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# Corpuscules in Corners
- URL: https://www.journal.ninthheaven.co/literature/corpuscules-in-corners/
- Published: 2025-08-02T07:44:48.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-13T15:26:25.000Z
- Description: I want to work back to that intuition I had of the infinity of the self— that this world is bursting at its seams and margins with the divine. Is coming home to oneself like turning from ashes and ashes to dust in corners?
- Author: Kuyili Karthik
- Tags: Literature & Poetry, Poetry, Issue I - Blue Winter, #Import 2025-10-08 13:07

**Corpuscules in Corners**  
*by Kuyili Karthik*

> *I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.*  
> – Pierre de Fermat

The old and the young play at mischief.  
Middling adults labour under the misapprehension  
that they are divisible parts  
of an indifferent structure.  
They cower for the promise of cowries  
in corridors narrow and familiar.

A child finds miracles collecting in corners  
like dust unswept for years.  
Cobwebs span walls that converge  
like the parted pages of a book  
imparting divinity in spines of shadow.

I found respite in the classroom  
by sharpening pencils  
into a dustbin behind the door.  
Each shave was a meditation on graphite,  
my own temple spire  
that crumbled when I’d write.

Krishna held the universe  
in the cavity of his mouth.  
Might my utterances also taste  
of that dark syrup of truth?  
I used to eat the dust  
that layered soft and grey  
in felted nooks:  
wafers of dead skin,  
dirt and detritus underfoot.

My teacher who terrorised  
was tortured by trivialities.  
Her wooden ruler struck terror  
upon knuckled fists.  
Our sins were hemmed in  
by its margins.

Shylock wanted  
to cut a chunk  
from the guilty flesh that owed him,  
but you cannot carve a pound  
form the wealth of the whole  
without disfiguring it.  
We are divisible only  
through the pipette  
of man's mind.

My blind grandmother taught me  
how to look at the sun  
the way the Vedic yogis did.  
I saw through my fingers,  
interlaced against the sky,  
a little square of light  
bordered by skin.  
If I took down my veneer,  
perhaps I’d be too blinded  
to catch a glimpse of the divine.

I want to run the risk--  
split the stasis of endings  
and unfold into the horizon.  
We try to splice  
a fraction of a fraction  
of the richness of the world  
but lacerate its tapestry.  
Are we really *cut* from the same cloth?  
I wove myself in,  
dissolving into the web.  
Shavasana,  
the sinking death of ego  
easing into the ebb of dissipation.