Adding It Up

Okay, no question about it; I keep odd hours. But I can be so much more productive while the rest of the world sleeps or slumbers.

Meanwhile, I find these quiet hours ideal to catch up on reading, for work and pleasure. And when I come across a poem as excellent as the oh-so-apropos, Adding It Up by Philip Booth, I not only am glad to be awake, but sit bolt upright, antenna quivering...

Adding It Up

by Philip Booth

My mind's eye opens before

the light gets up. I

lie awake in the small dark,

figuring payments, or how

to scrape paint; I count

rich women I didn't marry.

I measure bicycle miles

I pedaled last Thursday

to take off weight; I give some

passing thought to the point

that if I hadn't turned poet

I might well be some other

sort of accountant. Before

the sun reports its own weather

my mind is openly at it:

I chart my annual rainfall,

or how I'll plant seed it

I live to be fifty. I look up

words like "bilateral symmetry"

in my mind's dictionary; I consider

the bivalve mollusk, re-pick

last summer's mussels on Condon Point,

preview the next red tide, and

hold my breath: I listen hard

to how my heart valves are doing.

I try not to get going

too early: bladder permitting,

I mean to stay in bed until six;

I think in spirals, building

horizon pyramids, yielding to

no man's flag but my own.

I think a lot of Saul Steinberg:

I play touch football on one leg,

I seesaw on the old cliff, trying

to balance things out: job,

wife, children, myself.

My mind's eye opens before

my body is ready for its

first duty: cleaning up after

an old-maid Basset in heat.

That, too, I inventory:

the Puritan strain will out,

even at six a.m.; sun or no sun,

I'm Puritan to the bone, down to

the marrow and then some:

if I'm not sorry I worry,

if I can't worry I count.

Clever poem right up to those killer final two lines, which is when I sit bolt upright. Those two lines could have been a couplet, but are not; and how special is that final twist?

Anyway, back to work... counting, figuring, worrying, posting!

-- David M Gordon / The Deipnosophist