A number with a portrait hidden inside it is a lovely, absurd idea, and Mike Stone's «Rare Numbers» builds a whole love poem out of ideas like it. The speaker imagines a number that contains the face of the person he loves, a formula that captures her beauty, and finally a procedure that reproduces his own feelings. Each is said to exist, and none is ever found. The central idea is that love is so large and so exact in its effect on us that the speaker can only reach for the most extreme language he knows, the language of mathematics. Even that language fails him, and the poem ends with something closer to ruin than to triumph.
The structure is simple and does a lot of work. Each of the three stanzas opens with "There exists," a phrase that mathematicians use when they claim a thing is out there without necessarily producing it. The poem repeats this logic. It never hands over the number, the function or the algorithm. It only insists on them, the way a lover insists that someone like his beloved must be somewhere in the universe's workings. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, so rhythm comes from line length. The first stanza stretches out in its third line, "That contains in it, after the millionth decimal place," and the line itself feels like counting digits, going on and on before it arrives at the short, plain "A portrait of you." The long wait and the quiet landing mimic the way a tiny payoff sits at the end of an enormous search.
The word choices carry a second layer of meaning. "Both irrational and imaginary" describes a kind of number, but it also describes the speaker's state of mind. Love is irrational, and it is imaginary in the sense that it is built from his own mind. The phrase lets the technical and the emotional meanings sit side by side. In the second stanza, "Hilbert space" sounds suitably vast and unreachable, a place that is real in mathematics but impossible to picture. Against this cold vocabulary the poet sets the long, soft word "exquisiteness," then lands bluntly on "your breast." The jump from abstract geometry to the body is a little comic and a little startling. It shows desire pulling the speaker out of his own cleverness. It also means the beloved appears only as an image and a body, something to be admired and calculated, while she herself says nothing.
The one-line stanza "Someplace yet to be discovered" is the poem's hinge. Standing alone, it reads as hope, as though the formula might yet turn up, and as an admission that it hasn't. The poem needs that pause, because the third stanza changes direction. Until now the mathematics has been about "you." Now it turns to "my love," and the verb is "emulates," which suggests that even the best algorithm can only copy the feeling, never be it. The last line is the longest and the darkest: the algorithm "urges all my lemming cells to self destruction." The lemming image draws on the popular picture of creatures rushing in a mass towards a cliff. Applied to the speaker's own cells, it makes love feel like a force that overrides the body's instinct to survive, and the word "all" admits no exception. The tone is half joking, half frightened, and that mixture gives the poem its sharpness.
What makes «Rare Numbers» worth reading is how it reverses the usual direction of a love poem. Poets often compare the beloved to something in nature, such as a summer's day or a rose. Here the comparison is to things that are exact, infinite and uncheckable, and the effect is both funny and moving. The poem suggests that precision cannot capture feeling, but that the wish for precision, the urge to prove that this person and this love are real, is itself a part of love. The speaker ends up undone by his own equation, and the reader is left to decide whether that is a joke, a warning or a confession.