Pisgah Inn, Milepost 408.6, Blue Ridge Parkway,
199 Hemphill Knob Rd., North Carolina
Nov.12, 1997
Dear Numerologists,
Drop a race horse, a bullfrog, or a flea from a high place,
calculate the damage mass makes squared. Massive rock
slides across Blue Ridge Parkway around milepost #408.
Equations of chaos can’t quarry from stable sums. Steep
road cuts, planes of schist—shear stress, friction. Yesterday,
I drove for eight hours thinking about the irrationality numbers.
For example, our national highways: US 19, US 23, US 74 in
incestuous copulations with Interstates 26 and 240. My high
school math teacher with her drag queen name—Miss Pris-cilla,
saw I didn’t care so much for numbers but rather the way
mathematics bitch-slapped sloppy things. Probabilities
of genetic drift, mutations, anomalies. I’ve had numbers
—count and amount—ticking away in me long before I knew
the two of you—if I’m counting correctly? If I count at all
Balance Sheet Bob
tallying the Route numbers
and stars going home—
more than one infinity
Judson Evans teaches at Berklee College of Music, and serves as Co-Editor (with Lew Watts ) of Haibun for Frogpond. He has published two collaborative books of poetry: Chalk Song with Susan Berger-Jones & Gale Batchelder (Lily Poetry Press, 2022), and Gear, with the accompanying book of photographs Remote Viewing by Ray Klimek (Meshwork Press, 2023).
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Heavy Feather Review 