All Straight Lines
July 1 2014


In the rear view mirror
the city recedes.
I ascend into cooler air, a soothing darkness,
the island of heat
well behind.
Just imagine
a million people
converging on a point of light.

Where every person
is her own small universe.
Colliding like stars
that have strayed too close,
torn apart
by tidal forces.
Or passing through, uncannily,
retinues of planets
drifting past
untouched.
Or blissfully oblivious
that extra-terrestrial life
even exists,
so tightly contained
in her own gravitational pull.

The sky glows
against high amorphous cloud;
in the middle of nowhere
civilization
declaring itself.
Even in the clear
there is a lightening,
where the celestial void
is not quite so black.

The curve of the earth
has come between us,
and I am a rogue planet
far from the gravity
of its native star.
Who knew
that there was no true vacuum
in outer space.
Or that all straight lines
are really curved,
so it only feels
like escape.

The car is idling
on the sloping shoulder
of a gravel road.
The cone of my high beams
is alive with moths,
fireflies
pierce the dark.

I'm reworking a lot of old tropes here. There is escape, flight, freedom ...the myth of the open road ...the idea of alienation from city life, while being renewed by nature -- or, even more, a connotation of misanthropy ...the astronomical metaphor ...and the viewpoint that telescopes from microcosm to cosmological. There is also a theme of light and dark, both observed and felt.

So, as is often the case, it's a poem I've written before. And I'll probably write again. Which is OK, plagiarizing myself. Because it's all process, not product; and in the end, I may actually write the one great poem that's worth keeping. Or at least get better each time out: experiments in variation on a theme. At best, it keeps me from over-writing: having said it before, I feel less pressure to get everything out; and having said it before, I'm better able to distil it down to the essentials; and having said it before, it's easier to avoid falling in love with a word and only using it for its own sake. Still, like most other poems I've written, I feel this one has too many words. This seems an essential paradox of poetry: to be in love with words, yet have to mercilessly cut and slash. Pulled in both directions, I most often surrender to love!

I dislike adverbs, and assiduously avoid them ("assiduously" and "mercilessly" notwithstanding!) As I've said before, an adverb is a lazy way of telling it, when showing it is far more powerful. And they strike me as patronizing: if the context doesn't allow the reader to infer that something happened "suddenly", you're either writing poorly, or not giving the reader enough credit. These are two cardinal rules of poetry, and probably all good writing: show, don't tell; and trust the reader. So my use of the word "uncannily" -- and at the end of a line, and highlighted by the preceding comma, no less -- may seem uncharacteristic. But I think it's a great word, and works really well here. So, as in all rules, they are proven by the exception.

I used "her" instead of "his" (twice, in the 2nd stanza) not out of political correctness, but because that pronoun works better. I think it gives the poem a kind of authenticity, a hint at something autobiographical -- especially when the reader knows the author is a man. But it also works better in general: while "his" is glossed over as the impersonal pronoun, "her" catches one off-guard, and immediately evokes something more singular, more personal.