Negative Spaces
No lines in nature. Things just start
being something else. Sky between
bare tree limbs isn’t the sky
but discrete shapes of sky. Blue,
maybe, but more often gray with light
washing in white. Axioms may apply
to them, yet they resist geometry.
To ascend a negative fretwork of maple
a boy wedges his Keds sideways
against two forking trunks, arms and legs
spreading a mandala propping his body
as the Vitruvian Man enjambed
to stutter feet ladder-wise side-to-side
upward to grasp a limb he can tarzan
to and swing from for momentum
to hoist his belly over and once astraddle
hump along on his butt to a chosen
tine of the fork for a short shinny up
to begin the one foothold at a time climb
through an un-delineated webbing
of segmented voids toward a vast dome
that surrounds a solid ball of planet,
a center shaping an endless cosmos.
Any ingenious boy can clamber
up to sway in the slender apogees
of trees but, due to the gravity
of our situation, a wise boy knows
the danger lies not where he clings
to thinnest twigs to wave his cap
at unseen black matter, that lies
with no line whatsoever beyond
a pewter sky to make his gesture
in a space that if for but a moment
centers infinity, but that the way
up must be the way down.
being something else. Sky between
bare tree limbs isn’t the sky
but discrete shapes of sky. Blue,
maybe, but more often gray with light
washing in white. Axioms may apply
to them, yet they resist geometry.
To ascend a negative fretwork of maple
a boy wedges his Keds sideways
against two forking trunks, arms and legs
spreading a mandala propping his body
as the Vitruvian Man enjambed
to stutter feet ladder-wise side-to-side
upward to grasp a limb he can tarzan
to and swing from for momentum
to hoist his belly over and once astraddle
hump along on his butt to a chosen
tine of the fork for a short shinny up
to begin the one foothold at a time climb
through an un-delineated webbing
of segmented voids toward a vast dome
that surrounds a solid ball of planet,
a center shaping an endless cosmos.
Any ingenious boy can clamber
up to sway in the slender apogees
of trees but, due to the gravity
of our situation, a wise boy knows
the danger lies not where he clings
to thinnest twigs to wave his cap
at unseen black matter, that lies
with no line whatsoever beyond
a pewter sky to make his gesture
in a space that if for but a moment
centers infinity, but that the way
up must be the way down.
