We aren’t ready to talk about it yet, each of us, whatever it is,
          but in the smell of sizzle and garlic over the glowing

embers at this shindig tonight, everything is different.
          Some unforeseen perspective is coming to maturity

inside us, for how long should anyone decide to wait in any quick
          catch-up conversation to come out with what dark wallow

they have been carrying? This is the South, meaning, slow down,
          meaning a lot of gossip is getting tossed around, meaning

what aches we seem unable to say about ourselves
          we will always share so easily about someone else first.

And I am wondering most, upon my wife and I arriving here
          in new adult shoes and wool sweaters, about the grief

of the person for whom this party is thrown, him having lost
          his father so suddenly, but it’s not polite to ask anyone

about death after any number of months have passed, is it,
          and this is a celebration, and these old friends and I don’t

argue about music, or mass shootings, or no-good, Goddamned,
          full-of-shit politicians anymore, or war, meaning

we have accepted some wounds as ageless and unchanging
          and have handed them on to the next generation. I still don’t know

what feelings to give that surrender. Winter has been thrusting new enigmas
          into the mouths of these old friends and I, and though I haven’t spoken

to most of them through more than a few seasons of new
          defeats, I have gathered with them again, tonight, in South Carolina,

in this high-ceilinged barn turned wedding venue, for a fortieth
          birthday, a surprise party in the name of life moving forward,

and sometimes even sweetly. A pig body on the grill seasoned
          with more than a little laughter, oysters exploding open

in the low-country pot, I’m still alive, but I can’t stop noticing the mist outside,
          in the distance, milling around the meadow like a squad

of ghost detectives on a stakeout, chain-smoking menthols
          at the edge of the property, almost out of view, like any difficult story

about the South, or about ourselves we might need a few more drinks
          to ignore, like a whole ocean trying to stuff itself back inside a river,

or like a cold case I’m trying to solve about this group of people
          that the strange entanglements of time have begun to pull apart,

and now the mac & cheese and steaming meats are being served, so we gather
          in a smaller group around a table covered in mint cloth

and lilies, and sit down, and after my friends have those few more
          drinks, as I suspected, the outside ghosts of the realest damage

begin to pour forth, begin to speak for themselves of my good friend’s
          tiny cousin, for instance, undergoing a rushed brain surgery

in Texas, with a 50/50 shot at survival and of the recent divorce
          of two people not at this party who had both, it has been revealed

to me tonight at this table, been beating on one another with leather
          and lengths of chain and had each been doing so while drunk

in front of their three kids, and someone else to my right in reading glasses
          has also been diagnosed with diabetes, and there have been two

miscarriages having to be endured by two couples sitting across from us.
          How is it that any of us are still able to eat barbecue with others

after such demolishment? Dream businesses gone bankrupt.
          Brothers dead. Families abandoned. And now the human

obliterations are too many, are piling up too high, all the way up
          to the see-through fabric which cascades down over all of us

like funeral veils from the wooden ceiling of this barn.
          How human, I had forgotten, that the sharing of despair

seems to eliminate what I thought had been distance
          between us, each of us at this table lugging around

what we thought we should keep separate from others,
          what I have tried to keep separate even from myself.

How stupid of me, stewing in the small intestine of my own father’s sickness
          and my friend’s death, to play the child’s game of measuring

one loss against another, as if one grief is in competition with everything else on earth,
          as if one grief isn’t reason enough itself to gather for grilling

like humans do. More than enough personal tragedy, here, tonight,
          to be buried under with baked beans, and it will take me months

to dig through all of this because I still think about what the right feelings
          for others might be for months before I allow myself to have them.

I’m doing my best impression of an adult, tonight, listening
          and not weeping, listening and just peeling the skin off my hot wings,

this colder than normal slap of cracked lips, this sting of a canker sore
          interrupting every sip of water, every difficult story, every bite of spicy pork,

every friendship I have been given, tonight, to feel thankful for, every difficult feeling
          these people I care about must go on enduring, these heavy happenings

and helpings and handfuls they have shared with me I don’t know how to keep
          eating. Forgive me for my being overwhelmed by the freight of this shame.

I am a self-obsessed man who must be reminded how to change what I know,
          now, is both difficult and simple and tastes like too much villainy to say out loud:

I am sorry, my friends, but it has been too impossible for me, for too long, not to want
          my own suffering in the spotlight, above all others, acknowledged.