Numbers
By Dorothy Porter
I get magic
(sometimes I get more
than I bargain for)
but I don’t get
numbers.
Numbers do worse
than humiliate
or elude me
they don’t add up.
I am no algebra tart
ravished
by the meretricious music
of the spheres.
My eyes and nose
never streamed
with incontinent ecstasy
through geometry classes
as my disastrous triangles
collapsed in a cacophony
around me.
Perhaps it’s a failing
to grasp
or even want
the utterly perfect number
burning through my retina
like the utterly perfect morning.
Instead I peer
with nauseating vertigo
into the deep dark pitch
of numbers
like an exhausted mammoth
dangerously tottering
on the edge
of a bottomless mystery.