we too can break bread

Your plate is loaded
edge to edge
with surplus sticking over, out
You hold your plate, with thumb across the top, palm flat
and firm, with glass in other hand, rim-full, and balance
in your bearing. Smiling as everything is set down
with aplomb,
and smiling, you arrange yourself before me,
napkin, silver, smooth your skirt, straighten up posture
and pause with hands folded daintily
for grace.

Fine.

I'll call your fucking bluff.
You say grace. But you do
an astonishing job! - for an atheist,
and then we both dig in, me with wary
gusto, waiting for the dig that never comes.
You, with great enjoyment and seeming
sincere warmth and good humor, you, you
godless heathen hypocrite! Yeah, polish it off, and lick
it clean - but your soul knows where your mind has been.

Fine.

So I rise and clear the plates away, with half a mind
to serve desert and coffee, and the other half
to just sit back down, and keep just kind of looking
at you across the table, with a look, until you laugh
and say,

"What?!"

But I don't sit back down. "What" was the one question
I cannot answer. Instead I step sideways, into the kitchen
flip the switch to coffee, pull the cooling rose jam tart with
light maple drizzle and marzipan filling from the sill where it
lay, and make dramatic passes in the air with my pie knife
as I set it down, to an "ooh!" but no ah. "Ah," I say, "let me just
get the coffee,"

it's done.