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Posts Tagged ‘coffee’

No Detail Too Small 

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on June 7, 2026| 4 Comments »


 
The weather changes the beans, 
Svetlana tells me as we sit in her home.
I sip the coffee she’s made me, 
a blend she and her partner created
from five different beans that they roast
themselves. She can taste in her cup
whether the growing season was rainy 
or dry. Everything changes everything. 
No detail too small to link us to the world
of the real, to help us remember who we are. 
I am thinking of the piano player 
today in Santa Fe. As her hands
flew across the keys, passionate 
and precise, it was the way she moved
her eyebrows that stirred me,
her utter commitment and wonder 
expressed in a single arch or furrow, 
lift or frown. I am thinking of how 
my friends Don and Mindy have written 
the word wisdum on the wall in their home, 
and how all day I have giggled about it.
They can seem so trifling, the details 
that capture us, claim us, rearrange us.
I once thought redemption was something grand. 
Something costly. Unlikely. Now I believe
the lost pieces of ourselves can, in part, be 
recovered through noticing the smallest of things— 
the raising of a brow, a handwritten word, 
the treble notes in a roasted coffee bean. 

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Sumatra

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 18, 2019| 2 Comments »

 

 

I want to serve you Sumatra,

the wild, mossy, mushroomy

dark of it. I want to serve you

 

the muted black song in a white cup,

so you can, if you listen closely,

hear the birds of Southeast Asia

 

with their foreign calls,

hear the farmer as he hums

while he picks the coffee cherry,

 

as he removes its dark red skin.

I want to serve you the scent of moss,

so strong you find yourself laying in it,

 

staring up at the sky through

the canopy, laying there for hours

forgetting anything else to do.

 

Will you find there, too,

the hint of old leather, a favorite

belt, a favorite shoe, something

 

familiar to slip into? Dark in the cup,

dark like midnight, dark like two a.m., dark

like the silence that finds the world then.

 

Dark in the cup, like fathomless space

where a small voice whispers, stay awake.

And there, in the cup, the gift of a place

 

where we have never been, but

together, perhaps, we could sip the Sumatra

and visit again and again.

 

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When Faced with a Challenge

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 5, 2018| Leave a Comment »

 

 

 

Already the mind

has put on its tool belt

grabbed its manuals,

consulted its experts

and rolled up its sleeves,

but the heart just wants

to know itself,

pours a cup of Sumatra,

sets out another cup,

and waits to see

who will arrive.

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The Lesson

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 30, 2018| 6 Comments »

I asked the world

to teach me of truth

and waited and waited

for a lesson. Anything.

A bird. A rainbow.

A bug. A storm.

But nothing.

And so I went in

and made a cup

of coffee—ground

the beans and steamed

the milk and cradled

the cup in my hands.

And I tasted it.

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In the Coffee Shop

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 7, 2011| 1 Comment »

How separate we act,
all of us hunched at our own
little tables, rounded over

our thin paper cups,
mumbling into our phones,
or leaning into our laptop screens

or hidden behind the news
stretched out in black and white.
We frown when jostled,

we scowl when bumped,
we grimace at the din
of communion as our

selves steep into the blur—
do you want sugar with that—
it is bitter, the cup, and so

very much what we came here for.

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