Page 37 -

—he’d later teach law—also taking that class but he sat as far from me as he could
in that third-story cell, as if he might catch my ineptitude like an airborne virus.
And now he’s gone, like almost half
the students who traveled with me through those places.
At length, we’ll all be down to none.
Zero: I’d consider that one easy to grasp. But it seems no one grasped it until a Hindu mathematician named Brahmagupta proved the zero to have null value, something that he referred to as sunya.
Apparently that indicates
empty of any intrinsic nature,
which itself eludes me. I do know, though,
that the sick elm was hewn just as I left school, and before I earned my B.A., that beech
had started to scar, its squirrels had vanished.
Lea, a former Pulitzer finalist, founded and for thirteen years edited New England Review. His twentieth book, and his thirteenth collection of poems, Here, appeared from Four Way Books, NY, in 2019. In 2021, Vermont’s Green Writers Press will publish Seen from All Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life, his collected newspaper columns from his years
as Vermont Poet Laureate (2011–15). His most recent publication is a mock-epic graphic poem, The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy, in col- laboration with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka.
30