Negative
Negative, negative, negative,
Don said to Scotty.
Now, nothing to be negative about
for these teachers of math,
Don retired in Utah,
Scotty a name on a stone,
a cemetery dweller
whose home was once a math class,
and a pie-shaped house
that he himself designed.
No negatives side by side with positives,
coming to terms, or not, in some hereafter.
Scotty with his lurching walk,
hospital visits to students
to give them homework.
And Don, once a patient tended by nurses
that were students in his classes.
Don in Utah, Scotty nowhere,
that zero of all zeros, thinner than air,
finer than dust, that house
we see by faith only, or don’t see,
no faith in God; or, in a God
who, withholding a hereafter, is negative.
I recall Don’s rimless glasses, his knack
for compromise,
and Scotty’s gun cabinet,
the fishing rod in his hand at the San Juan
River.
His shadowy voice, sort of deep and
angular,
the Camels smoked occasionally,
the swear words spoken often.
A gay irreverence, not surly
but at times a negative outlook, except,
I suppose, when it came to math.
Some said he was a genius,
could have taught anywhere.
I recall the brace on his knee
from an old basketball injury,
and his last words, my last look
as he shut my pickup’s door
and walked towards his house
which I’d been in, many times.
I recall standing beside him on the Rio
Grande’s banks,
that river that flows between two countries.