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An Early Morning Cafe’

An Early Morning Cafe’

At the summit of the Trade Center
107 stories into urban ether
the Windows of the World Cafe
served pate’ and poached salmon
to diners staring down
into the caverns of Manhattan,
but early in the September morning,
the sommelier and maitre d’
still asleep in their far-away flats,
only the sous-chef and banquet staff
had arrived to peel the shrimp,
trim the artichokes, and wash
the leaves of the escarole.
Simple work in silence with your mates
in an empty early morning cafe’
is a pleasure: jokes, mild complaining,
a hummed tune or two,
sneaking a cigarette in a quiet alcove,
stories of luck in last night’s poker,
when suddenly a berserk machine
decides to murder a building with fire.
Like a badly shot elephant,
the hundred and six stories holding up
your peeling knife and lettuce drier
wobbled and shook for a little while.
Smoke belched out from blown-out eye sockets
but when the flames began melting the bones,
it all tumbled down on top of itself in
a smoking gray heap, the shrimp,
the artichokes, the escarole, fifty thousand
bottles of elegant wine, joining
in a sticky red downpour:
type A, type O, Chateau Lafitte, Rothschild.
Pouilly Fuisse ’79, type AB ’49,
and you yourself unless you leapt
out one of the windows of the world
to try with your imaginary wings
to finish the flight to the city of angels.
Humans so riddled with hate they transmogrified
from men to bombs to smash the girders
under your cafe’, though they’d never met you at all,
to murder you for the glory of God
with your apron still smeared with shrimp guts.
It was always thus. Try killing an abstraction
by murdering a building from the air,
but all you kill is Bob and Edna
and Sallie and Rodrigo and Mei-Mei.
A building is only a set of artificial legs
to hold up human beings in the air,
and an airplane only a sheet of folded paper.
But 50,000 bottles of good wine
and ten gallons of fresh gulf shrimp,
and Bob and Edna and all the rest.
Now that is something real!
If you think you’ve bagged the one truth
and that truth wants final sacrifice,
then you have stepped outside the human race,
and your plane will not land in heaven
wherever you think it might be.
Heaven in an early morning cafe’.
Wherever you are.

Bill Holm Playing the Black Piano
© Milkweed Press, 2004

A powerful piece. A powerful peace.

This is a wonderful article from the New York Times titled. ‘The Good Short Life”.

An honest account of life and death by Dudley Clendinen

 

Do more

reality

“the same reality that see the hand as withered, sees the hand as non-withered.”

-margaret laird

Relationships Ah relationships.

Over the course of our lives friends, like it or not,  come and go. All contribute greatly to who we are and show us new ways to experience life.  We, over time, develop expectations of one another consciously or not. We may feel disappointment for the times we feel they are not there for us.  We may feel a pang of jealousy when other friends compete for their time. We may feel grief when they move away or become distant.We feel loss when they start new relationships that take them away from us.

People come into each others life to share their light with us. Enjoy the perspective they provide us, bask in the light they share and know we are constantly in a dance with one another.  There is no mistake we meet the people we do. There is no mistake we cross paths with so many others. Celebrate and drink it in while it is there. It is who makes us who we are today. They will always be a part of us and never separate.

beautiful people

‎”The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known
defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss and have found
their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a
sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with
compassion, gentleness and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do
not just happen.”     — Elizabeth Kubler Ross