The Principle of Position

An abacus in the dust,
Its gaps all gods in hiding,
Clicks its broken beads and shouts

Like old Hollywood gangsters,
You can’t get nothing on me!
Stir the shadows of the leaves

Over knowledge in the dirt.
Like wind in passing whisper,
And from nothing we derive

The one that turns out to be
Everything else, nothing much.
Faith and doubt began from this

Conflict over figured ground.
Can you see the pattern lie,
The ancestral accident,

Like the way we feed and breathe
Through a fork stuck in our necks,
Like the blind spots in our eyes,

That what once was good enough—
Some, a clump, comparison
Of things more, or less, the same—

Left us too loose-wired for none
As less or of no interest,
Nothing just something not there?

Of course we thought gods came first,
Or magical ancestors,
Or just the one God of dust.

We sensed we were from a void
Or chaos, some kind of mess,
But it had to be something.

We were a long time stumbling
Over counting devices
And the reckonings of priests

Before it dawned anywhere
On anyone, the magic
Was moving in the cipher

Shadowing the abacus,
The absence that spawned the one,
Divine gravity of none.