Mathematical Park

prose poem

In the piecemeal dawn, I cut a swath through a loose choreography of trees, stamp underfoot sterling tips of grass, upset the elements reticulate in every detail: root, stem, bud, spore; the silent engineering of cells; the hermetic architects of honeycomb, wood snail, bone rot, laboring all at once, rearranging the view as I walk from one end of the park to the other and back, and count each addition, each subtraction superstitious, compulsive, as if I could ever solve the equation of cloud and fern, root and nail, torso and hand, my hand when it pushes aside a leaf specially designed to extend from the branch, and catch the nutrient of a star pooling random at my feet. 

Originally published in XCP: Streetnotes, Winter 2003.