Philip Jason

Theorems

Everyone knows this: that the square
of the length of the longest side of a right
triangle is equal to the sum of the squares
of the lengths of the two shorter sides.
What they don’t know is that Pythagoras,
when he expressed his theorem,
wasn’t interested in triangles. He was
trying to calculate the angle between
the first and second versions of the heart,
an angle he believed to be 1) the most elegant
expression of truth in the universe,
and 2) the perfect gift for his wife Eloise,
a woman so forgotten, I am forced
to invent her just so she can exist again.

What is also not generally known is that Eloise
had an adjacent theorem. In her lost work,
the heart has only one purpose:
to leap the spirit in us from the body of the animal
into the body of the god. Truth, she contends,
is the rust that grows on the heart, slowing it down
so that the leap from dust to light forms a lifetime.
Without the rust, the journey is a single bound;
the spirit learns nothing on the way. We arrive
as gods still smelling of fur, still howling,
still putting everything we encounter
into our mouths, weighing everything with our tongues
to determine if we are loved.

And even though we never know for sure,
when my mouth is full, I think
of Eloise. I imagine she had
small hands that would disappear into the dough
as she was making bread. Every time
they reemerged, she greeted them like they
were newborn, suckling them with kind-
breasted words. Hello, she would say,
the world has sent you here to bloom.
I am the rest of you.

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Philip Jason’s stories can be found in magazines such as Prairie Schooner, The Pinch and Ninth Letter; his poetry in Spillway, Lake Effect and Summerset Review. His first novel, Window Eyes, is available from Unsolicited Press. His first poetry collection, I Don’t Understand Why It’s Crazy to Hear the Beautiful Songs of Nonexistent Birds, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press.