I fell in love, today, with the black
and blue marker stains on the table
made by the two-year-old boy—
he colored in the circles he’d drawn
with so much enthusiasm that the ink
seeped through the paper
and into the lemon cream paint on the table
where no amount of scrubbing could remove it.
It wasn’t so much the stain though, no,
and it wasn’t the color. What I fell in love with
was the way his mother didn’t see
that the table was ruined. She saw
that he did such a fine, precise job,
that he took so much pleasure in the coloring.
And when I apologized for bringing markers
that didn’t easily wash, she looked at me
with so much surrender and said,
“On a day like today,
who could worry about a table?”
It was yesterday they found the dog
waiting beside the car.
It was this morning the skier’s body was found
in a massive snow slide.
It was all day, through the stupor of loss,
I fell in love with the shape of empty branches,
the scent of black tea, the sound
of my son’s voice, fell in love
with the grace in the way my friend shrugged
when she saw the table, the way she hugged
her son. She offered me chocolate from London.
We ate the squares slowly. All day the gray edge
of grief made every little thing
more precious, more sweet.
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