We sit over the end of a comfortable dinner and discuss the state of all things.
A study has shown that exceptions to popular proverbs, laws of physics, rules of thumb, common knowledge, sensible notions, and given assumptions are becoming more and more the norm. Geometry is shifting. Angles, never before provably trisected, now regularly fall into neat triplet piles. Shelter is losing its place in the hierarchy of needs. Soon, it will be forgotten entirely.
It appears to knowledgeable observers that knowledgeable observation is becoming a lost art, akin to alchemy and divination by gut of pigeon and pig. There are suspected reserves, not measurable, of container ships laden with butterflies who are waiting to change the world’s climate. If there are ghosts, they wear visors and lean deep into ledgers with our very dimensionality at their calculating mercy. Nymphs, fauns, and revenant Pan himself establish Websites and collect scores of followers, who fondle tokens of their avatars while staring at doorknobs, thinking of the potential for rattling entry in the dark.
My love, this world is slipping away into an immeasurable mystery. Nothing we have known to be true is certain. We should sleep with our eyes open now, scanning the dark for signals. And then, when we think we have seen enough, it will be up to us how we choose to live. What we choose to measure. What we count on. How we refine and define the terms.
So if a butterfly comes close, hold your breath. If a god possesses you, count rapidly to one hundred seventeen. If the door rattles in the night, we’ll cast a cold eye on it, pass through the walls, and escape, carrying nothing with us. Not even the meaning of love, or of home. We will come back for them later, or make new ones while holding up our thumbs to plead for rides to new places.
Our thumbs — once the measure of punishment, as the story goes — will become our transport. We will have to depend on each other to carry each other.
Eventually, we’ll forget the old origin of the term and say: a “rule of thumb” measures the distance you were carried before you decided you could live where and how you are living right now, and is only fixed until the next departure.
And then we’ll say: Love is the vector of human travel. We’ll say: Home is the fare humans paid for the transport.
And when we say human, what we will see is aluminum pie plates — when full, flaky and soft centered; when empty, easily flung into flight, shining as they fly.
We polish off the last of the dessert, and leave the clean up for tomorrow as we hurry off to bed.
Tags: poems, poetry, meditations, prose-poems
