C’mon Back Café

It’s 96 degrees

iced coffee, early afternoon

diligent millennials inside at their laptops

I’m outside in the warm shade

of a large sycamore, a wilting, tired angel

barely able to breathe

some of her leaves

collapsed into themselves crisp as dried out bats

but she’s hanging in there.

How I depend on her! Her massive splotched

trunks cantilevered over the sidewalk

hold.

So long as she stands, I can make it

in this heat, blissfully peaceful, in spite of it

practicing my listening:

a workman intermittently tosses torn-out sinks

and old fixtures into an echoing dumpster

gutting a defunct barber shop, in this strip mall,

an older one, that somehow

manages a homey feel, a sort of plaza — its shabby ivy

twists up the wood posts of the overhang testifying

to its tough struggle—

there's a nail shop, a dog-grooming salon, even

that endangered commercial species, a used

bookstore —all

within range of this silent sycamore’s presence.

Where do sycamores come from?

Where do angels come from

where have we all come from

blown into a strip mall like scraps of paper

clustering together

on our devices, separately

at the C’mon Back Café?

The demolition sounds

irritate me until I let them go

into the surf of passing tires

into the silence suddenly reverberating

when the motorcycle stops.

Strange, I hadn’t even heard its throbbing idle

until it stopped.

Every moment’s a culmination.

John Cage would be all for it.

I have docked at this space-station

on my way to the far reaches of the universe

my wife back home on earth, perhaps

doing laundry or reading. Heaven help us

if strip malls keep proliferating.

This wasteland’s so literal it’s worse than Eliot’s.

Have architects all lost their imagination?

Of course, it’s fiscally driven,

integrity’s out the window. Amazon

and Walmart have us so hooked on convenience

and price, to be a local now

is to be a refugee

in a lower-middle class strip mall—souped up

but temporary and insulting and hideous

as immigration detention centers, not as horrendous

of course, but similarly degrading—all of it

created by international corporations.

It’s a bloodbath. But you know all that.

I am visiting my daughter and grandsons

who were able to buy a house on this planet

a little too close to the sun for comfort.

Thank God it has a Y, with a great pool

protected by very expensive fighter jets breaking

the sound barrier several times a day.

You always know there’s a war

going on somewhere, even as I sit here

poised in solitude, I’m surrounded by rehearsals

for war—that are supposed to make you feel safe!

I’d feel a lot safer if they’d just give me whatever it costs

to fuel one of those jets for a week.

To think we’ve been at war since 1990—

Twenty-eight years!

This is apparently an indifferent

chaotic universe, but I bet

there’s an underlying order

I imitate by temporarily sipping iced coffee

in peace. There’s a core of peace

at the center of this universe. I can feel it

just sitting here in the warm shade. It’s paid for

by my small breathing

that in turn attracts a weak breeze

that causes you, my uncomplaining angel, a bedraggled tree

to ache and lift the whole

garbage-producing population of human beings

with your burning wings.

I had to get out of the house.

The Trump pimp, federal circuit court Judge Kavanaugh

in the Senate Supreme Court Confirmation hearings on TV

was slaughtering language with phrases such as

enhanced interrogation techniques (meaning torture

used by Bush administration in Guantanamo)—

compared to that, writing poems

even if they’re mediocre or shitty

is a way of sharing the shade of a sycamore tree.

Now a garbage truck’s backing up, it’s beeper going

the guy on the ground

beckoning it back with his hands, says

C’moan back . . . moan back, now, that’s it, keep comin’ . . . moan back . . .

that’s the news for the day

from the Moan Back Café.