Espresso

When you are riddling your existence,
everything is a clue.
Like shots of espresso grazing your tongue
because bitter things have a way of cleansing
the palette despite our insistent denial of it.
Like the barista with curly hair,
who catches me reading,
smiles,
and I remember that I have curves
just like my mother
and just like the earth, who likes her peaks naked,
collarbones exposed, and her rivers to be
coursing.
Like plucking a round fig
and biting straight down
and liking it.
Like finding God protecting His brood.
Like finding God strapped to a buoy
and wondering,
What's He doing out there?
I say He because She doesn't need the title.
I say He because She's busy creating biscotti.
She likes some sweetness.
She makes rest a choice and not a day of the week.
God is just a word.
God is the name we call the seed
we come from.
Picture it:
the oak tree prays to the Acorn
and then ignores the ones on its finger.
We make a Big Deal out of Big Letters.
We make a racket out of our wondering,
as if we were the ones to invent it.
The answer to a riddle is always in left field,
or not even on the field,
or probably in a bar somewhere,
ordering a jack-and-coke
and snickering,
while we fumble through the diction
and convince ourselves of homonyms.
Talk is tiring business.
Intrigue gets boring.
Sometimes it feels like an easier feat
to find God perfecting the backstroke
in an espresso
than to find a way to articulate
its taste.