When I tell you this, that pi’s not algebraic,
you say ‘prove it,’ thinking that I take the pi’s.
Although I can’t, I find it elegiac
and, like Grey’s churchyard, simultaneously wise
and useless thwarting warts and evil eyes.
While it’s difficult to think that we should care
about math more than CK underwear
the latter leaves us less than meets the eye
while the former’s models muddle everywhere
because what’s algebraic is not pi.
This
form
forces
fine feelings
into abstruse lines
each longer longing to affix
a meaning to creations made live by febrile minds
and for this new spring trick I thank both you and SlashDot. Well done. Though if continued cumbersome.
(The thank-you in this poem is to Gregory K. who in 2006 wrote on SlashDot: “April is National Poetry Month (and, it turns out, Math Awareness Month), and on my blog, I decided to get people writing poetry based on the Fibonacci sequence. The poems are six lines, 20 syllables long with the syllable pattern 1/1/2/3/5/8, though they can go longer, obviously. I’ve been calling ’em Fibs, and people have been writing them on pop culture, politics, math, and more.”
Gregory K.’s Blog is at gottabook.blogspot.com/2006/04/fib.html )
“Two and two makes five
for large enough values of two.”
A seagull said this yesterday.
Do you think it could be true?
‘I am old,’ said the Durac, ‘and riddled with charm,
so I live all alone in The South.’
The Slynog replied, with a sound like it cried
though it moved not a part of its mouth,
‘You are eusocial, Eugene, eugenically broke;
you give over too early to wrath.
You keep seeking the reeking unriddling of All
though you look for it only in Math.’
‘Am I truly eusocial?’ the Durac essayed.
It pleasured him slightly to toy
with the sensible Slynog whose ‘sensitive’ seethed
under bedclothes of logic to buoy
up a billow of bubbles of misapplied thought.
‘I’d have thought that a taut skein of cells
in the skin or the blood were eusocial while I,
like an unaxoned neuron or bells
unadorned by book, candle or swung-about cat,
am waiting alone though we meet.’
The Slynog, who nurtured its own hermit past
with plunges through bloodstreams to eat,
said the Durac was right, and remarked that the light
was marvelous this time of the day.
Then they parted imparted with illusions they’d shared
a moment. Each went on its way.
I read until the math eludes my grasp.
I give up, do not go on to page two.
Page one has brought me rationals that rasp
away until their complements shine through
sufficiently to persuade me it is is true
that angles must be right to be correct.
I draw some, making straight lines intersect,
and on these axes try to classify
the books I’ve read, although when I inspect
my groups they are irrational, like pi.
Earth Tourist 