'Loss and its sad math'

 Let's start the new year with a poem that was new to me. It's by one Sarah Freligh, and it turned up on Facebook this morning. It's a single-sentence work that comes close to being chopped-up prose, but I think it is shapely enough to work as a poem. And it is very touching to read, especially if you have had the experience it describes, as Mrs N certainly did when trying to read the ending of Charlotte's Web to our children and breaking down in tears every time. They too found it funny at the time, but now they are old enough to understand. The thing that really struck me about 'Wondrous' was the phrase 'loss and its sad math'. 'Math' is a potent word here, with its double meaning relating at once to the kind of math ('maths' in English English) by which our death draws inexorably nearer with every year we add to our lives, and 'math' in the sense of the mowing effect of death, the grim reaper: a math is a mowing, as in 'aftermath'. Sarah Freligh gave the name Sad Math to one of her collections of poetry.

Wondrous

I’m driving home from school when the radio talk
turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit
the here and now of the freeway at rush hour,

 

travel back into the past, where my mother is reading
to my sister and me the part about Charlotte laying her eggs
and dying, and though this is the fifth time Charlotte

 

has died, my mother is crying again, and we’re laughing
at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math,
how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief

 

multiplies the one preceding it, how the author tried
seventeen times to record the words She died alone
without crying, seventeen takes and a short walk during

 

which he called himself ridiculous, a grown man crying
for a spider he’d spun out of the silk thread of invention —
wondrous how those words would come back and make

 

him cry, and, yes, wondrous to hear my mother’s voice
ten years after the day she died — the catch, the rasp,
the gathering up before she could say to us, I’m OK.