"In the weeds" is how you say
when you’re double, triple-sat
when the four-top at thirty-two
is waiting to see the dessert tray
and the deuce at twenty-seven asks again
for that bottle of wine.
Later, this frenzy will feel like a rush,
like the throttle of a motorboat,
its hum in your throat.
Even later, it will reappear
false traffic in your dreams,
easy motion stymied on a troubled wake.
On a good night, your hands move
as if they know how to steer,
definitive and hard-knuckled.
On a bad night, flustered, you throw
precious knives into the trash,
drop glasses that shatter on the floor,
forget to bring the drinks.
You are and aren’t supposed to be here,
directing a current of vodka-tonics
toward the mascaraed woman
hoohoodling with the manager.
She brings her daughters to the bar,
two long-haired girls who play
hide-and-seek in the ladies’ room.
In each girl’s face, out of place,
you see mythic degrees of sadness.
Characters for your so-called novel,
all these so-called friends:
John, folding napkins, whose nose still drips
with the ghost of his old habit
and Sharon who left a shift early
to see a judge in court,
and returned with a divorce;
all these lives in the weeds
while you wade in the clear,
invisibly refilling drinks.
This is what you pay to write,
your barren heart, your loneliness,
on two-thirty-eight an hour and
tips for common graciousness.
You’re the only waitress
on the floor tonight who isn’t stoned,
and somehow it feels
like you’re the one
short on imagination.
If you’d had a child in your teens,
he’d look like Jason tending bar,
sullen, slick hair, exasperated,
everything having taken too long already.
Yours is not tenderness for the mundane,
but disquiet, unearned disdain,
the will to slip unheeded through cattails.
Just in passing, he calls you sweetheart.
Sweetheart, he says,
while pouring your beers.
The word runs you cold,
stops you dead in the water.