The things you think about on clear winter nights

August 30, 2012

The things you think about on clear winter nights

A comet criss-crosses through a sky

studded with stars that shine

like city windows, like

sparks of electricity. 

Its hyperbolic trajectory traces

arcs through deep space, or maybe

it hurtles around suns

like an airplane around the earth,

like an electron around a nucleus.

You interstellar traveler,

do you ever get homesick?

I know you race on farther than the glimpse

we catch, faster than numbers race through wires,

or an electrical impulse across synapses in the brain.

Pulled on by gravity, or destiny,

blown on by solar winds,

comet:

I wonder,

do you ever long

for your cold nebula home?

If you could, would you ever return?

Or are you like us,

the planets,

the molecules,

wandering forever and yet

trapped by your routines:

your physics, your fate.

siren song

January 24, 2010

siren song

why do people come here, to our city?

with their gaudy cameras

and their alien language,

not caring to know the place

but just to visit here,

like a museum of a faraway land

except the sky is still the same.

I expect they still throw their coins

into the trevi fountain,

a constant stream of people going through

and through and through and

you never notice the faces that are gone

because there are so many more to replace them;

when they gape at the cathedrals,

I think they must tell themselves not to look too high,

or they would notice

that the sky is still the same. 

I suppose, then

that this need to escape – this wanderlust – is universal;

I’ve traveled too, experienced the whirlwind,

been part of the mindless, meaningless masses,

but I’ve always tried to settle down,

to stop the perpetual motion, the endless cycle,

and always,

it eventually strikes me (and kills me)

that the sky is still the same. 

it makes me wonder if that’s the answer to this great mystery;

if that’s why all the people feel the need to keep moving,

to keep going through and through and through,

because maybe they’re secretly afraid

that if they truly stop to look around

they’ll know that they can never really leave what they’ve left,

because the sky will always be the same.