My wheels were rolling down an almost
Empty road on Pi day, thin veils of rain
Hanging in the distance, black cattle
Behind fences, a curious piece of purple
Litter in the center of the highway,
On my way to Hanksville to rendezvous
With daughter, who had been out camping.
I saw the car containing her pass the other
Way, and as I turned around to head north
Again to Goblin Valley to catch her there,
Instead, the thought rotating in my head
Was that we have as near as proved the fact
That mathematics is neither the eternal key
That turns all pins and tumblers of this
Universe, nor the pure creation of humanity.
Neither can the cosmos compass an exact
Mathematical relationship to its whole self
Nor can the math be cut to fit a human box.
All those wonderful, irrational, infinite ratios—
Log two, the square root of two, the golden
Ratio, e, pi calculated out to twenty-two
Trillion digits, a measure more accurate
Than the universe and equally incomplete—
Remind us that our minor imaginations, knit
Together, bursts of lust and blood, can game
Larger palaces than any n-dimensional cosmos
Because our maths admit the infinite mess
Of that concept of infinity. I was thinking this
As I rolled into the state park parking lot
Littered with wheeled vehicles proportional
To within a proton of true by two, three dozen
Digits of the infinite’s irrational approximation
In every dark, inflated tire. From one such
Collection of circles surrounded by hoodoos
Stepped my imperfectly circular, infinite child.
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