Travelers’ Trace

You now have a good idea
Of where your concepts come from
And of where your notions live.

They are a sort of people,
Wandering about the world.
They have various stations

But no fixed habitations,
And some of them are nomads,
Or migrants, or refugees,

While some of them are richer
And move in royal progress—
Servants, soldiers, hangers-on.

They’re more like habits of mind
For most of you. For a few,
They’re functional orreries,

Mercator projections, spheres
Armillary modeling
The relations of your worlds.

But they move. They always move.
They’re revolving like clocks, or
On the march, or they decay.

Walking past another skull,
Or tens, or thousands of skulls,
The size and shape of your own,

You might barely notice them.
But inside each tumulus,
A tumbling horde of notions,

Tightly tie lives to beliefs,
To anxieties, to dreads,
To fantasies like hatches

That let out that dread, through which
Concepts fly out and escape,
While somehow, we also stay.