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CALCULATIONS FROM SCRATCH
by Eugenia Macer-Story
Trying to calculate from Scratch, once again
Why Shakespeare wrote no plays
The statistics professor contemplates
Ibis whipping the number
seven
Symbolically over boundaries of long division
Frustrating easily divisible
purpose of demons
To control life within indicative diagrams
Embodying itself in the
duplicate sweater
Of the carpenter impersonating the history professor
Or the professor with tools,
attempting
Rational architecture by exactly duplicate
Planks and
mortar, not fitting
each other
In the freezing ice storm, expanding later
As continual sun brings
edges level:
The kingdom of ice and of shadows
Disappears into
carefully-built igloo of granite
Shadow without a name, solidly rendered
In tiny exact details,
easily crumbling.
Yet pellet in pale plaster, fallen
Into a niche as the planned wall goes
haywire
Shows (possibly) the number 7 with a flexible whip
Sprouting in a loop from priest’s hand
Masked, in a sketched robe with bird feet
Enigmatic, yet we know: number seven
Difficult to duplicate, punished
For standing alone: haunts the centuries
With irregular odd/ even multi-anomalies
But perhaps that is the purpose of the
cameo:
To stand alone : 7 whirled by chaos
Into: the stand alone 7, pendant found
Within a flaw in the crumbling wall, solidly
Regular in being solid like a plaster pill
Marked with esoteric formulae & undigested,
Still in the alchemical capsule.
“Scratch” trying to calculate from chipped cameo
Patterns of raw quartz making new infinite
sigils
Sketches interlocking loops too easily now
In flowing completion of the incomplete
weather
Where there’s no infinity upon the moment
Startled that
the same, secure circles go nowhere
Undetected again as cave entrance plowed under
Vast rooms now
keyed into rough chiseled detail.
Bright ice speaks shifting shadows darkly
Silhouetted through overhead window
As sun highlights melting ice & in the moving trees
Numbered faces form briefly on pale walls
Of the careful archeologist’s nightmare.
Along the expected path, historically
A small zig zag on the graph introduces white noise:
The Ibis in the abyss existing as nothing
Throughout the longer journey, missing
Instants arranged into the moving scenery
Subtly changing value of journey beyond façade
By adding./ omitting one fragment of
distance
Every now and then, scourge of the number 7
& hidden in the niche, the
blood-stained pamphlet.
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