The Math Campers

by Dan Chiasson

  A beetle polishes its psychedelic shell.

  Fireflies splatter-paint the night.

  The keeper’s Honda’s battery failed

  parked near the cemetery gate.

  The cemetery overlooks the brook

  that blazed the highway’s route.

  A hurricane washes out the highway.

  The cemetery seesaws on its bank

  then makes a break for the valley.

  Caskets line up for the slip-n-slide.

  A collarbone surfboards down the alley.

  Through the mudslide we humans wade.

  In April, when the animals

  In April when the animals emerge

  One by one from their holes

  As from an advent calendar

  To meet their awaiting identities

  The mouse shimmies into her fur

  The patch of blue expects its jay

  Hello chipmunk I am nervousness

  In April when the animals

  In April when the animals emerge

  As from their office cubicles

  And the world wakes up, enlarged—

  The spring held all its dividends,

  then shed them like confetti;

  home in Vermont last weekend,

  I saw biofuel silos in the country,

  farmers returning to farming,

  asparagus, ramps, hemp

  new ferns along the paths unfurling,

  and robins waking sleepily.

  In middle school, if two boys

  want to kiss, or hold hands, they can;

  sixth-graders learn sea-level rise

  and march with their friends against guns;

  The hills say there’s no single way

  to be, up here, this time of spring:

  swimmable water in the valley,

  snow on Mount Mansfield still falling.

  In Greensboro, the Saabs

  transformed to Priuses

  crustier than the ones in cities,

  driven by nurses and heiresses.

  Near Caspian Lake one day

  Chief Justice Rehnquist at his summer house

  swore Stephen Breyer in, only

  a part-time village clerk to witness.

  The Circus Camp patches its tents;

  the Farm Camp rouses on the hill;

  a goat behind a wire fence

  prepares to be clumsily milked.

  Hard problems at the Math Camp wait

  all winter for solutions;

  engorged sums hibernate

  and dream of consolation;

  A raft dry-docked through winter

  gets its feet wet and waits

  for July, when the Math Campers

  arrive, to stare at the stars and calculate

  the absolute value of fifteen

  or how the summer might expand

  and prove eternal by division

  of days into hours, minutes, seconds;

  they’re factoring love in suddenly

  and measuring how the stars in pairs

  create the sky’s geometry,

  and measuring their hearts’ spheres,

  skew lines of who they are and were;

  they know, year over year, you grow

  by comparing consecutive summers

  and expressing them in a ratio.

  Now, in the interval between

  dodge ball and snack, the Math Campers

  back-of-the-envelope equations

  they must solve to make the summer longer.

  They’ve meted out the summer

  with the math they’ve done so far;

  if they want a longer summer,

  oh, they’ll have to practice harder:

  For every correct answer, one more hour;

  a furlough from the changing leaves.

  The daisies cheer from the bleachers

  and bumblebees gossip about love.

  Rationalists will say they failed.

  Fall came and bulldozed the bees.

  The daisies saw their heads explode

  and parents returned in their SUVs.

  The raft was dragged to a frozen lawn.

  The October stars withdrew

  into relations of their own.

  Ice strangled the bright yarrow.

  Black Adder has a restraining order

  against Hyssop: fucking psycho

  arrived in a three-wheeler

  and did donuts in the meadow;

  An astronaut unzips his suit

  and masturbates to the turning Earth,

  while distant galaxies ejaculate

  in acid trips of death and birth;

  first in his class, he spends the day

  on beating off and solo chess,

  and writing in his diary

  “I gave up Earth for fucking this—”

  an organ on the TV mass

  plays all day for company;

  the wonders of the Universe

  turn into drudgery;

  the Universe, first in its class,

  elaborates its origin

  in the enormity of space;

  light finds its lost horizon

  then vanishes in ecstasy;

  a dust-cyclone undoes the sun

  and kills our Opportunity.

  The little rover lost its friends.

  First in his class, he toiled hard

  on valedictory remarks

  for his own graduation:

  “My battery is low. It’s getting dark.”

  Bloom (II)

  David Teng Olsen, Mural, 2017

  At sunset, this October,

  I picked some Nippon daisies,

  the last flower to flower,

  a verb named for its noun.

  The weather was all indoors.

  A Page solo plus Michelangelo

  enameled in cerulean, tangles

  of what looked like instant ramen,

  a heavy barge in the surf offshore,

  a spindly zeppelin down, the scene

  split by an architectural birch

  crisscrossed by laser blasts.

  Dave added the sky one day,

  then blew our heads apart

  by denying it had ever been a sky.

  A spider creature was our sons.

  Their hair entangled meant

  they would now never be apart,

  not their whole lives wandering

  in a world itself worryingly

  wandering who knows where.

  Look, there’s a friendly bloom;

  look, a vivisectionist, a severed wrist.

  These thoughts our house had had about us.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to the editors of the following publications, where these poems, sometimes in altered forms, first appeared:

  “Years ago, our sons were born…” (West Branch)

  “He asked me my happiest memory…” (West Branch)

  “I owned, East Coker,…” (The Yale Review)

  “How beautiful it was…” (The Yale Review)

  “The balcony, the might-have-been…” (The Yale Review)

  “We made out lazily, for hours…” (The Yale Review)

  “He was writing an autumn journal…” (The Yale Review)

  “That fall, he had been invited…” (The Yale Review)

 
; “He patrolled the Sound in his mind…” (The Yale Review)

  “It was already November when he wrote again…” (The Yale Review)

  “Coda: Stonington” (The Yale Review)

  “Tom the stutterer’s brother…” (The New Yorker)

  “Who changed change, die, eightball, tarot, oracle?…” (The New Yorker)

  “Sitting in a swivel chair…” (The Sewanee Review)

  “If you want to make it to the moon…” (The Sewanee Review)

  “The gap kept getting filled in…” (The Sewanee Review)

  “The rock face launched from its chasms…” (The Sewanee Review)

  “What happened to Hibbing, Minnesota…” (The Sewanee Review)

  “Half in, half out of my dream…” (The New York Review of Books)

  “Bloom (II)” (Academy of American Poets)

  “My awareness seems to extend this day…” (Knopf Poem-a-Day)

  The illustration on the jacket is from a handmade periodical assembled by a group of English teenagers during one summer in the 1870s. It is captioned “My Lady in Waiting” and is unsigned.

  “Bloom” and “Bloom (II)” describe a mural in our house, painted by the artist David Teng Olsen, and depicting, in surreal, sometimes delightful, sometimes disturbing ways, scenes from our family life.

  The title “Must We Mean What We Say?” is borrowed from the famous essay and book by Stanley Cavell, and intended to reframe his famous question in terms of poetry. Poets borrow the language, and with it the emotions, of their ancestors. They say things they don’t mean, or they say things they mean in codes and in guises. Poets deflect sincerity onto strangers and shadows.

  I am indebted for the tone of section I of that poem to the English-language narrator of Chris Marker’s film Sans Soleil.

  The epigraph, from Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, was suggested to me by Garth Greenwell.

  Much of the poem was written while I was staying at the Merrill Apartment in Stonington, Connecticut. My thanks to everyone at the James Merrill House, and especially to Sally Wood.

  “The Math Campers” was written while I was staying as writer-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center and, a week later, at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. My thanks to Megan Mayhew Bergman. Parts of the poem were delivered at the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa exercises of Harvard University, and written for that occasion. Thanks to Hopi Hoekstra.

  Thanks, as ever, to my editor, Deborah Garrison; to Todd Portnowitz at Knopf; to my wife, Annie Adams; and to my colleagues and students at Wellesley College.

  This book is dedicated to Frank Bidart, my friend, colleague, and mentor. My work would not have existed without his.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dan Chiasson is the author of four previous collections of poetry, most recently Bicentennial, and a book of criticism, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America. He is the poetry critic for The New Yorker. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Whiting Writers Award, Chiasson is the Lorraine C. Wang Professor of English at Wellesley College, and lives in Massachusetts.

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