ALT A TABLE I was trying to measure my mother’s sadness with a very long ruler. She talked at me from one end of a sentence. A sentence the length of a table. Everything I say to my mother begins so far away. In Athens. Under fruiting olives. On Plato’s ideal table. Just now, I set my glasses down on a thousand-year-old idea. Is there no table in the world as perfect as the one in our heads? What about this table in our house, propped up by magazines, splintering and covered with wood stains? We are sorting pea blossoms there now, a dozen hands suspended in a pillar of sunlight. My aunt is there, and my mother, my cousin, and a feeling of language begins. I wonder about the table in the mind and how it is so lonely there. I wonder what thoughts a table is thinking. Is a table an argument or an understanding? When two languages sit down to a table, call it a translation. When only one comes to the table, a branch cries out in the yard. Immaculate snows that fall over a table go on falling