[306] Geometry

Title : Geometry
Poet : Alfred Kreymborg
Date :  1 Jan 2000
1stLine: Never a mouse
Length : 25 Text-only version  
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A nice poem to start the year off...

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