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Five-minute poem. Care to join me? Share your own, inspired by the photo above or the poem below.

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Near

I’m doing good. And then, today, this:

Tears and rain in torrent, in floods held too long in cloud.

Mad scramble for bra and socks, shoes and hat, tangling in them.

Rabbit goes through the hole, comes out again, his ears caught in laces.

**

I haven’t run in years. Not since there was something

to run away from.

Or to.

*

The gravel turns to mud turns to river turns to blood.

I’m not racing anything. I can’t even catch my own breath.

There are things I’m afraid of here. Long brambles that scratch

and cut, roads that go to nowhere, winged things that buzz

my mouth and want the curled pink of my ears.

There are things I’m afraid of everywhere.

*

My father is a runner. There’s something in him that needs to move.

I don’t know why or how or if that matters to this poem, but as I run,

I picture him sitting, one leg on a lawn chair after knee surgery,

his fingers drumming a path on the arm through a long summer night.

We went for a walk later, slow, and I thought about age, the way the

body succumbs to the weight of what we carry.

*

The run today? You made me cry. It’s as simple as that. As complicated.

It wasn’t even you, or the loss of you or the

so many years gone gain of you.

It was the way of you, the away of you.

*

I’m not running away from anything.

I’m not running toward.

I’m just here, now, stopped-time, still motion, suspended animation.

One leg poised, step-siding a deer print, a coyote print, an imprint

in the muck of where we’re never going, where we’ve never been.

*

Tomorrow I will feel this, the way

muscle tugs on bone tugs on breath tugs on lung.

Tomorrow I will feel this, the way

fists fingers fears untangle loosen let go of hearts.

*

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