Just Passing Through
By Mikal Wix
We all know how each passing year roils up from the deep, plangimus mortuos, not tsunamis from a cataclysmic shaking, but gentle lunar cycles pulling forward, pressing back, gravity, like water, making us move even among the immovable spaces, those interstitial places, we all feel the motion of suns becoming moons, swaying atop the foamy swell believing in the unfathomable ages of geologic time, and yet in denial of all reckoning of its internecine passages in and around us because we are eternal in our infinite imaginings of all the spectacles, of all the mighty atmospheres with their boundless permutations. We need not count or add or multiply when we can subtract and divide with splendid aplomb!
Time is no match for us; it knows only one path, like a dupe stumbling through dense thickets of primordial swamp, it arrives on the beaches to discover the New World is old, like the prickly Spaniards landing in Florida to quench their fevers and finding their way through knotted by extravagant twisting footpaths, it must follow and never lead. We are the captains, we chart the course, and we charge the entrenched pillbox with its lazy soldiers hiding behind machine guns that only fire one thing, like time, an insipid shell full of black powder and pathos, indifferent and so easily subdued by powers of the Mind’s Eye—we reframe the narrative and rush into the breach intrepidly, impetuous but crowing still, vivos voco, because you and I, us passengers all, have the wile that time craves: a zealous curiosity about what may come next, and the will to choose any course to contemplate our providence of wit.
Mikal Wix lives in the American South, which seeds insights into many outlooks, including revenant visions from the closet. His work can be found or is forthcoming in Corvus Review, Jupiter Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Hyacinth Review, Roi Fainéant Press, decomp journal, and elsewhere. He works as a science editor by day.
