Written by Andre Peltier. Posted in Poetry.
With crutches and ropes,
her brothers helped her
scale the steeple of
Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge.
Swinging past the clock,
like from flying trapeze,
this nameless woman
reached the cross
and rang the lone bell.
Around the corner,
on Rue Sophie-Germain,
named for that jilted
mathematician,
you sat drinking your coffee,
drinking in the atmosphere,
replying to emails,
checking your account.
I watched her swing
from the steeple as you
studied Archimedes,
Fermat’s Last Theorem,
the royalist Cauchy.
I wasted time staring at her
flight, and you read
Recherches sur la Theorie des Surfaces
Elastiques.
I glanced back.
Our eyes met again as
if never before.
The chemical bond strengthened
and true.
A heteronuclear connection.
Atom upon atom,
we exist in the same moment.
We exist in the same
infinite life.
Neither created nor
destroyed,
our love is elastic.
We learn of the melting
Blackfoot Glacier
and Schrodinger’s equation.
The magnetics of our
molecular bond attracting us
again… again.
Suddenly, the ropes break,
the crutches fall
to the asphalt below.
The nameless woman
Lands with motionless
broken neck.
Inconnue on the police report,
like Sophie Germain on
The Eiffel Tower.
Le Figaro
suggested her right arm
was replaced by the scales
and toes of a chicken,
shrunken in her sleeve,
reaching for her crutch.
It was never proven
nor was that on the official
report.
You laughed it off on the
surface and on
the molecular level.
