Better Living Through Introspection

Dinner in Lebanon

When we departed for dinner in Lebanon
the gladiator was still the general, unleashing hell
in the forests of Germania. So we left him behind
to eat around a campfire on the side of a white mountain
underneath the cypress trees, underneath the stars.
Hungry from our voyage, we gorged ourselves
on a traveler’s feast of hummus and pita
and olives and cheese and lamb. The world was full
of nervous anticipation, and we shoveled
into the empty pauses the history and lineage
of our families, the bloodlines that tied us
to a lakeside city in the plains where our parents’
parents shared time if not the close space we
occupied for seconds on the mountainside.

When we returned separately to a new world we found
the gladiator dying face up in the sands of the coliseum,
and there was a kiss hanging between us. We can’t recall
how long we burned buoyantly in its pressure…
just short of an eternity, perhaps. One of us mistakenly
witnessed in that kiss the harbinger of a graceful summer,
but in reality we had tasted winter wrapped in satin promise.
Our kiss was the gladiator’s ringed hand, gliding through
the unharvested wheat on his dream-sequence farm.
We should have given more time to his trials
then we did to dinner in Lebanon.