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Numbers

As a child

my kitchen had no walls

and everything ranged

in big bubbling pots of

winter, spring, summer, autumn,

peas, carrots, corncob days

husked, rising to the surface

in the golden bullion of universal soup.

Numbers. Numbers. Numbers,

numbers were something I wanted more than anything.

Wanted ten shopping carts filled with ice cream.

Wanted six cases of orange soda.

Wanted to be eighteen—then twenty one.

Wanted five girlfriends and two more for the weekend.

Wanted the power of numbers.

More was magic, majestic, and magnificent.

I never understood the numbers in my parents heart.

The endless trying to make two plus two equal five.

Didn’t know that numbers could numb and murder the soul.

That the Judas tree of numbers can have countless limbs

and still give no shade under the finite sun.

Now as a man of numbers

The cumbersome weight of my ledger

middling in years, thinning of hair

records my loss and my gain and

I realize that love and life are singular.

Now I long for one true thought.

One poem that braves enough to be.

One woman whom I can be infinite with.

One is so rare a number.

© 2003 Daniel Kantak