EULER’S IDENTITY


It’s just a name for his famous equation,
but so elegant, crystalline and profound
there would be fewer things as worthy
of merging his selfhood with.
e + 1 = 0 is how God might scrawl
It’s signature, the five supreme mathematical
constants tied into an exquisite five strand
Turk’s Head the light shines through.
Addition, multiplication, and exponentiation,
each only once: zero, absolute nothing
is the additive; and one, everything, first rung
on the ladder to infinity, the multiplicative;
Pi, the infinite, irrational lynchpin of all
Euclidian geometry; e the base of the natural
logarithm; and i the imaginary grain of sand
in the desert of complex numbers where
sprout the orchids of the polynomials,
the impossible square root of minus one.
In sum they skate like an ice dancer across
flatland, multiplied the twirl and expand

in silent tempo sketching out the diagram
of the self-creating, the chewing-gum
continuum from zero to infinity of time,
the trampoline topography of space.

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