“Sunset Runner”
Sports Saturday
Here’s a poem for all you joggers out there. Mykie Silz Reidy’s runner is spurred by a desire that cannot altogether be understood. It is deeper than sexual desire, the speaker says, a prayer to have “access to knowledge” of what we are “past the roots.”
The poet isn’t more precise about what is desired but knows that it is somehow articulated by the “loud and glorious” “purple and orange feathers of the setting sun.” The jogger prays to be unleashed by gravity so that he/she may run into “the kingdom more vivid that all my longing.”
Night Runner’s Prayer
By Mykie Silz Reidy
Tonight I run past the city limit
past the strength of my thighs
carried only by the will to move
out to where the sky reclines
against a brown crust of earth.
Here, undisturbed, a silhouette
against this immense mountain of world,
I watch as the sky, in a dream’s liquid motion,
purples the color of desire.
Desire, not as in the want of a man,
the exact antidote to the body’s
chemical curiosity, but as in
the desire for access to knowledge of him
past the roots of his sex.
Tonight the sky, black to the east,
wears its purple and orange feathers,
loud and glorious, a canvas of burnt fruit,
the way colors are only where they can’t be touched.
But just this once, let gravity unleash me
so that I may run into sky, plum-heavy with rain,
that kingdom more vivid that all my longing.
