Appetite

Coffee Beans

91 Coffee Beans Eyes half-closed, you pour down coffee beans from the sac rushing noise of their shiny-soft grains, fluid and bright like river. The grinder hics and churns. Quick whiz of the blade your thumb presses the switch first swirl of the day. Ground, beans smell of earth dust hot water will percolate like rain crossing continents over growing seas. In the fields, coffee beans are red little bugs wind-rattling among bushes. Who got the idea of roasting them black? Some old Arabic secret, crisp of a flame changing color and structure of their molecules. For the chemist, caffeine is white powder, so many heart beats, and sleepless nights per spoonful. I snatch the pot, and a drop surges on the burner, licorice bubbling into tar, its smell passing over the drizzly voice on the radio news from a place or another. During World War I, a Senegalese regiment was called “Grains d’café”—coffee beans each man kept one like a token, tight between his jaws and cracking it under his teeth at the moment of the attack jumping shadows over shadows against the unknown snow a taste steeping deep mouth and veins, in fears, and hopes for home. ...