Cafe GirL

Ear buds in listening to Leonard Cohen at a café in Ennis, Ireland. Counting the sugar cubes in the small white bowl, sipping a café latte; the music like a night washing over me. Outside a grey Celtic sky a sheen, a soul alone and wandering again. The door opens and a girl walks in. She sits down, opens a book and lights a cigarette. The owner goes over with a cup and places it before her. The soundtrack of this movie groans and pulls plaintiff minor key melodies from the ether. She doesn’t glance at me, but I know she is aware, her dark hair like ink from my pen draping shoulders hidden beneath a scarlet blouse. Her skin is like white sugar, eyes dark pools of sylvan mystery and I in my solitary soundtrack slip into the lines in my open notebook; nothing comes. But an image appears, a vision, for what else is the imagination but a vision factory, blending so-called consciousness with the very real worldliness, and ah, how lamentable it is we have been duped by Descartes into thinking we are so separate from anything and all. The image is of her, this café girl, lying on a large bed, nude and smiling, the topography of her shapes, valleys and hillocks and hidden verdant glades of pleasure and desire. I traverse her entirety and am lost in a revelry, a sensuality, when I feel a touch on my shoulder. It is she.

“Can I join you,” she says, quite shyly.

I slip off the buds and hear faintly Leonard’s woeful voice and guitar strings.

“Of course,” I say, quickly, and clear away my notebook and pens.