The Distance Between These Things

Imagine me as a child
with a measuring tape
borrowed from my mother's sewing basket
and it was yellow on one side and
gray-white on the other.

Imagine me stretching it
across the dining room table
and realizing 57 inches lengthwise
but 64 on the diagonal.
It was the birth of geometry.

From protractor and compass,
I learned to extract the area
of a figure and express those values.

My hand was so many inches long before it grew.
My loneliness was measured in square yards.
The cosign of my longing became
my latitude and
I could find its position from
the angle of another person's moon.
This was and is and will become
my geography,
my way of saying
that I was here
for so long
and for so often
and it will never be enough.

So,
stretched from end to end,
each of my emotions might circle the earth.
Or not.