pythagoras & me

i imagined you a life 
in geometry, living on
a white background with 
black outlined triangles.

there you would spend your
day pacing back & forth

breaking the physical down
into equations, squaring all
different parts of yourself:

your arms & elbows,
hanging little '2's from
your ear lobes & waiting
for the multiplications to
take effect.

really you lived around 530 BC
moving from Samos to Crotone,
(which is on the heel
of italy's boot).

did you have a body made
of white stone like that bust
they have left of you in 
the Capitoline Museums of Rome?

i see you ambling down
the Mediterranean shoreline
rubble joints & pupil-less statue eyes.

i ask you to make my skin 
into stone as part of 
your ascetic life: withdrawing 
from physical sensations to
obtain spiritual goals,
i let you kiss me once before
we begin.

at night do you wonder back
to the land i set for us 
of blankness & triangles
in search or the tactile?

the acuteness of angles
aching in your body as you
turned in the dark beneath
of moon too round for us both.

i read that you came up with 
the theory of metempsychosis
or "the transmigration of souls"

each soul set free briefly
from heaviness:

upon death, souls entering 
new bodies

i see this when i looked
out the window last night
at the sidewalk 

in the glow of lamp posts 
at least a dozen souls 
with L.L. bean backpacks &
camping kits 

on migration 

was it your soul that came
into me?

was that why i noticed you
far off in the distance?

why i made a blank world
for us to measure the 
length of each other's sides.

your father the seal maker 
in his shop, pressing metal
into permanence.

what do you think of it here?

i'll walk us to the shore again someday 

& i promise you can tell 
me about what the ocean 
was like in Crotone

i'll leave the light on
in my bedroom in case you go wandering.