By the Numbers Read online

  Now is, of all seasons, the season of paper,

  and we have policies that make death a benefit:

  you have lucked out, hit the jackpot, you are worth a million!

  Now change your beneficiary and delete me from the mortgage.

  Search out the bills in the right top drawer, and one drawer down

  receipts organized in twenty-one categories

  for the IRS—travel, supplies, books, charities, faiths, memories—

  and burn them, paying no taxes, for this is the truth: you owe

  nothing now, and were there a light Judgment burning in this night,

  I would have come back somehow to warn you,

  but there is no light, there is nothing, though you cannot believe it.

  No, you will feel instead that I packed carefully,

  taking everything that was ours, though I have nothing.

  You will feel carjacked and pushed out on a curve,

  watching the car you and I somehow are still driving

  turn and stop and turn, until it has vanished

  into the future we thought of, still happening without you,

  though now, of all that could have been, there is nothing.

  There is only where you are going, though you seem so still,

  there is only that somehow we see each other

  from two trains in the station, parting so slowly

  we can’t for the life of us say which of us is moving.

  Night Lights

  (1977– )

  A shower, a cigarette?

  Slow of speech,

  I answered with these decades when you asked

  what I wanted next.

  Blackout

  Lights out, and gleeps of powerdown

  in the middle of the shameful News.

  You go to the window, hoping darkness

  is Universal, and not just you.

  The Rich Man Sotto Voce

  Years I was poor but didn’t have to be.

  Months I was lost but knew the way home.

  In my crazed minutes I took good notes.

  Therefore, Lord, I do not complain.

  Nor, lest you hear me and remember

  how small my suffering, do I dare pray.

  To a Tea

  The way he asked it.

  You were moved, unmoving,

  the way a crowd

  tightens at the exit.

  Your eyes on him

  slowly narrowed,

  as if you were steadying to pour

  into a cup the size of an atom.

  Slice of Life

  Instant before

  pain’s thunder, lightning:

  the fingertip

  crescent of blood

  widening,

  like someone you thought was asleep

  rolling over and smiling.

  Who Has Seen the Wind

  The wind blows—nothing mostly—

  blows its blowing—

  happy to have what happens to be free

  go where it’s going.

  Red, Green, Blue

  Apparently I have no idea

  what I’ve just said.

  This plummeting elevator,

  this choir

  of silence holding one steep note:

  I am the bomb squad poised above your heart

  to snip… which tiny wire?

  Star

  Never and never again, song says,

  love or pain like ours.

  How vast a night one firefly

  easily overpowers.

  Reading Light

  You look up from an oldish author:

  Is he dead?

  Such power we have,

  not knowing. Let him live.

  Roads Not Taken

  It never came down to two roads at all,

  or if it did, I took the one less traveled by

  for a driveway, or the entrance to a mall,

  or it slipped past like a station off the air

  while I bent down to fiddle with the dial.

  So many hours, so many guessed turns later,

  I can’t be sure the taillights I am following

  are really the car I thought I was following.

  One says I know this road, we’re really close,

  another Uh, guys, we are totally lost.

  Actually we’re having a pretty good time

  singing and waving to singing and waving cars

  that flare up head-on, fading to red behind us.

  We don’t have to be anywhere. The party we left

  and the one we were headed to are probably over.

  And as for those who might have been following me,

  odds are I lost them long, long ago.

  Nothing to do but keep on driving as clearly

  as if I hadn’t, flashing my change of lane and exit,

  in case there’s anyone who needs to know.

  Roads Taken

  Last bells of evening, toning bronze

  and bronze, a hint of plaint.

  Even if I hadn’t heard the shuddering board,

  the splash, the laughter, I’d have known

  from the quaver of voices over water

  that this is the last house in summer,

  and now is the double loneliness

  of missing a party you don’t even want to be at.

  The T’ang poet sets out on a thousand-mile journey,

  minor administrative post in prospect,

  chronic war rattling around the mountains

  that might last all his life. And someone else

  returns from a journey no one knows he’s been on,

  feeling again the thick air of the valley—

  the children so tall—and whatever happens to love

  that hasn’t been used enough, has happened.

  He spreads before them, as excuse or evidence,

  what he has gathered, mottoes of gods and sages,

  spells, strange weathers and archaic praises,

  currency unfamiliar in this land.

  End of Summer

  Just an uncommon lull in the traffic

  so you hear some guy in an apron, sleeves rolled up,

  with his brusque sweep brusque sweep of the sidewalk,

  and the slap-shut of a too-thin rental van,

  and the I told him no a gust has snatched from a conversation

  and brought to you, loud.

  It would be so different

  if any of these were missing is the feeling

  you always have on the first day of autumn,

  no, the first day you think of autumn, when somehow

  the sun singling out high windows,

  a waiter settling a billow of white cloth

  with glasses and silver, and the sparrows

  shattering to nowhere are the Summer

  waving that here is where it turns

  and will no longer be walking with you,

  traveler, who now leave all of this behind,

  carrying only what it has made of you.

  Already the crowds seem darker and more hurried

  and the slang grows stranger and stranger

  and you do not understand what you love;

  yet here, rounding a corner in mild sunset,

  is the world again, wide-eyed as a child

  holding up a toy even you can fix.

  How light your step

  down the narrowing avenue to the cross streets,

  October, small November, barely legible December.

  Notes

  Section I in general: Most of the myths in these poems will be familiar. Persephone, Demeter, and Hades. Echo and Narcissus. Pygmalion the sculptor. Apollo and—is that Daphne? After he lost Eurydice, Orpheus was dismembered by the Maenads and his head floated down the river Hebrus, still singing. In the Iron Age (after the Golden, Silver, and Bronze Ages), Lycaon, king of Arcadia, served a meal of human flesh to Zeus, who turned him into a wolf. I’ve stolen
the title of “Zeus: A Press Conference” from Adam Zagajewski’s brilliant “Franz Schubert: A Press Conference.”

  “Metallurgy for Dummies”: Tinnitus (TIN ih tus, by the way) is ringing in the ears.

  “By the Numbers”: Joke you don’t have to get: quarry as in “a place you mine stone” comes from the same root as four and square, quart and quarter. But quarry as in “something you hunt” comes from a different root and is related to cur and French coeur (heart).

  “Are We Alone? or Physics You Can Do at Home”: This ramble has a few specific debts:

  “The simplest and most popular cosmological model today…” —Max Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” Scientific American, May 2003, 41.

  “Searches for extraterrestrial intelligence…” —Ian Crawford, “Where Are They?” Scientific American, July 2000, 39.

  “How Much Does the Internet Weigh?” —Stephen Cass, Discover, June 2007, 43.

  But more generally it riffs on dozens of other pop-sci articles (for which Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos would provide a teacherly and highly readable synthesis) and respectable but highly speculative ideas about multiple universes and other dimensions. Light from objects moving away from us (which is almost all of them) is shifted towards the red end of the spectrum. Objects approaching us are shifted towards blue. Yes, the earth’s mass is indeed six sextillion tons and gravity is the weakest force, many orders of magnitude weaker, for example, than the electromagnetic force. According to last week’s estimate ordinary matter and energy constitute 5% of the universe. Dark Matter (23%) and Dark Energy (72%), both so far undetected though they are presumed to be everywhere, make up the rest. Fact-checkers please note: I am the holder of a valid Poetic License from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

  “Prokaryotes” are primitive cells, specifically bacteria with no nucleus and dna not organized into chromosomes.

  “The Stars in Order Of”: “Soldiers and poor”—Edward Thomas, “The Owl.” “Church-bells beyond the stars heard”—George Herbert, “Prayer.” The Pleiades is a cluster of seven stars, though one is relatively faint and not everyone can see it (Tennyson couldn’t). The constellation has some of these names in other cultures, but some of mine are made-up. On an 18th-century voyage to the Southern Hemisphere French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille named fourteen “new” constellations things like Telescope, Microscope, and Compass (not, however, Cell Phone). Readers of science magazines frequently come upon some version of the sentence “There are 100 billion neurons in the brain, about the same numbers as the stars in our galaxy.” Very faint stars are best detected with peripheral vision, but we only see color looking head-on. Big Bang produced hydrogen and helium. Heavier elements up through iron were created by the fusion reactions in stars, elements heavier than iron in supernovas.

  “Songs for Senility”: Apologies to the shade of William Butler Yeats for filling a great passage of “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” with static. The real words are:

  What matter if I live it all once more?

  Endure that toil of growing up;

  The ignominy of boyhood; the distress

  Of boyhood changing into man;

  The unfinished man and his pain

  Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;

  The finished man among his enemies?

  “Nine times the space that measures day and night” and “O how fall’n! how chang’d”—Paradise Lost, Book I. “When such as I cast out”—Yeats, “A Dialogue…” “The woods decay, the woods decay and fall”—Tennyson, “Tithonus.”

  About the Author

  James Richardson’s books include Interglacial: New and Selected Poems & Aphorisms, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the “cult favorite” Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays, How Things Are, As If, which was selected by Amy Clampitt for the National Poetry Series, Second Guesses, Reservations, and two critical studies. His poems, essays, and aphorisms have appeared in American Poet, The American Poetry Review, Boulevard, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Pleiades, Poetry, Science News, Slate, Yale Review, and such anthologies as Great American Prose Poems, Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists, the 2010 Pushcart Prize, and the 2001, 2005, 2009, and 2010 editions of The Best American Poetry. The recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Robert H. Winner, Cecil Hemley, and Emily Dickinson Awards of the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and New Jersey State Council on the Arts, he has taught at the University of Virginia, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia. For the past thirty years Richardson and the scholar-critic Constance W. Hassett have lived in New Jersey, never very far from their two brilliant daughters.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to the editors who first gave some of these poems a place:

  Alhambra Poetry Calendar 2010: “Roads Not Taken”

  Connotation Press: An Online Artifact: “Origin of Language,” “Shore Town, Winter”

  Fulcrum: “Iron Age,” “Pygmalion among the Young,” “Twilight of a God”

  Gulf Coast: “Red, Green, Blue,” “Room Temperature,” “To a Tea”

  The Literary Review: “The Stars in Order Of”

  Narrative: “Are We Alone? or Physics You Can Do at Home,” “Bit Parts,” “Echo”

  Painted Bride Quarterly: “Roads Taken”

  Pleiades: “Apollo at Happy Hour,” “Apollo in Age,” “Blackout,” “By the Numbers,” “Head-On,” “Orpheus at Last

  Call,” “Ovidian Deposition,” “Songs for Senility,” “Twilight of a God”

  Redivider: “The Rich Man Sotto Voce,” “Star”

  Smartish Pace: “Emergency Measures”

  Yale Review: “The God Who,” “Postmortem Georgic,” “Special Victims Unit”

  “End of Summer,” “In Shakespeare,” and “Subject, Verb, Object” originally appeared in The New Yorker.

  “Subject, Verb, Object” was reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2009. “End of Summer” was reprinted in Alhambra Poetry Calendar 2009.

  “Metallurgy for Dummies” and “State-Sponsored” were first published in Tin House. “Metallurgy for Dummies” was reprinted in Pushcart Prize XXXIV: Best of the Small Presses (2010).

  “Northwest Passage” won the 2007 The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America and was first printed in the program of its annual awards ceremony.

  Selections from “Vectors 3.0: Even More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays” have appeared in The Bloomsbury Review, Hamilton Stone Review, and The Literary Review. “Vectors 2.3: 50 Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays,” first published in The American Poetry Review, was reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2010.

  Thanks to Paul Muldoon and David Orr for taking a look at a draft.

  And more than thanks to my best Poetry People, Connie Hassett and Cat Richardson.

  Copyright 2010 by James Richardson

  All rights reserved

  Cover art: John Schaefer, Sun Surf, 2009. Oil on canvas, 12 × 12 inches.

  ISBN: 978-1-55659-320-8

  eISBN: 978-1-61932-142-7

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  Lannan Literary Selections

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  LANNAN LITERARY SELECTIONS 2010

  Stephen Dobyns, Winter’s Journey

  Travis Nichols, See Me Improving

  James Richardson, By the Numbers

  John Taggart, Is Music: Selected Poems

  Jean Valentine, Break the Glass

  RECENT LANNAN LITERARY SELECTIONS FROM COPPER CANYON PRESS

  Michael Dickman, The End of the West

  James Galvin, As Is

  David Huerta, Before Saying Any of the Great Words: Selected Poems, translated by Mark Schafer