And Tell Them What It's Like Here

July 14 2020

The traffic ebbs and flows

but never stops

on the multi-lane expressway.

Pinpoint cars

emerge from the far horizon,

the vanishing point

where lines of sight converge.

An endless stream of cars

appearing out of nowhere,

as if somehow conjured

out of nothing at all.

People going about the business

of their busy inscrutable lives,

doing who knows what

going who knows where

all times of day and night.

Two processions of cars

rocketing past each other

in a blast of wind and noise,

coming and going

as if their trips cancelled out.

Then shrinking into the distance

until they soon disappear

at opposite ends of the earth.

An inexhaustible river of cars

with their anonymous inhabitants

endlessly circling the planet,

as if forever trapped

on a Mobius strip of highway,

no terminus
rest-stop
or off-ramp.

As if our lives amounted

to zero sum.

As if there were no purpose to travelling,

and we could just as well

have called ahead

and told them what it's like here.

Leaving that long ribbon of concrete

baking in the sun.

Where deer will graze along the shoulders

which have gloriously overgrown.

Leathery old turtles

will lumber to a stop

to bask on baking blacktop.

And great armies of ants

will scurry on chemical trails

bearing impossible loads.

But we are not content to sit

quietly at home.

We are bustling, rushed, important

restlessly self-absorbed.

So we pass oncoming cars

eyes facing forward

enclosed in our bubble of glass,

going down the road

always heading somewhere else.

Hoping life will be better there
hoping to find ourselves.

A first reader was confused by the title. (maybe a first ...but not a sufficiently close reader!)

Here's my response:

A line in the poem. One I thought was key. Everyone going someplace someone else just vacated. Maybe it would make more sense if we just phoned ahead to each other and did each other's business! It reinforces the zero sum and infinite loop ideas. The sense of futile busyness.

Also, as a title, I like it because of the inscrutability and misdirection. Makes you want to read the poem to see what's up.

I added the final two lines several days after writing and posting this. (As well as the "restlessly" in what had previously been the closing stanza.)  I wanted to get at the fallacy of the "geographic cure":  this idea that if we change where we are, if we keep moving on, we will satisfy some unmet need or find a way to heal. That we can reinvent ourselves simply by going outward and  changing our surroundings, rather than looking inward and changing ourselves. And how being in motion can fool us into thinking we are making progress.