Mathematics (a poem)

Mathematics

a poem by Bianca Bowers

It is August sixteenth,

and I am fuller than I wish to be

Winter has crept inside me

with all the stealth of a spy

I let my forty fifth birthday pass,

three days ago,

without so much as a wink 

Like a crowd of strangers,

I spurned its presence, kept my eyes on the floor

The full moon coincided with it all

I shed blood, reflecting moreover

on that inconvenient hourglass that will soon dry up 

along with any superficial beauty I might have possessed once 

upon a summer ago

But as I write this pathetic account 

of a woman falling

short of her adolescent expectations

the afternoon sun is soft and warm in my cheerful writing room

and I hear,

my son, watching Stranger Things,

my daughter, singing over Billie Eilish 

my husband, haggling with Optus, and

These anxieties 

that graze my knees,

cripple my muscles, on occasion 

are so insignificant in the grander scheme 

of a boundless soul in a finite body

and I ask myself, how long

’til you live fully? 

before you die piecemeal?

When you’re forty six or fifty?

When you weigh what you did at twenty?

When you write a book that pays for a roof?

and I think to myself, perhaps

it’s got nothing and everything

to do with mathematics

for as long as life is a calendar,

a scale,

a calculator…

this human can never truly be happy.

© Bianca Bowers 2019