The Geometry of Verse

     Here in the US, we have a new poet laureate (announced by the Library of Congress on September 15, 2025)  --  and this selected poet Arthur Sze sees poetry as a unifying agent -- "verse can bring us together".

     Sze is a poet whose work I value reading -- but its links to mathematics are gentle and scattered.  Here is a sample --  the closing lines from Sze's poem "Sight Lines".  (The complete poem is available here at poets.org.)  

from  Sight Lines      by Arthur Sze

. . .    when I come to an upright circular steel lid, I step out of the ditch—
      I step out of the ditch but step deeper into myself—
      I arrive at a space that no longer needs autumn or spring—
      I find ginseng where there is no ginseng my talisman of desire—
      though you are visiting Paris, you are here at my fingertips—
      though I step back into the ditch, no whitening cloud dispels this world’s mystery—
      the ditch ran before the year of the Louisiana Purchase—
      I’m walking on silt, glimpsing horses in the field—
      fielding the shapes of our bodies in white sand—
      though parallel lines touch in the infinite, the infinite is here—

From The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems by Arthur Sze (Copper Canyon Press, 2021).