True or False

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.    (Gustave Flaubert)

Her Massive Sandal

You have no idea how much poetry there is in the calculation of a table of logarithms! -- Jane Muir, Of Men and Numbers

                                

Don’t ask me to describe the color blue

or to portray the flavor of a pear;

to explicate the texture of the air

or draw a contour map of Timbuktu.

I’d rather write that one plus one is two.

My stance on faith? Euclidean foursquare –

an abstract God is (n)either here (n)or there,

and as for love, it can be false or true.

In cold and calculating, clear, exact

equations, I approach infinity

while you are left to reason with your heart.

And yet in symbols signifying fact

we share a common tongue, a symmetry,

the pure delineations of our art.

by Catherine Chandler 
(first published in 14 by 14, Issue #11, December 2009)