A Discreet Charm

A Discreet Charm

Our good friends are with us,
Jack and Jen, old lefties with whom
we now and then share
what we don’t call our wealth.
We clink our wine glasses, and I say,
Let’s drink to privilege . . .

the privilege of evenings like this.
All our words have a radical past,
and Jack is famous for wanting the cog
to fit the wheel,
and for the wheel to go straight

down some good-cause road. But he says
No, let’s drink to an evening as solemn
as Eugene Debs demanding fair wages—
his smile the bent arrow only the best men

can point at themselves.
I serve the salad
Barbara has made with pine nuts, fennel,
and fine, stinky cheese.
It’s too beautiful to eat,
Jen says, but means it
only as a compliment.

Over the years she’s eaten the beautiful
and accommodated mixed feelings, walked
through squalor as often
as the rest of us
to reach some golden center of a city.

Here’s to an evening of contradictions,
I say, let’s never live without them.
We’re in northern Appalachia
where strip mining and slag heaps

uglify the nearby mountains, and where
the already poor will lose their jobs
if the ugliness is corrected.
A sign on the interstate says Noah’s Ark

Being Rebuilt Here. Here is where irony
dies its regular public death,
and many believe
they’re telling the truth
by simply saying what they think,

which means here is like most places.
Jack’s about to say something,
but the scallops dappled with sesame seeds
and wrapped in bacon are ready.
They’re especially delicious,

Barbara says, because they’re unnecessary.
Our friends don’t seem to think
that’s funny, but we all dig in
to the unnecessary as if
we can’t get enough of it.
As I was about to say,

Jack says, Ever since Obama, I’m feeling
a widespread sense of decency,
aren’t all of you?
I’d like to agree with him,
but widespread
suddenly makes me think of the night sky

and large, empty spaces.
More like pinpricks of decency,
I want to say, isolated little outposts,
but here comes Barbara with the shameless
store-bought cheesecake
called Strawberry Swirl,

which, for a while, tends
to end all arguments, though there was
a time we’d have renounced it—
back then when evenings like this
were emblems of excess and vapidity
and a life that made us furious.



Stephen Dunn

Posted over on New Ohio Review