Look at that desk, he said, five-hundred-page shuffle,
Don’t tell me that is the sign of busy,
Don’t give me some stupid story.
Obviously, to the untrained eye, the olio of font shapes, ink colors,
mixed mediums, led, lead, led to rushed conclusions-false starts-
See the red? I pled. This shows a state of flux.
Minus. He said, Excuses. I use that color too.
What do you do all day? Rotate sheets-scribble letters-
And he was a numbers guy, a math man, a counter of beans,
so the only way to balance
our opposing views was to speak strict geometry,
and stepping outside on that crisp clear night I said,
See the equilateral triangle up there-look up-
Venus on the bottom right, Mars atop and the
Crescent moon? He smiled at me like the moon.
And said, I see, but what does that have to do with you,
You haven’t shown me anything new.
The next night, the same time, the book keeper asked
the book collector, Red anything today? She denied doing any further editing.
He preferred being in black himself.
There is no less of a mess on that desk. Tell me, Sweetie,
Have you gotten somewhere today? We still needed to reconcile.
So I took him back outside and told him to look up at the scalene now,
Venus sinking, the moon smirking, Mars winking wide and weak,
and asked him what does it mean?
He could not figure out the answer I was looking for,
So I helped him a bit and filled the space in with the correct operators,
Operate-hers, Calculate-hers and Compute-hers
were all aptly named for gender roles.
Without needing further proof,
he understood the expansion and rotation,
All at once he said
Read me one of your poems, Please.
Image credit By Smithsonian Institution from United States [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons.
