Numbers (poetry)

Last updated 3 April 2012: the copyright compliance effort continues. All the bold-face ellipses ("...") indicate a place where I skipped a segment of the poem to trim the quoted material and improve my original content: cut and paste ratio.

A poem by Robert Creeley; one of my very favorites, but sadly (far) longer than is permissible by E2 copyright standards. Here are a few excerpts, but what you should really do is go out and buy The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley or some other volume containing this piece, because it's just that lovely. Like all of Creeley's work, it's exquisitely simple and understated in its word choice, but the real mastery comes in its use of line breaks and meter or lack thereof. As a sometime poet and mathematician both, this piece is incredibly inspiring to me. I used to keep a copy taped to the wall wherever I lived; I think eventually I left it with someone who shares my determination to enjoy both art and science in life.

"Numbers" is dedicated to the sculptor Robert Indiana, a pop artist most famous for his widely reproduced sculptures, paintings, silk screenings, and other pieces that incorporate the word "Love".

ONE

What
singular upright flourishing
condition . . .
it enters here,
it returns here.

Who was I that
thought it was
another one by
itself divided or multiplied
produces one.

...

Math geeks, are you drooling yet? Around this point, I start feeling pleasant tingles of what I now know is abstract algebra in my brain.

You are not
me, nor I you.

...

Do you see what he did there? I'm going to over-explain it anyway, if only in a feeble attempt to convey how much this poem lights my brain on fire. Creeley emphasizes the one-ness of individuality while introducing the idea of "more than one", leading neatly into the next verse, "TWO". (I think of the sections for each number as verses, for lack of a better term.) The possibility or impossibility of relationships between "ones", individuals, to create groups, larger numbers, which in turn can relate to other numbers, is an idea which recurs, nay reverberates, throughout the poem. I really, really wish I could post all of it, but I don't have the poet's permission.

...

TWO

When they were
first made, all the
earth must have
been their reflected
bodies, for a moment—
a flood of seeming
bent for a moment back
to the water's glimmering—
how lovely they came

What you wanted
I felt, or felt I felt.
This was more than one.

...

And there you have it: Adam and Eve, or whatever you want to call them --- once there is more than one person, there are relationships, and everything becomes infinitely more complex, just as mathematically one is infinitely greater than zero. I'm sorry --- my explication doesn't do the Creeley justice: his words explain these ideas, which --- sort of like abstract algebra --- would be ridiculously, almost uselessly simple and obvious, if they weren't also so universal and profound.

This point of so-called
consciousness is forever
a word making up
this world of more
or less than it is.

...

Abridging this poem is painful like pulling teeth, but also perilous-precarious like trying to somehow thin out a house of cards without having the whole thing collapse on me. No, wait, I've got it: I am playing poetry Jenga! That's it! Anyway, I included these lines because they remind me of another favorite Creeley poem of mine: "A Token", which ends with the lament, "...words, words/ as if all /worlds were there". Creeley is a master craftsman; words and silence are his medium. Whenever he chooses to share his thoughts about them, I have to stop and catch my breath.

THREE

They come now with
one in the middle—
either side thus
another. Do they

know who each other is
or simply walk
with this pivot between them.
Here forms have possibility.

When either this
or that becomes
choice, this fact

of things enters.
What had been
agreed now

alters to
two and one,
all ways.

The first
triangle, of form,
of people,

sounded a
lonely occasion I
think—the

circle begins
here, intangible—
yet a birth.

I cannot bear to cut a single line of the "THREE" verse. Fortunately, it's a short one? It can be hard to tell: the lines are short but the stanzas vary in length and the numbers dd and multiply... Anyway. This paragraph break is to try to explain how "Numbers" has something new to reveal every time I reread it. I started writing my first draft of the previous sentence with the lead-in, "Like all great poetry", then changed it to "Like all my favorite poetry" because I realize that just because I like something a lot, it doesn't mean it is of high quality but even that doesn't work because I have plenty of favorite poems that mean the same thing every time, even if that something is as simple as "I love the way these words sound." But the reason I started writing this paragraph is because I wanted to call attention to one such revelation: namely, the way Creeley subtly shifts the meter between verses. The ones for odd numbers I read as more syncopated, even asymmetrical, whereas the even numbers feel much more solid somehow, steady and measured. The contrast is particularly striking here, between THREE and FOUR, but also between SEVEN and EIGHT, quoted further below.

FOUR

This number for me
is comfort, a secure
fact of things. The

table stands on
all fours. The dog
walks comfortably,

and two by two
is not an army
but friends who love

one another. Four
is a square,
or peaceful circle

celebrating return,
reunion,
love's triumph.

...

Is a door
four—but
who enters.

...

Speaking of symmetry and asymmetry, another idea this poem constantly makes me examine is the concept of balance. I mentioned trying to live in the space between art and science before, but this poem is also about the happy medium between thought and feeling, rationality and whatever else doesn't actually exist at the end of what's a false dichotomy anyway... again, exactly where I try to live? That is what this poem is ABOUT, and that doesn't come nearly as close to expressing what I mean nearly as well as Creeley does.

FIVE

Two by
two with
now another

in the middle
or else at
the side.

From each
of the four
corners draw

a line to
the alternate
points. Where

these intersect
will be
five.

When younger this was
a number used
to count with, and

to imagine a useful
group. Somehow the extra
one—what is more than four—

reassured me there would be
enough. Twos and threes or
one and four is plenty.

A way to draw stars.

I could not bring myself to cut a single word of the "FIVE" verse. It is suffused (or maybe it just suffuses me) with a childlike joy and wonder remind me of Sesame Street's counting songs and what I consider their twenty-first century counterpart, They Might Be Giants's Here Come the 1 2 3s. ♥

SIX

Twisting
     as forms of it
two and three—

     on the sixth
day had finished
     all creation—

hence holy—
     or that the sun
is "furthest from

     equator & appears
to pause, before
     returning . . ."

or that it "contains      the first even number
(2), and the first odd

     (3), the former representing
the male member, and the latter
     the muliebris pudenda . . ."

Or two triangles interlocked.

SEVEN

We are seven, echoes in
my head like a nightmare of
responsibility—seven
days in the week, seven
years for the itch of
unequivocal involvement

Look
at
the
light
of
this
hour.

...

At sixes
and sevens—the pen
lost, the paper:

a night's dead
drunkenness. Why
the death of something now

so near if this
number is holy.
Are all

numbers one?
Is counting forever
beginning again.

Let this be the end of the seven.

EIGHT

Say "eight"—
be patient.

Two fours
show the way.

Only this number
marks the cycle—

the eight year interval—
for that confluence

makes the full moon shine
on the longest

or shortest
day of the year.

Now summer fades.
August is its month—
this interval.

She is eight
years old, holds
a kitten, and
looks out at me.

Where are you.
One table.
One chair.

In light lines count the interval.
Eight makes the time wait quietly.

No going back—
though half is
four and
half again
is two.

Oct-
ag-
on-
al.

NINE

There is no point
of rest here.
It wavers,

it reflects multiply
the three
times three.

Like a mirror
it returns here
by being there.

...

Somehow the game
where a nutshell covers
the one object, a

stone or coin, and
the hand is
quicker than the eye—

how is that nine,
and not three
chances, except that

three imaginations of it
might be, and there are
two who play—

making six, but
the world is real also,
in itself.

More. The nine months
of waiting that discover
life or death—

another life or death—
not yours, not
mine, as we watch.

The serial diminish-
ment or progression of
the products which

helped me remember:
nine times two is one-eight
     nine times nine is eight-one—
at each end,

move forward, backward,
then, and the same
numbers will occur

What law
or
mystery

is involved
protects
itself.

ZERO

Where are you—who
     by not being here
are here, but here
     by not being here?

There is no trick to reality—
     a mind
makes it, any
     mind.

...

What
by being not
is—is not
by being.

When holes taste good
we'll put them in our bread.

And they do, so we do. Amen? Seriously, that is how much I love this poem; it makes little old nontheist me say "Amen" unironically.