dinner

"Dining out is like love. It should be entered into with abandon
or not at all."
- Harriet Van Horne


if this had been sex,
i would have squirreled it away,
kept it secret, not told
a soul except, maybe, in an anonymous
blog, and if it had been there,
i'd have claimed a kind of unwrapping, revelation,
near-religion, even,
a tongue revealing all of the places
i'd always ignored, or misunderstood,
thinking them unnecessary, facile,
disposable, incapable
of feeling anything.
if this had been sex
i would have extolled the virtues
of a tongue.

actually, no. i'm lying.

if this had been sex,
i don't know what
i would have done, really,
because if you have this kind of sex
you feel, afterward, trite with adjectives.
the language you've been using all your life ceases
to be sufficient.
you know that to talk about it with anyone
but your new love would be sheer
embarrassment, an exercise
in devolvement, you reduced
to awkward hand gestures, the occasional deep sigh,
and lots of sentences that end with,
"I think YOU can fill in the blanks."

if this had been sex,
i wouldn't have been able to tell you a thing.

but this was dinner,
and it began with a single pair
of radishes.

(to be continued)