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Strategy And Tactics

By Heikki Huotari
Fall 2022 | Poetry

      1.  God said, How circular the argument the saints purvey. The rows of crows

and concentrated umbrages of moons askew, serenity is for the very few. My

secret safe with stable equilibria, each contour line a precipice and my decline but

piecewise constant, to my gyroscope zing went the strings. God said, Consider

whirling dervishes, their axes of rotation in alignment. The amended axiom of

choice prescribes two of each kind.

      2.  God said, To deny me my conclusion is to be irrational. God said, on Noah’s

arc an edge, the adage gets it backwards. Optic nerves need not apply. It’s

birdcage if not birthday cake. I need no pendulum. I’ll be a patent troll. God said,

I wash my hands of Pontius Pilate and my feet of Jesus and from crow’s nests

opposites to lobby me an object of Aristotelian logic. The eyes of attorneys

general are the windows of attorneys general’s souls.

      3.  God said, Associate the number zero with the empty set. On hearing car

alarms, God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. On losing contact with reality, I sent my

complements to the place which was shaded only yesterday. I’d never curse an

animal with ears, says Goldilocks, dismissing simultaneously ultraviolet and

infrared. God said, associate the number zero with the empty set. I think that I’m

Napoleon therefore I’m not. The volume of the solid is computed with a simple

triple integral. The distribution that is Gaussian to you is Gaussian to me.

Accelerometers do not fall far from trees. An octopus sans blind spot, I’ll hang

my hopes on one red-nosed reindeer at a time.

      4.  God said, What next will mortals make of precedent and antecedent? Strike

me lightning twice and shame on me, Beelzebub to be, and not to be my favorite

source of darkness. There are three and one half adolescents in your average time

machine. Remember me in any order, my addenda loudly to lament, the innocent

to innocently flee. The gentle curve is that of a moraine. Some thumbs say to

some fingers, Who’s opposing who? I’m walking back my happiness, at ease. I’m

well advised to hold the chalice tentatively, to extrapolate from random passages.

Change one of your parameters and you would be diminished. Of the two

competing deities how will I know which is the good one?

      5.  God said, Consider these united states, consider these tectonic plates. As

virtue is derivative but sin original, Go figure, I say, counting bounces. I see no

gorilla. Although all of us are made by some creator, some are made by some

creator more. Negotiating for the hostages I’ll have beginner’s luck. The ether as

inclusive as the metaphor, from equilibrium to equilibrium a handout for the

ne’er-do-well but nothing in the forest for the trees, as innocent as by dissociation

these depictions have more nuance than their subjects, and obsessions, would that

they could be compulsions. Damn the costume continuity, my doppelganger right

or wrong.

Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. Since retiring from academia/mathematics he has published poems in numerous journals and in five poetry collections, one of which won the Star 82 Press Book Award.


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