Travel is Supposed to Be Luxury? Right?
Or maybe not. Maybe business travel is more like space travel than we usually admit. Maybe it’s like heading off for the moon and then standing there, at the edge of a crater.
Looking back at what we once were, and yet will, perhaps, become again.
That’s the strangeness of travel. Business travel, especially. The tourist can pass through as a sort of oddity to the local flora and fauna. But the business person — he or she has something of value (supposedly, anyway) to offer to the natives of any given planet / continent / locale. And so no matter how odd or alien the visitor seems — new place, new planet, new moon — the native accepts her long enough to find out what the next step should be.
The poem of the week this week is Standing on the Moon, a sonnet. Not a Petrarchian sonnet, despite the two-stanza, eight lines-six lines, format. And without the rhyme, which is difficult for me — and other modern minds — to work within if you aren’t writing in rhyme-rich Italian, you can’t really have a Petrarchian sonnet. But the 8-6 split of the 14 lines into point and counterpoint? That makes it, at least, a cousin to the Petrarchian sonnet.
I think the most interesting part of travel — holiday or business, it doesn’t matter — is that for a moment, somewhere along the trip, the traveler knows she is somehow outside it all. It doesn’t matter if it is the food, the climate, the time zone. Whatever makes the truth come home, it is still recognized. One way or another.
The traveler knows she can’t quite fit in. No matter where.
She knows she’s an alien. As alien as any little green Martian.
And when she wants to return home? The same problem.
She’s been outside the norm.
Coming back to whatever passes for normal, no one really quite fits. Close, maybe. But not quite.
Standing on the Moon
Outside Earth all edges seem thinner. Light really does
bend around bodies and deceptive spaces,
heavy with doubt. Earth itself is consonant with puzzle
and longing. Radiation pierces you, carves highways,
runs you through, washes you away, bit by bit. You
trace a jagged coastline, Chile to Peru. Is there a North
in space? Of course not, you whisper. Bewilderment
whispers back: all magnetic lines mark relevance.
Millennia, Earth gouged its orbit through the
not-quite-emptiness. It continues same after same. Until,
the day it becomes, simply, different. Your now is too short
to know this. Your existence may not be calculable
by any exoplanet geek wanting to witness
that split second you stood outside all that sustained you.
If you enjoyed Standing on the Moon
You’ll find more of my poems on this blog or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves, which is available in both ebook and print. Missed a poem of the week? Links to prior weeks are on this page.
As always, comments are welcome. Feel free to tell me what you think. Can’t understand what I meant? Think it’s great or just mediocre? That’s ok. Art is always best evaluated in the eye of the beholder.
Have a great week!