Curved Air

Spin the world on its axis. On its mahogany table,

The slightest touch will turn a globe of antique wood.

Spin it with the sweep of a hand: an idle gesture 

While contemplating other aspects of the day.

Spin it and then go; there are better things 

To be done. Meanwhile the entire planet turns.

Coffee at ten in a salubrious café; lunch with an old friend; 

A casual hour spent debating the merits of this or that;

Work of importance, not arduous, remunerated 

In the style to which we are accustomed.

The decisions of a day like this seem to have no echoes. 

Pedestrian as a well-presented menu; 

Inconsequential as our choice of courses.

Sky folds over the city.

Going home, anyone with imagination

Might see it as an occlusion lifting

Yesterday’s weather to heaven;

Or the same sky unfolding is broken cloud

Tearing itself apart with unimagined winds:

Cyclonic, convective, katabatic;

Distant hills and deserts whirl them across our days,

Send their countless names, Bora, Chinook, 

Fohn, Harmattan, Mistral, Sirocco, 

Whispering in our ears.

But all skies remain steady, cloud moving beneath,

And the earth, spinning under its own weight, stirs

Storm and zephyr, sets the sun to shine, blanks

Our faces in mist, draws down the rain.

Spin the world and the flattened hand imprints 

The lacquered surface just as, on the planet’s face, 

Human imprint has left its own red weal. 

Walk casually to another meeting, sit

In comfortable chairs to conclude some business,

Civilized and well and willfully ignorant

Of the planet turning or the rawness our being here

Brings upon it: a blight on land and sea and air

The crafted globe, with every country marked, smashes

To the floor. Its wreck remains, in all ways, man-made. 

Under a lowering sky, in this place where weather 

Approaches climate, cause and effect are little understood; 

So much has been done, as always, by our hands. 

No sense denying it any longer. 

The rain now falling is warm; 

The water we drown in,

Warmer still.

© BH, 2016

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What I mean by this is something like ‘what goes around, comes around’. Here we are, getting on with our lives and casually ignoring what devastation we leave in the wake of it. The globe? A symbol (and we have many of them) of the world in miniature. We fail to see the symbolic and believe it to be representational. The world-artefact is to remind us of the real world not to be a pleasant representation of our clever understanding of it.

Anyway, so it goes. And we go too: oblivious to the elements, skies and winds; oblivious to our own strength, oblivious to the fate we preordain for ourselves.

The reference to the 1970s band is intentional but very oblique.