God on the Treadmill

Sometimes it takes miles to give up resistance,

though the mirror shows a body unresisting, shows

perhaps something to admire. Others may.

A body without difficulty loosening, breaking

its own willfulness, cracking itself

like a rusted bolt that finally begins to turn.

A body that turns. Toward openness, fantasy,

those desires of and not of the body. Sometimes

I notice a powerful man engaged steadily

repeating difficult action: folding himself, his tight

skin, over and over, lifting a declined torso

or pulling up a suspended trunk, and think,

how neat, how controlled to be inside that body.

I struggle not to stare, grip myself not to lose myself

inside the thought of being inside that body.

I can never get there I know because it is

the image I want, the veneer of muscle

having taken primacy from mind, now first

among equals: bicep, abdominal, quadricep,

the launch after launch of a perpetual run.

I want the image even when I am it, or nearly it—

because even then, I am also that other thing,

self-conscious, burdened, struggling for movement.

If there is a link between God and animals—

the way He identifies with the so much

that isn’t us, as He had to have, to have made them—

it must be in the body enacting will immediate

through movement, as if with a word

creating a world (enacting creation immediate

through speech). Which is to say, this is my time

of prayer, my only time: miles in, as long

as it takes for the body to relinquish resistance.

Bright, public, surrounded by others who move

toward better movement. And all the while seeing

in a wall of mirrors that image of myself, deer,

horse, running close kin to breathing, motion

necessary to survival, perfect image of a man

that I’m merely a self-conscious copy of.

I pray for things, of course, for myself

and for those whose pain touches me, selfish

and unselfish prayers for intimates and strangers.

I pray for the runner in the mirror, too, sleek, easy

animal, unselfconscious and present, and absent

as a god, the man who could almost be me,

who I do my best to rush toward. I pray that

one day, by His grace, we may meet.

Source: Sweet Core Orchard (University of Tampa Press, 2009)