Michelle Mitchell-Foust

Herodotus says the king made a bowl to leave behind the memory of a number. We don’t know the number. We don’t know if it was divisible by two or three. I want, at the moment, the number to indicate a ratio, part of a proportion, because the measurement of the earth depends on this, the balance among things, the snow at the bottom of the hill, the gold garage light caged in a tree, my love for my friend and the distance between us, which I can’t bear. I made a pinhole camera to demonstrate proportion, and everything bright hovers on its milky eye, and here is the catalogue of what hovers there smaller than itself: the blue horizon and the dash at the stoplight, a shell night-light, the gazing ball of the sun going down against the white back fence, which made it look like night in the woods lit from underneath on the wax. I held these things yesterday, along with two pearls that are spheres hanging from my living room ceiling. My friend is smaller now, and if I held my camera up to her, she would give off enough light to hover pocket-sized in my hand, and grand in the world.