I, too have been another person
in the coffee shops at dawn in other cities,
in the calm before the trams squeal round the corner of the square
where I am faced again with poverty of language I possess
and lack of time.
When sky turns half-tone,
headscarfed women in blue uniforms sweep cobbled lanes and alleys
with rush brooms behind the rubber-tyred waste trucks,
so dew-washed faces of the buildings
and the watered facets shine.
The earthy perfume of the coffee,
scooped from sacks beside the roaster making berries darker still,
the labels, Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia,
Jamaica, mapping people of the world I’ll never meet:
their lives are private as my own, their thought as intimate,
and they remain anonymous as I, but we exist,
to bear each kiss or fear we’ve had or pain we gave,
till faces crumble, and our poetry grows bodiless
and eulogies are stale.
We find each other interesting, even intricate.
My thoughts run on this way.
And then from brick and stone the click-click echo of tall heels –
how can these women on their way to sit in offices or stand
all day in stores the tourists haunt
proceed so steadfast and contained?
They cross themselves, like businessmen and students
passing by the pilgrim church; some bow, or nod or genuflect,
while others go without a glance, as if to pause
is to declare belief in fairies, magic, ghosts.
The clients of this café pick up papers and take seats,
backs turned to windows, where whatever is familiar
has the same charm as the news that testifies that nothing’s changed.
They’ve tried on history’s tragic mask so long
the next page is a replica of every one before.
Everything that’s in me lies in each of these staid faces.
I have turned my whole attention
to erasing the ennui of day-long travel, in cramped
armchairs in the sky, from other rendezvous
where the familiar future pushes days along, each one
a template for the next, to come to this that feels like home.
Here, there: the present’s stacked up like denial on denial,
and the avenue named Freedom’s built on water,
but explore yourself, this place says: there’s no radio
or music to abduct you, only streets that fill with thinkers
just like you in time-lapse study of each moment
and no camera but your eyes and ears,
such motion and such life, on this first morning, and the thought
of others like it and the foretaste of the cup, and why not,
do the same tomorrow when the dawn breaks here again.
Michael Sharkey lives at Castlemaine, Victoria. He edits the Australian Poetry Journal, and is author of several collections of poetry, and a number of biographical and other works.