To the Beauty of the Smallest Action
It is so intractable: how can it delight?
And so parsimonious with what of insight
it will allow, you might well call it the small god
of the Universe--not the One raised up a clod
and with zephyr breath blew life and shape and strange mind
into the cave dwelling likes of you and me. Blind
then and blind now (though less or more is hard to say),
we’re teased by this little box of a god at play.
But how deeply in we may peer along one line
if we concede the rest to blindness: a half-sign
then of all the inner workings, though half with half
in reconstruction never makes the whole. The math
has taught us that, which where like truth the beauty lies
beyond the senses. Thus we take pure thought for eyes
and learn the marvelous working out of strange things.
Yet for me, still it fails the flight of earth-bound wings.
And so I fail, holding to this provincial love
of what the senses make. Nothing outside, above
the local realm. Sight and sound, smell and touch and taste
the touchstones. All else seems to be invention’s chaste
beauty, a thing of second order and unfelt...
but what of the leafy bower? A poet dwelt
there once who spun his light and beauty moved. He thought
it truth. What then of what his moving hand had wrought?
No flight of fancy flies free of its gravity
nor rides the nothingness. Wings will fit to a tee
the rules of lift set out for them or else all falls--
like that poor son foundering within the sea’s blue walls.
And the others of vision, wanting the unbound,
the wild loosening, sweet outlaw minds that confound
at first established order with their faux disorder--
do they not subside, in the many-folded border?
Even the sea of nothingness is seething now.
What was the emptiness in thought revealed the how
of being, once our measure took uncertainty
to itself--from which that ceaseless activity
of the virtual and that which lifts it to the real:
By opposites, paired entities arise. They steal
from the zeros for a while but soon together die--
unless, like poetry’s wreathed leaves of laurel, they vie
and win that ordaining touch of the primal fire.
Then the debt of existence is paid. And the lyre
of bygone days that lifts with its whisper mere words
toward the upper realms and calls down the song birds,
which weaves still the ancient round of fair & bitter leaves
and culls among contending texts--what of that these
days when small truth is freed by chance, its ghost-life shorn
in fire, when one for one the nemesis is born?
So is it the little god has taken up hiding
inside the new strangeness of words or to confiding
a few secrets in the calculus of the smallest
world inquiring mind can travel to? And who callest
out to thee in the bower of number and measure,
save the sons and daughters of the poets? The treasure
shimmers now well beyond what song alone can transduce--
are not these makers of a mathematics of some use?
For they bring back in a language more difficult
than any invention of the textualist’s
cult
something protean and beautiful: infinity
borne on the infinitesimal’s divinity.
And there is law to it. The language is not free
to deconstruct on some slippery knowledge. This tree
flows out from itself like the cycles of the dance.
As for truth, that’s the sweet ongoing ignorance.
David Cummings