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Such thirst
to know how much!
Such
hunger
to know
how many stars in the sky!
We pass
our infancies
counting stones,
plants,
fingers, sand grains, teeth,
pass our youths
counting
petals, hairs.
We count
the color and the
years,
the lives and kisses,
bulls
in the fields,
waves
in the sea. The ships
made ciphers which
multiplied.
The numbers spawned.
The cities
were thousands,
millions,
and the wheat came in hundreds
of units
each
holding other integers
tinier than a single grain.
Time became
a number.
Light became numbered
and however much it raced with
sound
it had a velocity of 37.
Numbers surround us,
At
night we would
lock the door, exhausted,
approaching
800;
below
having come to bed with us
in that sleep
the
4,000 and the 77
goaded our foreheads
with their wrenches and
hammers.
The 5
would compound itself
until it entered the
sea or the delirium
where the sun might greet it with
steel
and we co racing
to the office,
the mill,
the
factory,
to start fresh with the infinite
number 1 of each
day.
Friend, we had the time
so our thirst could be
satisfied,
the ancestral longing
to enumerate things
and
total them,
reducing them
until rendering them dust,
dunes
of numbers.
We are papering
the world
with figures and
ciphers,
but
the things existed
nonetheless, fleeing
all
tallies,
becoming dehydrated
by such quantities,
leaving
their fragrance and memories,
and the empty numbers
remained.
For that reason,
for you
I love the
things.
The numbers
which go to jail,
move
in closed
columns
procreating
until they give us the sum
for the
whole of infinity.
For your sake I want
some
numbers of the
way
to defend you
and you to defend them.
May your weekly
wages increase
and grow chest-deep!
And out of the number 2
that binds
your body and your beloved wife's
emerge the
matches eyes of your sons
to tally yet again
the ancient
stars
and innumerable
spikes of wheat
which shall fulfill
the transfigured earth.
(Trans. William Pitt Root) from NUMBERS AND FACES,
Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal, Issue # 24, June 2001, pp.
23 - 25.
See last month's poem by
Sandra Z.
Keith. |
