I used to twist men round my little finger.
They wanted me to be simple
to fit their idea of aesthetics
but I was a coquette. I trailed
an infinite series of decimal places
behind me like a wedding dress
and wouldn't lie down and be a proper fraction:
no square pegs for me. I got around:
diversified into magnetism, flirted with statistics,
insinuated myself everywhere.
I'm embarrassed to let you see me come to this:
raised to that upstart's power, multiplied
by a clown I seriously doubt the existence of,
the result a cheap trick, worth less than nothing.

 

e
Grow.
That's
my motto.
Start small
maybe, but walk
tall. And the bigger you get
the faster you grow and the faster you grow the bigger you get.

She may be older, but I,
head down, single minded,
obtuse, was the first
to break the chain, transcend algebra.
I heft this pair
into the air:
a weightlifter balancing
two assistants on his outstretched hand.



i
Aye-aye! What have we here?
A game, a lark, a dance.
You can't catch me. No fear.
Did you glimpse a glance
Sideways from the corner of your eye?
I'm a misfit, right-angled to the rest,
won't keep in line. Don't even try
to pin me down. You wouldn't have guessed
the square root of minus one
would have looked anything like me.
No sooner here than gone,
a sprite, a shimmer, I'm imaginary.

   -1
Do you dare to equate me with that frivolous trio?
I may have worn red braces in the eighties,
but I never drank so much champagne
you lost the chink of gold my voice made.
And my venetian cradle was lined with fur:
nobody laughed at my christening.
Two decimal places are quite sufficient;
it's the digits to the left of the point that really count,
and in front of them, the sign.

There's nothing insubstantial about me:
I am your overdraft, the brown, official envelope
thudding on your mat, the repossession order,
the bailiffs breaking down your door,
your sons sold into slavery,
your daughters chained to advantageous marriages
or worse.

I am the amount owing.
And someone has to pay.


Peter Howard


(Note: The identity that forms the title of this sequence is a
particularly curious and beautiful one. e is the base of natural
logarithms, and is the number lurking behind the concept of exponential
growth; Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter,
but pops up in all sorts of places; i is the square root of minus one:
multiples of i are termed imaginary numbers.)

If you've any comments on his work, Peter Howard would be pleased to hear from you.