Running the 400 Meters

[MoonyLuna]

You had to use breath
you didn't have
enough of meanwhile
staying in one lane
of cinders running
so far ahead of you
you couldn't believe
you were supposed to
catch up to where
it seemed to be going
without you without
the loss of your lungs
your feet no longer
yours your whole body
longing for a tape
suspended across a line
you could see but had no sense
you could ever touch
without dying and being
transformed into a creature
of a higher lower order
with wings or more legs
than these two shreds
at the ends of you and yours
which had almost disappeared.


Copyright
David Wagoner

[MoonyLuna]

Featured Poet
David Wagoner


David Wagoner has published seventeen books of poems, most recently Good Morning and Good Night (University of Illinois Press, 2005), and ten novels, one of which, The Escape Artist (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965), was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He won the Lilly Prize in 1991 and has won six yearly prizes from Poetry (Chicago). He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for twenty-three years. He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and twice for the National Book Award. He edited Poetry Northwest from 1966 to its end in 2002. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Washington.