The car crossed another invisible boundary.
You may call all boundaries arbitrary. Indeed
They are if they’re named, if they’re drawn
On the air, if they’re distinguished from all
The imagined unbounded spacetime around,
On either side of each all-important, invented
Line. But consider that there were never
Any anywheres weren’t in fact wall-to-wall
Unbroken expanses of infinitesimally thin,
Impenetrably densely packed boundaries. Try
To divide the arbitrary itself from the given.
Try to defend that boundary confidently.
There is no actual discontinuity at any time
And if there were, that would be the end,
And yet there is only discontinuity anywhere.
The car was in Utah and then in Idaho.
The car moved through the moving air,
Continuously auto-generating its discontinuity
Everywhere. There was a fine shawl of snow
On the dusty green slopes. There were banks
Of old memories from many earlier passes
Through what could only have been, no longer,
Through what could only be the almost here.
There was no stopping, no stopping
The seamlessly becoming other pasts made
Presents as pasts becoming absent there.
Ravens picked at the occasional carcass
Of a passing, pasturing, long past deer.
The car pulled into a rest stop and the rush
Of the wind around it was the sound
Of carrying on without it as it rusted there.
“Welcome to Malad, Where Idaho Begins!”
Read the slowly fading, peeling billboard
For Malad City, named for a passing malady
Among those murderous trappers, the mountain
Men once passed through canyons almost here.
You can’t answer this, my cosmic physicist.
How is it there is always difference in the stillest,
Smallest voice of a momentary indifference?
Only one word, the absurdist cleave, can,
Meaning simultaneously to and away, begin
To indicate how that day devoured a trace of car
In passing that, in passing, devoured the very day.
No comments:
Post a Comment