It is a room of chairs.
Their thin spindles let the light through,
visually almost invisible,
easy to move about the room,
to reconfigure as people come and go,
with no sense of mass or weight,
always room for one more, one less,
a different sort of life,
one that allows for constant change,
ebb and flow,
never too much,
never too little,
a shape-shifting goldilocks kind of room.
You feel strangely at home here,
an older version of Alice in Wonderland,
never quite yourself,
never quite what others expect,
never quite fitting in,
at least not in the way you expected.
The world has not made room for you.
You are tolerated
as long as you re-arrange your furniture
in the proper way
in the proper time.
Your eyes soak in the room,
so airy and bright,
and settle into a chair.
There is no one here but you
and the woman you love,
and it matters not where the chairs are
as long as there are two together.
On my poetry blog, this poem is illustrated by a photograph taken at the Thomas Nelson House in Yorktown, Virginia, I love the colonial simplicity of the room, the lightness, and easy reconfiguration a room full of chairs offers. The fact that they are Windsor chairs, one of my passions, makes it even more wonderful.
My wife and I were talking this morning. We had company last night and ended up going to bed without the broad stretch of time talking that is part of our day to day life. We both felt the loss of that time, a disconnectedness that is uncommon to us and to our relationship.
From those two things, this poem.
