From the Fall/Winter 2013 issue of Poet Lore, a poem by David Wagoner about the arithmetic of expectations:
Amounting to Something by David Wagoner
You were supposed to do that
by saving yourself up
like coins in a pig rescued
just in time sometimes
from in front of the candy counter
or the desk in the corridor
at school with those stick pretzels,
and you had to think of yourself
having a face with hair
on its cheeks and upper lip
and a permanent girlfriend
who would have some regular babies
just like you and her,
so you had to learn how to add
and multiply and subtract
and long-divide and read
and write as fast and as neat
as a teacher and remember
what happened when and why
and go to sleep in a hurry,
get up and brush your smile,
pick up your feet and be sure
you had your zipper zipped
and never let Mr. Dirt
stay under your fingernails
and keep those ugly questions
and wisecracks and personal
wrong answers to yourself.
Wagoner's poetry has been with me for years -- and I imagine that we almost met on some Western Pennsylvania roadway when I was milking cows near Indiana, PA and he was a calculus student at Penn State University. Back in 2001, I included his poem, "The Calculation" in a small anthology entitled Numbers and Faces that I gathered for the Humanistic Mathematics Network (see also my blog posting for 28 May 2013).
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