Travel does not broaden the mind*
*quoted from G.K. Chesterton

In cars and carriages, or in houses on slab or legs,
we turn, we journey
on our owners-rings, coy or cocky, with oil-power
or our own plodding,
we tinsel the inchworm of our way, riding over
local earths...
Correcting to market grooves, skinning up a down...
Contourists!
buttocking the bob of our weight like standup
knock-about toys

We pass, satisfied with our results, amazed at us
in otherplaces,
dressing ourselves in the dish of our own horizon,
fancying, climbing
up the cornflake scree of choices, tidbits, deferments,
denying
our dread of the earliest fear: we are lost.

The slope behind
us rises, the slope before us rises like the sides, we are at
the centre
of the bowl of our own limits of sight, where
we insist
on striking out, in strokes we believe will
breast
the other side, sure that will
save us.

We decide over the brink of our dish
we fall off
the selfsame world, And then who would
we be?
"There Be Dragons" - as it says on
old maps
The earth is not only flat, but
concave
Deep abysses gape, you can fall off
the edge

death untimely, Death! Nighthorses bolt
in frenzies
that will unsaddle us from ourselves,
be thrown
into traps and funnels where holepassing
snakes
writhe terribly with green blinklight that
knows us
like a spot of seeking behind our recesses,
down
Out there we are unknown to ourselves,
so insist:
"Don't go out of the bowl!"

So, we: we make a force, buckle earth into
our own shape,
bowl out our own pitch. That bowl buckles
the landscape
as we go, so it is us that sees and not seeing that
comes to us,
like an eye looking out the thin end of
a funnel...
our peepers scoop a socket out of the whole compass
to empty
the unseen out of mind, and then we screw
a piggy squint
at the wholus-bolus and ask: "What?
How could it be?"

© Wayne David Knoll - January 1996
Nullarbor Plain, Western Australia