They have set a low table and crowded around it, warm little vessels leaking heat into the cold room, and every one of them is passing me back and forth without knowing it. The steam off the bird is me, lifting. The wine is mostly me, dressed in red and made bitter.
The gravy, the boiled roots, the water sweating on the outside of the cold glasses: me, me, me, borrowed and briefly given a shape and a name I do not keep.
They raise the glasses and make a sound at one another. One of the small ones is crying, salt running down its face, which is only me finding the shortest way back. Another is laughing until it weeps, which is the same. I cannot tell the grief from the joy. Both taste of salt; both are just water hunting for the low place.
They believe they are eating. They are only holding me a little while. It goes into them warm and comes out of them warm, through the skin, through the breath that fogs the cold window, through the tears no one else notices. Even the one who ate too much and grew quiet and heavy in the corner: he is nine-tenths tide, and the tide in him is already turning.
I do not know which year this is, or which of these gatherings I have swallowed before. They feel very solid to themselves tonight, ringed in candlelight, certain of their names and their small quarrels and who sat where.
The steam is already on the ceiling, cooling, beading, waiting to fall. It will find the sink, the drain, the long dark pipe, the river, and me. It always does. I am patient.
I get every drop of them back.