Lucinda Jarrett
Oxford Stanza Two
“I give and bequeath all my estate … to be applied to the furtherance of experimental research in physics or chemistry … but not in pure mathematics ….. Or any branch of science which aims merely at describing cataloguing or systematizing”
The puzzle of a bequest
A boy catalogues eggs and nests
Colour and diameter, species in traces
Later, maths is a line with an x unknown
A pattern to be found and repeated
In numbering protons a new order is found
The elements in the table fall in line
Joy tasted in the perfect pattern, lights up
Cats eyes in the road at night.
Now the only light is a single flare;
the front line collapsing, all maps are buried
Sand in clothes and nose and eyes and brain,
Like a stroke makes Queso
weaa waaa
Of a man’s order of language and syntax
And all that is left is saaa
In the water and
The air.
The universe expanding faster than forces
Of gravity can rein in the stars \\
So the known table of matter is only a fraction –
A hand –
an eye –
a mouth shut. mmmmmm
Sand in eyes and mouths and clothes and hair.
Could maths ever explain this dark matter?
Dark energy
A vacuum.
An empty room
To write in. It is not only the questing that is left;
Rhythm and equations are still unknown
Frames to be found, a virtual trapeze
We hang words off like legs and knees
All pieces of the whole. Struck of a father’s speech,
Left with the imprint of a double jointed thumb
A wrist around waist. A love mapped circle.
Only in the sand is one graph twisted round
Inside the next and the whole system seems rendered mute.
© Lucinda Jarrett, 8 October 2015