Civilization

You know that thing where you’re someone’s wife

and you’re out someplace with faces

and suddenly you’re shaking with the room’s potential for kindness

or cruelty while also finally understanding the tragedy

of the dinner party, its reliance on food and talking and how

they both have to happen with the same hole, and this

is a joke, both the truth and the awareness of the truth,

and also humanness, how it happens just in one body

for each of us and there’s no board to go to

should you wish to dispute the results, the where and when

of this you, so you leave to the bathroom when the flan is served

and there is someone else’s wife already there, smoking a cigarette

she found in the host’s son’s room, and when you put

your lips where her lips have been and inhale

sharply the tar, you know she is barely in her body

too, the heat of disappointment pearling the deep valley

of her philtrum, so what can you do

but press your sweatered chests together, letting her heart

murmur to yours its own meaty iambs, your twin drums

announcing the coming war, the kind of war where you must shelter

from yourself in someone else, so you lean in together,

your linea nigras humming into the other, seaming you

into one, and when you kiss each of her tears you swallow

the memory of their making, the quiet bed, the uterine

collapse, the daughter whittled down to bone, and then her lips

take in you, black birds moving in the field like a churning night,

and you know how as this is happening you make a choice,

and how thinking it gives it shape, a pearl your longing has made,

you rolling it with your tongue against your expensed teeth

so that the choice becomes a secret, and when a husband knocks

on the door to see how one of you are, you separate,

each wife holding in her mouth what she has seen,

what she has chosen, and swallows.