Cold Beauty-Warm Coffee

Arrived at my office and have begun to brew a pot of coffee. There's comfort to hearing it gurgle and drip. I shuffle around the kitchenette at the back of the suite.  I lay my purse down on the table as I look to see if there is any milk to add to my coffee.

In my purse are bills, the bane of a life lived in the mainstream.  There are bills for the basics, water, electricity and gas.  There are bills for the extras for advanced English classes, for ice time for hockey and for a gym membership (which I will never use but hope springs eternal now doesn't it.) 

There is also a dog earred book of poetry.  Somewhere in the middle of that volume is the poem which before I set about my tasks I will reread as I listen to some old Miles Davis.

And because Love battles

And because love battles

not only in its burning agricultures

but also in the mouth of men and women,

I will finish off by taking the path away

to those who between my chest and your fragrance

want to interpose their obscure plant.



About me, nothing worse

they will tell you, my love,

than what I told you.



I lived in the prairies

before I got to know you

and I did not wait love but I was

laying in wait for and I jumped on the rose.



What more can they tell you?

I am neither good nor bad but a man,

and they will then associate the danger

of my life, which you know

and which with your passion you shared.



And good, this danger

is danger of love, of complete love

for all life,

for all lives,

and if this love brings us

the death and the prisons,

I am sure that your big eyes,

as when I kiss them,

will then close with pride,

into double pride, love,

with your pride and my pride.



But to my ears they will come before

to wear down the tour

of the sweet and hard love which binds us,

and they will say: “The one

you love,

is not a woman for you,

Why do you love her? I think

you could find one more beautiful,

more serious, more deep,

more other, you understand me, look how she’s light,

and what a head she has,

and look at how she dresses,

and etcetera and etcetera”.



And I in these lines say:

Like this I want you, love,

love, Like this I love you,

as you dress

and how your hair lifts up

and how your mouth smiles,

light as the water

of the spring upon the pure stones,

Like this I love you, beloved.



To bread I do not ask to teach me

but only not to lack during every day of life.

I don’t know anything about light, from where

it comes nor where it goes,

I only want the light to light up,

I do not ask to the night

explanations,

I wait for it and it envelops me,

And so you, bread and light

And shadow are.



You came to my life

with what you were bringing,

made

of light and bread and shadow I expected you,

and Like this I need you,

Like this I love you,

and to those who want to hear tomorrow

that which I will not tell them, let them read it here,

and let them back off today because it is early

for these arguments.



Tomorrow we will only give them

a leaf of the tree of our love, a leaf

which will fall on the earth

like if it had been made by our lips

like a kiss which falls

from our invincible heights

to show the fire and the tenderness

of a true love.





Pablo Neruda