Wheeling Careless Blinding Night

Time is a cliff, off of whose escapement we fall into sleep. At the bottom of the cliff is the inferno of lethe, or unconsciousness. We travel through this limbo on the chariot of the underworld until we emerge the next morning into the conscious paradise of the earth’s surface. This at least is what the Egyptians thought.

Clocks keep watch over our nightmares, those monsters which romp through the underworld, or Hades.

The rotation of the world is the face of our clock, and wind and ocean are its hands. We briefly believe that time is in our hands, that we are the horologers, the merchants of bejeweled time pieces. The most well-known watch companies eventually go out of business. Even before digital watches, clocks on cell phones, computers, and iPads, fashions in watches change.

Time is a function of the rotation of the earth; over a long period, the nodes, or poles, of the top that is the earth precess, the way the mast of a ship pitches and yaws, changing the orientation of the rotation and affecting the duration of time, the position of stars relative to the degrees of ellipsis we use to locate them, and other aspects of chronology. Earth pitches because it is fat at the equator, thus it wobbles a bit on its axis.

We are blinded to reality by our dependence on the timing of seasons. Concepts of time are accurate in our small world, but vastly aberrant on a larger, cosmic scale. The solar system travels at 514,000 miles an hour through space, its galactic speed, headed towards the constellation Lyra, while the earth travels around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour, or 1.6 million miles a day, its orbital speed. As well, we revolve around our poles at about 1,000 miles an hour.

While the sun heads for Lyra, all the galaxies in our universe are headed in a different direction, towards the Great Attractor, a cluster of galaxies which is hidden to us behind cosmic dust.

However, we will never merge with the galaxy cluster at our center. The sun will turn into a red giant in 600 million years, eliminating life on earth. Earth will fall into the sun 7 billion years after that. Before that, the solar system will merge with the Andromeda Galaxy in 5 billion years.

Our solar system will never reach the Great Attractor, because the universe is expanding faster than we are traveling. So this is a shaggy dog story. We are going nowhere fast.

The impetus behind the poem was initially the tourbillons, the dust devils, whirlwinds, or cyclones that cause invisible “clear air turbulence,” like the monster of the Id in Forbidden Planet: a distortion that moves through the air. You never know if it’s air or an alien.

I expanded the poem’s reach, and so it needed to move away from its initial whirlwind.