CONSTELLATIONS

Everything perfectly proper
down to the clipped flight feathers
of the child’s migrating elbows
at the dinner table, hands folded
in his lap. But it can’t properly be said
the family sits around the dinner table
anymore, thinks the child

sitting in geometry class. Once
it was possible for the isosceles triangle
with two big sides and one small side—the one
of his mother and father and him—
to plot itself on a circle and to say
it was sitting around a dinner table, at dinnertime.
Even in geometry that was possible. But now

it’s just his mother and him. Two points. A line.
And it just isn’t possible to say it’s a family.
And it just isn’t accurate to say they sit around
the dinner table anymore. They sit across.
And his mother’s line of sight is a ray. It goes out
and doesn’t meet his. And the only triangles now
are her elbows when she cries, her face in her hands.