with sincere apologies to Wallace Stevens,
and to all poets, everywhere
I.
All my life
I had known only lines
so when my teacher
drew a parabola
I said,
“Huh?”
II.
I took all the numbers,
and squared them.
The big ones grew.
The little ones shrank.
The negative ones
became positive.
Opposites agreed.
It was kinda cool.
III.
I watched an object falling,
tracing its arc,
the ink of time leaving curves
on the paper of space—
a perfect parabola.
(Except for air resistance.)
(NO ONE LIKES YOU, AIR RESISTANCE.)
IV.
My teacher told us something
about beauty,
and curvature,
and the essence of number.
I took what she said
and plugged it into the quadratic formula:
No real solutions.
Worthless.
V.
I was of three minds,
Like a parabola
Which is defined by three points.
VI.
I found a cone, and sliced:
a little this way,
I’d have made an ellipse;
a little that way, a hyperbola;
and a little the other way,
I’d have hacked off a finger.
But I cut true, and so,
a parabola.
VII.
An equation and a graph
are one.
An equation and a graph and a student
are confused.
VIII.
If you walk a narrow path,
never too close to the house,
never too close to the road,
just the same distance from each,
then you will weird people out,
because why are you walking like that?
Nobody walks in parabolas.
IX.
The polynomials all babbled
in languages I did not speak,
like beasts, or birds,
or soccer commentators.
I could grasp no one’s words,
except the parabola,
and so I let it speak for them all.
X.
I held a mirror to my parabola
and it simply admired itself.
XI.
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of constancy
Or the beauty of change,
The turn in the parabola
Or just after.
XII.
I know logarithms
and trigonometric equations;
But I know, too,
That the parabola is involved
In what I know.
XIII.
I asked a cubic for its derivative.
It spoke in parabolas.
I asked a linear for its integral.
It spoke in parabolas.
I asked Jesus for a math lesson.
He spoke in parable-as.
