Mathematical Love Poem, with a Proof

I am on the plane, in the air, before I

see what just happened—I fell in love

with him, again, in the car to the airport.

It happened sentence

by sentence, slowly,

like pick-up sticks. As a child, I would lay one

atop a precarious nest of its fellows,

and then another. With Carl, you don’t

know when he’s going to feel insulted,

and get mad at you. But now I had said,

“The math in graduate school—was it real,

or theoretical?” “What do you

mean?” “Well 2 apples plus 2 apples is 4 ... ”

“It was all theory,” he said, “but it had to be

proved true, to be used for things,

like physics.” And for the first time,

he tells me about his prelims, and the summer

before them. “It’s a different world,” he said,

“I dreamed numbers.” And when was that,

I asked, in relation to your buying the farmland

with your uncle? Gradually we moved through time

and space. And your uncle’s death?, quiet

but not hesitant. We pass something—

not a planet, a hill. Six years,

and he is willing to fill me in, without that

impatience as if I should have known.

He drives over a river, past piles

of autumn brush, like wood rat nests

of pick-up sticks—

sticks that at the speed of light would be

measurably longer. I love the way

his palms face backwards when he walks, with that cattleman

walk—and the curls at his nape, black

and silver-shot. I love his thick

neck! And the way his 3 o’clock shadow can’t

be told from the dirt he has been working in.

When he looks at the stone ledge, which he has been

baring, in memory of his brother, over months,

I feel as if his mind is making some

kind of earthen love with it,

I see him, in my sleep, embracing it,

throwing it up onto his back—

a song made of numbers, he carries it,

and I dance with him as if born to it. And I was born to it.