New Year's Day

The meal is, shall we say,

     monochromatic:

in the cramped dining nook

with a hard-white beam

     of afternoon sun

chiaroscuro, bouncing off

white table-cloth, white china,

the white serving-platter

of pale roast pork,

the pearly-white of mashed spuds,

chalky pork gravy,

off-color rancid butter,

bread — white, of course,

no other, ever —

white paper napkins,

the pale complexions

of the right kind of people.

Stepfather presides

over a Swede Lutheran silence.

No one is permitted to speak,

save for pass-this-pass-that

and thank-you. The only sounds

are knife-scrapes and fork bites,

the shuffle of chairs

against the splintered floor,

the stifled winter cough.

Mother says nothing; beer

     has done its work.

Stepfather has no use

     for the two stepsons,

book-reading idlers and spawn

of the man he hated and replaced.

Still, as long as the child-support

checks came every month,

he’d have to feed them.

Nothing has any flavor.

White salt, passed round,

and added liberally,

helps not so much as pepper,

lots of it, and water aplenty.

Food cooked in hatred

can only be washed down,

     not eaten.

Ignoring the shouted order

to “excuse himself.”

the older boy gets up,

takes empty water-glass

to the kitchen sink,

and standing there,

he gazes into the sunlit nook,

at the dusty sunbeam

below the unlit chandelier,

from whose never-dusted

maze of dangling crystals,

descended

on pale white threads of silk

hundreds upon hundreds

of

tiny

white

baby

spiders

onto the white pork

the white bread

the white gravy

the white potatoes

the white tablecloth

the white paper napkins

onto the stern whiteness

of the Stepfather,

the passive Mother,

the little brother

gobbling away

at gravy-bread.

Does he tell them?

Or does he run outside

howling with laughter,

thanking the cosmos

for just desserts?