The Alignments

                                    A dot
                  has only one direction,
                       a line has two,
                  or so we were taught at school
                  back in the short pants and gravel days
                  long before particle physics.

                  Tell me, please,
                                    which way
                  did Time go?
                                    I’d love to know.

                  And early on
                  as a child-metaphysician,
                  my daughter up and queried it all:
                                    ‘Why do things
                                    have a line around them?’
                  She ought to have tried Wittgenstein.

Just making it longer and longer, where does it get you?

                  Looking out over
                  the ocean’s long inhuman reticence,
                  what rhythmical alternatives,
                  what miles of diamonds!

                  Toward orange sunset
                  on the grass-dry plain
                  I stare stupidly at silvery railway lines,
                  thinking they meet near infinity.

Making the slow line dip and sway in its motion
proceeding gravely into and out of the limelight
is worth the endeavour, if you are given to word-games,

which all of us are in one way or another,
playing at words of love and the diction of dying,
what we say being just as green as the world is.

Why is our writing all made up of lines?
There must be something capillary about signs:
look how the envious ink uncoils and twines.

                  Days of reflective Paul Klee!
                  It was the painter then
                                                      talking of
                  taking a line for a walk, like a dog,
                  that really set me off
                                                      on this little track.
Dream of a geometer or some architect’s draughtsman,
                  the beautiful russet sandstone
has been laying down its hairline strata
                  as fine as Thomas Bewick ever did
to capture our attention with lineations:
                  engraving in three dimensions!

                  Things baffle me,
                  I think they are the matter
                  our dreams were made of,
                                                                        crudely enough
                  by smiths and naiads
                                                                        in the Silver Age.

                  Following me, old footprints,
                  you trace a trail
                  across our imagined map,
                  mile after dotted mile
                  far to the nor’-by-northwest,
                  or so it feels to me.

                  Evening glides silently in
                  to ask us what
                  merest reality may be,
                  any more than, say,
                  lines and shadows,
                  shadow and line.
                  Whatever the headlines
                  in that dawn-thrown morning paper,
                  some passing snail
                  has left its own strand
                  of autobiography
                  in calligraphy of silver
                  there,
                                       across the doorstep.

                                    How short
                  would a life have to be
                  for sheer disappointment?

                                    And how very short
                  the would-be defining line
                  that was only a dot in space?