Morning Coffee Harmony

The espresso machine at the Café
Comes from a family of basement boilers
Torturing water to a soprano scream
We speak incompletely, punctuated
With pressure-cooker protests

Only Gentle Tom, in the corner
Ringed by an electronic fence
Rides the wave of the espresso boiler
Like a neighborhood Pavarotti
Sailing solo above the cappuccino
Like a tenor in Milan

Joel roams the late summer room
Fly swatting a squadron of open-door
Attackers, making Dennis wince
At his food-inspection fiasco
While we politely and gently
Hit ourselves on our balding heads
Like Norwegians finding truth

Mari hasn't seen such happy flies

Since she rode a pony to country school

After milking time was done

Wondering if our barnyard humor

Is the common element

John, who cannot forget a friend

Or Henry's English wives by name

Frowns at how the whistling blast

Turns trivia to temporary rubble

Building quickly back again

To an orderly acrostic memory

Recalling the brand name

Of the fly sprayer on the family farm

Jeff says Apple has an app for flies

And flips his finger up and down
As if to itch something electronic
To make his I-Phone buzz like a wasp

Joel shows us how high he used to
Lift his arm before he can't do it now
While Dale inter-espresso-mittently
harmonizes with the general hum
Explaining that he has to weed his drive
Before his neighbor turns him in

Over in the corner, Tom stands
Orchestral, presiding the internal chaos
Which from across the street
Is a symphony of morning coffee harmony

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames. We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves. For instance, some people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old. Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old. That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together. But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer. It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog