Tangle and fray, a run in my stockings. The table
felt heavy or turgid, the grain cracked. At dinner
that year, we fought over German and Italian and
English, over mahogany and over the last of the salmon.
He gets up from the head of the table. That chair that
wobbles as people come and go. An internal earthquake,
a witness of life occurring in multiple orbits. I’d
only picked up a few phrases: he’d had difficulty
translating himself into a language we understood ––
a pile of bricks half laid, a basket of discarded,
splintered matches.

A poem by Rose Miles.