The Coffee Line

Judith Vollmer


The cart was a house we approached at dawn,
the man tended the chrome pots bent over
in his canvas apron, the steam a circuit above the boiling
water and the smell could knock you out at 6 in the morning:
our paper bags softened in the mist, and our lunches sealed
in waxed paper held meats & fruit—
second sweetness of the day—but this would be the first, the dark
poured into our thermoses, the dark warmed our faces
in the first-light, the smell, holy
smell of the whole oiled & turning world
smoked into our nostrils down onto our tongues,
eyes in our heads watered, ears opened
to the sound of pouring from the chrome spout,
the falling dark waterfall into the cup, 1 cup just
now before work, sipping the dark, 2 sugars, 3,
help yourself to a fourth, it’s payday,
the milk warmed if possible    is that possible, the man
bends toward us hands up the cup and keeps pouring
elixir & frugality, cost & profit.  Every morning
the red ring of the single burner on the white
stove in the cart can be seen from far away in the black
wet streets we walk, minds dipped in sky-tar
buffed to something ebony & bony & vase-like;
we walk toward the wedding ring of night & morning fused,
Saturn, ring of the brain’s tiny volcanoes awakening.
       
       --after John Sloan, American painter, 1871-1951

 
from Reactor by Judith Vollmer. 
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
Used by permission of the poet and of the University of Wisconsin Press.