Why I'm in Awe of the Spiral

When, in the science museum, I arrive at the overview

of our galaxy, with its tiny arrow pointing to You are here

(which really ought to be We are here), and see

that the two to four hundred billion stars of our local cluster

are drifting or chasing or dreaming after each other

in circles within milky circles, I can’t help but think

of those ancient paintings and rock engravings,

discovered all over our celestial body,

of that one line which begins at whatever point

it can, then curls outward, or inward, toward nothing

anyone can define—the oldest shape revered

by Aborigine and Celt, by mathematician

and engineer and Burning Man reveler alike,

and even accorded a place of honor among the mess

of thoughts on my desk, as a nifty paper clip of copper.

But it’s already there in the florets of the sunflower

crisscrossing with the precision of a logarithm,

and in the pin-wheel shape of the Nautilus shell,

and in the coiling neurons of the cochlea

that let us tell Art Tatum from a three year old’s improvisation.

Call it what you will—“God's fingerprint,” “the soul

unfolding through time,” “the passageway into the Self”—

I can’t help but admire, even fear, something as mundane

as a flush of the toilet, when its swirling is a variation

on our sidereal drift, our existential pain.

And then there’s that famous falcon, “turning and turning

in a widening gyre,” a portentous symbol of our own

circling into some dread, some pernicious chaos

we thought we had just escaped, one town burning

a decade behind us, a millennium before that,

and into next week, next year, next whenever.

And when the two of us took that winding road

an infinity of others had wound down before us

and would wind down again, our spirits hushed

by the crosses and bouquets at each dead man’s curve

and just burning in the dry heat to touch each other,

wasn’t that a wondrous and terrible turning?

Source: Almost Human (Tupelo Press, 2017)