I come in for a tall flat white
and find a welcome table.
For seven minutes or seven hours,
I dump the weather I carry in me.
I give up: my students who surge
for grades and then they’re spent,
stuck songs, dead parents’ whispers,
medication lists, transit screed
or places my kids want to be,
meals from twenty years of marriage.
I let them settle, trickster frogs and dissolving
crabs, on their backs, as they pop and gust away.
I come in for this ambient hive,
where I can float alone, the lull in a club room,
the big eye of a fish god on caffeine,
and try to name what I can’t say, pressing
the sonic, edges back into their edges
until they give way and swallow.
But there is nothing to draft, and less, less sense
to make of where we’re headed,
through acrid scripts, through loneliness.
Words emerge and brush me around,
fortify my sabbatical vein and keep me
from going hoarse on beverages and bad news.
The coffeehouse is just space
to suspend myself in crosshairs
of sound, to hold out for breath,
to reanimate, to hover and cohere,
to shuffle and accrue
what remains, and return a swarm.
Letter from the Bardo
