running the coast (toronto)

` Running the Coast '


Breaks like day or hour, urban coast.
Between trickles of a gravel stomach,
panged steps, and breaths
that ripple along railings and a shore
of pebbled concrete. An unpainted mass.
Here a path with green and blue broken
lines, geese that acknowledge their own trails,
vomit, the ascended summits of small hills.
Vapours as permanent
as an afternoon grid, a long series of lights,
vehicles not moving. The twitter and curse
of a helicopter watching from above, reporting,
perhaps seeing my miles per hour
rise ever so slightly -- like a curve
of Nature that gleams amid a "mobile wind"
a sketch of breakwalls and sailboats. The setting
of bows beyond suns and an island
which the Natives wouldn't bridge or name.

Still the wind is a hurdle for those who remain
behind glass, behind land or sail, a configuration
we may never know: strength, temperature,
or era. Was it the shield of Achillees
or the fleeting skin of Zadopek? Achillees, I know,
has come and gone -- has grown, like a hamstring
stung by the hills of Troy. The achillees
comes and goes, entrusts itself to the mind,
to a cold-water recovery, a cross seperate and bare
from the rest of the body. The body saying,
"tomorrow I may not go!"
Tomorrow the forgotten moment
of dehyradation, limbo - both feet lingering
in the air... a raised white bridge where one
wants to turn around, feels the wind at their back
and another runner climbing the steps from below.

resuming the scenario --- of use and miscellaneous testing

.
I fling the fast and dying merchant a faint denomination,
ask that memory be kept like pavement
beside an rageless river --as though the yellowy lines
had buckled only once before. I pass the market
where statuesque rows linger well before dawn