Sunday Morning at the Pemberville Café

It was a fleeting moment early one Sunday morning on the road in northern Ohio. Such moments always are.

…la rota che tu sempiterni
desiderato, a sé mi fece atteso
con l’armonia che tempere e discerni…
                  —Paradiso, Canto I

 
…the vast
wheel you have made eternal by desire
held me intent to hear the harmony
you tune in all its parts…
                  —trans. Anthony Esolen
 

I.

The Great Black Swamp is platted farmland now,
drained by a vast, strict grid of ditches spaced
each quarter-mile.  From muck rose land to plow,
these quilt-square fields crosshatched with furrows traced
 
from sluice to sluice in fertile rectitude.
The towns between the Maumee and the Portage
grew flush in times of plenty and renewed
themselves, somehow, in times of shortage.
 
My last time through I’d grown intrigued and learned
this history.  Dawn now:  I’ve left the turnpike,
searching for coffee and breakfast, and turned
along a downtown street whose stores stand stern, like
 
squat, square-shouldered presbyters who ask,
in measured red-brick tones, my business here.
“Sustenance,” I say.  And through a mask
of silent shopwindow blinds their answer’s clear:
 
No lights click on.  But up ahead some cars,
American, cushy, vaguely dated,
are clumped outside a diner and a couple bars.
The diner’s Open sign in understated
 
neon provides the sole sign of life this early.
I enter through the steamed up plate-glass door.
It’s empty but for one booth full of burly,
jovial men; each one of them is more
 
than half-again as old as I, and I’m
not young.  But by their mud-flecked boots I know
Sabbath began some hours ago for them
out in the corn and soybean fields below
 
a slate-gray sky and fading morning star.
Tucked over in a corner booth, I never
quite catch the quips and stories that they share—
just voices stripped to sound, a wordless river
 
washing over me, swift waters tumbling in
a rush of glinting, speckling current welling
up, cascading from an origin
far older than the stories they’ve been telling.
 
Carried downstream, their stories run like silt
scraped up along a broad, brown course from scarp
and bed to settle here as bottomland built
clod by clod, then drained, surveyed, carved up.
 
They revel in their well-kept stories tossed
around in repetitions recast slightly then
end-stopped by laughs and ricochet guffaws.
These eddy, pool, settle among the men:
 
Indecipherable to transient eyes
and ears: each story, day, year, generation.
Somehow the repetition sanctifies.
Bring toast as offering, coffee as libation.
 
 
 

II.

The waitress enters, tray in hand.  Despite
the hour she moves briskly: soiled plates removed,
glasses refilled, OJ topped off—She’s quite
handy with coffee pots and bowls of grooved
 
white ampulets of Half-&-Half and packets
of Sweet’n Low.  Amiably she glides in
and out; her own contrapuntal banter gets
taken up into the flow as she slides in
 
another plate.  And as their voices blend
another Sunday morning slips in
among these ruddy men, this big-boned blonde.
This blonde: round-faced, apron flapping, wide hips in
 
snug and faded low-rise blue jeans pie
in slow fan light—and, once and always, someone’s
kin.  Their tales, jibes, plates careen, collide
in over-weaving rhythms sprung: Done once
 
and done a thousand times, she leans and stretches
off across the table wiping milk-dot pearls—
her low-slung jeans and rising top reveal what catches
each man’s eye: A wheel with eagle’s wings unfurled
 
from hip to hip in blue-green dye.  A half-stop’s
silence marks this grace, what these and their folk
half-know between bedsheets, among their crops,       
in proper rows in pews:  The wheelwork
 
creaks ahead; each day the escapement ticks
against this mainspring of unbridgeable
nearness; the spring stays wound; these days, these clicks,
this cafe, this winged wheel mean nothing, mean all.
 
Raise your voice in ache and jubilation:
Bring toast as offering, coffee as libation.