Vision

I walked off Warmerdam Field
one Spring morning two years ago
after a four-mile run.
The sun had just climbed
a hand's width into the sky.

A woman who had already
been running when I arrived
was still running, her walking cane
tinking, tinking against the metal
rail that curves along the inside lane.

After two years of sweet living,
accumulating thirty pounds of love
handles from luxurious loving,
after fathering one child and anxiously
awaiting the arrival of another,

I have come back to Warmerdam Field
on this drizzly Autumn morning
to shed the sweetness of life
that has lately been cloying.
And the running woman's still here:

running in her same blue shorts, white shirt,
and red hat that covers hair neatly
pulled into a ponytail. Every four steps,
her cane taps the metal
rail that hedges the grass field.