Two men, two women, two mo(u)rnings

1. There's a story that Descartes, who died of early mornings,

fashioned for himself a

model of a woman: his

daughter, who had died in young adulthood (trans-

lation of morning), out of

wood and pinions.

This was old-fashioned, his ontogeny reca-

pitulating hers -- think of

hair in a ring --, his

capturing her but failing to bring her to

life, lacking the

vital fright of e-

lectricity. A disordered pair, the

man and those moveable

parts, so clearly the

least of his arts, that moveable beast, so

portable, the terror of

unfinished speech, the

unfinished tower of her standing proud and

lewd, the rouged and

painted flower of her cheek.

2. Évariste Galois died of a gunshot

wound after dawn. He had

written all night, the

candle-light and flicker of thoughts -- their

trickle like candle-

wax -- in the heat of

loving and having no time, and the wick: in the

center of a page, he had

written: "une femme", a

woman who blushed like the gunpowder dawn, her

rosy fingers to

him, and then gone: "une

femme", encircled by orders and indices,

what would become set

theory. In the margins:

"I have not enough time." This is where God

doesn't -- needn't or

can't -- come in. This

young man, barely past boy, the tower un-

finished of him, the

fading flower of his cheek.

(Edited 8 October 2009, begun 23 September 2009. The story goes that Galois committed to paper everything he could of his prodigious mathematical imagination that night, knowing it might well be his last; set theory would have been invented eventually, but not in the same blaze of glory. I have Descartes' story on no good authority, but am amazed by the image of the master geographer and crypto-religious philosopher rattling around a drafty castle, his daughter's creepy effigy rattling around alongside him.)

The pigeons, no matter

The pigeons, no matter they flew any higher, caught
fire, drifting through the air askance, soot-

colored and aglow as twists of paper lit --
gently, lest they burn unevenly --, let

go, and spiral themselves into smoke, living
rings of whispering yellow, or sparks given

off of sputtering logs: the sound wind
makes in a furnace, in a city unforged, when

printers' stuttering presses and type slag
words away in a shimmering draft, sag

low to the ground like glass with age, ash
thick on its silvery breath and skin smashed

open and ragged and feathery light, wings
rustle and curl, with toneless peal sings the

paradise almost lost in the flames, rush of
flames almost invisible for the fire, blush of

darkness visible, the stubble -- like grass burnt
down -- of the city, the towering unswept

chimney of air unmortared, the perch, hot,
tottering, slaughtering perch of pigeons. (What

rhymes with pigeon?) Eighty-nine of ninety-seven
neighborhood churches burnt down. (What rhymes with seven?)

(Edited 4 October 2009, begun 27 September 2009. Milton, whom I am in time to appreciate as the language's greatest versifier, was blind long before 1666, when he returned to London in time not to appreciate but to experience -- hearing, feeling, probably smelling -- the Great Fire, which seems to flicker behind his descriptions of Hell in the first book of Paradise Lost. The detail inspiring this poem comes from Samuel Pepys, who of 2 September 1666 writes: "the poor pigeons ... were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.")

Untitled ('Young boy winter'?)

How much white in the air today, instead of gold! How

fair the light and fading, giving

way to welcome youthful cold, who'll

play outdoors all afternoon with falling leaves (how

red his cheeks!) and evening, pleasing

parents, whom -- beloved -- he'll leave behind.

(I looked outside and this poem came in, encouraged by yesterday's reading of a fellow poet's verses in progress, all with more _song_ than I'm used to seeing, and by the memory of a young boy pleased at moving faster than he was used to experiencing.)

This earthly afterlife

The voice as undiluted as ever, un-

mixed with the water of time, pure wine this

earthly afterlife -- what believers

mean by the space between baptism and

death, when the body's warm of a midsummer's

dream (the teeming crowds and footlights, the

edges of seats, the applause, the repeats; the

flowers you've picked swan-colored, the note hand-

written, to dawn consecrated, you're smitten and

waited, standing, for her call at the curtain), when

all that's created is certain of being kept

dear, of becoming -- before that endless

night is slept, the voice as clear as

breathless evening --, in its coming-to-be, the

fullness of is: the loving of pouring

out, of drinking in, of thinking --

this the antidote to doubt -- how

better it is to have "slumbered here

while these visions did appear", and

nodded -- blissful mystery -- during the play.

(Edited and transcribed 20 September 2009, begun in smallest kernel -- the title -- 14 September 2009. I owe the rest of the poem to four interlocutors, one the quoted author, one a noted scholar, one an amazing actress, one an amazed (like Theaetetus) philologist. I think that even those still living have never met each other, but I imagine that they -- and I -- would enjoy the conversation. In its stead, the poem.)

A breakdown(:) on Konigsberg's bridges

(Because of formatting, this poem is available for download as a four-page .pdf here.)

"Brooding on the charmèd wave"

(Because of formatting, this poem is available for download as a two-page .pdf here.)

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).)