Calculation

The anatomy of desire led to
the mathematics of doubt, and that
over months and months walking alone
through an iris garden drunk on its own perfume,
that led usually to the calculus
of grief or, in better days, those brief spells
between each drizzling front in off the coast,
in better days it led to the biometrics
of tenderness, the economy of lip and eyelash,
the sun coming through the window in sheets
onto the tousled sheets of the bed,
every limb akimbo as in an Escher print
where one leg of the body, pencil-gray but alive,
walks into the leg of the other, where one hand
draws the hand that draws itself— So much calculation
along the journey to affection, the emphatic
ear lobe and clavicle, the opera
of skin riding softly over each rib,
the Giacometti of a neck, the little hairs there,
the way only one side of mouth
smiles at the other’s voice, two sides less often,
the way the heat of them passes back and forth
in the machinery of sex, the machinery
of loneliness a kind of whisper sent out,
called back before it reaches the ocean
of another ear— So much calculation,
even after it ends, crows paint
matrices on the sky, placing their X’s
there and there in an assembling,
dissolving theorem, their loud fermatas
claiming not certainty, not doubt, not non-belief
but a reckoning of wonder, high up
on their currents, a black-feather hovering
for months from that day forward
over the multiplying, uncountable hearts.