My mail box continues to bring me gifts. Jared Pearce’s A Map to Twenty-Six Dimensions was an unexpected surprise. With its beautiful sunflower cover and poems that, as the author explains, are snapshots of the same “scenes of a life” taken from different positions–different perspectives–and in an abstrusely metaphysical leap of reasoning based on String theory, different dimensions–the poet offers a map-like spread of impressive writing. I’d like to include one such offering below:

Love

The inside curve lips around–a membrane
totally impervious to spoken language and
roaring on its own,

And the way gravity washes
itself on one’s skin purls
or crashes the whole tube:

The interplay
from trough to crest is one graceful motion
while the point we hold lies

Perfectly still, embraced
in one long dream of the cosmos
swimming into life;
An event so liberating
because though it feels like everything
swells and expires, we haven’t really moved

That we can tell.
We’ve surfaced and seen
the world, finally standing in
one place–every buoy,
every tress, every rafter.

My apologies to Jared: this blogging system doesn’t allow me to include the delicate enjambments of his fine poem–but I couldn’t resist including it.

Contact Jared Pearce for copies at jcpearceATbsu.edu, or write to him at 301 N. Reserve St./Muncie, IN. 47303.