Natural Equations Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Natural Equations



College algebra made me scratch
My head—I had to take it twice,
But after class following the girl in
The miniskirt, I finally understood
What made the mathematicians so
Interested—
The ever changing triangle made
By her legs and the sidewalk kept me
Hypnotized, like a moving bridge under
The sun, leading up to the canopied
Summit, the cool underside that threatened
Harlotry’s revelations,
The desire of all men to do mathematics
Laid there, the will to add one body plus another,
The indented shape of nature’s trap
Swaying in its white cottoned hood,
And her smile not in her eyes but on
Her lips saying it was okay,
She wanted you to look, and to understand
Her through simple additions….

Ever after, when I saw a woman, I
Recognized her as nature’s beautiful
Numbers and the motions she took, the
Strange and enticing algebras she put on
For men—The arc of a woman on a swing-set
In the bright sun, added to it the movement of
Her long auburn hair, swaying seemingly chaotic,
But each swish of motion, a new equation impossible
To calculate, unless she let her hairs splay in
Your hand, to catch sunlight through,
Then you would know the solution, which
Was her lips multiplied on yours’…..

A woman swimming in the ocean near shore,
Her body becomes a point from which a line can be
Drawn through the plane of crashing surf, as if she
Was swimming about in an attempt to distinguish
Right from wrong, and when she steps out and
Disrobes from the sea into the sunlight’s true shower,
She becomes the first mathematical
Proof to which your eyes can comprehend the universe,

So when I returned for my second attempt at
College algebra, I wetted the tip of my pencil on
My tongue and set to work
Putting to paper all that I had found out;
Woman was the answer
To all the equations, simple and true—
The professor, an understanding bachelor in his
50s gave be a respectable B, because he granted
I had found the first universal solution,
The sad and hungry desire, to all of
Humanity’s mathematics.

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Robert Rorabeck

Robert Rorabeck

Berrien Springs
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