Coffee Shop Metamorphoses
At Lestat’s in San Diego, California
A painter is trying to turn
electric meters into trees,
brushing the metal brown
as rust and rotating her wrist
to imitate the natural
knots in the grains
of the supposed wood.
Paint beads as sap might bleed from bark
were they trunks of furs or maples.
To the artist a tree is just
a streak of green and coffee-brown
across the canvas of her eye.
I glance down to my own hands, browned
by freckles caked across the canvas
of my skin, scarred and gnarly as the bark
of the tree trunk I drunkenly
clutch to keep from stumbling,
which becomes a coat rack I lay
my jacket against and climb
into the stars flung like paint flecks
across the canvas of the sky.
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