Young Girl at the Olympics

Like a salmon leaping upstream to spawn,
Her sleek body unfurls
Impeccably through the absence
Of matter.  She dislodges light
Particles, her ponytail shimmers
Beauty, beauty of form, and oh God yes!
She vaults the height of a house;
Spins, sausage rolls, arms squeezed tight
Over scarce breasts.  One, two, three
Seconds to be shot out of the cannon
Of her own will, then she
Lands, barely a wobble, that’s
One-tenth of a point off—having nudged
The laws of physics with the naked tip
Of her arched foot, this little doll
With the seriously dented triceps,
Furrowed brow,
All sinew and suppressed
Hormones, whittled to a nervy lust,

Pants in triumph.  The second
Jump’s not so good, her lip trembles,
Just a child, after all.
But what an engineered
Apotheosis of the human,
All that compressed
In ninety pounds of genius meat and joy,
Honed magnet, anti-gravity device.
Little salmon, like the last
Of your kind
In our dying time, do you leap
Even higher as if to say No matter what
We’ve done to the earth,
Look how our souls
Made flesh can flame for a moment,
See how we almost fly?