Math Nerd in Love
He hired me to teach him
the equations of motion
in some unknown coordinate system.
I took him to passages in books,
derived the laws,
principles of two-body motion
through calculus.
He loved the way I said 'differentiation,'
my lips parted like butterfly wings,
floated over the syllables.
I showed him how to program his calculator,
to punch in conversions,
to graph exotic functions.
We soon fell into periodic motion,
lying in a fen of space-time I'd never been,
swung in geodesic paths
heading toward chaotic motion
(I was unaware of)
I failed to test for minima or maxima,
the slope of our relationship was zero
(I thought I knew.)
It was minima - a well to fill.
Inescapable,
potential love barriers my wave-like body
could not tunnel through.
I fell in love.
[first published in Blood and Fire Review, Fall 1999]
|||home|||
The Solid Gold Dancer Blues
When we hit the girl on the bicycle,
we smelled like those fishy blue gills
that weren't big enough to keep & eat
in mother's egg & flour batter.
The girl's mid-air ballet began
As a Marilyn McCoo tune gurgled
through staticy AM radio waves.
Her ten speed's reflectors dangled
in air like our fishing lures flashed
in the lake water. The car
bit down hard.
For some of the fish we cut the line
to let them swim with hook & string attached
Some mouths we ripped out, though,
to retrieve those shiny spinners.
Our eyes bobbed as the girl
floated onto the hood.
Her legs were tan, her clothes glittered.
It was all in motion,
feathered hair waved,
terry cloth wrist bands swirled,
the make-up she wore left
little pearl kiss marks on the hood.
The windshield bowed toward mom
like a shattered jigsaw puzzle of glass about
to sprinkle on her lap. Pressed & cut
by the back of a wanna be Solid Gold Dancer.
Everything dropped.
Black tire marks
sliced across two lanes.
I measured the length & arc of the skids,
at the end, our family surrounded
a simple girl with a broken ankle.
Mother's car, her hook & string.
She lay like a heap of tumbled laundry
with her back propped on the guide rail.
Over & over she rocked & rubbed
swollen bone, already forging
Solid Gold into another dream.
|||home|||
|