Poem: ‘Life in Bilateral Wonder’

“My favorite number is 2 ... 2 is kind of responsible for the concept of whether things are even or odd.”
—Melanie Matchett Wood, American mathematician

Two—the first even number, prime, balancing two ones like weights on a meter stick rocking on a fulcrum. We balance on two feet, and if we wobble we can stretch out our two arms on two sides and focus on a point with our two eyes.

  Information gobbled
  sorting itself like black
  and white marble tiles
  in the foyer

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Two eyes, either side of the nose, nicely central on my face, not too high or too low, not too spread out, binocular vision, and what would my vision be like if I were a flounder flouncing along sandy bottoms of bay shallows, both eyes perched on the top half of my flattened body? Does the flounder roll his eyes in exasperation because his eyes don’t line up with his puckered mouth?

  Two nevers
  multiplied
  equals always

A shape cannot have only two sides—even a slice of bread, which, when dropped, lands on the floor buttered side down (symbolic of life’s frustrations and setbacks, perhaps the flounder can relate), has a third dimension, and if I say it twice it’s a bi-mention.

  Bicameralization:
  “It takes all the running you can do
  to keep in the same place,”
  says the Red Queen

Binary bifold, life’s bilateralism. Bihydrate; that is, drink two glasses of water, which is a liquid not unlike the primordial quark-gluon plasma ooze except that is created at a temperature of four trillion degrees and I wonder how they do that because wouldn’t the laboratory explode and even two glasses of water would not be enough to quench such a fire. So the quark-gluon plasma is said to be a liquid, and don’t get me started on entanglement entropy, which appears to be a circumstance where not only is everything like a knotted tangle of yarn but is also disaggregating faster than you can say upsilon (which has two components of bottom quarks and anti-bottom quarks—of course, a thoroughly dichotomous situation). And the flounder, most decidedly pro-bottom, flutters.

  I think I’ll take
  a walk in spacetime
  wiggle my fingers
  among the strings

Nothing odd about that.

This poem resembles a haibun—a Japanese literary form that combines prose with haiku.

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