Mary says, angels are great, but you gotta know when they’re fucking with you.Like, for example, Jacob: most people see angels somewhere Mary says is pretty—clouds or flame—but Jacob sees them on a ladder, which Mary says is unromantic—two sides reaching toward each other that can never touch.Do you disagree?A little girl prays to Mary: the powers of darkness must be the wolves under my bedbecause they disappear when the sun rises.Mary says put all the facts in one column and the sums in the other.This leaves space for adding more facts.Angels, Mary says, lead to algebra because they lie.An angel cannot tell you how many petals there are on a buttercup.Solve for the great unknown, Mary says, the sacred X.Image = fact = madness until proven true.I set you children a lesson, Mary says. Our unknown is I am.The angel comes with a message about a broken link or a loose chain.Infinity, Mary says, equals how many children, how much cake.
hunger
(Philosophy and Fun of Algebra by Mary Everest Boole, 1909)
Feature Date
- April 3, 2022
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
Copyright © 2021 by Beth Bachmann.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Beth Bachmann is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the author of three books from the Pitt Poetry Series: Temper (2009), winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize and Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Do Not Rise (2015), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and CEASE (2018), winner of the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Emily Clark Balch Prize. She lives in New York City.
No. 111
Seattle, Washington
Center for Religious Humanism
Seattle Pacific University
Editor in Chief
James K.A. Smith
Poetry Editor
Shane McCrae
Founding Editor
Gregory Wolfe
Image was founded in 1989 to demonstrate the continued vitality and diversity of contemporary art and literature that engage with the religious traditions of Western culture. Now one of the leading literary journals published in English, it is read all over the world—and forms the nexus of a warm and active community.
We believe that the great art that has emerged from these faith traditions is dramatic, not didactic—incarnational, not abstract. And so our focus has been on works of imagination that embody a spiritual struggle, like Jacob wrestling with the angel. In our pages the larger questions of existence intersect with what the poet Albert Goldbarth calls the “greasy doorknobs and salty tearducts” of our everyday lives. Learn more at imagejournal.org
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
