Talk Talk

New Year's Eve

Happy New Year All!

I wish for you  what I wish for myself and my family--good health and good cheer, peace and prosperity. Here's to 2007. May we find on earth a bit of heaven.

Sunshine Supermarket

Two friends of mine made reference recently to a trip to Cuba: their countries allow them to do that. I thought of them yesterday on my way home from Islamorada. Here's a poem. Of sorts.

1:25 PM 12/30/2006

I could be in Cuba
sitting in the Cafe Cubano
in the Sunshine Supermarket
sipping a cafe con leche
looking at the menu
taped to the wall--
Don't forget to order your
whole roasted pig for the Christmas Night
or New Year's Day.

The square room, tables for four
pushed against whitewashed walls,
the cafeteria chairs,
so faded, so mauve, so leatherette,
cracked linoleum, swept clean.
I am eating Maria cookies
reading the neon signs, ads
for el presidente beer and the Lotto.

A man at the cash register folds his paper,
a girl in an apron leans out the pass-through window.
Music plays in Spanish. I imagine
men in Havana ninety miles away listening
to the same song. But something is not right;
this is an old Cuba, reconstructed,
remembered from before the exile. The men
in their work clothes will get up from lunch
and go back to work, not home to nap. This is
the Keys, the Overseas Highway, as close to home
as some will ever get.