The poem is from my latest collection, What Shines, and the essay from Such Dancing as We Can, my latest book of personal essays
Scarlet/Indigo
… strength in what remains ...
–Intimations of Immortality
By the pond, a maple
reddens already,
in middle August.
Impossible:
it still should be summer.
Fall’s upon us.
Much endures, it’s true,
yet how hard, no matter,
not to sense a shadow,
as the old do.
Here at the edge
of our late-shorn meadow,
small baubles shine:
five blackberries strung,
more dark than just blue,
on stiff canes
gone leafless. The berries
should have vanished by now.
Brush bends in a breeze
that contains a slight chill.
Though tiny and poor,
it’s sweet,
the fruit, even more so
than when I found more.
Sunya
In my many years of education, apart from the most basic arithmetic I could never quite grasp anything that involved numbers. I still struggle on that score. I recall the words of Mr. Dunham, the very best teacher in my entire school, or so I was told. “Let’s face it, son, you’ll never be a mathematician.”
As if I didn’t know that.
What in this world, I wondered, did Rick and Teddy, the algebra hotshots, see as they blithely and swiftly dug up the ineffable X?
A certain venerable pine tree was another matter entirely. All the while I was there, it stood in the courtyard, valiantly fending off some sickness, though over time its limbs crashed one by one to earth. I knew that pine very well. Come late spring semester, it always held a robin and her downy chicks, and I watched them, rapt, maybe because, like the old tree that housed them, the birds embodied survival.
I could see a tree and some birds, and beyond, clouds that I squinted at, trying to force one or the other, before it drifted into nonexistence, to resemble something I could identify, though the effort rarely proved successful. But calculus, physics, economics? Don’t ask me a thing. I ducked all but the latter in college, and economics therefore became the one course I failed in those four years. My clearer impressions from that course also came through a window in a fetid classroom.
Back then, the Yale campus’s beeches seemed immortal, their barks smooth, not pocked by disease as so many of their kind have since become. Squirrels assembled, somehow always a trio, in the beech nearest the room where I sat bemused. A pair would chase a solitary, after which they’d rotate, as if they understood the notion of it from playground tag, though no twosome ever caught a single.
They seemed to be having fun, as I was emphatically not.
No, I was only baffled. What, just for one instance, had that New York City whiz encountered in his life that emboldened him to challenge our professor over some assertion, which I surely didn’t understand even then? I could never own any knowledge unless I could integrate it with some personal experience. That’s true to this day.
I had a good friend in the class– he’d later teach law– but he sat as far from me as possible in that third-story cell, as if he might catch my ineptitude like an airborne virus. He’s gone now, like nearly half the classmates who traveled with me through these places I recall. In due course, we’ll be down to zero.
Zero: I’ve always considered that one easy enough to grasp. By chance, however, I lately read that no one did grasp it until a Hindu mathematician named Brahmagupta proved the zero to have null value, something that he referred to as sunya. Apparently, that indicates empty of any intrinsic nature, a notion that itself eludes me. How can there be such a thing?
Just before I graduated from high school, my sickly pine was hewn and, as the last college year ebbed, my beech had started to scar. No squirrels used it anymore.
Really good, both.