Poetry:
For the Math Gyze
Dan Lukiv
M.Ed., English and Creative Writing
McNaughton Centre, Quesnel, BC, Canada
E-mail: lukivdan@shaw.ca
Contents:
THE PHYSICS STUDENT
Trigonometric orbs
And Fourier green-waves partly filled
With Greek letters of
An expanding universe too distant,
For the moment,
In his brain that seems to hurt,
He thinks.The physics student,
His eyes glazed--
Too much adrenaline and thyroxin
In cerebral arteries?--
Determines to reach the bus stop
On time,
For the cross-town trip
Amongst sweat-smelly homo sapiens;
Well-gaited, he walks headfirst into a university
Telephone pole,
Bounces immediately backwards,
Stands shaking his head,
Clutching his notebook and
Hieroglyphic text
As if they were dwindling provisions
On a space station; he has not yet
Noticed
His mismatched shoes--One brown, one black,
One with no heel.But he makes it to his bus
On time,
Trying not to rub the Cyclops-blotch
On his forehead.THE MATHEMATICS PROFESSOR
He stops, mid-
Equation-jumble, mid-thought,
Eyes staring upwards,
Scratching his Garfunkel head
With one end of a chalk stick,
Releasing white dust into his
Hair-nest--Snow builds up on plaid shoulders,
Even on cracked leather shoes,
Until he jerks into action,
Epiphanied,
Filling the green board with
Further hieroglyphica.This, in the auditorium of many seats,
For a little clump of fourth-year
Hyperbolic experts,
Who have grown unmoved by these
Blizzards that come
And go.THE LITERATURE PROFESSOR
When I showed him 7 pages
Of calculations bobbing, I suppose,
In that stormy sea of Calculus,
That revealed, I said, how far
Milton's teeming heaven stood from
Minuscule earth,
Given, of course, the devil-liar had taken
3 days to accelerate
Before landing--
7 pages smack in the middle of 15
Called "The Mythology of Paradise Lost"--The literature professor sat looking, looking,
Looking up at me. I felt my heart too much
As I exposed my handiwork engraved
On the most expensive vellum
I could purchase.
He didn't actually notice, I think,
That he was shaking
His head."I'm trying to show that the arts and sciences
Aren't really that far apart," I said,
But he just kept looking,
Shaking his head even harder.THE CUBOID
The second-floor, glass-and-steel walkway
Between the English the mathematics buildings
Had cut-outs of crows on clear walls
To discourage little birds from crashing
To their death.Sometimes it worked.
AT SEA IN A STORM
At the scarred table in the galley,
A finished-for-this-semester
Deckhand sits and sleeps,
Crammed into a corner,
As his mug vibrates,
Spilling coffee down his fingers--
Newly black-grained
From tow-lines
And rope.The tug,
Hauling an oil barge,
Dives into another
West Coast-valley, and
Then soars up,
Up another wall of jade.He actually sleeps for an hour
In the bawl of diesel-pistons,
Rattling dishes,
And a pot of roast beef that
Clamors in the oil-fired oven.Suddenly the wheelhouse door
Springs open:"Asleep?" the skipper yells.
"Get up here and steer this boat,
Ya bloody some kind of math student!"Like a confused snake,
The deckhand's mind reacts,
Slides into a blinding landscape.
His eyes are volcanoes
In a white face.
His stomach fights hard
To throw up.
He steadies himself
As another blast
Throws the tug up and down
As if it were a toy
In angry hands.Trembling,
He leaps for the outside door,
Dives for the rail, and
Adds his own bile
To the great gall bladder
Of time--
And sweats.Jade water and rabid foam
Roar past.
Wind yanks at his hair.
Salt-air drives itself
Up his nostrils.
Dizzily he walks
Like a roller coaster-drunk
Through the sea-tombed
Galley.The wheelhouse door slams behind him
As the tug leans
Hard to starboard.
The deckhand takes the wheel
From the bloody skipper.
His stomach sucks his strength,
Like a parasite,
Leaving arms and legs shaky,
As he stares wide-eyed
Through wet glass
Into a crashing world
Of madness.
Academic Exchange Extra invites reader responses to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.
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