The Second Wind

When the first surge of momentum had exhausted its reserves
and the body and the operation both ran out of nerve,
I sat down in the middle of the distance I had covered
and found inside the fatigue a second wind I had not discovered.

The second wind does not arrive until you push past
where you wanted,
past the point where comfort says you have already been haunted
by enough of the difficult, enough of the demanding,
the second wind is waiting for the man who keeps advancing.

There is no signal that it comes, no warning it approaches,
you are stumbling through the late stretch
when it finally coaches
something in the deeper reserve you did not know you carried,
and suddenly the weight you bore feels less than
where you tarried.

I have lived the second wind in business
and in personal endeavor,
every time I thought the limit was the limit, I found clever
reserves of forward motion that the early miles had buried
underneath the difficulty that I almost had not carried.