Late afternoon: witching hour of the soul.
Old men at the bar, their voices gravel.
They speak the names the lake has swallowed whole,
The wives who walked, the threads they couldn’t unravel.

The waitresses arrive. The evening shift.
One stops where windows face the frozen deep.
She watches the world turn white, dissolve, and drift,
Then turns to serve the ones not yet asleep.

The lake holds still—a cold that won’t expire.
The white has eaten distance, depth, and shore.
Still diners come and whisper their desire:
“A window seat.” They can’t say what it’s for.

What do they think they’ll see beyond the pane?
A mirror, or a door they hope to find?
Perhaps they come for what they can’t explain—
What has no name, long buried in the mind.

Now voices fill the room like something warm,
With wine poured out, the ritual of plates.
A thin domestic hedge against the storm—
The way we talk while something silent waits.

The waitresses glide swift from chair to chair,
Their hands like birds, their motions deft and sure.
Thought is a luxury they cannot spare.
The body knows its work, its only cure.

They never look. The orders keep arriving.
The bread runs low. The glasses must be filled.
And yet they serve through all their quick surviving,
A silence underneath that won’t be stilled.

For when they pour the water, clear and cold,
Into each glass beside each waiting face,
Unknowing priests, they serve the unconsoled—
They serve the lake, and give the drowned their place.

The lake asks nothing. It does not require
Our witness, or our grief, or our way back.
It holds the cold, the depth, the dark entire,
And waits beneath, immense, unbroken, black.

The check arrives. We’ve eaten what we owe.
We leave our tips like debts paid to the drowned.
The lake is in our blood, its undertow—
Cold current calling us to hallowed ground.

The waitress waves. The door swings shut. We go.
The lake is where it was. The lake remains.
We start our cars. We leave the drowned below.
Or think we do. The drowned course through our veins.