Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
This body,
Cut up into large squares
Like brownies
That are readily stacked
And stored
In heavy brown cardboard
Boxes, like
Blocks of hard cracked golden-brown
Velveeta cheese,
Reassembled at the destination, or
Every morning
Anew, not unlike those clicking
Number puzzles,
Trying to rediscover the
Integer sequence,
But there's always that final
Dissatisfying hole
Where the last piece remains
Forever missing.
Body cut into large squares- funny of you to use this body. This way it can be a human divided into mind and body, together yet distant, conflicted; or it can be the society lacking the pontifex to converge the upper class with the lower, the educated with the rabble(although nowadays we have this fragile construct called the middle class). Finally, and most favorably, the piece can evoke the vision of universe, our knowledge thereof. How to live, to breathe, how to tread the swampy ground lest we sink and die; how to love and how to die or help the dying- questions that have lingered in the mass imagination for centuries and yet there is always that 'final piece, integer sequence' missing.
ReplyDeleteThe phrase 'reassembled at the destination' lends a very crucial image to the poem- the image of Sisyphus, thus beginning the heart-broken, sorrowful mood prevalent throughout the rest of the poem and towards the tearful conclusion 'forever missing'.
'Trying to rediscover the integer sequence'- here mathematics is given an ambiguous role in the thematic quest for knowledge. It is hinted, on the one hand, that the answer is hidden in numbers(PI, golden ration, sinusoid functions omnipresent on microscopic as well as macroscopic scales) and on the other- that for all efforts and all the greatest mind put to work- they still remain elusive. We can reach the millionth fraction number of the PI but still and yet the question lingers- when will it end, when will the efforts of centuries reap fruits and the mythic number will appear to us in all its wisdom and glory. And perhaps then, the shock will be much alike that of the heroes of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy heroes when Deep Thought pronounced the meaning of life they had been waiting for a million years:
You aren't going to like it," Deep Thought warned. "Forty-two," it said, with infinite majesty and calm.
I am gratified to learn what this poem means. I was lying in bed dreaming that the whole bed, body included, had been cut into perfect cubes and stored in a cardboard box, and dreamt of all the words up through the part about Velveeta cheese (expected a comment concerning the non-cosmopolitan reference; in the 60s this nasty substance grew old in refrigerators and turned hard, glassy brown and semi-transparent). Got up cos a starving cat was dancing on my head and typed it all out quickly just like it was; went back to bed hoping some sage would interpret it for me. Like, a little heavy on the similies, but oh well.
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