Numbers

I've been thinking about numbers lately. What they mean, how I think of them. What they carry, or don't...I know that I acknowledge and work with the numbers that show me how to eat and travel and make my necessary way in the world at large, but the numbers that I live with show me things much larger than they are. I mark a kind of worldly time with them too but not as much as I used to. The intimacy they carry isn't about that marking off of shadow and sun. I can think of these numbers as sentient at times, almost, in the way that I can anthropomorphize ideograms and the moods I impose upon them or signatures and the things they show me about what they want. And the numbers I know always carry tags of luck and caution, unseen subvocalized scripts that show me runic messages from cultures that knew better than to quantify by habit and make that habit a mandate. My numbers have colors that remind me of when they came to mean what they do. The number four is the shade of Arizona desert, a sort of cimarron with a heart of nutty brown. Twelve is scarlet with black and white edges, like the Gothic lettering I know so well, reflecting flourescence behind framed glass in church basements. Three is the color of pewter, a trinitarian metal that is humbler than silver. Nine is viridian, a spread of mossy summer that harbors a song I overheard on a hiking trail near Brasstown. And eight is a color I don't know yet, a color that wants to be born into hue and tint but plays games with what it might represent. It's square but loopy and forms a field of linked lines like bars that might fall from an old corral with the push of a big wind. and it has a heart where circles come together and then away again, doubling up upon the sunny flush of four. Telling just enough of its story to make me hungry but not a syllable more. I have other numbers too, but these are the ones that stay with me. They don't hold size and richness the way that grainy paper does, and their value doesn't sag and sway when the math of oil and futures goes awry. Their stories morph and play like dreams with curves to sleep in, and the things they have to show me can't be traded, built, lost, or hoarded. You have to look behind the weight they carry to see this other luck, a way of measuring that stands outside of time and money to let you in on the mythos of what came before and is on the way, as well as what's right in front of you.