The Proof of the Axiom and Other Poems

The Proof of the Axiom

1.
She circles inside
the proof of the axiom

The axiom is self-evident
Is it true

2.
Is a wavelength blue
Is a wave a wave

She performs a gesture
with her hand

3.
If she hit rock
she could build a house

If she built a house
she could look out of the window.

4.
O, no! There's an axiom
inside the proof of the axiom

and another
and another

5.
She cannot tell
the net from the knot

fact from effect
All, as Parmenides says, is one

6.
She walks in woe
from lodgment to lodgment

trying to make
an analytic judgment.

 

DJ Spinoza talks to Flipper

He walks around walks around
DJ Spinoza

He looks like a circle
from which sticks out a snorkel

He says, Hey Flipper
You're next in line

for the French throne!
For your directions aren't overthrown

by th'element they swim in
You almost talk

whereas I sit under infinitesimal pieces of glass
instead of doing philosophy

If I were a rich man
all day I would tiddi-tiddi-dum

for the order of tiddi-tiddi-dum
repeats the order of things

I know
it is so

Look,

A cow flies
A fly cows

A rat larks
A lark rats

But a dog dogs
A bug bugs

All sorts of things are happening
in the bayou.

 

The Deaf

The deaf sit at a table
in an aviary

of hands
Their thought lacks words

Their hands sing
like an aviary

as heard by a deaf man
while visiting the zoo

He has eyes
in place of ears

His birds
are like roots

The deaf
have 17 fingers

5 palms
They exceed understanding

Thought
void of words

Love
with no one there

The world of the deaf:
behind a glass wall

the hearing
gape like fish

Words are absurd
think the deaf

How
They are just not for us.

 

La Fille Des Sourds

The hearing
daughter of the deaf

dreams aloud
in Sign

In French
she is la fille des sourds

She has
a Dedekind Cut

She says: /t/ /k/ /p/
mutter babble

Her first words
are not in her Muttersprache

She walks
cries mutter

mutter mutter
Die Mutter kann nicht hören

The mother is crushed
by the sides of her bed

Why
It is because they are so many

the dead.

 

Group Portrait with Massacre

Four horsemen moved along Mission Street
I jumped in the saddle & the set was complete

Our number was circular; if you squared it
It would end in itself, even for the visually impaired

Even for the hearing impaired
Even for the tactilely impaired

Even for the olfactory impaired
Even for the gustatorily impaired

Even for the impaired impaired
It rotated impassive, it didn't yearn to be paired

We rode through the thickets we rode through the glades
Cattails exploded like hand grenades

Before they were gone, they meowed woebegone
Beneath each shone a black sun

I couldn't bear it
I was a rabbit

I was a bunny
I was a hare

I walked around like Maurice Scève
My left retina was a sieve

My right retina was a colander
I hit SAVE
I hit SAVE

But my RAM got knotted in its own Boolean
Ringlets

like a stoned anaconda

Our captain said to us, our captain
The earth lies like brown tartan

Various peasants upon her go
Recalling the Book of Hours of Jean, Duc de Berry

Let us depopulate her fully
And treat ourselves to a game of tic-tac-toe

Tic-tac-toe is a kind of binary arithmetic
I don't know the number of combinations but there can't be many.

It's like flipping 9 pennies
And 9 is 3², my maties

Just then a dragon flew by, its wings were covered with scales
Do-re...