Shift
Feb 25 2014

I sit
on the water's edge,
the setting sun

almost liquid.
The dark horizon

splits it in a jagged arc,
wider and wider, as the mountains rise
until it's bursting big.
Where it seems to pause, shimmering,
a brilliant orange gold.
And then, will quickly thin
pinching-off,

an after image

of light.

The trick
is to shift

to distant eyes.
Where the sun
is eternally fixed,
the absolute centre.
And the mountains and oceans
in all their ponderous grace
are wheeling through space,
steady
unstoppable.

My grip, tightening,
feeling queasy, inconceivably small.
I am a spinning child, who suddenly stops
his footing unsure.
A bareback rider
on a massive earth,
as the planet beneath me
soundlessly turns.


I've written something like this before, where I tried to create this sense of the music of the spheres, of a clockwork universe of massive ponderous bodies following unstoppable trajectories. And in which man is insignificant, inconsequential. I recall something about lying on my back looking up at the night sky, and having the sensation of riding the planet, of watching the horizon overtake the stars.

As I've said before, I often get the impression I'm writing variations on the same poem over and over again. So it goes.

This version came out of an image in a movie I just saw. Before Midnight is the third in a series that includes Before Sunset and Before Sunrise: the rare sequel that is better than the original (not an easy task, since in this case the original was brilliant!) It stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, and is a real writer's movie, full of pitch-perfect dialogue, subtle truths. (Most movies these days are not "writer's" movies; they're director's movies, or special effects flicks.) The two are on vacation in Greece, sitting on a patio at the edge of the Mediterranean and watching the sun set. They're backlit, and the camera draws back and back (or maybe it doesn't, but this is how I seem to remember it). So the impression is of their smallness in a vast landscape. And when I followed their eyes to the moving sun, bisected by the jagged horizon of weathered peaks, my perception suddenly shifted, and I had the impression of this massive planet wheeling through space, carrying them on its back and leaving the sun behind. This is the image I try to recreate in the poem.