Mezzo Cammin

Today, as I jogged down the center line¹
of a closed-off, rain-glossed road, lost in a rhythm,
the memory of a boy returned: fifteen
or so, barefoot in faded cut-off jeans,
sprinting past neighbors’ houses, tears drifting⁵
into his ears, heart yanking at its seams—

he hoped they’d rip and didn’t slow at all ⁷
for more than a mile. After crossing Mission,
the boy collapsed beneath an oak, his whole 

body one cramp. (But later the secret smile, ¹⁰
imagining Guinness there—the clock-men stunned!)
Twenty years gone, that race so vivid still, 

yet I can’t for the life of me recall the gun:¹³
who was it, or what, that made me start to run?

There is not too much imagery for setting here, but I was drawn to the boy’s desperation, his “heart yanking at its seams” in the midst of unremarkable circumstances. Mezzo Cammin is Italian for “Half Journey”. The title may be an allusion to Dante Alighieri’s La Divina Commedia, which opens with, “In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood with the right road lost” (translated). The poem opens with the speaker crossing “the center line”, with the line being a symbol for reaching the midpoint of life.

Most of this poem describes a flashback, as the speaker remembers his past but observes as an onlooker, addressing his younger self in third person. The poem is unstructured, with scattered rhymes that appear to have no order: “jeans” and “seams” in lines 4 and 6, as well as “gun” and “run” in lines 13 and 14. This randomness matches with the speaker’s confusion over his direction and purpose in his life.