The Break
As we brush through spaces—
Cosmic riots, crowded bars—
Where centrifugal
Powers force even stars
To lose their places,
Some shear in the air,
Some disconnect, blurs
The sheer crush,
The astronomical
Gush of numbers
With the lull
Of summer, the hush
Of human seas:
Tidal races which need
To drift slowly, to rush,
Not like heavenly bodies,
But at their own speed.
March 5th, 7th & 30th, 2021
Kaiholu
Explanation
What life waits to give us isn’t skyscrapers, or nations. Life waits to give us a leaf pile, the note of a bird at sunrise. Simple gifts. Not the roar of the stadium.
The universe rushes past us as we rotate at a thousand miles an hour, as the earth circles the sun at 67,000 miles an hour, as the solar system speeds through space at 448,000 miles per hour. Our galaxy itself, the Milky Way, travels at 1.3 million miles an hour. Wherever it’s going, it’ll never get there.
And yet a leaf falls, floating randomly sideways, untouched by anything other than a breath of wind. Our speed, our real numbers, mean nothing to it.
A break is an ocean breakwall or jetty, an eye of a storm surrounded by eyewalls, a wind shear or vortex that changes the dynamics of otherwise benign air currents, but mainly it’s the gap between what we do for love and what we do for practicalities.
I wrote it as a coda to my essay “In Dreams,” named after Delmore Schwartz’s short story. My essay is about our own beliefs in art for art’s sake. Our generation may have been the last to believe in romantic notions of pursuing a dream, rather than a career or a salary. I would put a slow, lazy beach summer ahead of the return to business in the fall. I am probably a bad example to youth everywhere.
Races are human races, the rat race run at the speed of celestial objects, but also a current in the sea or a tidal breach through the mouth of an estuary.