Arranging the marriage furniture

Arranging the marriage furniture

(a conversation overheard after the fact)

Says he,

We’ve been looking for an upholstered chair. For the bedroom
but not for the bed. You know, for when you wanna watch TV,
but not in the living room. A chair like that.

And it will, oh yea, its rusty color makes the bedroom look
better than it does. Bought it right away, that same day.

So it works, works perfectly well, like when the wife is in the
other room, fiddling, doing whatever it was she was doing,
and I wasn’t.

I was in the bedroom alone.
That’s what a chair can do.

neil reid © february 2011

Process notes:
Honestly, don’t blame me! And I almost got up, put on my hat and coat, walked away from the table when something about this common yet earnest conversation just suggested pen-to-hand, then please write. The only omissions are mostly only omission itself (too much too fast for me to get it all down).

I think (I suspect) his meanings may be something slightly (kinder) other than recorded here, but I adored the words he chose to use all the same. (That’s why I stayed.) Yet again, there’s something “informative” too about the how & what he said. I am mostly studious editor here.

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Chair redux

read write prompt #111, broken chair
by Nathan Moore

Write a poem based upon your own response to a photograph.

(Read the RWP prompt for descriptive details and the full-sized photograph.)
(Read other participants responses to this prompt.)

image by Sepulture (Mood Disorder)

Chair redux

This once was a tree. It still is.

Last word said, “Bare this now

open palm, imprint our broached

sky cloaked hood, and it will

appear to you, a river’s face.”

Hidden memory we can’t reveal

to a sight-seer eye. Not because

we don’t, because you won’t.

“Watched and Watcher since

time understood a followed word.”

This was once a tree. So it is.

There is only enough to build

three legs. “That much and

no more! Don’t ask.”

Yet neither, hesitate!

Such tended in devout right thumb,

perhaps some rain, we’ll wait thus

for a fourth to grow. What matter

a millennial dual-helix pause?

After all, this chair already

grew a man. “It is the eternal

passion of a three-legged chair.”

A chair that made the universe.

This was a tree. Father, son,

holy ghost, “and man steps forth”.

And what’s a righteous god without

providing a lap to contemplate?

Neil Reid © January 2010

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Found beneath my chair

Found beneath my chair

 

 

Says wondering to chair,

     Is this home?

Says chair to wondering,

     Be seated.

 

Says chair to chorus,

     I am one. I am one.

Says chorus to chair,

     Listen. Listen.

 

Says room to door,

     We are coming. Be willing.

Says door to expectation,

     His children are waiting. You may pass.

 

Says sky to me,

     It was always us. And you are my heart.

Says me to chorus,

     You are everywhere I turn, and I can but

     diminish the flood, never rest the dawn

     in shadow’s fear. I am one.

 

Says dream to wondering,

     Yes.

 

2002 © Neil Reid

 

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Burnished

Burnished

 

I am my mother’s eyes.

I am my father’s hair.

 

Borne of cold maple and

sweet hot humid southern stone.

 

My grandmother’s gingham,

a cat beside the kitchen sink.

A jar of nails unbent in my

great uncle’s backyard shed.

 

Smooth old paint, three layers deep 

upon a farm bred captain’s chair.

Mother tried to refinish it when he was gone,

find its charm under days of labor spent.

 

But the charm was before, part of

a promise unkept in a dusty shed.

Uncomfortable, when she was done.

 

I liked it best in his shed.

 

 

Neil Reid © April 2009

 

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