by Carl Boon
They’ve been tasked since Tuesday to distinguish Archimedes from Pythagoras,
Eliot from Pound, the earth they lean on
from the earth that told stories
to their mothers. Some of them turn
beautiful, quite suddenly, when they gauge
the West, and some snap ponchos
over their shoulders. I’ve forgotten
what it means to know facts and statistics,
rises and runs, which planets are dry
and which the ice has tamed. I’ve forgotten
the Stoics, Tolstoy’s faith, what Hegel meant
when he twisted a bone to the sky.
Under domes they’ve made to shield themselves
they ask each other to define metonymy
and paradox, mitochondria, to believe
for a moment that blue is hotter than red.
I eat a toasted cheese sandwich, glistening,
consumed with you who note Iroquoian
prophecies, the songs of the Algonquins.
You are beautiful but one of them,
an umbrella between your knees, recalling
Bishop’s “plucked and skinny fowl,”
or the morning I threw my thesis away
and watched it rain into useless paragraphs.
