Mixing two prompts today: the first being “ambient light” and the second being a challenge to write a Robert Frost-inspired poem about a road not taken.

You Are Probably Telling This With a Sigh

Imagine, if you can, a man with the deepest voice you’ve ever heard
sitting at a strangely firelit table, intimate in an otherwise teeming bar,
looking at you in way you will remember 23 years later, on a random Wednesday,
while you’re folding a pair of your daughter’s leggings and waiting
for a second pot of coffee to finish brewing. 

Imagine, if you had left that night, away from the strangely firelit table, 
and ventured into something less sure. Perhaps deeply contenting. 
Perhaps disastrous. Where you might sit again, 23 years later, across from a man, 
running your finger around the rim of a coffee cup, counter-clockwise, in some 
subconscious spell of time reversal.

Imagine, if there were only two roads, in a calm yellow wood, 
and not the tangled many-paths of options, like an intricate burst of blood-vessels 
pulsing life to places you can’t control, but might try to, or at least hope
to look all the way to the end of a shady track, beyond the protective undergrowth
to see not what but who is waiting.