Traveler

"Light can be obscured, but you can't hide gravity,"
--Dr. Heath Jones.


Preoccupied – no, not like a stone, yes, like a river – silent or singing;
on thoughts that convey him like Solomon’s great green carpet, he goes.

His track is a Silk Road, rippling along a steady dimension
where travel is light and payload only pulse and breath,

There are days, just past Asimov or Heinlein that drift among Ursa Major and her cub.
There are nebulae, he climbs, of brain chatter, accreted like caddisfly cases.

There is current that carries him through blustery rhetoric,
then breaks into A minor 7th and eddies in with a morning crossword.

And there is gravity in memory that tugs his stories back to tighter orbits,
dragging tails full of dust, salting old family constellations.

He believes in angels, makes sadness the seraph of wind and rain;
makes joy the blessed kin of April sunrises and fireflies.

Sometimes he broods with the sagging fruit of summer,
gathering ballast from pages of Frazier and Foote.

Then as faithful as Persephone to her dark husband’s bed,
he returns to the Cherokee and General Lee’s Army.

Sings to bear and Wayah Mountain, smells the blood of Pickett’s Charge.
feels the sting of frost and nettles on his tongue. He confides,

How sweet to be disturbed with mental commotion soundless as snow -
how savory to be satisfied with what meets deep desire.

how fortunate to find Gödel’s Cone of Light - to explore
the Seven Sermons to the Dead*- to ride them like Zeno’s arrow -
ever on along a melon slice of space and be home.


* Septem Sermones ad Mortuos by Carl Jung 1916