The opposite of zero is, then, what? Anything? Everything? Is zero its own opposite? So. What’s the opposite of anything? Of everything? Are these related? How? If such questions are problematic for numbers and words, offspring of the brain, they are meager in comparison to the lustrous complexities of the actual, say everything that ever existed over anything that might exist minus all that’s not happening right now, before you, for instance, why do we insist that dark and cold have opposites, of which they are the absence, as signs assign the clear world of streets and continents, only contraries? What are poles, themselves, the absence of, if not thought? What’s the opposite of thought?

Skip Fox
from his book For To
BlazeVOX, 2008

Used with permission of the poet.