RIGHT ANGLES

Geometry came easily to me.
The right angle and the tense hypotenuse
Explained to me what I had been seeing my whole life.
The priest centers his circular chalice and paten and host
On the rectilinear table.
Women come in the afternoons to change the altar linen.
Thick and starched it celebrates the angles.
My grandmother had a table board
She covered evenly with polenta
Corn mush she covered with red sauce,
Setting a meatball in the center.
Sixteen people sat on its perimeter
All eating through the same large rectangle.
Racing to get to the middle.
So we knew which way to work our forks.
The vertical is the shortest distance to the meatball
But if you are in the corner of the rectangle.
You will eat in a hypotenuse to cut your cousin's path.
One of the men always won the race anyway.
Lifetime killers for food, big eaters, big sleepers after dinner.
These men built houses, they laid sidewalks, they laid brick.
My father used a level to check a plumb line coated with chalk
For a perfect vertical, or check a chalk line strung between posts
For the perfect horizontal, or used a straight-edge to guide a trowel,
Cutting diagonals across the concrete square before it set.
Where the diagonals cross, you will have four right angles.
Isosceles, they call them, with equal legs.
At the corners of the square
You will have eight forty-five -degree angles.
You can cut these into other things.
All of them have names.
You need a compass and a chalk or a pencil or a stick.
According to the priests, this is a form of prayer.
Don't worry about that, my father said.
Just get it right.