Poem with Partial History of the Deadlift

My husband loves the part in Les Misérables 
when a man pinned under the wheels of a cart

is begging for help, but no one in that busy
marketplace moves to rescue him except

for the ex-convict Jean Valjean AKA Mayor
Madeleine. Valjean crawls beneath the cart 

and with nearly superhuman strength lifts it 
to free the man. In my opinion this counts

as a deadlift, which according to all 
the dictionaries I've consulted 

literally means the lifting of a dead 
weight from the ground, oftentimes from 

a squatting position. Javert, the town's 
police inspector, is instantly reminded 

of the only man he's ever seen do such 
a thing— a prisoner who can't quite shuck 

his thieving habits and is on the lam again 
soon after his release. Then there's the stone 

that archaeologists unearthed from ancient 
times in Olympia, Greece, with a handprint 

on it and the inscription "Bybon, son of Phola, 
lifted me over his head with one hand." I don't  

know anything else about Bybon, but this week I read 
on social media a story about a seven-year-old boy 

of Filipino and Hmong ancestry who's training
to deadlift three times his weight; he says he 

owes his strength to his favorite food, lumpia. 
When I tell this story to a new poet friend, 

he thinks I'm talking about the cumbia, a dance 
originating in Panama or Colombia, in which 

partners step back then front, front then back, 
while rhythmically swaying hips and arms to mild 

percussion. To dance passably well you can't 
drag your feet around like stones, so there's that 

to be said about a kind of similarity to what 
the weightlifter aims to do: hoist a weight even 

for a few clean seconds, in seeming defiance of 
the gravity that keeps wanting to take us down 

to our usual abject position in mud and muck. 
So we want to wrap our hands around the merest 

gleam of silver, to use our body as both boulder
and lever until it comes loose in one smooth move.