Bolivian Prose...

This Kitchen Table:

We sit at the kitchen table at dusk
and they tell me secrets I can´t understand.
We sip tea with sugar
and spread fruit on stale bread.
They say there are tigers by the Amazon.
They tell me this is the richest country in the world.
In the mornings we sit at this table,
same cups, same people, same bread
and we stare at the steam from the hot water, keeping our secrets to ourselves,
holding onto our dreams from the night before
while the parrots are just waking in the tree outside
and a Mexican man preaches about Jesus on the radio.

I´ve been learning what to call each dish as we lunch together everyday
for hours - joking, teasing.
Sometimes I laugh and everyone winks. I don´t understand their secrets,
though everything I do understand comes from hours spent sipping tea,
eating stale bread, the laughter, the winking and the silence
that wait at this kitchen table.

Kitchen Tablle II:
Let me tell you a story
is always how meals begin
and hours later even the food and the drink are forgotten.
Hours later I sometimes have forgotten how to smile,
trying to console a broken hearted woman in Spanish,
or explain to her that I can´t stay here forever
because more than anything else, I don´t want to.
Instead I tell her how grateful I am for her gifts to me
and how sorry that life is so hard.

After lunch I drink a ritual cup of coffee with her husband.
He tells me what its like to mine gold
and that he used to drink his cafe con cognac to keep warm on the job.

But really he loves to drink chicha.

In the afternoons we drink our coffee black,
no alcohol, no milk, sometimes a teaspoon of sugar.
Since he´s too old to keep working coffe is the new gold.
There´s a man whos sells the best coffee in Bolivia, he tells me,
somewhere on the street.
He pours hot water in the cups while he steeps rich dark grounds
in a small pitcher by the stove.

I stare into black water.
Somewhere in the distance I hear him laughing.
He told me something funny.
I lift my head from the grounds, and here we are again in the kithcen.
The faucet still dripping even though the water´s been off for days,
raw meat and the bread machine on the counter.
I steal a glance at the cacao fruit sitting in a basket by the door.
I can taste it´s sweetseeds on the back of my tongue.
I return to the conversation and offer back a little chuckle,
not wanting to laugh too hard at soemthing I didn´t really get.
I´m not sure he knows I´m lost to his stories, though I´ve learned the nuances of his accent.
They still seem like secrets, just waiting to be discovered
right across the kitchen table.