the nth dimension

i)

Our starting point: a cosy huddle
where Euclid's three friends commune with each other.
Wrapped up in themselves like a great ball of wool
soft and round, with nowhere to go.
Hearing and seeing and speaking no evil,
for evil needs time to hatch its plots
and time as yet still sleeps.
Three friends, and yet not three
but one, as yet undivided.

ii)

Who said Time is the fourth dimension?
Let's say time is the space in which they grow,
the abyss into which they fall.

iii)

It starts with an arrow, trailing a thread,
unravelling the ball, and piercing the heart
of darkness indivisible. How long, O Lord,
how long before the arrow finds a mark,
crossing the continents on a straight iron road,
light-speeding towards the stars?
The pioneer's arrow, a shot in the dark,
a radius implying a sphere.
But that must wait.

iv)

Add perpendicular height to width
and pictures form: our first fictions.
With flat-eyed models we fool ourselves,
imagining we've captured the world.
Hollow men scratched on a cave wall spear
a doomed and reering hollow beast.
Four crossed squares within a square,
and a triangle on top pretend a house
but with no creaking, peeling walls,
no hidden garden of delights,
no smell of bread or baby's wail –
the picture barely paints one word.

Or let the frame fall flat:
and boundaries are born.
The wagon train stops and looks around,
finds a plot of land to settle.
Fields are enclosed, hedged in with lines,
and we learn our first lessons in theft.
My property, my land. Look! the map cannot lie,
the map that lies flat and directs the ordnance,
the troops who chart and invade and conquer.

v)

Let the mind allow another right angle,
and the flat-bellied map grows big with child,
a globe that glows with life.
Deep waters hide a million forms
that swirl and sway in a million currents.
On land, a man stands tall, imagines
him master of all he surveys.
The swaying curve of a woman's hips,
the sinuous slalom of haughty cats,
movement, growth, decay -
all is beyond his foolish grasp, yet still
he charts and plots.
His eternal right-angles condemn him
to meet with other souls only at the corners,
the lonely interstices of
his barren, criss-crossing matrix.

vi)

What is the next dimension? Is it sound
and taste and smell, senses that cut
across the cold geometry of a plotting mind?
The smell of tar and lavender recalls
a morning walk along a quiet street.
A tune with dying fall restores to life
a gentler, playful, growing time.
Fanciful, unmathematical, I know,
yet reaching places where vectors cannot go.

vii)

And then the mathematicians' torment:
to turn another ninety mad degrees.
x, y and z: my head can get round that,
but what comes next? Try as I might
my alphabet gives out; I cannot twist
the space within my head a further turn.

And yet to chart the infinite mysteries
they add to space and time some seven more
existing nowhere, yet as real as love
or death. With arcane formulae they soar
beyond my feeble fancy's universe. I,
imagining myself at root elsewhere,
not real within their epic symphony
must seek an nth dimension.

viii)

Soul and body have bounds, even to lovers;
bounded by vicissitudes of life
that limit who we meet, and where, and when,
and ultimately bounded by a sleep.
Yet spirit soars away, refusing trails,
lofted by strains and scents of angels
glimpsed in time and space but dwelling elsewhere,
nowhere. The unbegun rumour spreads and taunts;
the shadow glimpsed in the mirror's reflection
teases the mind to turn again and seek
another direction, another home,
faire and farre beyond all telling.

18/2/2004