Reply #7: Politics ain't Poetry, but i'll try

[dweller]

The Calculation
A man six feet tall stands on a curb, facing a light suspended fifteen feet above the middle of a street thirty feet wide. He begins to walk along the curb at five m.p.h. After he has been walking for ten seconds, at what rate is the length of his shadow increasing?
A problem posed by my calculus instructor, Penn State, 1946

Facing a streetlight under batty moths
And June bugs ratcheting like broken clock springs,
I stand, for the sake of a problem, on the curb--
Neither in grass nor gutter--while those wings
Switch down the light and patch my undershirt.

I turn half right. My shadow cuts a hedge,
Climbs through the rhododendrom to a porch,
And nods on a window sill. How far it goes
I leave to burglars and Pythagoras.
Into the slanting glare i slant my watch,

Then walk five miles per hour, my shoes on edge
In a practiced shuffle past the sewer grid,
over the gold no-parking-or-pausing zones,
And into the clear--five seconds--into dirt,
Then over a sawhorse studded with lanterns,

And, at the tenth, i stiffen like a stump
Whose lopped head ripples with concentric figures,
Note the location of my other head
In a garden, but keep trundling forward,
Ignoring Doppelgangers from moon and lawn-lamp,

My eyes alert now, levelling my feet,
Seeing my shadow sweeping like a scythe
Across the stalks of daisies, barking trees
And scraping up the blistered weatherboard
To the eaves of houses, scaling the rough shingles.

At fifteen seconds, in a vacant lot,
My head lies on a board. I count it off.
I think back to the garden, and I guess,
Instructor, after fifteen years of sweat,
It was increasing five feet plus per second.

At the start, I could have fallen, turned around
Or crossed to the very center of confusion,
My shadow like a manhole, no one's length,
Or the bulb itself been broken with a shot,
And all my reckoning have gone unreckoned.

But I was late because my shadow was
Pointing toward nothing like the cess of light,
Sir, and bearing your cold hypotenuse--
That cutter of corners, jaywalker of angles--
On top of my head, I walked the rest of the night.

David Wagoner


2 seconds, infinitely.
dp