This plane of earthly love

Poet Joan Mazza celebrates qualities mathematical: 

   To a Mathematician Lover     by Joan Mazza

   As we embark on this plane
   of earthly love, I should explain,
   my experiences with men
   have doubled my troubles
   and halved my pleasures,
   divided my time into fractions

   too small for singular pursuits
   or multiple friends. Interest
   and patience diminished
   at an ever-increasing speed,
   a calculus I would never
   try to formulate.

   Let’s not be another statistic,
   Venn diagram with circles
   migrating farther apart,
   parallelogram like an old barn
   listing more each year
   until it topples.

   Let the shapes we make
   of ourselves be congruent,
   without triangles. Let us be
   better than average, to hang on
   with the few who last—
   to the thin tail of a bell curve.

Several "poems starring mathematicians" also were featured in this blog in 2010:  on May 14 (poems by Tiel Aisha Ansari and Jonathan Colton) , May 4 (poems by Edna St Vincent Millay and David St John), April 28 (poems by Carol Dorf and Miroslav Holub), April 26 (poems by John L Drost and Keith Allen Daniels and William J Macquorn Rankine and Carl Sandburg) , April 15 (poem by Marion Cohen), and April 14 (poem by Willan Benjamin Smith).