41) The Man Who Is Not At The Table

Now that my humorous friend is dead
and from the world is deleted
he does not sit at the long table in the dining room,
the long table whose faded green tablecloth can be described
as gentle and modest by someone alive
in a world just waiting for adjectives. He does not sit there

reading a book he hasn't looked at since grad school,
bemused by his own marginal jottings --
"Art as illusion? Or is this ironic?" -- seeing
an idiosyncratic merit in phrases that once provided only
promptings for lunch-hour parodies in that courtyard
where the yellowjackets obsessed over our sandwiches . . .
He's not there

at the table in such a way
that someone could notice his dark reflection
in the glass pane that protects a watercolor of beached boats,
his reflection dark-shadow-gray but not black
framed by the oddly bright reflection of the red and white curtains
behind him filtering winter afternoon sunlight
with a quiet complication

that someone usually might skim over
as if there would be plenty of time to go back
and really ponder the bits that seemed elusive
or just not crucial to the main theme
the first time through.

---Mark Halliday