My father reflected in a table

The varnished luster has lasted all these years

in a pair of tables reflecting my father’s craft.

Before he was a knickerbockered Chicago boy 

playing kick-the-can in the street, the tree

towered high in the fresh mountain air  

of my grandfather’s dreams. As they packed up 

and moved to a Colorado farm,

it sheltered birds and shaded the forest floor.

Now a man, but with no war to fight, 

my father got up in cold dawn to crouch 

in a frozen field or sit with baited hook 

by a rustling stream, inhaling the fresh air 

in silence, waiting for his chance. 

Someone cut that tree into boards

as he enlisted, missed his bid

for bakers’ school, learned airplane repair, 

then married my mother. The boards seasoned 

while he worked in a gas station, struggled 

through the math to be an engineer, 

and finally decided to teach instead.

Now he hunted for four, bringing home 

trout and pheasant, rabbit and venison

he cleaned and prepared for cooking

as the wood waited to become something.

One day, alone in a quiet workshop, undisturbed 

by tobacco-chewing students and irate parents, 

he measured the boards twice. With sharpened tools,

he cut perfect, straight lines. Planing, sanding

with gentle hands, smoothing wood to satin, 

he breathed the scent of the mountains, 

in the same silence, with the same sharp focus.

I imagine him happy then, angling 

the table’s legs with a fisherman’s patience 

and drilling the dowel holes carefully,

like tying a fly. Precisely as he cast his line,

he mitered the drawer face and fitted it in place

like pieces of a broken dream. 

While he divorced, traveled, married

and remarried, the pair of tables stayed mated.

Someday, their ashes or dust will join the earth 

and all of us, but for now, they reflect the man 

I think my father wanted to be.