Explore a new idea by writing a poem . . .

      Often I try to unravel the intricacies of a new idea by writing -- using communication with my fingers as steps toward understanding.  And when I found the poem below (here at the website VIA NEGATIVA) I saw it also as a poem of discovery -- and I offer it to you:

Every Line Intersects the Line
                           at Infinity at Some Point                       by Luisa A. Igloria

"Out of nothing I have created a strange new universe."   - János Bolyai (1802-1860)

The optometrist asks you to look into 
the autorefractor: two dark lines form 

a road that stretches from where you sit
to a red barn at the horizon. If your brain 

tells you that you're looking at a point 
at infinity rather than just mere inches away, 

it helps the eyes focus. Things have to end 
somewhere, don't they? In projective geometry, 

you're told two parallel lines will intersect, 
will meet at a point in the line at infinity. 

If you tilted the horizon up or down, it 
would remain what it is. If you turned 

around, infinity would still be there  
as an infinitely beckoning horizon. But

what a strange idea: how in that world, 
another traveling along the same line 

as you at parallel distance will arrive 
with you at the edge of the world. Maybe

you can't see them now or touch them.
Maybe they haven't spoken to you in months,

in years. Maybe you move along, uncertainly: 
an inch at a time, imagining the possibility.

The website VIA NEGATIVA was founded in 2003 by Dave Bonta and offers many of his poems.  

Luisa Igloria joined VIA NEGATIVA in 2010.