Numbers - Dorothy Porter

I get magic
  (sometimes I get more
    than I bargain for)

but I don't get
  numbers.

Numbers do worse
than humiliate
  or elude me

they don't add up.

I am no algebra tart
  ravished
by the meretricious music
  of the spheres.



My eyes and nose
never streamed
  with incontinent ecstasy
    through geometry classes
as my disastrous triangles
  collapsed in a cacophony
    around me.

Perhaps it's a failing
    to grasp
      or even want
the utterly perfect number
  burning through my retina
like the utterly perfect morning.

Instead I peer
  with nauseating vertigo
into the deep dark pitch
  of numbers
like an exhausted mammoth
  dangerously tottering
    on the edge
      of a bottomless mystery.

- From Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets ed. by Farrell and Jones