On Track (2002-2004?)

1.

How much depends upon this thing perspective
when I run the track machine through the stars--
the stars beneath me strung among the saplings,
every tree on the main drag a vortex of light
either silvery white or white gold, meeting
visible constellations on the picture window
(hearsay tells) are filled with gas that keep
away weather -- so stars are gas, and inflammable.

But how much does all this geometry matter,
the light arrived, the gold stars aged the most?
(No mentor to plaster a single one approvingly
upon my bit of third-grade construction paper,
imperial purple backdrop for gold to flash more).
When the sun sets all the insulated windows weep.

Bodies moving on machines to ape earth’s curvature,
how ships have fallen from horizons to rise elsewhere.
So if I run enough, who sees me vanish? Who catches me?
Better yet, how catch myself in medias res, as from myself
I run, a dog who tries to catch the can tied to its tail?

2.

And how this daily work-out sets you back some.
Either blurred or super-imposed upon themselves
in the picture window: the office building’s date,
walls of gold statutes, ribbed alphanumeric spines
single decades fatten until there’s barely room

for stairwells threading offices to the lobby,
and sprawled across their curtains, me -- t-shirt stretched,
running over the heavens. My blurred likenesses
are viewed through Vaseline-daubed lenses,

some B-movie gimmick: silent space-walk
in a sound age. Between the overlaps of the old,
the younger self is wanted, but the apparitions, wisdom
and beauty, don’t join -- my liquid crystal display catches,
nor inches, illuminates: runner’s wall. Were this daylight,

I wouldn’t see myself, since by day you can’t peek in.
By night, all that is missing from your life is revealed
outside this brick parallelogram, the interior broken
to parapets and mirrors, the polish of brass hand-rails,
the elevator shaft a bronze and living advertisement.

Shops for haute couture and photocopies mock you.
Flower-shops recall the time you have to race against.
For whom are the bouquets amassed, lovers or the passed-away?
Once their star-bursts were snapshot through telescopes
that groaned for these moments, many moons ago.

3.

In the apothecary, an apprentice’s washrag
wiped the seething from vials, their frosted glass stoppered.
Back in the day they taught these purgatives
were aqua vitae, despite their sting on application,

as they delivered panaceas or cures, for hysteria,
piles, difficult pregnancies, headaches, mortality.
With nausea or sweats you might expel your ailment,
as demons were cast from swine into bodies of water.

Law relied upon its gutting. The wooden racks
contained an antiquated magic tossed into night
with the blank scrips and ceramic mortar and pestle.

Now that library ladders slide across a finished century,
each year yields another gold book, another ribbed ingot.