About the author
Bearings
Navigate the concepts while you may,
Understand the undistinguished phrases,
Collimate the convoluted mazes
Man constructs to show, the shortest way,
Bad is good, black white, and night is day.
Luncheon
The officer trees
repeatedly saying –
The ossified drives
reportedly seeing –
The pussifoot trays
paradingly sighing,
The rotors in the bowers,
The rotgut lost in flowers,
The infantile cantata,
The elephantine waiter,
The android Andromeda – or the male Medusa,
Tête-à-tête with the Bultitude – or the female bruiser,
Deals and deliveries,
Plans and palavers:
Fare catalyses here their various affairs;
Glassed off from these
A variegated arkful drifts out there
Under the officer trees.
The Eve of St Affidavit
As I sip the bland cedilla
By my aspic-shaded villa,
Where the salmonella ripens in the sun,
Through the rennet-peopled pines
Wind the simnel-chanting lines
Of the banisters whose longitude is done;
Clad in pelmet, syncope, albumen and lathe, they move as one;
For tonight is Calibration,
Time of terror and elation,
When the calipers commute and our Parenthesis is won.
A Limerick
If the lemniscate of Bernoulli
Is the shape of Infinity troulli,
And eye to the eye’th
Involves E to the (minus half) pie’th
Then the Universe must be unroulli!Explication de Texte: The symbol for infinity resembles the mathematical curve known as the lemniscate of Bernoulli; the "imaginary" (or "lateral") unit, the square root of minus one, is denoted by i; and i raised to the power of itself has (see Eli Maor, e: the story of a number, 1994) an infinite series of real values, of which the lowest, radical one is e to the power of minus pi over 2 (about 1/5) – which is totally absurd, but true; e sounds identical with Einstein’s energy symbol E. [D.I.M.]
"Bearings" was first published in Ariel: a Review of International English Literature 2:4, October 1971.
"The Eve of St Affidavit" was first published in the SF fanzine Bar Trek 3, 1977.
"Luncheon" and "A Limerick" first appeared on this Ansible Editions website page in 2003.
Texts copyright © David I. Masson, 1971, 1977, 2003.