Where Two Are Gathered

Where Two Are Gathered

Coby Dolloff

Who is the third who walks always beside you? / When I count, there are only you and I together
– T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

Mathematics is a funny thing,
and friendship a funnier one still.
Whether we brave the frozen tundra with Shackleford
or face the fiery furnace
or the friendlier fire of the hearth,
gathered with friends on a night when
The Conversation begins to grow and to shine
and to take on what we lazily but rightly call “a Life of its own,”
or whether the burning is wholly in our eyes,
in our hearts, ablaze as we walked the road together – did we not feel it?

Mathematics is a strange thing,
and friendship a stranger one still.
Perhaps the old creed was right
(if I may not offend my brothers toward the East)
when it told us that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, together.
Perhaps we are not the first to recognize who sits among us
when we sit together and the bread is broken.

Mathematics is an odd thing,
and friendship an even odder one still.
Where two are gathered, three, or more —
Where three are gathered, are gathered four.

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Coby Dolloff
Poet & Writer

Coby writes and teaches at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA. His deepest interests lie at the intersection of theology and comedy. You can follow his work (if you’re not averse to a few memes) on his Substack. 

Photography by Sir Simo