Our Father, the Lost Geometer
Cal Freeman
Down near the creek, Euclid Avenue floods
with brown-green water. I rest my right hand
on his Elements and swear that my life
will always be this circumscribed and small,
a rite that goes by many names,
among them allegiance, temperament, weather.
My sister wanders out in a fog of obtuse angles.
She wears a Gore-Tex slicker to bear
the heavy rain that’s falling from the north.
Cataracts echo in the culvert;
the submersible pump emits its steady hum.
Last August I watched the mud of the creek bed
dry to shaved ridges of bone
from the west-facing doors of my mother’s house.
These drastic riparian shifts drown
and erase the stories nobody wants told.
I keep referring to Euclid as our father.
I keep guessing where the edges of this life
fall off into ensoulment. In bisecting
the city he made us who we are,
a terminal series of squares and birthing lines,
as if this town were the geometry of grief
and we were blameless.
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with brown-green water. I rest my right hand
on his Elements and swear that my life
will always be this circumscribed and small,
a rite that goes by many names,
among them allegiance, temperament, weather.
My sister wanders out in a fog of obtuse angles.
She wears a Gore-Tex slicker to bear
the heavy rain that’s falling from the north.
Cataracts echo in the culvert;
the submersible pump emits its steady hum.
Last August I watched the mud of the creek bed
dry to shaved ridges of bone
from the west-facing doors of my mother’s house.
These drastic riparian shifts drown
and erase the stories nobody wants told.
I keep referring to Euclid as our father.
I keep guessing where the edges of this life
fall off into ensoulment. In bisecting
the city he made us who we are,
a terminal series of squares and birthing lines,
as if this town were the geometry of grief
and we were blameless.