Flight of the triangles

FLIGHT OF THE TRIANGLES

(After the artwork School of Fish, by Brody Xarhakos)

 

You’ve been held captive far too long,

Not only by bloody nails and rusted bolts

And pencil lines finer than thinning hair –

 

But by logic underpinning rigid proofs,

Faith in a trinity synonymous with one,

The lyric of your differentiating names:

 

Oh, sad scalene, isosceles, equilateral –

We sang you high in three-part harmony

As a silver frame tingled each syllable.

 

But the time’s less than a thought away

When you’ll break free from roof trusses

And skeletal pylons shouldering clouds,

 

From pyramids facing fears and hopes,

Diamonds born of a rain-forest’s death,

Stars complicit in proliferating triads.

 

With the joy of a mirror shattering,

You’ll fly off to your vanishing point,

Leaving us breathless in your wake.

 

TOM PETSINIS is a novelist, playwright, poet, and Peer Programs Supervisor (Maths) at Deakin University. He has published eight collections of poetry, including My Father’s Tools, Four Quarters, which won the Wesley Michel Wright Poetry Prize, and most recently Steles. His play The Drought was short-listed for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. His novels include The Twelfth Dialogue and The French Mathematician, nominated for both the New South Wales and South Australian Premier’s Award. Forthcoming work includes the novels Fog and Plato’s Number, and a poetical work Shinoko and the Silkworm. Tom’s work has been translated into a number of languages.

The poem Flight of the Triangles is published in the following journal:

Issue no. 18 of Le Simplegadi entitled “Always on the other side”: Migrations and Shape-Shifting Identities in Anglophone Literatures.

A note from the editor: Flight of the Triangles was written in response to a painting, School of Fish, by Brody Xarhaxos. The painting was part of a collection entitled Mentoring Metaphors in which Brody re-imagined several mentoring metaphors created by peer support program coordinators at Deakin University during the Students Helping Students Coordinator Development Program.