Math is not performance art

Math is not performance art. It's a private

improvisation, a moment's commitment to

memory of right privation of mind,

sensory deprivation of all but phenylethyl-

amine dream of love in solution:

["Love in solution" (only mixture):

the flavor is 'arrow of time', how

anything happens is a vector, directed forward and away, for

every action an equal contribution to degenerate case. Spi-

nors asymmetric in the stomach of first love and algebra. Drink. It is

axiomatic, at the end of a class, that hands converge: no

need to think; but the fact -- we feel -- that

everything real is also complex is … ]

the [ = THEO-]

dream of (numb-) saturation (-er), neurons'

yawning gasp of synapse as the skies start

factoring in long silences at last, long

walks down garden paths observing

talks with something to prove.

[ … "something to prove".

Bent low over desks, discretely sounding out

steps, we quietly -- rose of eraser -- sum(b)vocal cantation to

fitfully rigorous prayer. As almost one, we stare -- loose

vector of eyes -- at the eastern board, the improbable rise, each

morning, there of perfect circles suggestive of n. Look

close enough in and the folds smooth out, Loba-

chevskian spirit un-

clothed in the son to

visit Euclidean

space: it's about time.]

Re- [ = -RY (neither -REM nor -LOGY)]

cover rather than dis-, and -member,

-call the lovers' morning notes of de-

pressing distinction; the integration (self, other) has a

least upper bound: "it was the lark", whose

song resounds in periodic confessions

["Some periodic confessions":

I know enough math to make it seem like I do; once

threw a charcoal Calculus across the room; gave

up -- at that point -- any trying to prove; gave my -- much later and

also vanishing -- self to you: rational and, so, un-

real. All this to whom? If an animal names and permutes the

four-letter words like DNA snippets, bio-

logical computational proof --, re- … ]

of [ = OF (of course)]

us in always natural light, the

ideal pieces of meteor strikes "that the

sun exhales" in heliacal rise, all

sides and angles aligned, and warmed:

sensible bodies, not extraordinary forms, and

[ … -verse engineers our "ordinary forms",

prismatic and streaked, when

next we meet, would we be simple since unimaginary (not

-tive), and skip the manifold possibilities, stick to basic a-

rithmetic, reading and (A:w)ri(B:gh)ting each other with no long divisions, sub-

tractions subtracted -- we'll forget satisfying the field axioms -- multipli-

cation permitted so long as it's of metaphor, or of touch? And

count on days' tabulation to prove how

much. Such, at least, is the theory of]

love [ = LOVE (or, in the

absence of proof,

improvisation: you start by saying

"Yes", then "Let you and me." The

rest is math. QED

(-esiderandum)].

(Edited 3 September 2009, transcribed 30 August 2009, begun 29 August 2009. I struggled with this, and so hope to have given this poem the capacity to speak well for itself; but for bibliophiles -- you know who you are -- the -graphy includes, in order of I'm remembering them, Augustine, John Donne, Roger Penrose, and John Milton (for inspiring the centermost notion, that the most interesting thing about a miracle -- its beauty, really -- is its strictly incidental and so unmeaningful _precision_ of occasion in human time).)