|
My Dance is Mathematics Poems by JoAnne Growney published 2006 by Paper Kite Press now available here Scroll down for poems –- those named to the right and a couple of extras |
CONTENTS ABC The Bear Cave (a poem of Romania) |
|
ABC Axes beget coordinates, dutifully expressing functions, graphs, helpful in justifications, keeping legendary mathematics new or peculiarly quite rational so that understanding’s visual with x, y, z. Small Squares Mock feelings serve as well as true ones. When lovers leave, avoid laments. Grab a cactus — new pain forgets. |
Things to Count On I want to say how beautiful it was — but it was not. Each animal, each shed, each acre was useful; we kept them with good care and counted them, counted on them. One hundred forty acres, seven sheds. A white frame house, eight tall rooms and bath, a cellar with a dozen shelves for canned goods and four lines for laundry, a truck room for junk. We five in three bedrooms, four beds. One extra room for guests — my aunts. Our dining room with seven doors plus closets. A shed beside the corn crib with space for three wagons and a Plymouth. The barn with two mows for hay, a third for straw, a granary, a bathtub for livestock drinking, and six private stalls. Nine cows with two for milking, which I did. In seven days no minutes to be happy, no hours to be sad — not even when my father died. My mother's a good woman, worth three good women. For sixty years everyone has thought so, and more than a hundred have said. I've stopped counting. |
|
When browbeating fails — gaudy, hazardous, uncomfortable, bargain-basement shoes keep women in place. More than the rapist, fear the district attorney smiling for the camera, saying that thirty-six sex crimes per year is a managable number. The Bear Cave (a square poem of Romania) Twenty-five years ago at Chiscau, marble quarry workers discovered — trapped by an earthquake in a wondrous, enormous cave — bones of one hundred ninety bears, Ursulus spelaeus (now extinct). Cold rooms of cathedral splendor now render tourists breathless while the insistent drip of water counts the minutes. There is no safe place. |
Time I The clock goes round — showing time a circle rather than a line. Each year's return to spring swirls time on time. II Time's not as Newton said — the same for all — for I am punctual, and you are late. You waste the savings I spend on you. |
|
A Mathematician's Nightmare Suppose a general store -- items with unknown values and arbitrary prices, rounded for ease to whole-dollar amounts. Each day Madame X, keeper of the emporium, raises or lowers each price -- exceptional bargains and anti-bargains. Even-numbered prices divide by two, while odd ones climb by half themselves -- then half a dollar more to keep the numbers whole. Today I pause before a handsome beveled mirror priced at twenty-seven dollars. Shall I buy or wait for fifty-nine days until the price is lower? The price-changing scheme of this poem is derived from a version of the Collatz Conjecture, an unsolved problem that has stolen hours of sleep from many mathematicians. Start with any positive integer: if it is even, take half of it; if it is odd, increase it by half and round up to the next whole number. Collatz' Conjecture asserts that, regardless of the starting number, iteration of this increase-decrease process will eventually lead to the number one. |
III Six o'clock does not exist, but at seven she answers your knock, elegantly dressed for the nineteen jewel evening you've carefully planned. IV At my time’s end I want to rust away like the graceful iron gate that wore jack-o-lanterns in October, swung the lions of March winds, struck the backsides of generations of women bringing groceries to the kitchen door. Misunderstanding Ah, you are a mathematician, they say with admiration or scorn. Then, they say, I could use you to balance my checkbook. I think about checkbooks. Once in a while I balance mine, just like sometimes I dust high shelves. |
|
San Antonio, January, 1993 A mathematician left the convention focused on 9, the digit that sits in the billionth decimal place of pi, ratio of circumference to width of the yellow circle that parted the clouds as she strolled down Commerce Street to the Rio Rio Café for lunch and a beer. On fire with jalapeños she went shopping for a souvenir. She bought earrings — red-red plastic peppers with green stems. She said, "Hot peppers are like mathematics — with strong flavor that takes over what they enter." Fool’s Gold Not a cashmere sweater for the moths to eat, nor a Picasso print to hide a dent in plaster. No more scarves or earrings or a bread machine, no crystal perfume vials or precious inlaid boxes. Please, no plants I might allow to die. Celebrate this birthday with numerology. Select and give a number. I like large primes— they check my tendency to subdivide myself among the dreams that tease like iron pyrites in declining light. Consider seventeen. Its digits will turn heads when I wear it large and crimson on a grey T-shirt. Watchers will wonder whether I pay tribute to the ancient Flood that started and drew back on seventeenths of Hebrew months, or if I count invasions of northern India by the warlord Mahmud, or if, like early Muslims, I base the world on it—the sum of one, three, five, and eight— basic lower corner of the magic square.
Lament of a Professor at the End of the Spring Semester I took an extra step to bridge the gap between us, blind to your matching backward step. We've moved in tandem until I'm angry at you, and at me — I thought you needed lenience, but gentle rebukes instead would have changed the direction of our cadence and given you a chance to lead the dance. |
My Dance Is Mathematics Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned. From "Dirge without music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay*; read by Hermann Weyl in a Memorial Address for Amalie Emmy Noether on April 26, 1935 at Bryn Mawr College. Born in Germany (1882) and educated there, Noether fled the Nazis to the US in 1933. They called you der Noether, as if mathematics was only for men. In 1964, nearly thirty years past your death, I saw you in a spotlight in a World's Fair mural, "Men of Modern Mathematics." Colleagues praised your brilliance — but after they had called you fat and plain, rough and loud. Some mentioned kindness and good humor though none, in your lifetime, admitted it was you who led the way to axiomatic algebra. Direct and courageous, lacking self-concern, elegant of mind, a poet of logical ideas. At a party when you were eight years old, you spoke up to solve a hard math puzzle. Fearless, you set yourself apart. I followed you. I saw you forced to choose between mathematics and other romance. For women only, this exclusive standard. I heard fathers say, dance with Emmy— just once, early in the evening. Old Max is my friend; his daughter likes to dance. If a woman's dance is mathematics, she dances alone. Mothers said, “Don't tease. That strange one’s heart is kind. She helps her mother with the house, and cannot help her curious mind.” Teachers said, “She's smart, but stubborn, contentious and loud, a theory-builder not persuaded by our ideas. Students said, “ She's hard to follow, bores me.” A few stood firm and build new algebras on her exacting formulations. In spite of Emmy's talents, there were always reasons not to give her rank or permanent employment. She's a pacifist, a woman. She's a woman and a Jew. Her abstract thinking Is female and abstruse. Today, history books proclaim that Noether is the greatest mathematician her sex has produced. They say she was good for a woman. |
|
Can a Mathematician See Red? Consider the sphere — a hollow rounded surface whose points seen from outside are the very same points insiders see. If red paint spills all over the outside, is the inside red? The mathematician says NO, the layer of paint forms a new sphere that is outside the outside and not a bit inside. A mathematician takes safe pleasure in surface mysteries. A poet sees red inside. |
Conditionals If you take a rose with petals curled and put it in a vase beside the clock that has no hands, someone you thought was lost returns for morning tea. If you push hard against your belly wall and square your shoulders while no one watches from the pines, you hear your sister's whisper in distant highway noise. If you slowly peel an orange after noon and pluck tomatoes by the quarter moon, you see beyond obsession to details. If you walk the river's edge to pick up stones and pile them to mark a place, tomorrow’s dawn shines bright upon your broken fingernails. Good Fortune is good numbers— the length of a furrow, the count of years, the depth of a broken heart, the cost of camouflage, the volume of tears. |
|
Butterfly Proposal The future looks sad and scares you. Don’t let forebodings hush the echoes of old voices—we need the past to build high spirits. I’ll write you into a poem. A butterfly on your hand proposes life— a promise drawn at the intersection of Broadway and Euclid, a fortunate convergence that counters disillusion. Butterflies are transient, illogical while you wear every sort of rule impalpable and tight. You shrink from praise and flounder in the caramel of fear’s sweet heat. Your moth-mind skitters everywhere; your deeds all are polite. Twist your finger with rubber bands: the throb will keep you sane. You don’t have to fix each broken thing. Adjust your ears; hear slowly. Into the pauses understanding. |
Of Education Only a Fool would go to school unless he's not and seeks thereby to learn to Fool but then, we note, he is a Fool. He who'd teach is twice a Fool—first, to trust a pencil's words because it has a point, more Fool to join the pool that reason logically, whom rippling muscles ridicule. A rule of school is that no Fool can make a sow's ear from a velvet purse, despite the whirlpool that spins new thoughts. The bureaucrat wears motley when he tries to overrule the teacher who can show that EXCELLENCE has more E's than FOOLISHNESS. No pencil scrawls by itself—it’s but a tool. |
|
|
|