What I Owe You Is Silence

The plate had a fold in the rim

where he'd gripped it pouring chips.

He handed it to me and said something

about the weather — finally cooling down —

and I said yes, right, I know.

Three weeks I'd been holding what his wife told me

in a parking lot, standing by our cars,

her voice gone low and specific

the way it does when something needs

to leave the body and go into someone else's.

I took it. Of course I took it.

And here is his hand holding out a plate

at a neighborhood thing in someone's backyard,

and his face is open and ordinary

and he has no idea what shape

his life is in from where I'm standing.

I drove home. Sat in the car

for fifteen minutes.

The engine cooled. The porch light

of my own house burned

through the windshield.

She trusted me. He trusts me

with pleasantries. I am holding

both of those at the same time

and I don't know what that makes me.

The light stayed on.

I stayed in the car.