<br/>The Conversion

Poetry

Some people might say that I am a rhymer rather than a poet. I have had the ability to make rhyming lines fairly easily, but I like to think that my poetry has more in it than just rhyme. I love imagery–the sights, sounds, smells, feels and movements of natural things, and I try to make my poetry very concrete and real. For some reason, funerals have been a very large part of my poetic efforts, I suppose because poems celebrate a life better than mere speech. At any rate, I have included some poetry here, and I hope you like it. As always, the subject matter is very diverse.

Here is a poem I wrote while Molly, my wife, was teaching calculus. Her students had told her that they did not understand poetry: that the subject matter was so obscure, meaningless, and irrelevant. She replied that poetry could be about anything. They rebutted by saying, “Right! I suppose you could write a poem about mathematics!” Taking the challenge, she said, “Yes, you could write a poem about math.” “Let us see one then,” they countered. Molly came home and told me the story. “Is there some way we can make a poem about math?” she queried. I said, “Well, if you will help me with the terminology, I will try.” Here is what we came up with.

TRIGONOMETRY
By Dan Spier

There is nothing in life so darn hectic
As a brain in a course trigonometric.
I had much rather study invasions
Of Vandals and Huns than equations.
And especially ones like quadratics!
They’re fit only for fools and fanatics!
While my social life sits and relaxes,
My dumb brain is a blur of Y-axes.
Even tangents and points of inflection,
Make me suffer a loss of direction.
While derivatives—both first and second,
Are a little bit more than I reckoned.
When old fractions turn inverse proportions,
My sinuses go through contortions.
My domain is as strange as an ocean,
And my slope and my range? I’ve no notion!
I think radians are tires for one’s auto,
And determinants words for one’s motto.
Logarithms sound right for percussion,
And matrices good for discussion.
But my function’s velocity’s dropping,
And I sense by acceleration stopping.
My vertex’s endpoint—it dangles,
As I’m swallowed in huge right triangles.
All my maximums minimum weakly,
As my anti-log poem ends bleakly,
I guess if one thinks perpendiculous,
Trigonometry’s not so ridiculous.

Wrested from off the dusty plaster wall
Where long it hung a market crucifix,
Push pins had pierced the manufactured holes,
Long languished there in mercantile neglect
Amid the other Christmas stocking blanks,
Hand-painted graphs of erstwhile caribou
And candy canes and horns and dolls and drums
St. Nick and Magi, Bethlehem, and all.

But carefully in tissue tomb it now resides,
Awaiting morphogenesis to come.

Recumbent in her Lazy-Boy my wife
Reclines and carefully unfurls the coil.
Then starched and stiff, the latent prize unfurls
The canvas mesh she straightens on her knee,
And starting like the ancient Eastern kings,
The northeast corner working toward the west
And southward up and down the needle flies.
In subsequential holes, she fills with wool
Or brightly colored silk or cotton thread.

The acupuncture process heals the mass,
Converting fabric plain—mosaic-like,
The loops obliquely march in measured line,
A perfect pyramid emerges strong.

In places where the paint had flatly lain
The seamstress matches hue and tone and shape,
The screen by magic fills and plumps each fold
And trees and bells and sleeves and toys emerge.
Conversion comes at last to lifeless form
A vacant, empty shroud of cloth transformed
To Christmas stocking filled with Christmas joy
To Christmas stocking made with love and care.