Dream I have a little of a mathematics Child again absorbed
in novels from my sickbed Bright clutch of what is recognition
somewhere avant meridian Another child leaving in the novel
I am reading Light in me a sleep a pool of neither
thought nor feeling not of things but of their elements
escaping Slips away the child in the book from a party
her birthday from the other children she is leaving
I am tired I am reading I am adding I am trying
not to understand To undo the will to understand
Must relinquish must and trying Reading free from I
I read a child listening for the first time to music for the first time
in the sense of recognition What is it that sees me
child in a novel that has neither person nor a substance
music mathematics is a dream makes me see myself
more loving when I listen makes my heart go
the hunter and a lonely Remembering is a mathematics
and the body in its illnesses the stamina has symphonic
calculus of living in a sickness I can listen now
learn I have a mind listening heart I have
remembers what the seeing was a dream a reading is
a feeling I have every time I have first comes
the listening then memory dream the sense
of speech is mathematics to see a means of feeling
there is always then the leaving and undoing Life I was
a fraction will not see the world that I am making
I knew in my additions I was nothing more than
almost child again in the middle distance speaking
to his apparition Speak you have a history
Copyright © 2021 by Kyle Dacuyan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 24, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.