For Maryam Mirzakhani

 There’s a way out of this landscape. 
 It may take lifetimes. Beyond death’s
  
 singularity, others will find a path – slow
 and persistent as a tortoise, or agile
  
 as an ape that leaps past low-
 hanging fruit on hollow banyan 
  
 trees. Here flowers have flat 
 petals but the ground swoops 
  
 unexpectedly, dips and tilts and roller-
 coasters round into itself; dragonflies
  
 grow double wings and on
 the high plateau, balls glide
  
 across the baize, reflecting off,
 or through, mirrors that line
  
 its bounds. Arrowed streams
 are split by sudden strike-
  
 slip shifts, while filaments
 like wisps of spider’s thread are
  
 edges from another space,
 or doodles in our own.
  
 Is this a torus after all, 
 on which to vanish and return? 
   

*Maryam Mirzakhani (1977 – 2017) was the first woman to be awarded the Fields Medal, one of mathematics’ highest honours, for ‘outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces’.

‘Geodesic’ first appeared in Allegro Poetry Issue 19, December 2018.