Flexing My Sestinas

For seven months now, this exercise class at 8 a.m. Forty minutes. Tedious – one small rip across the smooth fiber of morning. I don’t want to be skinny, just full of energy and run. No stress – ready to tackle a maxed-out world. But this workout’s a whole new world – squats and shoulder presses, exercise the abs, set the biceps aching. Stress and then release – it’s just so tedious, balancing myself among these skinny ladies with their hair of thinning fiber – they make jokes about breakfast fiber and creating a heart-healthy world out of bran. I’d give them the skinny on multigrain breads, but exercise takes away my breath. What’s tedious as counting grams? A pound of stress for every ounce of fat. Do birds stress over diet, their daily intake of fiber? And now hill-climbers – so tedious, arms out of synch with legs. A world of hills out there to climb. Exercise my thirst for waterfalls, a skinny slicing wind off the summit. Skinny is as skinny swims. There is no stress where there’s a will. Is it exercise to conquer switchbacks by sheer fiber, gain that peak-vista over the world? Dip toes in a mountain lake – tedious? Of course this fitness class is tedious. How many years. An unnamed, skinny muscle to push me way past my world, my body. Tension and release, stress and giving it up. Mind is its own fiber; and it feeds, they say, on exercise. If life is tedious, and full of stress, I’ll skinny-dip in the flow and fiber of a rushing world and call it exercise.