LXXV*

Is it always 1 am?

Have your clocks stopped
trusting you?

What good is all this reading
after your glasses have gone to sleep?

Did you forget
to bring out the best wine last?

Isn’t even darkness light?


* after Paulo Neruda's The Book of Questions

vaulting

in half-light of moon through honey locusts
white petals given to summer gusts

they say ride rider ride, claim this promise of freedom
others exhort the darkness is an oblivion

this universe is vast and infinitesimal
your gallop born by cold wet stones

the moon lies down and hoof-beats sleep
you barter hope for a single blown petal

lineage

and what will the outcome of all this be?
days rising and falling
one after the other

your father's ancestors
sent out with spears to hurl
into the black unknown

how many came back?
shall you not also go?

it had to be a cephalopod

O for octopus
for my octogenarian mother
the octagonal lies I tell myself
about how the sky is really the sky
and not just a mass of diminishing air

Mathematics

attempted proof—
if this then that
it leads to a card
an image of a brown rabbit
a white card with a pastel blue border
passed down from a generation that still writes

this doesn’t fit into the constructed equation

some people require mechanical valves
an old man in a nursing home
where I played as a boy
his leg gone above the knee
a pencil stub

I’d wheel grandmother into a sunny room
she’d tell mother
how the ceiling writhed with rats

which variables do I assign?

red digits of an alarm clock
night full of numbers for inputs
sine wave at the bottom of a curtain—
a vine of gold thread repeats in a pattern
bifurcates three times
ends in three leaves

each spring mother went to the woods
picked a lady slipper
set it on a table in a glass vase that never broke
she’d done this since childhood
before wild orchids were endangered—
a place she only speaks of now

we hunted for salamanders under logs
if lady slippers are x and salamanders y
if you plotted them against t
they’d approach the same value

sometimes M seems to be zero

she sent a card—
gold foil Sun with round cheeks
crescent moon surrounded by stars
never stop believing
the trick to drawing salamanders is to alternate legs
give the tail a slight sinusoidal curve

unsolvable symbols
unrelenting theory of chaos
if only the answer was one