Four Stories

Last night I went to the regular Four Stories literary event in Osaka, organized by the dynamic Tracy Slater. Four authors read excerpts from their work for 15 minutes each, while the listeners enjoyed good Portuguese wine and food and the chance for relaxed, grown-up conversation with interesting people. That's a rare opportunity for a translator working from home whose main everyday human contact comes through two young boys and the Internet, and it was exhilarating to have the brief chance to enjoy an atmosphere Tracy describes as "like a 19th-Century salon, only 150 years later―same socializing, same witty banter, but no corsets."

One of the readers was Jessica Goodfellow, an amazing Kobe-based poet who is also a friend. Her work interweaves imagery from mathematics, the Bible, and nature in fresh and thought-provoking ways. Two of her poems were read by Garrison Keillor on The Writers Almanac earlier this year, including this one, The Invention of Fractions.

The Invention of Fractions
by Jessica Goodfellow

God himself made the whole numbers: everything else
is the work of man.
—Leopold Kronnecker

God created the whole numbers:
the first born, the seventh seal,
Ten Commandments etched in stone,
the Twelve Tribes of Israel —
Ten we’ve already lost —
forty days and forty nights,
Saul’s ten thousand and David’s ten thousand.
‘Be of one heart and one mind’ —
the whole numbers, the counting numbers.

It took humankind to need less than this;
to invent fractions, percentages, decimals.
Only humankind could need the concepts
of splintering and dividing,
of things lost or broken,
of settling for the part instead of the whole.

Only humankind could find the whole numbers,
infinite as they are, to be wanting;
though given a limitless supply,
we still had no way
to measure what we keep
in our many-chambered hearts.


(Copyright © 2006 Jessica Goodfellow. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the author.)

You can find more of Jessica's poetry at Verse Daily here and here, or buy her chapbook A Pilgrim's Guide to Chaos in the Heartland from Amazon.

I'd been half expecting that the boys would still be up when I got home late in the evening, but they were actually asleep - on our bed. I was able to carry Dan back to his own room, but had to lean over Kei and growl gently "Who's been sleeping in MY bed?" to rouse him so he could climb into his top bunk.