Latte With an Extra Shot of Metaphor, Please

Sometimes a poem finds its real flavor in a café.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

“Anybody can write in a café is made different,” Flannery O’Connor wrote to a friend … and bless her Southern Gothic heart. For myself, on days when Sitting Down At My Desk To Write A Poem feels just too damn intimidating and portentous, being able to grab my notebook and walk down the street and sit at someone else’s table is a godsend. The rattle of cutlery and conversation, the chance to be around other people who don’t expect to talk with me — on the best days, it’s just the right mix of stimulating and relaxing. Plus, you know, if you sit long enough in a café you’ll see stuff happen. And sometimes what you see has a poem in it.

---

Magic

Two silver-haired women
pick their way between trees and tables
in the garden behind the café,

and looking up from where I sit
I could swear that one of them has a cat,
a placid orange tabby, tucked under her arm,

but when I glance over again, the cat
is a smooth brown lap-dog with triangle ears
as big as the rest of his body

which as shape-shiftings go
is you might say a familiar one,
though I never saw it before,

and I'm tempted to cross the garden
and ask how it's done -- but who
would answer? And what would happen next?

---

The Annoying Lovers

The annoying lovers, a few tables over at the café,
cannot sit still, and gaze, and whisper -- no,
they must for love's sake be endlessly twitching:
he lifts her hair, she touches his cheek,
he links his fingers round her wrist, she feeds him
a bite from her cruller; rising to refill
their cups, he pauses to wind his arms
around her neck and murmur in her ear; seated again
they clasp hands, re-clasp them, lean forward
to kiss -- never still, the tics of desire
on full display, as if they enjoy display,
or believe they are invisible, or we are.

And when did it happen, I wonder, brooding over decaf
a few tables over, that the sight of this twitchy
joyful affliction began to irk me,
lost its poignancy, its charm, became
a plain annoyance? Have I lived so long
in savored solitude, no motion but my own
to mirror, that this unending restless dance
exasperates my hard-won sense of quiet? Envy,
could it be? Do I want what they have? No, but
I remember wanting to want it, and how much
the wanting seared. Not the touching and twitching
sparks envy, but their easy unscarred certainty
in one another's pleasure -- that, yes. Not to mention
the ostentatious disregard of all things not themselves;
having my own well-practiced habit of invisibility, 
it piques me to be practiced on.

                                                         And now they stand; 
she smooths his jacket collar, he strokes her hair again, 
one more full-body embrace and they are out the door,
the center of the universe moving with them. Around me
the café ticks and hums; annoyance fades,
becomes a new thing as I open my notebook
to write it down. Pen kisses paper,
thought caresses page, a phrase leans forward
to see itself reflected in the writer's eyes -- look,
the universe has re-centered a few tables over,
where my notebook and I sit gazing, speaking,
almost invisible, almost unmoving, altogether,
annoyingly, in love.

---

Magic is a new poem, and I found it at a new-to-me café, not far from where I live but off my regular “map” for walks, and prone to close in mid-afternoon at about the time I’m usually getting ready to leave the house. I finally made a visit there a few weeks ago, and found their back garden enchanting — not just because of its casual maze of shrubs and tables and little paths, but because of the mix of clientele. One table was circled by a couple of generations passionately discussing folk music; at the table behind me I heard a young voice firmly declare, “Going to cons takes a ton of money and energy, and my artistic ass can not afford it.” And then arrived the two silver-haired women and … whatever familiar they had with them, and I was completely ensorcelled. I’d come there with one poem in mind, and the draft of it had danced onto the page; before I left I turned to a clean page in my notebook and started scribbling again. Coffee-and, a table outdoors, a possible shape-shifting, and the start of a bonus poem — I couldn’t have paid enough for that visit. (And yes, I promise, I tipped like a fool.)

I wrote The Annoying Lovers going on twelve years ago, and its first draft was written in the café that’s become my second home. A big room, high ceilings and wooden floors, murals of Parisian street scenes on the walls, tall deep-bayed windows looking out the street, casually mismatched tables and chairs, proprietors who know what I’m likely to order but are ready to be surprised … and all this a block from my apartment building. The clientele is a cross-section of the neighborhood — students, remote workers, friends catching up, elderly walkers catching their breath, the stock guys from the hardware store across the street catching lunch; listen closely, you can hear at least three different languages being spoken at different tables. Including the unspoken language of love, or at least of sexual infatuation — a “conversation” that I found distracting enough to start a poem about, a dozen years ago. Anyhow that’s where the poem started; as I kept writing, it wandered off into introspection … and then ended up right back at the table where I was sitting. Which is another kind of shape-shifting, in a way. More everyday café magic.