Numbers by Ashley Went

At 26 I lost my dad to the numbers
Of cancerous cells colonizing his organs.
Statistics gave him a fifteen percent chance
Of surviving for five years.
Metastatic multiplications strangled him for two,
And he went from healthy to 3B to 4
Until one day he was gone.
All that he was,
It was too much to be collapsed
Into 59 years.

For one month, his big white work van sat in the gravel,
As though still silently waiting for him.
Waking up for school, I used to hear it rumbling
In the minutes before he drove away.
His work table, emptied of his power saws and sanders,
Still sat covered in sedimentary layers of sawdust.

Permanences—
Those impressions of fixity we carve
Out of the ever-changing worlds that we inhabit.
Abbreviated moments that we make our own,
Forgetting that our lives are blips of illusion
In a vast sea of infinity.

When I was in school,
I couldn't understand how lines
Could stretch forever through some imaginary space.
But maybe by lines they meant love,
Extending infinitely in every direction,
Even when cut short by the limits
Of one page.

When they told me he had a few days, we drove for 18 hours
Through California at night,
In my first real experience of space,
And my most profound experience of time.
1-5 North stretched on and on, as the seconds ticked by on the clock.

As the minutes and hours passed,
He was dying.
We drove through Olympia in the early morning light,
And finally to his hospital room, in the hospital where I was born.
He stabilized.
The minutes re-expanded into the indeterminacy of living-time,
Turning into days, maybe weeks.

But time compressed back into days,
And days into minutes,
And I was 1,136 miles away.
And then: the end.
The end, or
Infinity
With its invisible continuity and unrealizable potentiality,
Love stretching outward in either direction.
26 years, and a long line of irrational numbers
Extending for n years ahead.