Garrison Keillor Reads Math Poem
June 5, 2012 at 3:32 pm 1 comment
As Garrison Keillor said, “Here’s a poem for today by Mary Cornish, entitled Numbers.” (Or maybe you’d prefer to hear GK read the poem on The Writer’s Almanac.)
Numbers, by Mary Cornish
I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.
I like the domesticity of addition—
add two cups of milk and stir—
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.
And multiplication’s school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.
Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else’s
garden now.
There’s an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.
And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.
Three boys beyond their mothers’ call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn’t anywhere you look.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: Garrison Keillor, Mary Cornish, NPR, numbers, Writer's Almanac.
1.
xhenderson | June 5, 2012 at 3:39 pm
Thanks for sharing that—my wife and I normally change the station when the Writer’s Almanac comes on, but this is nice. I particularly like the relation between division and Chinese take out (with the obvious allusion to the Chinese Remainder Theorem).