The mathematician

Published in North of Capricorn - an Anthology of Verse 1988

No one will speak to you now -

not after the dead were found

in your sitting room

drinking daquiries

and playing party games

with mirrors.

No one will be seen with you

after you described murder

as love on a slippery floor.

You have exhausted the equations,

examined the parameters

and found there were no limits

only sunken boats

in the bath, glasses

filled with tokens.

You incline towards stasis

but that is simply because

you awakened drunk

and wedged between two walls.

No one will recognize you now;

your face is a perpetual

and enraged metaphor

and your hands are too

abstract to open doors.

You sit in the dark

exhume parabolas and lines

of rhetoric

and wait for a delivery of ducks

or guns

or children with their feet on fire.

No one will tell you where you are;

you search for words

and find only telephones

whole vocabularies articulate

themselves in silence.

You watch from beneath the bed

bewildered and almost tame.

Soon you will scratch your name

into the wood and hope

there will be someone to welcome you

long after the last words have gone home.

poem by Jeremy Tager