** will be back to correct this **

Numbers
I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,they are willing to countanything or anyone:two pickles, one door to the room,eight dancers dressed as swans.
I like the domesticity of addition–add two cups of milk and stir–the sense of plenty: six plumson the ground, three more falling from the tree.
And multiplication’s schoolof fish times fish,whose silver bodies breedbeneath the shadowof a boat.
Even subtraction is never loss,just addition somewhere else:five sparrows take away two,the two in someone else’s garden now.
There’s an amplitude to long division,as it opens Chinese take-outbox by paper box,inside every folded cookiea new fortune.
And I never fail to be surprised by the gift an an odd remainder,footloose at the end:forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,with three remaining.
Three boys beyond their mothers’ call,two Italians off to the sea,one sock that isn’t anywhere you look
~ Mary Cornish