Popcorn Redemption
Maybe one day still remote in its futurity, this one will be the stuff of legends. If not of legends, the day will maybe come in which it will be the what-about of blockbuster movies and their sequels, a thing people will go to stand in lines for, wrapping themselves around the corners, after a while coming back out of empty-headed but surely happily praising the humble glory of popcorn and coke drowned up in the warm butter of cinemas afternoons, in winter. And that would be it. But just as likely, a better day awaits, already offing but still in the far-flown future.
Whenever it comes if it ever does, that day might bring with it voluminous mysteries dispelled, especially for him who never stood in blockbuster lines and knows not what makes the movies corn pop in one’s mouth, or the stuff that causes coke to bubble, and who usually forgets the butter. For such a day it will only shine under the sun provided time loves releasing things to let them be unto themselves, as a present from its futurity. That could also be my great break into the openness, into the light. I could be reborn then, though not as a star.
Not that I have ever trusted poets knowing anything too deep. But it gives me comfort that a day is already sprawling from the future which will be the closest I could ever get to finding out from which ancient Mediterranean fable you must have escaped into the midnight tidings, where I found you. But if I do not get to know that, then I will for sure be told of the unknown Botticelli sculptured on your face, even when not smiling. And, if not that, then is a foregone conclusion that only then it will be revealed, for all to know, which character you would have given life to, in a Chekhovian or Shakespearian dream.
As to now, I am only certain that buried in you the answers lie to questions which only few men can survive not asking. Yet, I am none of those men.
Coffee on Late Afternoons
Late afternoon coffee has the taste of unfulfilled
morning promises to which a second chance have been given. But some out there might beg to disagree and to say that late afternoon
coffees are the humbling reward a man gets who habitually strolls alone his inner aimlessness
through the downtown regions of his city.
If I am guessing right, you too are now flavoring your cup, on another far-off table miles from mine. Should my second guess be also right, holding your cup up to your mouth, you are not even half-consumed as I am by wondering if chance has a law I could invoke, to summon your presence side-by-side the shadows I am turning into. You should see them, floating up from the nutty scenting darkness of the night soon to be flourishing around what in me is most forlorn. Easy to believe you sent them over to disguise your absence.Dipping to the bottom, I have been sipping
reminiscences of us. You would see them scattered by the same winds that blew you my way twice
from the depths of autumn years past, first on that nowhere-bound G-Brooklyn train, and again on that rainy Manhattan corner.You sat there, facing me in that now defunct Little Italy coffeeshop which we were the last patrons of. Your face adorned your regal overcoat, ready to challenge the approaching winter. You spoke wisely about life, reenacting viva voce scenes from your days in Milan and California. Your
words were gyrating around the cosmos to invoke Dante, to make remarks about the imperishable beauty of his Inferno, which was becoming ever
my own as you were getting ready to depart, maybe not even suspecting that my interspersed silence had all along been calling you Beatrice.There was nothing else that I, who never got to even be your far-gone forgotten love, could have said that could have made any sense even to me.
You were moving westward, you said, were getting into Hollywood and the movies, where your heart was pointing you up; or maybe your heart would wound you up in Paris, who knows, land you on latitudes where mine could not have followed.Then, where hopes could have grown, distance sprouted because you were bound to be leaving. When taking-off was announced I heard you spatially, from faraway. I had learned long before that where distance sprouts, abiding nostalgia flowers its pains. So yeah, I am still bleeding coffee, Beatrice—you who were for me the destination where my habitual city stroll was destined to arrive at, every time. It could have mattered not if the nine cycles of hell had not been spared me.
Beatrice Lives
Although I have been doing it every day through all my born years, only today I finally learned there is so much that can be revealed to a man who rain or shine sticks to his routine stroll throughout any city he calls his. It has been deciphered, and now I know why it has never been possible for me to set foot on the abutments and adjacencies surrounding Elizabeth or Mulberry or Grand streets without giving in to wondering how many, of all the indwellers I must run into, would have had as a forebear someone who would have become immortal by being named Dante’s name.
The unsparing autumn wintry darkness had been raging on, turning to opaqueness and invisibilities things on which it blew, making of human existence a foggy field. Distilling fear, I felt being blown out and away into a nobodiness, into something like the specter I had ceased being years ago. I was not yet nell’ mezzo de la mia vita, downtown beasts barring my way to where I was surely not going anymore. Nonetheless, I then learned that dread is a cold master, and that it strikes you during routine strolls through autumnally windy, darkening cities, whether in Milan, Paris, or London.
That is when, drenched in fear, I looked up and around, and then, Beatrice!
It was only a pop-up vision for sure. But she taught me that the spring is not any longer it, and that the autumn is now the cruelest of the seasons, which however when most lonely makes the shared company of coffee into cups of warming Paradise.
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