Just One Look at You
Author Archives: Scott Bowles
A Fifth
The universe is not made up of particles,
but ratios.
A fifth, to be specific.
Not mass,
not matter,
but the leaning of one number into another,
the quiet swelling of a sequence older than time.
Galaxies bend by it.
Rivers muscle their banks by it.
Shells coil, ferns unfurl, storms remember their shapes.
Three to two,
five to three,
eight to five—
the ladder hidden in all things,
singing itself upward.
You are not made of matter.
You are made of ratios,
of the perfect fifth,
of the golden sums that turn silence
into breath,
into bone,
into stars.
Mortar
You are not owed the minds of others.
Not their judgment, nor their mercy,
nor their passing weather of regard.
You are permitted this alone:
your own thoughts, your own labors,
your own brief and burning hour.
What they think of you
belongs to them, as wind belongs to the field
and fire to the ash.
If they think well —
let them.
If they think poorly —
let them.
If they do not think of you at all —
so much the better.
To crave their gaze is to hand them reins.
To demand their mind is to beg for chains.
Stand straight, if you can,
or lean as the tree does into the storm —
but stand by your own strength,
not by the borrowed crutch of praise.
You are already free,
if you would only stop asking for permission.
