Numbers Man, poem by Carl Sandburg

NUMBER MAN
by Carl Sandburg

         (for the ghost of Johann Sebastian Bach)

He was born to wonder about numbers.

He balanced fives against tens
and made them sleep together
and love each other.

He took sixes and sevens
and set them wrangling and fighting
over raw bones.

He woke up twos and fours
out of baby sleep
and touched them back to sleep.

He mananged eights and nines,
gave them prophet beards,
marched them into mists and mountains.

He added all the numbers he knew,
multiplied them by new-found numbers
and called it a prayer of Numbers.

For each of a million cipher silences
he dug up a mate number
for a candle light in the dark.

He knew love numbers, luck numbers,
how the sea and the stars
are made and held by numbers.

He died from the wonder of numbering.
He said good-by as if good-by is a number.

SOURCE: “Number Man” appears in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (Harcourt, 1970), available at Amazon.com.

SOURCE: Poetry (October 1947).

IMAGE: J.S. Bach postcard, available at ebay.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He received three Pulitzer Prizes, two for poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln.

Bach in the DC Subway, poem by David Lee Garrison

BACH IN THE DC SUBWAY
by David Lee Garrison

As an experiment,
The Washington Post
asked a concert violinist—
wearing jeans, tennis shoes,
and a baseball cap—
to stand near a trash can
at rush hour in the subway
and play Bach
on a Stradivarius.
Partita No. 2 in D Minor
called out to commuters
like an ocean to waves,
sang to the station
about why we should bother
to live.

A thousand people
streamed by.  Seven of them
paused for a minute or so
and thirty-two dollars floated
into the open violin case.
A café hostess who drifted
over to the open door
each time she was free
said later that Bach
gave her peace,
and all the children,
all of them,
waded into the music
as if it were water,
listening until they had to be
rescued by parents
who had somewhere else to go.
***
Find the poem in David Lee Garrison‘s collection Playing Bach in the DC Metro, available at Amazon.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: David Lee Garrison earned his PhD from the Johns Hopkins University, taught Spanish and Portuguese at Wright State University from 1979 to 2009, and is now retired. Garrison’s poems have appeared widely in journals such as Connecticut Review, Poem, and Rattle, and also in several anthologies. Two poems from his book, Sweeping the Cemetery, were read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac, and one was included in Keillor’s Good Poems, American Places. The title poem from his book, Playing Bach in the D. C. Metro, was featured by Ted Kooser on his website, American Life in Poetry.  (Source: poetryfoundation.org)

FURTHER READING:
Pearl Before Breakfast: Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Washington Post

The Things We Miss: Violin Virtuoso Plays a DC Metro Station, huffingtonpost.com

WATCH AND LISTEN: 
Joshua Bell plays a DC metro station (youtube.com)

Listening to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No.3 with Clancy

As most cat lovers know, cats love music — especially classical music. My cat Clancy loves the mornings — basking in the sun while lounging on the bookcase that holds the radio, his ears moving in perfect rhythm to the music. Listen here to one of his favorites — Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 by performed by the Academy of Ancient Music (Christopher Hogwood, conductor).