Vanishing Point

“The term convergence point describes the action of lines coming together, while vanishing point is the exact spot where they disappear into the distance…”

Sleep deprived, I cycled the city wondering what I might write about this week.

It felt as though my creativity was riding, just a block away, racing down a parallel street,

and I wondered when those two lines - intention and imagination - might come back together or whether they would just continue on their own way forever, thinking of each other fondly like long separated lovers, yearning but unable to ever again … meet.

At the rail yards by the harbour the train tracks converged toward a vanishing point, bearing long lines of wagons side by side - one set mainly blue, as if mirroring the water

while the bridge I stood upon bisected them, constraining me with rigidity, showing where I had come from or where I was going - if only I knew, with conviction, just which way was which.

And now it felt as if everything was vanishing, an abandoned sofa emphasising the point and making this otherwise empty laneway a dry and dusty living room, with just one occupant - myself, pausing beneath the sign that read

WARNING

AREA UNDER

SURVEILLANCE

And maybe someone really was looking or maybe that sign was the prescient brilliance of an unnamed official, years ago, warning that one day a Poet would come. Not a warning at all but simple…. Prophesy.

Though my surveillance was brief. A ship was leaving, drawing my eyes towards the harbour as it headed away, tug escorted, bird followed, unberthed and departed,

searching now for its own vanishing point….

Following, to the hill above the harbour entrance, I found the world stretching, curving a beach Eastward and casting mariners across the Pacific, while a pathway bent to the South…

where just a week ago on the Winter Solstice, ocean, clouds and beach conspired to construct another convergence, pointing to places I once knew in childhood as if 1970 still existed out there, at the meeting place of land and sky, of water and memory,

and I pedalled home down empty lanes and streets, falling forward to my future, somewhere unseen ahead - time itself the final part of this bitter sweet geometry.