They quarreled in a car with full-blast air conditioning.
About money – how to or how not to spend it
and back-history long enough they each knew
the other’s extravagances, commitments (or lack of them)
to security. At a green light, a vagrant in layers of clothes,
(more than necessary for a hot August evening),
careened across the intersection and waved at them
whether in thanks or blurring them like windshield wipers,
neither could decide. When he reached the curb,
they felt he was was still there in front of them,
a lost pilgrim, a wayward shepherd. A silence opened.
She shivered, turned the air conditioning down
though she knew their silence was not frozen,
it was knuckled, not as in a blow to an eye
or solar plexus, knuckled as in a fist
where her fingernails bite her palms
and that the knot of hand might not open
this night and perhaps not the next.