“When people move-when they travel-they look at where
they come from,
not where they’re going.” -Martin Amis, *Time’s Arrow
*
Let us now take this chance
to praise those dancing demons
of ambition,
whose feigned clairvoyance
of fortune
and exactitudes of fame
burn as the smell of smokey fallow
to the new-retired mare.
Travel, and all its takeoffs,
all its energies in skidding towards
an unopposed truth, makes its mince
by outlining all we ever look for
but leaving the chalkdust prints
of what we fail, at first, to find.
Yes, spaces contrary to the familiar exist
Carnivore cities of grind and result
cascaded above the floodwalls that save
the vagrant’s midnight search.
Coastal clearings of pacific civs,
best kept secrets where trees are still planted
and further kinds of nowhere that you never expected
to simmer with all the prospects of bored and implacable youths
who pine to efface the status quo, which ,after all, is quite the average,
is quite like “HOME”
Though I suppose, we eventually find
whatever space can be considered our own
when everyone grows up and stops
pretending they read Burroughs,
have a lot more going on, or are a lot less busy
than they make out over infrequent coffee meetings
(where it is also admitted
that they brew their own hot beverages,
or tell their own jokes)
Somewhere in the near-space continuum where Travel has
become for us what essentially differentiates
the commonplace in nature from
that most human of neuroses,
the acceptance of a willing to improve the conditional.
And so to Ambition, and its fiery fops who make us refute
steadiness, accountability, the routine of the resolute
Who let our ships of sanctimony attack
implied with the luxury of steering back.
