When we became clever the Earth shrank itself
Into the head of a pin, surrounded by angels
Its curvature now a real number with infinite digits.
There are rivers in the skies, and swept down one of them
I find myself far from you, months away but only hours away.
How can we really learn what space is, its viscosity,
When the heat is always set to a boil? At midnight
The Moon stands upended, its light arriving in a heartbeat.
If only my life could bend more easily than the space I am in.
Instead the clay jar around my scroll
Fractures easily. My words dry up and fragment
Dispersing like flakes of ash into the white noise.
But a music of meaning still stands unbodied somewhere;
Well-tempered, no ratios of numbers will capture it today.
Lacking words, but curving around the Word itself,
The Reason, the Logos, the one and clearest ringing note no
Bell can yet attain. When it rings
Our bones will gather again
And body themselves into an army.
A note from the author:
The poem uses a medieval paradox, evoking the mathematical infinities possible on the smallest scale, as a way of imagining the irony of how small the Earth itself has become. We travel enormous distances in a frenzy of activity only to find ourselves in a place no more able to define us than the one we had left. Our technology gives no meaning to our lives, only more "sound and fury, signifying nothing." Christ himself is our only hope of meaning and significance, and when his word and life envelops us, there are no longer any boundaries to what we will become!