September – coffee
1. granita (ice crystals)
I meet you there on a summer’s eve,
The café a real place, not an unwrapped, sky-bound castle:
Desserts on display, coins in the register, ceiling-fan breeze,
Ties and dresses and shorts and eager faces,
Air moist and salt-filled, thick, anise, baked sugar,
My alertness contained,
Calmly spooning coffee-ed ice,
Contemplating the small crystals melting,
Melding on my tongue,
Melding their bitter chocolate-liquorish with the soft-smooth cream like
Memories of moments sweet, waiting.
The glass on the table is transparent.
The small, silver spoon resting beside, is opaque.
The table beneath them is square – though I might prefer it round
and ornate-ed,
A touch decadent. You know how it is:
The unending curve of the glasses’ body and lip filled to the brim,
Coffee-dark below, lush-white above,
Their encountering line contemplative,
Each expanding gingerly, preciously, into the other.
La granita: grah-knee-tah.
Rhythms outside moving in, familiar, voices and such:
Words, laughter, high-pitched-low-pitched, a girl, her friend, her
mother, a kid, a guy, the tangling ring and footsteps from behind
the bar,
Every voice, everyone, every thing in the café, alert, it seems,
Contained, awaiting the iced melting.
You enter, hidden from view.
A slow hush.
A shadow disappears.
I hear you through the stillness moving,
Taste you in one paused breath,
Cool and creamy and calm.
You see me, step across the pause,
Open a window in my chest just that way,
As if I were a transparent glass on your table,
Spoon silver, table square,
Violate the stretched line, and look inside where I’m filled to the brim,
Push down gently and twirl and groove and lift it back through your lips,
Place it gently, contemplate, smile.
I melt into ice.
2. bitter delight
I drink my tea (and coffee)
Without adding sweetness
For a part of me delights
In the nuances of bitterness.
This makes my
Place without, one stepless
Breath removed from my own tongue –
Fit-mis, less-hope, word-reversing,
Hued-red, ed-fate, rounded
Around sweet-proper flavors
Of September’s re-bounded
Returns: ’how was the beach,’ ‘too
Cool,’ ‘where did you,’ ‘we hitchhiked
Through Spain,’ trips defined
In less than a cup of tea, by
How many lumps you place
Inside to stir. Oh, how in vain those comfortable
Mugs of sugared tea, (and coffee,) I’ve tried to ingrace,
Failing, by that my bitter conceit,
To distinguish pieces of flavor diced
From the whole, like mistaking a water pail for the well.
I almost lost the chance, winded and fleeting, so ingrained
Was I, to taste the whole of you, frozen by
Your so-many hues within,
Revealed in the moment escaped from your black-brown eyes,
The color of unsweetened coffee, (or tea), that sweetly filled my
Once misfit, word-reversed Septembers with the coy,
Smiling ‘hello’, sugar-dripped, sugar-dripping, from your lips onto
my tongue.
3. peach iced tea in a glass
2 streams flow through me,
Through your lips,
Through your mind:
The expectation, and
The new;
Represented, and
Real.
It’s the difference between,
Within, where joy expands itself.
You expect something cool
And sweet, peach flavored,
But do not know: I take pride
In what I give and find a different
Harmony to place in your mouth –
Lemon, though you can’t feel it,
And ginger, though it pricks
Behind and you close your eyes
And let it take the groove all the way down
As you suspend and swallow and
Feel me again, dripping, slowly, gliding,
Honey-dropped.
---
2 streams flow through you,
Through his eyes,
Through his body:
Belonging and
Defenselessness;
Fulfillment and
A place without fear.
It’s in the hold between,
Unheld, where love grows.
He is lost, removed from
Something inside, a child afraid of
A real dark. You open
One glance revealing
The scene he needs to find:
Broad, fresh and salt-
Pure air to feed the
Weeping hunger he withheld
For years, an uncovered ship’s
Deck on which he finds you - warm,
Cold, perplexed, growing, white, gold,
A body, an eye, an unending new to never leave.
---
2 streams flow through each moment,
Through every breath you have,
Through every touch withheld:
What is deep and
What will not ever be;
Growth and
Unseen equivocation.
In the pause before deciding,
Unaware, belief remains.
