A chance meeting...
Brief moments in space, where we cover more territory
in the plane of our lives than all timed place.
Because usually we're following the -
gradients (which are always in the down-
ward direction) and tra-
velling
within the 3rd, 4th, 5th
dimensional phase planes of our existence.
But in this "plane," there's no space-time rhyme. With no change in position, you can
reach infinite inkling; or before the
blink of a watch, infi-
nite pain.
For
example, consider "sudden
awareness" when until then you
were inadvertently an actor, but
after, it was you, your actions, your context.
Out on the dance floor, to the well-rounded social
individual, there comes a known
stretch of unconscious where
the gre-
garious partner dissolves,
and only the beat, your body solves.
Or when during
sexual climax you realize it's prime, but prior
that second, you just thought it was rational?
How about glancing at eyes that belonged to a stranger but, then precisely, your
every fiber recog-
nized another fellow
human?
In my hand, the weather page for
Cannes, printed from the internet
more than a year ago, shows the
existence of sun drenched exits!
Christy Bergman,
July 26, 2000
Note on the Meter: Because this poem was about ways of covering space,
I wanted to express it with different-shaped-and-sized meters. To design
my meters, I took a sheet of graph paper. I let the x-axis be lines per
stanza and the y-axis number of iambs per
line. I then drew out some curves that
seemed to fill the space and themselves had different shapes, keeping
in mind that stanzas of iambic hexameter or more are very rare and bulky.
Here's what my chart looked like:
Thus, the curve of •'s would make a stanza 2-7-5, ° 's would make
a stanza 9-5-3-1, x's would make 6-5-3-1-3-5, || 's 4-4-4-4, * 's 1-3-4-5-6.
I then cut out small pieces of paper, each with a •, °, x, ||, and *.
I closed my eyes & drew a shape. The order in which I drew the shapes was the order
in which I composed the stanzas.
