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The Tidy Life of The Small Table
A Coffee Shop Book

 

Vision at the Osceola Café

I’d planned to go to the Osceola alone
but I took a friend who’d stood at my door
and asked me what I was planning to do.
I said town. I was going to town.
 
We sat at a high table near coffee urns
where people poured their own, part this,
part that, say hazelnut and Columbian decaf.
Each one’s style answered in ounces.
 
In came an ash blond college student,
hair draped over her right shoulder,
somehow swept up on the left.
Back from school with my friends.
She smiled in all her patient answers
to the where’s, how long, how old.
 
After the girl floated out of sight
in a room filled with paintings and light,
my friend flipped tears sideways.
Not tears for what she once was
but for being here and seeing all this.