Zero

“Thou art an O without a figure.”

     —The Fool to King Lear

Robert Frost knows what zero's place is:

"I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places."

He was "too absent-spirited to count."

Poets have their ways of figuring the amount

Of what's carried over or left behind:

It's "misery in the sound of the wind"

for Wallace Stevens, that old snowman,

"who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

There's always some shepherd whose

song's just ended, some angel melting with ruth,

a skunk hour, or an empty heath,

"a tighter breathing and Zero at the Bone."

It's a narrow question, but to tell the truth,

zero's easy next to one.

                                                                        DL