Poetry

I wish I were a poet, but I'm not. Sometimes poetry happens to me, however, usually before the world wakes up. Sometimes I even notice it, if I pay attention.

When poetry happens, I try to write it down, but I seldom succeed. It happened the other morning on the tempo run. You hit that perfect rhythm where you feel like you can glide on forever, fast and silent through the dark, so quiet and invisible that even the trees don't know you're there. The hills along the bayou melted under my feet. Gravity ceased to be and the Houston humidity disappeared, to be replaced by the supernatural caress of cool breezes on my face.

I tried to write a rhythmical poem about the run, but it sounded too much like a middle aged WASP trying to rap. In real life, the runner on the bayou left the middle aged WASP behind. The legs were spingy and warm by the time I crossed the bridge at the bayou, right outside Maria Gratia's loft. All the lights were off--a building full of people still asleep and missing the best part of the day--

--missing the ghost runner outside who increased the cadence as the path snaked down the hill in the bayou park proper. No sounds save the breathing of the breeze and of the runner. I am totally alone and totally ephemeral. I am a phantom, pure, incorporeal and invisible power that I can direct at will, slicing swiftly through the dark. I can see the cars on the parkway, but they cannot see me, down by the bayou whispering past the moving water. Their eyes are blinded--glued to headlinghts drawing them unwillingly toward offices, jobs, desks, responsibilities.

My eyes are open. Every sense is seeing, hearing, tasting and feeling, as if someone found the volume switch on life and turned it up. I can see every ripple in the water, hear each footfall of the the animals darting for cover, almost taste the sillouhette of a leaf swaying, and feel the tincture of the merest idea of dawn, there, on the edge . . .

For this small interval of time, the world revolves around me. A small outpost of nature within the concrete jungle unwraps its beauty for me alone. I turn the entire globe under my feet, by my power alone, as miles evaporate.

Poetry.