If this were middle school, would I be scrawling your name?

Found in a file where I was looking for something else: I was asked some years ago to write lyrics for a fictitious band, Pythagoras' Daughter. I don't know if anything came of the project, but I appear to have generated at least one song for it. I had forgotten entirely.

Hypatia

I wrote a letter from Alexandria
She never let it go
Beyond the ghosts of library and lighthouse
Beyond the absence we know

I walked a mile in Alexandria
From the book to the stones
Read equations from a map of Ras el-Tin
The shortest light between two bones

The circle of the sun
The life of the mind of the world to come
And she said

Put the desert back
Put the desert back
Put the desert back among the stars

You read a letter from Alexandria
In your fine Roman hand
She holds the spheres
She holds the reckoning
In the palm of her sand

Like axioms we learn
Like shells in the skin of the soul we return
And she says

Put the desert back
Put the desert back
Put the desert back among the stars

Related mostly in that I had meant to post them earlier, but instead spent the early afternoon on the couch with cats and the later afternoon with sairaali at the MIT print shop and then Veggie Galaxy, where I enjoyed the conversation, the spicy tofu melt, and the most hardcore non-dairy milkshake I can remember: I had never heard of Rabbi Regina Jonas before this morning. I had never heard of Asnat Barazani, either. (She appears in a folktale retold by Howard Schwartz, so I feel I really should have.) Women I shouldn't be surprised by. I bet there are more.

Related mostly in terms of mathematics: how to slice your very own Möbius bagel. You're welcome. Goodnight.

P.S. Rabbit, rabbit!