It’s hard to know where I am rooted now, land shifting under my feet, ocean starved for oxygen, less light than there used to be.
Maps are redrawn, globe’s reconfigured, not round but battered, dented, an abused beach ball. Our orbit wobbles all over the place.
We float in a lava bowl. Tumbleweed our international flag; it just keeps rolling off the edge into the cosmos where everything echoes back eventually.
Nothing is as we expected. Our gate has changed, our flight’s canceled. We’ll wish we’d said goodbye, but goodbyes are hard.
If you were to pray now, what would you wish? Can you feel a shift of light, the cooling season? Do you hope this is the last time even though it never ends?
We perform this waltz in a non-waltz century. Voices of the dead keep time. One day even you will leave and return in a new mask. One Two Three, One Two Three.
What the readers said
Three readers, filed separately. Where they diverge, the divergence stands rather than being argued out. How the Archive reads →
Count the stanzas before reading a word of it. Six, and every one is exactly four lines — twenty-four lines, no exceptions, nothing running long or falling short. That is a strict stanzaic form held without a single stumble, and it matters because of what the poem tells us it is doing: We perform this waltz in a non-waltz century. A waltz is three. This poem is written in fours, throughout, and it closes by counting One Two Three, One Two Three from inside a four-line stanza. The measure of the poem and the measure of the dance do not fit one another, and the mismatch is the title line made structural rather than stated. I do not know whether that was planned or arrived at by ear. It is the most intelligent thing here either way.
The pronouns are doing work too. The poem opens alone — where I am rooted — gathers into a collective for three stanzas of we and our, then turns and addresses the reader directly in the fifth, which is the only stanza that is nothing but questions, four of them in a row, none answered. Then the last stanza folds you back into we. Solitude, collective, direct address, collective again: the poem enacts its own transmigration through its pronouns.
The best writing is the airport. Our gate has changed, our flight’s canceled. / We’ll wish we’d said goodbye, / but goodbyes are hard. After three stanzas at planetary scale, the poem drops into an ordinary, specific, universally known indignity — and the grief lands there, in the small print, rather than in the cosmos. That stanza is where a reader is actually reached.
Which is why I would press on the images either side of it. An abused beach ball, tumbleweed our international flag, a lava bowl — these shrink the planet to toys, and while I take the diminishment as deliberate, the effect is to make the earth easier to hold rather than harder. They are also the most available images in the ecological drawer. The cancelled flight is precise and entirely yours. I would trust that register further.
Let me record my stop first. I went looking for the machinery — who redrew the maps, who starved the ocean of oxygen, which apparatus cancelled the flight — and the poem names nobody. The collapse here is presented as a condition of the universe: the orbit wobbles, the light dims, the season cools. There are no actors, no decisions, no interests. That is a real choice about frame and it puts this poem in the elegiac tradition rather than the diagnostic one, which is a legitimate place to stand. Having noted it, I had nothing further to map.
The dependency is more interesting, and the poem is smarter about it than it first appears. The consolation on offer is cosmic return — One day even you will leave and return in a new mask — the old promise that nothing is really lost because everything comes back. Set against actual extinction that promise is thin: a species does not return in a new mask, and an ocean does not. But look at the line just before, in the fifth stanza. Do you hope this is the last time / even though it never ends? That is not consolation. That is a question in which endlessness is the bad news — where the wish is for a final time and the answer is that there will not be one. The poem hands you eternal recurrence and, one stanza earlier, admits it might be a sentence rather than a reprieve. I would not resolve that tension. It is the most honest thing in the piece.
One further note on the title, which is carrying two freights at once. Transmigration is the passage of a soul into a new body — the poem’s ending. It is also, plainly, migration: land shifting under the feet, maps redrawn, gates and flights and people going somewhere else because where they were is no longer habitable. The poem never says the second one aloud. It does not have to; the vocabulary is doing it.
Voices of the dead keep time. That is the line I would build the whole poem outward from. Not the dead watching, not the dead grieving — the dead keeping time, functioning as the metronome for a dance the living are still performing badly. The dead are the only thing in this poem that is still reliable. Everything else has come loose: the ground, the orbit, the light, the schedule.
And the return, when it comes, is in a new mask. Not a new face, not a new body — a mask, which is worn, which is temporary, and which is what dancers wear. I will not build an edifice on that, because the poem does not; it sets the word down and moves straight into the count. But the choice is not accidental, and it makes the promised return feel less like rebirth than like another turn on the floor with different costuming.
The pressure through all of this is exhaustion rather than terror. Nothing here is frightened. The tone is of someone who has been alarmed for a long time and has arrived somewhere past it — Our orbit wobbles all over the place is a sentence with a shrug in it. That shrug is either the poem’s weakness or its subject, and I think it is the subject. One Two Three, One Two Three is what you say to keep going when you no longer expect the music to resolve.
Why it is here, and what it reaches for
The non-waltz century
Transmigration enters the Archive as six quatrains of planetary grief that end by counting out a dance step.
The myth it exposes is so ordinary it is usually invisible: that the ground is a constant — that geography, seasons, coastlines, light levels and timetables are the fixed backdrop against which human events happen. The poem takes that backdrop away in its first four lines and never gives it back. It’s hard to know where I am rooted now, / land shifting under my feet is the whole exposure: rootedness was never a property of the person, it was a loan from a stable world, and the loan has been called in. Everything after is inventory — the redrawn map, the dented globe, the wobbling orbit, the cancelled flight — of things that were supposed to stay put.
Beneath it runs the myth the ending reaches for: cosmic return — that recurrence, transmigration, the soul in a new mask, is consolation for material loss. The archive records the dependency and also records that the poem undercuts it a stanza early, in Do you hope this is the last time / even though it never ends? — where endlessness arrives as the thing being endured rather than the thing being promised. The consolation and its refusal are both in the text, unresolved, and the piece is better for not choosing.
Its symbols split between the cosmic and the clerical, which is the poem’s real method: the abused beach ball and the lava bowl (the planet reduced to something handleable, a diminishment that is also a defence), the tumbleweed flying as an international flag (nationhood as dead matter blown across a border it no longer recognises), the cancelled flight — the one wholly ordinary object here, and the point at which the poem stops being about the earth and starts being about the reader — the new mask (return as costume rather than resurrection), and the waltz count itself, kept by the dead. Its target is the non-waltz century: a period whose motion no longer fits any of the measures inherited for living through it.
It is retained at the first rung, Archive. It arrived legible, our readers agreed quickly, and nothing about our procedure had to change to receive it. Rung is not rank. What it leaves behind is a baseline for the contemporary eco-elegy — and one formal lesson worth keeping: a poem can argue that the old rhythms no longer fit simply by writing itself in fours and calling it a waltz.
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