No other had ever come close to it,
its warm walnut shine, sturdy but
graceful legs, with endless leaves for an
infinite number of dinner guests you rarely allowed,

its elliptical silhouette a perfect fit for the room in the
ugliest house in the nice neighborhood, a
fixer-upper worth hundreds of hours, gallons of paint and
sweat, with the basement that

flooded our very first night, the
living room with the misguided angel mural we drywalled over and the
lights you said to never use because you
couldn’t possibly reach the bulbs to change them,   

the kitchen where we called the family to tell them I was sick,
the bedroom where I healed, waking up five times that
year to a new body, until I was better but we were never
quite the same after death slapped me awake,

when we were parallel packing you let me
take it, more generous than you had to be, and now
it doubles as a table to host loved ones and a
desk to type poems looking back at a safer distance.