With a feeling of shame, we drove west from Georgia
to the end of America, holing up with the ex-lover
of John Wesley’s mother, a frayed Victorian on Puget Sound.

The mold in the house made it hard to breathe or sleep.
Worn out from insomnia and all that driving I forgot
what defines a prime number; is it indivisible

by any number but itself? I could’ve looked it up
but that’s not the same as knowing. My confusion was the number one—
why is one excluded from the set of primes—it seems arbitrary

as if one’s singular line were shameful.
I recall myself
as leaves drift across a frozen road.

The past is a prime number, divisible by nothing but itself,
and the only pure way to the real.
Like a nervous habit, I return

to nothing left over. 
One should be counted as a prime,
indissoluble at it is, so deeply joined to its noun,

like the tree shading a cousin’s doomed wedding,
or the shopping mall cafeteria where she and I swallowed salt and grease
when we were eleven and prime. 

^{Fractal: a cascade of never-ending, self-similar, repeated
elements that change in scale but retain similar shape.}

A
cascade 
of 
infinite 
is why
I believe in 
loops 
and spirals, 
subtle shifts, cycles.
My son, preschooler stunned 
by
the science museum, 
sticks his hand 
into a glacier, 
the chunk 
a broken testimony, 
the history 
of
a world dissolving. Cold!
It’s cold! And
it’s melting. Look right here, he says.
Similarities 
of self
astonish. I see them in 
architecture,
geometry a welcome language, 
shapes
a new alphabet for
prayer and song.
I study Peter Eisenman’s
House 11a
lapping up patterns, interlocking Ls, 
squares and 
replicated rectangles—
the syntax of
ideas. For Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim 
in
Bilbao, syntax looks like
titanium scales rhyming across curves. Glass 
and limestone 
patterns, similarities of 
visual texture,
are creations of weight, depth; order breaks 
tension
where the lines turn. A cascade 
of repeating elements grounds my belief in 
humanity
as mystery. Signs appear: a sound, 
song,
and syllable mean things.
Armadillo! Armadillo! sings my son, 
the youngest,
using his Louis Armstrong
voice; grit gives way to twang and twang turns into hard-rock screams.
He’s an oracle
at four years old, an armor-clad mammal 
his muse.
My oldest son speaks in code, 
echolalia a symptom of a seizure-
besieged brain. When
he utters, No, and No, and No, and 
No,
then I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know, I listen for 
a divine voice revealed.
Cascades changing in scale, not shape, is why I 
trust weight, depth, height-materials and thingness:
Saturn’s rings, the Pacific coastline, bolts of lightning, 
a Romanesco 
cauliflower, angelica flower-
heads, veins
of sycamore leaves, seashells, snowflakes, blood vessels, DNA.
A range and scope of fractals 
inspire awe, a cascade of never-ending 
wonder at both 
connections and aberrations as 
well
as places of perfect order and broken patterns. When 
I consider what we
may be reduced-sized copies of, I grapple 
with insight;
it hovers in physics and biology, the shapes of letters, 
the magic of new languages,
the mystery of cells and synapses, the music 
of my sons’ voices,
the geometries of buildings and trees.
Sometimes
I glimpse an answer, something like seeing starlight years after 
the star dies, supernovas.
Four hours before my youngest son’s birth, I dreamed 
my sister, dead
31 years, placed him in my arms: Take care of him, she said. He has 
her eyes, ice-blue and illumined by 
God.

Up late scrolling
for distraction, love, hope,
I discovered skew dice.

In the promotional video
you see only a mathematician’s hands,
like the hands of god,

picking up the dice one at a time,
turning them over and over 
before returning them 

to the hard wood table,
where each lands with something 
between a whoosh and silence,

face up, face down,
some faces lying on their side,
as at other archaeological sites.

I bought a set of the patented dice,
each with its own logic and truth 
and aleatory uncertainty—

at home alone I rolled them
across my dining table
to pass the time, 

and time with its own logic
passed. Dear god.
I haven’t been touched in so long.

But why wouldn’t geometry equal divinity

1000 + 1 + 1 + 1         What is faith

but trust in one & infinity         Once

in Granada I studied a wall of polygons

or was it stars or bees         or for a second         a flash

of gladiolas in a field until I could see

a galaxy         planets spinning         spokes on a wheel

clocks or buttons         vines blooming         a tornado

from a future century              garden of ellipses

my lover’s cornea         alight each morning 

God         so far away         & right in front of me

A dramatic clue lodged in a rockface. Set in a shimmering sound belt slung around the grasses. Collections of numbers signify a large sum, a fatness that cannot be touched. Numbers are heart weight in script. Calculus means a small pebble pushed around maniacally. Binding affection, instead of fear, to largeness.

Ideas are peeled into fours and pinned on the warm corners of earth to flap in a wind. Wind, the product of a swinging axe that splits the sums. This math flowers on the tender back of the knee. An operatic leaf in the tree uses a secret algebra to perforate dense void. The void behaves as a porous slice of rye bread spread thick with salted butter.

Food is braided into the body. On the watchface of the lake, a felled tree trunk keeps protracted time. Circling vaguely like the day does. The circle is dented by the dense tear of a woman without the thing she needs. A loudness about need has a reverse effect. The loud need loses mass. This new thinned need is braided into a story archived in a dark library inaccessible to the public.

The tear weighs the same as a loaf of rye bread. The circle is made of birthday wishes glued together with morning sun mucus. Whatever is hidden is pluckable in time, even sound and meaning. Wind deserves a trophy for revealing this elegantly.

Let y equal any number of fathers.
Let x equal the numberless planets.
Let y minus x equal long nights of fog
and let x plus y equal hydra & incubus.

If y is > x, why do all my convictions gape?
If x is > y, does “father” just mean nightcap?
When x ÷ y, we set sail on a windjammer.
When y ÷ x, watch for the banshee, the jinn.

Or let x be replaced by a midsummer night
and y by—well, you can never replace y but
by morning y will lollygag near half-moons:
Odysseus sailing to Ithaca, mildew as it rots.

And a b is no mere theory of relativity: it is
helter-skelter materfamilias, Ma Barker, and
Rebekkah, the mother who deceived. Not
Sarah who couldn’t conceive nor the Mother

of all of Nature: the black tern, the kittiwake;
plants ornamental, baroque; the cumulous,
the nebulosus; and yet, mother-of-pearl and
ice-cold, tiger’s-eye and monkey in the middle.

Let’s say a b is a % of all the love in the world
or synonymous with do you love me now that
I can dance? Let’s agree that a is the salsa or
paso doble and b is always always the beguine.

Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is 3,592 measures.

A voice kept far from feeling is heard as measured.

What’s wanted in desperate times are desperate measures.

Pushkin’s unfinished Onegin: 5,446 lines.

No visible tears measure the pilot’s grief

as she Lidars the height of an island: five feet.

Fifty, its highest leaf.

She logs the years, the weathers, the tree has left.

A million fired-clay bones—animal, human—

set down in a field as protest

measure 400 yards long, 60 yards wide, weigh 112 tons.

The length and weight and silence of the bereft.

Bees do not question the sweetness of what sways beneath them.

One measure of distance is meters. Another is li.

Ten thousand li can be translated: “far.”

For the exiled, home can be translated “then,” translated “scar.”

One liter

of Polish vodka holds twelve pounds of potatoes.

What we care about most, we call beyond measure.

What matters most, we say counts. Height now is treasure.

On this scale of one to ten, where is eleven?

Ask all you wish, no twenty-fifth hour will be given.

Measuring mounts—like some Western bar’s mounted elk head—

our cataloged vanishing unfinished heaven.

—2016

Four less one is three.

Three less two is one.

One less three
is what, is who,
remains.

The first cell that learned to divide
learned to subtract.

Recipe:
add salt to hunger.

Recipe:
add time to trees.

Zero plus anything
is a world.

This one
and no other,
unhidden,
by each breath changed.

Recipe:
add death to life.

Recipe:
love without swerve what this will bring.

Sister, father, mother, husband, daughter.

Like a cello
forgiving one note as it goes,
then another.

—2010

anything over zero is zero
anything over one is itself

a bed over zero
is a funhouse mirror aimed

at a cloudy sky
a sky and its clouds over zero

a storm over one
is an infinite storm

a night over one
is a kiss over zero

and the minute hand eating its tail
is a red ear on a wet pillow

the memory of laughter
is a lamp over one

one inhales before one sighs
a lamp over zero is zero

the hole in a satin sheet
slowly ate up the yellow

till splitting the hem
the hole was unleashed

like a kiss
a long kiss over zero

Geometry is a perfect religion,
Axiom after axiom:
One proves a way into infinity
And logic makes obeisance at command.

Outside of the triangle, cubes, and polystructures
There is restless pummeling, pounding and taunting.
The end is diffused into channels
Every step into eternity—and steps are endless.