Three Poems

Gödel’s First Incompleteness or Ode on Dissociation I
 
Lispector said to write
with the whole body—
 
the body as a loosing
an arrow into. Each translation
 
seconds the second o.
I checked. My parents are
 
my parents. Also real.
The faceless neighbor,
 
heavy on his feet
in the apartment above,
 
is a threat. False.
Dissociation is
 
a defense mechanism. True.
Sonoluminescence
 
in a snapping shrimp is
a sort of aftershock. Shut rapidly,
 
a single claw cavitates, necessitates
an entire ocean sweeping in.
 
I cannot prove it, but it isn’t
impossible.

***

Gödel’s Second Incompleteness or Ode on Dissociation II
 
A null set is, of itself,
a subset—a mathematical marsupial
 
lugging the nothing self—
four-cornered triangle,
 
false truths, nub of
grasshopper luck, fat want.
 
Today. I remembered—
asymmetrically, yes—but
 
there you were. In a flash.
On every axis. I remembered.

***

Amygdala
 
I admire that you refuse reason.
I am incorrigible too, if meddled.
 
At what point you convinced me
if had become when,
 
that love was just that, I can’t remember.
Anyway, now there is the year
 
I heard the glass fill on its own,
the year I heard the kitchen sound
 
its going. The sunk cost
of being alive. It is December.
 
I’m not asking to be well.
All night I worried the house sparrows
 
building their nests would toss and slosh
in the storm. But this morning
 
I found them. Their song intact.
Day meant proof. I could not avoid it.