DINNER AT ANNIE'S

At Annie’s, a little gay

bistro just off Dupont Circle,

I am sitting across

from my college roommate’s

older brother’s Portuguese

husband whose name I can

never remember.  I call him

Raul, which I do not think

offends him, at least not

tonight as his lithe olive

hand stirs the straw of

a Hendricks and soda.

His husband, a tall man

with soft Gaelic features,

smiles easily and holds

his Cosmopolitan like a Martini.

He is a thicker, more elegant

version of my roommate, and

while asking a question across

the table, he moves his hand

to Raul’s knee.

The other two guests

at our make-shift dinner party

come in like a 1920s

vaudeville act.

The first, a lawyer,

is unpolished and gruff

for this delicate, music box

of a restaurant. But when

he speaks, his prose

rattles like timpani.

He orders off the menu,

hoping the wait staff will

bring him a slightly incorrect

version of his meal, which,

of course, they do.

He does not, however, admonish

them; instead, he begrudgingly

eats enough to be satisfied

but not so much that

he cannot wipe the corners

of his mouth with a brow

furrow of contempt.

The other one, a dandy, is, I think,

the closest I will ever come

to meeting Oscar Wilde. He is

one liners and innuendo.

He sips his Martini like a

Cosmopolitan and fills conversation

with a Southern lilt and

timing forged only in the mouths

of antebellum matriarchs

of Georgia and Northeastern

gays who have slid geographically

and linguistically as far south

as their politics will allow.

He takes small bites of

his dinner and a young waiter

until both are just bones

on a plate.

And I am a guest and an

anthropologist, eating the last

of my steak salad while scratching

Sanskrit fieldnotes on the

cocktail napkins that cover this

place like Autumn leaves.

And I doubt this little poem

shows how scared I am—how

my heart is racing and my hands

tremble like the cherry blossoms

which hang, with their weekend

grips, on the last days

of their season.

Because while stultified, while

barely hanging on to the

last days of the only season

I have ever known,

I am still, of course,

a scientist, and we only look at life

with glass eyes.  We only look at love

with hearts, already dead.