Explore "An Acrobat, a Violinist, and a Chambermaid Celebrate" by Maxwell Bodenheim on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
/ Geometry of souls. / Dispute the roundness of gesturing flesh; / Angles, and oblongs, and squares / Slip with astounding precision / Into the throes of lifted elbows; / Into the searching perpendicular / Of fingers rising to more than ten; / Into the salient straightness of lips; / Into the rock-like protest of knees. / The flesh of human beings / Is a beginner's-lesson in mathematics. / The pliant stupidity of flesh / Mentions the bungling effort / Of a novice to understand / The concealed mathematics of the soul. / Men will tell you that an arm / Rising to the sky / Indicates strident emotion; / Reveals a scream of authority; / Expresses the longing of a red engine / Known as the heart; / Rises like a flag-pole / From which the mind signals.
/ Men will fail to tell you / That an arm rising to the sky / Takes a straight line of the soul / And strives to comprehend it; / That the arm is a solid tunnel / For a significance that shoots beyond it. / The squares, and angles, and oblongs of the soul, / The commencing lines of the soul / Are pestered by a debris of words. / Men shovel away the words: / Falteringly in youth; / Tamely and pompously in middle age; / Vigorously in old age. / Death takes the last shovel-full away: / Death is accommodating. / Nothing is wise except outline. / The content held by outline / Is a slave in the mass. / Men with few outlines in their minds / Try to give the outlines dignity / By moulding them into towers two inches high, / In which they sit in lonely, talkative importance.