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Senior Coffee
- Louisiana State University Press
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28 SENIOR COFFEE “Medium coffee,” I say, and think, Hold on, I’ve had too much already, so I say, “No, make it a small—wait a sec,” and the counter guy says, “You want a senior coffee?” and I say, “No—uh, yeah!” My first senior coffee—senior anything, really. Only 89 cents! And not bad, either. Or not great, but as good as the coffee I was going to get anyway, and a lot cheaper. At home, I show Barbara the little paper cup: “Hey, look, senior coffee.” Big mistake: after that, it’s “How about a senior coffee?” and “I’m making coffee—you want regular coffee or senior coffee?” And soon everything’s senior. Do you have your senior cell phone with you? Bring home a senior newspaper, will you? Those sneakers look a little worn; why don’t you get some new sneakers—senior sneakers. And when I say I’m bored, she says, “Why don’t you write one of those senior poems you’re so famous for?” All poetry is senior, of course. At a party, a professor in one of the “practical” disciplines questions the value of teaching people to be poets, and I think, The ancients assigned three muses to poetry: Calliope to epic poetry, Erato to love poetry, and Euterpe to song and elegaic poetry. How many muses did you say you have in Design Leadership Systems? I wonder if there’s a guy out there named Señor Poetry. He’d be at a table in a plaza somewhere with his wife and daughter, Señora and Señorita Poetry. He’d be drinking coffee and writing poems, and everyone would be looking over his shoulder. What is he writing? Wait, wrong question. A better one is how is he writing, since style is so much more important than subject matter. Henry James says a woman living in a quiet country village has only to be “a damsel upon whom nothing is lost” to write about soldiers and garrison life. Truer words, Henry, truer words! No one’s more senior than Henry James. 29 Some onlookers are guessing that Señor Poetry is writing in the manner of Baroque lyric poet Luis de Góngora, though others say no, he can’t be. Góngora’s contemporaries called him “the Spanish Homer” but also the inventor of “Pestilential Poetry.” Not for Góngora the poem in which language works in the background while the story gets told. No, sir, his is the language that steps into the footlights and windmills its arms, which is why his fans and detractors pronounced him the greatest of poets as well as a pretentious fool. And maybe Señor Poetry is not a poet at all, any more than a man named Señor Smith shoes horses for a living or one named Señor Miller owns a mill. Maybe his wife’s the poet. Or his daughter: maybe she’s Henry James’s damsel upon whom nothing is lost. They’re so proud of her! I am, too. I love her as much as though she were my daughter, which means I want her to have a life like mine, one lived, not for poetry but through poetry. Everything—a car starting, bird song, the gurgling of a coffeepot, the whirr of a fan, the whispers of lovers, the silly noises babies make, the wisdom of the books the mighty dead have written—all of that steps easily into poetry and makes itself at home there. Poetry and coffee: now there’s a combination for you. Though if the poetry’s strong enough, you’ll need nothing more than a lifetime in which to read and write the stuff, I think, and then I think, Famous? Me? ...