The Slant of Sun Shines Through a…

February 2024
free verse

On the time-stained paper
Buried at the bottom of the drawer
Are the diaries that a younger me wrote,
Most of which form a tangent to my grandfather’s path.

The wooden rectangle of the sunlit table
Intersects with the rays of sunshine.
My grandfather sits against the wall
With the chopsticks in his hand,
“Look here, this angle |between the two chopsticks|
This is an alternate interior angle”

Clock ticked its rhythm
In the four-dimensional world,
Conveying the tapestry of knowledge.
As the derivative of the tangent plane grows,
Years pass by.

The slant of sun shines through a half-opened window
Integrating into the dishes on the dinner table,
Projecting shapes of quadratic surfaces.
Picking up the chopsticks from the bowl,
With an infinite number of angles I’ve encountered in my life,
Now I can visualize and calculate something even fancier –
Something that even my grandfather doesn’t know.

Despite that, the sunshine from a decade ago does not fade,
And the chopsticks stretch and continue to intersect with my life.
Though the angles that make up the alternate interior angles lie on different sides,
Their values remain the same
Unchanged, no matter how slanted the intersecting line is.
Models based on these values can thus begin to vary.