Statistics Means Never Having to Say You’re Certain

Danielle Evans

One, the number of times you’ve been on a real
baseball field before tonight, sitting so far up in
the bleachers that with your eyes closed
you hear only the birds and the L rumble
and think this could be the beach, or
Two, the number of men on each team
so beautiful you’d marry them tonight,
no questions asked, or
Three or Four, the number of friends you made
whose names you’ve already forgotten,
or, Five, the number of dollars your friend
overtipped the server, for coming
all the way back to the ninth row
of the last section, to bring more Bud Light.

Sometimes I wish I’d been a mathematician,
the kind of person who could find order
anywhere. Instead, we’ve found a Russian,
an FBI agent, two marines and kid
from Nebraska. While row 8 gets rowdy
with each pitch, I read the television screens
like they are novels, watch the numbers flashing
across the bottom for each batter like they are not
records of the number of times the bat
connected with the ball, or the number of games
won in a season, but a complicated
all encompassing index of value, one that will
tell you not just how fast each man runs, but what it is
he dreams of getting to, at night when he is alone
with his hotel linen.

Maybe the numbers are, in the end,
total values, maybe playing any game
runs the risk of becoming nothing but numbers,
maybe your own life could be reduced to similar
calculus, if anyone cared. A happiness index:
what you are grateful for, minus what you
take for granted, divided by what you want squared.
A lifetime achievement score:
what you have won, divided by what
you deserved. A purity test:
the number of people you’ve loved,
divided by the number of times you said fuck me
and didn’t mean it. A moral aptitude test:
how often you blame Eve minus
how often you blame the serpent, divided by
how often you blame the damned apple—
which, historians say, wasn’t
an apple anyway, but probably a pomegranate,
owing to the climate. Unless, of course,
there really was an Eden
in which case geography is useless,
our maps being charts of only what we’ve known
we’ve lost. Here on this earth someone still
has to lose, take one less mark in the win column
become a slight percentage more mortal,
as soon as the floodlights dim
the rest of us must bleed home slowly,
pass the remains of crushed beer and popcorn,
become the reduction of a crowd to singular
elements of motion, accept the reduction
of ourselves by one night, one less chance
to be anything else.