Poetry Out Loud: National Recitation Project

Adding It Up

Philip Booth was born in Hanover, New Hampshire and died there in 2007. He studied with Robert Frost at Dartmouth College and, after receiving a

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By Philip Booth

My mind’s eye opens before

the light gets up. I

lie awake in the small dark,

figuring payments, or how

to scrape paint; I count

rich women I didn’t marry.

I measure bicycle miles

I pedaled last Thursday

to take off weight; I give some

passing thought to the point

that if I hadn’t turned poet

I might well be some other

sort of accountant. Before

the sun reports its own weather

my mind is openly at it:

I chart my annual rainfall,

or how I’ll plant seed if

I live to be fifty. I look up

words like “bilateral symmetry”

in my mind’s dictionary; I consider

the bivalve mollusc, re-pick

last summer’s mussels on Condon Point,

preview the next red tide, and

hold my breath: I listen hard

to how my heart valves are doing.

I try not to get going

too early: bladder permitting,

I mean to stay in bed until six;

I think in spirals, building

horizon pyramids, yielding to

no man’s flag but my own.

I think a lot of Saul Steinberg:

I play touch football on one leg,

I seesaw on the old cliff, trying

to balance things out: job,

wife, children, myself.

My mind’s eye opens before

my body is ready for its

first duty: cleaning up after

an old-maid Basset in heat.

That, too, I inventory:

the Puritan strain will out,

even at six a.m.; sun or no sun,

I’m Puritan to the bone, down to

the marrow and then some:

if I’m not sorry I worry,

if I can’t worry I count.