Dihedral
For Cath
Although our faces correspond
like a Picasso with two sides,
an inseparable bond
whose sudden breach
of symmetry collides,
dividing each with each,
our once unsullied vaults,
incalculable riches
now bounded by our faults,
a measured line that stitches
into an uneven waltz
childhood’s seamless gifts,
the coming day’s unwritten sphere
fraught suddenly with rifts
that seem to interfere
with its celestial sound—
these vertices of heaven
only touch the ground,
the seductive flaws of Eden
that make our flat world round.
December 21st, 2012
Explanation
Dedicating these sunken cathedrals, these celestial underwater carillons, to my wife, I was reminded of Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona, where one person gradually becomes another, and the way a line through any geometric shape (a dihedral) both divides it and creates new faces, new angles, which in turn touch each other. The former selfish symmetry of a circle produces children, different shapes which together unite the form.
A bar line in music separates notes from one another, but it also embodies the momentum of the harmonies; its structure shapes and even drives the clock, the continuum of melody, the metabolism of the pianist.
The perfect world of our childhood, and later of our love, is bisected with alien tangents, other songs, which might interfere with heaven, but which in fact bring us down to earth, into a world of touches whose very fall from grace enables us to endow our dry, ascetic lives with a happy dance.
And so prim ecclesiastic cathedrals sink not to hell, but to earth.
December 24th, 2012–January 7th, 2013
Lanikai