Open Bracket Descriptions at Lunchtime

While drinking coffee and clear water
at a table in the back of the restaurant,
a black van, slightly broken with rust,
parked along the curb out front with an
engine running and the worn down bumpers
lined in a taut contrast of white sunlight.
For whomever it may have been waiting,
all the diners, a second or two, at least, lost
their view of the amphitheater across the street
and consigned to the sidewalk that stretches
unilaterally forward or backward, as do the
water and sewer pipes filled with ingressions.

A flock of perched sparrows are their own shadows
On the power lines when blanched clouds are the sky.

“This dark coffee, and this glass of water,”
I said to myself while gazing into reflections
of my defining plate, where I was dumb sized
into the place setting, until a fly caught
a greater attention and took me to a corner
of debris, crumbled tissue, temporal dreck,
and then flew up to the moltings of dust
that were hung from the panels of the air vent,
where the air, with its molecules of shed skin,
slightly warmed and scented with skillet grease,
swept into an absence beyond ceiling tiles,
above sandwiches made of sesame seed bread.

On roofs rain collects in puddles, snow into drifts,
And mutely reflect the dispossessions of the sky.

With coffee grounds at the bottom of the cups
the waitress had read fortunes while a
half-hour philosopher contemplated fulfillment.
After the meals were served and eaten, they both
hesitated to further into the afternoon, to instead
wait in their gone hopes for a Frisian stallion
to ring the bells of the back door, previously broken
into the null and ready to ride through a double
parquet forest of blooming dogwood and surrounded
by the absence no longer needing to be charted,
maybe upon flanks of hair like a controlled ink,
or a soaked nib flowing the definitions of petals.

Fallen leaves are invisible as the winds when
Entered into a sole moving mass of dense water.

I finally got up myself and left the newspaper
with the articles folded upon their own pages.
A chess game remained in stalemate and its players
went behind their strategies, only leaving fingerprints
upon a full dispenser of napkins ready for dirty hands
that suspended the shadows of early Hitchcock.
Someone next to me had slumped into an escape with
halved eyelids in the first or third quarters, wearing an
iron pressed shirt but unshaven, a starched collar
but scuffed shoes and sunglasses in the front pocket.
A radio broadcast told of a hijacked taxi cab tearing
through parking gates, culprit’s description in contrast.

A compass of shadows lengthens as day continues to fall
forward until they point everywhere in the open night.