Hunter Lewinski

PASSAGES;TUNING

unfeathering-bird,
riverbed; the fact
of the corpsed stag:

strange archipelago
as I sit

so sonority in-
sinuates itself;

so distance darkens

in networked burrows
underground,
by small rodents,

the whole earth
a piping organ,
broken stanza—
my life,

my slow ear, lowering
to the ground in measures
gelid & patient, but

belated; fumbling
after the decaying reverberations
of a downward-turning
coda, sotto voce:

tremor of soil
as the ground adjusts
underneath

OPENING OF THE LINE

1

as a clearing of trees
(is to [=])
messages from deep space;

I proceed as if through
a column of fog—
which is to say, by forgetting
my way back

2

pausing in a glade, an indeterminate
point along the line,
caesura—
the echoes having not yet returned:

how far does my voice travel from myself

& how to calculate the velocity
of the responding utterance?

3

Georg Cantor in a footnote to remarks delivered at a meeting of the Gesellschaft

Deutscher Naturforscher und Aerzte, September 1883, on the existence of actual infinities:

“Apart from the journey which strives to be carried out in the imagination [Phantasie] or in dreams, I say that a solid ground and base as well as a smooth path are absolutely necessary for secure traveling or wandering, a path which never breaks off, but one which must be and remain passable wherever the journey leads.”

4

advancing, through stone & night,
brush & storm, camphor & burn;
leaf-mouthed, I am myself unfound

among the gloom-technicians,
plotting strange coordinates in
the dark, late. Transmitting our
location to you now; please advise.

*Quoted by Joseph Warren Dauben in Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 127.