Something for nothing

     Among my favorite mathematical ideas are the seeming-paradoxes -- notions that require a twist and a turn and a leap before one can say "aha."  Using a symbol for "nothing" is one of those leap-requiring ideas.  I don't remember when I first understood zero, but I have enjoyed watching my children -- and now grandchildren -- grapple with ideas of things that are absent rather than present. 
     Here, from Hailey Leithauser, is a poem  that celebrates the cipher. 

   0      by Hailey Leithauser

                    Philosophic
   in its complex, ovoid emptiness,
   a skillful pundit coined it as a sort
     of stopgap doorstop for those
                    quaint equations

                    Romans never
   dreamt of. In form completely clever
   and discrete—a mirror come unsilvered,
      loose watch face without the works,
                    a hollowed globe

                    from tip to toe
   unbroken, it evades the grappling
   hooks of mass, tilts the thin rim of no thing,
      remains embryonic sum,
                    non-cogito.

"0" first appeared in Poetry (January 2003).  A history of zero may be found here.