Mary Cornish

Rating: 4.67
Rating: 4.67

Mary Cornish Poems

I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
...

The Best Poem Of Mary Cornish

Numbers

I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.

I like the domesticity of addition--
add two cups of milk and stir--
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.

And multiplication's school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.

Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else's
garden now.

There's an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.

And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.

Three boys beyond their mothers' call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn't anywhere you look.

Mary Cornish Comments

pratyusha das 19 January 2018

tnx u mary mam

0 2 Reply
Ursula Willing 16 October 2009

I am searching for Mary Cornish or the rights holder of her poetry. The Poetry Foundation has not been able to help because no contact information is available. Any help from any one would be appreciated.

1 8 Reply

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