Journals of a running poet

Since I can trace the exact moment I wrote a first serious poem (& tried publishing it) to a late afternoon run after work, in mid-January about ten years ago, with just a sliver of a moon above & Venus's faint smile, vision dampened slowly by car lights and snow, alone in a perfect world of breath and tempo only the marathoner knows.

And since I was pretty certain also that because of my familiarity with local terrains I'd probably be the one to discover the body of a missing local school teacher who they thought had been buried in a snow drift, covered over in a culvert or field somewhere, having been last seen eating at a McDonald's and then carelessly wandering towards the lake, and who'd recently been on sick-leave for depression.

And since the mystical union of approaching night, sympathy and physical endurance, added to some gnawing pressures of a personal nature, gave me not just the first line of a possible tribute piece (that I did call "Dead teacher dirge") but an impending sense of the nearness of a lost colleague who, as it turns out, was to be discovered days later by a teenage volunteer, a frozen limb poked out by the hockey stick he'd been using.

Well, you'd think I'd have published a book of running verses by now: poetry about the extreme exhilaration of the race itself (of which I've run my fair share) or even one about my idols Billy Rogers, Rosa Mota and Haile Gebrselassie. But my running poetry may have been romanticized by a particular evening, and tied inexorably to a terrible incident and discovery. The journals of the running poet, if ever written, are fated to look for the inexplicable connection between inspiration and a death. With some fanciful derridean subtitles like "running as the death of teaching" or the grander modernist "portrait of the runner as snowy fields".

I have written the odd running poem since then, like the following, always inspired by a sense of life's cruel stony finish,

Long as the slope feels right and a stride can bite

& a tail-wind's favourable,
with spring hostas & grass along the way(& love of sky
going dearly 'afore)


then I can run!—

& even as the thunderhead's
snarly fifes, lake over lake
& the cars' brash ferocities, too, nose round me
at every mile,


still there's breath means to go on


and the road ahead
(same long sun-loving one) —
spun of a breakthrough


will add to it, down the mazy path, a drama too
for gravelly shades and Lady,
accompanied by rain, wind; or moles in a winding ditch;
or leaf hoppers startled


to their knees; or teens, all teeth & gauche hate,
who wait for me,
a roving Aeneas, alone in the world, a warm body on legs
laughed at in spades


For the day's the same, howso'er it lisps with slopes,
and dandelion yards,
and a runner all eyes & ears for a dear blue sky,
who'll gladly turn home

when the tall winds die

or ones intended to turn into a wider musing on lonely deaf-mutes or a dead animal lying by the side of the road or something even more crypto-romantic:— always a small but significant excerpt from a life-writing that only 25 years of continuous running seem to have given. So a lonely deaf-mute I met almost daily inspired a 'courtly love' in me,

     What kind of love is past
& imagines more proffered water than's drunk
    at the steps of vinyl homes?

     What kind of desire is that
runs to its destination without benefit of sound
   nor of animated arms at her door?

     What of the silence in there
open to shadows and all eyes for the umber limbs,
   with impassioned steps & breath?

     What unmerited word tries
and encircles willing neighbours as part of its rout,
    more heated sequels to come?

     What unrequited puzzle is that
kneels to plants instead of more water-offerings,
   and the sad returns to her door?

while the dead cat I once saw lying by the road became a type of consolation for grieving spouses, both seriocomical and lyrical.

If it elicit a comfort and sorrow
all the way from the head to its look-up
and the nape can curve for talk,
a dead cat looks like Fay,

turned as is across an ICU cage
like a vessel, storm-racked, emptying into a bay
poor Fay! where nurses dab her back
and prick her so I could say,

"Oh Fay! I saw a dead cat as I ran
as I ran today by the side of highway twenty."
—so I'd say this to curved space
& pass my hand through

"It looked like you & you like me."
All soft repose, all sprightly pillow pose
configured for the box's arch,
at last. "A night for snuggling close."

But softly-stencilled forms fade to the earth,
returning powdery for the day.
If I ran my finger down its face,
could I still say I'd kissed its face, dear Fay?

And then there's a pleasant little roadside alcove (I've run by hundreds of times) literally arced out of a forest clump, with bench and a large smoothed quartzite rock, somewhere near its centre, on which are etched the words 'Dean's Vista'.

Since to him Fay's as terrible as she was to me
   or worse (god help me!)
—and regarded as such we felt the same—

   Dean, real or imagined
I say (I do even now) even after an evening rain
   I saw alone on a bench,

smoke in hand, lounging jauntily 'gainst the back
   staring at the road ahead,
& at the dry gray guy who was running by, me—

   and locked eyes with me,
who felt a little shy, seeing he had something to say
   & that something was Fay,

   Dear god! he was dying to say
as paternally as he was able, & without stopping
   "Morning hang-over

is nothing compared to this itch to kill, eh!"
   Dean flicked his ash,
feet crossed under him in the wet sprig turf,

   and gave me a look
as if to say "Who's killing Fay can only one man be."
   Dean, who's an angry boy

and slightly leaner and taller than I'll ever be,
   with ash at his feet,
shirt rolled up and clearly itching to kill,

   suddenly turned to stone,
stone of 'Dean's Vista', just as the bunting flew in,
   wet turf at his feet

The connection between inspiration and death? I can trace to a particular event (a run and body) the exact beginning of a poetry vocation. How oddly whimsical (or mystical) a dead teacher gave way to a first poem, just as Mallarmé had called it: "With nothing for language/But a wingbeat in the skies/The future poem emerges/From its most precious dwelling" ("Fan"). Precious dwelling of silent women, road kill, and snowy culverts. And how irreal the landscape of the running poet who, perhaps as a trick of breath and feet, always seems to intuit from that site the most fragmented lives & themes imaginable: dangers of youth who wait at street corners, healing softness of a dead cat, a bird's stony feet.

Perhaps I've known all along that the "wingbeat" the runner feels isn't a trick of breath and feet but always a first poem. That the lost body of the dead teacher always leads to it first.