profanity

I used to run long country roads in college training for

my first half marathon, feet on and on,

staccato claim: my stubborn heart can overrule the tiredness of

calf-thigh-hip-spine on tarmac lines

that split Wisconsin fields of crops thick as my running buddy’s hair,

cresting in breeze, my own Red Seas –

sometimes I ran the line along the middle of the road, just cause

I wanted to, like I could prove

significance by calling rules irrelevant and optional.

The soybean leaves just shrugged at me,

the cornstalks hummed a laugh at my preposterous grandiosity:

long after I fade down and die,

this civilization fails, subsides,

the land beneath the fields will still lie East-West open to the sky

through which the smitten universe looks down in wordless awe.

Dad made me sad and mad and for first time in my life I swore.

“Damn it,” I said; he bowed his head.

I’d crossed the lane of us and now was running on a yellow line

of holy ground; profane, profound.

There’s no real difference between disgust, desire, except

direction of the urge. Connect, diverge,

are vectors going different ways, distinguished by trajectory:

Sanctity:Sin, End:Origin –

an existential seesaw far too big for me, gymnastic game I’ll never be

enough to play. I’d meant to say

“East-West-North-South aren’t big enough to change my mind or love, why must

we disagree? It’s hurting me

how words are hiding what we mean,”

but in my trying to be heard, I scrambled up limits and words:

vectors are for functions – functions are momentum’s proof.

Profanity – I pincer-grasp these concepts far surpassing me

and tack them to my point of view –

a trestle for a pebble, scaffold for my bold futility –

call fields and sky witness to my

audacity, cram hell into the fault between Dad’s heart and mine –

as if somehow I can endow

myself with greater meaning if I trivialize, make common

with my wrinkling lips things that eclipse

both time and space, whose rightful place is with the gods – or gravity.

No yellow lines or hearts like mine

to throb with love and life and want, and yet they echo, resound, haunt

with still-unfolding meaning, audience to mankind’s convening

round our Babels. Meanwhile, I – brave little cinder in their eyes –

run on their median lines and throw my arms as wide as they can go,

hail mysteries witness to my loves and griefs and futile hopes and wild beliefs.

If true meanings can nod, they do. This little spark is nothing new,

she who forgets that she will be forgotten oh so easily –

but they? They will outlast, remain – like fields of corn sprawled on vast plains,

like whatever hell is or why we thought of it, past words and lines –

Around-Within-Last-Also-First, jewels of the reverent universe.