Poetry / Never Bourne

I sat in the coffee shop lounging in my usual deep cushioned chair in the corner, listening to the soft jazz music wafting on the air, on the same air-conditioned breeze that pushed mochas and espressos through out the place, and I heard the lovely soul infused voices of Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughn and Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone and Norah Jones. And I was covered, in jazz and sweetness and soul.

The music played in my ears, as I read my book on the creation of the universe and how man was now destroying all that he had. And so my mood was set, somehow all of this was created, and we as a species were destroying the only real thing that we needed.

And then she walked in, and I forgot all that I had never learned. She was Jazz, smooth and sensual, mother and lover, sinner and saint, beauty and pain all in one. From the opening of the door, to her walking across the shop to the counter, ordering her Mocha with raspberry flavoring, her hair flowed to some inhuman beat, more than man could ever find in a set of drums or on a guitar. Her hips, mesmerizing me as she turned to look at the pastry case.

She pointed to the cake that she wanted, her nails the color of a rich chocolate sauce. Her skin, pale as the moon on a cloudless night, amazing smoothness up to the cuff of her sleeve that was tight, and gave an impression of holding in so much, so much love, so much pleasure, so much beauty. Her womanly form, held in by cotton or some other blessed fabric. The whiteness of the shirt complementing the opalescence of her skin was as if someone had bleached it just for her, so that she would always stand out in a crowded room.

She would always be noticed, just for the jazz in her soul.

She reached into her black purse and I saw that she sweated beauty. She was Beauty. Her brown striped pants hugged those hips that would never leave my mind. She wore hemp sandals, and her toes were the toes of Venus on the half-shell, though even Botticelli would have never been able to perfect her.

She paid for her mocha and her sweet treat and waited for the drink to arrive. She stood there and as the steam was blown into the milk for someone else’s drink, she whirled her hair with her free hand. Hair that parted straight down the middle of her head, and fell in black waves, cascading over her shoulders and down her back as beautiful as the finest silk, but as thick as the most expensive wool.

They called out her drink, and as she twisted to pick up her raspberry flavored concoction the music changed, and a blues horn sounded. Her hair, looking alive as if it was it’s own dark being, came over her shoulders and covered her face for a moment of shyness. Hands full of sweetness, she pushed the arrant multitude of strands back with her wrist.

She smiled a thank-you to the barista and her smile blinded me to all other people in the universe, to those cutting down trees, voting Republican, building Nuclear bombs in North Korea and Iraq, yuppies driving their testosterone filled SUV’s and choking me with their exhaust, those pet abusers, breeders, those evil-doers. Every other soul in the world but hers.

She was the one I wanted to know always.

The most beautiful creature I would ever see in my entire life, and she left out the back door of the shop before I could pack up all my things in my digital turtle of a backpack. I shouldered my heavy bag and ran through all the other nonsensical people in the establishment, muttering a soft litany of apologies as I made my way through. The light outside hurt my eyes, I put my hand up to shade them from the glaring sun. She was gone. Nowhere to be seen, a bus pulled away from the curb, on its way into the city.

There I was, a dollar twenty-five in my pocket, mind racing to catch the next bus to come along, thinking that was the one. I wanted to tell her so much more than what she had already heard, but by the time I had figured it out, she was gone. But I knew that I would be half an hour behind the one who would never know how she held my soul in her jazz filled hands. Mere seconds before I could have had her for at least a moment. Now I would forever carry around the memory of a love that never got born.

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