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Table of Contents

GEOMETRY of souls.

Dispute the roundness of gesturing flesh;

Angles, and oblongs, and squares

Slip with astounding precision

Into the throes of lifted elbows;

Into the searching perpendicular

Of fingers rising to more than ten;

Into the salient straightness of lips;

Into the rock-like protest of knees.

The flesh of human beings

Is a beginner’s-lesson in mathematics.

The pliant stupidity of flesh

Mentions the bungling effort

Of a novice to understand

The concealed mathematics of the soul.

Men will tell you that an arm

Rising to the sky

Indicates strident emotion;

Reveals a scream of authority;

Expresses the longing of a red engine

Known as the heart;

Rises like a flag-pole

From which the mind signals.

Men will fail to tell you

That an arm rising to the sky

Takes a straight line of the soul

And strives to comprehend it;

That the arm is a solid tunnel

For a significance that shoots beyond it.

The squares, and angles, and oblongs of the soul,

The commencing lines of the soul

Are pestered by a debris of words.

Men shovel away the words:

Falteringly in youth;

Tamely and pompously in middle age;

Vigorously in old age.

Death takes the last shovel-full away:

Death is accommodating.

Nothing is wise except outline.

The content held by outline

Is a slave in the mass.

Men with few outlines in their minds

Try to give the outlines dignity

By moulding them into towers two inches high,

In which they sit in lonely, talkative importance.

Men with many outlines

Break them into more, and thus

Playing, come with quickened breath

To hints of spiritual contours.

Seek only the decoration;

Avoid the embryonic yelping

Of argument, and scan your patterns

For angles, oblongs, and squares of the soul.

I overheard this concentrated prelude

While listening to an acrobat, a violinist, and a chamber-maid

Celebrate the removal of their flesh.

While playing, the violinist’s upper arm

Bisected the middle of the acrobat’s head

As the latter knelt to hear,

And the chamber-maid

Stretched straight on the floor, with her forehead

Touching the tips of the violinist’s feet.

Motion knelt to receive

The counselling touch of sound,

And vigour, in a searching line,

Reclined at the feet of sound,

Buying a liquid release.

Angles of arms and straight line of bodies

Made a decoration.

The violinist’s music

Fell upon this decoration;

Erased the vague embellishment of flesh;

And came to angles, squares, and oblongs

Of the soul.