The Invention of Mathematics by Amy Uyematsu
A man who is not somewhat of a poet
can never be a mathematician.
Karl Weierstrass, German mathematics teacher
/ one
one is the only true number
the I in the eye
each baby the god
in a mother's sigh
/ two
after the number two there was no stopping
troubles blossoming
in geometric progression
two to tango
and two required for murder and war
Doris Day singing
love me or leave me
and the tragic lob
of my nervous girlheart
th-thump, th-thump
she already knew
that deafening silence
when the call goes unanswered
th-thump, th-thump
with its inevitable
downbeat on two
/ seven
how could 7 not be lucky for me
with four 7s in my phone number
the year I was born 47 reversing perfectly
to 74 when I gave birth to my son
whose sign is in July, the 7th month,
like my mother and father,
two stubborn Leos in their vigorous 70s
I'm thankful to be
a Saturday matinee kid
raised somewhere between
Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs,
7 Brides for 7 Brothers,
and Kurosawa's heroic
7 Samurai
Japan has 7 gods of fortune
with the only woman
being the goddess Benten,
ruler of the sea,
a lute-shaped biwa in her arms
she's the guardian
of literature and song
and 7 syllables, a gift of blood
the line of a tanka swinging
to 5-7-5-7-7- rhythms
the tradition of haiku parties
jamming long into night
only natural I'd arrive
with a poem in my hand
/ irrational
how fitting there are even eccentrics
among the legions of numbers
so stubborn they defy
any notion of orderly arrangement
numbers like pi or the square root of two
whose decimal translations
burst all reasonable boundaries
never repeating
no end in sight to their
unwinding names
and I have to admit
I wave the banner
of every so-called irrational woman
who can juggle five things in each hand
a skill little girls learn by nine or ten
while our somewhat dazed
and mystified mates
stand by in hopeless wonder
/ the imaginary number i
my student don't get the joke
after all, every number is imaginary
even those we count out
as
I tell them about some nameless
mathematicians who nobody paid
much attention to
always gazing at stars
those early oddballs and nerds
locked in their rooms
pondering pages of silly calculations
as if all life depended on them
until somebody yelled i
let's make up a new number
defined as the square root
of negative one
blasting open the infinite
which no one can see
able to chart arrow to bull's eye
through windstorm and breeze
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