—for Al Winans
for a brisk pot of afternoon tea after a hard day of shopping.
We watched the green and cream trolleys rumble down Powell
to the Market Street turnstile, then spun like musicbox dancers,
while the electric trams labored like lugubrious caterpillars,
the air singed blue with cascades of sparks whipping the air,
as their antennae criss-crossed an electric junction box.
Iron wheels groaned, singing the lost songs of mines
to the embedded tracks where horses once labored.
I remember the little scoop of vanilla ice cream,
a summit to be conquered with fork and finger,
while she worked a raft of apple pie adrift on a pale plate,
and the clink of spoons as she stirred her tea,
was a braille of fairy bells. They did it right, she said,
beating a spoon staccato on the sides of the thick mug.
Waiters scalded the teapot before filling with boiling water
with the Lipton teabag already inside the pot—
they knew to follow her instructions to the letter.
God help them if they brought out the teabag
still in its ceremonial wrapper on a separate plate.
She would have none of it, no lukewarm water in the pot.
No teabag afterthought. Utter nonsense, she said.
Afternoon tea, properly made, righted the world.
I practiced my alphabet, my finger tracing slow sounds
along the shores of the puddle flooding the Formica table.
8/23/21
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