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MIT Poetry
But man, there's no boundary line to art.
–Charlie Parker
1.The young Fibonacci, with downcast eyes and open mouth,
His abacus under his arm,
Scuffs through the dust of the streets of Bugia,
Sweats under the fire of the Arab sun.
Thin boys wave their arms and jeer:
The Blockhead, the Bighellone,
Outcast because of one eye that turns inward,
Fibonacci, son of the Simpleton Bonaccio.
And Pisa is very far away.At home he stares, heavy-lidded, into the fire
And dreams a gift of numbers.
He dreams rabbits, leaping from the fire in pairs,
A predictable sequence-
One pair, two, three, five, eight, thirteen,
And on without an end,
Each number the sum of the preceding two,
Increasing by the magic ratio of the golden mean,
The sequence a graceful logarithmic spiral-
An unbearable glimpse into infinity
That he will one day catch between the covers
Of the Liber Abaci.
Both nostrils filled, one with the dark snuff
Of nothingness, one stuffed with light,
He nurses a sneeze.
Unborn stars lie buried in the mottled jelly of his eye,
And in the eye a tear, indifferent,
Reflects the world, reduced, warped and wobbling,
The curve of its convex edge
The fragment of a spiral.
2.
In the galaxies of outer space,
Arms of stars twirl outward
In spectacular spirals;
With held breath, I watch the night sky
For a comet, waiting to see its graceful tail
Spiral away from the sun in a blazing curve.Released by a collision at the sun's core
A neutrino sails through space toward earth,
Arrives in eight minutes, a quick trip,
Ducks into a trap set to catch it,
A tank five thousand feet underground
In the Homestake Mine in Lead, South Dakota,
Bumps an atom of chlorine,
Liberates an electron
Whose curling track
Sprays outward in a delicate spiral.Skullful of green wonder
At the whorl of a ferntip
Forcing its way through leafmold,
I stare at wonders seen and thought of,
Known and imagined:
A snail's spiral shell,
The whorl of seeds spiraling from the center
Of the drooped head of a sunflower,
The marred bark of a young dogwood
Scarred in an ascending spiral
By honeysuckle trying to get ahead,
The towering corkscrew horns of the African Kudu
That must be hunted alone,
The open secret of the ear's coiled cochlea,
The lonely spiral growth of streptococci
In a swollen throat.
The serpent coils savagely on itself,
Tries to swallow its tail,
Fails, an ecstasy of rage,
An eternity of escape.As the sun arcs over the horizon
And darkness settles thick and gentle as an eiderdown,
And a narrow moon slices the sky,
Its curve clean as the lid of an eye,
On a stretch of earth that seems more flat than not
I lie back, looking up and out,
Feeling small, and feel
The arc of the earth's curve
In the small of my back.
3.
The dusts of Fibonacci's bones
Sift and swirl in spirals
As the planet whirls and heaves.
There is no rest.
Yet somewhere there is a room,
A room with walls that spiral
Toward its center, a space
Sucked clean of time,
A place where mystery takes its ease
And hides its face.