Ode to Coffee

An Ekphrastic Poem

First I want to thank all my new subscribers. For some reason, it’s scarier to share my work with friends and family than with people I don’t know. So my partner Josh started telling our friends and sending out texts inviting folks to subscribe. I even sent a few myself. So thank you. I appreciate all of you, but having the people I love support my work means more than you know.

If I could, I’d send you all this iced coffee as a thank you. Josh and I discovered that we could freeze coffee so instead of having iced coffee that gets watery as the ice cubes melt, the ice melts and it’s all coffee, which leads me into this week’s post.

Last week I mentioned my love of coffee, so I thought I could expound on that with a poem. “Ode to Coffee” is an ekphrastic poem after one of my favorite paintings, Richard Diebenkorn's Coffee. You can click on the link to see the painting itself.¹

According to The Poetry Foundation, “An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the ‘action’ of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning.”

But I think the best ekphrastic poetry takes it further, using the work of art, in this case Coffee, as a launching point into a new work of art. In “Ode to Coffee”² I started with the painting of the woman in her chair drinking coffee and then took it into an exploration of coffee and drinking and the relief that can come from both.

Ode to Coffee
                                    after Richard Diebenkorn’s Coffee

That first sip of morning. 
The woman in her chair, 
cup in both hands, 
brought to her lips like a chalice. 
Hues of blue and green. 
She faces away from the window, 
away from the day. 
That first taste of day, 
of loam and earth.
Like the relief 
of the first drink of alcohol, 
except the edges sharpen, not blur.
That drink when the world is 
too harsh and jittery, 
when everything hurts. 

After the relief of years, 
of reaching for scotch, gin, vodka, wine, beer,
the black curtain of no memory, 
now I have only coffee. 
Coffee is memory.
Of late afternoon Café Cubanos 
as I sit on the deck
watching the sun sink.
Too late and I’ll wake
as if I’ve hardly slept,
and the only thing to do is drink more coffee,
at least two cups each morning,
then there’s always that afternoon dip,
sometime between two and four,
when it’s either a nap or coffee or both.

Like those drinks to forget, to make myself 
feel right in the world. 
Now it’s the rich darkness
that lets me keep on with the day.
Like my Dad said when he was dying 
that Saturday he took morphine for the pain, 
“That first drink really did it.” 
He knew I knew what a first drink could do.
In my bed of morning again, 
curtain closed against the light
that first sip so hot and thick.

Thanks so much for reading this week. Let me know what you think in the Comments. Any coffee drinkers out there?

Please feel free to share this post with anyone you think might enjoy it.

1. Richard Diebenkorn’s Coffee is at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. As the painting isn’t in the public domain, I chose to not include a copy of it here.

2. “Ode to Coffee” was first published in MacQueen’s Quinterly and later appeared in Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche.