An Excess of Fireflies

My mother liked to drink iced coffee
on humid New Jersey afternoons. This was long
ago, before we feared caffeine or were spooked
by what negligence and downright abuse have done
to this physical world, before things reached the point
where anything we eat or drink or breathe just might
kill us. Because they didn't know better,
people back then could drink coffee at all hours
without it keeping them up at night.
Maybe if they tossed and turned
they had some other explanation, like
how elusive sleep can be after a thunderstorm,
or the way an excess of fireflies
foretells a night of lying awake.

She didn't make fresh coffee; she would only take
this small pleasure if some remained from the morning.
I loved the color, the soft milky brown in the dimpled
amber tumbler, cubes of ice bobbing in their murky sea.
I never learned to like the taste, or to pretend I did.

Now in summer I often have an iced mocha, the bitter
coffee masked by sweet chocolate, the color just as I remember
and my own icebergs cloistered in a narrow glass. It's not humid
here, rarely even very hot; still, far from there in time and space,
I feel the heaviness of that moist summer air, the increased gravity,
the beaded sweat on me and on the glass, the closeness, the distance.

-Lisa Rappoport

[A dear friend gave me this poem. It is letterpressed with shiny gold ink and I keep it in my window so it catches the light. I was thinking of the things we surround ourselves with, the things we like waking up to and this was one of mine. Your turn.]