The Equator

A line from Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World: "...how many times in the course of a lifetime would the equator be a significant factor?" (4). Probably seldom--but then again, probably every day. The very fact it is there, by convention if not by physical fact--more a line on a map or globe than a physical fact on the ground or surface of the seas--cannot be ignored. It is one way of marking the line between us here in the farther northern hemisphere (another convention) and Brazil, where all those wing-beating butterflies are or are not causing all kinds of fluctuations in our weather. But we have so many imaginary lines fencing us in and out at the same time...

When a metaphor stretches

the idea of a line across

creases in the land, undulates its way straight, purposeful

through folds, dips, furrows, gullies, hills and hollows,

across rills and rivers going nowhere

creating borders of everywhere always in

between along the way, the connecting separation

made concrete, inked in by wood and wire and glass-topped

bricks and stones linking points planted along the way,

inventing prolonged unification, purpose as well as place,

trajectory into the out there,

try not to straddle,

centre yourself on your own ambivalence, find, locate yourself

on both sides of where the line guides,

disappears in both

directions