Mathematician
His grand piano plays unique form,
algorithms in air.
In the Red House, knowledge was abstract –
origami, exploded.
A bird on the fishscale slates of the house across the road,
and decades to go before the 4-minute mile on the field next door.
The Red House: of Corpus, but separate –
as we are all members of one another.
And maths, life-like, purely what you make of it.
Mind over matter.
He went to Mass, Saturdays.
He numbered grains of sand in the desert, in Africa, was it? –
it was educational.
The 4-minute mile was run.
The red house the tiles the desert.
The corpus the body of knowledge.
The desert behind the eyes –
a problem in algebra
matching content to form.
Jane Griffiths is Fellow and Tutor in English at Wadham College, Oxford. She has published six collections of poetry with Bloodaxe Books, most recently Little Silver (2022)’.