A Gulliver Retrospective
I dreamed of Gulliver
lying athwart a hilltop
observing trees at a distance
wondering if they were tall or diminutive.
Life, for him, must have been an uncertainty
considering the relativity of his stature,
whether that was really a country of giants
or if it was he who had become miniature.
And, he thought, anachronistically, of Alice,
who had drunk from the bottle labeled “drink me”,
and had first become so large her head hit the ceiling,
and then reversed the process with its antidote.
Perhaps that is what occurred in Lilliput,
that the people there were of quite normal dimension,
while he, so huge and monstrous, like Gargantua,
was really some diseased creature, an acromegalic.
So he thought of Harvey Cushing, who when visiting
the British Academy of Sciences, encountered the skeleton
of a giant whose expanded pituitary fossa
set him thinking, setting the field of endocrinology in motion.
Probably that is also an anachronism.
But time is like that, like a ball on a spring.
Sometimes when we think we are thinking of tomorrow
it is really our yesterdays that keep up-popping.
It is especially our thoughts which are relativistic,
as often contractile as they are expansive.
Gulliver, for example, thought he was pretty smart,
until, in the land of the Houyhnhnms, he met his masters.