The dog, dead for years, keeps coming back in the dream.
We look at each other there with the old joy.
It was always her gift to bring me into the present—
Which sleeps, changes, awakens, dresses, leaves
Happiness and unhappiness
differ as a bucket hammered from gold differs from one of
pressed tin,
this painting proposes.
Each carries the same water, it says.
Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons
in and out of your head.
Arithmetic tells you how many you lose or win
if you know how many you had
before you lost or won.
Arithmetic is seven eleven all good children
go to heaven — or five six bundle of sticks.
Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head
to your hand to your pencil to your paper
till you get the answer.
Arithmetic is where the answer is right
and everything is nice and you can look
out of the window and see the blue sky — or the
answer is wrong and you have to start all over
and try again and see how it comes out this time.
If you take a number and double it and double it again
and then double it a few more times, the number
gets bigger and bigger and goes higher and higher
and only arithmetic can tell you what the number is
when you decide to quit doubling.
Arithmetic is where you have to multiply —
and you carry the multiplication table in your head and
hope you won't lose it.
If you have two animal crackers, one good and one bad,
and you eat one and a striped zebra
with streaks all over him eats the other,
how many animal crackers will you have if somebody
offers you five six seven and you say No no no and you say
Nay nay nay and you say Nix nix nix?
If you ask your mother for one fried egg for breakfast and
she gives you two fried eggs and you eat both of them,
who is better in arithmetic, you or your mother?
The song begins and the eyes are lifted
but the sickle points toward the ground,
its downward curve forgotten in the song she hears,
while over the dark wood, rising or falling,
the sun lifts on cool air,
the small body of a singing lark.
The song falls, the eyes raise, the mouth opens
and her bare feet on the earth have stopped.
Whoever listens in this silence, as she listens,
will also stand opened, thoughtless, frightened
by the joy she feels, the pathway in the field
branching to a hundred more, no one has explored.
What is called in her rises from the ground
and is found in her body,
what she is given is secret even from her.
This silence is the seed in her
of everything she is
and falling through her body
to the ground from which she comes,
it finds a hidden place to grow
and rises, and flowers, in old wild places,
where the dark-edged sickle cannot go.
