The summer before the porch was enclosed
we’d eat our card-table suppers out there,
as the sun set behind the Steeles’ house,
and sooner or later Dad would decide
we had to review the compass points.
He’d stand one of us, back to him, and ask:

“If your left hand is pointing West
— that’s where the sun sets, remember–
what direction are you facing?”
South.  No – North –
we’d stammer.  “That’s right.”
Then, turning us by the shoulders
like in Blind Man’s Bluff, he’d say:
“Now you’re facing me,
with the garden behind you (North).
In what direction am I standing?”

I’m not sure why this brief obsession.
But soon the porch, enclosed and ordinary,
became the New Room, called that ever after,
a place where many years later our mother
would read in the low green chair
by the window, the afternoon sun coming in
(West) from where the Steeles once lived,
behind her (North) what used to be his garden.