Equivalence

In telling the time, we commonly refer to hours that differ by a multiple of 12 using the same number. Sixty hours after 3 o'clock it is again 3 o'clock. The clock relationship -- with its times that are named by the same number but are not, after all, exactly the same -- illustrates the mathematical notion of an "equivalence relation." In "Equivalencies," the insights of poet Judith McCombs stretch this mathematical concept.

Equivalencies     by Judith McCombs

The fear of not writing, of having no words,

Is the muscles not working, the pack top-heavy,
the hard slime on ledges where the ankle gives way

A poem of calculus (of ants on a worm)

Philip Wexler plays with the terminology of calculus in this poem:

     The Calculus of Ants on a Worm

     Swarming tiny
     bodies nibble
     away, no limits,

What nobody else has thought

     Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1893-1986) was a Hungarian Biochemist who discovered Vitamin C and won the 1937 Nobel Prize for Medicine.  Szent-Gyorgi offered this summary of the research process:  discovery is seeing what everyone has seen and thinking what noone else has thought. Mathematicians and poets join research scientists in that quest to see and say something new.     I was reminded of Szent-Gyorgyi's view when I read this little poem, "The Roasted Swan Sings," by Mark Baechtel in the anthology, Cabin Fever (WordWorks, 2003):