#923 - the comfort and joy of counting

 

17.vii.22

923

3.197

the comfort and joy of counting

 

this is how it all started

the scratching down I mean

so many sheep, days, winters to go

became a sort of system

and over the fence

(you’d count the posts)

never quite the same

 

became a game of patience

time turned into a clock

it ran down

 

then how much fence is falling?

what will it cost now?

 

people come round and ask me

they expect me to know

how many books do I have (?)

 

a question better asked the other way

like not how many trees do you have (?)

but how many trees have you (?)

I do realize that could mean the same thing

in English but you know what I mean

I mean – to how many trees do you belong?

 

there are, by the way, half as many in the world right now

as there were when we started cutting them down

ten thousand years ago

when things got a little less icy

 

pretty arduous beginning on that job too

do you know back then there were about

as many of we two-legs upright about

as there are currently up in the air

 

they used to say

there’s one born every day, hour, minute

whereas now in fact there are about four born every second

 

just giving you a rough count there

needless to say that number is going up

I have come to the conclusion that

this is a general tendency of numbers

 

how is loneliness possible?

yet there’s more of that too

 

how many books?

why would you bother counting them?

I don’t even have time to read them all

 

people also ask me, for instance,

how many books

have you written?

I think this is just as silly

when none of them are ever likely to be finished

 

it’s like in a painting, in a poem

how many times do I have to go

to get where I’m going?

 

I don’t think anyone knows

the answers to such questions

but as life goes on, they multiply

 

how many steps to the scaffold (?)

one might ask

well – who wants to know a thing like that?

 

a king in his counting house

what do you think he gets up to in there?

 

perhaps when he’s an old old man

perhaps several hundred years old

someone will ask Elon Musk

‘how many worlds do you have?’

 

I think it’s better to ask

how many worlds have you?

I don’t mean that in an archaic, inverted way

I mean to ask to how many worlds

can you belong?

 

won’t he still be Musk, of Earth?

 

there are many many known worlds

in fact, there are more every day

and these a fraction, infinitesimal

of the number we know that there must be

 

who’ll even dare to guess?

need I point out no one’s ever yet been to another

but, as we have already observed

counting leads to higher numbers

consider the market if you will

 

you can count on us getting there

wherever it is

 

the latest count of human junk on the moon

is 187,400 kgs … it’s spread out quite an area too

then there’s the space junk between us and it

quite a bit of Musk there too

 

but nothing compared with what’s in our oceans

the plastic floor of ages yet

 

but as far as the planets are concerned

exo- and otherwise

so little signature of breath

count up as high as you can

and go on

we could say far away

 

but there can only be one world for me

it’s beautiful to belong