Wherever there is number, there is beauty. –Proclus (411 – 485 CE)
Tonight, the Summer Triangle’s bright
in the eastern sky, its starlight arriving from
the Middle Ages. Then, the old scholars
said geometry is numbers in space
and music is numbers in time, measured
in measures with fractions that pulse and pause
like the fetch of waves or rain’s staccato, swish
of a metronome, a salsa, waltz, sonata.
And the old scholars said that numbers
in space and in time describe our universe
as it floats, bends, extends, yes, folds into itself,
yes. Those numbers curve, feather infinitely.
Time dilates. Like a potter at his wheel
coning clay upwards, mathematicians draw
how the past slips into the present.
Equations of space and time bewilder me
yet this July night I believe my father’s near.
Once again, I hear Ernie Harwell on Dad’s
transistor radio—the bat’s crack, a faraway
crowd roaring as players run the geometry
of a diamond and a whole universe suspends
with that tiny sphere hanging in the dark.
Marion, I LOVED your reference to one of baseball’s grandest storytellers, Ernie Harwell, he of the deep, honey-voiced Southern charm. I wish I could’ve cloned myself cuz we had the great Harry Caray in his prime and Jack Buck. I’d wanna be three boys: in LA with Scully, STL with Buck, and Detroit with Ernie. Than you. Now a word from our boy: Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be a pitch or a person, stealing is legal, and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire’s eye or on the ball.