Poem: Proof

 

Proof

 

shadows crept with little aplomb

anemic under a filmy light bulb;

the bulb a starved winter sunset,

dimmer and dimmer

less yellow and succulent.

never there.

 

but it was the rat nest of books,

nestled in dogears,

that feasted on an old man's tired hands

to devour his paralyzed,

insensate scholarship.

as proof, real mice

throbbed in the walls,

eerie in their omen of sibilance.

 

below half-dead, hung eyes

a tome of hope lay open

--vivisected, mostly slain--

yet no cure for the old man's tortured quest,

no Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

 

the sad only conclusion, then, 

being a certain kind of god.

a god who had designed a futile math,

an impregnable tower,

all of human knowledge 

merely the architrave.

 

to climb above would be to slide,

to become sunset’s smallest last shadow--

forever to stretch, thinner, ceaseless,

not gone, but nevertheless

never there.

 

 

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