The Mathematician's Lover

Flitting little shadow, dark, then light.
A candle gutters against the draft

From the window by the desk
Closed against the night --

A grown-up night, uninhabited by
The witches and sprites you as a child

Thought carried on out of sight.
The desk is wide and white;

It offers up a straightened, neat
Stack of papers on which to write

Notations, formulas you
Conceived.  By a gibbous moon,

As mute as a monk hunkered over his
vellum, you inscribe this theorem, then

Call your colleagues who throng
That chalk-dusty room on campus.  Stark

And new:  a herd of equations in black
Ink, remembered and rescued from the brink of sleep.