mathematician's prayer

correct us, oh creator, within our lives,
with your measured overlooking presence.
the leaves have fixed themselves in the world intact,
trees towering as the graveyard fills,
souls adapted to so little space.
the turned-out spirit perceives everything,
intensified limbs, cells,
mutable representations,
that old succession of species,
everything numbered by laws.

historian's complaint

curled language lost perhaps
relations undefinable

works forgotten
meaningless discarded

just as something amazing
starts to speak

forms

long towering numbers
embellish metaphors

beyond questions
every incompetency dissolves

just as colored perceptions
model abstractions

forms within things
overlooking their presence

colors remain themselves
free now to possess nature

X simultaneously produces necessity

a contained number schema
radically dissolves the leaves

time’s universal language
speaks of the inviolability of things

we gray ourselves and astonish ourselves
with the forms of flowers

that thing only colors will know

Once

Love said, selfishly,
how woman, if loved first,
loved even the warm thought
of its vain patchwork of tangerine leaves.
It worked its face into flown pictures.
Should one portrait appear, it left again,
They knew how to find each other,
their letters changed their want.
Behind their laughter, after their eyes,
they saw in cumulus shadows
the way wonder might love a night.

Art

Christ’s dead face had once influenced night,
his weird eyes laughing in Corinthians.
That proselytizer's dream of acceptance had left.
As a writer she knew words would one day mean trouble.
Those that made livings of colors,
they said, “Come warm woman, musician of flesh,
rise up out of the leaves.”
They would resurrect her that way,
in all their lurid paintings.