To Be Met

..for Peggy 

You, on your way to sharpen a pencil,

I, hurrying to the kitchen for a cold nectarine 

meet in the hallway like two ships merging 

in harbor light. How could I not embrace you, 

stopping the clock, the orb in its orbit, 

to say how we’ll never forget this moment? 

We laugh knowing we will forget, 

 there being so many stoppages. 

And yet when I spot you in the market 

weaving your way down the aisles 

I navigate past the frozen lotus, 

 black-eyed peas and Jolly Green Giant, 

to hold you in my arms and halt Homer 

in the blinding light of mid-sentence as if 

Odysseus is home to Penelope again and again. 

To be renewed daily 

 in quadrants of morning melon, the passing of pills, 

our ritual tea with glumper dish, 

a touch of milk and biscotti, dunked. 

The choreography of us: 

each other’s step and hesitation, 

 the measure of our silence and stare, 

a charged word and it’s cargo. 

How we know where not to go and meet there 

In a shared unknowing.