I was in New York last week, and I threw down a freewrite while sitting on the steps of the Met. I’ve reshaped that aimless prose into a seven-stanza poem in which I limited the syllabic count of each line to seven different possibilities based upon the relative and transposed spacetime coordinates that applied to that particular freewrite: 2, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14.
May (82nd & 5th)
in this city of exponents
where the mathematics are visible in everything
men of the twentieth century vowed to touch the sky
for economy
the economy of spacetime that everyone knows here
where time is the unifier
of breadth and length and depth
nature finds her way
to express biology among all this artifice
through the constant music of movement: choral, orchestral
the regulation of involuntary processes
through veins in marble
capillaries in cracks in the pavement
platelets in asphalt
white blood cells in granite
the nervous system
where there is still so much more below than above
and the electrical currents
of internal regulation
boast of immortality and collapse
over the ether of dashed dreams
the paradox of impermanent permanence
and vice versa, of course
encoded in the double helix within the
intersection of concrete seams
expanded through the scaffolding
that has been used time and time and again
to construct, to rebuild and to reimagine
that which has already been through
the same process of rethinking
at least a dozen times
generation after generation
of dreams and aspirations that
tangle in the rearrangement
of everything and
dizzily collapse at the feet
of the god of all things temporary
the god of all things
but the temporary and the tiny find ways
to open up, to hold big, significant things
through the blessings of
economy and
mathematics and
biology and
impermanence so
that all of the world’s timeless principles
are reduced into a thimble
a lifetime within
a few elongated, gossamer moments that
stretch out over the synapses to snap
at the cold and recall
beauty
and a mark on the hip that gets explained away
when the aches of autumn
drive the sun deeper and deeper into the horizon
the economic blessing of
a shared moment is recounted
so that the insignificant
becomes part of your memory
of you
and what seemed so small
is now much larger than originally thought
there’s a whisper inside traded glances
(you were there, too, weren’t you?)
♥ EAB