Classic Poem

Number itself goes numb under
its simple addition, zeroes and nines
make but a poor retort
to its fury of finities. If
even for a single instant,
between here and the dark
tepees of the woods yonder, God
had to count the snowflakes,
it would never snow.

Trillions, quadrillions are a cup
soon filled between a house and barn.
Not all the falcon-plundered
swans of the world could so down
that white tornado-ing corridor.
Something else—meteorologies—
clouds and cold air—
meet, mindlessly formulate,
and suddenly everywhere
over a hundred, a thousand square
miles, precipitate, without reckoning what
casual enormities the geo-
metrical townships are buried under.

One Gothic individual crystal
gets caught on the long mane
of our neighbor's mare,
and a vast theological problem,
a band of angels, pivots
upon an asterisk: It turns
in a trice to mist or melt.
But what formal intensity ar-
ticulated it out of nothing
a moment ago? Nobody understands
the mind of a crystal;
or the tie of art to mere elements,
or of self to the rags and cinders
of its long nonentity.











By permission of the author.