The Reinvention of Time Travel

Visitors

This thing that has my voice and has my image,

my friends, my point of view my right of passage

my fingerprints, my blood, my lineage,

is it me? is it real? and what’s the damage?

 The Traveller’s insecurity grows

… Why me? 2

Does it mean when the lights turn red

and it’s my car alone stopped dead

that I’m special for the things I’ve said,

Or have I been overlooked instead

missed on account of how I was bred,

because I’m average, low on bread?

…

I want to know: is the world misled

about me, had it misread

my personality? And why is red

not green instead?

Why me? I said.

… and he looks for significance

in memories of places

Our pasts and futures start with memory

and lock together in identity. 

Visitors 1: Occupations

I’m travelling in wonder back across seas

and continents to rediscover the Ruined City.

Streets stilled and stifled by heat and decay

have retained exquisite mysteries

for a trickle of barely inquisitive visitors

who slowly sift through burned out

temples and palaces pillaged by trees.

In this quiet place of desultory work,

a man plays pungi to his cobra,

women repair roads with baskets of soil,

a nub-end role to keep things going.

The locals show full commitment

to refurbishing our imaginations

with corrugated history and speculation,

and they’re all snake charmers now,

evoking Twelfth Century calamity

as easily as logging a fallen brick.

But staying feels like urging stones to grow,

we sigh, surprised there’s anyone here at all.

Our guide smiles and climbs on board

our imported mythologies, and advises:

without its people how could we have known

the Ruined City and its history exist?

He hopes in time that tourism and commerce

will push up through the weeds and marble,

and the past will reassemble misplaced slabs.

This is a rich and creative place after all –

anything can be accommodated here,

even new kinds of occupation and ruin.

Visitors 2: Assisi

Tourists draft terse texts in Assisi’s lanes

shadowed by temples and statues of saints.

The artist shading in the square beneath

the colonnades paints deities and drains,

defies street-sellers’ holy kitsch and gross

arithmetics of alms and argentine.

Cameras record in every corner

moving pictures, frozen poses, that stall

today in images of stale beginnings.

But this aint no jerky Zapruda reel

to shrink us with sudden death and moment.

It’s time for stillness, waiting to uncoil,

to watch spirits descending Roman steps,

catch perhaps some current assignation,

a mangy cat whose back is raised at dogs,

and kids of any age standing their ground…

In that instant visitors drop their phones,

as tablets in the Forum turn back to stones.

Visitors 3: After Ullapool

After Edinburgh perspective recedes.

Alternative gravity traps the car;

old oilrigs disgraced by redundancy

stand in mocking sea lochs up to their knees;

cities keep their distance, villages shrink.

Highways, which further south sweep like armies

striped and stretched across scorched urban earth,

are ant trails here, diminutive in broad

confident valleys; here inland waters

take command to flail at stubborn shorelines,

filching stony debris beneath the screes.

After Inverness once illustrious

A-roads decline, belittled by the peaks

that soar inaccessibly into clouds.

We find ourselves asking how long have they

been travelling, what could have brought them here?

Moment by moment the light contorts us:

we could touch that razored edge of forest

that clings like lichen to the loch’s far side;

the cotton grass with its feet in a bath

of sodden peat is just beyond reach;

rock-splash droplets catch sparks along the gill

and make brief rainbows on asphodel leaves.

After Ullapool it’s hard to distill

our boundless capacity for wonder

or the immensity of what we see.

Even mountains find space apart.

We’d hardly need take the eight months to Mars

to discover how small we are in Skye.

Visitors 4: Postcards home

They’ve made me their album, these images

of where I’ve been, reaching me like bridges

on those space-stations in holiday towns,

a stranger, unconstrained, barely grown,

storming with Southern trains, steaming alone,

slicing through sceneries of woods and downs:

that child’s view lingers, indelible, supreme.

Then, grasped by arrogance and age, serene

as witnesses to sights we can’t describe,

we’re all sightseers for the rest of our lives,

still owning ourselves in places we’ve seen.

We brought you postcards, now pictures on screens:

You can’t see me here, but I shot these scenes.

Here, take a look. Can you tell what they mean?

Old views without a view show no respect;

and while we look to live, not to inspect

for life, wonderment is all that we expect. 

“You’ve been stopped again at immigration

by officers awaiting your oblation.

Visitors can’t pass without their visas

and a little something more to please us.”

4. Observers »