newton's lover

because newton loved how
algebra flashed across his lover's
white teeth, because Newton
fell from the polar sky into

a deep endless ring of swiss
sunrises-

the world became an arrow, and it
grew bright red. newton had a lover,
a mathematician lover,

who let the solitude of continuous numbers
fall across that dark face, when there
was an air of sleep, when the white teeth

were hidden-

and Newton loved that, the arrow
of logarithm running across those same
white teeth. he loved it enough to

want to shape the sprightly Lockean world
into a shadowimage of that greater crux
in astral knowledge-

Newton would make the world for his mathematician lover-

he would make it
all of black hair and
laced arrows. he would put
locke in a white sepulcher of
desiccated eyes-

and newton thinks the
stars made genius of helium,
then threw it down to
the small and lonely earth,
to make the nights less cold,

to make the wine taste a bit better, even splashing
over his white teeth, white with the algebraic formulas
that were as beautiful

as any undiscovered moon