Luigi Coppola
Ntil
We begin with drawing a line
as a 1-dimensional construct,
from that conceptual scribble
we turn and twist and tense into a circle,
a 2D extension of that initial, limited plane.
As we gaze through that, we notice
that it is merely a silhouette of a spheroid,
that 3D expanse more air than anything else,
juggled and jolted and jostled over. That itself
is the shadow of a 4D sphere extrapolated
from temporal imagination, the turmoil
of thought, and the interplay of inverted indices
perplexed by prayers of probabilities
& possibilities & powers of the Nth degree.
of the 5D world, itself a hotly-contested hologram
along the horizon of a 6D home, itself an enigmatic
experiment on a 7D petri dish that floats and fizzles
along on the quantum lip of an 8D universe
scrawled along the edges of the quarks & leptons,
strings & things of the 9D realm until
on the other side of the infinite coin,
beyond & boundless, the 0, the zero
the almighty, the all is shed, and the D goes back
to the underworld, leaving only the 1, the unit,
the single, the one true path
curveless & edgeless & directionless & less
right where it all began, with us
drawing a line.
_______________
Luigi Coppola (www.luigicoppolapoetry.blogspot.co.uk) teaches and writes in London, England. Shortlisted for the Bridport Prize twice, he appeared in the Worple Press anthology ‘The Tree Line’ and publications include Acumen, The Frogmore Papers, The High Window, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Iota, Magma, Orbis, Neon, Rattle, The Rialto, THE SHOP and Snakeskin.
Editor’s Notes: The image is from an actual problem in Discrete Matheematics in the 5th dimension. [Find least possible value of nn, such that we can always choose 2 points out of n points in 5-dimensional space (wherever they may be marked), such that there’s at least one more lattice point on the segment joining them. Cited from Brilliant: https://brilliant.org/problems/not-many-just-5-dimensions/]
