Pam Winters

 Sixty Remembers Nineteen
  
 We started the semester in ancient Mesopotamia. 
 In fact, that part was pretty easy. 
 They used a positional system, just like we do.
 Then, that extra degree of freedom....
  
 The culture of the people who made it then, 
 who we were then, was different. We’re used to being 
 completely concrete, remembering the mud.
 They’re enigmatic. Reciprocal. Sextile. Sexagesimal.
  
 We’re sixty. Hard but fragile. Butt-ends 
 will deviate, footbones, hair from a grave.
 Stroke the leaves, the psyche, the burgundy stems,
 thumb the bulb: use us before we wilt. 
  
 What’s to be eaten here? Whatever appeals.
 A trail of kinked roots, a flank, a ruffled orange flower.
 Green flourishes, hands and fire drape themselves
 over you, more volatile and dumb than wild leeks.
  
 The body, the shape—I should say it’s not quite true 
 that we didn’t have a symbol for zero. 
 No, the biggest issue we had was nothing. 
 Or more precisely, the lack of nothing. 
  
 Zero makes it possible to tell 1 from 10.
 The oldest documented zero is surprisingly modern: 
 it’s in a temple. A guitar, pajamas, lithium, a putsch.
 Why do we need a symbol that literally means nothing? 
  
 I don't know how people thought of the bloody world.
 We had to use context clues to figure magnitude.
 They kept telling us we were allowed to assume.
 Did we ever make the leap?
  
  
 Copyright 2021 by Pamela Murray Winters
 
   

Author’s Statement:

Big birthdays, the ones with zeroes, are liable to cast one’s mind back. I mean no commentary on speech codes, triggers, etc.; the action in this poem strays from the lecture halls.

Nearly all of the words, aside from a few text and voice changes, came from three sources: my poems “Sigma” (published on The 22 Magazine blog, 2011) (https://the22blog.com/2011/09/26/sigma-by-pamela-murray-winters/) and “Cleaning Wild Leeks” (unpublished, destined for my next manuscript) and a 2014 Scientific American article by Evelyn Lamb, “Ancient Babylonian Number System Had No Zero” (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/ancient-babylonian-number-system-had-no-zero/).

Bio:

Pamela Murray Winters is the author of The Unbeckonable Bird (FutureCycle Press, 2018) and a number of poems and essays in other publications. She lives in deepest Maryland suburbia, where her eyebrows and toenails and neuroses have grown so long and twisty over the past year that she fears she’ll never extricate herself from the living room rug.

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review