Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

THE TRAVELING CURMUDGEON,
SOMEWHERE NEAR PERUGIA

There’s so much to see wher­ever you go,
Why else would so many spend
So much dough get­ting to Europe
And back with so many photos?

I haven’t seen all that much,
Or maybe I’ve looked at the wrong things
In the wrong way. The churches, for instance,
Leave me cold, their stone arma­ture
Ascend­ing into gloomy regions of shadow
And silence. Nor are the foun­tains remark­able,
Except that they smell awfully funny,
Like overused and sel­dom cleaned
Pub­lic restrooms smell funny
In a sub­ter­ranean sort of way.

Then there are the peo­ple,
Lit­er­ally throngs of them, trav­el­ers
And natives alike vying nois­ily
For table, cab and tram, or a halfway decent
Rate of exchange. Clam­orous rather than
Glam­orous, they eye each other sur­rep­ti­tiously
While suf­fer­ing var­i­ous affronts
To cher­ished ideals and per­sonal beliefs
Sound­ing in his­tory, or what might be called
The mys­tery of mis­taken impressions.

I’ve been dead tired more often than not,
Tired of look­ing for places that seem
Always hid­den in a fold of my map,
Or folded in a map of the hid­den.
Some­one once said (it may have been me
After one two many glasses of Fras­cati),
That we travel to find our­selves
And in the process sink effort­lessly
Beneath the sur­face of things,
Another voice or vista always call­ing,
Another way of see­ing the world always
Pos­si­ble, not fixed in time and def­i­nite
Like death and axes,
But nei­ther ephemeral either.
It’s more a state of mind we try,
A tran­si­tion as it were, where who we are
And whence we came is never as impor­tant
As where we want to go tomor­row,
And the next day, and the next day after that,
Tick­ets in hand, cam­era ready.

–by R. Diguette

THE GEOGRAPHY LESSON, or,
CRAM’S IMPERIAL WORLD GLOBE

That’s the world up there
on the shelf, I told my son,
rounder of course than it really is,
for the world is out of round,

(which is some­thing you may not know)

and a good deal smaller as well,
made from some kind of card­board,
I guess, cov­ered with curi­ous shapes
in bright col­ors, a/​k/​a countries.

And you may have noticed that
the George F. Cram Com­pany, which
made that world, likes topog­ra­phy;
pass your hand over the Adirondacks

and feel for a moment like God,
or if not like God then Odin, who,
leg­end has it fash­ioned the world
from the giant Ymir’s loins,

(which is some­thing you may not need to know)

or some­what closer to home, like Paul
Bun­yan, who with his blue ox Babe
left giant foot­prints that are
the lakes we swim and fish in

–by R. Diguette

Rick Diguette writes poetry and fiction.

Copy­right ©Spin­oz­ablue and Rick Diguette 2008.

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