Tilted
Arc
June
25 2018
As
you journey further and further north
— plodding
by foot
along
a line of longitude
that
stretches from pole to pole —
the
day steadily lengthens,
every
few steps
seconds
more.
Between
the first day of summer, and winter's depths
it's
as if you can actually sense
in
the heat
soaking
into your skin
and
the light
holding
back the dark
the
vast geometry
of
circling planets
in
their intricately choreographed dance;
in
the passage of time
the
measure of space.
Feel
yourself
an
infinitesimal speck
on
a constant patch of land
all
your senses tell you is flat,
on
a rapidly spinning sphere
too
massive to make sense of,
travelling
in its tilted arc
around
a yellow star.
Or,
you can simply sit,
leaning
back
in
the languorous warmth
as
your heavy eyes drift shut.
The
red glow behind your lids
the
penetrating heat,
the
insect buzz, a puff of breeze
the
sultry flush of sweat.
Thinking
that 6 months hence
you'd
be buried in snow;
a
Siberian mammoth, preserved on ice
until
the next big melt.
The
cycle of freeze and thaw,
of
ice age
and
interglacial.
Because
what goes around comes around.
As
planets revolve and rotate
stars
spin through space
and
galaxies majestically wheel.
A
clockwork universe
in
a perfectly balanced dance
of
distant attraction
and
invisible lines of force.
And
you
alive,
for this blink in time
on
flotsam earth.
I like the way this poem
moves in and out, and does so in both time and space: between days
and season and epochs; from the personal and circumscribed to the
unimaginably large. It starts small, and then – after the aperture
dilates and narrows and dilates again – ends in much the same
place.
I
think this reflects a theme I return to often: the idea of
humanity's insignificance in a cold indifferent universe. Which is
not a message of nihilism so much as one of humility. And which is
where I depart from both the religionists and the modernists:
instead of putting self-important man at the centre, I make us out as
marginal and transient.
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