The Mark of the Empty
Published in The Blue Nib Literary Magazine, December 2018
poetry
​
We are the same species that
banned as heresy at the council of Myassia
the idea of Zero despite humans
flirting with nothingness thousands of years
before in a world of constant change
violently cataclysmic and delicately paced

We are the same species that
struggled with the allure of absolutes
and our place in infinity
under the limitations of declarations such as
god is in everything that is
and everything that is not is the devil

We are the same species that
sanctioned the illegal and secretive use of zero
the same people able to count the totality
of what is not there
but we cannot manage to respect
the shifting cycles of nature

We are the same species capable
of debating if numbers exist outside the
human mind but we cannot convince the most skeptical
or the ignorant to name the solution set to
making peace with endless permutations of survival

We are the same species who
eons ago carved the ideas of zero
in the temple wall of Gwalior
and who etched the Bakhshali text on birch bark
exploring nothingness
blankness
non-being

We are the same species who
gave birth to Aczel whose odyssey to Find Zero
led to an old shed at Angkor Conservation that sheltered
a stone stele, K-127, inscribed with
“The Chaka era reached year 605 on the fifth day of the waning moon.”

Maybe the oldest invention of place holding ever found

We are the same species to
name the void then fill it with Descartes and Hawking
but we cannot remember the lessons of learning
by comparison
by empathy
by compassion

We are the same species to
know happiness as the deepest thing
and sadness as the other deepest thing
but we cannot lay hands on
the emptiness left by fear and hate

We are the species gazing
at the unloveliness and inelegance
of ourselves
in increasingly larger numbers that
are not practically countable
not the quality of being 1 or 2 or 3 together
not named as distinct

We are in danger of leaving
nothing but the
Mark of the Empty
to demonstrate on this day in the fourth month
of the 2018 cycle in the age of digital
that we took out an unpayable debt
and defaulted
because we could not hold and name
our place.