Making the Strange Familiar

That man could transmute a vector

into a yellow pencil between my fingers,

radiation into sunlight on my arm.

He lifted electrons from their galaxy

and on the rug left marbles orbiting.

The Red Planet and Dog Star

came near when he named them,

but the hospital came too close

when he read me his father's letters:

the apron of lead, the dose of gamma rays

that made him sick to cure him.

So we wasted the old man's last weeks,

stayed home in a sun-lit living room

safe as a greenhouse.

My father talked of mathematicians

I should have known, and sketched their curves

by heart. He drew Agnesi's Witch,

a pointed hat locked in coordinates,

but he couldn't explain the Rose

of Grandi, why with its four perfect lobes

it was a rose at all. Out of the garden, only

days after he clipped them,

our roses withered; this one had lived

centuries in an algebraic sentence.

He made me learn his lop-sided alphabet,

squeezed equations from his pencil

till I knew them cold.

I remember his father's final letter

came after the funeral and that night

opened in the fireplace. For a second

our living room glowed. Then, crouched in ashes,

the brass firedogs glared back.

HOMEWORK

Through the wooden grid of our bay window

I watch Mr. Banach and his son

lobbing a hard ball by the pin oak,

where my father used to throw it up farther

than I could imagine. It rose and rose,

brushing the oak leaves,

rising to the top

of something he called a parabola.

I wanted to grasp that, like the baseball, curling

my fingers around the threaded snake-spine.

But it started falling,

following gravity, he said, faster and faster till

Slap! I caught it wrong. My palm stung.

Concentrate,