Boundaries 2

I'm still thinking about boundaries -- about where they exist and don't.

The Oil Drum reported,
Today, someone in the NYMEX pit session paid $100 a barrel for front month crude oil.

That just means the price didn't stay there, but it got there. Big Deal (as in it is -- as in, it's no.)
The article on Bloomberg said:

``This is the culmination of everything that we talked about last year,'' said John Kilduff, vice president of risk management at MF Global Ltd. in New York. ``Various geopolitical problems have deteriorated overnight, in particular Nigeria and Pakistan. Commodities, and in particular oil, have become safe havens in a dangerous world.''
Nigeria, The Middle East, Venezuela... And: Prices rose 2.9 percent last week partly because of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan's former prime minister. Pakistan borders Iran, which holds the world's second- biggest oil reserves, and is located along the Arabian Sea, where tankers travel before entering the Persian Gulf.

These things between us -- between here and there, you and me, up and down -- I'm much more interested in the way we travel over, and yet these markers seem to hold some undeniable psychological weight. It's not at all unlike New Year's day itself, really -- here we are, it's all the same as it was yesterday...

Passage over Water

by Robert Duncan

We have gone out in boats upon the sea at night,

lost, and the vast waters close traps of fear about us.

The boats are driven apart, and we are alone at last

under the incalculable sky, listless, diseased with stars.

Let the oars be idle, my love, and forget at this time

our love like a knife between us

defining the boundaries that we can never cross

nor destroy as we drift into the heart of our dream,

cutting the silence, slyly, the bitter rain in our mouths

and the dark wound closed in behind us.

Forget depth-bombs, death and promises we made,

gardens laid waste, and, over the wastelands westward,

the rooms where we had come together bombd.

But even as we leave, your love turns back. I feel

your absence like the ringing of bells silenced. And salt

over your eyes and the scales of salt between us. Now,

you pass with ease into the destructive world.

There is a dry crash of cement. The light fails,

falls into the ruins of cities upon the distant shore

and within the indestructible night I am alone.

link to the Poetry Foundation Archive
Robert Duncan, “Passage over Water” from Selected Poems. Copyright 1950 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.