Poem: Proof

 

Proof

 

shadows crept with little aplomb

anemic under a filmy bulb;

a bulb like a starved winter sunset,

dimmer to dust,

less yellow than hollow.

never there.

 

but it was the rat's nest of books,

nestled in dogears,

which feasted on an old man's tired hands

to devour his paralyzed, insensate scholarship of a soul,

and so serve as proof of the real rodents 

scurrying in the walls,

eerie from their omen of sibilance.

 

below the old man's half-dead, hung eyes

a tome of hope lay open,

vivisected by his fingers and yet mostly slain--

and still no cure for his venerable quest,

no Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

 

the sad and only conclusion, then, 

an impregnable tower of futile math,

all of human knowledge 

merely its architrave.

 

to climb higher, therefore, would be to slide,

to become sunset’s smallest last shadow,

to forever stretch thinner and yet ceaseless,

not gone, but nevertheless

never there.

 

 

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