Gravity and Levity Poem by Bin Ramke

The heron resolves itself from the gray lake the water
conversely the woman dissolves in sex, her own

in liquefaction but the flesh reforms like wings
unfolded flight like light drips glistens

the setting sun the horizon first
above now below the bird the evening only local

the spinning earth flings its fluid surface
dissolving itself into itself its ecstasy

the need we feel each for each, the falseness
of any world, at all it is a kind of patience

impossible to distinguish from lassitude
it is a kind of hope indistinguishable

from stupidity. I know (of) a man who killed
himself and the woman he was about to marry

killed herself a month later. He wrote a note:
Until yesterday I had no definite plan to kill myself.

I do not understand it myself, but it is not
because of a particular event, nor of an explicit matter.

Every elliptic curve defined over the rational field
is a factor of the Jacobian of a modular function field

was another note he wrote. (I have his picture
on my desk, a gray parallelogram,

a thin man in black jacket black
tie bifurcating a horizon behind him

the line just above his ears this point
of view this lonely life there is only

a kind of barrenness in the background and a sky
which is a world, of course, plenty.)

This is a bigger world than it was once
it expands an explosion it can't help it it has

nothing to do with us whether we know or
not whether our theories can be proved

whether or not a mathematician
knew a better class of circles

(he has a name, Taniyama, a Conjecture)
than was ever known before before—

not circles, elliptic curves. Not doughnuts.
Not anything that is nearly, only is, such

a world is hard to imagine, harder to live in,
harder still to leave. A little like love, Dear.