Hating Geometry

This poem appears in the Spring 2015 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.

Walking, I turned sharp left there, went two blocks,
Turned right, and off the straight east-west farm road
A black car angled to the curb and stopped
Beside a house. The driver, a woman, got out.

Just then I saw with a shock that the cloth toy
On the right bumper, a sitting cottontail,
Was real, was dead, caught young and springlike, so,
Mid-spring of its last spring, front-facing still.

It seemed out for a ride, like a glad puppy
Feeling its floppy ears stir with the wind.
You made a catch, I said, and she with a shudder
Said yes, her husband would have to take it down.

I walked on then in grief, as always hating
Geometry, by whose unfeeling book 
A line from a to b may penetrate
Straight through the figure of an upward arc.