David Kirby
TRUE RELIGION

 

As the waiter puts our plates down before us, I notice

a guy and a woman at another table,

and like a lot of guys and women on dates these days,

her hair is up, and she’s wearing jewelry and makeup

and a pretty dress, whereas he’s sporting a t-shirt

and shorts and looks either as though he just cut

 

someone’s grass or is going to do so after the meal

when he should be romancing his beautiful date,

though they seem to be getting along okay, are smiling

and chatting and looking about at the other guests

and the restaurant itself, which is quite nice,

even though he has his elbows on the table and is eating the way

 

a prisoner does who is afraid that another prisoner,

a larger and meaner one, will take his food away

from him and make him watch as he, the mean prisoner,

eats it in front of him, holding the food over his head

and lowering it into his mouth as he laughs

and makes uncouth slurping noises, whereas she is cutting hers

 

into small bites and lifting her fork to her lips and patting

those lips with her napkin after each small bite,

which means that he is finished long before she is,

but he waits patiently enough and then jumps up

and lurches off to the men’s room, and I look down

at our plates again, and we have butter beans,

 

which I love, because my mother used to cook them

for me when I was a little boy, with ham hocks

and rosemary, and I think of the time

the nun told me I was going to hell: it was my first day

of Catholic school, and I’d made it through arithmetic

and story time and was looking forward to the afternoon

 

when I found myself in the lunchroom looking

at a plate of meatloaf and potatoes and butter beans,

but bad ones, bland and mushy, and Sister caught me

raking them into the planter on my table and asked me

if I didn’t know it was a mortal sin to throw away food?

It was a rhetorical question, but I didn’t know that.

 

I was teary, trembly-lipped; I was still working on

my colors. My mother set me straight on the way home

from school, though earlier, all I could think was,

Here’s this six year-old kid sitting on a rock next to Judas,

and the kid asks, “What’d you do?” and Judas says,

“I betrayed Our Savior. How about you, sonny—

 

what are you in for?” While the guy is in the men’s room,

the waiter brings them a couple

of brandies, and the woman picks up the guy’s glass

and drinks about an inch of his brandy and then lines it up

with her glass and drinks exactly the same amount

and puts the guy’s glass back on his side of the table

 

and folds her hands in her laps and waits, and when

he returns, he picks up his glass and scowls at it

and turns it this way and that but then shrugs and downs

the remaining brandy in a single gulp, and I wonder

what the woman is preparing herself for, that is,

how she thinks the evening will end and therefore

 

how much more alcohol she will need or how much less would

be right for the man who plans to ravish or, more

likely, ignore her or whether she’s just giving

the world a little tap the way one does when it tilts on its axis,

and it wobbles a little, but you tap it, and it starts

to spin again. Sometimes you have to show history

 

who’s boss. If not for Judas, Jesus might have just been a politician;

he’d have worked out some kind

of treaty with the Romans and been forgotten,

whereas now he makes millions happy every day. Thank you, Judas!

You, too, Jesus—great balls

of fire! Are you guys a team or what? You guys are adorable.

___________________