Poem: 10,000 Ft Above
Flying above our patchwork country
I find myself wondering
How did this world get remade into so many squares?
How were the rounded eges turned at sharp angles
Squared off and split by geometrical necessity
Turned to tesselated patterns
And laid, boldly, over the lazy curves of the landscape?
Was it man who made it so?
[Plowing in straight lines
And living in wooden boxes
Laying streets in cardinal directions
To point the way for lives that travel unbroken roads
From a hospital to a cemetary
On opposite ends of a square community]
Did he realize that he was murdering the curve of nature?
But water breaks his rule
In the midst of rectangles and ninety degree logic
It meanders
Takes no line but the path of least resistance
The shape offered by the land
Furrows dug by time
Plowed by microscopic hands
Multiplied by the immensity of repetition
Water drops that smoothed stone
Conquered the sharp sides and hard lines
To run diagonally
Sinuously
Languidly draped across its bed of earth
Like every dip and hollow of a woman’s frame
Who sleeps bare and unashamed
Arms and legs in slanting repose
A subtle sneer to the square bedframe
And to whom love will be made
In spreading moments and angled penetrations
In liquid immersions that remind us why all rivers are feminine
Why all curves are natural to mothers of the land
Why men plow in straight lines
But still water their fields with the streams that obey neither column nor row
Why birth and death
In straight lines conceived
Come roundabout and at us sideways
Carving unexpected paths
In the same stone block of time
Shared by the myriad square builders
Since the moment the first man looked at the curve of a hill
And saw the straight spine of progress poking through
Copyright 2006, Elijah Hubbard
I find myself wondering
How did this world get remade into so many squares?
How were the rounded eges turned at sharp angles
Squared off and split by geometrical necessity
Turned to tesselated patterns
And laid, boldly, over the lazy curves of the landscape?
Was it man who made it so?
[Plowing in straight lines
And living in wooden boxes
Laying streets in cardinal directions
To point the way for lives that travel unbroken roads
From a hospital to a cemetary
On opposite ends of a square community]
Did he realize that he was murdering the curve of nature?
But water breaks his rule
In the midst of rectangles and ninety degree logic
It meanders
Takes no line but the path of least resistance
The shape offered by the land
Furrows dug by time
Plowed by microscopic hands
Multiplied by the immensity of repetition
Water drops that smoothed stone
Conquered the sharp sides and hard lines
To run diagonally
Sinuously
Languidly draped across its bed of earth
Like every dip and hollow of a woman’s frame
Who sleeps bare and unashamed
Arms and legs in slanting repose
A subtle sneer to the square bedframe
And to whom love will be made
In spreading moments and angled penetrations
In liquid immersions that remind us why all rivers are feminine
Why all curves are natural to mothers of the land
Why men plow in straight lines
But still water their fields with the streams that obey neither column nor row
Why birth and death
In straight lines conceived
Come roundabout and at us sideways
Carving unexpected paths
In the same stone block of time
Shared by the myriad square builders
Since the moment the first man looked at the curve of a hill
And saw the straight spine of progress poking through
Copyright 2006, Elijah Hubbard
posted by Elijah at 9:12 PM
0 comments
