In the margins of my math notes I’ve scribbled,
Little poems that you will never read.
Frivolous, little rhymes,
Alongside the gentle crests and troughs of a sin graph,
Frivolous, little rhymes,
That have neither its fluidity nor its grace.
She writes on the board: y=x +2,
And I sit here bored and wonder why;
Why am I here and what’s the point?
The point, she says, is “(2,5)”
That’s where the two graphs intersect.
Our point of intersection was an afternoon in June,
When the sun was high,
At an angle of almost 90 degrees to the ground,
And we were high,
And imagining angels bursting out from our skin.
I wonder if I could plot your smile,
As a stretched out parabola?
And even if I could,
Could I ever graph the feeling I felt in my toes,
The feeling that nearly ate me alive,
When I saw it for the first time?
And could I say that my stomach fell according to the gravitational constant;
At an acceleration of 9.8ms2,
When I saw you fading away?
I don’t know.
That’s something I find myself saying in matters of both math and love; I don’t know.
But as I write this I wonder;
Is my love really any better incarnated in poetry?
Because what I felt was intangible and fluid,
What I felt was like swirls of smoke,
What I felt I felt alone.
And who am I to think that I can just mold it into language,
And assume that nothing will be lost in translation.
And actually, maybe math does offer a little more than I thought;
Because what’s more tragic than a pair of parallel lines,
Following one anther into infinity,
Continuing on as if with the faith that one day they will meet,
When all evidence points to the contrary.
And what’s more reassuring to a broken heart than infinity itself,
That promise that there is always more than you can ever possibly imagine.
And don’t all the women’s magazines that you need to isolate your x.
And as a child, didn’t I learn to count on my fingers,
And didn’t those same fingers wind themselves around yours when I learned that I could count on you.
And aren’t you the most challenging problem I’ve ever had to solve,
A problem that refutes theories and laws,
That I can’t define with words or with numbers.