ManicDDaily

As followers of this blog know, I’ve gotten very involved of late with the dVerse Poetry Pub, and poetry in general.  (There is nothing like community for stimulating work. )  The prompt today by Emmet Wheatfall deals with “conflation,” what I think of as piecing things, often disparate, together.  I don’t know if this poem totally qualifies, but it is a poem I’ve had on my mind, and that I re-wrote (and improved) with the idea of conflating themes in mind.   

Far

We pushed from cold night into a Chinese restaurant,
the fluorescents reverberating like the din.  One waitress
wiped the table, burnishing smears into reflection;
 another balanced a rounded pot of tea and a fist’s stack
of cups (their sides glowing, incongruously,
with little seeds of translucence, grains of rice
made glass), the pot so full
that tea brimmed to the edge of its
spout with every shift from level, hip
or wrist, a
glimmering lithe tongue.

A man in my group had, some time before,
lost his adult child.  It had been sudden, she
had been young.
It was hard for me to look at him,
each expression–his patience
with the waitresses, concern about the chairs, even his
cold-reddened skin—a riddled mask
over the shear of loss that had left
the merest sense of face, worn
like the extremity
of an icon, the bronze saint whose foot has been rubbed
to a bare grip, slip
of soap, by petitioners who have
prayed to be washed clean, not of sin, but suffering.

The teapot begged to be poured; the waitress ran its
gulping stream over the beaded cups, steam rising into
air that ached to be warmed, the door, the night, opening
always at our side.

I could almost not look
at the man, as if his pain
might brim over,
scald me too, and yet another part of me,
what I like to think of as a part
that catches light like the curve of
a cup, or perhaps a part that is
dark, swirling, like the grain in the veneer
of even a plastic tabletop, that part that
somehow recalls a tree (or at least, the idea
of a tree), shifted my chair closer, wanting
to  drink with him that
fresh, hot tea, 
anything that could pass for succor.