---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... cc&d magazine (v215) (the December 2010 Issue)		Order this issue from our printer as an ISSN# paperback book: or as the ISBN# book “Entering the Ice Age”:

Order this writing in the 2010 collection book of poetry from July-December “cc&d” and “Down in the Dirt”.		click on the book cover for an author & poem listing, order the 5.5" x 8.5" ISSN# book order the 6" x 9" ISBN# book

Crazy Math

Terry-Hamilton Poore

My youngest is learning to use the toilet.
He perches happily on that open oval,
the skin of his bottom nearly as white
as the plastic seat.
“Tell me about my intestines,” he demands--
the same thing every time, and so I recite
like a parent at a Seder this particular story of passage,
of the journey taking place in those miles of transit lines
compressed, slippery-pink inside his tiny belly.
I am as fascinated as he that everything about him works.
All the cells that keep multiplying by dividing
over and over, yet never losing track of what to become—
toenail or corpuscle, cornea or dendrite
or, of course, intestine.

At his age I loved the anatomy floor
of the Museum of Science and Industry.
Umbilicaled babies in bottles with their transparent eyelids.
Paper-thin cross-sections of people pressed between glass,
colorful as a preschooler’s melted crayon creation.

I can’t go there now.
All I see in those bottles
is the loss at the other end of those floating cords;
I look at the giant slides and hear the clinical hum
of a circular saw turning what was once whole
and alive into this slice, fixed and dyed.

But here the freckled legs are drumming
against the porcelain. His body having done its work
he leaps from the seat to assess the results.
A quick flush and he’s out the door—
his cells still multiplying by dividing over and over—

and everything reductive and isolated in my life gives way
to his wild expansion, drawing me into this crazy math,
this giddy science, where there is no dissection or subtraction,
just and, and, and.

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...