Judson Crews's "The Calculation" is a small scene with a sting in it. A man and a woman stand in the cool twilight, and she makes a bold, playful, intimate gesture. He answers with the language of a forecaster, and the moment closes. Its central idea is that protecting yourself against disappointment can guarantee it. The speaker is right about everything he predicts, and being right is exactly what loses him the evening.
The opening stanza shows him bracing for loss before anything has happened. "I figured that some degree / of evaporation could be / expected" sounds like a lab report, not a man talking about a woman. Evaporation is a clever image for feeling slowly leaking away, and he treats it as a natural process, nobody's fault. The first two lines even rhyme, "degree" and "be", but the rhyme is cut off by the single stranded word "expected", and after that the poem never rhymes again. It is a tiny, neat version of the thing being described. Then comes the physical detail: he turns his collar up and buttons "the last button". Closing himself in is the first action we see.
Against this, the second stanza opens with "Defiantly", and the woman takes off her "step-ins", an old-fashioned word for underwear, and twirls them on her finger. The line break after "her" holds the gesture in suspense for a beat. The twirling makes it playful and a little mocking, a dare more than a seduction. Then comes the poem's oddest moment. She talks about a weather map she saw at the bus station and remembers "distinctly" that "low barometric pressure / is predicted for the Northwest / portion". It may be a joke, a deflection, or a message in his own code. It could also mean that she has noticed his habit of turning everything into data and is handing it back to him. Either way, the stiff phrase "portion" dangling alone on its line adds to the deadpan comedy. The forecast sounds as if it is about the weather and about the two of them at once.
His reply gets the shortest stanza, and it is the saddest line in the poem: "I figured, I admitted, something / like that." The echo of "I figured" shows he has not moved an inch since the first stanza. "Admitted" makes his understanding sound like a confession, and "something like that" is a shrug. A woman has just performed a daring gesture and made an oddly tender remark, and he agrees with her as if confirming a train timetable. The words are about as vague as a sentence can be.
The final stanza answers the second. "Ruefully" mirrors "Defiantly", so her whole emotional arc is held between two adverbs. She turns her back and puts the step-ins on again. The verbs are plain and the gesture is quiet, and nobody shouts or leaves. What happens is that the earlier moment is undone. The poem began with him buttoning up, and it ends with both of them fully covered.
Formally the poem is free verse built from short, uneven lines that follow the rhythm of speech. The lines break in unexpected places, such as "her / step-ins", "something / like that" and "Northwest / portion", so that small hesitations appear in the middle of phrases. The vocabulary splits into two camps. His words and the weather-map words are technical: calculation, degree, evaporation, barometric, predicted. Hers are physical and active: slipped, twirling, turned. The poem is mostly about which camp wins.
What makes it worth reading is how much it does with so little. It is funny, because the language is so absurdly clinical for the situation, and then it turns sad once you see what the clinical language costs. The title is the final irony. He did calculate correctly, and the sum came out as loss.