Sunday, September 6, 2020

poem

Curvature

Space and time are curved.
Nothing real is ever really straight.
Street maps are lies,
False matrices of intersecting lines,
Hash tags, tic-tac-toe grids sketched
On restaurant place mats to occupy the kids,
Hopscotch boxes chalked on asphalt,
The way sidewalks weave around trees and telephone poles.
The shortest distance between two points actually bends,
It comes in waves that no one sees,
In clouds of probabilities.

I underline the best parts of books
As straight as I can
But the ink always veers
Into the ends of sentences
Smearing the certainty of periods.

Words should be curved 
To fit the formless niches of truth.
They used to teach cursive in school,
That incautious flow of letter into letter;
Not this staccato etching of printing,
Pencils that leave the page, tap tap tapping,
The whir of printers spitting out uniform fonts,
Letters unconnected,
It's all so discursive.

Many save old love letters
For the Proustian effect of forgotten perfumes;
My nose in the nape of your neck,
My hand caressing the arch of your back.
I've always saved them for the script,
Thick ink raised from the page like Braille.
I trace the looping swerve of your signature
Across delicate stationary frail
As ancient artifacts and find 
The truest paths follow the curvature.

9/7/20