“Talking Tea” is a Jim Thomas poem, found among other places in Ukula Volume 3 Number 1. It is a poem whose addressee is an at times intimate:
I love it when you talk tea.
I love your lips upon the rim,
your fingers around the handle
And at times inanimate but made alive by the verse for the poem also chooses to apostrophize the tea that talks:
and you, dry leaves between perforated sheets
of cotton, are dangled
The poem ends with a voice uttered sybil-like from the position of the teacup:
Later
smiling
into empty cups
stained with tannin
and soggy leaves,
you seize me and turn me upside down
for a fortune reading, a telling talk.
And so for day 176
08.06.2007