Our kitchen, winter Sunday,
boys playing on the floor,
I’m drying breakfast dishes
when I have the vision:
four chairs in front of a store
on a street I never travel.
Four chairs that will complete
our chair-less dining room suite.
I drive into the vision
and they are there,
with the same turned legs,
the same dark wood
as our furniture at home.
And on the bottom of one seat:
1927, date in the same hand
as on the table, underneath.

Everything sundered
wants reuniting,
everything rent, to mend.
So, I am not amazed Dear Heart
that nightly you walk
from the occluded country
to rest awhile with me.
Are not we
who have born three sons,
more joined than chair and table
turned from a single tree?

From The Green Season, 2nd edition (World Parade Books, 2012).
Used here with the author’s permission.