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Since 1996 Volume XXI

Colette Inez
 

Colette Inez has authored eleven poetry collections, won Guggenheim, Rockefeller and twice earned NEA fellowships and Pushcart Prizes.  Her last collection Horseplay was released by Word Press.  She is widely anthologized, appeared on public radio and TV, and has long been on the faculty of Columbia University.

ELEGY FOR A MATH GENIUS

 

The onion field held us flat on our backs,

hands interlocked, spring night of dim stars.

Then the seven-thousand dollar houses sprang up out of nowhere.

 

A memory of your “love my ring a ding/ ding dong wang,”

wacky, kinky and written a hundred times in leaking ink

on a blue-lined page you folded and mailed with a three-cent stamp.

 

You were a polymath, highest Math IQ in NY State.

 I, an innumerate working for the phone co. Your numbah puhleez.

We loved the sky and doubted heaven.

 

You sent me papers on the subject of trajectories, binomials,

Fibonacci sequences, and married a composer from upstate.

Piano notes hung in the air when your cells went awry

 

and carted you away into the silence of minus signs.

So soon. The just-moved-into house stunned, your children

waiting for your numbers to leap out of nowhere.

 

Our shared weltanschuung, your word, remembered.

These houses now a town.

Onions tossed in a bin sold for a penny each.

 

I could do the math. You liked them crunchy on buttered bread.

 

 

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