Consider the cup of coffee, black as night,
At night, all night, beside her on the table,
Under the kitchen light where she would sit
Staring at nothing, still as a photograph.
Consider the way at first the steam would rise,
Like phantoms twisting up against each other
Struggling to pull away from the black lake
That burned them every which way into nothing.
Consider the cup of coffee as it cooled,
The glassy black of it on which the light
Above floated a tiny version of itself.
How like an eye it might have looked to her,
The bright pupil there, the negative of hers,
If she had seen it, although she never did,
Never so much as lifted up the cup,
Never so much as touched it, staring off
At nothing as it went from hot to cold,
To colder while you watched her from the hallway,
Back in the dark beyond the doorway’s frame,
Unseen, unseeable, and completely safe
As the cold eye in the mirror of the cup.
By Alan Shapiro, from Night of the Republic (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)
Read a Q&A interview with Shapiro about winning a 2014 North Carolina Award for Literature.
