Monastery burial-ground under snow, by Casper David Friedrich. 1818.
(Destroyed WWII)
Millions of people drive during the holidays. To and from. Rarely just to. I drove through ice and torrents of rain south, then through a cloudy day north and into white mist and fog. The drive, something about the drive, and the time, and the strangeness of endlessly moving forward in relative terms, led to the poem below, and a work in progress:
The Trip
The vanishing point teases us
Tempts us with the power
Of horizons
So I tried
I really tried to outrun it
What exists beyond the V?
What exists?
How does it stay just beyond our reach
As we hurtle forward like a car?
Can we go beyond the center of the sky?
Can we trick what vanishes
Into the next phase
The next rationale?
I hurtle onward like a car
Hurtling through enclosed gray air
Through tunnels of trees
Evergreens
Not just like
Exactly like a car barreling down
A tunnel of Nature
Her children shooting up through
The white like guardians of growth
Like sentries stopping our wanderlust
Through the remnant of the great snow
Of 2009
Starting south moving north
From brown grassy shoulders
To white shoulders rising like
The presence of all color
Like ghosts dancing
Ice elated
Like white crows so thick they
Can't herald death anymore
They just hover
Abandoned
Laughing
There is something mesmerizing behind the wheel
Going 75 the relativity of speed
The slowness of it all and the hurtling
Sense all at once
Looking for the next
And the next
And the next
-- by Douglas Pinson
You tap into a cool idiom, that is to say hot and cold, impersonal and personal, that poets very recently have forgotten about. Thus: your idiom establishes a relativity to this other idiom and thereby strengthens the real, or emotional force, of events within and without the poem. The italicized “exactly” in turn cuts across the aspect of the relative with even more directness and appeal.
There is something very strange about driving, especially in a fairly straight line, on and on and on. Strange that if you slow down to a certain point, you think you’re crawling, then you look at the speedometer and you see 60 miles an hour.
I’ve been doing it forever, but every now and then, it strikes me as quite bizarre. It also reminds me of the difference in our worlds and the worlds of yesteryear. Tess walked for miles and thought she left one world for the next. I travel further each day just to go to work and think it’s all the same.
Good reference to Hardy, favorite novelist and poet, and genuine all the way, as sublime sufferer, delver into sympathies. I was thinking also of John Hawkes, that idiom.
If the journey is to or from a place where there is/was love, interest, and beating hearts that beat better because you were there/are on your way, than the “hurtling” is worth it.
Keep on…