"The Mathematician"

     Here is a selection from "The Mathematician," a long poem -- found in its entirety in The Rumpus -- by Oregon poet Carl Adamshick and recommended to me by poet R Joyce Heon  --  for a sample of her ekphrastic poems, follow this link and go to pages 37-42.  And this link leads to more poems (in this blog) starring mathematicians --- and a few of them are women!!

from   The Mathematician     by Carl Adamshick

What I do is calculate.
I’ve always seen the world as numbers,
buildings and trees factors,
math as a language better suited for explaining
how things work
than the formula of grammar.

The rate of explosions, the intake of air,
angles, velocities, pounds
of pressure, the probability of the atmosphere
to ignite. It can be any equation
and I see

the solution as reality etched with numbers
on each flame, mortar and brick,
on the tip of blue feathers in flight
and, slowly,
the page fills with a scrawling transcription.

Her heart could house a cathedral.