Marathon, Utah, 27 March 2017

If space and its geometries were metaphors,
I wondered, then what defined a marathon?
It was early in the morning, the hour before
Dawn, the hour that began Egyptian sundials
And doomed us to the duodecimal quotidian.
A couple of distant nuclear meltdowns,
Bright enough to pierce clouds and ambient
Village predawn lowlights, prinked the sky.
I was trapped in bed with someone's head
Snoring on my shoulder, body grumbled.
To kill the other person's fleeting dreamtime,
I stared out the window at what body's eyes
And brain interpreted as purple night, stars.
In a marathon, time cannot define the race,
Only the sequence of start and finish,
Winners and also-rans. The race is defined
By its distance. Run the distance, race is run,
No matter how "long" the time taken racing.
Surely, forty-two point one nine five clicks
Can only be construed as distance, only
Translated into the boggy mess of time
Quantified. But let's call time by its proper
Name, change, I whispered to myself
Immobilized in the dark. Change is as
Countable as the dimensions abstracted
From it, although every count of anything
Must be part fiction, part simplified. Change
This while holding that constant. Okay.
Nothing can be held perfectly constant, but
Close enough for our perceptions, yes.
Holding the route constant, the map true,
The potted plants on the tenement balcony,
The slope of Heartbreak Hill, the angle
Of the tarmac as the potholed ascent starts,
The crowds confined to the sidewalks,
Holding out cups of water and cheering,
The young and bizarrely involuted minds
Of the terrorist boys leaving backpacks
Behind, the starting gun, the finish line,
The skin of the planet beneath the stones
As the whole thing careens sideways,
Spinning, then of course, the course
To a first approximation resembles the truth
Because change, although everywhere
And everything, from itself also changes
And is not always the same, so that what
We call a line run through two places
Can exist, in a way, as a difference between
Change accumulating rapidly, acceleration,
And change compiled over eons, nearly
Stasis. The difference between time
And itself is geometry and when the bomb
Went off, I thought, it went off in a kind
Of cruelty to our belief we exist in space.
That was a long time ago, gruesome race.
Morning's stars gone from my mind, dawn.