Irreducible Minimum
Zero puts on its Sunday-go-to-meeting best.
Zero is the enfant terrible of numbers.
Zero has a toothache, leave it alone for awhile,
let it find its bearings, adjust to the temperatures.
You don’t want to get zero angry.
You’ve met its cousin, the corpulent O.
You once lived next door to its family, the Circles.
Doesn’t say much though, our zero does.
Doesn’t do too much or try very hard.
I don’t think it thinks it really needs to.
Zero boasts of cardinal and ordinal values
while being of no influence and scant importance.
A non-entity, the value of its function vanishes,
producing a sum identical to that which it was added.
Zero is, after all, the symbol for Nothing.
Nada, nadir, goose-egg, blank . . .
But zero has grown accustomed to the name-calling.
It’s Mid-Eastern good looks having moved millions,
quite intimate with commas and dollars,
associating with decimals in order that it might appear strong.
Zero pines for the full moon and powers of ten,
finding courage through configuration,
brought up to believe in the perfect form.
“I rhyme with Hero,” it proudly boasts,
unaware of other, more brutal, ironies than One.
| Bruce McRae |
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levelheaded: Irreducible Minimum
Broadly, this poem is an attempt to reduce the poem’s supposedly “Irreducible Minimum” into 25 lines of language. The poem is held together by the pleasure it takes in its central joke. Beyond this, it almost goes without saying: the poem is a character profile of something called “Zero.” But while the poem would have us understand Zero’s boorishness, it also asks us to consider what it means to assign human characteristics to the number zero.
More on that shortly. First, let’s look the way the poem characterizes Zero. The speaker does not hold Zero in high regard. Zero “doesn’t do too much or try very hard.” Zero is “of no influence and scant importance.” With its “Sunday go-to-meeting best” and its intimacy with “commas and dollars,” we could see Zero as a common caricature of a Wall Street banker – literally valuable, but devoid of values. But the poem isn’t just a hit job. We also get to know Zero’s extended family – the Circles. The Circles exist mostly as a brief foil to Zero’s loudmouth tendencies, but these kinds of extraneous details create some room for sympathy, particularly in light of Zero’s “toothache” or that it “has grown accustomed to name-calling.”
It’s also worth noting Zero is referred to as an “it” throughout the poem. This doesn’t rule out the possibility that Zero is a stand-in for a certain type of person, but it almost rules out that we are hearing about a specific person, and it opens the possibility that we are hearing about something more abstract than either.
And that brings us to the poem’s purpose. Why are we learning about this character? Well, we have no good answer to that question. The poem is not designed for us to assign clear and indisputable meaning to its parts. We can see real people in some of the poem’s lines, and we can establish some affinity with the speaker because we’ve had common experiences. But even if there is no answer to that question, do we have enough? We think so, and the ending is the key to the poem’s success. The poem is at its most ambiguous in its final lines. We see Zero pining. We understand that Zero was “brought up to believe” certain things, that they may not be inherent it. With “more brutal, ironies,” the poem raises its stakes. There is finally real danger for Zero, and frighteningly, Zero doesn’t know the danger exists.
-The Editors
