Reading about the tower or great-boled tree
of ordinals, I think how Cantor grew
more wise and more insane, trying to save
his tree of Jesse from the pruning shears
and kitchen gardening of Kronecker;
though I must share the latter’s feeling for
the natural numbers, those deceptively
well-ordered, step-wise creatures, which appear
transparent as they mount, but all in all
among themselves, are most unknowable.
Dreaming about the cardinals, at night,
the alephs flaming like a candelabrum,
I see you in the attic of your house
installed between Diogenes Laërtius,
nachgelassene Schriften, commentary
on Aristotle, Plato, and the latest
fashionable fact-shredders out of Paris.
So cloudy is the place you occupy
in the last hierarchies of my world
that I hardly discern you; yet I know
you are not just a postulate I made.
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