Poem of the Month: August 2004

Numbers

I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.
I like the domesticity of addition--
add two cups of milk and stir--
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.
And multiplication's school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.
Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else's
garden now.
There's an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.
And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
    with three remaining.
Three boys beyond their mothers' call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn't anywhere you look.

- Mary Cornish

Journal prompts:

• Write about numbers. Which numbers are important to you? What kinds of things to do you count, or save?
  
  
• What have you added to your life lately? What could you subtract?
  
  
• Write a poem using these lines as a structure:
  I like the generosity of_____________
  I like the domesticity of____________
  There's an amplitude to____________
  I never fail to be surprised by____________