Vox Populi
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Gary Fincke: The Book of Numbers
Using a standard typewriter, Marva Drew, from 1968 to 1974, typed
the numbers from 1 to 1,000,000 on 2,500 pages.
— The Best of the Worst
.
Fat with ambition, this book,
Though you can see how its plot
Must progress regularly
As wills in the careful scripts
Of scriveners. In this tale,
Everything says conclusion.
Each symbol, each myth predicts
A sort of Rapture when life
Goes blank as an end page, all
Of the story well-planned as
An Earth-centered universe.
I want, tonight, to say I’ve
Started that book of numbers
So often I think it’s mine.
At least to a thousand, where
I’ve stopped; or once, ten thousand,
A weekend with childhood flu,
My aunt hauling the pages
Downstairs to ponder. “You got
Every number right,” she said,
Reporting like proofreaders.
Ten thousand and one, I thought,
Ten thousand and two, and went
Outside, after that fever,
To bounce a ball off the roof,
Off the wall, to simulate
One tense game in a season
Of one hundred-fifty-four.
And in ten years, if one group
Of believers is correct,
The world will explode because
That year matches the number
Of weeks Jesus walked the world.
The next year, too, will shatter
Us, a famous psychic claims,
And then the year 2000
Will send millions of hopefuls
Up the mountains to welcome
The universal blindness.
Thus, we need someone to count,
Take on a second volume
To insure we don’t know how
It all turns out. “Pass it on,
No returns,” we say, schoolboys
Punching the arms beside us.
Or circled, Boy Scouts, around
A campfire: “Jack still burning,”
Puffing on a glowing stick,
Handing it off before it
Goes black. One million and one,
Marva, one million and two . . .
~
Copyright 2025 Gary Fincke. From The Necessary Going On: Selected Poems 1980-2025 (Press 53).
Gary Fincke is the recipient of multiple awards for his poetry, including the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine and the Rose Lefcowitz Prize from Poet Lore.
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Love this poem of numbers and time. And “Thus, we need someone to count,” suggests we humans need to think we count, and we need as Rosemary says to realize all of the many who count but are not taken account of in our determinations about war and peace. Gazans are not counting for much these days, apparently. Thank you David and Michael!
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Thank YOU, Mary.
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War, death, and hunger days count at least triple.
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Oh, and then I thought of universes, galaxies, eternity, and what a good poems it is.
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Indeed. Lived time is more real than the calendar or the clock.
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There have been 29,877 days in this life of mine, and from one of the trillion rooms in Southern California, I watched this day wake up, listened to the towhee greet it, as my dog Luna ran out to chase her first citrus rat. And the first poem I read in this one early morning of the numbered days of my life was The Book of Numbers.
” In this tale,
Everything says conclusion.”
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Beautiful response, Laure-Anne. Thank you.
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And you’ve got a poem there, dear Laure-Anne!
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I asked AI how many numbers a person could type in a lifetime. I got this response:
Faster typists can enter significantly more characters in the same amount of time.
Well, I learned more from Finke than from AI
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And a count-rough, of necessity- is being made of the deaths in Gaza, in the Sudan, in Ukraine . . .
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Oh, Luray. Thank you for saying this. I wake in the night thinking of the starving children… So many…
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In light of all this, its such a shame our days are numbered.
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My Irish-Cherokee grandmother Red Cook used to say she wasn’t going to die, but just ugly away. And by god she did.
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Best thing I’ve heard in a week!
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