Time Travel

By Peter Kane Dufault

To travel in time — revisit
the Past — it would be like this,
I suspect, or this is it:

the crouching, encapsulated
in metal and glass, the speed,
the enormities of the hills
by moonlight and cloud-march, un-
altered in all history and so
close we could almost touch them,
or they us … But we move too fast.

There can be no communication. If
they reach out — with a moth, say,
or a fox — it vaporizes
against our reality; and
if we swerve into them it’s we
who explode instead. And still

we see it there. A grave darkness
platemarks the Past for us. We don’t
allow that in our time; the lights
never black out. Inside
each capsule, tachometers glare
and, outside, our highbeams and tail-lights
bring a full moon to naught.

The huge
and unbroached casks of blackness
looming from the river and road-cut
westward — a wilderness, un-
interested in revolutions
per minute or millennium — they
are like the name of the place:
Northeast Kingdom … Northeast
Kingdom … I can hear Joubert:

” The republic is the only cure
for the ills of the monarchy; the
monarchy, for the ills of the republic. ” We
don’t outdistance that gentle despair,
though we drive ever so fast.

The one cure for the Past is the future;
the one cure for the future, the Past.

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