I. SUN
When I spend my morning at a café,
Armstrong sings to me on the radio.
I listen through hisses of steam
and I breathe in caramel chaos.
I’ve ordered a redeye, caffeine on caffeine —
“it’s one of those days,” for the fifth time this week,
and I suspect I’ll return for more of the same:
a scone and espresso, routine on routine.
Buttery crumbs of discarded ideas
lie heavy on my hallowed table,
a wrought iron wobble to its wrought iron legs.
I tap tap tap on my keyboard to the beat of a printing receipt,
and the register-keep sings with Louis:
“When you’re laughing, when you’re laughing,
the sun comes shining through,”
streaming through floor-length windows,
illuminating this still life where the only movement is
write and delete, write and delete
the lines in which I put too much feeling,
or too much caffeine, and not enough feeling.
II. MOON
I swirl a spoonful of errant beliefs into a hot cup of coffee
and inadvertently create a vortex at the heart of my table.
A door, a key, a beckoning thing.
Oh, jarring portal— what are the odds I fall gently?
Thirty-two to sixty-eight?
Well I suppose them odds is as good as any…
I take a quick leap and I don’t look ‘til I’ve surfaced,
and I find I am in a mist, in the midst of a forest.
A veritable cathedral of twilight surrounds me—
I’d rest in this beauty after all of that mayhem,
but some dormant compulsion urges me forward.
Tangled up branches, onwards and upwards.
I know I’ll find shelter and warmth
if I traipse through these woods,
and I cross an old bridge, and I jump over roots,
and I wear down my legs, and my feet in my boots.
But then I’ve done it, I’ve stumble on a gatehouse
and I find myself deep in the keep of a castle.
Voices echo low, gentle ivy on stone:
“When you’re smiling, when you’re smiling,
I’ll build a bower for you,
and in the twilight, in the evening,
It will shield you from stars and from moon”
Confused, I frown my furrowed brow at the moon–
she frowns back through crumbling windows,
reluctantly illuminates corridors before me
and I follow her upwards, up stairways.
Past the parapet, to the top, to the top
of the crumbling castle.
III. STARS
The very cosmos whisper through the stone beneath me:
“When you’re laughing, keep on laughing,
keep defying the stars
who dare illuminate the night with their fire,
angering the moon.”
I look up, where stars glitter cold in their orbit
perfectly ordered, unmoved by my wanting.
Then I see it, feel in my chest,
the moment I must have been summoned here for–
a supernova pirouettes through time,
light cascading from her shoulders,
weaving through the gauzy tunic of midnight.
And I know she’ll be admired to the very edge of the universe—
from Canis Major to the Valles Marineris,
from Alpha Centauri to the depths of Mariana.
Yet she comes and goes as she pleases,
as her kind are wont to do—
stately as Cassiopeia, and just as capricious.
She’ll surely anger the moon–
I would too if I possessed her magnitude.
I’d stand at the threshold of constellations,
weave an offering of words through gravity and time,
wait in infinity limbo if I must
to ask the heavens what they know,
and tell them all I’ve learned.
But I hear rain descend upon the old castle,
it drip drip drips
through every crack in the crumbling walls,
falls gently on the hills and valleys of my face,
until I am mortal again.
IV. RAIN
I’m pulled like a thread from the fabric of space-time,
transported back into my body,
plucked from the precarious castle,
returned to my seat at my favorite café.
The mortal world hums to life around me, beautiful, ordinary—
the clattering of cutlery, the diners and their din.
The windows steam in time with the espresso machine,
and I find an altar of creation spread out before me—
sanctified by solitude, blessed with espresso.
My wrought iron table with its wrought iron legs
holds the weight of the words I’ve been writing.
Louis sings to me over the radio:
“When you’re crying, you bring on the rain,”
and I fear that is too much responsibility for one pair of shoulders.
For rain is relentless, a burden, a benediction.
But I think of all the moss that will grow now, soft over stone.
I think of rainforested trees that will reach up so tall
that they’ll drown the equatorial sun.
I think of Idyllwild pathways
watered by ancient mists that have travelled the world over,
just to fall on the ferns there.
I clutch my cappuccino warm to my hands
and I think of the stars in their heavens,
silent and cold at the edge of my memory.
There’s not much to show for the journey, is there?
But at least I brought the rain.
So from now until the sun remembers to bless me
I’ll have a scone and espresso, please—
the moon in the sky, routine on routine.