Running is a metaphor used to include movement of any kind in this collection: whether it is the act of literally running, the flow of blood coursing through the poet’s body, or thoughts building to lines in his mind for a poem. It is essentially the life flow, synonymous with being alive.

It is what propels one poem to another, even when the poet is at rest. He Is both the runner and the observer moving from first, to second to third person to convey or encompass something larger than himself: from being a child to a parent of a sick mother, to working at his day job, he is constantly moving around distractions that keep him from writing.
Ironically, it is poetry, as necessary to him as breathing, which also keeps him from living.

Contradictions like this abound. He’s watching someone running toward and away from him at the same time, knowing, “You must / let go to keep memory intact”. When someone is gone from his life…he turns “to song …. the only way to resolve these contradictory feelings is to go on writing, keep running out of melancholy, where (his) heart has foundered…to run
(a) poem into a state / of atonement, of salvation…at the miracle of life”.

The pandemic brought many such contradictions to a head. He is trying not to forget what the world was like in 1999, to stop worrying about what it will become. It involves making peace with someone no longer with him, whether “gone to the other side,” or just gone from his life. Both are alluded to often without differentiation.

It is the renewal he sees in the garden, which assures him he will feel love again, even as he keeps changing: “I am another and the same”. He looks to discover what he already has, and proceeds to go on. What matters is to keep his feelings for someone alive; it’s what gives him “a new/reason to write:” “once open/ the heart cannot close”.

A comparison is also made between a literal heart doctors open to clear arteries, to opening his mind and heart to clear the way for new life: “I have renewed my purpose, writing and translating”.

Linda Lerner’s Taking the F Train (NYQ Books, 2021) has been chosen as finalist in the 2022 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her poems currently appear in Maintenant,, Gargoyle, Chiron Review, One Art, Shot Glass Journal & NYC from the Inside.