Geometry -- Alfred Kreymborg

A nice poem to start the year off...

(Poem #306) Geometry Never a mouse chases ever a tail, never a mouse ever sees that always a cat catches always a mouse, cats being kittens who once chased their tails. Toss a pebble into a stream, never a circle catches a circle; shoot a dawn-ball into the sky, never a moonbeam catches a sun; drop the same thought on the floor: Only a kitten catches a tail, the tail being straight, the kitten a circle. Yet never a mouse chases ever a tail, never a mouse ever sees that always some death catches always his mouse, deaths being kittens who once chased their tails. -- Alfred Kreymborg

A dizzying poem that seems to be a metaphor for human progress, life, death,
cosmology, logic, physics, metaphysics, space, time and the most
pronouncedly noneuclidean geometries that ever sprung from a mathematician's
pipe-dreams. And no doubt a host of other things that I'll think of the moment
my head stops spinning.

m.

Links:

A biography of Kreymborg, and another of his poems at poem #245

For another beautiful poem that explores the relationship between form,
content, geometry and the universe, see poem #195