Mental Music

Pay attention to these patterns,
The ones you can’t see, touch, or hear—
Ghosts live on in names of numbers,
Prosodics of this universe.

Is it real? Of course it’s not real!
There’s no sensing it. There’s no sense
In it or to it. It’s just there,
Down for the count when you count it.

Hour priests, magi, fang shih, augurs,
Pythagoreans, alchemists,
Geometers, cosmologists,
Pure mathematicians agree,

The sea of numbers can be swum,
Rowed, sailed, scanned, and deep dived but not
Likely crossed. From Nilometers,
Ziggurats, zodiacs, trigrams,

And thought problems in games of chance,
To quantum superpositions,
The pragmatic and mystical
Human mind can’t resist patterns.

There are patterns for you here, friends—
Minor, boring, irrelevant
Patterns, but patterns all the same.
Count back and forth along these lines,

A kind of Tetragrammaton,
Not a real one, just the shadow,
Writhes, the shape you glimpsed in the waves—
Could be monster; could be the waves.