Lesser Chronometries
by Derek Gromadzki
Imagine an azimuth in an imagined way. Imagine a line and let it be bent, a silverstring kink in a showman’s rope strung from two petals of a compass rose. Call the line a cipher. It slants. It slants fugato and fails. Call its direction a center on loan from peripheries and say it escapes itself up a penknife altitude to parallax. Between is and was is a flicker: the smaller of two suns a sextant feeds to a miniature sea. You say meridians. Let’s make a list of illusions. That’s one. I say meander and say the tropics are vagaries that tilt out of true. The ecliptic, a carafe’s hip a half second of arc abseils, and only the equator is real. Look for longitude in the length of a wave but look for length in nothing. I’ve heard it said it rides leviathan chines and steers by parallels of broken hulls. Of latitude let’s speak crosswise of ink on ink, edges and pages from portolan charts. Imagine a ship sails over ellipses and an ellipse undoes an edge with little ado. Say from the ship circumference is faience, sine qua frit and non save blue. Say what heading you will for the ship, but I say headwinds and permanent red. Cerise by west by weathercraft. A sounding bell cedes to fathoms and halves. Call ‘by the board’ and count deep six a half a dial’s worth of time. Say that dials are days; number hours their cantons. Let minutes chamfer the hours that minutes misfit. Secondhand tangents lever the ship in circles. It finds its way by a watch.
DEREK GROMADZKI is the author of Pilgrimage Suites (Parlor Press 2017) and the chapbook, Horology (Paradigm Press 2016). His work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Black Warrior Review, Chattahoochee Review, Conjunctions, Fugue, The PEN Poetry Series, Witness, and other magazines. His latest translations, collaborations with Sayuri Okamoto, can be found in Alice, Iris, Red Horse: Selected Poems of Yoshimasu Gozo (New Directions 2016). He has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and Oberlin College & Conservatory. He is a 2018 NEA-JUSFC Fellow.