Tonight’s guests, they’ve endured the oppression of that most cultivated, civilizing of structures: an arch, which humbles, makes modest, weathering the threat of its stones to fall, the rocktumbled warning, the tomb’s guard, the sepulcher’s sentry, that that’s served from night immemorial as a gateway through the electrified fence to their keeping, ensuring a bow through the barbs, giving mouth to the fire that would destroy their design even as it feeds its own flames — O the deepthroated, humiliate way, this passage of exile that’s wordless yet punctuated with stark vowels of grief: the songlessness of the conquered, stooped under the arching shade of the willows by the banks of the Babylon rivers; the Roman shuffle as shy as a caretaker, pressed through the cracks between the stones of the Temple, to be remade into either oil or Europe: how they’ve survived if with head hung the terror underlying the form — the arch’s essential destruction, debasement: in its greatest manifestations forcing submission, almost negating of presence; in its least variations standing so tiny and tight that the quills along with the parchment are flayed from any soul processed through — how through this, again, they’ve survived, and miraculously with their appetite still intact…only to emerge from an oven, across the ocean and its lip they’re stepping high and slowly as if poultry themselves, so as not to break or catch anything over the door, opened for their hostess to check on the baking, theirs or that of a surrogate sacrifice — the chicken they’re coming out like, about to be served; still, singeing what hair they have left, snagging their limp, raggedy dresses, worn and torn skirts, their loose, thousandmark suits on wire racks whose grilling appears to mark stripes across their ripped uniforms, too, shreds them into ties, strips into bands to bind tight their hats in their hands. Their glasses go fogged, and so they remove them; they’re all wearing glasses: one schmuck in a pincenez, regular specs the rest; remove them by their bridges, by their noses, their ears, then go groping for the hems of their garments, to wipe. Upon emergence, their stars lose their luster and fall from their breasts, cool to the ground as if cookies or cakes of six pointed flavors, which are as treats for the kinder: holdovers, of sorts, to tide them for bed if they’re asleep come the dawn of dessert. Singer helps his wife out; the Rosenkrantzs, even the wife of them winnowed to bones by now and so dry they’re not even fit for the pot that clouds up above, its soup stirred around with a pinch too much pity — both try to cram through at the same time, but orderly, in step, holding hands. They’ve been conditioned so thoroughly by now, trained, made to follow orders as if a recipe for themselves: a perfect selfpoison, its only and secret ingredient, fear (they all bow their heads save the last of them, Feigenbaum, who hits his); some of them young, some old, some healthy, some sick, some, relatively — they might be related. As a homemaker, a homemacher, as her husband would kid, who she prides herself on knowing her way around every substitute, how to deal with each lack of ingredient, keeps herself knifesharp, spoon-willing, tines tastes herself to ensure: makes piles, takes lists, sneaks groupings and tests; and with no attempt to make separate, between who’s been expected, already counted into the sum of the chairs, assigned placesetting and portion, and who’s been lucky enough to have managed her charity with a spontaneous tip, or on an invitation palmed off secondhand — there won’t be a problem, I’m sure…as she comes back from her guard at the door, how she’s cold to the nose as she greets them whether by name or with respect for their ruses: some meriting hugs with the mittens all thumbs, and with kisses for others, one cheek each or one for each cheek, it depends.
