Fields｜Issue 3
Sock puppet
Now and then a famous somebody drops in
and tells us we’re too pretty,
on the inside, that we’d loved too much
the music of theoretical diction and not
the mathematical phenomena it points to.
Our study group still meets every Tuesday
to scatter your ashes, which keep recurring
in this shoe box, and sometimes we feel
like students of a ridiculous ruse
that demands our total attention, though
the chipped lapis of the waters call
back to us unintelligibly like the bells
of an incomplete cathedral, which
say maybe not to take ourselves too seriously.
to police an inferior machine
Please note: you’re dead now. Act like it. A determinism
will still find you, terminal man battling higher courts.
Keep doing what you’re doing. The metropolitan area
will turn out to be a large park, on an even larger preserve,
on a small island in international waters where endnotes
accrete with no point, stilt into a long drink of daylight,
and get on with their lives. Though talk of process and talk
of postures will still take on sharp edges in the first hours
of proper night. Every circle has one dilettante forgiven
only from the neck down. Like fire, you’re a good thing
when contained, a cacophony that ends sharply
at ten p.m. You’re a great comfort to me. How I can’t say.
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