Numbers

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 mothers' call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn't anywhere you look.

I liked this poem for a number of reasons. Mainly, I liked the way it reminded me of learning numbers in elementary school. When as a young child we would learn how to do math, the teachers would try to animate it and make it easier to understand. These images of the numbers both brought me back to that and painted a good picture of numbers in my mind. While doing math and dealing with numbers can be pretty boring, this poem brings life to these kind of things and makes them fun. Now, looking at numbers and doing different problems in math class I will thing of this poem and it will be a little more fun. It lightens up what can be a dull and boring topic.