Quod Erat Demonstratum

In spare hours carved from sleep
I’ve been reading up on math proofs
from old notebooks with crouched lead text
assembled in a trademark headlong march
of complex symbols and reasoning
that means I copied from the board.

Maybe copying from the board is how we learn
plagiarism. I can’t after all identify the swirling Greek
letters, skipping over un-colonized bits of English alphabet—
only desperate times could call for a positive integer j—
and I can’t after all explain in any of my own words
what follows the three-dot triangle meaning
therefore but really saying I dare you to follow.

These are lines of flawless logic, where a conclusive then
always follows if and suppose and let, and belonging
has its own symbol, and there’s a term lemma
just to signify a side-theorem I had to prove along the way,
sorry. I would drag a finger along the text to test the sensation
of proof, like braille, but lead blurs, and these are proofs
I could never reconstruct.

I never copied QED at the end of any notebook proof
because that which was to be demonstrated
wasn’t demonstrated by me. Instead
I shaded in a small black square each time
to remind myself to return.