Coffee
There’s an old screen door in my heart
and a memory,
bare feet on a worn wooden porch
and an old yellow kitchen
with a stout black stove and sunshine
shambling across the linoleum, warming
the green checkered oilcloth
holding coffee and yeast breads and hands
pouring coffee, aging hands
browned from late-summer gardening,
fragrant with yeast and cinnamon,
the hands of sisters
and their white-haired mother.
But it’s their sound I remember,
voices talking
all at once, answering without asking
in a rhythm and dance
that is older than I, a dance
born of years and tears,
resentments and laughter, it’s a truce
without words I am witnessing,
hearing without listening, absorbed
in fishing sodden crumbs
from the bottom of my cup that is
mostly milk splashed with coffee,
and I don’t know.
I don’t know that this memory
Is imprinting
deep into my skin
like the oilcloth under my arms,
and I don’t know that there is
a black and white film recording,
winding throughout my heart,
dated summer of ’95
and that I will remember it
every year in aging summer,
unwinding across my memory, asking
if I could hear it just one more time,
in color.
