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
• Previously on Poetry Daily... •
Poetry
Volume CLXXVI, Number 3
June 2000
Copyright © 2000 by the Modern Poetry Association.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
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