Foreblind Poem by Glenn Latal

I watch the afternoon brush a coat of fresh shadow
Onto the building across the street.
It fills the view through the window of this quiet café.
The day cools and darkens around me.
Reflected light in elongated mimicry
Of the shape of the window slides across the table,
In and out of my outstretched hand.

Its cool and warm here in the well lit darkness.
I have a peripheral sense of a burden of rain,
The soft ostinato of a woman’s breath
And the fleeting gather of her well mannered smile
Acknowledging proximity and nothing more.
This voluntary obligation being the petty coinage of civilization,
The tossing to the peasants has been millennia in the perfecting.

My hand smoothes the linen
As Corelli’s bipolar lilt pours down upon us
From the softly undulating diaphragms
Of sleek visaged gargoyles crouching atop the walls,
Continuo to the confident timbre of our well modulated murmurings.
Gently stirring the fronds of the foliage strategically scattered
To comfort our need for well regulated doses of serendipity,
The sound weaves among the tables and solicitously reassures us
That we are indeed poised and fulfilled,
Being the ultimate in connoisseurs.
Leather and cologne discretely bespeak security and surety,
While that wayward relation, qualm, so as not to embarrass,
Is given a small annuity to reside abroad,
But not by me.

We are not rich, pampered, safe and slumming,
Merely swaddling our post-(inser cliché) transcendence in nostalgia.
Masonry walls stand disrobed and unintended,
Shorn of lime and pigment to salve the sophisticated eye.
Each brick of this family of individuals determinedly connected to its intimates,
Sustaining and supporting all through their personal bonds.
This is the community we’ve praised whenever encountered,
But rarely considered laboring to build.
Dry stonewalls can always be re-laid after rupture.
Failure entails no loss, it is considered a normal course of events, all change partners.

In my reverie, we could clear a space, dragging the tables and chairs
Along the floor with the innately suitable resonance of wood on wood,
Stand and appreciate the craft of properly laying a brick,
Discuss the dignity of labor and our grandfather’s calluses
And what we used to wish to be when we were grown.

Instead, I blink and look about me.
We sit and read and stare through the plate glass
At the slender, lone Aspen, modestly disregarding us,
Tidily suspended between consumption and armored flight,
In it’s hand-wrought-iron cage of protective custody,
So submissively, unassumingly stoic.

As a pencil negligently dropped, rolls off a table,
Often my thoughts seem to come to rest
Just beyond my ability to grasp.
We assume there must be value to this life.
After all, there is meaning,
For, there is coherence, isn’t there?

Across the croissants crumbs
And demitasse of cappuccino sits qualm,
Sipping and smiling wanly over the rim,
Keeping me company on my vigil.
And I have nothing to say.
Not even this.