Poetry for Garden of Stone and Light

Garden of Stone and Light (1992)

By Ann Struthers

Crowds of students must separate around

this high school jock’s dream of phallic symbol,

pillar of stone that screams domination,

rocket-shaped in a hall dedicated

to mathematics, where trajectories

are planned, programs written for missile paths

that may blow up villages, hurl children

like ragged dolls through exploding houses.

When Freud thought he found penis envy in

Vienna, he disguised the male myth

of superiority in slick pseudo-

scientific jargon.

What woman would

covet the decoration which in art

is green-veined marble, but in real life looks

like a naked turkey neck? I am sick

to death of solipsisms of old men,

sick of the society made by math,

that plots azimuth of murder, washes

the hands of mathematician, far

removed from the little girl running down

the jungle path, aflame with napalm.

Oh, science, how can I believe you when

I see her mouth burned away to a black hole?

The world of power uses computers

as pimps and whores. Real power resides in

goodness, which cannot be measured, graphed, or

recorded. It never shakes seismographs,

never lights up telescopes, or appears

in predictable curves of anything.

Here in the Durham Computation Center

numbers are not gods, neither archaic

Roman numerals nor subtle Arabic

whorls. Logic is a dissembler. Pascal

worked out the formuli for finding a

cylinder’s surface dimensions, trying

to forget his toothache. Controlled family’s

money; refused to pay a dowry fee

to the convent where his sister yearned to

profess here vows. She spent years scrubbing the

scully, a lay sister. Psychology

which claims “to explain everything, explains

nothing.”

Nothing is neutral when in use,

even the lotus, floating like Budda

across the abacus, umbilical

cord adrift through muddy pond that is both

and neither time and space. Mathematic

tradition is not rock but sea; deep in

the waters of faith Euclid swims, his arms

metronomes for his backstroke. Computers,

must be turned toward building the better

city, must abjure power, the other

face of genocide.

The force of peace is

mostly untried. Above this massive stone

hangs two canvases, intensifying,

repeating the same colors, except each

displays a window of sky, small spaces

brushed with horse tail clouds, cirrus, promising

three days from now rains will fall like blessings.