HERE AGAIN for the FIRST TIME

By Kasie Whitener

Poetry readings need to take place in a coffee house. There’s a consistency in coffee houses that enables the work, that breaks open the caged hipster in us all, that unbinds our artistic sensibilities and makes us willing to listen. Willing to be changed.

Everything about the place is familiar though I’ve only been here once. There’s something almost cliché about a coffee house in an old Colonial on a college campus. Dark corners and nooks where students huddle together over textbooks and lidded cups. There’s an age and creak to the stairs. An unfulfilled ambition in the artwork on the walls.

I’m here by invitation to a weekly meet-up in Columbia but it could be any campus in the world, any coffee house, anywhere, any time. Nostalgia overwhelms me; I want a cigarette and a spiral notebook and a pencil. There are unwritten things inside me pressing to the surface.

As the singer/songwriter strums his tunes, I feel the simplicity of them invade me. And I am once again, opening like a moonflower, to the possibility of change. He sings about coming home. About losing something that seemed small at the time but since then has been indicative of a much bigger loss. About an airline pilot’s constant flight.

The word distance takes on new meaning.

Across the room, I catch my poet friend’s eye and he smiles, cheeks rosy from the cold, satisfaction beaming from him.

Mindgravy is a weekly poetry reading and open microphone event at Cool Beans brought to the Columbia arts community by Al Black, an Indiana native with a Southern writer’s heart. He’s compelling in verse and presence and the room at Cool Beans in its familiarity is a welcoming place to find yourself quietly waiting to be changed.

Partitioning the room are heavy sliding doors that stick and groan and resist the push and pull of people slipping in and out in various attempts of subtlety and respect. I leaned to the man next to me, a regular, and said, “Are the doors always a distraction?”

“Every week,” he said, with an amused smile, “Part of the charm.”

Al read a new poem, one he first asked the man on my left permission to share. It was about a series of visits with the man and how Al had watched his friend work through the process of his father slowly dying.

“Daddy is comfortable,” the man would tell Al and Al put it in the poem as the refrain of grief and acceptance.

Then the same man stood to finish the night with a flute to his lips and played the most tender dirge I’ve ever heard. Quiet and shimmering with so many tears already shed and dried and gone but not forgotten. I felt grateful. I thanked him.

What a gift to feel the camaraderie and friendship, the empathy and passion, the love in the room at Mindgravy. Thanks, Al, for inviting me. I look forward to returning.