Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2021
Working Backwards Julie L. Moore When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. . . . [H]e is Thou and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light. ~Martin Buber
I thread through the Society of Friends’ Historic Estates of Serenity, the avenue winding between both sides of the cemetery hosting turkey vultures that loiter close to an opossum run over last night. The scene reminds me of Fibonacci and his numbers, each one the sum of the previous two: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on, ad infinitum. So here I am, one driver meandering through, as a second comes the other way, the animal between us, in the center of the street, and suddenly, we are three. The five buzzards swoop in, their primordial urges limited to the turn each takes, beaks like pliers riving flesh from bone, reddening the road, and we are eight. I can write that now as 8 because of Fibonacci, whose Liber Abaci converted Europe to Hindu-Arabic numerals, abandoning the smooth stones of the abacus. More magical than he knew, his numbers conjured the spirits of Euclid and Pythagoras through division, making all answers golden: mean, cut, ratio. Did I mention I’m on my way to church this Sunday morning? And that the Greeks weren’t right about everything? Symmetry isn’t necessary for beauty, no, I need only the slow-order railroad to my left and the swift Mississinewa River to my right, striking a curious balance between sensation and relation, It and Thou, perimeter of the burial ground, that center of gravity.
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