Every Line Intersects the Line at Infinity at Some Point

"Out of nothing I have created a strange new universe."
- János Bolyai (1802-1860)



The optometrist asks you to look into 
the autorefractor: two dark lines form 

a road that stretches from where you sit
to a red barn at the horizon. If your brain 

tells you that you're looking at a point 
at infinity rather than just mere inches away, 

it helps the eyes focus. Things have to end 
somewhere, don't they? In projective geometry, 

you're told two parallel lines will intersect, 
will meet at a point in the line at infinity. 

If you tilted the horizon up or down, it 
would remain what it is. If you turned 

around, infinity would still be there  
as an infinitely beckoning horizon. But

what a strange idea: how in that world, 
another traveling along the same line 

as you at parallel distance will arrive 
with you at the edge of the world. Maybe

you can't see them now or touch them.
Maybe they haven't spoken to you in months,

in years. Maybe you move along, uncertainly: 
an inch at a time, imagining the possibility.