Conway, Arkansas

For Kate

We sat up late drinking coffee and then
beer and when that ran out we went back
to coffee. I'd been driving since yesterday,
seventeen hours behind the wheel
to this midnight coffee at a kitchen table
with one empty chair.

Cathy was there, leaning back in her chair,
black coffee and a lit Salem, silent and then
suddenly ready to tell us, everyone at the table,
how Hill looks more and more like you did back
when you were her age, time a wheel
that turns back on itself and only yesterday

you had said she looks more and more like Kate. Yesterday,
or the day before, she would have leaned into a chair
in that way of hers, listening to the stories wheel
their way through how things were back then,
when everyone was young and reckless, before time backed
up and left them feeling old when they looked at her place at the table.

And no one even looked at the empty place at the table
except when Sue would sit down, enough with yesterday
pacing around the kitchen, walking the line to the door and back
again to the place near the empty spot, the chair.
And she would finally settle or collapse, sit next to Cathy, and then
when the quiet overpowered, say she'd be so glad you came. And wheel

her way back into the line in the floor she paced while
Keith would sit, too, and your father, until the talk around the table
got too much for them, and they would wander then
into the cold Arkansas night, staring over the rail at yesterday,
or nothing, at a one-time girl who used to sit in a chair,
at the darkness that doesn't look back

at you. It's nothing but emptiness as you stand with your back
to the house where she once was while
the women, sisters and aunts and mothers sat in chairs
they couldn't fill around a table
that would never be as full as yesterday.
And what then

is left to say? If there was anything, then we would bring her back
or bring back yesterday, while
we sat at that table, and didn't look at that chair.