Knowledge That Was Never Ours

Poetry as means to thought,
Way to find unknown ideas—
At least nine decades ago,

The marvelous Tobias
Dantzig declared, in the light
Of the latest news about

The structure of the atom,
We must call the infinite
Divisibility of

Matter “a myth.” Poetry,
However, keeps dividing
Matters indefinitely.

Maybe poetry’s a myth.
Certainly it’s stuffed with them.
But at bottom it isn’t.