Is a Line and a Circle Both

I, in effect, drove around the block and
pulled back in before Rocket Man was half over,
starting again in a moment,
give me a moment,
not unlike, I want to say,
astronauts whose orbits
are only exercises in orbital glory,
requiring no further rationale or justification,
so don’t ask, I have my reasons,
like the dog walking in circles around
the spot on the rug he’ll eventually lie on,
ten, twenty, thirty circuits
without a pause, counting them
down as the astronauts do
gliding in suits of foil and chrome miles
above us and the rain. Rain recirculates, too,
and that’s where I am in the driveway,
wanting every road to be a court,
every day to be a skipping record,
look how memories of old records
come around, it used to be you’d see
the machine of it turn like stars turn
in the sky but only when sped up on TV.
The dog may circle, sniffing, why?, but
of course his dog years, zipping by like taxicabs,
go from there to somewhere ahead,
in a line as straight as a latitude,
which of course also circles the world,
suggesting, alright, that I’ll come around to
a decent poem someday, I’ll so concretely
act upon this or that sushi-grade abstraction,
and the round of applause will be detectable
above the scratchings of the LP left
to itself, beyond the end of the song
and into the black hole of neverending
revolutions, until you start it over.