Thursday, October 20, 2011

Revisions, revisions.

Made some changes and it feels much closer to finished.

THE AL KHWARIZMI IN YOU

Wonders if
there's an algebra
for all of it:
for the moon's curvature
as a midnight calculus,
for how the windmills
behind the casino
turn their giant Xs
into late night whys,
for how the tide
rises with an
asymptotic longing.
Even for the arc
of a brand new
table tennis paddle
that your sweaty hand
now grips
or the velocity of the balls
(larger than they've
ever been)
spinning across the net
between your namesake
and your imagination.
Where he,
still a baby
burps and sighs
asleep in a crib.
The trajectory
seeming derivative,
almost always
of the desire.
Two Greek letters
on different sides
of an equation,
each ciphering
the other,
each signifying
an absence
by their italicised presence.
Daddy, Daddy,
don't you know
I miss you,
his sigh says.
He rests his head
on the hollow
of your chest.
Asks when
are you coming back?
A gulf
with no echoes.
As he whispered
to you once,
his lips are
an empty set now.
Two brackets
attempting an embrace
because kisses,
however long ago,
count and multiply
in the abacus of memory.
Is there an algebra
for all of it?
What you've
done with the days
since you left,
what you tried to do,
or might have tried,
had you correctly
solved for all the variables,
if you had
a slope to graph,
a slide to rule them.
If the days didn't
dance to their
own algorithm.
Is there an algebra
for all of it,
the floating
function of the seagulls,
the breaking
but unbroken waves,
the ghostly geometry
of the foam's fathering?
For how two pairs
of footprints,
now non-linear,
could solve
all the sand
drifting
between them?

1 comment:

Anita C. Fonte said...

your work is new to me and the idea of pairing mathematics with poetry is also new--but makes sense, too. For me, algebra (as I recall it many moons ago) was fun. It was a new language with numbers and letters and sometimes made more sense than trying to conjugate verbs in French.