Poem by Cathy Colman

Incompleteness Theory                                                             

        But I want to tell you the story.


That evening I was locked in      the museum and
            smuggled food from the paintings:
Van Gogh’s rotten pears. 
Magritte’s huge apple. 
Rembrandt’s overcooked potatoes.


        I want you to know.


I remember I came to see your kind of place,
for days in crowded unseaworthy
rafts, only to be      turned away again 
            from shore. 


        I want to tell you 


about the theory of incompleteness, 
that in any      mathematical system 
            there is always a question in 
the language of that system that cannot be answered. 


    
        We slow-danced naked,      as in 
a low-budget film, out-of-sync looping, 
my ravenous 
silverfish lingerie, peppered with holes.




        Now, as I lie
on the ink-spattered linoleum
that limns a map of the heavens, my limbs 
search for


the center of exactly what will hurt 
the most.
Inside the dark, becalmed,
        I find god’s fingerprint,      the horse latitudes 
where sailors used to heave 
the great beautiful beasts overboard to save
on weight and water.


        I want you to know.


You touched my riverbed hair.
Falling
down through winter’s painted carapace
I see myself,     I want myself,     without you
                    everywhere, starving.

​

Cathy Colman’s first book  Borrowed Dress won the 2001 Felix Pollak Prize for Poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press and was on The Los Angeles Times Best-seller List the first week of its release. Her second collection, Beauty’s Tattoo, (2009), was published by Tebot Bach Publications. Her poetry has appeared in Barrow Street, The Gettysburg Review, The Huffington Post, The Colorado Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Journal, Writers on Writing (Putnam) and elsewhere. She has won the Browning Award for Poetry and the Asher Montandon Award for Poetry. She was nominated for Pushcart Prize seven times and was a former reviewer for The New York Times Book Review. She has just completed her book Incompleteness Theory. She teaches fiction and poetry and lives in Los Angeles.

---