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 sixteen 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 parent's 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 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 person whom I can be infinite with.
One is so rare a number.
© 2009 Dan Kantak
From the author:
ReplyDeleteGlenda,
The poem looks beautiful on your page.
A long time ago I hosted a radio show at the University Of Connecticut. Refelecting back on that it seems to me that posting a poem is a lot like radio--one doesn't know who is listening, only that it is likely someone is. The poem becomes an altrustic gift. You don't know to whom it was given or even what worth it has. And maybe, just maybe, someone saw it and printed it to give to someone else. I know of no other reason to write than this. It is what we do not know in life that makes life worth living and poetry worth writing.
Dan