Hallway to Nowhere

Category: tea

  • Bitter Disappointment (Poem)

    My mother took me to a tea room.

    She promised a special treat.

    What kind of tea would it be?

    Some tea brought from China, pressed into a cake,

    Aged so that it was even older than I?

    Some tea from Japan, fine-leafed and green,

    Served in a cup more delicate than my dreams?

    We entered into ordinary room that tried to make itself special

    With cloying incense and scarf-draped lamps.

    No other customers, for she had reserved the entirety of the hour.

    The server poured us tea,

    From a commonplace pot into commonplace cups.

    She told us that we were to swirl it once

    Then pour it out quickly into a bowl on the table.

    A woman came and read our fortunes aloud,

    Speaking with a fake Creole accent,

    And made us each a taped recording.

    I carried mine for years.

    The taste of the tea I never drank lingers on my tongue.

  • Panta Rhei: A Heracleitian World (Poem)

    Time and memory are fluid,

    Running through us with marbled colors,

    The psyche as malleable agateware.

    The bayous and cypress trees of childhood

    Exist vividly alongside now-beloved mountains draped in smoke.

    The Shearwater cup that held tea,

    Then favorite pan-fired gunpowder green,

    From which I sipped early in the musky mornings before grade school,

    Sits still on my mind’s shelf with successive handmade tea cups.

    The paintings by my father and other local artists I see on the walls,

    Together with current pieces of artwork.

    The past is never that, though we can try to pretend

    And even attempt to banish it from our being.

    Better I’ve found, to accept this and embrace a multidimensional life,

    Observing the interflow of old and new with detached curiosity.

    Such mixture will inform all that we experience, however we decide.

    I choose awareness. Let this bring what it will.

    All things always in flux.