A world of theorems and formulae, poem by Vijaya Gowrisankar (MY FIRST JOB Poetry and Prose Series)

A world of theorems and formulae
by Vijaya Gowrisankar

“This sum is so hard.” I heard my friends groan. I looked
at them and shook my head. “Once you understand the
technique, it is really simple,” I said. Maths and I were best
pals; she understood me and I understood her, like no other

It all started with explaining how to solve the Maths problems
to my friends, my classmates. I needed assistance for Hindi and
I offered my services as a Maths teacher to her son, instead of
tuition fees. It started as a mutual understanding, a need

Before I knew it, I was spending time teaching Maths to those who
struggled with it. I was always surrounded by kids, even at lunch,
those in the same class and junior to me. The joy when they solved
each problem and the struggle to explain to those who refused to listen

I learnt to tailor my explanations depending on the calibre of each student
For the weaker ones, I explained easier techniques. For those who just
needed a push and were sharp, I taught them the tricks of revision. I told
them to attempt the simpler sums, and prepared pages of sums to practice

IMAGE: “Numbers in Color” by Jasper Johns (1958-59).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: A major surgery in class 7 left me with a weak nervous system. This meant I stammered badly when I tried to talk. My self-confidence was at its lowest low. I felt at peace when I did Maths. I loved Maths and “She” loved me in return. Surprisingly, I stammered less when I was explaining Maths or talking to Maths. That love for Maths opened the opportunity and for a long time, that was my first job. I taught Maths to children for years.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 
Vijaya Gowrisankar‘s fourth book of poems, Savour –Art and Poetry Meet, was published on April 30, 2017. Her first three books of poems, Explore, Reflect, and Inspire, are all bestsellers. Her submissions have been published in Silver Birch Press, Nancy Drew Anthology, Poetry Marathon 2016 Anthology, Sometimes Anyway: Pride in Poetry Volume II, Forwardian, Triadae Magazine, iWrite India, Dystenium Online, and Taj Mahal Review anthologies. She has appeared as guest speaker in colleges. A participant in the Poetry Marathon 2016 (24 poems in 24 hours, 1 poem per hour), she has reviewed and edited poetry and fiction books. She participated in NaNoWriMo 2016 and completed her first novel in November 2016. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter. Visit her blog at vijayagowrisankar.wordpress.com.

Like Two Negative Numbers Multiplied by Rain, poem by Jane Hirshfield

LIKE TWO NEGATIVE NUMBERS MULTIPLIED BY RAIN
by Jane Hirshfield

Lie down, you are horizontal.
Stand up, you are not.

I wanted my fate to be human.

Like a perfume
that does not choose the direction it travels,
that cannot be straight or crooked, kept out or kept.

Yes, No, Or
—a day, a life, slips through them,
taking off the third skin,
taking off the fourth.

And the logic of shoes becomes at last simple,
an animal question, scuffing.

Old shoes, old roads—
the questions keep being new ones.
Like two negative numbers multiplied by rain
into oranges and olives.

SOURCE: Poetry (September 2012).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jane Hirshfield is the author of several collections of verse, including Come, Thief (2011), After (2006), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize, and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Award, among others. Hirshfield has also translated the work of early women poets in collections such as The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (1990) and Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994).

Numbers, poem by Jared Harel

NUMBERS
by Jared Harel

My grandmother never trusted calculators.
She would crunch numbers in a spiral notebook
at the kitchen table, watching her news.
Work harder and I’d have more to count,
she’d snap at my father. And so my father worked
harder, fixed more mufflers, gave her receipts

but the numbers seldom changed.
There were silky things my mother wanted,
glorious dinners we could not afford.

Grandma would lecture her: no more garbage,
and so our house was clean. The attic spotless.
In fact, it wasn’t until after she died

that my parents found out how much she had saved us.
What hidden riches had been kept in those notebooks,
invested in bonds, solid blue digits
etched on each page. She left them
in the kitchen by her black and white television
we tossed a week later, though it seemed to work fine.

SOURCE: “Numbers” appears in Jared Harel‘s collection The Body Double (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2012) available at Amazon.com.

SOURCE: Cold Mountain Review, Volume 39, no. 1, Fall 2010.

IMAGE: “Spiral Notebook” by Pam Kennedy. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jared Harel’s poems have appeared in Tin House, The American Poetry Review, The Threepenny Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Ecotone and elsewhere. His poetry chapbook, The Body Double, was published by Brooklyn Arts Press (2012). He lives in Astoria with his wife and daughter, and plays drums for the NYC-based rock band, The Dust Engineers. Visit him at jaredharel.com.

Numbers, poem by Mary Cornish

NUMBERS
by Mary Cornish

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 mother’s call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn’t anywhere you look.

SOURCE: “Numbers” appears in Mary Cornish‘s collection (Oberlin College Press, 2007), available at Amazon.com.

SOURCE: Poetry (June 2000).

IMAGE: “Counting Circles” by Carol Leigh. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Originally an author and illustrator of children’s books, Mary Cornish came to poetry late in life. After a progressive disease struck her drawing hand, Cornish enrolled in the MFA program for creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College, where she soon switched to poetry. Known for its thoughtful investigations of domestic scenes, Cornish’s work also explores the relationships between art, artifice, and the past. Cornish is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and lives in Bellingham, Washington, where she teaches creative writing at Western Washington University.

Simple Arithmetic, poem by Billy Collins

SIMPLE ARITHMETIC
by Billy Collins

I spend a little time every day
on a gray wooden dock
on the edge of a wide lake, thinly curtained by reeds.

And if there is nothing on my mind
but the motion of the wavelets
and the high shape-shifting of clouds,

I look out at the whole picture
and divide the scene into what was here
five hundred years ago and what was not.

Then I subtract all that was not here
and multiply everything that was by ten,
so when my calculations are complete,

all that remains is water and sky,
the dry sound of wind in the reeds,
and the sight of an unflappable heron on the shore.

All the houses are gone, and the boats
as well as the hedges and the walls,
the curving brick paths, and the distant siren.

The plane crossing the sky is no more
and the same goes for the swimming pools,
the furniture and the pastel umbrellas on the decks,

And the binoculars around my neck are also gone,
and so is the little painted dock itself–
according to my figuring–

and gone are my notebook and my pencil
and there I go, too,
erased by my own eraser and blown like shavings off the page.

Photo: ”Morning light on rock patterns, North Saskatchewan River, Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada” From the postcard book: Sierra Club Nature in Close-Up. ©Ron Thomas,1988, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Find the 160-page book at Amazon here.

Simple Arithmetic, Poem by Billy Collins

SIMPLE ARITHMETIC

by Billy Collins

I spend a little time every day
on a gray wooden dock
on the edge of a wide lake, thinly curtained by reeds.

And if there is nothing on my mind
but the motion of the wavelets
and the high shape-shifting of clouds,

I look out at the whole picture
and divide the scene into what was here
five hundred years ago and what was not.

Then I subtract all that was not here
and multiply everything that was by ten,
so when my calculations are complete,

all that remains is water and sky,
the dry sound of wind in the reeds,
and the sight of an unflappable heron on the shore.

All the houses are gone, and the boats
as well as the hedges and the walls,
the curving brick paths, and the distant siren.

The plane crossing the sky is no more
and the same goes for the swimming pools,
the furniture and the pastel umbrellas on the decks,

And the binoculars around my neck are also gone,
and so is the little painted dock itself–
according to my figuring–

and gone are my notebook and my pencil
and there I go, too,
erased by my own eraser and blown like shavings off the page.

Photo: “Morning light on rock patterns, North Saskatchewan River, Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada” From the postcard book: Sierra Club Nature in Close-Up. ©Ron Thomas,1988, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Find the 160-page book at Amazon here.

Pi’s Circles by Yann Martel

The Life of Pi, Chapter 78 (Excerpt)

by Yann Martel

To be a castaway is to be a point perpetually at the centre of a circle…the geometry never changes. Your gaze is always a radius. The circumference is ever great. In fact, the circles multiply.

To be a castaway is to be caught in a harrowing ballet of circles. You are at the centre of one circle, while above you two opposing circles spin about.

The sun distresses you like a crowd, a noisy, invasive crowd that makes you cup your ears, that makes you close your eyes, that makes you want to hide.

The moon distresses you by silently reminding you of your solitude; you open your eyes wide to escape your loneliness.

When you look up, you sometimes wonder if at the centre of a solar storm, if in the middle of the Sea of Tranquility, there isn’t another one like you also looking up, also trapped by geometry, also struggling with fear, rage, madness, hopelessness, apathy.

Photo: Andrzej Szymański