One
or Two
Is All
Three is One
And Two
All divisible by One
None divisible by None
All multiply into All
All add into All
There is One in Three
There is One in Four
More?
Not in Division.
All is more than we imagine.
We approach it discretely.
As One
And Two
And Three.
More is difficult.
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You had me at "For Angie". Don't make me cry. My eyes swell up horribly and I have to teach tomorrow. Plus, I understand most of this, but I need "Writing Interpretation #1" to fully understand
ReplyDeletewait... I forgot to put a comma in one of the sentences above
everything in your beautiful poem, because that is not my strength.
I love you.
For me, there are two things: 1) life (or the way things "really" are; and 2) language (or the way we understand the way things really are). When I write "poetry," it is just an experiment in attempting to understand the way things really are by communicating them, primarily to myself. Many of my recent poems have been in pursuit of this. This one, in particular, is an exploration of our human tendency to manipulate the way things are into understandings that cannot possibly be. It's math, and poetry, and life. The world of "unreal" numbers represents a whole class of "understandables" that cannot exist, except for within the existences that we have created for them in our minds.We do this with numbers (i=sqrt of -1), but more tragically, we do it with our lives. We multiply and divide our notions of what we can imagine about ourselves at the expense of ourselves. It forces me to hold more dearly to our more basic, our more "true" natures. To love the real. To abandon the ideal.
ReplyDeleteThough I was not entirely conscious of it at the time I wrote the poem, it does have flavors of The Beatles "I Am the Walrus." Well, the first line anyway:
I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.
It's not something to be proud of, commenting on your own poetry. And it is a dangerous thing to box oneself in so tightly, as I am not so much a master of language to suppose that any meaning I was pursuing was either attainable or communicable. These ambiguities in interpretation of language are what drive me most in writing. However, writing in community is preferable to writing in isolation, so I will break the rules--this once.
I hope this helps a little.
I should add--and this is probably the more obvious quality of this poem--that all parts are part of the same "thing." In numbers, all numbers contain all other numbers, in that all numbers contains fifths and sixths, and sevenths of all other numbers. With the basic operators (+-*/) all becomes part of all, and there is little distinguishing among them.
ReplyDeletethat is one of the most beautiful concept of how we (or numbers) relate with each other and with ourselves. who would have thought numbers could teach us so much?
ReplyDeleteThanks for explaining it. I see how it all fits together now. At the time, I was feeling lonely, so I focused in on bits and pieces instead of the big picture.
ReplyDelete"All divisible by one, none divisible by none." I interpreted this to mean that just one person can have a huge impact, but if you have no one, then nothing happens. I know, it doesn't make sense now, because why would you want to be divided instead of multiplied?
But I felt the same thing with "All multiply into All, All add into All." We can't be all on our own. We need to connect with others.
This is my favorite poem ever, even if I was too stupid to understand the big picture.