the sum of it all

 This minutiae: Edinburgh last year, the woods filled with sorrel, learning something about your parents you wish you'd known a long time ago and it rocking you to your core, knowing some things, not knowing others, mint liqueur, absolute truthfulness at all times.

Mathematics

It's like mathematics, the way
we become opposite and equal
sides of the equation. You push your
hands through me; they clot in my hair
and we lay there,
nose to nose,
occasionally misting up each other's faces
with our breath.

I tell you we're parentheses
surrounding a nothing, or
the nothing is a something and the something
is that dream we each have
of our past lovers. I pretend you're
thinking of your last fuck, while we fuck,
because it makes me jealous and I always
fuck better when I'm seething.

You know this,
know these symmetry-games I play, matching
the holes in your body to the parts of her that
must have been placed there; I am like a child
learning shapes and numbers.
Circle. Square. Take away
and you have the proportional nth amount,
or the negative number that fills us.
You are you, +1, and minus all your old loves.

But mathematics does not show the trail they leave,
the ghost-fuck always between us, the droplets of
him still salting my stomach.
You can taste him,
the unknown amount – let's call
him z – but by working backwards you can
discover his mass,
the bulk of him that you replace, the number
recurring.

We are the probability of it,
the sheer unlikelihood that humans
can fit each other like a mechanism,
whirring and spitting,
the statistical blunder of negative number.
A clock which turns backwards, a bed left
yellowing in dirty light.
The sum of it all is n, where n
is the aggregate of memories
palpable.


Note: This poem, and another, have got into the next edition of the York Anthology. This one is quite old.