‘The future is fixed, dear Mr Kappus, but we move around in infinite space.’

— Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet




The calendar turns, creates and recreates us

one square at a time. Each of its dozen diagrams

a maze, no lines dotted. A forest entire in aerial view,

no tree missed. It’s thus we surveil ourselves,

the months translucent, the weeks set out in orderly

blocks constructed airtight in files and rows.

A chessboard in one colour, its visitants imprinted

or penned, all pawns—no pieces, rooks or royalty,

every move legal. A crossword tabula whose solution

fattens with the moon, shadowing its phases; a jigsaw

solvable only in the discarding or forgetting,

socket by socket, tab by tab. Dumbed-down

skeletal narrative or crammed overwrit progress

of crisis or confluence. A set of clues, hints, memory

jogs, a cryptic gridlock, every blank laconic or

loquacious, every geometric both infinite and fixed:

the challenge to complete, chore to survive.