Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Siken mentions “the square root of negative one” in the Spork Press Editor’s Pages of Edition 2.2 Spring/Summer 2003
After Cortez but before Pizzaro, around 1545, fairly early in the history of algebra, something fantastically weird happened. Girolamo Cardano, messing around squares and square root...
I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves
tremble but I am invisible, bloom without flower, knot
without rope, song without throat in wingless flight, dark
boat in the dark night, pure velocity. As the hammer is a
hammer when it hits the nail, and the nail is a nail when
it meets the wood, and the invisible table begins to appear
out of mind, pure mind, out of nothing, pure thinking.
Through darkness, through silence, a vector a violence,
I labor, I lumber, I fumble forward through the valley as
winter, as water, I mist and frost, flexible and elastic to
the task. I am the hand that lifts the rock, I am the mind
that strings the worm and throws the line and feels the tug,
the flex in the pole, and foot by foot I find the groove,
the trace in the thicket, the key in the lock, as root breaks
rock, from seed to flower to fruit to rot, a holy pilgrim
moving through the stations of the yardstick. I track,
I follow, I hinge and turn, frictionless and efficient as an
equal sign. I flip and fold, I superimpose, I become
location and you veer toward me, the eye to which you
are relative, magnetized for you revelation. Hook and bait,
polestar and checkmate, I am your arrival, there is no
refusal, we are here, you see, together, we are already here.
Lovesong of the Square Root of Negative One was written by Richard Siken.
Richard Siken released Lovesong of the Square Root of Negative One on Fri Apr 24 2015.