Dinner (this is a poem of Joel's I'm posting for him)

So you sat next to Peter Orszag at an East Village restaurant?

What do you know about the CBO,

or the vermicelli he lifted with dexterous financial fingers

via a stainless steel fork?
The only thing you know for sure
is that Orszag is not a chopstick man,
and this knowledge is a tugboat

pushing the great barge of commerce
down the widening mouth of foreign policy.

I once ate there with friends and was silent
watching the senator perch atop his chair

like Franklin's bald eagle.

After coffee and dessert,
there was the car ride through this city of forests.

There is usually a car ride.

Taken from chair to chair I saw in the window

the diaphanous shadow of your phone's shallow face.

It fixed with tenacious reason on the shatter resistant passenger side

as if it were a giant night insect attracted to the darkness.

I saw the rows of text, the sublime back-lit miracle of liquid crystal

digalized before my eyes, and could see nothing else.

Not the trees, or the sky, or the ghosts of the great burning.

I only saw it:

The ephermeral rectangle; the small glass doorway;

The place where we make sense of what we do not know.