“At the Dinner Table at Night,” a Poem by Allen Guy Wilcox

You’ve gone to bed with the baby again, as I step
gingerly through the house, searching for quiet projects
I can take to completion and leave for you like origami.
Each room for you to wake in as you wander,
brewing a gift like morning coffee, the raw ends
of your several lists now seared and cooling.

It’s much nicer when we can sit here
as a family a few moments longer, while our girl
begins to improvise tomorrow aloud, ticking off
her list of necessaries, countermanding the plot
with reasonable justifications which she has collected
from the pond like pretty rocks. To sit here,
with large glasses of water in front of us,
and a bowl of dressed cabbage now resting.
To age and grow together this way, to keep
unfeigned the family hug she often calls for;
the marriage and the patterns of work and rising,
not to let them go to seed; to allow ourselves
to achieve our own narrative, to board the right train,
see there are still seats for us, to watch the rifling
landscape harmonize, on this one route, headed
towards the very spot on the map we had agreed on.

How right it would feel to maintain the memory of being
at the dinner table at night, and, before bath and bedtime,
to have thrown a last jacket back on—it being a clear night,
after all—and to step out onto the driveway, caps on our heads,
holding hands or not, but together, and just look up.

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From The Red Goose by Allen Guy Wilcox, available from Doubly Mad.