On Boxing Day, the hub and the bub
having subsided, life resuming its
normal ebb and flow,

I errand around my ‘hood, deciding
that yes, I will tackle the traditional
post-Christmas chicken lasagna

that Dick and I have come to love,
so I stop at two stores and from
memory (a risky thing)

gather ingredients, pleased with
myself for recalling them all, when,
outside Trader Joe’s,

I walk past the surprise of someone’s
stray purple spectacles on the path
to the parking lot.

I stop and peer through my own lenses,
thinking of my mother and her
lost specs yesterday,

on Christmas, me fetching her readers,
not the bifocals, not where they
she thought they were.

I think of the poor woman whose
purple frames must have fallen
from pocket or purse—

a stylish woman, given the snazzy specs,
who perhaps this very moment is frantically
looking for them.

I pick them up, searching for someone
blinking in optical confusion.
Seeing no one,

I settle for a store employee who says,
after I ask, that yes, they have
a lost and found,

and I hand him the glasses,
hoping they find their way back
to their owner, as I was finally able

to do for my mother, after she recalled
where she’d last seen them. She
put the beaded chain

around her neck, her eyeglasses
restored to their proper position
on chest or bridge of nose,

the gift of sight one that we lens
wearers do not take for granted,
sighing in relief

when the world comes blessedly
into focus.