Pythagoras, Not  Copyright © Richard Whiting 2010

I’m the product
Of tangled genetics
That breach and break the rules.
My father, working in accounts,
Built our house upon mathematics
Working from home, fingers dancing
On the calculator with its numbers
Of sickly green.

Keen on initiation,
He gave me sums to do
Calculating I’d be a chip off the block.
Answer.
Seven, One, Nought, Seven,
Seven, Three, Four, Five.
‘Wrong,’ he says, sad, bemused;
I turn it upside down
SHELL OIL it reads.
His sigh lasts for three point five seconds.

That was my trouble. Words.
Numbers, the science of exactitude,
Held no magic for me as words
Alchemised to a million meanings.
There numbers sat, sad regiments,
The foot soldiers of the rich
By which to oppress the poor.

My geometry kit was pristine.
Still is, thirty-five years on.
What pray, is a set-square, a slide-rule?
Mark Barrington, from the detached houses,
Had a circular protractor. Why?
A geometric exercise in one-upmanship?
My compass, often employed
Throughout the autumn term,
Was ace at threading conkers.

My parents wanted pi
I gave them Poe.
Once, watching the Trooping of the Colour
My father saw me in the Blues and Royals.
What maths had I to march and weave
To pull a pin and count to ten?
In English we started Owen, Sassoon
And I was already more Quaker
Than Queen’s Own Highlander.

The teachers ran up the white flag.
My parents returned home
With tuts and shakes
From Assessment Evenings.
My sister joined a bank
To compound my rebellion.
I was caught reading Jude,
Hidden amongst a murderous morass
Of logarithm, sines and cosines.

I was forgiven, by osmosis;
Large acreages of time.
When I moved into my first flat
My father put up the shelves
To ensure that they’d be straight.
He fumbled through my books
‘Phillip Larkin…’ he began, thumbing through
Please! Please! Please! I prayed
Don’t read This be the Verse

‘Books’, he declared
‘Will get you nowhere.’
He was wrong.
In all my bleakest, or blackest days
Books have pulled me through.
I cannot count the times.