Over Coffee

Over Coffee
by Carlos Martinez
Here is the best of everything – you sitting in a chair
at a table in a café at the back of a bookstore where
the dust motes glide through the air as easily as wrens
and crowds bustle up and down the aisles looking for
the latest self-help books, the most recent diet guide
while you and I sip coffee and tea and eat
freshly-baked scones and the children
suburban mothers tow along behind them
make noise as their rubber-soled shoes drag across
scuffed linoleum. In front of me, the leather-bound anthology of
contemporary poetry you bought for me, my hands
resting on its front cover, which is as warm as flesh.
Your hair is so blond it sheds light, this dim corner
illumined by it and I am so much dazzled, I cast
my eyes down to where the scratched tabletop reflects it.
Wrong is what people say, those who have never sat
at a table in a café at the back of a bookstore where
rain’s driven crowds inside to browse
rows of books, where I am
a tongue-tied middle-aged man
whose gray-haired head
plays moon to yours.