Leslie Neustadt

I am haunted by triangles.
Euclidean space eludes me.
But I live within its truths.
The sum of any two sides
of a triangle always exceeds
the length of the third side.

I grew up in a polygon
of untruths, caught
between parents
at acute angles.
We refuted Pythagoras’ theorem;
violated the law of cosines.
My mother obtuse,
my father, the circumcenter.

Hungry for congruence,
I never understood.
Geometry is sacred.
If only a steely eyed
geometrician had helped me
untangle the triangulations.