Letters and Numbers

Down the side of page one in his gray softback journal he squeezed the letters

R
G
B

then across from each, like notes on a staff, an inscrutable series of zeroes and ones that reflected some unknowable pattern lodged in his astronomer’s brain—

maybe Red Green Blue to color in the Fibonacci spiral he printed on his business cards when the cancer returned

or nonsensical numbers for the Black Belt Sudoku puzzle he still pushed through with his morning oatmeal

or in the final days a single haunting code pulsing through leaf and cosmos that he had begun to write himself into

and then all those blank pages

left for me.

Pat Snyder Hurley is a Pushcart-nominated poet from Columbus, Ohio, who has been published in literary journals including Pudding Magazine, Poydras Review, Snapdragon, and the Passager Journal, as well as the chapbook Hard to Swallow (NightBallet Press, 2018). You can find her online at pathurleypoet.com