THE LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE DINING ROOM TABLE

 Ken Meisel

Has my whole life in it; even when I tried to become a big fish

or a bird or a cat or a cicada trying to sing one sensational song.

Every life is a pastoral, just an ode to the light at the edge

of the dining room table where we eat, where we break bread,

where we speak to one another about what love is; or what hurts us,

or what makes us cry like a fountain made of stars blowing out of eyes.

To say yes to the world means one more life counts for the earth’s

simple bargain with us. To hold a bird in one’s hand is to feel what a star is,

when it is trying with all its might. To kiss is to play dice with a mystery.

To pet the cat, my little cat named Olive, makes me smile like an elephant

because the wind in the willows is what breathes in and out all our days,

and she’s not trying to prove anything to a year’s calendar except

that it matters to nap in the light at the edge of the dining room table.

The light at the edge of the dining room table doesn’t seem to care a wit

about all my memories. All it does is act like I’m there, just keeping

count of what energy is made of when it slants direct across wood,

and one is left with excitement, or what Spirit is without my two cents.

God created words because we couldn’t describe him. This is what a hiker

told me in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We were hiking together.

We were up in the rhododendron gardens; he was divorcing his wife

or rather, she was leaving him for another person; we drank beer

and we pretended we understood what dying and love was made of,

and he told me, God created all these words so that we could describe

what the light at the edge of a table feels like when we are lost in it.

He was drinking, and when the fire petered out he blubbered like love

does when it drains into that unsteady brook of memory and forgetting.

It slaughters something deep in us, he said to me. Yes it does. It’s forged in light.

I told him nothing is wrong except that we use words to describe

what the world is trying to say to us by how it won’t ever answer us.

The light at the edge of the dining room table is God, saying

Come unto me; the world is what cries us awake when we give love to it.

Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist, a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of eight books of poetry. His most recent books are: Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press, 2020) and Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press, 2018). Meisel has recent work in Concho River Review, I-70 Review, San Pedro River Review, and Rabid Oak.