They come to me, twice annually
and grumpy about it,
these future engineers and doctors
complaining that in math
there is an answer.
Something definite they can work towards in the way of Being Right.
In math they say, the world lines itself up in
neat little rows
and
if only you work hard enough, you’ll get there —
that 100% summit that means you are, at least for today,
OK.
On your way to greater things.
Money. A house in the suburbs. Barbecued salmon on a fancy grill.
Security against all kinds of evil.
Bad neighborhoods. Property crime.
Security against the time on a Monday evening when the phone rings
Voice in your ear saying terrible things
And you at a bedroom window peering out at the yard below —
mind scrabbling against the words in your ear
like a mouse in a jar
calculating perimeter and area
the square footage of the fence you put up against bad luck,
in math, you say,
these things don’t
happen.
What’s the point, right now, of us, on the cusp
of our lives, being trapped in this room with you?
We
Are preparing for the real world
Logging answers in notebooks,
Pens poised for the equation that will make it all make sense
The code in the teacher’s edition — what the symbols equal and what you get if you add irony
How can you stand there and say a man died and his daughter wrote about it?
How can you tell us there are only
questions?
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