In the beginning was the
word.
(Sire of
the image)
Defining
of the facts
Of flesh
and of mortality
Of time
and space
And
thought beyond the scope of all and either.
And then the number.
(Sire of
the real)
Confining
of the facts
Of flesh
and of mortality
Of time
and space
And
thought beyond the scope of all and either...
I spoke before I counted
Cooed consonants
and vowels while she pinched
my splaying toes and sang soft piglet melodies,
chanting
with her dancing touch one, two, three,
and all
the way home...
And so I knew at coming in
this world, water spilt
into the
shock of gasping air that words were
touch and
song and wonder and giggling number
only hung
on them to ornament their sense.
Time wore on me and
taught me rigid math,
instructed
me in minutes, hours, days and years,
spinning infant music into silent sums with which
to weave a world more solid than the dreamstuff
of my singing soul.
I fell into the real
unwilling
caught in
calculus, described in graphs,
balanced
plus and minus, sine and cosine,
profit,
loss, and times divided, arc and segment,
into all
the creeds of common commerce.
Number gave us peace
statistic
and I did
not complain nor fault companions
overloud for
lusting after space flight, making
metrics god,
hanging scale on worth, nor hold
them guilty
for its other stubborn sins.
Like birth, like death,
eternity's a
word that
will not compass measure,
so coming
at the end I yearn again for
simpler
thoughts that outpace calculation and
tickle
soaring souls as singing fingers once did toes.
So now at last the
number.
(Finished,
summed, and bleak)
Confining
of the facts
Of
flesh and of mortality
Of
time and space
And
thought beyond the scope of all and either...
And soon again the word...
(Pray God)
Defining
of the facts
Of flesh
and of mortality
Of time
and space
