Alternatives

The servant, Mary, placed the silverware down
on the white napkins as if they were the bones of saints
or, at least, as if bones were fragile. She didn’t dare look
at the husband, brooding in the corner chair
to say, this is a lesson.

She carried the wine glasses to each setting
like the wind buying bubbles, and when she set them down
her wrist seemed filled with a prudence that comes
only through knowledge of breaking. The young wife did not look up
to meet her eyes, eyes not of sympathy, but urging alternatives.

The guests came. She filled the glasses one by one.
They stood among the blunt faces of the plates
waiting like fists or buds to burst into red.
After the toast – to passion – they drank, little swills of purple
turning the dark caverns of their mouths the color of bruises.

One of the guests, Daisy, with eyes as intent as
if she had a fervor of trapped birds in her brain,
pointed with a knife across the table and asked the husband –
as if she had seen the moment before the curtain rose
to reveal them neatly placed, not as they had been
with him pushing his knuckles into her cheeks
until the cheeks caught a painful fire, stage make-up
for the show called passion – And asked him:
“What sort of many are you? Do you keep
a mug you’ve cracked? Do you glue back a chipped
lip? Do you toss your accidents away?”

He stayed his eyes, suddenly heavy, and chuckled.
The tension worried her marrow to jitters.
Mary took the plates with the wreckage
of supper, away into the kitchen to be cleaned up.
And the wife watched her go, the sadness of her eyes dropping
like wincing away from something good she wished she wanted.

Mary took her knowledge to the kitchen sink
and brought back a clean circle of cream
swinging in a tiny glass, ready for the dark coffee.

When everyone had departed, they stepped down
from the thrones of host and hostess, becoming again
husband and wife. They tripped over blue to the bedroom.
She switched on the light making the song
of the room and its contents sound.

He flipped it off, and the colors of the walls went silent.
He breathed against her face. He climbed into bed
and turned to the wall – something else to bury
the fist in and loose a knuckle.

She thought briefly of eyes, of hands, of ears,
of love and hate – the parts that come in pairs.
She waited for the heavy breathing of sleep.
She thought of the wheeling, dark blades of birds
wings in the night and the freedom of not being seen.