Screen Dump 709

You're grappling so as not to forget what you want

to remember . . . a whoosh as if the surf crashes the cliff

with you floating above . . . You have decided

to practice narrowing your focus to eliminate

the superfluous from your walks . . . the day, deftly unraveling,

seems almost to disappear . . . so many thoughts

vying for your attention . . . then this idea of the texture

of it all . . . everything everyone seemingly connected

with tabs for those nestled in the cleft of your memory . . .

Antonio Palmerini

Screen Dump 708

You recount how touch initiates the sense of "I" . . .

how it costumes the body on misty mornings

and waits at the bus stop for passengers to resume their lives . . .

A test email breaks the silence . . .

The number of people passing through the portal increases . . .

And so it begins . . . parsing the engagement

with you in the soup aisle at the supermarket

swiping your phone for texts, checking the message

you took great care to get just right,

elbowing through inundations

amid the wearisome floundering of the spinning orb,

harvesting the future for meaning

while standing at the edge of a cliff for however long . . .

Antonio Palmerini

Screen Dump 707

You leave the gallery and long-limbed bronzes

which is OK since it's being streamed

with gaps for reconciliation

by people filing in . . . as what? . . .

let's call them inadvertents . . .

visiting the exhibition retrospectively,

following Zoomed corridors

through an opening in the text

and into the next scene

of customers at the counter in a diner

rewritten while obsessing the commonplace

with thoughts of odysseyites

going round and round the roundabout

in your old neighborhood

resonating with the rhythmic beat

of a blacksmith's hammer on an anvil

shaping steel red-hot from the fire

as if it were planned . . . 

as if it were the answer to the blue question

glued to the ATM . . . empty, unused

on a one-way street

informing each and every touch of the day . . .

Antonio Palmerini

My poem, The Mathematician's Daughter, was a finalist from among 468 entries from 44 countries in the 2023 Stephen A. DiBiase International Poetry Contest. Bravo to the other poets, & many thanks to curator Bob Sharkey & his team for a super event!

The Mathematician’s Daughter

But what of the cul-de-sac of her childhood?
The slow circling of bases on the dusty diamond,
calculator in hand?
The unraveling of ribbons on warm Saturday afternoons?
Her knack, yes, for movie theaters
and the sheer pagination of her intellect.
Her ability to plumb the depths of bodies in motion
to retrieve artifacts long forgotten
pinning onlookers to the mast with her proofs
as she practiced higher-order equations
on the sweet-smelling turf
under autumn’s orange sky.
Forget as well that she knew by heart
the names of Leibniz’s monads
the mass appeal of transits
the high rise of sorts with the stop sign in front
the vase of freshly-cut delphinium.
I once found her calibrating the pulsating, scratchy music
of stoops, wearing a smile filled with late hours -
hours spent spread-eagled over reams of graph paper
lined with doodles and obscure footnotes
from the sixteenth century -
her first four words as illuminating as ever.
She tried hard to find happiness in coefficients
in the beauty of imaginary numbers
staying the required course despite the odds
instead of shortcutting to the breakfast nook without a word -
an unmade bed, some fast food bristling in the wastebasket
the canned soups in her cupboard
arranged as they were in powers of ten.
In the end, she returned to the lecture hall
where, amid furious note-taking, she had once plotted our future
filling the whiteboard and the air
with intricate drawings of the Interstate at dawn
calculating the logarithmic distance from x to y to z.