Celestial Navigation
2010.12.10
I am thinking about the space/time continuum, about patterns, about imaginary travel;
the layered paths of airplanes over time,
the singular blip of a cellphone on a GPS tracker.
Over and over I trace the worn footpath that leads to the watering hole, the ferry landing, the bridge.
Exciting things happen at the edges.
Travel, migration, movement of forces,
waves of cultures, ever widening,
circling around home, the hunting ground, the place where there is food.
The map is an abstract concept or a plan
or a pattern of information,
or depiction of a concrete physical place in two dimensions,
or as a point on a globe.
I think about the word confluence;
A flowing together of 2 or more streams; the point of juncture of such streams;
The continued stream formed by that juncture;
A gathering or meeting together at one point.
I think of atmospheric forces, pulling, pushing, merging,
energizing and changing themselves.
Ancient geology.
The fugitive and amorphous marks of time.
I hardly dare to look up.
But I must,
at the dark cup of space arching over head, the place of mythology and the elements,
where light hurdles itself as the sigh of a dead pinprick star no more substantial than
the moonbeam under my eyelid.
In some other dimension this world has moved off it's foundation a fraction of a shift.
As I wave my arm there are other arms fanning, beckoning a wing beat away,
With something heavy tipped from my fingers, hauling ass away to make it's mark.