Coffee Maker by Cecily Parks

"Alone, one can but toy with imagery."
-James Merrill, 'Hourglass

Sobriety kicks me out of half-slept sleep
again. Unbound and starved for a routine
that favors day, I'm drawn toward this machine --
the twin-globed, bubbling keep
of caffeine grants plastic-coated access to
achievement, ritual, speed. Which is all I need
these days -- to watch the water, bead by bead
unyield itself and be drawn up into

each elementally alien ground, to give in.
It's almost selfless, brave (to me, at least,
it seems) as I mull over last night's pieced-
together bourbon-driven
dream, which concludes the process nuanced nightly:
we leave the bar, I take you (in my head)
to my near-empty apartment and empty bed.
Reversing cause and effect, I hold you tightly

and wait for bliss, for anything but regret.
Meanwhile, within my plastic odalisque
the water is disturbed enough to whisk
uptube and be beset
by the grounds, or is it the other way around --
the valence fluxes between subduer and
subdued, undoer and undone. I stand,
also propped on the counter, as things compound

without me and within. The torrid brew
ceases to bob and seethe, and with gravity's grace
(and changed) descends into the lower vase --
the final follow-through.
In vicarious absorption and half-awake,
I can only hover here and try not
to think of you, and grasp the steaming pot
from the maker that never makes mistakes.