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On 88th, the street where I lived as a girl when an hour could seem an eternity, it would be years before I met the young man who pointed out that those numbers, turned on their sides, had a special meaning. What meaning? I wondered and pondered the two unbroken loops pinched at their centers, forever returning to themselves like a pair of ice skaters tracing figure eights into a state of bliss. I wondered if he thought that love is infinite, that our souls will live forever, that sky even on crystalline days moves into unseeable endless space. I was thinking that the iris of his hazel eyes pulled me into a place where I could feel lost or float before thought was possible, as if in vitro. I no longer live on 88th Street, having left double infinity in its impossible realm. Because infinity cannot be multiplied or divided—infinity just is. Still, I was grateful that I didn’t live on Main Street or Elm, and the young man I married found meaning on that finite block in Queens where he found me. |
Maria Terrone’s full-length poetry collections are Eye to Eye, A Secret Room in Fall (McGovern Prize), and The Bodies We Were Loaned. No Known Coordinates is forthcoming from The Word Works. At Home in the New World was her creative nonfiction debut. Read more at MariaTerrone.com.
