halfway point and putting in my music; decided to keep listening to the gorge or my breathing or my thoughts.

Started reading Louise Glück’s Averno before my run. “October” is the second poem in the collection. I’m thinking about reading the entire collection. Should I?

Averno = a small crater lake in Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld.

Here’s the first poem of the collection:

The Night Migrations/ Louise Glück

This is the moment when you see again
the red berries of the mountain ash
and in the dark sky
the birds’ night migrations.

It grieves me to think
the dead won’t see them—
these things we depend on,
they disappear.

What will the soul do for solace then?
I tell myself maybe it won’t need
these pleasures anymore;
maybe just not being is simply enough,
hard as that is to imagine.

This poem makes me think of one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems, “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark”:

We grow accustomed to the Dark –/ Emily Dickinson

We grow accustomed to the Dark –
When light is put away –
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye –

A Moment – We uncertain step
For newness of the night –
Then – fit our Vision to the Dark –
And meet the Road – erect –

And so of larger – Darkness –
Those Evenings of the Brain –
When not a Moon disclose a sign –
Or Star – come out – within –

The Bravest – grope a little –
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead –
But as they learn to see –

Either the Darkness alters –
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight –
And Life steps almost straight.

There are many different ways I think of these poems together, but right now, I’m thinking about Glück’s first line, This the moment when you see again, as the moment in ED’s poem when we fit our vision to the Dark and Life steps almost straight. This moment, for Glück, is the moment after a great loss and after you have been changed by it. This idea of being changed/altered comes up several times in “October,” especially in 4:

The light has changed.

The songs have changed.

So much has changed.

And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly
in anticipation of silence.
The ear gets used to them.
The eye gets used to disappearances.

You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared.

oct 3/RUN

5.4 miles
ford loop
61 degrees

Full fall color! More orange than anything else. Beautiful. Running over the lake street bridge — river emptied of everything but ripples. Windy. Noticed the evidence of the marathon everywhere — port-a-potties and barricades waiting to be picked up. No trash or torn-up grass or anything else that might indicate lots of people gathered here. I’m always impressed with how quickly everything is picked up. Encountered an older woman on the lake street steps. Tried to think about May Swenson’s wonderful poem, “October,” but all my thoughts scattered. Felt good. My right knee (the OG), didn’t bother me until the very end, and barely. No shifting or rubbing kneecap today!

No headphones for the first 4.5 miles. Put in Bruno Mars playlist — “talking to the moon” — while I finished my run.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. Orange everywhere! Not the kind that’s almost red, but the soft neon, almost like orange sherbet
  2. No rowers on the river, no roller skiers on the path, one fast-moving rollerblader
  3. A single goose honking, somewhere in the sky
  4. mostly cloudy with the sun sometimes peeking through the clouds
  5. long shadows cast by the trees on the east river side, near the overlook closest to the ford bridge
  6. a stretch on the east side of the river with no trees — no shade, nothing to frame the wide open sky, strangely bare
  7. the sound of jack hammers
  8. 2 bikers at the top of Summit, just past the monument. One said to the other, “This is the only tricky (or did he tough?) part of the route”
  9. a bike darted past me on the ford bridge then turned into a small overlook. No! I wanted to stop there to admire the leaves! Then, before I reached the overlook, hopped on their bike and pedaled away. Hooray!
  10. the short path that you cut down after exiting the ford bridge to get to the river road was the ideal form of Fall — all oranges, a few yellows, a winding path, mysterious woods

A few weeks ago, I decided that in October I would study 2 poems titled October, one my May Swenson, the other by Louise Glück. This week, May Swenson’s version:

October/ May Swenson

1

A smudge for the horizon
that, on a clear day, shows
the hard edge of hills and
buildings on the other coast.
Anchored boats all head one way:
north, where the wind comes from.
You can see the storm inflating
out of the west. A dark hole
in gray cloud twirls, widens,
while white rips multiply
on the water far out.
Wet tousled yellow leaves,
thick on the slate terrace.
The jay’s hoarse cry. He’s
stumbling in the air,
too soaked to fly.

2

Knuckles of the rain
on the roof,
chuckles into the drain-
pipe, spatters on
the leaves that litter
the grass. Melancholy
morning, the tide full
in the bay, an overflowing
bowl. At least, no wind,
no roughness in the sky,
its gray face bedraggled
by its tears.

3

Peeling a pear, I remember
my daddy’s hand. His thumb
(the one that got nipped by the saw,
lacked a nail) fit into
the cored hollow of the slippery
half his knife skinned so neatly.
Dad would pare the fruit from our
orchard in the fall, while Mother
boiled the jars, prepared for
“putting up.” Dad used to darn
our socks when we were small,
and cut our hair and toenails.
Sunday mornings, in pajamas, we’d
take turns in his lap. He’d help
bathe us sometimes. Dad could do
anything. He built our dining table,
chairs, the buffet, the bay window
seat, my little desk of cherry wood
where I wrote my first poems. That
day at the shop, splitting panel
boards on the electric saw (oh, I
can hear the screech of it now,
the whirling blade that sliced
my daddy’s thumb), he received the mar
that, long after, in his coffin,
distinguished his skilled hand.

4

I sit with braided fingers
and closed eyes
in a span of late sunlight.
The spokes are closing.
It is fall: warm milk of light,
though from an aging breast.
I do not mean to pray.
The posture for thanks or
supplication is the same
as for weariness or relief.
But I am glad for the luck
of light. Surely it is godly,
that it makes all things
begin, and appear, and become
actual to each other.
Light that’s sucked into
the eye, warming the brain
with wires of color.
Light that hatched life
out of the cold egg of earth.

5

Dark wild honey, the lion’s
eye color, you brought home
from a country store.
Tastes of the work of shaggy
bees on strong weeds,
their midsummer bloom.
My brain’s electric circuit
glows, like the lion’s iris
that, concentrated, vibrates
while seeming not to move.
Thick transparent amber
you brought home,
the sweet that burns.

6

“The very hairs of your head
are numbered,” said the words
in my head, as the haircutter
snipped and cut, my round head
a newel poked out of the tent
top’s slippery sheet, while my
hairs’ straight rays rained
down, making pattern on the neat
vacant cosmos of my lap. And
maybe it was those tiny flies,
phantoms of my aging eyes, seen
out of the sides floating (that,
when you turn to find them
full face, always dissolve) but
I saw, I think, minuscule,
marked in clearest ink, Hairs
#9001 and #9002 fall, the cut-off
ends streaking little comets,
till they tumbled to confuse
with all the others in their
fizzled heaps, in canyons of my
lap. And what keeps asking
in my head now that, brushed off
and finished, I’m walking
in the street, is how can those
numbers remain all the way through,
and all along the length of every
hair, and even before each one
is grown, apparently, through
my scalp? For, if the hairs of my
head are numbered, it means
no more and no less of them
have ever, or will ever be.
In my head, now cool and light,
thoughts, phantom white flies,
take a fling: This discovery
can apply to everything.

7

Now and then, a red leaf riding
the slow flow of gray water.
From the bridge, see far into
the woods, now that limbs are bare,
ground thick-littered. See,
along the scarcely gliding stream,
the blanched, diminished, ragged
swamp and woods the sun still
spills into. Stand still, stare
hard into bramble and tangle,
past leaning broken trunks,
sprawled roots exposed. Will
something move?—some vision
come to outline? Yes, there—
deep in—a dark bird hangs
in the thicket, stretches a wing.
Reversing his perch, he says one
“Chuck.” His shoulder-patch
that should be red looks gray.
This old redwing has decided to
stay, this year, not join the
strenuous migration. Better here,
in the familiar, to fade.

After posting this, I decided to order Swenson’s collection Nature (and Glück’s Averno). So excited!

Back to Swenson. Today, before I went out for my run, I was struck by 4, 5, and 6, especially in terms of light, the eye, and vision.

from 4
But I am glad for the luck
of light. Surely it is godly,
that it makes all things
begin, and appear, and become
actual to each other.
Light that’s sucked into
the eye, warming the brain
with wires of color.
Light that hatched life
out of the cold egg of earth.

I like her description of light, the eye, and the brain, which is warmed with wires of color.

In the next section, 6, I’m struck by how, after praising light, she (seems to) praise darkness too:

Dark wild honey, the lion’s
eye color, you brought home
from a country store.

And offers a parallel description of dark, the eye, and the brain:

My brain’s electric circuit
glows, like the lion’s iris
that, concentrated, vibrates
while seeming not to move.

The eyes and light and vision come up again in section 6:

maybe it was those tiny flies,
phantoms of my aging eyes, seen
out of the sides floating (that,
when you turn to find them
full face, always dissolve)

then

In my head, now cool and light,
thoughts, phantom white flies,
take a fling

What to make of these references?

sept 24/RUN

4.4 miles
st. thomas loop*
57 degrees / humidity: 88%

*a new loop! 43rd ave, north/31st st, east/46th ave, north/lake street, east/lake street bridge/up marshall hill/cleveland, south/summit ave, west/east river road, south/lake street bridge/west river road, south/stop at ancient boulder

A grayish-white, or white-ish gray?, morning. Cool, not crisp but damp. Lots of leaves on the ground. Lots of gold in the trees — more gold than red or orange. No rowers on the river, but at least one or two roller skiers on the path. I felt good.

Recited Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall” and Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” as I ran. I struggle with the rhythm in Hopkins’ third and fourth lines:

Leaves, the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

I don’t remember anything else I thought about. What did I think about? I’m happy to lose some thoughts and some time.

A quote from the wonderful Pádraig Ó Tuama about poetry:

A little block of letters in the middle of a blank page can open up windows into your world, and offer help, insight, company, spaciousness, reflection, and solidarity. In solitude we can appreciate a deeper solitude. In need we can approach company.” —Pádraig Ó Tuama

@duanalla

And, some more regular questions to ask ourselves that I want to add to my undisciplined site:

What are we pretending not to know today?” —Toni Cade Bambara What are we pretending not to see? What have we pretended not to see for a long, long time?

Deborah E. McDowell

sept 18/RUN

4.6 miles
franklin bridge and back
64 degrees / humidity: 87%

note: as I write this entry, at my desk in the front, a fly keeps dive-bombing me. I think it might be the same fly that harassed me early this morning while I was drinking my coffee. Argh!

Dark this morning. Looked like it might rain; it didn’t. This sort of light makes everything look even darker and dreamier to me. Ran north on the river road trail to just under the Franklin Bridge. Stopped to walk back up the half of franklin hill that was left. Put in Renaissance and ran south. The trail was crowded, but not too irritating. Saw evidence of rowers — walking up from the rowing club — but no voices down below or shells in the water. Encountered a few roller skiers. I don’t think I heard their poles clacking at all. Heard some shrieking blue jays. No geese. No big running groups. No Dave, the Daily Walker or Mr. Morning. I did cross paths with Daddy Long Legs,

leaf watch, fall 2022

Some golden trees between franklin and seabury — I think Scott’s favorite tree might have turned yellow. More slashes of red and orange. Things are speeding up now. Full color by the beginning of October?

image of the day

I think I’ve mentioned this image sometime in the past — heading up the second half of the franklin hill, the stretch after the bridge but before the top, the trees on either side frame the sky in such a way that it looks like the shape of the Mississippi River. Very cool to see and to imagine everything upside down, with the sky as river, the ground as sky.

The fly continues to bother me. Bzzzzzz….bzz..bzz..bzzzzzzzzzz

Speaking of a fly, it’s hard to believe that I haven’t posted this ED poem before — update, 9 jan 2023: I did post it already. On march 15, 2021.

I heard a Fly buzz — when I died / Emily Dickinson

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –

The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room –

I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –

With Blue – uncertain – stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –

With a loved one nearing death and the 13th anniversary of my beloved mom’s death at the end of the month and falling leaves and winter coming, I’m thinking about transformation and decay and things passing away. Speaking of decay, I saw a tweet a few days ago about IDK and how it both stands for I Don’t Know and I Decay.

august 20/RUN

5.1 miles
ford loop
65 degrees / humidity: 85%
9:15 am

A good run. I stopped after 3.5 miles. Partly to check out the view at the overlook, and partly because I sped up too much between miles 2 and 3 (I went a minute faster than mile 2 on mile 3) and needed a break. A beautiful morning. No rowers or roller skiers or radios blasting. A few big packs of runners. Mostly cloudless sky, bright, blue river.

favorite view

Take the steps down from the lake st/marshall ave bridge and head up the hill on the east river road trail. Near the top, enjoy the view on your right side of the wide open river, stretching out below you. The best part of this view: the openness! nothing between you and the river, except for air.

overheard conversation fragment

Two women walkers. One said this to the other: “It’s time for them to go back to school!” Agreed. But, who is them? Their kids? Somebody else’s kids? Their grandkids? And, why do they need to be back in school? Are they bored? Annoying? Causing problems? Wanting to learn?

an interview I’m reading

Writing a Grove: A Conversation with Poet Laureate Ada Limón

Ada: Absolutely. I worked on it over several months while meeting with this wonderful writing group. We have to bring in something each time we meet, and I just kept writing about trees. Week after week, it kept happening and happening. I couldn’t stop. But they were so supportive and wonderful. They became a sort of an anchor for the project. And it just kept growing. I didn’t expect it to be so long, but I also felt like it could go on forever.

Camille: Some of the obsessions are never going to leave you, and to me, that was part of what I loved. With each page I thought, Oh, I’ve seen this before, but how is she going to manage it differently? It reminded me of the Miles Davis quote about John Coltrane that was a guiding force for me as I was writing my first book, when I was really worried that I was doing the same thing over and over and over again. And I read the liner notes where Davis wrote about Coltrane’s first solo album. He said, “I don’t understand why people don’t get John Coltrane’s music. All he is trying to do is play the same note as many ways as he possibly can.”

I love this quote from Miles Davis and this idea of doing something over and over again but in different ways and the idea of obsessions. Some of my obsessions: open views (running) and staying on course (open swimming). It’s interesting to notice how I return again and again to these two things in this online log. I’d like to play around with variations on this theme: Even though I can barely or hardly ever see the buoys, I manage to stay on course. This never stops astonishing me.

Scrolling through my reading list, I found another interview with Ada Limón (she’s very busy these days!) over at The Rumpus: Resurrection On A Daily Basis: Exploring The Hurting Kind with Ada Limón. Here’s a bit about deep looking:

The Rumpus: You write, “I am getting so good at watching.” What is the role of close observation in poetry, and how as poets can we better cultivate the skill?

Ada Limón: I think that’s a great place to start. Really watching, noticing, and deep looking—not the distracted looking, but really curious looking—that’s a way of loving and a way of valuing, and I don’t think I knew that before. I think that I thought watching was part of life, and I thought it was part of the creative work of being a poet. And I always thought observation was important, but I didn’t know it was also the thing that connected you to the world on a larger scale, not just in the way of making poems and making art, but in the way of making your life feel connected and whole and complete.

When I’m feeling blue, which I often do, just watching even for five minutes, the birds, or even just looking at my plant in the window, just the smallest thing, or looking at my dog, I’m reminded of what it is to be a living thing amidst this living world. In some ways it takes me out of myself. If I were to offer that to other people, what it is to look without the foregone conclusion, without the narrative, without the—What am I going to turn this into?—but instead to look with a real curiosity and to de-center themselves a little bit in that looking.

Resurrection On A Daily Basis: Exploring The Hurting Kind with Ada Limón.

Deep looking is without judgment or expectation or a pre-formed narrative. It involves de-centering ourselves. She describes it as watching or looking or staring? Does this looking always mean close scrutiny? Limón suggests that this watching connects us to the world.

Now I’m thinking about another passage on looking/observing/noticing that I recently encountered (via BrainPickings/the Marginalia) from the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne:

The best way to get a vivid impression and feeling of a landscape, is to sit down before it and read, or become otherwise absorbed in thought; for then, when your eyes happen to be attracted to the landscape, you seem to catch Nature unawares, and see her before she has time to change her aspect. The effect lasts but for a single instant, and passes away almost as soon as you are conscious of it; but it is real, for that moment. It is as if you could overhear and understand what the trees are whispering to one another; as if you caught a glimpse of a face unveiled, which veils itself from every willful glance. The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two, becomes just as great a mystery as before.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

I like the idea of not focusing on (or closely watching) something, but letting it find you. As I read this again though, I don’t like the language he uses — “overhear, catch Nature unawares, catching a glimpse of a face unveiled.” I don’t like the idea of spying on nature (or being a peeping Tom!).

One more thing I found in my Safari Reading List that fits (loosely) with my discussion so far. In the first interview with Limón mentioned in this entry, Camille Dunghy names Ada Limón’s collection of small essays a grove. Here’s a wonderful poem I found on twitter a few days ago, with the same name:

The Grove/ Jay Hopler

Like unborn suns in bunches hung from branches bent by
years spent holding up such pulp-plump fruit,
Gorgeous and corpulent, their green rinds tight
And shining, sheened with rain, the season’s first blood
Oranges are on the trees.

How beautiful they would look against a blue
Sky! How weary they look against this black
One–––.

To be born tired and to live tired and to die tired.
To die of tiredness. Not as hard to imagine as it used to be.
Was ever there a sky this low?
No, and still there’s not.
It’s just a flock of black-

Birds shrouding out above the trees. The moon
Is up there…somewhere.
And the stars.

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.

july 17/SWIM

3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
80 degrees / calm water
9:30 am

What a wonderful morning for a swim! Sunny. Warm and calm water. Strong shoulders. It felt so good to be moving through the water! Fast and strong, straight to the buoys. As I neared them, and could finally see them, I wished that I could draw or sketch or do something to recreate the image I see when I’m in the water. How different is it from someone who can see “normally”? At first, there’s nothing. Then, occasionally, the absence of something, a hulking nothing where there should be something. Then, the idea — I can’t see the buoy but I feel like it’s right there. Then, a flash. A brief flicker of orange or triangle or buoy. Finally, when I’m close (20 feet?): a buoy.

As I twisted my head out of the water to breathe, I looked up and thought: cloud. 12345 breathe left: cloud. 12345 breathe right: glaring sun and cloud. I started thinking about how I like that as I exert myself, either in the water or on land, I have more difficulty over-thinking things, which is something I do too much of. No time and no energy to think too much. I’ve written before about overthinking. I decided to look it up, and found this helpful article/thing I wrote on march 20, 2018:

“A few days ago, I stumbled upon a brief essay about running and how it differs from walking:

But the act of running gives me something I cannot get from a walk, and that is total mental freedom. I agree with Kierkegaard that walking is objectively better than sitting, in terms of feeling good. But it is not always sufficient. And although the day-to-day business of writing is closely connected to walking, the business of being a functioning person – for me – requires something else. Running demands that you concentrate on something which requires almost no conscious thought at all. It is a particular kind of thinking which is all about the next few seconds and entirely pragmatic: mind that low-hanging branch, is that dog on an extendable lead, am I about to get mugged by a flock of Canada geese (the nightclub bouncers of the bird world). It also proves that you are more, or at least other, than you think.

Stepping Up to the Page / Natalie Haynes

I like her idea of running as offering a particular kind of thinking and I agree that much of running time is taken up with mundane, immediate thoughts about branches or cracks in the pavement or how deep a puddle is, whether or not the runner I’m approaching will move over, etc.. But, what I also like about running is that flashes of insight happen too–I have really great thoughts. Because of the effort I’m making and my need to pay attention to my surroundings, I can’t ruminate slowly and obsessively about those thoughts. The best I can do is try to record them in a voice memo or write them in a log entry after I’m done. Why is this a good thing? I’m not sure that I can express it right now–maybe something about a need to correct my tendency to overthink things or my love of imposing limits on my creative process?”

Thinking/ DANUSHA LAMÉRIS

Don’t you wish they would stop, all the thoughts
swirling around in your head, bees in a hive, dancers
tapping their way across the stage? I should rake the leaves
in the carport, buy Christmas lights. Was there really life on Mars?
What will I cook for dinner? I walk up the driveway,
put out the garbage bins. I should stop using plastic bags,
visit my friend whose husband just left her for the Swedish nanny.
I wish I hadn’t said Patrick’s painting looked “ominous.”
Maybe that’s why he hasn’t called. Does the car need oil again?
There’s a hole in the ozone the size of Texas and everything
seems to be speeding up. Come, let’s stand by the window
and look out at the light on the field. Let’s watch how the clouds
cover the sun and almost nothing stirs in the grass.

june 24/RUN

4 miles
river road trail, north/south
82 degrees / dew point: 63
9:30 am

82 degrees is not fun, and 9:30 is too late to go out in the summer. Even so, I’m glad I went out for a run. A lot of my energy was devoted to enduring the heat, so I’m not sure how much I remember about the run. I will try to make a list of 10 things:

`10 Things I Remember Even Though I Was Hot and Tired and Uncomfortable

  1. Greeting Dave, the Daily Walker
  2. Also greeting Mr. Morning!
  3. the dirt on the trail was loose and sandy and a light tan — so dry!
  4. a man was standing under the lake street bridge looking at his phone
  5. was that his bike on the other side of the porta potty?
  6. chirping chipmunks down in the gorge
  7. several of the benches along the trail were occupied
  8. 2 bikers converging from different directions at the entrance to the greenway bike trail, one much faster than the other — I briefly wondered if they would run into each other
  9. at least twice, I felt sweat dripping off of my elbow. Where was it coming from? My pony tail?
  10. heard near a 3-way stop: funk music from a car stereo

No view of the river, roller skiers, roller bladers, fat tires, big packs of runners training for a race. No eliptigos (I saw one the other day) or rowers.

overheard on the trail

one: one walker, an older man, saying to another: “He doesn’t know about…”. What doesn’t he know about, and (why) is it a problem? This might make a good title for a poem.

two: again, 2 walkers. An older woman to a younger man: “Well, Bob and Anne had heart attacks, but they both seem to be doing okay.” Wow.

Stumbled upon this great poem by the strangley wonderful, CA Conrad.

excerpts from TL;DR/ CA Conrad

*

Find something colorful outside the grocery store. I found bright blue chewing gum smeared on the parking lot.

Get close to it; study the color with a magnifying glass if you have one. Take notes for a poem.

Go in the store, look for the color on a product label. You will find it. Take your time. A perfect match for the blue chewing gum was the blue half-moon marshmallow on a box of cereal.

Take more notes for a poem. What intersections did these two objects with the same color make for you? The gum and half-moon marshmallow were the intersections of temperature and texture for me. Take more notes for a poem.

*

Each evening for a week, go for a walk. Stop 3 times to narrate what you see 360 degrees around you into a recorder on your phone or another device.

Try to list what you see, “A cat crossing a roof, a car playing Lady Gaga parked below, a blue postal box, a LOTTERY sign flashing in gas station window.”

When you see one object on your walk that holds your attention, closely examine it while narrating what it looks like. Where could it have come from?

Go home and sit on the floor inside a dark closet. Listen to your recording. When you reach the part about the object you had carefully scrutinized, do not focus on what you narrated but on why you aimed your attention at the object in the first place. Take notes for a poem.

*

Get a clear drinking glass, a pitcher of water, and a black Magic Marker.

Make a black line on the middle of the drinking glass.

Place your face near the glass on the table. Pour water while carefully listening and watching it hit the mark; do this 3 times.

Pour the water a fourth time with eyes closed, letting your ears remember the mark. You have successfully braided your eyes and ears.

Now sit back, close your eyes, and listen to the most immediate sounds in the building. Let the layers reveal themselves, shifting to what you hear further away, then further.

When you feel you have heard everything, wait. Sit there a little longer, listening for the faintest of traffic in the sky or a faraway rumble. Take notes for a poem.

This poem comes from an entire issue devoted to Attention!

june 22/RUN

5.35 miles
franklin hill
71 degrees
8:30 am

A little cooler today. I opened the windows and let in some fresh air before I went out for my run. Ran north on the river road trail. Was thinking about taking the Franklin loop, but then I saw a roller skier at the top of the hill and decided to go to the bottom of the hill and back up it again. I was imagining that I’d meet the roller skier again on the hill somewhere. Halfway down I realized they weren’t coming. I was a little disappointed because I never got to hear the clicking and the clacking of their poles. Oh well, they got me to run down this hill, closer to the river, so it worked out. When I reached the bottom of the hill, I decided to turn around and walk back up it. Then I pulled out my phone and made note of something I just heard: the voice of a male coxswain! Rowers! A few miles earlier, I had heard the female coxswain instructing some rowers. 2 groups of rowers and a roller skier. So many of my favorite things to encounter!

a new experiment

Speaking into my phone at the bottom of the hill gave me an idea for an experiment that I might want to try again. Run to the bottom of the hill. Turn around and as you walk back up it, pay attention. What do you notice? How many different sounds can you hear? What do you see? Speak some of your observations into your phone. Here’s my recording for today:

june 22nd

transcript, a series of recordings:

one: June 22nd again. Walking up from the bottom of the franklin hill. First interruption was the coxswain’s voice, a female voice, giving instructions, first calmly, and then more enthusiastically, trying to pump them up for a hard effort. And then, later, running down the franklin hill, getting to the I-94 bridge, underneath it, hearing another coxswain, this time a male voice, talking to rowers. I could hear the smooth, soft entering of the oars. Nothing awkward or clunky about this one, but it might have been that I was too far away, and there were too many noises. [this is a reference to a description from a few weeks ago of the awkward sound oars breaking the surface of the water.]

two: 2 sounds mixing together. First, the soft rustling of the wind through the trees, almost a shimmering. And then a bike passing and the whirr of the wheel, sounding just like the wind.

three: Listening to the wind some more, it sounds somewhat like a waterfall or water trickling down gently, or a soft shower.

four: I can hear the grit under my shoes as I walk, especially under the Franklin Bridge where it’s amplified. Also, rustling off to the side in the bushes — a squirrel or a bird or a chipmunk or something else? [the rhythmic footsteps of a runner passing] A runner passing me. I like watching their feet rhythmically moving. It’s mesmerizing to watch, especially when it’s a good steady runner like this one. Just the bottom of their feet, their shoes are black, and to me, as they get farther away it just looks like a black ball, a circle, that’s bouncing from side to side. Maybe with my fuzzy vision I can’t even tell that there’s a shoe or a leg connected to it. It just looks like a black ball bouncing back and forth, steady, which is quite impressive because they’re running up a decent hill.

five: [the sound of chirping birds]

After I almost reached the top of the hill, I put in my headphones and listened to a shuffle of Taylor Swift’s Lover. First up: “ME!”. This song helped me lock into a fast, steady cadence. I ran faster for most of the way back — stopping for a few quick breaks. I remember waving to Mr. Morning! and passing a few runners. Oh — and I heard the female coxswain’s voice again. I pulled out a headphone and listened for a few seconds.

fill in the blank

About a mile and a half into my run, I overheard one woman walker say to another: “I mean, I wasn’t arrogant or anything, I just said ______.” I was past them before I could hear what she said. What did she say? I’ll never know, but I can imagine. This reminds me of a poem I wrote last fall:

vii.

Eavesdrop
on the words
scattered
by wind and
careless
voices. Not
concerned
with manners,
no need
to be nice.
Feel the
disconnect
between
you, the path,
other
people. Free,
off the
hook, unseen,
able
to listen
in, to
overhear
and not
be judged, to
invent
dialogue,
give it
another
ending,
turn it all
into
a better
story.