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“The universe turns on an axis.”
I looked for it this morning
behind the toolshed,
where the rusted wheelbarrow sits
tilted toward the weeds.
If there is an axis,
it must be very thin,
thinner than a hair from a horse’s tail,
thinner than the line of light
under the kitchen door at dawn.
Rumi says the planet rolls helpless and free.
Like a marble dropped by a child,
perhaps,
or an apple falling from the wild tree
that no one planted and no one owns.
He speaks of chessboards and kings.
But here, the crows are moving
in their own jagged diagonals across the lawn,
unconcerned with checkmate,
perfectly centered on a discarded crust of bread.
And the drunkard who finds absolution in relief—
I think of the dog by the hydrant,
the simple, holy necessity of emptying oneself
to make room for the world again.
If the key is bent, the lock will not open.
So we leave the door unlatched.
We let the wind do the turning.
It is a quiet business, this rotation.
You don’t need a ring on your finger
to know which way the earth is leaning.
You only need to stand still long enough
to feel the grass brushing against your ankles,
reminding you that you, too,
are moving at a tremendous speed
while doing absolutely nothing at all.
“The universe turns on an axis,”
Rumi said, as if the cosmos
were a pig on a spit,
roasting over the slow fires of eternity,
or a wheel on a cart that is going nowhere,
driven by a driver who is fast asleep.
It is a comforting thought, really.
The idea that there is a center.
The idea that there is a point to the spinning.
But an axis is a fiction of geometry.
It has length without breadth.
It is a line drawn by the mind
through the middle of a dark room
where everything is moving too fast to see.
If the universe turns on an axis,
it turns on an omission.
It turns on what isn’t there.
We spend our lives looking for the pivot,
checking the bearings, oiling the hinges,
sure that if we can just find the middle,
we will understand the perimeter.
Meanwhile, the stars keep rushing away
from whatever it was they started from,
and the poem turns on its own small axis,
which is nothing more than the space
between the thought of a thing
and the thing itself,
a line so thin you could cross it
without ever knowing you were gone.
“The universe turns on an axis,”
Rumi said, a grand cosmic spit
roasting stars and nebulae,
while down here, in the kitchen,
we worry if the pilot light went out.
It’s a matter of scale.
The axis of the universe passes
through everything and nothing.
It’s a line of infinite length and zero width,
which is difficult to measure with a tape from Walmart.
We build our houses with plumb lines and levels,
insisting that things be upright,
that the floor stay beneath our slippers,
while the ground beneath the floor
is leaning at twenty-three degrees,
hurtling through a vacuum at sixty thousand miles an hour.
You would think we would feel more nauseous.
You would think we would hold onto the countertops.
Instead, we argue about the property line,
or why the mail is late,
or whether the soup needs salt,
as if the small axis of the afternoon
were the only one that mattered.
And perhaps it is.
The cosmos can rotate all it wants
around its invisible, perfect center.
It has billions of years to kill.
We have only until dark
to figure out how to stand up straight
on a marble that won’t stop spinning.
“The universe turns on an axis,”
he said, a massive, frictionless shaft
drilled through the heart of everything,
while I am standing at the sink,
scraping the dried yolk off a breakfast plate
with a thumbnail that needs clipping.
It’s hard to keep the cosmos in mind
when the hot water smells slightly of rust
and the yellow sponge is falling apart in my hand.
The grand rotation of the galaxies
takes a hundred million years to complete,
but the toaster takes exactly three minutes
to turn a slice of sourdough into charcoal
if I don’t watch the little plastic dial.
We are told the axis is made of love,
or light, or mathematical grace,
but the axis of this kitchen is the refrigerator,
humming its low, mechanical B-flat,
keeping the milk from souring before Tuesday.
The stars go about their heavy spinning,
silent and cold and perfectly balanced,
while I trip over the cat’s plastic mouse
and spill four ounces of medium roast
on the floor.
The universe can have its infinite pivot.
It has a billion years to kill.
I have a sticky cabinet knob to fix,
and the smell of wet asphalt outside the window,
and the sharp, brief sting of a papercut
that tells me exactly where the center is.