In a former life, I was an academic, an English teacher, and a poet. In order to try and re-connect with my roots, and in light of this weekend being the final breather before the big push, I thought I would try something a little off-beat tonight: a poetry open thread.
In the extended entry, I have posted the only poem of mine that I have saved on my laptop. If you have a poem you want to post, please do so. It doesn't even have to be your poem. Also, if you have a good poetry website or blog that you would like to share with others, please post that as well. I think one of the best poetry resources out there is Ubu Web.
If this is well received, I'll start holding these threads on a regular basis. If you have something else you would like to talk about besides poetry, feel free to do that as well.
The Sprinter's Running Shoes
For Jason Pattit
By Chris Bowers
May all of creation, all of the heavens and the earth, all of
the living and the dead, take heed of the sprinter's
running shoes,
may those who take heed sing joyous songs of praise,
cantos and psalms reverberating through the air,
may those who take heed leap and dance before the stars,
join hands, and together measure movement with their
breath,
may those who take heed fall to their knees in a prayer of
gratitude, countless thousands praying in cities and
forests across the continent,
may those who take heed be blessed so that the shoes may
be blessed in turn,
blessed as a sign of goodness, a sign of presence, a sign of
peace, a sign of joy,
blessed with a countenance that protects them from harm,
blessed with a light that endows them with beauty,
bless them with a grace that imbues them with speed,
a speed that fills the laces, blackened, caked in dirt, covered
in dust, cut short and tied twice so that I cannot fall,
a speed that fills the heels, crinkled and covered by tape,
quickly changing their shape to the shape of my feet,
a speed that fills the soles, worn smooth by years of
training, space by blue ink notes left to me by my
friends,
a speed that fills the whole shoe and lifts me off the track,
lifts me as my arms and legs fill with sugar and with blood
in the last fifty meters of a race,
a race of one hundred, two hundred or four hundred meters
on a track of rubber and paint or cinders and chalk,
a track spreading gravel over my calf, first spattering the
hair on my legs and the bends of my knees as I
straighten my body coming off a turn
moving so as to bring a grace to my loneliness, the flowing
space of my solitude filling the smallness of my world
with beauty,
a world that, in its smallness, affects the infinity of the
world around it,
a world that has borne witness to my speed, a speed that is
blessed and that will bless me in turn,
bless me as I come quick and low out of starting blocks,
almost stumbling, lunging forward into the air,
bless me as I hold my form on the back straight, seconds
and strides before all oxygen leaves my body,
bless me as I lean and lean look to my side the entire race,
my muscles loosening and starting to fail as I reach the
finish line,
my head pulsing and unable to think as I wait for my time
at the end of a race,
gasping, bent-over and ecstatic as I have so often waited for
my time after races
on tracks in meets at colleges and high schools throughout
Upstate New York
in cities and boroughs named Hamilton and Canandaigua,
Binghamton and Chenango Bridge in the Appellation
Plateau,
Lake Placid, in the green hills of the Adirondacks, the
oldest mountain range in the world,
where my family twice vacationed when I was young, site
of the first time my father ever took me fishing,
Baldwinsville, north of Syracuse, flat and empty, its roads a
drag strip for races to cross-country practice
with both me and my training partner, Jason Pattit,
crammed into the back seat of Lee Mobley's
Volkswagen,
its power blue frame shaking as the speedometer surpassed
eighty-five somewhere on 690 West
as we drove toward Van Buren Park or Beaver Lake, the
central New York autumn passing us in a blur of
yellow, orange and red
and the same gray sky, yearlong gift of the Great Lakes,
covering the entire region
and bringing the same warm showers everywhere
throughout April, May and June,
showers bringing rain to press my jersey against my skin,
the slight outline of my chest revealed in full,
showers bringing rain to fall over the kaleidoscope of
school uniforms at a track meet
where all colors cover the track, flow over the infield and
the bleachers
in pools of blue and yellow, of gray and red and brown
where teams set up camps
in piles and in circles of raincoats, duffel bags, sweatpants
and radios,
in groups of runners listening to walkmans, telling jokes,
eating rice cakes, eating candy bars,
playing cards and trying not to think about running until a
few minutes before the race
the way I stared at patterns in the tiled floor of the waiting
room during my father's surgery,
silent and looking down, my running shoes mixing together
with the host of shapes on the floor,
elaborate pyramids, smaller squares moving into larger
squares, dark rectangles rotating at all angles in my
mind
the way my father's cancer built upon itself, cells
reproducing toward infinity near his colon
even as my mother sat next to me in the waiting room, her
legs crossed, one hand pressed against her face and
almost covering her mouth
and the occasional sob escaping her body sounding like the
call of a dying bird
in the suburban trees next to the track and the football field
at Liverpool High School
where, as a sophomore, I ran the best race of my life in the
league championship meet,
making the final in the one hundred meter dash, lowering
my personal best by four tenths of a second
and beating Aaron Davis, the eventual champion, to the
first step out of the blocks
and being so stunned I was in front that I slowed long
enough for him to pass me in a rush of short quick
breaths and warm spring air
serving as the genesis of a story I would tell Jason for years
afterward,
at first while running during cross-country practice in the
summer and fall, sweat falling through the shortness
of our hair
and beading over our eyebrows and into our eyes, a late
summer breeze pressing the dirt in our drying sweat
against our skin,
then later when we would run in the winter, the track
uncleared and unusable because of snow
so instead running our repetitions on a nearby footpath,
sliding ten to twenty yards after each interval on the
cleared ice like children at a bus stop
and causing the red and purple blisters on the underside of
my toes to burst, silently spreading blood over the inside
of my shoes
just as Jason had silently spread blood over the top of his
shoes in a bathroom stall in the boy's locker room
after practice,
only surviving because he had, unknowingly, cut the wrong
side of his wrist open
and sat there wondering why more blood had not come out
until, after a few minutes,
he left the stall, threw the razor away, cleaned himself up
and walked home
only telling me the story years later as we were running on
an early summer afternoon,
sweat and heat not yet upon us, mosquitoes still biding their
time before nightfall,
only a few more words to be exchanged and then silence,
only the birds and then silence as we ran through Long
Branch Park on an early summer afternoon,
sprinting the hills both up and down, jogging a sprinter's
jog in the open spaces, waiting for the remainder of
oxygen to escape our bodies
and then to live off sugar and blood, our bodies moving
quickly and silently through the paths of the forest,
pine needles muffling the sound of our steps as we moved
through the forest both perfect and unnoticed
and as, thousands of miles away, the waves of an unseen
ocean crashed silently over thousands of slowly
eroding shores.
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