Adagio Logic

by ali c

1. Let L be the one who left. Let Y be you. Where do we place the ache? The narrow stairway of my throat, the flushed breast of

spring’s blossom cleaved open, or your blue-lit car?

Let it be ∂: the partial derivative of what remains.

Let it be the myth I wrote tucked in your shirt.

That’s where the truth falls apart.

2. Time is not linear but a trick mirror

It curves like a clodded jawbone clasped in a hunter’s hand—

fractals of my large, wet want splintering across the silvered

glass. I walk into it again and again—a ghost trying to

remember its shape from the shadow,

the glass giving just enough light to rupture the

black of what remains with me.

Each reflection more animal than the last:

this one has your breath stitched onto her clavicle,

this one’s arched spine retracting into the rib

from which you built her.

One of them is floating in shadows, your

hands bracketing her hips like parentheses.

She is praying, maybe. Or asking you to dance.

Another drags her skeletal finger over a lip-wet

cigarette—remembering the taste, not of you,

but of the day you left—hair knotted with nicotine’s

tangy perfume, a fifth beer bottle’s cap chipping

the white wood of teeth.

Even departure has a flavour. The mirror

remembers. The body, gone savage with hunger.

3. Consider the theorem:

If love, then permanence.

Contrapositive: if not permanent, then not love.

But this is poor logic. Love is not mathematical but

maths envies love’s imperfections.

Maths does not want to be known. Its language,

a spiral in the conch shell, sin spilling from Eden’s fruit,

found in the forbidden curves of my pelvic floor.

How many times have you vanished into some

impossibility?

When I found you on the cliff—your breath laboured

like a newborn calf, pulse split like an old church bell’s

sound, face forgiven of its colour—I had hoped

to help you. Like an equation I had solved years before

but since forgotten. The answer strung in my teeth.

Each tooth a vibration. A quiver I chew through

in the hopes to find its root.

4. A list is a kind of plea of remembrance.

This is why the heart makes bullet points:

• smoking weed behind the bike shed

• his car snug in the snake-mouthed tunnel

• narrow window of camera light slicing the flesh of my

nude body

• the silence after the party

• the word love—and what it failed to do

5. Descartes was wrong.

You think, therefore you grieve.

Feeling arrives first—an unfamiliar text, alphabet

in another language, animal of the unexplored forest.

6. Language will fail you.

This is an empirical fact.

Try describing absence without falling into metaphor.

(See? Already drowning.)

That has not stopped me from scribbling you into each breath.

My mind flaring with the image of my teeth at your white

wrist, your fingers returning to my lips. Your name spangled

into the vertebrae of highways. Tires knitted

with the red from the bloated stomach of a deer,

still-warm flesh pounded into

the earth’s welcoming mouth.

Life yawns its brevity across the narrow path of stars.

7. There is no closure.

There is only forgetting, and forgetting to forget.

Some call this healing. Some call it Wednesday.

8. If you must write to them,

do not send the letter.

Slip it under the flap of tongue.

Chew it until it reduces into a vowel,

hollow and coarse like lace.

Spit it into the river. Call that moving on.

Postage is not an absolution.

9. One last thing: the world did not stop when I left,

only trembled, slightly, in the throat of the hour.

Now I return to this city—starting again—as body,

as feral theorem no hand can solve

without burning. I come back a boy too full of

music to measure. Each note refusing silence.

Each chord a muscle I forgot to bury.

***

There is no writing that does not begin in error. The mistake was

believing I could think my way out of heartbreak. “Adagio Logic”

began as a failure of genre. I wanted to write a poem rooted in the

intertwined grief and anger of heartbreak and betrayal, but what

arrived was more anxious than elegiac—closer to a proof

unravelling itself mid-theorem than a confession. At its core, the

poem attempts to drag logic across a terrain it was never meant to

navigate: grief, memory, desire. And it does so slowly, indulgently,

against better judgment.

This work was written in response to Chopstick Variations, Margo

Guryan’s 2009 album of piano compositions, each one a brief and

haunted geometry of tone and silence. What struck me most was not

their minimalism, but their recursive disobedience. The pieces flirt

with logic, then wander. They begin with an idea—melodic, almost

childlike—and then fracture it into questions. That movement felt

deeply aligned with what I was trying to do in the poem: to use

structure only as a means of gently unraveling it. Guryan’s Adagio in

particular guided the pacing of the poem: the way it delays climax,

how it holds the listener inside a question of time, how it refuses

conclusion while still delivering beauty.

The poem unfolds through nine numbered sections—not for the

sake of structure, but to mimic the steps of argumentation, or the

phrasing of a musical adagio: slow, deliberate, with tension threaded

into silence. The recursive numbering allows the poem to spiral

without conclusion. It doubles back on itself not in order to clarify,

but to complicate, as grief does. As language does. Every time I

think I have said the thing, I am returned to the unsayable. What

can’t be theorised is bitten, buried, or sung. I felt it necessary that it

mirrored the relationships I had with many men I knew, though it

was inspired by this boy I had known for a month. Sometimes it is

the shortest relationships (be it romantic or platonic) that most leave

their mark.

The discursive idea lives here as contradiction: to reason the

unreasonable. I call it “Adagio Logic” because the logics I turn to in

the wake of loss—mathematics, music, philosophy—are not systems

of closure, but frameworks for being with the unsolved. In that way,

they are like poems. This poem does not seek to resolve itself, but to

display its workings: the ghost-mechanics of memory, the unreliable

calculations of love, the residue of an idea that transcend its

language.

The poem engages logic the way a body engages hunger—not to

master it, but to keep it company. I was interested in the ways the

body refuses metaphor, even as metaphor seduces us into believing

we can name what we feel. In Section 6, for instance, I try (and fail)

to describe absence without falling into metaphor, only to

immediately surrender to it: “Already drowning.” That’s the kind of

discursive moment I’m most interested in—the moment where

language breaks and the poem admits its own incapacity. Where

lyric and logic, mouth and mind, collapse into each other.

Which brings me back to disassembly. This poem disassembles logic

as much as it disassembles the self. But I do not believe it is trying to

fix anything. Rather, it tries to sit beside what logic can’t hold. It

reveals. The ache, the uncomfortable leftover. The capability of

healing again.