2 Million Miles - Feb 16 2021

 

2 Million Miles

Feb 16 2021

There are several blocks

between my place and yours.

I walk briskly

through the vacant streets of night

lost in thoughts of you.

Oblivious to weather

and barging through the reds,

looking neither right nor left

as I focus straight ahead.

The street lamps glare,

illuminating the way

but hurting my eyes,

small pools

of bleached-out light

strung loosely together

by grim stretches of murk.

A short distance

compared to the drive we took

on our long road-trip west,

the white line a blur

and the wind in your hair

in a shared world of two.

And then how far

we travelled in our heads,

imagining the future

as if time would never end

and space did not exist.

And all along

the earth was circling the sun

covering 2 million miles a day.

How fast we moved

and how slow it seemed

when we thought it would last forever,

walking as fast as I can

but not nearly fast enough.

Which is how it is, when you're circling;

soon back where you began

and having to start fresh.

The page turned

and the old calendar tossed.

Making fervent resolutions

to usher in the new.

Here's another poem inspired by a quote. I'm currently reading an utterly fascinating book called What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses: Updated and Expanded Edition (by Daniel Chamovitz), and a chapter began with this from John Muir (who was a famous and influential Scottish-American naturalist around the turn of the 20^th century):

“I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, travelling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!”

The “two million miles a day” snagged my attention. Here, by viewing the planet through an astronomical lens, what we think of as the critical difference between our mobility and a plant's rootedness is reduced to insignificance. And in purely human terms, the implication seems to be that however far or fast we move, however frenetic to either escape or come together, our efforts and concerns are petty, dwarfed to nothingness by the vast distance we cover anyway, no matter what: a perspective on human affairs that brings to bear a becoming humility. Which I guess is always going to be true when looking down on earth from outer space.

Here, the end of an affair. But the beginning of another. So at least the poem concludes on a positive note, despite the depressing narrative. The earth's revolution around the sun, after all, is as much about circling as it is about distance: about revolving, getting caught in loops, endlessly repeating; but also about returning to the beginning and getting to start over -- there is always another day, another year, a calendar page to turn.

The 3^rd stanza might strike the reader as an unnecessary tangent. But I think it serves to foreshadow: the the hurt, the murk, the grim stretches. And the 5^th does some of this work as well: the idea of fantasy and illusion, both of which – since they are both products of magical thinking – inevitably set us up for disillusion and disappointment.