Sometime after the heat of singlehandedly dissolving the heart of the iceberg

and before the dream of a black man hit by a train in an all-white city,

epiphany let herself enter through my midnight window,

settled on my windowsill, welcome and messy as an unexpected rain.

The chalkboard sign in dobra kava reads, “If you’re not shaking yet,

you haven’t had enough of our espresso.”

I’m shaking yet.

Little epiphanies strike when we’re not always awake yet.  Yesterday I sat in the garden with my Italian friend Camilla.  She served me pasta al dente and lime pie as light and airy as nuvole*.  We discussed Mother Teresa’s basic tenets in my basic Italian.  We discussed les croyances limitantes* in French.  I am her yoga teacher.  She is my life coach.  We solved all the world’s problems in three languages within the time frame of a few short hours, but here is the one question I am left with:

How do you explain EPIPHANY ?

I tried breakthrough.  I tried personal discovery or realization.  I decided not to get into James Joyce or the 6th of January.  In the end she nodded her head to indicate she was hearing me.  That’s what life coaches do.  They nod their heads.  They listen.  You know what writers do?  We write.  And we dream.

So last night I had all these revelatory dreams – being lost, getting on the wrong boat, not being able to sit back and enjoy the tour with the wind in my hair because I was preoccupied with worry about whether or not my phone battery was going to die before I got back to the hotel.  I did dream a black man was killed by a speeding train.  Did you know Kafka was hit by a tram and left to die in the street?

And when I woke up from the dream, the answer to the last poem in the collection I’ve been working on just came to me.  It came to me like the rain through the screens, fresh and unbeckoned.  Yes, I have to mop up the rain with used bath towels.  There’s mess.  There’s poetry to be written.  And revised.  Mopped up and written again.  But at least a solution has been revealed.

The working title of the collection was Private Epics.  I’m thinking of changing it to Private Epiphanies.

*nuvole = clouds; les croyances limitantes= what we believe about ourselves, spec. the doubts and limitations that can hold us back.  Interesting to note that auto-correct turned these words to novel and crayon laminates.