Shotputters and discus throwers.

And if a person does not care to transfer those terms that he learned from lower and less worthy things to those sublime entities...

Saint Augustine

Cut down to size by distance, always consigned for everybody's safety to outer fields far from hurdlers, sprinters, vaulters, quartermilers who - unlike us who put the shot or spin the discus - disavow the soul's existence. Why else would they push their trimmed and sinewy corporeality 

against the grade-school lesson of parables? But we so mired by the bulk of flesh and muscle, forgoing assembly honors and applause to bow and crouch inside the lime-drawn circle that circumscribes our earthly life - we know that everything is only practice, imperfect imitation

of training loops eternally projected in locker rooms of the mind. For as the discus thrower pivots, triply, hugging the limits of his circle, as conscious of his former fouls, his current propensity as Augustine - he knows it is the finger's final flick that makes the discus soar,

all else just preparation. Just as the grunting shotputter knows, eyeing the sad arc of the cast iron ball, heavy and black as a soul full of the charred ballast of neophyte desire, that oafish humility and not swift grace is a proper stance for heaving that weight without weight, above all things that can be measured