Dreams of Perelman

Poem by Quincy Arthur

Planes of white, horizonless, like the muted orange of sunlight with eyes closed. The bedraggled Russian Grisha perched on the pointilist surface of a straight line extending forever that way towards the East if where I’m facing is North. Squinting doesn’t help. I’m drawn back to the tangible by sweeping jolting gesticulations as he urges an idea upon me. This line is a self and it starts from this end but it has no other. No part of it exists, the division doesn’t work. Any attempt to isolate a segment sprouts a rhizomal infinite again. A wailing Hydra stands at the gates of escape to the ex. It barks and multiplies when swings are made at its life. Ha ha, representation! Still he urges. I’m back in the plane. Don’t slice or define, for everything extends for fathoms beneath words. My mother telling me that to trust is good. Blind falls backwards tracing asymptotic trajectories instilled in me the notion of the good of fellow man. So did the words of consolation after scraped knees and bubbling incarnadine. Welling tears and lumps in throats and things we’ve heard before all seem realer when felt, when ushered in and ushered out without stunted punctuation and plosive alliteration. I yelled diatribes on concrete and hardness but chemical formulas of rubber floated elsewhere above me. Still do, somewhere. Wisps of smoke with beauty and import and relevance to health and death, so… practicality. ‘Tzzz’ says a puddle as I flick-a-burn it from a musty park bench. Concentric (no) circles (no) indicate (passively potentially) that I hit some target. Paul Weller inciting optimism and yet no teleological referent. Grisha rejecting a telos. Eating borscht with his mother as it rains in St. Petersburg as a medal hangs in Spain with no receipt. Pinkish reddish bloodshot drops fall to their end from his spoon — stopped by their ether of existence, their metaphysical underpinning — causing ripples topologically accounted for, but only with words and lines and numbers. The undulating mirror speaks more to things. Flatness stands imposing, pragmatic and easy. An uncracked mirror is what you want to see. Waking up I’m dropped onto the two-dee surface of our dimension. I slip and roll everywhere and it’s nice.