Twist

A Möbius strip is the simplest kind of hyperknot, of a self-intersecting surface. Here, a paper strip is twisted and taped together, so that a line drawn continuously on it covers both sides, the two dimensions of width and height, without having to leave the one-dimensional flatland of the page. It has traveled between dimensions. The wormhole which has allowed it is the simple twist of space, similar to the one Einstein surmised, a quantum topology band which allows matter to exist simultaneously in two parallel universes. If this seems far-fetched, you have only to think of how your pencil got to the other side of the paper without having to lift it, as you would with a single, untwisted page. You have crossed dimensions while staying in the one where you were born.

Similarly, a poem can co-exist with an ocean. Oceans are hyperspheres, helices that touch everywhere at once but need no seams, no sides. The sand that sloshes underneath the bay moves invisibly around the globe of our view like an ouroborous, an infinite loop, its own wormhole, providing access to a world of submarine mountains while lying seemingly immobile on our beaches.

The most twisted whorl of all is the poem, which can circle back on itself, moving from outside to inside without any apparent stitches. To do this twist, it must use some of the trillion synapses in the brain, a much more complex system of nodes and mirrors than the one-shot Polaroid of the simple sky would seem to be.

But of course everything in nature is connected to everything else, so that the sky is in fact a gaseous web of atoms which absorb gamma rays and solar flares that radiate into space and envelop other galaxies, so the molecules that make up the tides that lap our tropic bay are elements derived from the cosmos at large, providing the bright coral-green simplicity of sea out of a myriad of atoms pulled from space, forming pixels which somehow resonate in the interconnected junctions of our brains as simple mirror images, friezes, nets in fact too vast to be understood, let alone seen.

Out of this vocabulary, poems rise.

So our complexity mirrors the cosmos, and the two coincide to provide the IMAX reality so comfortably laid around us like a topological blanket. This immeasurable depth is hinted at in the twists of spiral knots that invert dimensions seamlessly, providing Rubik’s Cubes, toys that provide small metonymies of the immense machines that mesh to support our existence.