The Ghost Pyramid
This poem was originally published in Rune #93, a fanzine of the Minnesota Science Fiction Society.

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The Ghost Pyramid
reared on symmetry
does not realize it is a blue hippopotamus
clasping a teacup in between
monstrosities that are faces
and petite nails that are edges
in the perfect skewed cube it thinks it is.

Its fourteen pieces
(the cattywumpus number)
spin in geodesis
(but they actually lumber)
by their nature proving
that one shape's another
if you set it moving
and remove the color

Each mausolismic chunk
or modest flat triangle
of the pyramid both defines
the fact of its challenge
and provides a handle
by which to distinguish
mess from edifice
(which in civilized puzzles
is accomplished through color coding).

Here, just two truetypes dwell:
eight nuclear turners
around which six polyhedral clouds
glide, clod and collide
like electrons
for nucleons barely stable;

but as I turned
these irregularities incarnate
with algorithmic faith
that they would rotate neatly
into flat planar place if I
perpetrated no mistakes,

I thought not of isotypes and ions
but of animals built for their environs
staunchly standing in grave proportion,
small as field mice or great as lions
No more strength than their proper portion,
Legs as long as prescribed by science
coming flush under careful torsion.

Supple springhare or weighty kudu
is not so easily alien gauged
when it would have as much flesh as you do
if you were similarly staged;

Thoughts like these are inevitable
when you are forced to weigh the hippopotamus and the teacup
Equally in what turns out to be
in the end, ramshackle path notwithstanding
A solution of perfect symmetry.

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