Eighteen wheeler — I. Innumeracy

Has anyone ever counted how many wheels an eighteen-wheeler actually has?
Maybe it is like a millipede,
which is just a few legs short of what it says on the tin
—and never the same number twice.
Maybe an eighteen wheeler actually only has
fourteen wheels on those cold foggy mornings
when one wouldn’t want to bundle up, walk all the way around,
and check them up close.
And twenty-two, while driving where the I-94 meets the lunacy of Chicago traffic,
with one’s knuckles whitened with fear
as hallucinating drivers zig and zag into and out of one’s lane.
And, surely, an odd fifteen when absolutely no one is nearby
—a defiant expression on part of nobody-in-particular against nothing-specific,
just because
nature abhors vacuous reason.

Maybe The One Thousand and One Nights ended
after only two hundred and forty-one actual nights,
for anyone that counted the times that
Sherezade punctuated the story as
“dawn was approaching”
—which would be the same number of nights after which I broke a promise
to a friend to share a joy diary
once per night every night for a year.
That many nights can as easily seem
as three hundred and sixty five or one thousand and one,
if one moment of ecstasy can so compellingly stretch
to be a promise for a lifetime
as it often does under the refracting lens of love.
(You, who are inclined to actually count the number of those Arabian Nights now,
are you certain that you will find the same number
when you count again tomorrow night?
Are you certain that your copy of the book
—or your ledger for the count—
will remain faithful to you?)

Maybe Helen’s beauty launched
some eleven hundred ships,
but the poets had to round it down to a clean thousand
to fit meter and rhyme.
(And if a milli-Helen is the amount of beauty worth only one ship,
shouldn’t a milli-pede be just a very small toe
instead of a sole-train?
But I digress.)

Yet the innumeracies of love rarely necessitate a flotilla.
Like any bundle of sweat and ecstasy we find our way into,
where the number and owner of limbs become uncertain
and where we simultaneously seem to be
    the proverbial one,
    and one another,
    and everyone,
all at the same time.
Like if your love is reciprocated today, you will have always been loved,
and if not, no one has ever loved you.
—at least for the first few times.

The Wise are those that will not seek a consistency
that the Intelligent cannot comprehend,
those that do anything but
    count
their blessings.

Melih Sener

“Eighteen Wheeler” consists of five parts:
1. Eighteen wheeler — I. Innumeracy
2. Eighteen wheeler — II. Confabulation
3. Eighteen wheeler — III. Induction
4. Eighteen wheeler — IV. Dice
5. Eighteen wheeler — V. Oath
(… well, fine, and also something about carrots.)