[Lyric] Numbers (Mary Cornish)

I like the generosity of numbers
The way, for example
They are willing to count
Anything 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 plums
On the ground, three more
Falling from the tree

And multiplication's school
Of fish times fish
Whose silver bodies breed
Beneath the shadow
Of 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-out
Box by paper box
Inside every folded cookie
A new fortune

And I never fail to be surprised
By the gift of 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