The Other Journey
(after Tomas Transtromer)
The other journey, the one we’re always on
but don’t know of except now and then
in pauses, where nothing is happening
when we’re doing nothing. Not chores, not planning,
not even rumination. Basho says our home
is the journey, meaning this other one
conjoined with our ordinary travels whose footprints
we leave behind as memory-fragments of ourselves
unlike the other journey on which the day
is strangely paused, as if Joshua
had asked God to stop the sun for us.
Riding an elevator unmoved between floors,
paired to media devices’ incessant barrage of voices,
so we can hear from each only a few words
with their timbre, drive. One at a time, we’d ask,
but they don’t want to hear, only to be heard.
Our hearing maxed out into silence,
we revert or convert to what doesn’t seek us,
what we find ourselves in seeking. Wind in the trees
has no voice so can be heard. Waves just beyond
the edges of a beach, the stately cadences of Mozart,
winter birdcall, the rustle of leaves in a slight breeze
seen unheard through a closed window. We settle
‘as empty-handed as a shirt on a clothesline.’*
*(from ‘Madrigal’ by Transtromer)
The Dog Star 
2 Responses to “The Other Journey”
You can’t go wrong standing on the shoulders of Transtromer. II like the cadence, the “day strangely paused, as if Joshua had asked God to stop the sun for us” and the litany of nature voices. Unassuming and reverent.
Thanks, Craig. If it weren’t for the influence of Transtromer, Stevens and a few or others I might not be writing poems at all. Or they’d be very different.