Per Capita

In the style of Billy Collins

I read in The Atlantic today that the Vatican has the highest crime rate in the world. In honor of our math teacher pope, a poetic consideration of the mathematic dimensions of this claim.

I like to imagine a priest
lifting a wallet from a tourist’s coat—
not maliciously, just absently,
the way one pockets a pen at a hotel desk.

It would explain so much.

The Vatican, you see, holds the record:
highest crime rate in the world,
which sounds like something
you’d whisper at confession,

except the math is doing most of the sinning.

Eight hundred residents. Five million visitors a year, shuffling through in their comfortable shoes, each one a potential statistic but none of them a capita.

The capita are the cardinals.
The capita are the Swiss Guards
standing very still in their Renaissance pajamas.
The capita are the men
who decide which crimes get counted
and which get quietly forgiven.

Divide five million tourists’ misfortunes
by eight hundred souls in vestments
and you have yourself a headline,
a scandal, a data point
that technically contains no lies.

This is the per capita problem: not whose crimes, but whose heads we choose to count.

It also explains why the single resident
of a very small island
is the world’s most dangerous driver,
most haunted individual,
and statistically certain
to be struck by lightning
before lunch.

We are all, in some denominator,
more alarming than we seem.
The priest replaces the wallet.
No one files a report.
The rate stays high.