Chincoteague

Walking in Chincoteague among the reeds
stitching thin air and sunlight into shade
I thought of Tabitha the seamstress dead
and Peter at her bedside calling out
Get up!—which led me suddenly to you
and winter evenings from the time before,
hunched in a cone of yellow light, one hand
poising your needle like a trophy saved
from chaos that might any moment now
descend again, the other with a thread
you lifted to your pouting lips and kissed
to dampen and make sharp enough to pierce
the needle’s eye before you pulled it tight,
and took a breath, and cut the thread in two.