A Tidings of Magpies

by Anne Higgins , Strong coffee smells like a current of warm southerly air in the climate of dawn. Strong coffee gets stronger when poured back through the grounds. Opaque, thick, hot, bitter for waking up, the caffeine pumps through your center, stains your mouth with morning, with going to work, surprises you with your own breath.

All Dharmas Are Marked with Emptiness by Frank X. Gaspar I'm talking now about the destitute and the wild-eyed, I'm talking about the lady who made the head of the Virgin Mary out of cut up pieces of magazines and broken glass and a can of carpenter's glue—and then there's the girl I know who works in the supermarket, who printed an entire anthology of poems on a single eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of Xerox paper and folded a hundred copies down to wallet size and passed them out to anyone who dared look her in the eye. You know what I mean: there are all those lonely, desperate, weird minds—yours among them for all I know—and the Dharma is everywhere, books and words and people thinking, beat-up notebooks from the dollar store, scribbling the world into them—a man has a mystery, a woman has an adventure, the kids are banging rhymes together like tin cans full of old nails. Where's it all going, this clatter, this wonder...

In the White Sky by William Stafford Many things in the world have already happened. You can go back and tell about them. They are part of what we own as we speed along through the white sky. But many things in the world haven't yet happened. You help them by thinking and writing and acting. Where they begin, you greet them or stop them. You come along and sustain the new things. Once, in the white sky there was a beginning, and I happened to notice and almost glimpsed what to do. But now I have come far to here, and it is away back there. Some days, I think about it. Hubby and I are sitting here this morning drinking our coffees and listening to WWOZ out of New Orleans on the computer and trying to decide what to do with our day off. If anything. It's cool and grey here. Good day to curl up and read or watch more episodes of Treme in our vigorous and studious attempt to learn about our daughter's new home. I...

It's very quiet here this morning. HoneyHaired is at school taking her last exam of the quarter. Art History. Hubby's luxuriating in being back in bed after driving our grrrrl and the neighbor grrrrls to school this morning. It was my turn, but I bartered to drive extra shifts on a morning without so much snow and ice. I was thinking perhaps next summer. Birds are chattering away at the bird feeders in our front yard and I see glimpses of a fat furry tail scampering across the outside of our living room window. This fall we had a mama and baby squirrel constructing an elaborate nest outside our kitchen window. The baby would come out in the evenings at dinnertime and peek in, lifting his little paw on the screen like a hello. I don't know if it was the workmen who came to fix the gutters or a forewarning of the bitter wind that comes in from that western exposure, but the squirrels moved their home from the back of the house to a front window box where I hope they're mo...

by James Tate People in this town drink too much coffee. They're jumpy all the time. You see them drinking out of their big plastic mugs while they're driving. They cut in front of you, they steal your parking places. Teenagers in the cemeteries knocking over tombstones are slurping café au lait. Recycling men hanging onto their trucks are sipping espresso. Dogcatchers running down the street with their nets are savoring their cups of mocha java. The holdup man entering a convenience store first pours himself a nice warm cup of coffee. Down the funeral parlor driveway a boy on a skateboard is spilling his. They're so serious about their coffee, it's all they can think about, nothing else matters. Everyone's wide awake but looks incredibly tired.