With Statistical Means, She Writes

by Lawrence Mark Lesser

Math seeks
structure once
context boils off.
Not in statistics
where context informs method
and interpretation.

So when a statistician sits with context
to write poetry,
she can play
in everyone’s yard,
where sampling
yields found poetry,

where visualization
yields imagery.
Her couplets like matched pairs,
even those imperfectly rhymed,
a tail rhyme on a heavy tail.
She picks

poem size
for higher power
and adjusted R².
With elliptical confidence,
she settles for nothing
but the best

fitting line, jittering
phonetics, poetics, semantics, and linguistics.
Wrangling rawness, she scans and trims
for robustness
‘til datum yields
punctum.