Biathlon

I run the final length of dirt road and plunge into the corn, crawling, the bubbles I stir up with my outstretched arms and hands streaming over me like dew or sweat or pollen, lisping through broad green tongues, "aren't you claustrophobic? Aren't you tired? Aren't you giving up yet?

I emerge, dripping, breathing hard, trying to huff the strength down into my legs, and run onto the wooded path, the wind whistling through the water in my ears as if my arms are taunt, freshly straight behind a skiboat on a wakeboard.

And now my competitors join me fiercely like a herd of deerflies buzzing around me, biting my back, shrieking in my hair, making my face flush brighter, faster, faster. They follow me, undaunted by hills where they crowd around me thicker, hardly lagging as I once again find myself on the dirt road, the paved road, up the last hill.

On the sidewalk my last tenacious contender, in a burst of extinction, rams against me, laughing at the swinging of my arms at her, but daring not enter behind me into the winners circle of study.

Distractions

"They are not quite decent," indeed, "to tell the truth" and to borrow, just for a moment, the words of Jane Kenyon.

Waving to all who peer out into the courtyard, they perch on the best ride in town, the top down, the wind in their hair, their showy white hats blowing about their faces and feathering and silking upward to a brilliant pink tip.

And the way they carry their limbs! Just so, like the male swan, neck curved, pinioned wings gracefully drooped to draw the eye of the lovely female--

I feel I ought to give them a thick bottomed glass and pour them a drink of my very best, sit in their company, lean in to catch the fragrance of their light perfume,

Which I do,

They, resting daintily on the edge and then sliding their slender, brown legs into the very middle, properly bent beneath them at the knee,

Sipping up the sparkling water with their toes.

Sighing with Annie Over One's Slavery to Words

"Many fine people were out there living, people whose consciences permitted them to sleep at night despite their not having written a decent sentence that day, or ever."
--Dillard, The Writing Life, 51