Direction

You expect me to tell you about the interior of the room
in which I’m typing this, and connect it to my feelings,
but I’d rather tell you about the interior of your room
and use that as a symbol for something less abstract.

Actually, here’s a better idea. Let’s put our heads together
and try to think up a third room unknown to either of us,
then divide or multiply its number of windows by the least
number of words necessary to describe it.

In this way perhaps we can accurately triangulate
brief but nearly photographic images of each other’s
mothers when they were first married, in veils,
and of their driving down the street with tin-can tails,

of their first orgasmic separation, their little giggles,
and of their medication when it came time to prescribe it.
You expect me to tell you about the spite in my loin
which is the sad hail of commas in the professor’s paragraph,

but I can’t even begin to do it, for I am a ranch boy
and not even a very good one; I live in El Bandito, Texas.
I am an old man in Maine, I manage a dime store,
and you, you are a movie director, but only in your mind.   

—Aaron Belz