ISSUE: Winter 2008
Father Fibonacci Is Deafer By the Minute
And longs for the cochlear curls of his youth, which stayed
on the pillow one afternoon, but still he works; hearless,
he kneels in the rows. Above the birds are ribs of umbrellas.
Father Fibonacci grows pink in the sun, says the enemies
of peaches are enemies of me, and boils with fruit on eastern walls.
Father Fibonacci sleeps in his plot, and lets the garden invade itself
with curculio beetles and peach leaf curl. He wakes as hungry
as patterns do: if no one were watching, he would eat the dirt
and flourish all around it, grow succulents and spines,
be tunneled through by things that shine, and feel in him aeration
and the punishment of horsehair worms, but even the dirt is watching,
from topsoil to irised center of the earth. The garden who loves him
will pin him through with one corsage, the garden will dry in a book
later, not now; now, if no one were watching, he would live
off the land and grow perennial, and let the endless subtext rise
through his surface, the cream of a clock face.
