Perhaps I’m doing this blog post thing wrong, but I wanted to try my hand at poetry.

 

Finding X

Cercare, men, of the philosophes’ helios on heavenly bodies––

No, that’s not quite right, I’m not a Renaissance polymath, like those

paste-colored portraits I glanced over in my Euro textbook

 

last year, when I was filled with all questions

and far too few hands. I read Machiavelli, balanced crooked

in the memory of a bean-bag chair, told myself I’d

 

take up a gym membership, take up school lunch without

the lost clicks of computer keyboards and raindrop buttons, stuck

mid-conversation measuring time in the dry ring of bells

 

but I digress––in text without Provençal and Latin and languages

that the vernacular won’t understand, even––I’m sure I need to find

a letter. That’s what we came here for, right? A letter 

 

x, like the Leo among Renaissance men who patroned the arts and declared

feasts of Worms, shushing figures who called for reform. Well

I don’t know how to find x, but I know that years ago I

 

met a man whose reforms others would like shushed, him stuck

in the middle of vascular dementia, patronizing the arts and calling

a feast to be Of worms. We wanted to find x. Here’s what

 

we got: a kid and his grandpa in a retirement home, clicks

of a carmel photo. On weekends I’d bring my math homework

while he was there, listening to lectures of communism 

 

and oil fields and weeping criticisms of capitalist China

that Renaissance predecessors to Marx would find hard

to believe. The worksheet said to derive the circumference

 

of the circle, x. X, I found the circumference of my thoughts

spinning, lost and lackadaisical like Galileo’s fight for the

Earth to spin around the sun, condemned by faith

 

for speaking the truth. I wrote numbers on paper until the lines

warped, and grandpa sharpened pencils for my moments and his time, Mantegna 

to Raphael. The best days: flowered dixie cups of fruit smoothies

 

on a table, games of quiet and loud nostalgia as he dug memories

of a dreamer, coating my aspirations with the pencilled ephemerality

of youth. He was an idealist. I could have been influenced, but there he was

 

quoting Mao and Deng, making speeches by chance. The Renaissance changed

thinking. So did he, filling my mind’s open space with the most beautiful and 

terrifying thoughts. On a calm spring Wednesday, he rolled up in his chair,

 

the one pushed by the nurse, and fell, dropped. Here’s something 

they didn’t teach us in high school history: time is petty, worse than Cigna 

insurance company when he showed up at the emergency room

 

with a winter gown and clotted artery, worse than my mother’s sob in silence 

that echoed through the partition walls and linoleum tiles. I almost wish

it was the Church that struck him down, papacy adamant to drench his fiery beliefs. 

 

Cercare, men, of the philosophes’ helios on heavenly bodies––

there is no sun left. X is still blank and followed grandpa

into the unanswerable, but I must keep scribbling down numbers 

 

and rearranging thoughts. The textbook never says how hard it is, 

crafting theories and enlightenment after dark. So let me try: 

it’s not x. But it’s the only answer I know. The Renaissance

 

fades even if I wear edges of paper flipping through text, and grandpa

ends up taking those words with him. Outside the angel’s pin,

the philosophes push at thought’s door. But I am not a Renaissance polymath.

 

We wanted to find x? We got the past.

I don’t think that’s right. Sorry. I’ll try again.

Before exploration and written vernacular language, before 

 

science and empiricism and modern math, 

there was a kid, his grandpa, and the Renaissance. 

They chased x to the limits of chance,

 

and changed the text of history–