Track and Field:
The Metaphysic Invitational
Three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon and the first time
I’d heard desperation in my father’s voice,
on the other end of a cell-phone, Come quick, he said.
Hurry. We found him at the back side of a hay field,
his truck stuck
— while lighting the edges to burn off
he’d backed himself into a corner. After pulling him out,
on the way home, he looked at the smoke barreling
into the sky. He looked at the setting sun. Boy, he said,
one thing I can tell you, if you’re ever in the same situation, run.
*
Saturday at the river cabin, I’d spent the morning with Jimmy
learning the intricacies of a Berretta nine millimeter.
Jimmy talked about what it’d take to put one in somebody.
And about how the last deer he’d killed seemed to blink,
right before it died, and after it opened its eyes again
Jimmy said he saw this whole other level, or like thousands
of levels, like he’d witnessed this great oversoul beyond
what he once knew to be just an animal. It’d be tough, he said.
But if a man’s between me and my wife and my boy,
forget that other stuff. You ain’t got time to think.
*
I was having my weekly dose of cheeseburger
at some hole in the wall on the edge of town.
Holly, the waitress, was talking about some fellow
south of here, who was working on the combine’s auger
when his son came in and unknowingly started the motor.
What a mess, she said. What a shame.
I tried not to think about the meat in my burger,
and when I dipped my fries in the ketchup I closed my eyes.
Two booths over a big fellow in overhauls was rocking
back and forth, methodically sticking a fork in his arm.
As I passed him on my way to the restroom, I heard him mumble
over and over Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
*
Sometimes it feels there’s something dark waiting for me
on the other side of walls, or in the trees I pass
when I’m driving. I had a dream once I buried myself
at the edge of a field, and for three weeks
I never existed in the third person. I remember putting a stick
in the ground, and the feeling of standing over my own grave.
Such is often the case when I’m walking, while something
crawls in tandem underneath. Like when you’re alone
and the whole house creaks. When something on the wall
falls down. The door that always opens for no reason.
Or when it’s late and you’re under the streetlights,
and for no reason you take off in the deadest of dead sprints.
*
I was a pole-vaulter in high school and once my dad said
So what are you trying to jump your way
into heaven? I looked at my plate and stabbed a lone pea.
The fried chicken tasted like it once had a dream
of being a starling. At track practice, the poles were getting
too small
for me, and so the coach, who was also my football coach,
sent me to the shed where under a few hurdles
I found the only pole we called by name, Big Bertha,
a blue monstrosity that could support telephone wires.
Full speed I ran into the pit. Full speed ahead. Three times
and three times the same. Bertha stood like a wall. I was not
allowed to pass, and on the way down to the asphalt,
from fifteen feet up, I remember watching a cloud
disappear, and a bird somewhere landing softly in a tree.
*
Early in the mornings my mother would watch videos
of some lady in a blue cat suit doing yoga.
The lady instructed thus: if you wrap your legs and arms
around your body enough, you will eventually
have the sensation of being held. My legs grew sore
when I played along. Once during a math test at school
I contemplated putting one leg behind my head for better
circulation. Mom had an oriental puzzle box she kept her best jewelry in.
She showed me how to open it once, and said Yoga
is much the same. It’s like trying to find the pattern
of movement that opens the thing hidden inside.
*
We’re at some party and Jimmy’s walking around
with his Berretta in a holster. He shows me
the new radar sight, Illegal in this state, he says,
and points it up where a red light shoots into the sky,
To the moon, Alice, he laughs. Later that night, we’re alone
on a deck looking out across a lake.
Something large, like an alligator, but there are no alligators
here, swims by. Jimmy takes aim and fires.
I ask him what the hell that was and he doesn’t know.
He just knows he saw the whites of its eyes.
*
In another dream the first five years of my life were played
in reverse order, they were the latest reality television
hit show. The series ended as I passed back into the hospital,
where a doctor with one abnormally long fingernail
carried me through swinging doors, roll credits.
The next day at the gym I noticed a man running backwards
on a treadmill. I thought once he gets where he’s going
he’ll have already passed it on the way there.
He was watching a documentary about whales on the screens
above the equipment. When he finally climbed down
he stood still for a moment, and it was like he’d forgotten
how exactly it was he once walked in a straight line.
*
Where will we go with this? A parable an old man told me
proceeds as follows: A young boy finds one end of rope
with a tin can on the end, to which he places his ear,
and from the other side three words are whispered.
For three days he follows the rope, through a patch of trees,
over a bridge, and across several open fields.
Eventually he gives up, and decides to go home,
where in his room still is the handmade phone.
He listens and in the distance he hears a mad laughter,
then throws the phone out the window. The end.
But where did the rope stop? I asked. To get there, he said,
you’d have to run three days and forever. The words,
I asked, what were the words? If I remember, he said,
they were as follows: Don’t. Come. Looking.
*
Another dream and I was running. I ran through the a white space
and then into color and then into a field on the edge
of two tree lines. At one side my father stood behind a wall
of flames. On the other my mother was stretching her arms
and eating bread. In the middle I found a stick in the ground,
and when I pulled it a tree grew from the ground, with my name
carved on its trunk inside a heart. The next day driving to work,
for exactly one moment I felt like crashing my car
into something, anything, a building or truck coming the other
way.
But in the middle of this thought my foot hit the break,
I was at a light, I was stopped, I was waiting. A breeze was
blowing
and I remembered what it felt like to have the windows down.
