There’s a lot of angst floating around the globe these days, so let me set your mind to rest about the above-mentioned heart attack, if nothing else. The Kid Brother had a heart attack a couple of months ago, and luckily he’s now doing fine. Or as fine as anyone can be who is only 52 and has been told to lose some weight, exercise more, subsist on lettuce and chicken. (“Rabbit food,” he grumbled.) Which is a whole lot better than any of the alternatives one might imagine.
Meanwhile, there’s something about the number 52. This week’s poem is a meditation on that number, in prose poem form.
My Brother Has a Heart Attack At 52
Cards in a deck, not counting jokers. Weeks in a solar year. The age a grandfather died. Also Grace Kelly, Erwin Rommel, Frank Zappa. Stix in that game where you pick them up, sliding one lucky break out from under another and keeping the whole mess from falling down.
White keys on a standard piano. Liked by the Aztecs and Mayans for a great cycle of years. Tellurium: atomic number 52, silvery-white and rare, though stable. Hopes to find it in Telluride didn’t pan out. A wavelength of 520 nanometers falls squarely in the green.
With a B, it’s a band and some bombers. Also a bus line in Brooklyn, an opening chess move, a cocktail, a hairstyle, a Volvo engine. Also the age William Shakespeare, Thomas Beckett, Christopher Reeve exited.
Polio was still an epidemic in 1952. Mr. Potato Head came out. 1852? Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1752 was shorted some of September: 11 days “lost” when the Julian British went Gregorian (a mere 170 years after France, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain…made the switch).
Dewey Decimal Class 52 catalogs serial publications printed in English. Age an uncle passed away. Calories in 15 M&Ms or ten Kalamata olives.Romans wrote LII. Factorization: two-squared by thirteen. The telephone country code for Mexico. US Route 52 runs SC to ND.
The number of upper and lower case letters in the English alphabet. (Counting in Base 52, they could each rep a digit. Which is why we don’t.) 52 American hostages held in Iran, ’79 to ’81. It’s four and one-third dozen of anything, but in the astronomer’s New General Catalog, it’s a spiral galaxy in Pegasus.
At the US Archives: Records Group 52 holds hospital and case records back to the 1860s, handwritten evidence of mortality. The mileage of two marathons, rounded. Kingston, Jamaica’s 52 meters above sea level. At 50 miles above the earth, you’re an astronaut, though you’ve technically not reach space, which is 12 miles further out. Harry Houdini, Roy Orbison, Peter the Great.
In 2052, I’ll be 85. He’ll be 82. We could make this whole list over again.
If you enjoyed this poem
You’ll find more of my poems on this blog or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves, which is available in both ebook and print.
Missed a poem of the week? Links to prior weeks are on this page.