Today’s poem is from Law & Impulse: maths & chemistry poems, published by The Poets Union.

Magdalena Ball

10 digits of e

tracing the slope of your tangent
around a bell curve
the irrationality
of your decimal expansions
left me breathless

there was no room for doubt

in the ice of your bedroom
and watched your eyebrows move
f(x) = ex at the point x = 0 is exactly 1
you said, smiling enigmatically
though there was no enigma
for you
you found patterns there
danced in the rhythm of perfect numerics
watching the decimal digits grow
and grow

you saw it everywhere

kept moving forward
while i fell back
to integers
unable to follow you
out of familiar territory

from the mundane
comfort
of here and now
I watched you trip
into the transcendental