The Invention of Zero by Andrew Philip | Scottish Poetry Library

What like was it
this abundant world

where nothing was not—
no neat ring

shackling us to absence,
no way not

to count or be counted—
where everything

filled without this
empty nest of a number

perched in the mind,
everything swerved

its wide white oblivion;
and could we,

given the state of our knowledge,
live with the lack of it

unable to quantify
certain populations

in the wild, the exhaustion
of our reserves,

the number and intensity
of cries in the night?

from The Ambulance Box (Cambridge: Salt, 2009)

Reproduced by permission of the publisher.