Poem — Sept. 18 — “Coffee”
Coffee diet
Stronger portion
(Rather than larger)
Clumped cardamom island
Rests atop blackened water
Cool, then burnt, then drinkably warm
***
A spoon against a cup’s edge
Like mother’s voice
Familiar enough to draw us up out of fugue
Into purposeful speech
(Rather than comfortable chatter)
Thin tipping tap and quiver
Metal to ceramic; ting tang kittle-clack
***
Poured out daily,
Your patient passages of hopeful verse
You give everything away
For fear of losing it
Or dying with full pockets
(Rather than being)
A man full of days
Old with doings
Graced with obligation after obligation
***
Semper Conatur
Sober as a tin of instant coffee
And privately soothing that which would
Keep you disloyal, rested, and full of
The spice of wild reason
Precious in the way that it sustains
A long lingering note
Through the coffee-ripe air
Through the rivulets of memory
That run your impoverished veins
You are wealthier than you have ever been
You meekly break your time of withholding
You bless the hands that provide
And you bless with the spilling of so many sacred words –
- the hands that deny
And in denying, bring you out of living death
From the smoking lakeland edge
Back to the fields for labour
And to a returning of real and valuable things
