Exploring the Pastime Reaches and Beyond

Things in the dark

exist but are not realized.

Perhaps with wings

they wait for enacting light.

I start out as the sky descends

to the visible spectrum and begins.

Midmorning I find in a lab

a blue magnetic fluid:

revolving in the stress of gauss,

the source of blue resides.

November nights, up to the first snow,

derive from this seat of blue.

I spend a month reflecting at Palomar.

My delicate fourteen tons

I bring to bear

on galaxies: their lonely shine

harbors

on my dustless, understanding curve.

I come to a mountain out of season.

The brass benchmark telling the height

is under ice.

Without witness, without cease

a blizzard

pummels the summit's face.

I reach the pole. Here at the axis

the wobble and grind is audible.

My compass tries to point straight down.

It, too, deceived: Having achieved

one absolute, the source of north,

to find that south surrounds, is all but it.

The Humboldt Current has my boat

and its mile of line straight down.

Now and then, fishermen haul in

the inexplicable

along with seabream, haddock, squid.

I hook a coelacanth, thought long

extinct, and brain it with an oar.

Nose to the bottom

I shove off from the hundred fathom curve.

Slow footage of mud unreeling through my mind,

the miles of decline become my age.

Hauled up someday by accident,

rupturing in the lost pressure,

my look will say how knowing feels.

Living among the trilobites

I learn you cross great lengths of time

by stilling the waiting in yourself.

From scavengers I see how you can live

off your own dead kind.

I gum the grit of a tidal flat

and have no name.

A chance letter brings me home,

telling how I was found.

Returned I sit

like water in a jar,

light from a window passing through,

a slow rain of precipitate

remembering the bottom.

Copyright Credit: John Barr, "Exploring the Pastime Reaches and Beyond" from The Hundred Fathom Curve: New & Collected Poems. Copyright © 2011 by John Barr. Reprinted by permission of Red Hen Press.

Source: The Hundred Fathom Curve: New & Collected Poems (Red Hen Press, 2011)