The white-clothed round table is a still-life
roadmap: silverware intersecting over crumbs
on cracked China, lipstick bending around contours
of a tossed napkin, glass nose jutting from the curvature
of an empty pitcher, jaded flames punctuating
straight-lined candlesticks, and shadowed
silhouettes of a dozen faces—everything
directional, everything accusing
the black-haired, almond-eyed student from Jakarta
opposite me; even the brown diagonals
of her parang batik selendang
waving across her breasts with some vented current.

What she said
was, "God is everywhere. Behind
every fortune, every accident
is God." She said this more quietly
than red wax slipping down the shaft of a candle,
than bubbles bursting the surface of pink
sparkling water, than this room,
voiceless in her wake.

Perhaps it wasn't her fault, the fault
rather of a neighbor's scoff
when she hoped, "God bless the President not
to be stupid and war against an innocent people,"
Perhaps had her neighbor not countered,
"God's got nothing to do with it."
she would have left it at that,
and even now we'd comfortably debate
the merits of silk;
of summer as opposed to the snow
now trickling down the window-tinted night.

Now, this room is weighted
with eyes—eyes rummaging through it
like a woman through her handbag,
having lost something; eyes
exchanging glances, inventing some new
language for conversation.

Translation is guesswork.
My date's fidgeting stare—
does she wish, for once, I'd interject
with a comment about baseball, or is she
remembering last Tuesday, when devastated
by a runner-up trophy from a violin competition,
her best friend called, mourning the sudden
passing of her father?
The man four seats to my left, eyes
darting back and forth between the hostess
and his cup—has he simply been thirsty
too long, or is he contemplating his Geo Prizm's
dead transmission on the side of some highway
a hundred miles away, where, he's explained,
after three hours of no one stopping, stopped
a preacher and his wife, and their mechanic?
Even the hostess, my sister, so typically quick to steer
the table away from abhorred silence,
is busy burying her gaze in pools
of gravy in leftover mashed potatoes—
is it resignation, or secret confession of years
of teary nights alone, falling asleep on her knees
at her bedside?

Only the Indonesian student
can bring herself to motion, reaching
for the last roll in an intricate, hand-woven basket;
breaking it in two, spreading the butter.
She bites the first half carefully, crumbs
tip-toeing delicately across from her lips,
as if something were about to die,
about to give birth. We watch her,
silence giving way to the rattling
of some window in the wind,
not knowing the interpretation.