Tin Foil Thanksgiving

Pegeen brings me dinner,
chicken salad wraps and chocolate brownies
and conversation feathered deep with affection.
I sit in my recliner, my shoulder firmly trussed,
my pain firmly entrusted to post-op oxy.
She tells me of the Thanksgiving dinner brought
in aluminum trays by the caring staff
where her father died
(Her girls even now call it
the Tin-Foil Thanksgiving.)
She speaks of telling
her mother that her husband had gone:
the family standing in the room, “Where’s Ed?”
then silence, the others stepping back,
and Peg, by standing still
pushed forward to the podium of mourning,
to speak the deep truth of death. 

I think of how waiters sometime wrap uneaten
dinners in tin foil, shaping them into swans.
But swans, in their reality, make lie our eyes’ repast:
we do not see the urgent churning below,
the power of those thighs in continuous
travail that feeds our dreams of unending ease.

We throw away the cellophane and cardboard.
My shoulder begins again to throb.
“You’ll be ok?” she asks as she gets up to leave.
I nod, as does she, in unsaid thanksgiving,
turning and returning to each other grace
that endures beneath tenebrous waters
as we paddle, serene on the surface,
across the holy sea of loss.

-Kitty Yanson