THE ANALEMMA
Standing here in the same spot
Every day
Makes me think of you
This figure-of-eight feeling
I sometimes get
Is not something new
Your smile, your being,
Your overall everywhere-ness
Mingled with your general couldn’t-care-less-ness
Make me think that perhaps I’m wrong
It is an abstract thing
Like a solar analemma
It has no physical existence
Except in images long-gone.
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My Writing Life 
You sent me searching through three not-inconsiderable dictionaries, Tom. Finally, I think I get the general sense of ‘analemma’, but possibly there is a specific scientific meaning too. That aside, I find the poem intriguing for other reasons: who is the speaker addressing, why standing on the same spot each day, what might the speaker be wrong about? The poem is at once accessible and private; it lowers the drawbridge but doesn’t raise the portcullis. An interesting read.
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I only came across the word myself recently. I was fascinated by its obscurity. The specific meaning has to do with the earth’s trajectory round the sun – if it was plotted on a graph, from the same position at the same time every day, it would look like the figure of eight image on the picture at the end of a year. This stirred something in me to write a poem about it; about somebody with an unhappy experience, standing in the same spot at the same time every day, reliving it. And what you read is what emerged!
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