Ascension

It is springtime, & the mountain lions are just coming into flower. A few early ocelots are practicing calisphenics on the lower slopes, in between sherpaing tourists up to the holy peaks.

Madrigals are everywhere — not Walt Disney’s magical Colombian family but the musical variety, where a number of singers sing separate notes that make up the chords the music is written as.

The ocelots pause in their exercises, begin to debate whether training the groups of tourists to join in singing a capella madrigals would increase the pleasure of their climb, or would they run out of puff before they got to where they wanted to go.

BOUQUET D’ANTAN

Am unsure if I like the

smell of yesteryear. Too

much reminder of mould,

of dust that you can’t get

rid of. But now someone

has brought it back as a

fountain pen ink whose

color is magenta, & seems

unable to do anything more

than make your writing look

prettier on the page, much like

its stablemates, BOUTON D’

OR or KYANITE DU NEPAL.

an / afternoon thought / for Tom Beckett

an

other is

another all together

al-

together an-

other thing again

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The al-Khwarizmi ficcione

No record of it exists except as a refutation. & the only record of the refutation is a fragment of a manuscript without provenance, attributed by the late Umberto Allegrezza, on the basis of stylistic & scribic elements, to Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi, better known as an astronomer, as the inventor of algebra, & rumored to be author of a lost — or rather — hidden treatise on calculus & which, it has been claimed, was the basis for both Isaac Newton’s method of fluxions and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s integral notation.

The manuscript records the thoughts of al-Khwarizmi on a homily by his contemporary Photius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, adherent to a different religion, entitled “All Life is an Accident Waiting to Happen,” aware that it was an ironic title since what Photius was advocating was the exact opposite.

al-Khwarizmi’s piece has an equally ironic title. “All Accidents are a Life Waiting to Happen.”