Exposure to infinite space

One's images of love point true, like a
compass, cosmology only out of date. Be-
lieving, therefore, that he'd appreciate a
more precise sign of infinity

-- the con-
formal projection of a
plane tesselated hy-
perbolically --,

what follows is plot, in con-
formal projection, of
hypothetical

{you, me}.

Let
"poor heretics in love there be": just a
few who choose Copernican shapes, and
shed eccentric tears for the flattening
passing of heavenly spheres, for passionate
knees periodic to mystery, hearts meta-
physically made -- in apostasy -- quasars, no mockery of
doting outmoded and fools care-free out-
side lovers' walls for rain or days, notes
faded and hands like the folded page, doors
polished and bright, un-
locked and improbably responsive at night.

Thus the lover's turn to soul's paraphrase

(that
pensive prayer)

turned blithely in towards
what lives there and attracts memory. So

I see us one thing: we're kissing with
grandmother moon out there, past a set of
small cork-stopped and staggered glass bottles

(one of
air, peaty earth, one of spiraling shells, one
bounding uncountable sand, and rocks
tumbled smooth con-
tinuous function of river)

and tree-branch
framed, white, blue of
ultraviolet night, our flight's centripetal
twang of the background webbing, the spider's at-
tention that stalks with ciliac step this
life's finite and multiplicative rings, i-
maginary mood swings of
polar numbers ir-
rational, perfectly and painfully real.

Let
just such a particular personal cataclysm, years a-
go at the schism, stand for the general case, a
place I still know. The ground shook, or said "you
kiss by the book"

(this is only memory at-
tempting permutation and
meaning out of
only combination always leaning
down the emotional path of best fit: there's
no getting around it,
deeper is always farther down),

and
pictures capture only what we see, what
only we see, what we only see, you
see yourself: the microcosm and I her
dark matter, she filamented clusters of
memory attempting meaningful permutation out of
combination, pictures capturing only in-
corporating memory, nebulous and numinous, the
present particles of light drifting by, the
flush of singular events through matter, dark-
ly, pre- and processing forward
faster than the space between can expand

(this the
mystery of limits: nothing inside can
reach without past bounding infinity

[margi-
nalium: look for loopholes in quantum gravity]

),

so
all is derivative, but only partially.

There-
fore, the emotional path of best fit, all
energy dispersing eventually to heat, to
uniform waste and sour gold taste of
plate to aliens image inscribed, and only
in the meantime can
any of it seem
mine, hers, or ours, and I am

(function of nebulous foreground smile with
white dots red, hold sidelong the head

[the
female's zygomatic muscles so typically
so much stronger than a man's, not to mention the
learned and restful inflection of her hands, but
my crow's feet as burned by late-De-
cember sun into sand]

) ...

Let I am
something other than her
memory of me. Re-
membering that evening, this
household of days, in-
habitants all gathered
round to view what is
all around: not a
figure in sight

(the
light must pass by
definition)

just the
fluttering places recalled in quantities
just this human side of precision.

In
place of gods, to a space-based catapult of
carbon rods, spring-loaded, precisely ma-
chined, though not themselves machines, and
in their forceful adoption of the ancient
custom of blistering atmospheres open they
fuck themselves into diamond

(in the after-
glow becoming
Buckminsterfullerines).

So de-
scend all forms, those lifeless and life-ele-
menting ideas, crystals wispy with
urgent heat, the glass undone, crass
big bang spoor, melt to ground floor of
all the most populous cities when they meet.

For this
reason and others the believers have prayed to un-
do my decision, for strength, for infinite length, for rotation through
unknown angle, translation of the function through
space

(for space is time, not a circle, a
line: a circle of infinite radius that
yet feels the funnel -- when it opens or closes its
i -- at its heart, like the tractric)

murmuring vacuum of dark matter spool, the
heat death cool to aspire: the lattice whose
latest dislike is atoms and molecules,
worlds and the god-sized
whorls of seeming stardust at what must
be -- and damn the proof -- anti-infini-
tesimal scales, everything integrated, ga-
lactic pails kicked over and spendthrift slow to upend, their
contents fused to background radiation like
funneled cement, and to harden

(le
dur désir de durer)

is the
negative one-half dream, awaiting

(the
curve of her, to this very day)

its
conjugate pair. And here I must ex-

press my regrets, apologize to my relict, our
plot of point values polyvalent despite the
crisp black and white

(this the image of our personal
Mandelbrot set: no matter where we begin, we're
certain to get to
infinite points, all of them

{her, me},

a
ring of purely hypothetical identity).

An e-
quation's iterations like this are complex only
in their being well simple: reality really, the
provable things of unknowable mass and the
matter is beauty when seen from a certain
distance

(a photograph when
lit from behind and below by the crabulous
stars, hot mess, the kiss of evaporated
metals when photons graph all the scars, white
balance and red shift, f-stop, fuck this,
stop all the physical laws.

This
sense of Love's usury as delight, I
do not wish

(I re-
coil the film, re-
call an image of a
woman's face, pristine and bruised)

anymore to conclude, much less demonstrate, the
human scale of exposure to infinite space.)


(Edited 24 August 2009, transcribed in part 20 August 2009, begun 19 August 2009. I'd been reading John Donne while revisiting the mathematical bases of modern physics, especially cosmology, and wondered what the former might have done with access to the latter and their conventional modes of expression. Something more consistently metrical certainly, and perhaps more polished; but ongoing understanding of the world is rich with poetic possibility even for rougher moderns.)