Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Of Word and Number






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

And thought beyond the scope of all and either.

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