Number

Chasing numbers. On earthquake day we scour for the highest: 6.2 Bass Strait 1946. 5.9 is next so we’re history. The record for protests is 235 arrests. On earthquake day that was down to 66. Doughnut day imminent. NSW’s highest daily case [number]: 1599. Going below 1000 is made to sound an improvement. “Just 935 positive yesterday”. All going well it’s 6 weeks more lockdown. 12 if people don’t do the right thing. Jab numbers rise, but not without a vaccine. We wish these numbers added up. But there’s no 1 roadmap. We cannot count all the roadmaps out there.

Number (February)

American poet Howard Nemerov was born February 29. His statistical poem ‘Life Cycle of Common Man’ lists “roughly figured” totals of things consumed by “this man of moderate habits” in a lifetime: “Just under half a million cigarettes/ Four thousand fifths of gin.” The Fifties is another country. Nemerov wonders about the tally of words his anti-hero ever used, quantifying thus: “If you merely printed all his commas the result/ Would be a very large volume.” Distillation is good reason for poetry. Nemerov spells his numbers, assisting pronunciation, but statistical poems are a sub-genre, their surprises short-lived, their scansion forced.