Two Chairs
LEON Literary Review, Issue #4
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Beside the health center you saw two chairs:
wooden, solid, placed
just so, as in a draftsman’s rendering.
They sat inside a bed of daffodils—
not two-toned
but yellow all the way through. The chairs
were empty. Had to be. You had a momentary
wish to meet
the giddy gardener who had planted daffodils
right up to the chairs’ legs, so the chairs would be
swimming in blooms,
the seats like placid rafts the yellow waters
sometimes lapped. If you pick your way through,
delicate and discerning
in your bare feet, you must then raise your legs
out of the cluster, cross them well, and sit
as if an island.
You must commit to quiet. A single stem
might wreathe itself around your calf, a head
bob on the surf,
a flower-eating waterbird could choose you
as its perch. You’ll close your eyes and know
what yellow smells like.
But no—the gardener madly with his shears—
It’s not for you. Are you an island?
Look again: two chairs.
I used to live in the neighborhood of a university that managed a sea of seasonal plantings. In April, the daffodils were seriously dense. I drafted this poem around the time of my son’s first birthday, when I was also pregnant with my second child. How did it feel, in that moment, to be walking alone to a doctor’s appointment? Was I one person? Two?