The Math Campers Read online

  THE MATH CAMPERS (SINGING TOGETHER WHILE DRIFTING APART).

  We’re tied to stars and prone to fever.

  It’s not yet time for us to fall in love;

  It’s not too late to vow we’ll never.

  MAN, CALLING OUT TO THE MATH CAMPERS.

  On the Internet,

  I saw a man ingesting shit

  On a fetish site:

  Stay prepubescent!

  I saw a cartoon mule

  Blowing

  A cartoon otter!

  THE MATH CAMPERS, in tears, are called to shore, where their mothers await them, holding towels. Their empty inner tubes rock gently in the aimless drift of the lake water.

  THE PEACH TREE.

  Too fucking soon, you narcissist!

  Too fucking soon! The basics first:

  You don’t fast-forward to ingesting shit.

  You go to the mall first on a group date.

  You sit around by the phone and wait.

  You find an ally or a spy and you collaborate.

  You offer, first, your heart.

  You offer up your heart to eat.

  You watch as they gnaw your heart to the pit.

  Your heart is a pit. He spits, she spits.

  MAN.

  So strange: so bitter, yet so sweet.

  WOMAN.

  Pick his ripest fruit.

  MAN.

  Now what?

  WOMAN.

  Now listen to the Dean’s heartbeat:

  DEAN JANET TWIST.

  My heart beats, you interpret it.

  By the waters where

  We began our affair

  You chose, I chose,

  Its sell-by date.

  Your dick hasn’t worked in years;

  Now even the poetry’s prose.

  KYLE CONSTANTINOPLE.

  Ours were the last hearts on Earth allowed to sample a love so total that the poets, hearing of our love, came rushing to the upstairs conference room, to hear those ancient vows recited once more, before they were gone forever.

  Remember? It was the fall of ’95, my tenure case had been decided in the affirmative.

  DEAN JANET TWIST.

  We taught them how real lovers live.

  It was a cross-curricular initiative.

  It was a moment so transformative

  We used it in our capital drive.

  MAN, CALLING OUT TO TWIST AND CONSTANTINOPLE.

  You who control our work and pay,

  Tell us, for we are lost,

  For we are lost in the forest:

  Oh, must we mean what we say?

  WOMAN.

  They can’t hear you. They are in the past.

  Where they are you and I

  are strangers.

  Where they are you and I

  are younger.

  See, even now they vanish into retirement.

  They are premonitory ghosts.

  The MAN and WOMAN share a peach, alternating bites and tenderly wiping each other’s faces. They were given one day, a day of no fixed duration, years long; and now they see the day begin to end.

  THE PEACH TREE winces every time they take a bite.

  THE MATH CAMPERS, high-fiving and loudly exclaiming, remove their shoes and return to their inner tubes, floating in a summer made suddenly endless by new methods of multiplication! They have found a way out of time! Their summer will never end. They will now solve a lifelong, endless problem, many blackboards long.

  Two boys kiss and laugh in a cove by the old paint shop.

  THE MATH CAMPERS’ chorus fades, first barely audible, then inaudible, as the campers float away on the lake.

  THE MATH CAMPERS’ CHORUS

  A mayfly waking up at dawn

  Dies when the sun goes down;

  A tortoise on an English lawn

  [inaudible] its owner’s son’s son’s son.

  In the elastic interval between

  Snack and Nonlinear Equations

  [inaudible] we learn

  We divvy up [inaudible]

  [inaudible] [the sound of katydids]

  [barn swallows overhead] friends

  Divide by multiply [moon]

  [moon] [moon] [moon] [moon]

  FINIS.

  IV

  Over & Over

  For our sons

  winter moth I put your body on

  and I was happy with the armor

  flight was both possible and necessary

  since I was light, brittle and miniature

  flight was both happy and panicky

  now that I was inside your body

  my awareness stretching far beyond

  my wingspan and erratic decision-making pattern

  I was now entirely akin to myself

  now I resembled myself both inside and out

  who’s the guy with the new temporality

  of a moth’s life, only a day or two

  in his resplendent, powdery body

  before annihilation minus zero

  when January in one enormous puff

  exhaled ice across the landscape?

  like a child seen getting used to a man’s body

  seen when least he wishes to be seen

  seen walking in when he would like to be

  conveyed invisibly to his seat in math

  or like the melody hastening itself away

  in “Honey Hi,” the sweetness

  ticking its own lifespan away

  jittery, alert, despite my new blue peacoat

  hold your hand up to the screen—

  hold your hand up to the page—

  cover this stanza up just so

  cover these lines up with your hands

  just so I held my hand a minute ago

  to block what I was writing

  and possibly to mirror

  your hand as it mimicked mine

  or will, if you hold your hand up

  to the screen, or to the page—

  but this was years ago, now—

  this moment unfolding now was years ago

  my awareness seems to extend this day

  past the trap my body set for me

  past its small, pitiful adjustments

  of head here wings here antennae here

  what does it matter, the head and wings

  and antennae if my awareness

  soars over the tops of the pines

  with its spiny flowers still green

  like a drone flown by a teenage pilot

  over the rooftops, silent yawp

  past near meadows over the Stop & Shop

  its dragonfly landing gear ready

  now it zooms in on the roots which grip

  the soil and feed on its decay

  your hand and mine at the same angle

  you there, in the future, fleeing me

  :if the reader will please turn over

  her hands to expose her palms

  I will do so too and together, stranger

  together we shall contemplate enormity

  He wrote to me again

  He wrote to me again in a dream. A mild winter, a false start for the daffodils and for the fragrant hyacinths, whose green was suicidal in the beds and near the hedges

  and for the snowdrops whose dainty

&nb
sp; necks bend under the weight of the flower

  doomed when they hear their name to misunderstand

  their natures, bowed, ruined by one frigid day

  Why do they talk this way? I asked him.

  The flowers? he replied.

  The poets, I replied.

  He wrote to me again in a dream. Koyaanisqatsi-style, all life was time-lapsed into pattern. He emerged from out of the pattern but was not entirely human. He was more like a string of Christmas lights around a human body.

  In this form, more pattern than human, he approached me. And then I saw, beside him, another pattern: he was walking a little dog, a small constellation of lights tracing the shape of a little low-to-the-ground, comical dog, a dachshund or beagle. You could see just from the ways the constellations of their bodies interplayed, they loved each other: the outline of a man and the outline of a dog, moving as one being across the field towards me.

  Why do they talk this way? I asked.

  The poets? he replied.

  The flowers, I replied.

  they speak a language we can understand

  “of woe and worry and ruined beauty”—

  that’s why they speak this way

  you’d have a poem rhyme rhizome?

  The poets, you mean?

  The flowers, I mean.

  if the reader will now step away from the page

  if the reader will now step away from the screen

  together we will ponder who imagined whom

  and downstairs, start a new pot of coffee

  if the reader will please wait to have begun

  this poem until 11:54 p.m., it will sync

  up perfectly with midnight—wait, wait—

  the word Forlorn on the stroke of midnight

  He wanted to meet me, but our element was time. He approached me, where I was standing, years later; and I approached him where he stood, but he was too far in the past.

  We shared the illusion of approach, as on a treadmill. He walked towards me on his treadmill, and I walked towards him on mine.

  Soon we were sprinting towards each other, faster but no closer, faster, faster, but never closer, trapped in the eternal loop of the machine.

  His poor dog! His little legs were not meant for such a strain. He was cross with his master; he was exhausted and cross with his master.

  ten past midnight on my single day, well past

  the midpoint of my life, my body was finally

  what I intended it to be. Mr. Chrysalis!

  your formality disgusts me. Empty promises and goo

  I suspect you are thinking of your sons, I said.

  —You suspect correctly.

  What aspect of their lives most worries you?

  —That I can see inside of them.

  Why does it worry you to see inside of them?

  —Because I see myself inside of them.

  What makes you certain it’s you?

  [dramatic pause, uncomfortably prolonged]

  [in the background, a twin-engine plane appears in the sky]

  —I am wearing an ID tag. I check theirs against mine, the numbers match, and so we are the same person.

  [the plane lurches suddenly, then drops; there is an enormous explosion, then a plume of smoke]

  in his sweet rebellion I see my own

  in his trying on for the sake of trying on

  the highway leading only to other highways

  the GPS already certain where we’re headed

  since all its prophecies are memories—

  what is this? O what is this new thing?

  said I to my body, said he

  to his body, what side effect of passing time is this?

  But our bodies were speechless, in unison.

  We sat in the International House of Speechlessness.

  Our bodies cried to each other speechlessly,

  as time stole one after another minute together.

  Our bodies cried out to each other speechlessly,

  as more time carried little bits of us away.

  Then we laughed the family laugh, to find

  ourselves the specials on the menu we perused.

  Coda: Stonington

  On the deck upstairs, I read about

  the deck upstairs. In the daybed

  I read about the daybed. In the books

  I read I read about the books I read.

  High up, all night, I thought about

  my sons, how when they wake

  I will be finishing this line:

  my night their day from here on out.

  Birds, check. First light. Sunrise.

  Pole vaulting all night long.

  My outline splayed on the guest bed

  where Mary McCarthy stayed.

  The sponsors: the bats, the bottles;

  The milk-glass tabletop, the china cup.

  The Santorini Guide and smiling lads from 1982.

  A tin mini–license plate read “Jim.”

  In a book on one of the shelves

  I left a copy of this poem

  changed slightly since that night

  changed crucially yet slightly

  since the night I lay on the star deck

  and made my body an angel

  in the warm September night

  above the Sound and its bright buoys

  the way I did when I was a small child

  in a snowbank in my zippered snowsuit

  you can find this poem inside a book

  on the shelves in the hidden study

  three to the left of the Santorini Guide

  though when you find it you will see

  the poem changed slightly, crucially—

  because, you know why: because time.

  The

  Math

  Campers

  Johnson / Shelburne / Ripton,

  Vermont, Spring 2019

  A mayfly born at the break of dawn

  dies when the sun goes down.

  A tortoise on an English lawn

  outlives his master’s son’s son’s son.

  An ancient shark shakes off another century;

  eerie and pristine, a fetal dolphin,

  a steamship, and a sea anemone

  hang near her, lifeless in the jellied ocean.

  This shark read over Milton’s shoulder.

  In her extreme old age, she’ll stare

  eye to eye, into a skyscraper’s foyer,

  at gilled, amphibious corporate lawyers.

  The big night stares us down from space;

  we figured we would have more years;

  annihilation in her prom dress

  greets her platonic date, despair;

  the black hole poses for her picture

  wearing a coronet of stars;

  a glacier, like a mountain, only bigger,

  rides southward on its own shed tears;

  the deserts parched for centuries

  put on their snorkel gear;

  scorpions write their obituaries;

  a cactus curtsies, then disappears.

  First in their class, the lichens

  sprawl like a rash or a blush

  on the face of a glacial erratic.

  A thunderclap deafens the marsh.

  This who’s who comes from all over:

&
nbsp; a thawed field is a gold mine,

  an uproar over winterberries,

  chitchat along the power lines….

  What happens happened later earlier;

  what happens earlier happened later.

  Now frost is a shallow passenger

  and biohazards ride the white-tailed deer.