Cortado
                        —for Angelo
 
I like to say it, the way it rolls
off the tongue like chocolate.
Corrr-taah-doh ... a hint of lemon
on the fish, Chapulines, or Menudo.
This is liquid sweet as single malt
liquor, pretty as corn flowers blown up
poster-sized. I can’t quite navigate
the map of it, how I missed coffee
all these years. I thought it was
the darkest brown surface
side-lipping off a white cup or
a dried circle twisted
out of a porcelain bottom.
 
Pristine, Î would call the chalk-
cinnamon dusting a tension,
a pre-tea leaf reading
of the next second
when it comes — siesta eólica
taking the edge off the heat,
adding layers of light gust
to Mucho gusto, that this is
as good as a meal, a wedding feast
itself, apple-stuffed pig good—
diving out of the sea like a dolphin or
strumming a guitar inside your mouth.
 
 
 
Borges and the Honey
 
 
My friend tells this story about Borges
and California. It was graduate school,
the grains of art beginning to assemble
into a pyramid, youth barking like a dog
staring into the dark forest behind a house.
We were learning how to everything.
I imagine him then in a kind of suit
of poetry he was making carefully
like a European tailor, stitches into lines,
hems and verses folded over to neat
exquisite garments. That’s the way I see
the past, but he’s more than that now.
 
This is his simple story, though I use simple
the way Edward Hopper did when he said,
I have a very simple method of painting.
 
From his letter to me then—
“He was a great passion of mine in my youth, 
how the world's portrait is painted
with such precisely worded yet mystifying,
magical images, all delivered in his quiet,
self-erasing style.  I met him once
when I was in grad school in Southern California,
and after his reading we talked for a while
and somehow ‘honey’ came up
in the conversation (a quote perhaps)
and he said he'd never tasted honey.
How was that possible? Didn't they have bees
in Argentina? Whatever the case, I said
we had to correct that metaphysical shortcoming
immediately. I helped him into my car
and we drove around looking for a fast-food restaurant
that might have a packet for breakfast meals.
I found one and there in the parking lot
I opened it up. He dipped his finger in, tasted it,
paused, and with what I can only describe
as religious awe, let out a long ... mmmmmm.
And that was that.”
 
 
 
Flat White
 
 
I meant to drink it all,
back to even with the rim
where cloud touched upper lip.
Someone called that
a Flat White, one example
of how we misname —
a town called Boring,
another Happyland,
any Blues song
with Sunny in it.
 
I took the cup down
a slalom throat, smoothest
poetry reading I ever heard,
buffed cardboard smooth,
warm as a hand in a shared mitten
when you were twelve.
It’s the kind of white you believe in
because it’s art,
snow calving off a branch in a garden
under Mount Fuji,
blue wave cresting parchment white,
so well-drawn you can’t believe it’s not
moving on its own,
or that this cloud, your breathing
and drinking ever made it this far
inside you.
 
 
 
Frederick Douglass
 
 
Listen, I’m white. I cannot tell the story of Fredrick Douglass.
I can only say I admire him. When a person goes through hell
as a child, that anguish is transformed to a blackboard and chalk.
He isthe slate, his mind the instrument. Those who read that writing
centuries later are changed by it and him. It’s not sympathy or
empathy, but a knife entering the vacuum of a mind leaving
an imprint there — an acoustic sculpture, a kinetic plinth.
It sings, it moves. Holy child, savior of millions, your hand with a pencil.
 
Listen, I’m not entirely white. My mother was an island
in the Mediterranean — her skin made of olives, her eyes
their branches. The sea gives up the river, the river reverses itself.
The source neatens in us, slips its hands down an apron for smithing,
for cooking, for war. A goatskin shield, an oiled drum. There are ships inside of sailors, spears inside of soldiers, chains inside of the free. We finger them with heartstrings and dried bones. What I remember is the uncapped rage, the smile and laugh that were all part of the same being who was mine, as I am hers, and then us inside that shelter given to all those love has taught, freed, and saved.
 
 
Starbuck’s Poem
 
 
People float, dive into its sea.
It’s the center —
countered, staffed, wholly fragrant
and noise-worthy.
Business meets art here.
A mindless Zen
of heat touching hand and lip,
then throat to esophagus,
sternum bound, perambulating
toward the muscles.
 
Don’t believe there’s no mystery in us.
The white rounds land—
rain, breezes of human wish
foraging for thought, a word,
work that needs to be done in space.
I could drown in this
and be happy, immerse myself
in warm waters and dark beans,
a mermaid’s arm around my waist —
 
because mythology is the cure,
religion the hammer and tong,
art the only revenge worth pouring
into a tight white cup.
 
 
 
Espresso
 
 
If we drink it down and forget
the color or the bitterness,
we’re left with the plain fact of joy
after bereavement.
I know, I know—
it sounds like too much,
like happiness and contentment
inside a stuffed pastry,
all air and no substance.
I’m asking why else
are we here, and what do
we do with our time?
Sideswiped by a car, I was five.
I flew in the air
like a sailing beaker, a carafe
twisting in space and you know
what happens then.
But I didn’t die or break.
I kept on sailing
for decades.
Corkscrewed through days,
my desire to live
was like the strongest caffeine,
like love on steroids
because it was mine and I chose it.
I’m referring us all to the bright menu.
These are the ounces of your life.
Drink this particular darkness.
It won’t kill you. It will spring you
into your day like an eagle.
 
 
Reading Borges
 
 
Reading Borges is like draping gauze
over a camera or taking it off
on the veranda with the sun glaring
at an ironwork table, your blistered hands.
Here is a brightness unexpected,
one you’ve never seen
because your eyes were slowly dying
and night came on like a silent car
out of a day you thought was perfect
until it wasn’t. It is, really,
like a tiger in daylight or
a rewritten history so rich in color
it can’t and must be real.
 
He said, I feel, almost physically,
the gravitation of books, the enveloping
serenity of order, time magically desiccated
and preserved. One book embraces
another. They dry out and engorge
themselves on what’s inside, not arid
but made of air, sweet with magnolia
and orange blossom because some words
turn to history and archetype.
 
Dedalus’s wings helds, his child’s melted
over an ephemerous sea
that tasted salt and
earthly consumption, overwhelming
to the end of things.
You were the most gifted inventor
of flight out of
encasement, as if the library were magical
and you its sorcerer. Your Elvira de Alvear
the very thing that death itself worshipped—
approaching slowly, in quietude
like a retracted claw over the dried leaves
of the beautiful plaza.