Old Men Sitting Too Long in Coffee Shops

Old men sitting too long in coffee shops

Are the great sages of the world;

And old men in chairs on sunny sidewalks

Are Buddha and Solomon, Jesus and Groucho Marx.

It’s possible just to sit, they say.  It is.

You might have coffee, or a paper handy,

Or an old friend who knows all your old jokes,

And laughs with pleasure, hearing them again;

But then again, you might have nothing –

No coffee, no paper, no friend, no jokes –

And that would be all right too, and much the same,

Especially if a bird hops by on the sidewalk,

Or the waitress absently smiles on her way,

Because it doesn’t take much – they say –

It doesn’t take much.  It may even look like nothing

If you’re used to something more.

But that’s the trouble, isn’t it?

You all expect the world.

And we did too, and now we sit,

Triumphs and griefs forgotten –

Or not forgotten exactly, so much as put aside,

Like the paper, the coffee, the friend, the bird,

All of which are very nice, very nice indeed,

But not quite of the essence, which is something else,

Something we can’t quite explain to you, but if

You sit here quietly for a year or twelve,

You’ll start to have a feel for it, and then

You’ll finally know what we were talking about,

Not quite too late to thoroughly enjoy it

Before you disappear, unmissed, unmourning,

As we by then will long ago have done.